Essay, Humor, Life

DANCES WITH WHITE BOYS

“I already picked my outfit, but let’s go back through this journey,” I say to my little sister, flipping through the photos of possible outfits.

“No. No. No,” she says, rejecting three of the possibilities. We land—communally—on the outfit I’m already wearing: a light white short-sleeve button-down with neat, cubed stripes and medium brown tapered chinos.

I close my iPhone, making the screen go black on the coterie of headless photos, each angled in a way to showcase the outfits, variations on short-sleeved button-downs and narrow pants—in pairs of black and blue, blue and brown, and pastels.

The outfit is flattering, broadening my shoulders, slimming my waist and just generally creating that V that drives the boys wild. But, in boat shoes and a watch, the outfit feels a little vanilla. A little preppy. It’s a little white bread for me. I like dark, sleek colors, or muted patterns. The Ralph Lauren—oops, just let me pick up the brand name I dropped—shirt and chinos are all fine and dandy, and I know that I’d rather look good than weird and misshapen, but I just feel like a little non-me.

I spent roughly forty minutes curating outfits, trying them on, taking pictures, and getting multiple opinions before arriving at the White Bread option.

Tonight’s our staff banquet. It’s kind of the social event of the season, when the norm is getting sunscreen stains on my gym shorts and a crick in my neck from talking to seven-year-olds. Basically, we needed this, y’all.

My little sister—let’s call her Poppy—is looking chic in a deep blue sleeveless dress with a scalloped hem. I straightened her hair for her, her sitting doing her makeup and me haphazardly taking great swatches of dark brown hair and running it through the scalding clamps. Ten minutes into it, and I’ve already put more effort into her hair than I’ve ever put into my own.

*****

“Omg, look at him,” my coworker—sixteen years old—salivates over a boy, tanned, muscular and coiffed—the epitome of the Abercrombie Zombie.

“I don’t really like his shirt,” I say sharply, drawing her attention back to me. Just as the sentence escapes my mouth, someone else whispers, “Oh my god, I like his shirt.” I lean across the table and pat her hand. “No you don’t, honey. He’s just hot.”

*****

The lights are down and everyone is a pulsing mass on the dance floor. I’m in the middle of the mass, dancing with my friends. We’re being jostled by the people dancing around us.

The dance floor becomes a colony of microcosmic communities. There are constantly shifting dance circles, which vary in size, people dancing in the center, transferring across the expanse with others. There are small clumps drifting in between. The sixteen-year-olds cling together like lampreys on a whale, bobbing in unison. My group forms a loose oval, people stepping in and out.

The dance floor becomes an ocean, rippling and mutating. It ebbs and flows. It undulates with a liquid quickness. The sixteen-year-olds are a darting school of fish. My friends and I are jellyfish, languid and sleek in our motions, playing off each other. The lifeguards are seals, clamoring barks that go up into the pulsating air that’s already filled with deep bass and synthetic notes. The sports specialists—a motely crew of soccer, tennis, baseball—are penguins, muscular and lithe and slick and bobbing against each other. And in the center of the ocean are the Straight White Boys, slamming against each other and dashing up and down in the crowds like dolphins diving through crested waves.

I am a White Boy, so I move with the awkwardness that comes from long, gangly limbs and jarring hip-drops. But the Straight White Boys seem to leap above the awkwardness, and treat the dance floor with a tribal hunger, a clannish mob mentality. They crash against each other, fists in the air, screaming the words. Unabashed. Fearless.

*****

I wish I could dance like they do, unabashed. Unafraid. I wonder what it’s like to claim something without any hesitation. Without any forethought. The SWBs claim their method of dancing as assuredly as their predecessors claimed things like late night television and the Presidency. My predecessors, the Gays, claimed the margins, the outskirts. They sometimes even claimed the skirts.

*****

I have a chronic problem with living in the moment. I’m always too aware of my hands, the stilted movement in my legs. I consciously loosen my muscles, whip my hair out of its neatly, American Crew-ed coif and try to have fun.

I don’t know how many more summers I have of languidly hot days spent walking across the green fields of our camp. I don’t know how many more summers I have before I commit to a job, a field, a career. I don’t know these things.

So I decide to throw up my chin, glint my teeth and have fun. My body slips unconsciously into rhythm, and it syncs up with everyone else, until the ocean glides in beat and the dolphins appear to stop breaking against each other and everything else and start to move in harmony with the current. The seals bring out the laughter in everyone else. The fish dart and tickle and lighten. And the jellyfish, we bob faster, happier, funnier.

*****

I only have so many moments on this craggy, smooth, mountainous, oceanic planet. I only have so many milliseconds with friends. I only have so many shared gazes with cute boys across the room. We only have so many…fill in the blank.

So I stop analyzing things in the moment. I stop placing meanings on the people, stop subconsciously dividing them into genii to make it easier for filing later. I stop noticing the patterns and the movements and start dancing.

Because sometimes that’s all we can do. Throw up our hands, toss back our heads, giggle and act like dummies and the real dorks we are.

THE END

Life

I WANT TO BE DIANE KEATON

I’ve been feeling hypersensitive about my body, so I went on a run.

Back up a few years to understand why this is a big deal. I hate running. I ran essentially year-round for four years straight—cross country, indoor track & field, outdoor track & field, summer runs—in high school. By the end of senior year, running was gag-inducing. I exchanged it for other modes of cardio in college, and slowly lost the tolerance for longer runs I had built up—through literally blood, sweat and tears—throughout high school.

