This week has already featured Blowjob Drama, which is not in my top five favorite kinds of drama, and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is one of the very worst days to be a middle school teacher, as roughly half of the ongoing relationships in the building are going to abruptly end tomorrow, and most of them are going to end in desperately stupid ways for desperately stupid reasons. Meanwhile, I still have to teach math. Which they have even less incentive to pay attention to than usual.
I brought my dad Arby’s for lunch today, and while I was in the drive-thru the kid at the window checked my debit card and then announced that I had been her math teacher. I didn’t recognize her, both because it had legitimately been years since I’d seen her and, well, the mask— but she threw me for a loop with what she said next.
“Yeah, you hated me.”
She’d told me her name already, but I hadn’t been able to properly process it, and frankly in the moment I didn’t remember a damn thing about her– which actually means that there’s no chance that I actually did hate her, as I assure you I have forgotten none of those kids, and in fact they haunt my dreams still. And, honestly, it really bothers me that that was the first thing she thought to say to me– because regardless of whether I did hate her or not, her perception that I did is more than bad enough.
It’s several hours later now, and I’ve managed to put together who she is. And I didn’t hate her, but I suppose I can understand why she thought I did in the moment. She is, in fact, the cousin of one of the perhaps three students who I might use the word “hate” to describe my feelings about. And I don’t remember her being a big problem on her own, but her cousin (the “I got a baby by his brother” girl in this post, in fact) was an utter Goddamned nightmare and the cousin dragged this girl into her shit a lot. So she was around a fair amount for Angry Me, particularly since the two of them sat together on the bus a lot and the bus driver actually did hate both of them, to the degree where she put it in a referral once.
(These kids will never know how much time and energy I spent defending the two of them against this bus driver, by the way, at one point going over the driver’s head to central office about the way she treated them, but that’s a whole other story that I’m not telling right now.)
Anyway. I’m more or less over it by now, since I’ve managed to put together who she was, but the whole conversation had me fucked up all afternoon.
Just curious: how many of you had a teacher who you thought hated you at the time? Any that you thought hated you when you were in class with them but don’t think that any longer?
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with this terrible show. If not, well, it’s fuckin’ terrible, and it’s on Hulu, and you should probably watch an episode or two because it is terrible in a uniquely addictive way, like, I hate it but I can’t get enough of it.
Anyway.
The wife and I have started season 3. She has somehow already watched all five (Five? Sure. It could be as many as twelve; I have no idea) seasons already and is rewatching them with me. At the end of Season 2, one character found out a woman he’d recently had sex with was pregnant. I believe his entire reaction to this news was the single word “Fuck.” And then the season ended.
And do you know what happened at the beginning of Season 3?
She told him she’d had an abortion, and he was cool with that, and that was the end of the storyline. It was barely a three-minute conversation, with not a trace of remorse on either one of their parts. It has not been mentioned since.
And I gotta be honest: it was fucking refreshing. Because with any other show this would have been a half-season fucking ordeal, and there would have been endless conversations about it, and then it probably wouldn’t have happened.
But this one? Yeah. Season 2 cliffhanger, done and dusted four minutes into Season 3.
Before I get started with the swearing and the fuck-thising, a bit of context: my son, who I have thought many very unkind things about today that I will not repeat in this space, decided to come in and wake my wife and I up at four o’clock in the fucking morning because he wanted to sleep in our bed with us. There was no particular reason for this; he woke up in his bed and decided he wanted to be in ours instead, so he woke both of us up.
This was perhaps not reacted to as compassionately as it should have been and he was dispatched back to his own bed. I never got back to sleep, meaning that it’s currently 9:20 in the morning, I’m a quarter of the way through my morning coffee, and I have been awake for almost five and a half fucking hours.
It is already not going to be a good day.
Have you ever hated a song so much that you memorized it out of pure spite? I’m going to assume that you have and that this is not an experience unique to me. I have a number of Taylor Swift songs that I have completely memorized, and the main reason I have them memorized is that I hate them. Similarly, a song which I have just learned is called Friends by a pair of idiots named Anne-Marie and Marshmello. Marshmello apparently regularly appears in public with a fucking bucket on his head.
