Crushing Krisis

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Design vs Experience (or: when digital maps rule our physical world)

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EV refers to the voice of Google Maps as, “The Map Lady,” and sometimes The Map Lady and I have a disagreement.

Case and point: to get to the zoo from my house, The Map Lady has me turn off of what is effectively the suburban version of Market Street to get onto Chestnut Street – which makes total sense – but then has me turn off of three-laned Chestnut almost a mile before a crucial left turn to return to sluggish one-laned Market.

On those occasions, I turn to EV during a stop at a red light and say, “The map lady is very confused, today.”

A stone walkway into a larger plaza is partially obstructed by a large stone sphere; walkers have worn their own path around it in the nearby grass.

User Design versus User Experience, one of my favorite visual analogies from my time in start-up land. (Walkers have elected to cut through the grass rather than round the corner and walk on the pavers.) Photo by felixphs

Is she really? Computerized directions aren’t about a route that’s seemingly more direct or that has a higher speed limit. They’re taking into account a quantity and quality of factors that never occur to we humans as navigators … or even to the city planners who designed the streets in the first place!

Even though I call her confused, The Map Lady has found ingenious short-cuts to get me around Delaware County, like skipping a long chain of turn-only lights by cutting a three-quarter circle through a neighborhood with stop signs.

This amplifies the typical tension between User Design vs User Experience not only because of the sheer magnitude users, but also because the reality of their actions can transform the landscape itself.

This was exemplified for me by an article last month in Washington Post, “Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who’s winning?” A residential suburban neighborhood suddenly became a busy thoroughfare due to its status as a slightly more-efficient detour to construction than the route that was officially marked. Understandably, home owners who wanted to live in a quiet area aren’t too pleased with the increased traffic and noise.

While commenters castigated the home owners’ sense of entitlement (streets are public, after all), I couldn’t help but sympathize with them. I’ve only once lived on a block I’d consider a “thru-street” that delivered regular traffic from one destination to another. I find the noise distracting to everything I do, from recording to sleeping. When we bought this house, part of the search criteria was to find a street that more or less lead nowhere in an enclosed neighborhood. (Not a development; just a neighborhood that has no single street that starts on one side and continues out the other.)

Yet, during recent construction, SEPTA busses were detoured through the street perpendicular to ours; it was the only north-to-south way to avoid the construction for a mile in either direction. I was aghast – I had never in a million years assumed we’d be living adjacent to a bus route. Luckily, the change lasted on a few days. Had it been longer, I would have been legitimately agitating to move.

I ponder these things as The Map Lady steers me through previously unexplored territory to get to familiar places. She’s doing more than getting me there faster, or annoying another solitude-loving homeowner: she’s changing my use of physical infrastructure.

Is a tiny residential street built to handle occasional traffic able to endure the volume of “a vehicle every two seconds,” as was the case in that WaPo article? Are the driveways designed so that residents may safely exit into “a backup dozens of cars deep”? Should parking rules be changed, permits issued, stop signs turned to lights, or dotted or solid lines added to the road faces? The innards of historical cities like Philadelphia and Boston have long since wrestled with these dilemmas, but computerized mapping has made them relevant to every street in the country.

The rule of digital cartography can have impacts beyond rerouting traffic. Fusion details how a digital mapping company called MaxMind’s act of assigning unplaced IP addresses to the geographic center of the United States made life a nightmare for renters at an isolated Kansas farm. These people made absolute certain their street wouldn’t be mistakenly re-purposed as a thoroughfare when they rented their house, but didn’t plan for the ire of scores of scammed internet users landing on their front lawn – or for their personal information to be shared across the internet in misplaced retaliation.