This photo has no relevance to the post. I just hope it becomes the thumbnail.

So yeah, I guess long story short, I hate running. But there is nothing to make me feel simultaneously better and worse than running. Better because running triggers my already overactive sweat glands like nobody’s business, tricking me into thinking I’m burning a shit ton of calories. And since my body image issues are mainly in my tricky head, tricking is more benevolent than malevolent. Worse because running fucking sucks. My chest cramps up and I swear I start coughing up blood.

I went to the gym this morning—I’m writing this on Saturday—but I vegged the rest of the day, so I decided to go on a run before dinner. I’ve been feeling pasty and doughy and wholly unattractive these past few days. Partially it’s because I’m sick and that always throws me through a loop. Plus, my skin has been erupting like the Hindenburg.

But mostly it’s because I have to get shirtless in front of a bunch of muscled, athletic, tanned Abercrombie & Fitch wannabes at work.

And for someone who’s more in the American Apparel aesthetic—just visually, I can’t actually shop there unless I take the five-finger discount (stealing)—Abercrombie & Fitch wannabes make me as uncomfortable as an actual Abercrombie & Fitch store. Why do they have to be so loud? And so dark? And does that cologne they spray everywhere have some sort of horse tranquilizer in it?

I got lost in that tangent and I’m slightly confused. But that might just be the horse tranquilizers.

*****

I slip my earbuds up through the neck of my shirt, popping them into my ears. My phone is wedged in between the consecutive waistlines of my gym shorts and my boxers. Later, the phone will be wedged between my bare hip and the waistlines because the previous position caused a little too much slippage for the owner of the phone to be comfortable with.

I turn right out of my street, forgoing the hill straight ahead and following along the squat suburban streets, dipping down the hills, up by the library, down by the church.

I’m playing Spotify and trying to stretch my clomping gait into something more graceful. Flipping through my head like a Rolodex or a pinball machine are thoughts of how much I would like to be sitting down, thoughts of my burning esophagus, and thoughts of inadequacy.

This might come as a shocker, but feeling unconfident about your body is not fun. Truly, I’m working wonders here. I’m Mother Theresa, with a better haircut and a desperate need for an attitude adjustment.

There’s an antiquated phrase—and by “antiquated,” I mean 2006—“in need of an attitude adjustment.” I feel like that’s the kind of thing my mom would say about me when I was acting super bitchy and listening to Green Day—I was 11, give me a break. And the collection of words makes me conjure up images of crowbars, men in helmets and fluorescent orange breaker vests descending to the subterranean, ironclad depths of my psyche, finding my “attitude” and clobbering it with crowbars, cranking the cogs this way and that way, repainting the hull and hammering out any dents.

I wish changing your thought process was as tactile as fixing, like, I don’t know, a shelf? I’m not good at DIY, so I really don’t know what to say for this. Whatever, you get my point.

Changing your negative thought processes should be easier because…because it just should be. Like, I wish that I had the confidence and poise of a young Diane Keaton—I have no fucking clue where that came from, but she is CON. FI. DENT. So I guess I’ll stick with that?—but I don’t. And I wish I could say that I’m secure in my body and my heart and my mind and my soul, but I can’t. And that’s really frustrating. I’m a fixer. I aggressively and unwarrantedly take control of situations. I would rather do group projects by myself to have all the parts under my grip.

But we can’t control our minds. We can work at diverting downward spirals, but that’s hard. I want it to be easy. I want to flip a switch and be confident. I want to be Diane Keaton, rocking menswear and gray hair.

Da phresh cut.

Anyway, after the run—which was preceded by an impromptu, impulse haircut—I felt better-ish. But I hate that these material things—getting a haircut, going on a run, sacrifing a virgin and bathing in her blood—made me feel good about myself in a way that I wasn’t able to. Like, even though on the surface they don’t sound like bad ways to cheer yourself up, I want to be able to break myself out of the cycle of negging on my appearance.

I wish this was one of those blog posts where at the end I’m like, “And that’s how I discovered the secret to success, self-love, and body-positivity!” But it’s not because I really don’t have any answers.

Sometimes we’re all just Kathryn Hahns living in a world of Kate Hudsons—How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days, duh—but Kathryn Hahn ends up with that guy at the end, so we should all hope to be so lucky. Until then, just help your prettier, blonder friend try to ditch the perfect man for the sake of writing a good article.

Humor, Life, Rambles

AN ASS LIKE A THROW PILLOW

I have this theory that I only look truly hot in my bathroom mirror.

And if proven to be true, this theory is quite unfair to the other (seven billion minus one, I can’t even begin to do that math) people on this Earth because (seven billion minus one) people cannot fit into my bathroom all at the same time to witness me looking hot. And even if we scheduled out a time to get roughly six people into my bathroom to witness me looking hot, it would take a billion (is that right?) trips to show everyone how hot I looked.

How much “more info” could I possibly want?

Adding in the time required for each person to adequately drink in my beauty, and I’m looking at 32 years—at least—of being in a bathroom with six other strangers, and that’s just if each group gets a one-second viewing, which is unlikely and—frankly—unfair to them. But by even doubling the viewing time—64 years—or tripling it—96 years—it still seems impossible to do.