This fucking song ran through my head for hours last night while I was trying to get back to sleep. While it was running through my head, I was mentally composing this blog post, which I’ve been trying to avoid writing since I first heard this fucking song eighteen thousand years ago. Or maybe it’s just a few weeks; fuck, I don’t know.
Point is I almost got up and wrote this at 4:30 in the fucking morning because I realized sleep was not happening and at least maybe I could get something done.
Yeah.
So I initially wasn’t even going to write about the first reason why I hate this song: the godawful fucking obnoxious accent that Anne-Marie is putting on. I generally don’t like making fun of people for the way they sound or talk, but now that I’ve seen a picture of white-ass blonde-ass whitey-white Anne-Marie? Fuck you, that’s an affectation, and when she says so doan you looka me wif dat look in yo eye, or tries to spell “friends” and slurs it so badly that it comes out as effar aiyee endee ezzsh, to the point where I wasn’t actually sure she was spelling it right until she bothers to enunciate later in the song the first time I heard it, she is absolutely just being an asshole. No goddamn white girl grows up sounding like this in the UK. She’s doing it on purpose. Fuck her.
Now let’s talk about the friend zone. And let me be clear here: this is something that I absolutely fell prey to when I was younger and stupider. The difference is that now that I’m grown I know better, and I’m not super keen on letting current younger men get away with the same horseshit that I did when I was a kid. Y’all need to be better, goddammit. Men need to improve, and one of the first things we need to do is to let go of this stupid fucking idea that there are any women anywhere who owe us anything. And that, ultimately, is what the so-called “friend zone” is about. It’s about feeling entitled to women and their bodies and feeling like it’s okay to just hang around being unwelcome until they, I dunno, realize that they’re actually attracted to us after all instead of the men they’re dating (men, for the record, who they are attracted to) and fall into our arms.
Nah. This is bullshit. The friend zone is bullshit. And if you’re being this asshole, stop. If you think you’re in love with someone, you tell her rather than hanging around like a fucking angry puppy, and if she says no, that’s your answer and you fuck off. You decide what level of relationship you’re able to have with that person, whoever she is, and if your Deep Feelings are just Too Serious to maintain an actual friendship, and not a fake sham of a friendship where you’re constantly looking for a fucking moment of weakness so you can get your stupid dick wet?
You fuck off. And you stay fucked off.
The end.
My coffee’s gone, by the way.
All that said, there’s some other shit going on in this song that probably needs to be addressed, and at this point I’m addressing women. Lemme copy-paste some lyrics here, in more-or-less conventional English rather than the bullshit-ass white girl’s fake urban accent she’s putting on:
You say you love me, I say you crazy We’re nothing more than friends You’re not my lover, more like a brother I known you since we were like ten, yeah
…and, see, it’s at this point where I go back to not wanting to write this, because there’s a point at which I’m punching down. If you are not already aware of this, you should be: the thing men are most afraid of in relationships is that they will be rejected by women. The thing women are most afraid of in relationships is that they will be killed by men. So I can’t act like it’s all fine and good to say things like you need to stop humoring these assholes when not humoring the assholes might result in the assholes turning violent. But can we maybe not treat relationships like this like they’re family? Because given the rest of the song, I really don’t get describing this person as “more like a brother.” The order of relationships here goes dating –> friendship –> family. Your friends are, or at least should be, more important than whoever you’re fucking at the moment. And your family, at least ideally (I am aware that families can be toxic, obviously) should be more important than your friends. This is one of the things that never made any sense to me– the “just” in “just friends.” Friends is better.
Anyway.
Have you got no shame? You looking insane Turning up at my door It’s two in the morning, the rain is pouring Haven’t we been here before?
Don’t mess it up, talking that shit Only gonna push me away, that’s it! Have you got no shame? You looking insane Here we go again
So don’t go look at me with that look in your eye You really ain’t going away without a fight You can’t be reasoned with, I’m done being polite I’ve told you one, two, three, four, five, six thousand times
I think it needs to be made clearer, to young women in particular, precisely the demographic that this top-40 pop song is targeted to, that this is not how friends behave. And I say that as someone who has spent a career working with adolescents and has had a couple of classes that were composed entirely of girls in that time. Songs that take behavior like this and phrase it as how friends act are not helping.