Alternately, perhaps you live in a converted church and have suddenly discovered you are a Pokemon Gym courtesy of augmented reality game designer Niantic:

In all three of these examples – Waze, MaxMind, and Niantic – the affected residents were none the wiser of their property’s sudden change in status until they began to suffer the deleterious effects of the situation via the behavior of others. Worse, none of the three have an obvious avenue to protest their designation – Waze, by its nature, is crowdsourced and behaving as expected; it took inquiries from Fusion’s writer Kashmir Hill for MaxMind to make a change after a decade of ignorance to the problems they were causing; so far, Niantic offers no publicized process for property owners to opt out of their Pokémon Go mapping.

That is terrifying. The nature of our connected world is allowing private companies to effectively create their own geolocated “watch lists” that may soon begin to affect property values or put lives at risk without even the basic requirement of an appeals process.

Also, note the aspect of privilege associated with these three cases. The Waze neighborhood waged war through the app and were covered by the Washington Post. The Pokémon Church Guy immediately caught on and his good-natured response turned his plight into massive Twitter exposure.

What about the residents of the Kansas farm? They arguably experienced the worst harm, “visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children,” and having their personal details spewed across the internet in a series of doxxings. Until Ms. Hill found them all they got was a sign posted in their yard by the sheriff that said to leave them alone and call him with questions.

I won’t re-invade that shared personal information to find out their personal demographics, but even if they’re a third white male in this example the demographics of their location (and of the property’s owner, and 82 year old woman) combined with the length of their suffering speaks volumes.

Digital cartography is no longer simply describing or annotating our physical world – it’s having a reciprocal impact that is invisible until it’s unavoidable – and, even when it is unavoidable, its true nature is frequently gated by the technological access and savvy of the afflicted.

For me, that begs the question of which geography represents the truth – the one we can experience solely through the physical, tangible world, or the one that is exclusively digitally accessible? As with history, I think the truth will be determined by the victors, and in many cases that won’t be the unsuspecting residents like the people living in one of the houses in this story.

protagonists, plot armor, and diversity in fiction

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There is no question in my mind that diversity of representation in fiction is important, and not just because EV naturally gravitated towards female heroes as a baby.

The media we consume helps to construct the reality we assume, which is highlighted by one of my favorite communication theories, Cultivation Theory. It’s a pretty obvious theory at its root – if all we see on the news are stories about muggings and murders, we assume the world around us is disproportionally unsafe. We cultivate our perceived reality from the media we consume.

Similarly, I think if we consume fictional worlds where we see ourselves reflected we are emboldened, and when they are filled with people different than ourselves, we come to hope and expect our lives will be filled with those people, too.

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Marvel relaunched Mighty Avengers in 2014 as a majority POC team of Avengers. Art by Steve Epting.

That means all representation is good representation, like Riri Williams as Iron Man, but having a diverse cast is just step one of a truly representative fictional world. Step two is how you treat those characters and who among them gets to be the protagonist.

One of the challenging aspects of being the author to construct those worlds is putting your cast of diverse characters into perilous situations. For a story to be thrilling – especially a story serialized in the long term – we have to believe that characters are truly in danger.

This is part of what makes an auteur like Joss Whedon so compelling (and so maddening): with him, everyone is in danger, all of the time. There is no status quo. Of course, comic books embrace this concept wholeheartedly –  nothing thrills them like making the transgressive choice of killing the seemingly unkillable (only to bring them back to life later). It’s no coincidence Whedon was a comic fan before he was famous (he’s said many times Buffy was based on the template of Kitty Pryde).

(I don’t mean to deify Whedon, as he has his weaknesses from the critical lenses of feminism or queer theory (the two I feel somewhat qualified to speak to), but he is easily the best mainstream male creator to use as an example here – and not just for his visibility. The fact of the matter is, he’s willing to kill popular white guys and let women win. That’s a start.)

Is killing more characters more often the best method of making a story with a diverse cast more thrilling? Not really, because that doesn’t fully recognize the problem of protagonists and plot armor, among other reasons.

The protagonist of a serialized story tends to wear some unavoidable amount of plot armor – a form of extra-fictional protection derived from the fact that we know they will be in the commercial for the next installment. They might be injured or tortured, or even killed in the long run, but they don’t tend to die in random, unhyped episode.