So the moral of the story is that you’ll have to just take my word for it that I’m hot.

End of post.

Just kidding. Could you imagine? That was basically a math class.

Side bar, I was lying on my front lawn with my laptop—to be artsy, obviously—and I had to give up because I was getting uncomfortably moist. Which got me thinking, is that redundant? Is there a way to be “comfortably moist?” It doesn’t seem like it.

I’ve been wearing a lot of short bathing suits and watching a lot of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, which obviously has led me to thinking about my ass a lot. I’m long and lean—with a 10/10 face, in my bathroom mirror—so while my butt is cute and perky, it doesn’t pack a punch.

So today—Sunday, today, not Monday, today, when you’ll be reading this—I did squats and lunges. I put on “The Night Is Still Young” for some Nicki Minaj inspiration. And while doing that, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror—the mirrors at my Planet Fitness gym might be a solid second for how hot I look—and saw my profile. And my little tush wasn’t Kardashian-esque but it was cute in profile.

I was listening to Ross Mathews’ podcast Straight Talk With Ross—

Minute—minute as in “very small” and not as in “a measurement of 60 seconds”—side bar, I never know when to italicize and when to put things in quotes. Like, if it’s apart of a greater piece of work, you put in quotes, I think, but what is a podcast? Very unclear.

—and one of his cohosts was giving advice to a caller. She was nervous about bringing a guy back to her house because it wasn’t all Pinterested out and she was worried he wouldn’t be (P)interested in her if her house was subpar. And the cohost said that most people don’t notice the décor if the ambience and the host are warm and inviting.

“He’s not going to notice your throw pillows,” she—the cohost—said. “He’s going to notice you.”

And so, in a roundabout—“rounded butt” more like it—way, my ass is like a throw pillow. It’s nice that it’s there, but it’s not crucial to the party. But then, also, in a later episode, Ross said that he has roughly forty throw pillows in his house and he rotates and swaps them out, so maybe throw pillows are important? I’m getting very mixed signals here. What does that mean about my butt?

I’ve been reading a lot of BuzzFeed articles about how to “dress for your curvy body,” and while that sounds odd, because I’m not a voluptuous woman, I’ve discovered a ton of curvy women role models who totally embrace their body. Add that in to Ross Mathews, who is the poster child (man?) for loving your body, and that’s really what I want to get into. Loving my body. Living for it. Thinking that it slays. Because body confidence is sexy and refreshing and wholly too uncommon.

I have a small but perky butt. I have long eyelashes. I have good hair. I have nice lips. I have shoulders that have potential, a little tummy poof. But I have killer thighs and calves. That can be enough for now. I still slay. I’m still making people gag on my eleganza, live for me, die for me.

P.S. I saw this commercial for a medicine that combats foot fungas and it had an anthropomorphized foot playing tennis. This is not Don Draper’s dream.

There are no words. This is pedi-ful. Get it? Like “pitiful” but “pedi” because of foot.

Inspirational, Life

#BLESSED

The other day, I changed my Facebook profile picture and header. And since I was on my phone, there is an option to swipe right on your header picture and it takes you to your other photos. And since I was just hanging out on the toilet, I decided to swipe through my photos, getting pretty deep into the last year.

My current Facebook header.

Side bar, we all go on our phones on the toilet. Let’s not play coy.

And so I went through the photos of my sophomore year of college. And it made my heart hurt of happiness. Because I got to see all the fun moments again. Some were small, like eating fried ice cream with one of my best friends—Shelby—or bigger, like having a picnic with some of my friends who were graduating and being silly. It showed me the friends I made and lost over the year, and the person I was over this last year.

And as I was going through the photos, I thought about the person in the photos. What would other people think of the Danny that was in those photos? He was pictured with friends, eating ice cream, dancing, going to parties, snuggled up in pajamas, cozied up with friends, outside in the snow. He has a life, a smile on his face. Would they think he’s charming? Handsome? Outgoing?

On the outside, I’m sure that’s what they would see. But sophomore year was one of the hardest of my life, probably only on par with my sophomore year of high school, when I made the decision to come out of the closet.

But sophomore year of college was a little different. I don’t consider this to be a “secret”—because I don’t think it’s something shameful or meant to be kept a secret—but it’s just not something I often talk about. I think I’ve alluded to it in previous blog posts, but I struggle with depression and anxiety. The depression is something I’ve been dealing with—mostly unaware—for years, and the anxiety is something that developed in the last few years. This past year I decided to confront them both head-on.

Now, I don’t want this post to be about depression, because I think that’s deserving of its own time and love, but it did inspire this article, in a way. Depression warps your mind, your thinking. It tricks you into believing you are drowning, that you are alone. And for much of this past year, I’ve felt like that. I felt like I was trapped behind glass, preserved in static like a pressed flower.

But looking through those photos made me realize that that was not true. Over the past year, I lost friends and gained friends. I made connections and broke them. I tried for love—in all areas both platonic and romantic—and I stretched myself. And my depression makes me think that I am alone. But I know that I am not. Those photos—and my life—are populated with people. New friends. New connections. People that I went ice-skating with, people that I stayed up with late into the night. People I texted in tears. People whose names I screamed in joy in the dining hall. Not sorry for that, by the way.

A selfie I took this morning for no reason but vanity.

