STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB

I strut right up to the doors of the elevator with briskness and purpose. There is already a group of people standing before the closed doors. Some are looking up at the floor indicator, which is still a long way above our first floor. Some are staring into the middle distance. All are silent.  

 

Why are they just standing there doing nothing? They might have all day to wait but I’m trying to get somewhere. I can’t just stand here.

 

So without breaking my stride, I march up to the lit “up” button and authoritatively hit it several times. STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB, like a serial killer. I can’t believe none of these people have thought to do that. Do they think the elevator can read their minds?

 

I look around at everyone else, as if to say, “This is how it’s done, people. You can’t just wait passively to get where you’re going. You need to take charge.” A few people give me quizzical looks, like I have three heads. I guess they’ve just never seen a real leader before.

 

The elevator moves through molasses. Four … three … two … and holds there. I sigh heavily.

 

Some guy marches up to the elevator. He punches the lit “up” button STAB STAB STAB. He looks around in exasperation at us.

 

What is his problem? Does he think none of us thought to hit the button?

It shouldn't have come down to this

It should not have been entirely on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s shoulders to safeguard rights for women, voting rights, gay rights and other principles that so many people hold dear. It should not have come down to strangers hoping this woman would serve the court until she was pushing 90. It should not have come down to strangers playing Monday morning quarterback and scolding her for not retiring when it was more convenient for them and the country. Justice Ginsburg had served her country, remarkably and inimitably, and we should not have had to project onto her the wish that she be immortal.

 

The fate of American principles, on either side of the aisle, should not come down to any one Supreme Court justice. It should not come down to the fickle votes of senators in a body that is divided almost hopelessly in half. None of the decisions that can affect our daily lives should come down to a 5–4 vote or a 51–49 vote.

 

I am tired of the constant feeling of “it all comes down to this”—the feeling that many of the rights and privileges we enjoy as Americans are just a chocolate souffle in the oven, vulnerable to collapsing if a toddler runs through the kitchen. There should be more bedrock in our system than that. Sports analogies are imperfect but it feels like our team screwed around for the first three quarters of the game, caught up in the fourth quarter in a mad dash of scoring, and now the game is tied and the only hope of winning is a 63-yard field goal with 4 seconds left. I’m exhausted with it—not enough to stop fighting, but just exhausted with it constantly happening.

 

I don’t know what the answer to any of it is. There are ways to reform the court, like term limits or each president getting two picks. There is packing the court (which I’m skeptical about because then when the other side is in power, they further pack it and where does that end?).

 

There’s a limit to what anyone can do now but one thing we can all do, which might have averted this feeling of constant razor’s-edge, is to vote. To actually give a fuck before getting to the point of your only hope being that a near-nonagenarian would not die and herald the collapse of our society.

 

One lesson the last four years has taught us is that no matter what side of the aisle you’re on, you should vote every time. They don’t only have elections every fourth November, you know. They have primaries and midterms and state and county and municipal and school board elections, and those little elections may shape the bigger ones. Voting is the most power we have as American citizens. Why else would the government work so hard to suppress it?

 

Mister Rogers used to tell people to “look for the helpers.” This is good advice for kids but when it comes to the perils of democracy, I think some of us adults are looking around for other people to help without realizing that we are the helpers. We are the ones who need to act. Nobody is coming to save us but us.

 

My parents instilled in me the importance of voting and I am very grateful for it. I intend to do the same for my son (and the mini-lectures have already started to much eye rolling). Once I took him with me to vote in a primary and as we were leaving, there was an older woman who cried out in pain with the effort of getting out of a van to go vote (somebody helped her and she said she was fine). I told my son, “If she can vote, we can.”

 

People stand in lines for hours because they know how important their vote is. Unless you’re actually being suppressed, get to that polling place or mail that ballot. No “but both parties are the same.” No “I’m protesting by sitting home because I mistakenly believe the government is like a TV show that they’ll cancel if not enough people watch it.” No “I couldn’t bear to sully my halo by voting for a candidate who is not a completely pure ray of light.”