(Many forms of episodic fiction use this to their advantage, setting up a fake set of protagonists to off shockingly early. I can only think of one that legitimately killed main characters left and right at all times: Spooks AKA MI:5 from BBC. Be warned – you are going to be upset when you watch it.)

To make the world around the protagonist seem like it has some amount of stakes, it is the supporting cast who must go without plot armor to be placed in peril. Thus, if the only diversity in your fictional world is in the supporting cast, then your diversity tends to be expendable. If they aren’t, it feels like they are also are wearing “plot armor,” and now your fiction has no consequences.

The unfortunate result of this is that the people who need to see themselves represented more in heroic fiction – people who are black, indigenous, Asian, LGBT, female, disabled, and on – also wind up seeing themselves maimed and killed to make their protagonists feel something and to give their world the illusion of danger.

(The disposal of supporting female characters to make male protagonists feel was deemed “fridging” or “Women in Refrigerators” by then-critic/now-author Gail Simone. At this point, “fridging” is a more generalized term applied to the suffering of any (typically minority) character in order to create a reaction in the (typical male) protagonist.)

There’s a deeper vein being tapped here than simply the expectation that these characters will be endangered. There is also the risk that readers begin to see those grim fates as inextricably tied with their identities. A great example that isn’t tied exclusively to identity is the horror movie trope that the girl who has sex is sure to die. The implication (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) is that sex is sinful and it makes you narratively expendable (or, worse, a target for violence).

YAvgV02 - 0013 promo

In 2013, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie launched a Young Avengers team that turned out to be all-minority and ALL QUEER. Wow. Art by McKelvie.

What is the implication when the gay friend or the black friend always dies? When a reader who identifies that way sees themselves being killed again and again in the media they consume, what reality do they begin to cultivate?

Do they believe their life matters?

Author Kieron Gillen recently addressed this in a response to a reader question on Tumblr; here’s an excerpt:

Reader: I (queer myself) understand an issue with such a lack of proper representation/appreciation for queer characters, especially with the recent discussions of queer deaths in media. Yet with WicDiv I see all characters as equally cared for, even in death. Just curious on your thoughts?

KG: There’s certainly been people who’ve found it upsetting and stopped reading the book for it, which we understand entirely. At least part of the reason our story front loads the “All these people are going to die” is that we want to put our cards on the table. … [I]n culture, we are so used to seeing bad things happen to LGBT characters because they are LGBT, that we can read negative intent into stories where bad things happen to them despite that they they are LGBT. I suspect she’s right.

(Like Whedon, Gillen’s approach works within the context of his stories – they’re typically stories about fear and loss where anyone might suffer a terrible fate, and he telegraphs that at the start. Also, not every one of his stories is one of loss – his brilliant Young Avengers is a mainstream book with the most diverse group of characters I’ve read in years and it doesn’t end in misery.)

Just as the solution to making a story thrilling isn’t constantly killing characters, the solution to the issue of increasing positive diverse representation cannot be plot armor for every minority character that walks into the story. That’s both patronizing and predictable. There is no good fiction without risk. To again reference the familiar horror trope, just as it’s no fun (and: awful) to know that the virgin will always live to see the end of the film, you don’t want to think a character is invincible just because she is latina or disabled or bisexual.

The solution to the representation problem isn’t just more representative casts – it’s more diverse protagonists (in addition to the representative supporting cast).

That’s not only because diversifying protagonists puts different people into the most-warranted set of plot armor – that of the star. It also strips the unfortunate association of punishment when we see other representative characters who do suffer or perish, since they are no longer the only representative of a minority (or even no longer the only representative of their specific minority).

In Gillen’s Young Avengers, for a major character to meet a grim fate they would have to be a minority character because the entire team was a minority in one way or another – a woman, a gay male couple, a pansexual male, a bisexual black male, and a gay latina daughter of a same sex couple. In fact, given the final panel, it might have be an all-queer superhero team – a sentence which makes me smile every damn time I write it.