And this morning I got a Facebook message from a friend I haven’t talked to in almost five years. It was just brief and small, but I got to apologize for something that had weighed on me in a small corner of my mind. And even that was beautiful. It was a reminder that my life brushes against someone else’s constantly, and that it’s not just my story. Our world is a multiverse and there’s that word—sonder—that might be fictitious but means “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

Objectively and distantly, my life looks good. But up close and personal, it is so much better. At times, it doesn’t feel like that, but those photos made me realize something. That while I can look at them and be thrown back into the visceral pain I might’ve been experiencing at that moment, or the bad week I’d had before, but it also shows that life went on outside of my hurricane. Life with people who cared about me enough to text me and ask if someone was wrong, people whom I hugged tightly as we said goodbye for the summer, people who accepted my loud, brash voice and my prickly insecurities and my weird head.

We are lucky and grateful and blessed a thousand-thousand times for the people in our lives. I am lucky and grateful and blessed a thousand-thousand times for the people in mine.

I heard this really beautiful quote from Ingrid Nilsen, who is a YouTuber, that she said in her coming out video. It was in the context of her coming out, but I want to write it down now, so it’s immortalized on my blog.

She said, “We all deserve our best chance.”

And that’s what I feel like looking back at these photos has reminded. That I deserve my best chance for happiness. I have a thousand reasons to be depressed. We all do. But I deserve my best chance. I deserve my best chance to grasp at happiness. And I have people who remind me of that wordlessly, effortlessly. Life is so short and if you’re not grabbing at it full-handedly, then what is the fucking point of any of this?

Some will be small, like curling up with your best friends on your carpet, like eating fried ice cream, like waiting for them at the airport and jumping into their arms. Some will be big, like holding them when they cry, like helping them hold together their broken heart. We deserve our best chance. Take it. Grab it. Seize it.

Life is unfair and hurricanic and wild and lost and soulful and all we can do is tear into it and live and feast and drink it up.

Take your best chance. Live it up. Revel. Scream.

P.S. This post is dedicated to every person who ever made me experience sonder. Thanks.

Things I’m Thinking About:

The oatmeal I had this morning. It was delicious and fancy but also exploded in the microwave while I was trying to be Pinterest-chic and cut up strawberries. I spent 10 minutes wiping down the inside of the microwave that’s probably been in our house since the ’80s.

The aforementioned oatmeal

Betty Halbreich. She is a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman’s, and I want to be her when I am old(er). She was in the documentary, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s and I really find a soul sister in her.

This blogger/author who is my actual literary mother and inspiration. Her name is Jenny Lawson, and she runs The Bloggess, and she inspires me to be weird and authentic and creative and writerly and successful every time I read her posts. She also showed me that it was okay to write in your voice, even if your voice is rambling and sharp and different. I adore her.

Life

ROCK CANDY AGAINST BICUSPIDS

I think that I would like to be in love. I think it would be a nice feeling.

When I think of love, I think of crunching hard rock candy between my teeth. The snap of diamonds against each other, sugar melting on my tongue, gritty against the bitten and worried skin behind my lower lip.

I was saying to someone the other day that movies on the first date are never a good idea, and it struck me that I’ve now been on two first dates that had movies. The guy I was talking to asked, “How did they end up?” and I answered, “Well, I’m still single, so not great.” And that made me sad because it felt like I was reducing those dates to just passes or fails.

I’ve never been in love. And most days I’m okay with that, because most days I’m just scrolling through Twitter trying to think of dairy puns. It’s dairy tiring. I’m sorry. And if I was close to falling in love, I think I would skitter away like a spooked horse.

I’ve noticed that I compare myself and place a lot of metaphors in equine/deer animals, and I don’t know why that is. Just kidding, I know why that is. I like the awkward stilt of animals like that, animals that don’t slink or slip but clomp and jump and leap. And I feel like I’m much more of a clomper and jumper and leaper.

I had a dream the other night about a boy that I went on a not date with. In the not date, which was a date, we never mentioned the word “date” and so we hovered in limbo. Anyway, he just had a cameo in my dream and said “Hi,” but in that disconcertingly cheerful way of his that makes me uncomfortable because no one should ever be that happy to see me.

And maybe that’s why I shied away from him. He seemed too enthusiastic and too eager, and I’m used to chasing people. I asked out the same boy three times, and was rejected three times. I asked someone out in a moving car and he didn’t answer and we had to keep driving. And I don’t think I would date this boy, but he just reminded me of coffee foam on crooked teeth and the narrow clink of cups against saucers.

And I would like to be in love, but I don’t think I am built for it. I am calcium-love deficient, and my frame would crack and bend under the pressure. I am too spiny, too thorny, without soft flesh for cradling the blow. I am all angles and upturned jaw and teeth. I think love is the cracking of rock candy against porcelain bicuspids, the shattering and melting of hexagonal sugar that is gritty against the bitten and worried tender inner skin of my bottom lip.

Love seems weird because I feel like we all know what love is as an objective but I can’t take the next step and picture myself in it. It’s like reading the description of a roller coaster in a textbook. I can imagine the loops and the drops but I can’t imagine what they feel like. It’s like reading the texts of your friends. I always read them in my voice, and it takes a second for me to be able to hear it in theirs.