None of this shit is how friends behave. None of this shit is normal. And if someone in your life is acting this way, that is not the behavior of someone who is your friend. That is the behavior of a stalker. This person is dangerous. He is not your friend and this is not normal. And maybe the most fucked-up thing about this song is that it’s portraying legitimately crazy behavior as something that your “friends” do. And I am telling you if you don’t already know that there are far too many young women who do not know this is fucked up because we have normalized male entitlement so fucking much in this culture.
No.
Men, boys, stop fucking being like this. And again I’m not in a position to get all high-and-mighty about how women should behave when they have a legitimate showing-up-at-two-AM crazy fucker in their lives, but hey how about we don’t write songs about how those people are our friends? Because fuck the hell out of that idea. It’s bullshit and this song is bullshit and I hate it and I don’t want to hear it any more.
Especially at four o’clock in the fucking morning when all I want to do is sleep.
Friendship online is such an odd thing. I have a couple of friends in my Clark Kent identity who I’ve known for damn near fifteen years and who I’ve met once and never, respectively, and I don’t have the slightest idea when those numbers might go up again. We met through the previous incarnation of this blog, over at Xanga, and at the moment I can honestly say that the only reason I’m still on Facebook is so that I can keep track of the two of them. I have a handful of other friends who I lost track of after college and reconnected with– again, on Facebook– and for at least one of them I think we actually have a closer relationship now than we did back then. But I never see any of them.
And making friends as Luther is even weirder, right? Because the vast majority of you don’t even know my real name. I’ve got this network of people, mostly bloggers or independent authors, who I interact with a lot on Twitter and a bit less on Facebook and on the blog. I consider a lot of them friends, but the thing is people have Real Lives outside of their online personas (well, I don’t. I’m told people do, though.) and sometimes they just get busy or change jobs or move and their priorities change and suddenly someone you interacted with on a daily or near-daily basis has just gone poof and you don’t know why, and sometimes you don’t even notice for a few weeks, in a way that would never ever happen with people you know in the real world.
And sometimes you log into Facebook and you find out through the grapevine that someone’s depression finally caught them after a lifetime of struggle, and that person is gone, and you don’t really know how to react to it.
“Follows @nfinitefreetime,” it says there. Were I not connected to her on Facebook, too, I’d never have known she was gone. It’s not like Twitter is going to notice and unfollow me on her behalf, right? There was an outpouring of grief among our little sci-fi indie community last night on Facebook and Twitter; I retweeted a bunch of them on my account, or you could just check the #thankyousonya hashtag if you like. There were tons of posts, and the amazing thing, to me, was just how many of the people participating were also people I “knew” and considered friends the same way I did Sonya. She was at the center of a big group of people online, and we were all reacting the only way we could.
I don’t really know her, is the thing. I don’t know her family, or her RL friends, or what she liked to do with her time other than write and hang out with yahoos on the internet. I know she had a cat, named Fang, who was frequently the subject of tweets and Instagram postings. I don’t know where Fang is right now. I hope he’s okay. I know that she was the type of person who created random meme pictures for people she’d never met on their birthdays, which is where that picture up at the top came from. (My Twitter bio at the time referred to me as a friend to muskrats.)
And yet.
I wish I could have been there for her, when she was suffering, to point out all these people whose lives she’d touched and would miss her when she was gone. But I never did. Part of the reason why? I know people online who are struggling with anxiety and depression and the insane thing is I wouldn’t have listed her as one of them.
I dunno, guys. I don’t know how to end this because I don’t know how I feel right now. I don’t want anyone to ever feel like suicide is their best option. And I want to say something like “If you feel that way, know that you can reach out, even to a relative stranger online,” but the fucked-up part of depression is that that information doesn’t matter and it’s not that simple. She’d probably had people she knew in the real world tell her that, people who she’d actually recognize if they walked past her at the grocery store, not rando authors behind an @ on Twitter. And she took her own life anyway, because that’s how depression fucks with you, because it’s a disease, not a goddamn personal failure, and you can’t help it.
God damn it.
You will be missed, Sonya. I can only hope that you’ve found some peace.
I still have one guest post left, an original story by James Wylder that technical issues prevented me from running Saturday and then laziness/post-wedding cold issues prevented me from running today. It will run sometime this week.
