

Ready Player One was okay but also awful! And I kind of have a WHOLE BUNCH to say about it! Spoilers! » more: ready player one by ernest cline
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![]() ![]() Ready Player One was okay but also awful! And I kind of have a WHOLE BUNCH to say about it! Spoilers! » more: ready player one by ernest cline Dear Crystal, Today is five years since we started dating. Five years. That’s crazy, right? Genuinely unbelievable? Five years since we realized we wanted to hold hands and kiss and stuff and said, “Hey, let’s try this relationship thing” and then you kissed me real aggressively and got a bloody nose all over my chest. Good, memorable, wonderful times. ![]() ![]() ![]() There is an inherently narcissistic weight to being in a good relationship, but I have never been one to shy away from narcissism. You make me better. You make me smarter and more creative. You give me ideas and tell me to make them stories. You inspire words in me just by being who you are and moving through your life. ![]() ![]() I promise to love you every single day until I can’t anymore. Thanks for five incredibly lucky years and for the year and a half before that where everyone thought we were already dating anyway. – Ash ![]() ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, Relish didn’t feel like her autobiographical webcomic Stop Paying Attention. Perhaps it is a problem exclusive to her books — I haven’t yet read French Milk — but the whole of Relish felt pretentious and pompous and snooty. (I know those are basically synonyms but it deserves all three — “pretentious” for her superiority complex, “pompous” for the near-explicit sense of “anyone who doesn’t eat like me is unworthy” and “snooty” for her constant need to point out that cheap, quick food is “bad” even when she is talking about how much she likes it. I know this is autobiography and I know that autobiographies are a very tight lens through which to see and express the world and I know that it can sometimes make for a very limited scope, but I would have loved to see adult Lucy perhaps realizing that the way she grew up and her relationship with food is a highly, highly privileged one. Food is a political issue and it will remain a political issue until all people have access to high quality food that they can afford and I believe it to be a genuine failure on Knisley’s part to never in the entire scope of the book address that. She takes the time to let her readers know that she liked McDonald’s even though it’s “considered cheap and unhealthy” and in the same page devotes a panel to fat people picketing McDonald’s for making them fat, but never addresses any of the systematic issues that bar access to good, nutritious, fresh food for great swaths of human beings across the globe. ![]() As a fat person, this is what Lucy Knisley thinks of me. Wonderful. Food is wonderful and I mean that really and truly. I love to cook and I love to shop for fresh vegetables and choose the perfect piece of meat to barbecue. I love gourmet meals prepared by master chefs and a perfectly constructed Big Mac. I love to share meals with people I love and I love falling in love with people over shared meals. I feel like, at our cores, Lucy Knisley and I are probably not that different about food. But it seems very likely that Lucy Knisley has never been one of the 2.3 million households in the United States that live in a food desert. She has likely never paid $9 a pound for defrosted “fresh” chicken. She has probably never skipped a meal so that someone else in her household could eat. And though I do not expect her — nor anyone — to apologize for the privilege of being able to eat not only regularly, but incredibly well, I do expect her to acknowledge it. How can you spend so many pages talking about the unbelievable richness and joy of your food experience and not acknowledge how lucky you are to have had it? So, though Relish was not for me, I decided to trust Knisley’s skills and tastebuds anyway and make carbonara for my family following her recipe. Mostly. ![]() ![]() Though I am atrociously bad at recipes, I am a better than average cook so once everything was ready and organized and sorted into little bowls like the pros do on the TV, it went super easy. Even though I was worried the illustrative nature of it might mess with me, Knisley’s recipe was not at all hard to follow. ![]() ![]() So maybe, as a reading experience, Relish wasn’t for me and perhaps I have some serious qualms about un-broached social issues in it, but as a cookbook I have at least one great recipe — my girlfriend and I have already talked about making this again but adding onions and mushrooms and swapping peas for asparagus — and high, high hopes for the few others Knisley illustrated. I might think twice before I buy more of Knisley’s autobiographical work, but I’ll certainly be first in line if she finds herself compelled toward an entire illustrated cookbook. ![]() The Round House was seriously, unbelievably good and I might have a couple things to say about it! Spoilers! » more: the round house by louise erdrich ![]() Nineteen years later, I am twenty-eight years old and just about to finish up my first year in a new state. I’m no longer tall for my age, but I am still fat and smart(ish). Music is still the first thing I ever really loved, but I’m in a serious relationship with television at the moment. My idea of what “someone” is has changed dramatically and I’m okay with how I turned out most days. Nine years old seems insanely young to me now, impossibly young — too young for Hole probably, too young for anything, honestly. But I grew up with wonderful, involved but permissive parents and KROQ and the Los Angeles alt-radio culture of the mid-90s, so young or not, I first found my footing as a human being in Green Day and Candlebox and Nirvana and Tori Amos and The Offspring and Alanis Morrissette and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And Hole. ![]() I remember being angry — so angry — at so much, at everything. Angry at nine and at twelve and at fifteen and at twenty. Angry at myself for being fat and weird. Angry at the kids who were mean to me and at myself for being impossibly meaner back. Angry at the people who didn’t listen when I was hurting, angry at myself for getting hurt, for letting other people hurt me. Angry at the world in the most uncomplicated ways, the most individual. I was angry because I was hurt. ![]() I couldn’t have told you in 1994 when I bought it on cassette at Tower Records at the West Covina Plaza or a couple years later when I bought it on CD at the same Tower Records or a year after that when I had to rebuy it because I’d worn my first copy out or when I rebought it digitally because I couldn’t take the skips from my ripped copy any longer — I’d have probably just said I liked it a lot because Green Day was my favorite band and I would’ve felt like a traitor — but Live Through This was the most important album of my youth. And nineteen years later it means more to me than ever. I didn’t call myself a feminist in 1994, partially because I was nine years old and I didn’t really know what that meant and partially because I was raised by a father who called feminists “feminazis” and if there was one thing I wouldn’t have wanted to do in 1994, it was disappoint my father. I didn’t call myself a feminist in 2004 either because I was raised by a culture that taught me that feminism meant female superiority and that I should strive for something my conservative poli-sci professor called “equalism” but was actually code for the patriarchal bullshit status quo. I call myself a feminist now and I try very hard to be a good one, an intersectional one, an engaged one. But I’m also angry. Still angry, so angry. And where my anger was indistinct and personal when I was young, anger built on hurt and sadness, it is anger directed at the system now, at patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny. At the incredible violence women face, institutional and political and personal. Before I really knew why I was angry, Hole gave me a voice for it. Before I understood what it meant when a boy with a blond bowl cut chased me and my best friend around the playground at my first elementary school and flipped our skirts up, laughing, I was angry. Before I understood why a yard aid pulled me aside and told me not to play on the monkey bars because my shirt was “too short” and everyone was looking, I was angry. Before I saw the aggressive challenges from boys in high school because “girls don’t like metal” as acts of sexism, I was angry. And even though I didn’t really know it, Courtney Love was shaping that anger, asking questions that I wouldn’t understand for years, and planting the furious seeds of something that would shape me monumentally as an adult. As an adult, that anger raged, rages through me every day. Every time I see another woman sliced open on a television or movie screen. Every time I’ve been groped or catcalled or hit on through the open windows of my vehicle. Every story I hear about street harrassment. Every time a politician thinks they have a right to make rules about what people can or cannot do with their uteruses. Every single time I’ve heard “Nice tits” or “That mouth would look great around my dick” or “You’re fat but I’d still fuck you.” Every story about assault or rape or abuse. ![]() ![]() |