I know that I’m young, and that my friends are young, and that we’re all these loveless, lovelorn, fledgling birds. I don’t think I really know anyone in love.

But I think I would like love—objectively. I think I like it as a location, a place to exist within, like you’re literally in love, but I don’t like the idea of what leads up to it, the messy, the vulnerable, the stumbling steps.

Essay, Humor, Life

SEPPUKU

On Friday, I accidentally tried to break the ice at a party by telling everyone about the time I shit my pants.

So if you ever think that you are awkward or embarrassing, remember that you are not alone. Also remember that I am still cringing.

Why I chose this moment, surrounded by work colleagues I only know vaguely, to drop—pardon the pun—this bomb as an icebreaker will forever make me wonder. Now, it’s not that I’m embarrassed of the story. It’s actually one of my favorites to tell. Maybe one day I’ll be confident enough to write it for my blog, where it will live on the Internet forever until our world is sucked into a black hole.

Side bar, I’ve been reading a lot about black holes lately and despite no real evidence of its reverse, the white hole, I firmly believe that these two together create a wormhole that will transport us across the galaxy and are the key to spacefaring. So in other words, I have a lot of time on my hands.

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of questions, like, “You went to a party?” and “What was your fragrance story?” and “Were there snacks?”

And the answers to those questions are, “Yes, can you believe it?” and “My Body Shop white tea musk cologne mixed with sandalwood bathroom spray (semi-accidentally)” and “No. Not even an onion dip.”

I rarely go to parties during the school year, mostly preferring to stay in with my friends, watch bad comedies and going to 7-Eleven for midnight Slurpees and corndogs. So my party muscles were stiff and atrophied, but my real muscles were looking amazing, and I was wearing this slim-fitting, black tee shirt, so everything was going well aesthetics-wise.

Anyway, I was standing in a rough circle of people when I decided to engage in verbal diarrhea.

Side bar, the poop puns will not end. They’ll give me the runs for my money. OOOOH.

“So, why don’t we all talk about the last time we shit ourselves?” I ask loudly, clapping my hands together.

The silence lays thick and slow as molasses over our small group as what I just said registered. When I say something that I instantly regret, the seconds drop like an IV drip: slow and uncomfortable. Awkwardly, I try to cover my tracks.

“Um, um, um.”

It doesn’t really go over like it should.

“I feel like this was just a way for you to talk about the time you shit yourself,” someone in the circle says.

I laugh—that high-pitched cackle of terror—and say, “Come on, it’s not like we all haven’t done it.”

I can feel my intestines coil around my esophagus and disconnectedly think that seppuku—the Japanese ritualistic honor suicide of samurais—seems like a solid option right now, as I look out at the halo of alarmed faces around me.

One guy offers, “I mean, the last time was like when I was six.”

“When was yours?” someone asks me.

Fuck. The last time I did it, I was sixteen.

“HA HA HA,” I shriek. I briefly tell them the SparkNotes version of the story—again, maybe one day I will divulge the entire SAGA—and then change the subject with all the grace of a MMA wrestler.

The incident of my fuck-uppery lingers in our conversation like a malodorous fume, and not even sandalwood bathroom spray can disperse the nefarious tendrils.

I don’t think it was even the story that made me embarrassed. Like I mentioned earlier, that story is one of my best anecdotes. I broke it out in the first dinner with my now-good friend Nina. I read somewhere that Lena Dunham hates “bathroom humor,” and that’s when I realized that I had a distinctly different style of comedy than Lena. I mean, there were obviously other markers, but I chose that one.

I think what embarrassed me more was the complete misreading of my audience. I’m generally pretty intuitive when it comes to telling certain people certain anecdotes. I can discern which comfort level I am willing to broach with certain people. With Nina, I knew I could tell the story. And I’ve been used to the presence of her and my other friends, along with my sisters, all of whom I’ve told the story to. So like a deer skittering across an iced-over pond, I went from coasting to slamming face-first into a wall.

Later that night, I texted Nina and told her about the misadventure.

She was—obviously—shocked that I had fucked up so badly, but joined me in commiseration about being socially inept.

It was brought up only once the next day at work, so I guess that’s a blessing. But I’m waiting for it to rear its ugly head at the most inopportune time, which will probably be at my wedding or—more likely—a court hearing.

There’s no real way to end an incident like this, so in other news:

Pro of the Week: Eating waffles with peanut butter and raspberry jam

Con of the Week: severe farmer’s tan

Neither here nor there: Someone telling me that they read my blog but “not to tell anybody.” Because there’s nothing quite like receiving a backhanded compliment.

If there’s any takeaway from this occasion, it’s that I better believe in karma, because obviously I’m doing something to piss Someone Upstairs off.

Life, Rambles

SANDRA BULLOCK, THE EPISCOPALIAN CHURCH, & MY MESSED-UP KNEE

I’m typing this on my blue shag rug, and I think I’ve fucked up my knee from leaning against the wooden floor. I’ve tried to crack it back to normal, but it’s not working. Can anyone else crack their knees? Or is that something I should get checked out?

Today at work, one of my campers came up to me, pushed a used Band-Aid into my hands and asked me to “hold it” for him.

I spent an hour in a black hole of watching YouTube videos of “The Voice” competitors. Also side bar I almost wrote “spent an hour in a K hole” because I just assumed it meant the same thing as “black hole” and then I Screen Shot 2015-07-01 at 9.35.20 PM Googled it and found out that it’s a drug reference which led me to realize that I’m not cool enough to even know the names of drugs.