 

I don’t mean to lecture here because God knows there is more I could do: I could volunteer or march or organize. But I’ve been voting faithfully since four days after I turned 18 (1992 presidential primary). I think I missed one presidential primary and I felt very guilty for it. So I could do more but when it comes to voting, I’ve pretty much maxxed out that power, so forgive me for copping a bit of a ‘tude when it comes to this subject.

 

A Piece of Cake

The partygoers have just finished a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday” and the cake is being cut. It’s a decadent little thing: Chocolate cake with a rich buttercream chocolate frosting. Carol, the hostess, passes out pieces of cake to guests, who happily begin to eat.

 

“Trish, can I get you a piece?” Carol asks.

 

“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly! I’m watching my weight,” Trish squeals. “I already filled up on all that watercress and cauliflower. If I eat any more, you’d have to wheel me out of here on a forklift!”

 

Trish looks around the room, watching to see who is listening to her. Her eyes linger, just for a second, on a slightly overweight couple chatting as they eat their slices of cake.

 

“Oh, are you sure? I’d hate for you to miss out,” Carol says.

 

“It looks so rich,” Trish says. “All that icing! Goodness! I’m going to burst just looking at it!”

 

Carol cuts pieces of cake for two or three more guests. “OK, it’s up to you.”

 

“Well, maybe just a small piece. Very small! Just a sliver! Ohh! I’m watching my weight!”

 

“One small piece, coming up.” Carol makes a cut—nearly perfectly vertical—on the bottom of the Bundt cake. She lets the knife hover over 6:28 on the clock, demonstrating her second cut. It’s half of what she gave the other guests. “Is that OK?”

 

“Oh, no,” says a loudly flustered Trish. Heads turn. “That’s much, much too biiiiig! Oh, I could never even think about trying to finish that! Goodness!”

 

Carol moves the knife over 6:29 on the cake. “How about that?”

 

“Still too big! I don’t know if I could manage that! I just need a tiny sliver! Oh, I’m watching my weight!” Conversations have stopped at the party as people listen to Trish.

 

Carol moves the knife over 6:30 on the cake. It’s the smallest the piece of cake could be and still maintain its structural integrity. “I can’t cut it any smaller, Trish.”

 

“Well,” Trish sighs, “I can give it a shot. Although I may end up with a stomachache!”

 

Surgically, Carol transfers the flimsy piece of chocolate cake onto a plate. It will not stand up on its own.

 

“Thank you,” says Trish. “Would anyone want to split this piece with me? You see, I’m watch—”

 

“We know,” the guests cut her off. “You’re watching your weight.”

 

Step up your gender reveal party game

In the last few years, gender reveal parties have become more and more elaborate. It’s no longer sufficient just to cut into a cake that’s either pink for a girl or blue for a boy. Now people hire skywriters or blow things up in special hues to indicate the incipient vagina or penis. Expectant parents just keep trying to top one another. Recently, a gender reveal party in California involving explosives set off a huge wildfire.

 

Well, that’s bush league. You can do better than that.

 

If you not only want to keep up with the Joneses but top and humiliate the Joneses, here are some suggestions for gender reveal parties that will make that wildfire look like a sparkler.

 

Fly some B-52 bombers above your house. Have them drop 250,000 gallons of water into the backyard. The water will be dyed pink or blue depending on the baby’s gender. It will be like when they dye the Chicago River for St. Patrick’s Day, except with mass flooding.

 

Hang a pinata from the ceiling. If it’s a boy, fill the pinata with pressurized methylene blue. If it’s a girl, fill the pinata with hot Pepto Bismol. Depending on your baby’s gender, the partygoers (and furniture) will get skin irritation or burns, as well as a memorable surprise.

 

Have the party near gang territory and tell everyone except the parents the gender of the baby. If it’s a girl, party guests will all wear red T-shirts under their clothes. If it’s a boy, they wear blue T-shirts. At the moment of the big reveal, either the Crips or the Bloods will spy people wearing rival gang colors, and they’ll join the party in a fun, obstreperous way. The more the merrier!