That’s why representation matters. That’s why diversifying the casts of the fiction we consume is not “politically correct” or “diversification for diversity’s sake.” Representation matters because stories matter. We’re each our own protagonist, but many of us don’t see that reflected in the media we consume. When we have a world of comics books, movies, and television shows populated similarly to our actual worlds, then every person will own a key component of cultivating a reality where they matter and they are safe.

And, people exposed to those character who identify differently than themselves will begin to have it reinforced that “The Other” is not an expendable character in their story.

(This was originally going to be the introduction to a review, but it (a) turned into its own piece and (b) would seem to unnecessarily spoiler the outcome of the comic.)

Black Lives Matter (and I want to use my white voice to talk about it)

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I.

Black Lives Matter. Please, say it out loud if you have never before.

You and I are not special or noteworthy for being willing or able to say this. Saying it does not create action or change. It does not pledge our allegiance to a specific movement. To get to a place where America is ready to take action to protect and value black lives, we must first believe there is value. To believe a thing, we have to acknowledge it. To acknowledge it, we must say its name.

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The quote is from Desmond Tutu. Photo by Daniel in Babylon, 4/27/15.

Black Lives Matter.

Let me stop some of you before you chime in with “All Lives Matter!” Indeed, all lives do matter! All of the time, all lives matter. Happily, we can agree on that. However, at a point some of those lives may be more critically endangered, more systemically oppressed, more widely undervalued than some others.

This is one of those occasions. I think it’s good and right to be able to say “Black Lives Matter” and to allow that to focus conversation and action. It doesn’t erase or neglect all lives, just as Feminism is about an end-state of equality for all, including men.

I really look forward to being able to say “All Lives Matter” in America and knowing everyone means it the same way. Until we get to that point, as a society of firefighters trying to quell the flames of injustice we need to turn the majority of our attention to the one house that has been burning brightest, hottest, and longest.

It is the house of that of the black community – perhaps too apt an analogy, considering that arson attacks against historically black churches are just one indicator that not everyone understands or believes that Black Lives Matter.

Because they do. Black Lives Matter.

II.

Last night a terrible, heart-rending thing happened and for once the entire world saw it through the same objective eyes.

A black man named Philando Castile was driving his girlfriend and their daughter in his hometown of Falcon Heights, outside Minneapolis Minnesota, when he was stopped by a police officer due to a broken taillight on his car. Per his girlfriend’s account, when the officer approached the front of the vehicle, Castile advised him that he had a permit for a concealed weapon and that he would be reaching for his wallet.

The officer shot Philando Castile in the arm and kept shooting three more times. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, began broadcasting the event to the world with steely calm moments later via Facebook Live. Here is an excerpt from New York Times television critic James Poniewozik’s review of the broadcast:

“Stay with me.”

These are the first words that Diamond Reynolds speaks to her dying boyfriend, Philando Castile, in her video on Facebook Live. He’s slumped in the driver’s seat, blood soaking his white T-shirt, a police officer pointing a gun through the car window, as Ms. Reynolds’s 4-year-old daughter sits in the back seat.

…

First Ms. Reynolds calmly gives her description of what happened: They were pulled over on Wednesday for a broken taillight in Falcon Heights, Minn.; Mr. Castile told the officer that he had a licensed firearm and reached for his identification, and the officer shot him.

When the video begins, Mr. Castile is moving. A minute later, he’s still and slack. She worries that he is already gone.

Philando Castile died early this morning from his gunshot wounds. It is the day before his thirty-third birthday. [Read more…] about Black Lives Matter (and I want to use my white voice to talk about it)

Marvel introduced a black female Iron Man – is that a good thing? (Yes.)