This is the speech– lightly edited to change names– that I gave during the wedding ceremony. The most amazing thing about this wedding? It POURED all day long. I got as angry with a bride as I’ve ever been when I found out she’d declared that we were going to “risk it” and we were going to be outside for the ceremony. My entire script and my entire speech were written in ink on paper. It was going to be a disaster, and I already had a cold coming on.
The ceremony was at 5:30. At 5:00 the skies cleared to a perfect blue, and not a drop of rain fell for the entire evening. I ad-libbed the word “miraculous” into the first couple of sentences of the ceremony, and got a wave of applause from the crowd. I cannot believe the weather worked out the way it did.
And I will never doubt my sister-in-law’s word again. 🙂
When my brother first asked me to be the officiant for his wedding, I agreed to do it immediately, but on one condition: I got five minutes, during the ceremony, where I could say whatever I wanted—and neither he nor <his wife> got to see the speech beforehand.
They have absolutely no idea what I’m about to say.
Manic laughter.
This is an odd position for me to be in as a writer. Authors strive to write words that are remembered. I remember one sentence from the speech at my own wedding, and I’m pretty sure that the only way any of you are going to remember a word I say is if I screw something up. I’ve had nightmares—literal, actual, sweaty nightmares—about standing up here and getting Sarah’s name wrong.
(Note: the bride’s name is not Sarah.)
I slaved over this speech, though. These words that I’m saying to you now represent the fourth draft. The first contained fifteen swear words, one of which was in Russian. The third was virtually nothing but references to movies and hiphop music. The second was an attempt to take my responsibilities as officiant Very Seriously—and I actually have those words capitalized in print—and is probably best not spoken of.
I don’t do earnest and serious all that well. I do pop culture references quite well, but those of you who don’t have The Princess Bride memorized probably won’t appreciate a speech strewn with references to blessed arrangements and rodents of unusual size. And while “prepare to die” has probably been used in reference to marriage at some point, you won’t be hearing it from me.
I’m going to come back to the movie in a moment, though. Be ready for it.
My wife and I just celebrated our eighth anniversary a few months ago. Compared to our families, we’re amateurs. Our parents—my brother’s and mine— have been married for 43 years. My wife’s parents got married in 1971. And the <bride’s family> are not slouches at this either; Sue <bride’s mom’s maiden name> became Sue <bride’s last name> in 1979. So while there are a lot of people who have had more experience at being married than I have, we’ve been lucky to have a lot of good examples around us to look up to.
So if I have some wisdom to pass along, it’s this: To the outside world, the two of you are now one person. You will have disagreements in private. If you don’t, it’s probably a sign that your marriage isn’t as healthy as it could be. But outside your home, it needs to be the two of you united against the world. Your first responsibility to your spouse is to support him or her against any and all external challenges. To be a rock even if you feel more like gravel. Even—perhaps most importantly—when you disagree in private. This will become even more important in the future when your children enter the picture. Remember: you chose your spouse on purpose. You got to pick each other. The kids were something that happened to you. Back each other up: at all times, against all comers. Forever.
In public, you are one. In public, it is you against the world. In public, make it the truth: that when all is lost, there will be you.
But back to the movie.
The Princess Bride actually does contain some great advice for marriage in it, despite the fact that the famous wedding scene contains only one willing participant. It’s a phrase repeated endlessly at the beginning of the movie and also the final line.
(To bride and groom) You know what I’m talking about?
The bride did. I don’t know for sure that my brother heard the question.
“As you wish.”
At home, learn the phrase “as you wish.” And use it. Frequently. There will be hard days. There will be days where both of you get home sick and tired from work, and you will realize that you need to lay your own burdens aside, because your partner’s needs are greater. You may both be too tired to cook. Dig deep, and be the one that goes and gets Chinese food.
Did that sound like a ridiculous example? Half of my disputes with my wife are about which one of us is going to go get dinner. Learn “as you wish.” Figure out a way to divide chores so that each of you is doing the work that you were most likely to do on your own anyway. But when the other needs you to do theirs? Again, remember those three simple words: “as you wish.”
