General News

I hope that everybody is doing well. I’m in a pretty good mood right now. I’m writing in my underwear. In the dark. A cup of wine. A big bag of M&Ms. The sun is just starting to set. And it has been a pretty nice day. Pretty nice? It has been a great day!

Let me get started: I guess I don’t really think of myself as much of a board game person. Or really a game person all. But I love dominoes. I have enough control to get invested, but not enough control to start plotting and scheming and ruining people’s lives. If I play any game that’s longer than an hour, I lose all control. Someone I know made me play Ticket to Ride with them and by the end I was--in addition to trying to get from Chicago to Raleigh--building out a step by step plan to break up the marriage of the cruel fucker who was blocking both of my paths to Pittsburgh. And that’s not a great look. 

Today, I was playing dominoes with Adam, Garret, and Monnie. 80% of the normal crew. When he’s not too busy marching-banding, Anthony will play with us. I’m always glad to have the whole crew together, but sometimes it is nice to have an absent Anthony. Anthony, you see, is incredibly good at dominoes. I think he’s spookily good. I mean, surely half of dominoes is just a question of what tiles you have in your hand, right? So if someone always has the right domino, they are either cheating or receiving divine help. 

And look, I’m not expecting God to help me out. If he exists--big if--then he’s heard the things I’ve said about him and all his best friends. And if someone talked about my husband the way I do about the Catholic church, I wouldn’t help that person out of a well if I was a fucking ladder salesman. But in my defense, my husband is twice as nice as the Catholic church at half the price (because he doesn’t need all of those fancy fucking windows).

If an angel appeared to me at night and said, “You know, of all the people you know, God likes Anthony best,” I would call that spooky. Super spooky! And I’ve played dominos with enough people to know that Anothony is getting help from somebody. So that is at least medium spooky. 

My husband thinks I’m being silly. Well, technically he thinks I’m jealous. I told him that I don’t care enough about winning dominos to start inventing an imaginary system of deistic favoritism. But--as he pointed out--I said that with clenched fists. 

I was most grateful to see that Garret was there. Garret has been having a difficult year so far. The problem--well not really a problem, more the “reason Garret is sad”--is that Garret wrote a shitty play. Garret doesn’t realize that it is a shitty play yet, but he’s too close to the whole thing to see it clearly. Frankly, I think that he will feel better once he accepts that he wrote a shitty play. Right now, he is angry at what he sees as an unfair world. And it is a giant task to fix an unfair world. But it is a medium sized task to become a passable writer. 

Garret’s shitty play was called The Many Jobs of Hercules. And yes that is supposed to be an innuendo. The whole thing was very “What if Hercules said cock a lot and stole jokes from Drag Race?” Frankly, I think that a queered mythology tale could be pretty fun. It could even be edgy! All you’d need is access to time travel and twenty dollars to rent a blackbox theatre in the 1960’s. 

But this was not a fun play. And I don’t know why! If I spent as much time drinking wine and getting plowed as this Hercules, I’d already have ascended into heaven. But instead the whole thing was some mope show about how sad he was because of his oppressive religious upbringing. “Oppressive religious upbringing?” you might ask. “Did ancient Greek religions frown on gay sex?” I don’t fucking know. But at some point Hercules said, “You know Icarus [don’t ask me, I didn’t write the thing], I know I should be happy. But I’m not. I think it’s something about my oppressive religious upbringing. I’m just feeling really down right now.” I swear, if Garret wrote Hamlet, the soliloquy would go: “To be or not to be. Boy, I really don’t know. I’m fighting with my girlfriend and also my dad is dead. So I’m just feeling really down right now.” 

And the few times it was fun, it was always something I had already seen somewhere else. If I had a nickel for every time Garret recycled some sassy quip I recognized from a meme (and I don’t even like memes), I could pay his legal bills when he is arrested for being the most boring plagiarist of all time. 