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Today, Marvel and writer Brian Bendis broke the news via Time Magazine that at the end of the currently-running event “Civil War II” the mantle of Iron Man will be taken over by a 15-year old black MIT student named Riri Williams

(This IIM - 2016 - promois a major shocker, because the vast majority of fans assumed Riri’s introduction in the pages of Invincible Iron Man (visit the guide) – where she was reverse-engineering Tony Stark’s armor – was a set-up for her to take over the mantle of War Machine. Rhodey has become unavailable to carry that title due to the events of Civil War.)

Riri Williams as Iron Man is a very good thing. We do not have enough female heroes or heroes of color, and to see a that in a character who is both as she takes over the mantle of ostensibly Marvel’s most popular single hero outside of Spider-Man is a huge, visible step not only for Marvel comic readers, but for their film fans who this news will surely reach. To have Williams also be a female super-scientist when Marvel generally boasts only a handful is even more wonderful.

(The most prominent female geniuses of Marvel are Kitty Pryde, who is frequently shown to be nearly as genius as Beast; Valeria Richards, whose preternatural intelligence is partially attributed to super powers; the new Moon Girl; and Mockingbird, an oft-forgotten PhD) .

So Riri Williams as Iron Man is a good thing, right?

On the face of it, yes. Inclusion means representation. I love reading books about heroes that are women, and so does my daughter – also a girl of color.

However, there are some aspects of this character choice that have given some fans and critics pause, which I’d like to discuss here – three in particular. I’m very interested in your input. (Edited to add: Here is a post with similar critique from black writer Son of Baldwin, Here is another from black female nerd BlerdGurl.)

1. Minority legacy heroes are only useful until the original makes their return; then their marginalization can be worse than the average minority hero.

“Legacy Heroes” is a term applied to heroes that are the replacement or junior version to their original heroes. They are sometimes used by creators as an opportunity to change the gender or race of the character bearing the main mantle.. The easiest examples to give are from DC comics (Superboy, Batgirl, Wondergirl, etc), because Marvel simply isn’t known for this practice outside the past few years.

Let’s stick with Marvel, for the moment. For a brief time in the 1980s, Tony Stark could not serve as Iron Man and Rhodey Rhodes took over the title. Rhodey is the best possible example of a Legacy Hero – he was a dynamic, well-developed character long before he became Iron Man, and that means that he was able to continue to be featured even when Tony Stark returned.

Ms-Marvel - 2014 - 0004As War Machine, he’s lead his own title on many occasions (though they are usually short-lived) and he’s and been a significant character in both comics and now films (though he’s frequently sacrificed as a narrative reason to make Stark feel bad, as has happened twice this year alone).

His time as a Legacy Hero made him more visible, but after being Iron Man he didn’t stay an A-level hero. The white guy bumped him.

Another terrific example is the relatively new Ms. Marvel, the Pakastani-American Kamala Khan (visit the guide). Kamala is a wonderful analog to the original Spider-Man as a new, unsure hero, and Carol Danvers is very unlikely to ever retake her “Ms.” hero mantle now that she is officially Captain Marvel.

Her books sell ridiculous amounts of copies and have been nominated for Eisners. She’s now an Avenger. Things are going well … but we’re only in year two.

There are examples that don’t go as well. At the end of the comics version of the original Civil War, Captain America appears to die, and Bucky takes over the mantle as Cap (visit the guide). His days as Cap are amazing – great, layered storytelling. When Cap came back they shared the mantle for a while before Bucky was spun back to being Winter Soldier, at which point he began to sink back into obscurity – and he’s a white guy who stars in movies.

As with War Machine, he’s now a character Marvel needs to periodically kickstart into a new title or team only to watch him sink again.

Despite those concerns, check out the amazing list of Legacy Heroes Marvel is currently fielding: [Read more…] about Marvel introduced a black female Iron Man – is that a good thing? (Yes.)

I (Kirsten Dunst movie) do not care about (Katy Perry song title)

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Like a David Foster Wallace novel, this is only going to make sense if you read the footnotes.

Like a David Foster Wallace novel, this is only going to make sense if you read the footnotes.

