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One miserable day you decide you want to change your life. You’ve tried it before in all kinds of different ways, each time deciding that a different thing is the problem and attacking with vigor. And things change and they get better and they don’t change and they get worse. You succeed and fail, more the latter than the former, and you give up and you try again.
One miserable day you decide that, if you must be miserable, if this is an intrinsic part of who you are, you can, at least, try to do it in a different place.
You have done this before also. It did not go well. It did not make you who you wanted to be. You came home with your tail between your legs and a well-rehearsed line about how it just wasn’t the right place for you. It haunts you, but life goes on, and you end up somewhere worse because sometimes that’s how it shakes out, but there are people you love with you and you find people to love in that worse place and you keep living.
One miserable day you decide that maybe you’re not as miserable as you think you are. One day you realize that, actually, living in that worse place even with people you love, is making you worse too. Colder and meaner and smaller, less enthusiastic when that was your entire brand as a person for most of your life. And you think: I can get the fuck out of here and I can try again.
Anyway! I got recommended “I Don’t Love Nothing and Nothing Loves Me” from Dinosaur Pile-Up’s album I’ve Felt Better and I’ve been listening to it and the whole album ever since. I like that it’s pretty homage-y — from AC/DC to Nirvana to fucking Bloodhound Gang, I have been having a GREAT time figuring out whichever tenuous little connection is tickling my brain at any time and adding them to my Sounds Like playlist — and I’m especially fond of “Big Dogs Eat for Free” and “‘Bout to Lose It” and “Big You and Me.”
I know I’ve talked about Mac Glocky before, but here I am doing it again because his covers/reinterpretations are some of the most fun I’ve had with music this year. I’ve been obsessively listening to his Smashing Pumpkins take on “Everlong” and I can’t get over how good the “Cherub Rock”-ification of the “Everlong” riff works and it makes me insanely jealous of his ability to break apart a song and understand what makes it. I also got obsessed with his Alice in Chains version of “The Man Who Sold the World” earlier this year because it sounds so much like it belongs in their episode of Unplugged and I also LOVE his Idles-ized version of “Once in a Lifetime” and especially appreciate that the video turned out so charming! Oh to have a single musical cell in my body!
I read You Gotta Eat by Margaret Eby this month and loved it! I have a hard time thinking through what to do about food when I am physically/emotionally drained and she has lots of great strategies for getting through those times that I’ll for sure be implementing. Also she’s funny! And never condescending!
Alright, that’s it! I haven’t made all of my donations for September yet, but if you have any extra cash a friend of a friend could very much use some help — Stand with Fredy — and as always if you’ve got a favorite charity, let me know about it: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
When I was a kid, or, I guess a kid right on the edge of adolescence, eleven or twelve, I went to the LA County Fair with my dad and one of my friends — Missy I think.
It wasn’t the kind of outing my dad liked. We weren’t really an outing family, but it was easy for him to wander around looking at dad things and hanging out on a shady lawn while Missy and I rode rides and probably giggled about boys and did whatever you do when you’re a twelve year old girl.
On the way into the fair, there was a big refrigerated truck and for a couple extra bucks, you could go inside and there was a preserved shark suspended in watery blue fluid to look at, something like… A great white, I guess. It was big and daunting. I grew up adjacent to the ocean and I knew a lot about sharks and I wasn’t afraid of them, but up close it was something else, in this strange enclosed little space with just Missy and me and this creature that had been alive and wasn’t any longer but had been suspended as thought it might find life again at any second and I remember feeling something inside me shift a little or crack apart or snap into place.
I knew something I hadn’t known before, I felt something I hadn’t before, and for the first time I was really conscious of it. A lot of adults will talk about a moment they knew their childhood was over because maybe they look back on something and they can identify it later on as having been important, but I think that’s something adults define later, a narrative they create for themselves.
Standing in the cool dark of that space and seeing that creature, I felt something. A kinship. A sense of… change. I knew, right then, that the squirmy and unsettled feelings inside of me, the seeing of the shark, that moment that couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, was going to stay with me forever. I knew right then at eleven or twelve and every time the memory resurfaces, I know it again.
I felt pain for that shark and loss and fear and disgust. Something primal and free had been made neither and it cost five bucks to step into a trailer and gawk at it, to see it stripped of self and life, a murky embalming in a tideless sea.
My childhood didn’t end there. I think, probably, my childhood had ended a long time before that because sometimes that’s just how things shake out, but the sense that something was wrong about being in that space and seeing that creature stuck in my ribs and I knew that I would think about it again, that it would stick with me forever, a latent emotion I would never understand or be able to articulate.