I feel like I eat relatively healthy at work—salads, yogurts, water—and I’m essentially sprinting after seven-year-olds today—also wait side bar, I played soccer with my campers today and I thought I was so good until I realized that I was playing against second-graders and then I realized that I might just be okay—but then I get home and ingest a pint of gelato and it seems cosmically cruel and unfair that the bad things I eat count more than the good things I eat. Who thought of this system?

I just saw the interview of Sandra Bullock after she was named the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” by People Magazine and I A) thought it was weird that we can categorically decide that fact, B) loved her dress, and C) thought it was weird that People Magazine was the authority of this highly contentious and amorphous idea of beauty. But I really loved what she had to say. She said that she only accepted the “title” (?) if she could use the platform to talk about the women who inspire her, who protect and value each other, who support other women against the onslaught of media criticism.

And that’s so important—well, duh—because it makes me nauseous when I think of the pressures of beauty ideals that we put on women and girls. Even with campaigns and role models, I don’t know how much progress we as a society have made to make girls and women feel like they are enough, and are in no need of airbrushing away freckles or photoshopping thigh gaps. And I know saying that veers towards the “you’re beautiful and you don’t know it” territory that has been clearly claimed by One Direction and John Legend, which I don’t want to encroach upon. I’m not trying to be like, “Oh you think you’re ugly but you’re so beautiful,” I’m trying to say that women, girls, men, boys, everyone, all of us, are strong and lovely and fragile and we are twisting ourselves and mangling ourselves for external approval. And that sucks.

And I feel that so much. Do you think I like eating salads? Salads are awesome but I don’t eat them because they’re awesome I eat them because I want to be Kate Moss. And I hate that I want to be Kate Moss because bringing back “heroin chic” is not something I want to be on my Wikipedia page when I’m eighty and doing enough chemical peels to melt titanium. I want “finally made “fetch” happen” and “repopularized pagan rituals in mainstream America” to be so associated with my name that it’s even in the short little summary at the top of my Wikipedia page.

I just spent 20 minutes reading about Holly Madison and her tell-all book about her time in the Playboy Mansion, so I really lost my train of thought. But I suppose she’s related to the notion of women being forced into fulfilling certain ideal in society.

The Episcopalian Church just voted and will now allow religious same-sex marriages! While I don’t anticipate the Catholic Church following suit anytime soon, at least without a bunch of nuns rioting in the streets, it’s incredible for a religious organization to be standing behind same-sex marriage. Religion remains one of the last bastions of same-sex marriage opponents, so without that, they have one less leg to stand on. They’re basically hobbling around on peg-legs at this point.

It’s funny how the world can move so slowly for absolute ages and then within the span of a few weeks, things come to a head. In the span of a few weeks, we’ve seen an Olympian come out as transgender, a woman spark dialogue about racial identity, same-sex marriage become legalized across the country, and so, so much more. It makes me glad that I’m alive to see this. We came from generations of fighters and feminists and equalists and it’s heartbreaking that they didn’t see the fruits of their fights, but they fought for us, so that we could see it, and the fact that we had people who thought so far into the future and saw us and cherished us is enough to make me remember that however fucked up I feel or depressed I am, I was fought for.

Update on my knee, it’s still fucked-up, and I put ice on it, which just served to make it numb and fucked-up. Why does ice make anything better? Because it reduces swelling? Or it is a placebo? What would heat do? Maybe it’ll swell up and then I’ll have a peg-leg just like the bigots! Then I’ll be so #relatable to them and they won’t hate me anymore!

This post was an absolute cluster-fuck of thoughts. But I almost like them as much as my “essays about my life in which I exploit painful memories for metaphorical profit” posts, because this is much more reflective of my thought train. Like, when I’m writing those life essay posts, I’m poised and I edit and I’m so goddamn classy, and when I write posts like this one, it’s essentially like when you give a monkey a keyboard and it just drags its hands (paws?) against the keys.

BAI-BAI, BAES 😉

REAL JOURNALISM

Inspirational, Life

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: HISTORIC & RADIANT & IN ALL 50 STATES

June 26, 2015

I was lying in bed, probably looking at pictures of Khloe Kardashian, when my mom came into my room.

“Did you see it?” she asked, handing me her phone. I sat up, and read the headline of the article she had on the screen. I looked down at it and read the words, not sinking in.

Marriage equality passed in all fifty states. MARRIAGE EQUALITY PASSED IN ALL FIFTY STATES.

It still doesn’t entirely feel real, but it is, and I don’t think I will fully ever be able to express what this emotion is.

It is part blinding happiness. It is the happiness that all across the country, people are celebrating and dancing and loving and living.

It is part gratefulness that my personhood has been fully recognized in every state across the country.

It is part glee that we finally triumphed, and it feels like the end of a Disney movie where the good guys are cheering and the bad guys are grinding their teeth.

It is part sadness that generations of LGBTQIA+ before me did not live to see this day, and sadness that they didn’t see with their own eyes the brilliance and equality that they worked so hard for.

It is part peace that we, and by “we” I don’t mean just LGBTQIA+ people, but “we” as in everyone in the goddamn United States, can marry whomever we choose. By granting marriage equality, the institution has been restored. No longer will it be an elite club. Now it is something for everyone to hold faith in, to respect, to honor, to cherish.