There are some things in the world that I deeply, deeply1,do not give any shits about but I am begrudgingly willing to experience through the eyes of a toddler. Holiday fireworks are one of those things, which makes it cosmically Alanis Ironic that I watched them without EV.

Fireworks sparkle, which is plus, but they are loud and incredibly pointless, which is a minus. I’m all about enjoying excerpts of them from a vantage point that is far away from where they are exploding (but not from the comfort of my own home, because that means that they are too close to home). Like, maybe I would enjoy them from a roof deck party with some delicious catering. In the fall. Wearing a jacket.

I do not want to see them up close. I do not want to hear the blaring low-fi music. I do not want to feel sticky with perspiration while watching them.2 I especially do not want to interact with any of the people also watch them.

Yet, there we were, past EV’s bedtime in a crowd of people who were waiting to watch fireworks. Well, really, there were E and EV. I was still parking the car, largely because we were told to do so by two bored-looking police officers.

“But, there’s no signs saying we can’t park here,” E retorted, when they told us we weren’t allowed to park on the side of the street we just parked on, alongside several other cars and absolutely zero signage about not parking there.

“Yeah,” one of them replied, “there ought to be some signs. Last year we didn’t have signs, and it was just a mess out here with all the fire trucks and ambulances on the street. There really ought to be signs.”

As a result of that total non-answer, I was parking the car in part of downtown Landsdowne I had never before seen while E and EV walked to the local high school’s field to watch the fireworks show for a suggested donation, which is another aspect of fireworks you do not have to deal with when watching them from afar.4

I parked my car Bowie-knows-where at the asterisk intersection of three different streets. Luckily, I could still see the top of the high school and so, after reciting a mnemonic for the cross streets to myself5, I began to thread my way through a series of one-way side streets toward the school, following the ever-growing trickle of people funneling in from other adjacent streets.

As I turned a final corner to reach the side of the field, I noticed that a section of fence was broken open. It curled back on itself. No one was anywhere nearby. I could just duck under the fence with my water bottle and my laptop and avoid paying to watch the fireworks I planned to studiously ignore while writing a blog post on said laptop and stealing sideways glances at EV.

I considered it for only a moment, because I generally do not break any laws or ordinances regardless of if there will be consequences (thus the re-parking of car despite lack of enforceable signs). Anyway, the field wasn’t especially full, so it felt wrong to avoid the cover charge. The crowd was sparse enough that some kids were turning long peals of cartwheels down the middle of it. I texted E with one thumb: Where AR U?

She texted back: Middle bleachers.

Funny that; there were no bleachers on the field.

I paced back and forth down its length, trying to imagine if she would refer to a small copse of folding chairs as “bleachers” and also wondering where you paid to enter before it occurred to me that the high school must have two fields6. This field, I realized as the fireworks began exploding overhead, constituted the cheap seats – you didn’t have to pay to sit here.

I half-jogged off the field, adjusted my speed based on the amount of perspiring I was already doing, and ambled around the school as the glittering opening salvo exploded over my head to the strains of a John Williams march. As I turned the northeast corner of the building I discovered the throngs of people that the parking situation clearly indicated were in attendance. I picked through the crowd until I reached a thick knot of folks standing between me and the the gate to the second field. They could all see and hear the fireworks perfectly well; some of them were sitting on blankets in the middle of the street. Beyond them, there was a sole man in a “STAFF” shirt, ostensibly acting as a ticket-seller, ticket-taker, and bouncer all rolled up into one. Past him was a field of even more people, with a marginally better view of the fireworks than the knot I was tied up in.

I was reaching for my wallet to pay just as another salvo launched. The fireworks were so loud. My head was already thrumming from the repeated booms. I think they were nearly as loud as my drummer Zina, and I won’t go anywhere near her without ear plugs or in-ear monitors. I took another look past the seller/taker/bouncer at the field. It was teeming with people and it was closer to where the fireworks were exploding. I don’t like either of those things. Yet, somewhere in the teeming mass was my wife and child, the latter of whom was either gaping in wonder at the man-made marvel of fireworks or sobbing inconsolably about how loud they were7.