Melancholy, and fear. Shame. The sense that I was bearing witness to some kind of crime, some kind of gut-deep wrong-doing. A feeling that this dead shark in this glass case was a fundamental wound to the universe.
I think about Damien Hirst’s shark. And I think about Rosie in Australia. And I think about all the things we cage and contain to preserve them and I feel that gut deep squirm. The wrongness. The unsettled sense that I have experienced something I will never recover from even though it doesn’t feel like it requires recovery.
I haven’t seen Missy since I was twelve years old and I married a woman who would go into the shark trailer with me and feel the same inarticulable sense of mourning that I did.
Great Whites live all over the world. They can grow and lose and grow 20,000 teeth in their lifetime. How many more did that shark have to go?
We can’t choose what haunts us, but sometimes we feel it when the teeth catch.
I take great pride in being unembarrassable. Incapable of shame. I think of myself as existing Above and Beyond the mortal realm of humiliation. Some of that’s an act, obviously, because I am still human despite my best efforts. But by committing to the act for so long, it’s become truer and truer as time goes on. I don’t get embarrassed at things that I know other people would and I’m often joyfully and enthusiastically willing to do dumb shit out loud and in public that would likely horrify other people. I just want to be myself. If other people don’t like it, well. That’s not really a me problem, is it?
So, recently, I made a tank top. I had envisioned this shirt — I wanted a floral print tank top, fairly femme, and I wanted big white iron-on letters spelling out GET BENT across the chest. I say and write, “Get bent” a lot. I like that it’s both pretty aggressive and weirdly inoffensive. I like that the delivery can really sell your meaning. I like that it’s kind of old school.
I wanted this shirt in time to go to a concert in Denver and Crystal helped me get it made in a hotel room in Wyoming since we don’t actually own an iron with which to iron-on letters. I got frustrated and wanted to quit, but she made me persist! Because she is a very good wife and carries me through when I try to wimp out on stuff.
So I made this shirt! And it turned out fucking great! And I wore it to the show in Denver for Frank Iero and the Future Violents! And I took a picture with the whole band in it! And I have worn it a couple times since, including to see Ghost in Minneapolis and Ludo in St. Louis and I’ve gotten a bunch of compliments on it! Especially from drunken middle-aged women! Including a couple who have gently grabbbed me in the friendly way that only women can and went, “GET BENT! HA! That is GREAT!” And I get the bonus of getting to watch men look at my chest, read it, then look up at my face as they interpret it as a message for them and that is… Transcendent.
So I have warm feelings for this shirt and I’m happy about its existence. But then, while perusing Tumblr as I am now occasionally wont to do because the whole internet is a wasteland and who needs principles anyway, I came across a picture of the Frank Iero from Frank Iero and the Future Violents playing with his Future Violents about a week before I saw them in Denver. In the photo, he is holding his guitar flipped up against him so the back is showing. (He often puts words on the back of his guitars — numbers, his kids’ initials, whatever — so not unusual to see writing there.) But on this guitar… It says… Get… Bent…
 And. You know. Coincidences, right?! Frank Iero and I have… similar tastes? We are… close in age? It is… Not weird! That we would both! Be partial! To the phrase! Get bent!
But also, Frank Iero was/is (DON’T GET ME STARTED! The last week has been WILD.) a member of My Chemical Romance and has fans who are… Very Devoted! And they sometimes dress up like him and/or his My Chemical Romance bandmates! And then go to his shows! With his new band! And would probably very much make a shirt that said something he had put on one of his guitars!
And… while I love and respect these fans Very Much because they are, let’s face it, the ones who make the gears turn, the machines work, the reunions happen, I am… Just… Not one of them. Which is fine! I am obsessive and devoted in my own way!
But the idea… that Frank Iero might have looked at this shirt I was wearing while I was PAYING TO MEET HIM (An already, admittedly, kind of mortifying thing to do!) and which I had very clearly made myself… And thought I did it… Because he has that same phrase… on one of his guitars… … …
The Retroactive Embarrassment…. My soul left my body… I transmuted briefly into a toad as if cursed by a wizard I had wronged… I curled so deeply into myself that I returned to my fetal form… When what was left of my soul finally returned to my wombless wormy body, I burst outward into Humiliation Fireworks and then slowly returned to the earth as embers and ash… My body reassembling piece by piece… Even now, thinking about it, the molten lava of residual shame is the only glue holding me together.