The moment that really sticks with me is a speech from Hercules mother (who I am sure is a wonderful and complete woman in her own right). She talks about how strong Hercules was as a toddler and repeats a story about him licking popsicles so hard that the sticks would snap in half. And while she is telling this story, the actor playing Hercules is sitting cross legged downstage full on fellating a popsicle before biting down and snapping it in half. Now maybe I would feel differently if I had a dick that I wanted to be snapped in half by an ancient child, but the whole thing felt a little first draft to me. 

At intermission, I asked my husband whether he thought the popsicle portion of the Hercules myth is what gave Garret the idea for the play. He responded, “Lydia, Hercules didn’t have a freezer. I’m sure he never had a popsicle in his fucking life.” As I realized what I had said, I could see Greg realizing that the entirely fictional Hercules never had a life in which to never have a popsicle. We shared a look of horror as we realized that Garret’s dumb play was making us dumber, too. 

So Garret has been down. Because his play closed. And the few places on the internet that pay attention to new plays in Omaha were either largely negative or kindly ignored him. It is sad, I know. But I only have so much sympathy. Because I had to sit through the fucking thing. 

And Monnie didn’t make things any better! I mean, we were having a perfectly lovely evening and everything. I don’t want to make it sound like we weren’t all having fun. But Monnie had just read a book about artificial intelligence and kept bringing it up out of no-where. For some folks, AI might seem exciting. If you’re looking to fire people (or I guess if you are afraid of death and have boring/predictable enough thoughts to write into code) then AI is exactly what you’ve been waiting for. Personally, I don’t like the stuff. 

And in my defense, Monnie’s AI book seemed to be equally skeptical. Most of Monnie’s factoids were real fucking downers. A couple of times, I tried to shoot Monnie a dirty look. Something to say, “Hey, we’re all having a nice time with our depressed friend. Maybe you could stop being such a limp dick all night.” But I think that my expression was confused with concern about the rise of automation. What are you gonna do? I was glad to see that Garret was mostly just tuning the whole thing out and focusing on his losing hand of dominos. But at one point, he almost froze, looked up, and said something that I found so upsetting that I will only include it as a footnote*. That was my cue to leave. I finished out the game, won, and grabbed my things. 

When I left, it was absolutely pouring rain; one of those aggressive rains where the water slaps at your clothes and the wind blows through your eyes. I wish that I could be someone who dances in the rain, but instead I just feel under siege. My body panics. And why shouldn’t it? The sea is falling on me. And the sea is huge. It’s a geographical body. When a branch falls and hits a car, everyone is so concerned. But you can’t see branches from outer space! You know what you can see from outer space? The damn sea. 

Someone once told me that whenever it is cold outside, they try and listen to their mind and put their focus on internal things rather than the external. But whenever I am outside in the rain, my internals are just shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! What the fuck is going on!?” 

So it doesn’t help. 

In the three minutes it took me to walk home, I was completely drenched. My shirt was clinging to my body. Water was pooling in my underwear. The inside of my shoes were turning into some sort of soup. I hate that feeling. I don’t mind getting wet, but I’d rather have a granola enema than wear wet clothes. And for reasons that are still somewhat beyond me, we aren’t one of those communes who have gotten really relaxed and casual about nudity.

But nudity is fine in my house. So the second I walked in my front door, I stripped off my clothes with the expert speed of an Olympian. Picking my soggy garments up off the ground, I threw them at the shower and watched them splat against the wall and slowly slide down into the tub. My husband, God love him, grabbed a blanket from the couch and wrapped me up. While I shivered, he took off his sweater and put it around my head before dropping the blanket and starting to tickle me. Still sweater-headed, I couldn’t see where my hands were flying. I caught the collar of his shirt and tore off half the buttons. [I did that once with a man while trying to be sexy. As I jerked my hand across his chest and felt the buttons pop, I heard him shriek, “That was a gift!”] My husband laughed and pulled me tighter. I could feel my damp skin winning the battle against his dry clothes, but soon enough he took his shirt off anyway. How exciting! He hugged me even tighter and then pulled the sweater down over my head. Before the light hits my eyes, his lips meet mine.