When I came out at fifteen, more than four years ago, I didn’t think this day would come. The day that my mother would show me the news that marriage equality was passed nationwide. When marriage equality was passed in New York, I celebrated in silence by myself. But now, at nearly twenty years old, I can celebrate outwardly and proudly and I can feel the love and happiness pouring in over social media as all of my friends celebrate with me.

We are not only living history. We are also giving the next generation of LGBTQIA+ something that we were not given. We will be raising them in a world where they are recognized at this fundamental level with their heterosexual counterparts. I know that we are a long way from reaching total equality, and the fight isn’t over, but this is a huge thing. Marriage equality validates us in a way that has not been done before, and we will be giving our following generations a softer, hopefully better world to live in.

We are teaching the next generations that there isn’t anything wrong with being a boy who likes boys, a girl who likes girls, a girl who likes boys and girls, a boy who doesn’t like anyone, a girl whom everyone else sees as a boy. This isn’t just about marriage equality. This is about nudging our country towards acceptance and preaching self-acceptance.

I hope everyone relishes this day and basks in the sweet, hard-won victory for marriage equality. We did it, we’ve earned it, we’re here.

Inspirational, Life

RACHEL DOLEZAL, CAITLYN JENNER, AND ANGER

I’m always a little afraid to start a new season of Orange Is The New Black because it’s very emotionally-draining and I always get sucked into it faster than a bug down a flushed toilet. What a metaphor.

I went to Six Flags the other day and made the bad mistake of wearing a tank top with no sunscreen. That decision, paired with my vampire skin, had added up to some interesting tan lines, and by “interesting tan lines” I mean that I look like a nightmare and am trying to get my skin back to normal and I have to start working at my summer camp job where I get shirtless. And there are already hot people at camp, so when this human potato rolls up shirtless, with tank top tan lines no less, it become a big pota-no.

I’ve been following the whole Rachel Dolezal story and have been finding it so interesting, especially with the multiple connections people are drawing between her and Caitlyn Jenner. At first, I was like, “Um, what?” and then I was like “Oh, maybe,” just because people were saying that on one hand, people are largely accepting of Caitlyn Jenner, but we are condemning another woman for trying to cross some large divide. But then, after thinking and researching it more, I felt like we were wrong in comparing Caitlyn to Rachel.

Janet Mock summed it up excellently in a series of tweets. She wanted to completely stop the connection between trans-womanhood and Rachel Dolezal. She said that trans women of color are attacked daily because of “this pervasive myth that we are pretending to be someone we are not, and therefore should be extinguished.”

And I was thinking about how Rachel said that she felt black and identified as black and I realized that I didn’t know what that meant. I have never really felt “white” because I don’t think that’s a feeling. I think the only way to really feel a certain race or way or identity is to feel the pressing of society’s expectations on you. I was on Tumblr and saw this amazing post that said that young black women are subjected to so much fetishization and discrimination and expectations. Rachel didn’t go through that because she is white, and never had to be subjected to the unique experience of growing up as a black person in America. She chose to opt into that, and I think that’s where I become angry.

I am not black, so I will never understand what it feels like to be discriminated against because of the color of my skin. Being born a white person offers me some privilege, a privilege that is so pervasive and invisible to my eyes that it almost doesn’t seem there, but I guess that’s kind of the point of being privileged. You don’t have to think about it, you have the luxury of not thinking about skin color.

But I am a self-identified gay man. And I do understand that unique branch of discrimination, of unsubtle looks in the school hallways as people analyzed my clothes and my gait, of the terror of answering phone calls because I worried it would be pranks or loud chants of “faggot,” of trying to come to terms with a sexuality that was not embraced by my community, of being completely alone in dealing with everything. And so I put it into terms of that. If I discovered that a leader of the GLAAD organization was a heterosexual person pretending to be a member of the LGBTQIA, I would firstly be like, “Why?” and secondly I would want to scream.

Because that person has no right to pretend to understand the struggles I went through. They have no right to stand next to me and claim my childhood terrors, my psyche’s scars, my shattering, as their own. And so while I am not and will not ever be a black person or understand that unique struggle, I can sympathize, and I can understand why Rachel’s actions were so perverse. She did not have any right to claim those struggles as her own. Allies of minorities like gay or black are valued and crucial parts to the fight for equality, but she overstepped her boundaries and tried to claim those plights as her own. A white person does not understand the discriminatory experiences of a black person in the same way that a straight person does not understand the experiences of a gay person. You can sympathize, you can become angry, you can respect, but you will never know exactly what that felt like, what that struggle was. And that’s why I’m mad. Because she took something that didn’t belong to her and wore it as her own.

I usually don’t write about more political issues or discussions like the Rachel Dolezal situation because I am always so afraid of making people upset or being disrespectful or insensitive, so I welcome other opinions and thoughts. But I think it is important to open dialogues about issues like these, because they matter. I considered writing about the Charleston church shootings as well, but I haven’t fully verbalized my words, so the only thing I can really express is deep sorrow for the lives lost and anger that our government officials are dancing around the notion of racism as a motivation.

I think we, as a country, need to be angrier about things. We need to stand up and yell and get emotional and express our thoughts. Because anger is a powerful motivator. Anger, not blind rage, can be molded into something powerful and unbreakable and raw.