I’m still gonna keep wearing it though.
I love space.
I have always known that I would never go to space.
I was an uncoordinated, fat kid who didn’t trust the military (Of course there are civilian astronauts. Lots of them! Neil Armstrong even, technically!) and I knew I would never have the discipline for it.
But I have always wanted to be part of the space program.
More than any other dream I’ve ever had — publishing a book! writing a movie! — I wanted to help explore space. It was my second dream job — edged out by paleontologist because, dinosaurs are amazing obviously — and the first I knew, almost as soon as I dreamed it, that I could never do.
Space is incredible. Vast and beautiful and endless. Every single thing we learn about space teaches us something important, but also opens us up to even more knowledge, to an even more expansive universe than we previously imagined, to an infinity so broad it’ll break you if you think about it too hard.
And I wanted to be part of it more than almost anything I have ever wanted.
And I knew I never, ever could.
Math and I have always been enemies. My lowest grades were always math. I had to repeat high school algebra. I preemptively took the ACT, well before I took the SAT, because I’d heard that the math was easier and I was T-E-R-R-I-F-I-E-D that my SAT score wouldn’t hit the minimum to avoid college placement tests. (It didn’t.) I didn’t want to struggle through at least 3 quarters of remedial math before also struggling through college algebra. (My ACT did.) I had to take a no-credit in my college algebra class because I couldn’t hack it. I ended up taking a logic class to satisfy my one single math requirement. I don’t think my final grade was very good. I excelled in sciences until they required math — here’s looking at you, high school chemistry — and I knew, deep down in the dark cave-like places where disappointment lives, that it would never get better. I would never make it through anything harder.
I took physics in college anyway, probably through a fluke of class requirements, availability, and timing, and it was torture. I understood the concepts, the ideas, the big stuff, the theoretical. I understood it and I liked it. I cared about it. Physics is… as close as humans get to magic. But the math bewildered and confused me. I tried. I read. I studied. I have never been a good studier, but GOD, did I try. I tried. And I just… couldn’t.
After putting in my second lackluster test performance, my very smart, very kind professor — a woman who worked for NASA and JPL and took students to the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Kennedy Space Center every year — asked me to stay behind after class.
I think I’d gotten a D and I was unhappily resigned. I wouldn’t call myself an overachiever, but with the exception of math, school had always been easy for me. Not just easy, but natural. It has always felt like learning was what I was supposed to be doing, the only thing I’ve ever been particularly good at.
This woman looked at me with this awful kindness, the kind that strips you down when you’re not expecting it, and she said, “You just. You can’t do this math, can you?”
And my breath caught in my throat because I’d had teachers who sympathized with my struggles before, ones who tried their best to help, but no one had ever, ever looked at me like they actually got it — that I was trying my absolute fucking hardest and I just could not do it.
And I just nodded.
She smiled at me, soft, and she told me she would do everything she could to give me partial credit so I could pass. And she did. And I did.
I took an astronomy class with her later, a class I anticipated and dreaded in almost equal measure, because I still loved space and because I wanted to learn about it, and she smiled and nodded at me when I took my seat at the front and some of the dread faded because I knew she still got it and I knew she had my back.
I cried after that class a lot. Because I love space. And learning so much about it — it was a surprisingly in-depth class for even an upper division entry-level — was moving, but also devastating because I knew this would be the end of organized space education for me. There was nowhere else for me to go.
She told me once, about midway through, as we went over a test after class that she had never had a student who so clearly and easily grasped and engaged with conceptual information, but who couldn’t do the math. It was the kindest, most flattering knife I’ve ever had through my heart.
I’ve always told people that, if the opportunity arose, even if I knew it was a one-way ticket to certain death, I would go into space. This is true every single day. This has never, even for like, one minute in my entire life been not true. To reach into the rich dark and see the limitless sea of our existence, to leave the bounds of earth, I would give my life. In a heartbeat. In a nanosecond. In a Planck second.
I won’t set foot on an airplane, but any space vessel will do.
The privatization of space exploration pains me. The increasing incuriosity of the American public and their unwillingness to fund NASA and further exploration of our universe is nauseating to me. We are so small in the scheme of everything and we have so much to learn. We are a species built from survival instincts and yet our curiosity compels us to do so much more, to learn so much, to seek out the edges of our universe and understand them.
Math may have defeated my dreams of exploiting that curiosity to its fullest. It may have even crushed my dreams, but it can’t stop me from learning. There is always more to know. And if Opportunity could outlive her mission by 14 years to teach us as much about Mars as she possibly could, we can be curious enough to learn something from her and curious enough to care about what comes next.