I’m nervous that this is starting to sound a little bit too much like erotica. It’s not. I swear! This is news. I am nothing if not a journalist. Just because I’m not one of those boring journalists at the New York Times who hardly ever write about dominos or kegel balls doesn’t mean that I don’t have standards.

Sure, we had sex. I’m not shy about the truth! Democracy dies in darkness (but I guess not Bezos’s pocketbook, you fucks). But the point of me telling you that is not to titillate or seduce. It is to improve society as a whole! As such, I’m only going to pass along the parts that are newsworthy. Specifically, I wore his sweater the whole time, which was a fun twist for me. Warm and just a little too big. Absolutely lovely. When I orgasmed, my hearing went out. 

My husband wanted me to write a little parenthetical comment after, “Warm and just a little too big” that says, “But enough about his dick.” I replied, “Greg, I love you. And I love having sex with you. But I’m not going to lie to people. It’s plumb average.” 

Then Greg got all huffy at me and went, “I’m not actually asking for you to tell people that I have a big dick.” 

“Do you need me to play the tape back? Do we need a fucking at-home stenographer, now? Because that’s exactly what you said.”

“I just meant it as a joke.”

“I’m a journalist Greg. I can’t lie to people.”   

“I know you’re a journalist, Lydia. But you can still have some fun with it.”

“Fun with it? Look where that got the New York Times with Iraq.”

Then Greg just started laughing at me. After he left the room, I finally got the joke and felt a little silly. I’m not going to apologize for caring about journalism, but I thought I should still go say something sweet. But by the time I found him, he was already making us tea as a kind little gesture. Boy, I love that man. 

And that brings me up to now as I finish this article. I guess I still have his sweater on, too. But I’m not wearing pants. So I’m going to count this as writing in my underwear. I’m not all that cool. I’m not running around snapping popsicle dicks in half. I have to feel edgy when I can; tea in hand.



*Garret said:
"You know, I was talking to my nephew about applying for jobs. He was telling me that when he went to the community college for a resume class, they told them not to worry about what someone reading the application would think. Apparently, so many places are using AI interfaces to sort out unqualified applicants that your main goal with a resume now is just to get picked up by an algorithm. And that sort of thing isn’t being developed by experts in your chosen field, right? It’s just like some 27 year old coder who works at Indeed; someone who has never worked as a facilities manager (that is his nephew's current job). And the algorithm isn’t set up to make sure it catches the best applicants. It is set up to knock the most people out while still leaving behind ten promising resumes. If someone misses the best applicant in their company's history, they’ll just never know. You know? So this whole class was just about how to write a resume so that a computer will like it. It’s a computer seduction class, basically. And I realized--while he was speaking--that that is going to be the future of AI. It’s not that we are going to make AI so elaborate and complex that it learns how to act like us. It is that while it gets better and better, we will start moving closer and closer to it’s way of thinking until we meet in the middle like a big, sloppy kiss."

The sloppy kiss image really stuck with me. My husband and I have been watching Sex and the City recently. It passed us by when it came out, but we are really enjoying it now. I think that what initially drew me to it was that no one acted like any person I had ever met in my entire life. So there was an element of surprise. But the more we watched the show, the more I started to understand everything else in my life through Sex and the City. Last week, my husband was talking about politics and I said, “But Biden can be such a Charlotte sometimes, what did you really expect?” And he just responded, “I guess you’re right.” 

In one episode of SatC, Charlotte is dating a really bad kisser who--when he leans in to kiss her--licks over the top of her chin and lips like a sedated dog. So I think that that is why Garret’s statement really got to me. Because it latched onto the image of a grown man licking a disappointed lady. And because what he is describing is exactly what happened to me with TV.