We need to be angry about the way black people are treated in this country and in the world. We need to be angry about how TV networks deal with uncovering child-molesters like Josh Duggar. We need to be angry about the violence and vitriol aimed against transgendered people. We need to be angry that it is 2015 and we are living in a society that does not value equality. We need to be angry.

I was about to apologize for not posting a funny, witty little blog today, but I won’t. This blog is a reflection of me, and I don’t want it to come across that I remain cheerful and untouched by the atrocities and unfairness of the world. I don’t want that to be something people think about me, but I also think that we, everyone, has a duty to start dialogues about contemporary issues. We need to start dialogues. We need to start action. We need to be angry. We need to care.

Essay, Life

THE BALLAD OF RICK AND BEING SICK

I worked a children’s Disney show this weekend, so obviously I oscillated between “I hate kids, why do we insist on putting the future into their jam-sticky, gremlin hands?” and “Oh that kid is so cute!”

And because I was surrounded by kids, I began thinking about him. The original little jam-sticky gremlin. The original “that kid is so cute”. The original two-foot-tall Tower of Terror.

Me!

Sometimes, I think that I would love to be a dad someday. And then I remember what I was like as a child. I was an overly-coiffed, under-socially aware, little know-it-all. Seriously, I was kind of an asshole. Like, I’m an asshole now, but back then (circa 2000) I had no idea the level of my asshole-ness.

And for some reason, a memory popped into my head. In the middle of third grade, I switched schools. We had moved houses the previous August, but I was just now being integrated into the local elementary school. And obviously, as such, I was ready for anything*.

*I was in no way prepared; again, I was eight years old.

In my new school, I was the new kid. And since everyone else had been going there since kindergarten (obviously a lifetime), they all knew each other and I was this strange, primped beast. I didn’t really make a lot of friends in elementary school because A) I was superbly gay even back then, and it was a Catholic school and B) I was superbly aloof.

But this memory doesn’t particularly have to do with me being aloof. I was sitting in Mrs. Angelo’s** third-grade class, chatting with Lucy Duffy**, who had a weird birthmark on her arm, but other than that was just kind of a maniac.

**Names have been changed for anonymity, I guess? I doubt they care.

Mrs. Angelo was a tall, slim ribbon of a woman, with teased, jet black hair and a cake-face of white foundation and dark, Gothic lips. Seriously, even as an eight-year-old, I knew that I was dealing with a member of the undead. She also assigned a lot of homework for being a third-grade teacher.

Anyway, I was talking with Lucy, and spouting off the kind of nonsense that kids do.

Me: I think I’ll change my name.

Lucy: Do it!

Me: My middle name is Patrick, so I wanna be called “Rick.”

Even thinking back on this, I cringe a little. Mostly at the idiocy of being a child. I never really liked being a child because I think I always knew how little power I had. And how dumb I was. But also at that god-awful nickname. But, it was 2003 and it was a different time.

Coming off of the band-wagon that was the late ‘90s, I was dead-convinced that the epitome of cool were those cheesy, awkward 90s-00’s white-boy nicknames. “Bobby” was a big hit for me. “Jake,” “Chad” and “Billy” were some other gems. So “Rick” was not entirely unprecedented.

Apparently early 2000s hyper-masculine names were incredibly appealing to me then.

I thought “Rick” was infinitely cool until it was explained to me that nicknames didn’t really work like that. At that point, I was being called “Daniel” fulltime. I had not yet reached my stage of wanting to be “casual and cool” (aka 12), which is when I first started going by Danny. So for those few brief moments in third-grade, I was someone other than Daniel. I was Rick. I was a god.

Sometimes I think about what my life would be like if I were straight. And Rick became the manifestation of that. I think about what he would be doing if he were a real person. What kind of guy he would be. What kind of human he would be.

So I wrote out a little list of what Rick would be like:

1). Embarrassed of the name Rick, and change it to Ricky

2). Love muscle-tanks

3). Slap two pieces of pizza together and call it a pizzandwich

4). Be a ladies’ man

5). Be kind of a tool

6). Love Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones (like a lot; idk why this is so specific)

7). Be really into Survivor

Straight Rick sounds a lot like Gay Danny, except with a slightly less firm grip on reality, and probably a slightly stronger BO. Just kidding, I sweat like a pig. Just kidding(?).

I’m also sick right now, and I can’t tell if it’s allergies or a cold. Could it be both? Could I possibly have that bad of karma? Let’s not answer that. Let me live in ignorance. And igno-dance the night away.

I’ll end this. This is going on too long. I’ll end it. Or will I? I will. I promise. I swear.

The Wunderkindof

Too good-looking to be this funny. Politics. Pop Culture. Millennial Ramblings.

Category Archives: Life

DANCES WITH WHITE BOYS

I WANT TO BE DIANE KEATON

AN ASS LIKE A THROW PILLOW

#BLESSED

ROCK CANDY AGAINST BICUSPIDS

SEPPUKU

SANDRA BULLOCK, THE EPISCOPALIAN CHURCH, & MY MESSED-UP KNEE

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: HISTORIC & RADIANT & IN ALL 50 STATES

RACHEL DOLEZAL, CAITLYN JENNER, AND ANGER

THE BALLAD OF RICK AND BEING SICK