I did some mental calculations. We were at least two Williams movements into the show. It would take me at least another three minutes to pick my way across the field in the darkness to the middle bleachers. How long could a fireworks show be? 10 minutes? 12? I wanted to experience EV experiencing the fireworks, but it seemed like I’d only make it in for a minute of them, tops. I texted E: Staying outside fence at this point.

There was a terrifically gnarled old tree across from the entrance to the field. I sat on its grasping roots at the fireworks continued overhead, now to the strains of “The Raiders March” from Indiana Jones. The march came and went. Fireworks were still exploding. I pressed a pinky into my ear and texted E: Kind of long, no? How is she holding up.

No answer. We were onto some other Williams now, but not Star Wars, although I cannot imagine why not. Certainly it’s not any more of a fireworks choreography cliche than Indiana Jones?

Long story moderately long, the fireworks went on for 30 minutes all throughout which I kept thinking, “surely that must be the finale, it cannot possibly get louder than that,” and then for another rogue minute after the music stopped that was either a dangerous misfire or an encore. Despite all the throngs of people, it wasn’t hard to spot E and EV afterwards to lead them back through the series of sides streets back to the car.

“Did you like the fireworks?” I asked EV, who looked blessedly un-tear-stained.

“THERE WERE EXTRA!” she answered. “EXTRA FIREWORKS!”

“At the end?” I said.

“YES, EXTRA FIREWORKS AT THE END AND I ATE A LOT OF SNACKS AND THERE WAS A MAN HE MADE A ‘V’ WITH THE LIGHT UP SWORDS LIKE THE ‘V’ IN MY NAME, ‘EV’!”

“Do you think she’s yelling because she was deafened?” I asked E.

“No, I think she’s just excited.”

I smiled. I might have missed the fireworks, but I definitely did not miss her reaction.8

Endnotes:

1. One time E and I bought the Kirsten Dunst movie Deeply for $5 at a grocery store and it was every bit as bad as that suggests and every time we refer to it (which is with surprising frequency) we say it in this lusty, throaty voice, like “deeeEEEEEEply,” and that is the voice with which you should read the italicized word above.

2. I’m sorry, I tried to make this into a green eggs and ham3 joke, but the meter never gelled.

3. I have yet to read Green Eggs and Ham to EV because all of the eggs we eat are green (either with spinach or pesto) and I do not want to put her off of them.

4. E has informed me that it is common to charge for premium seating for fireworks displays in the suburbs and I was like “For real for real?” Philly is so flat and the buildings are so low south of Chestnut that you can more or less see waterfront or sports complex fireworks from any rooftop and most back windows. Come to think of it, one of the big differences between city life and suburb life is that I no longer have a back window to climb out of onto a roof BUT ALSO that suspected burglars cannot flee across my roof either.

5. “Favorite pizza in college, a small and typically shortrun paperback booklet yet not a booklet but a man, marriage of those two concepts.” Or, Powelton, Chapman, and Union avenues.

6. Consider that I attended a city high school where the only two outdoor spaces were a caged-in roof and a tiny parking lot that you had to circle nine times to run a mile, vaulting trash bags along the way.

7. She is not much of a cryer and she totally hangs at rehearsal with Zina (while wearing ear protection, of course), but she is terrified of loud noises she can’t really get away from, like hand dryers in small public restrooms. A few weeks ago we were in a stall toilet in a tiny bathroom at the zoo when a gaggle of kids decided to play with the hand dryer, and that was maybe my second worst five minutes of parenting so far since I’ve been parenting full time (and the first worst was on that day, too).

8. Just a reminder that you don’t have to read every italicized work on my blog like”deeeEEEEEEply.” It was just that one time. I don’t want to leave you with the wrong idea. That’s not what I mean every time I use italics.