 

Plant dynamite under either a pink Cadillac or a blue Mercedes. Blow up one of the cars depending on which gender the baby is. Do this near a school at recess, as everyone knows kids love explosions.

 

Lace the cake with ipecac and either pink or blue food coloring. After cake is served, at a climactic point of the party, the color of the copious waves of vomit will herald either a boy or girl.

 

Rent a helicopter and hover over the Amazon. As partygoers watch, spray the jungle with Agent Orange to defoliate a large area in either the shape of “BOY” or “GIRL.”

 

Now that society is catching up with the notion of gender non-conformity, there’s no need to be restricted by pink and blue. Instead, pick one city to nuke if it’s a boy and another to nuke if it’s a girl. This may sound like a lot of work but the hardest part is enriching the uranium, and the rest does itself. It’s a great way to break out of the pink/blue paradigm!

Running

I pictured more running, I guess. Running up and down streets and driveways, racing each other to the pool. Running between the raindrops when summer sun collapsed into cumulonimbus. Running home for dinner at mom’s voice or to bed when the streetlights come on.

 

We were never inside then. Summer days, we’d watch the sun move from one horizon to the other, turning bronze under its watchful eye.

 

I graft my childhood onto his. Maybe it is too much to expect him to summer like we did in dinosaur days (and maybe I edit, forgetting the rain and Mom kicking us out on a day too beautiful for Super Friends). Still, he turns his back to salt water blue to win shooting wars on Fortnite.

 

This was not the summer, perhaps, to expect legions of kids knocking up for him to waste the day away while they still can. And I sound to myself increasingly like a dinosaur when I expect today to look like yesterday.

 

A Font of Discontent

I’m quite particular about my fonts. I spend a long time staring at fonts every day due to my job so it’s no surprise that I’m picky. I know the importance of readable type.

 

That’s why the Calibri font annoys me. I don’t understand why it’s the default font for Word and I have a hard time switching the default font to something I want to use. Most authors send their articles to me in Calibri, I guess because they’re not picky and just use what automatically pops up (I don’t encourage authors to do a lot of formatting anyway because we’re just going to change everything to adhere to our style, so they’re wasting their time).

 

I have a hard time reading Calibri. Something about the serifs throws off my cursor: I put the cursor in the text to delete something but the cursor is often next to where I want it to go so I accidentally delete something else. For some reason, it’s also hard for me to tell in Calibri if there are two spaces after a period. That’s a problem because if you’re writing something that’s being professionally published, you should never ever use two spaces after a period for various reasons. It’s no longer 1979. (Legal and government documents seem to have made an exception for themselves but every book and newspaper uses one space after a period.)

 

Anyway, when I’m writing or editing in Word, I always use plain old Helvetica, 12 points. Helvetica is clean and classic and doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s easier for me to read and lets me pay attention to the substance of the text and not the formatting. I’m having this weird problem now with all my Helvetica bold text displaying as gibberish in Word. It’s something to do with the font app I downloaded that was supposed to fix another problem.

 

I have access to a lot of fonts because of my job but it’s annoying that Helvetica doesn’t seem to come standard with the basic versions of Office and the like. Scroll down far enough in Word and you really get down to the font dregs. I mean, Diwan Thuluth? Gujarati Sangam MT? What the hell are these and when would you ever, ever use them?

 

No, I’ll just stick with classic fonts that are easy to read. I like Helvetica, Bembo, Futura, etc. I like some of the fonts that you can use to evoke the past, like Cooper or Peignot.

 

I stay away from anything that looks like somebody used it to design a flyer for Casino Night. Comic Sans should only be used for an event involving young children. Papyrus is only appropriate for a menu for a restaurant that only serves wraps. Fonts like Funkhouse might say “fun” but they look like ass. A lot of script or novelty fonts are illegible. Impact just reminds me of memes. And don’t get me started on …

 

… Hey, wake up! How long were you out? Mid-second paragraph, as far as I can tell.