The floor will need to be vacuumed. The bills will need to be paid. The lawn will need to be mowed. When the kids come, the diapers will need to be changed and one of you will inevitably have to decide that that day you will be the bad cop.
You will both have days where you need comforting. You will both have days where you are sick or hurt and need help. You will both have days where you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will murder someone and go to jail with a smile on your face if you have to leave the house again. And you will both have days where the thing you need most is a firm slap on the side of your head and a reminder of all the things you have in your life that are going right.
Learn those words. “As you wish.” And remember what you are really saying when you use them. “I love you.”
I could not be happier to be standing here right meow. I love you both. But this is where it gets official. Are we ready?
And we moved to the “I do” part. About half a dozen people in the crowd caught the meow.
I’m not convinced this is actually a terribly important or interesting insight for anybody other than me, but it’s been on my mind for the last couple of days and I wanted to get it written down before it slipped away.
My son is four. He’s in preschool now– real preschool, which means that I can’t just go get him if I’m home and bored in the afternoon any longer, which hit me the other day while I was heading to the car to do just that. There are, I don’t know, eleven or twelve other kids in his class, something like that.
He has four friends. Now, at his age, “friendship” is obviously a really fungible concept, but there are two kids from his previous day care who are still showing up at our house (and vice versa) every once in a while and there are two kids in his preschool class who he seems to be part of a mutual admiration society with more so than the rest of the kids. That’s not to say that he doesn’t play with the others, of course, but these kids clearly are getting more attention than the others. And, interestingly, they give me more attention than the others, too. I’ve been dropping the boy off lately, and generally walk with him to his classroom, and one of the kids has been insisting that he also gets a hug before I can leave. The other one seems to be more of a priority during the after-school program despite being in his class, but she too insists on me paying attention to her a lot of the time before I am allowed to take her (him! Him! Christ, I’m only getting my own kid.) home– either that or he’ll drag me over to her to have her tell me something about their day.
What’s gotten into my head is that he’s at least in theory at the point where he might know some of these kids for a very, very long time. Now, I’m not friends any longer with anyone who I knew as far back as nursery school, but I was through college or so, and my oldest friends now are people I met in middle school or late elementary. But part of the deal at Hogwarts is keeping their clan together– I get the feeling that a lot of the kids that eventually transition out of there are graduating, meaning that they’ve been with mostly the same kids for a bunch of years. So it’s possible that he’ll be forming lifelong friendships earlier than I did, especially if we’re able to afford to keep him at this school. I have– most people do, I imagine– my own relationships with the parents of some of my friends who I’ve known for a really long time. And it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point with him where I can look around at the kids he knows and go “Which ones am I going to have to buy high school graduation cards for?”
A couple of weeks ago I was at the doctor’s office. They have a receptionist who is, oh, I dunno, in her mid-twenties and generally fairly lovely.
Since the last time I was in there (I’ve been spending my share of time at the doctor’s office lately) she’d dyed her hair grey. I’ve come to understand that that’s becoming a thing. If so, I approve.
As I was waiting, an elderly woman emerged from her appointment and engaged this young lady in conversation about her hair. She was quite complimentary about it.
Damn right, I thought. The grey hair looked great on her.
And I didn’t say a word about it to anyone.
Why?
Here is a rule for men who want to be either better people or better feminists, and frequently I have found that those two goals overlap: practice the fine art of keeping your opinion to yourself a bit more often. You will be surprised at how much it helps! And, here’s the awesome part: never once will keeping your trap shut about your opinion on a stranger’s appearance be harmful. Not once! Not ever!
Is it entirely possible that me telling this young woman (a good fifteen years younger than me, if undeniably an adult, so I think I can get away with that title) would have made her feel good for a few moments? Sure! Sometimes people like getting compliments from strangers. This is true!
It is also possible that at work is not a place where she’s particularly interested in getting opinions from strange men on her decisions about her hair. Is this gender-specific? Not necessarily. While she was gracious to the old lady, she could have been gritting her teeth on the inside. It’s possible that the old lady was the 44th person that day to tell her she liked her hair and it was getting aggravating. (True story! I once snapped at someone for saying Happy Birthday to me, because I’d heard it so many times that day it was starting to sound like an insult.)