The static from your television is 1% residual radiation from the Big Bang. You and I and everyone we love, we are made of star stuff. We are the universe, walking and talking and seeking. Stay curious. Don’t stop learning.
For about a year in the late 2000s, I became intensely devoted to crossing myself whenever I passed a cross.
This started with a steeple cross that was visible to me from the freeway on the drive home from my college. I often sat in a little clutch of traffic near it and it was lit at night, so I noticed it frequently, hovering over the wall that separated the speeding 210 from the neighborhood beyond.
I’m not religious. I’ve been to church less than a dozen times in my entire life. I’m unbaptized, un-saved, uncircumcised. I’ve been to Catholic mass once and I spent the entire thing staring at how super naked Jesus seemed on the cross, hanging morbidly above the Filipino priest’s head. I’m religiously curious, so I know a lot about rites and rituals. Plus I’m a writer and I like characters of faith, so I’ve done a lot of research over the years. I’m an atheist though. No waffling here: I don’t believe in god and I have no interest in church.
But this cross, it haunted me. I could feel the pull of compulsion each time I passed it, the little tug at me, like there was something my body, my hindbrain NEEDED to do, but I wasn’t getting the message. It probably took a month of this drive, two or three times a week, for me to figure out what it was. My right arm wanted to make the sign of the cross.
This is 1. hysterical because with all that lack of religious upbringing, I had no idea how to accurately make the sign of the cross, and 2. disturbing, because it was a compulsion with an intensity I had not yet experienced. I’ve had intensely intrusive thoughts my entire life (flashes of sudden injury, the desire to drive into oncoming traffic, having to back up from a rail because I wanted to jump — all the regulars!) but this was not that. And it wasn’t like the compulsive need to touch and smell things that I inherited from my mother. (Thanks, Mom!) It wasn’t going all the way back to my apartment or dorm door to make sure I locked it. Twice. I knew there were consequences if I left my front door unlocked. I didn’t have any identifiable fear or consequence of NOT crossing myself, I just realized that I had to do it and I had to do it real, real bad.
So I did.
It became a thing. I drove by this steeple, I crossed myself. Probably incorrectly, but it got the job done. I felt compelled first in my upper arm, then my elbow, then my fingers as I neared the cross. I’d cross myself and I’d feel the minor flood of elation at having satisfied the compulsion. I only crossed myself when I was traveling on the westbound side of the freeway because, I don’t know, these things just happen and the universe in which I live has all kinds of rules I just obey because that’s how it is. I also always did it with my fore and middle fingers extended, which had no reasoning either. It just felt right.
It was weird, but it wasn’t dangerous and it was only once a day, twice a week!
But then it started happening when I was eastbound as well.
And then it started happening any time I passed a large cross. Then any time I passed a church. Then any cross. Then cemeteries.
I was living in a Los Angeles suburb and commuting into the Inland Empire. I spent a lot of time in the car and I saw a lot of crosses and churches and cemeteries.
I knew it had become a problem when I had to come up with a way to cross myself SECRETLY.
I had started crossing myself so frequently (There are more than 40 churches just in the town of 40,000 where I lived.) that doing it with other people had become unavoidable.
I have been an outspoken atheist since I was thirteen years old, I couldn’t let my friends and family think I had suddenly become weirdly and confusingly Catholic. Also, I still — despite having access to the entire internet at my fingertips — had no idea if I was crossing myself correctly and being seen doing it incorrectly would have been HUMILIATING, obviously. I think I didn’t look it up because the compulsion didn’t want me to. My crossing was organic and it wanted to stay that way.
I had learned in like, the third grade, that crossing your fingers for luck came from persecuted Christians giving each other the what’s up, so I tried that. I didn’t like it. First of all, it’s not really an action, it’s an adjustment. Second of all, it didn’t satisfy my elbow or my shoulder. My fingers were okay-ish with the deal, but the rest of my right arm was Not Having It.
So I started drawing a cross on my thigh. It allowed for the motion of my entire arm, it seemed semi-holy, and it was pretty easy to do inconspicuously. And I did it A Lot.
The best way to end this story would be to tell you that someone busted me and I had an embarrassing breakdown about how I was an adult woman who couldn’t control my own weird, compulsive, faux-religiosity. Or maybe that the compulsion started to make me feel too out of control and so I forced myself to break it. But, sadly, this story just ends the way most idiot problems I have do: it just went away on its own.
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