Simple fact, dude: She doesn’t need your opinion on her hair. She didn’t need my opinion on her hair. She’s at work. She’s not very much in the be complimented by fat bald married men on her hair zone. There are literally no circumstances under which I would tell, say, the male nurse, or the dude sitting across from me in the waiting room, that I liked his hair. So there should also be literally no circumstances under which I tell the female receptionist my opinion on her body.
But I don’t mean to be creepy! I just want to give her a compliment!
Doesn’t matter, shut up. A thing I tell my students on a fairly regular basis: your opinion is not necessary here. Similarly, it is virtually never the case that my opinion is necessary on someone’s appearance, even if that opinion is a positive one. If there’s even a tiny chance that me talking to her about her appearance is going to make her uncomfortable– and there is way more than a tiny chance of that— then I need to keep my opinion to myself.
But how do I get to know people if I don’t approach them in public, you ask?
Maybe go to places where people meet each other. I hear good things about parties and clubs and bars. There are probably other places, too! But here’s the thing: even in those places, maybe you don’t start with the body talk? Find something else about the person other than their body to start the conversation with, if you can. You never know! It might work out!
She’s at work. Leave her the hell alone.
It is, in fact, rather astonishing how often the “Shut Up” rule works well for men when dealing with feminist issues. I know, guys: as men, and particularly as white men for those of us who are both, we’re used to society valuing our opinion– to the point where we’ve allowed ourselves to believe a conversation isn’t complete until we’ve weighed in on it.
Here is a thing that every woman alive knows more about than every white man alive: being a woman. Therefore: if a woman is discussing her experiences and her opinions about her own womanhood with or (especially) near you, it is probably best if you shut the hell up and listen. This is particularly true if you disagree with her. If she tells you someone catcalls her every time she leaves the house, and you were with her one time and nobody catcalled, maybe you keep your mouth shut about that. Because you know what? Other dudes saw her with a dude. Which means she was already owned by somebody. And they kept their mouths shut, because that one was taken.
She. Knows. Better. Than. You. About. Being. A. Woman.
What, you’ve never catcalled a woman? Have a cookie; hopefully you can bake them on your own. Shut up anyway.
Are there women who like having things shouted at them by random men? Sure. There are also people who think voting for Ben Carson is a good idea. There’s lots of crazy ideas out there. But we’re talking about your behavior here, and unless the woman is wearing a sign saying “PLEASE TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT MY CLOTHES AND BODY” you probably ought to assume that she’s not interested in what you have to say. Note that wearing revealing clothing is not the same thing as wearing a sign inviting comment.
Dude, all these goddamn rules. How the hell do I even talk to women anymore? Feminists are so fucking touchy!
Pretend she’s a dude. If you wouldn’t say anything to a dude under that circumstance, chances are you probably shouldn’t say it to her. You ever walked past a guy on the street and told him he should smile once in a while? No?
Don’t say it to women.
There’s nothing new in this post at all, by the way. If you happen to be reading it and nodding your head and thinking shit, this makes some sense, you probably should have been listening to women, because they’ve said this to you before– they’ve said it to all of us— and you didn’t listen. You’ve never seen my cock, I promise, so I have no idea why it makes the stuff I say more worthy of attention than it would be if someone without one had said it, but unfortunately that’s how it works in American society right now.
I still have one guest post left, an original story by 
I’m not convinced this is actually a terribly important or interesting insight for anybody other than me, but it’s been on my mind for the last couple of days and I wanted to get it written down before it slipped away.
What’s gotten into my head is that he’s at least in theory at the point where he might know some of these kids for a very, very long time. Now, I’m not friends any longer with anyone who I knew as far back as nursery school, but I was through college or so, and my oldest friends now are people I met in middle school or late elementary. But part of the deal at Hogwarts is keeping their clan together– I get the feeling that a lot of the kids that eventually transition out of there are graduating, meaning that they’ve been with mostly the same kids for a bunch of years. So it’s possible that he’ll be forming lifelong friendships earlier than I did, especially if we’re able to afford to keep him at this school. I have– most people do, I imagine– my own relationships with the parents of some of my friends who I’ve known for a really long time. And it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point with him where I can look around at the kids he knows and go “Which ones am I going to have to buy high school graduation cards for?”
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