Something a little bit experimental today! enjoy —CA
Ambidextrous
When I was in kindergarten, I would switch my pencil between hands every time one hand started to cramp from writing. My teacher refused to permit that, telling me I must choose a dominant hand. You can’t exist in the world without making a choice. You can’t be both.
Bisexual
There’s a word for wanting to have both, but the world rarely sees it. When I’m with a man I’m straight, when I’m with a woman I’m gay. You say I can’t have both, I say I can. Self-explanatory.
Contracts
The first contract I had to sign as an adult was an NDA for my new job, standard procedure. Hiding yourself when you’re not in the right company is an expectation.
Dayton, Ohio
sits right off a highway that goes from California through most of the country. As a result, we see it all. Drugs, human trafficking, anyone who needs to haul ass across the country to be forgotten. We sit at a crossroads, where you must reinvent yourself or die.
Elephants and blind men
There’s a famous tale in which four blind men encounter an elephant. One touches the trunk and says it must be a snake, one touches the tail and declares it a rope, another touches the leg and says it must be a tree trunk, the ear is determined to be a fan, one touches the elephant's back and says it must be a wall.
Flight
Every time I get on a plane, I remember that I come from the birthplace of flight. Everyone wants to get away differently, to be celebrated because they are no longer running, they are flying, and isn’t that better?
Gloria Anzaldua
A razor blade on a barbed wire fence. A bridge. A crossroads. All things Anzaldua calls herself. Sometimes she is the Chicana, other times the lesbian, the feminist, on occasion, the disabled. All of this ripping at the ways she stitches herself together. She lives in the borderlands, not fully Mexican or American. Not feminine enough to be a full-blooded woman, because she doesn’t want to marry a man, and yet she’s been menstruating since birth. A poet, scholar, philosopher, whichever name you ascribe to someone who tells the truth without belonging to someone else.
Hair
Every wlw chops all her hair off at least once, just to see. My hairdresser refused until after my senior pictures, and when she did cut it, she left it long on top in an asymmetrical style, trying to make it look more feminine. She didn’t want me to look like a lesbian. I didn’t correct her. I am too used to letting people see what they want to see.
Identical
I think it’s regrettable everything has to be relatable. “Same,” “He’s just like us, fr,” “Great minds think alike,” “We’re literally the same person, haha.” Tell me how similar we are when someone dies and you don’t know what to say.
Jumpin’ Jackpot
Once, my entire extended family went on vacation right before the new year, and we stayed in a hotel that looked like a castle. It had an arcade inside and the entire time I had my eye on a stuffed chihuahua with a pink boa. We still didn’t have enough tickets to buy it on the last day, but we gave it one last go right before we checked out of the hotel. My brother thought he had the best shot by playing Jumpin’ Jackpot, a virtual jump rope game. He won. Thousands of orange paper tickets shot out for the next ten minutes. I got the chihuahua. He didn’t second guess using his tickets on me. I hadn’t yet learned guilt. I didn’t know yet how to second guess joy. The chihuahua still sits in the corner of my room.
Kit Connor
plays Nick Nelson in the show Heartstopper. In the show, Nick Nelson gets to come out on his own terms. He falls in love with a boy and, when he’s ready, he tells the world he’s bisexual in the caption of an instagram post “Boyfriends (I’m bi, actually.)”
In real life Kit Conner is spotted holding hands with a girl and the internet calls him a “queerbaiter.” Eventually, he tweets, "I'm bi. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye."
I wonder about the tension between acting as a character who has the happier version of your story. I wonder if he cries when he thinks about the generosity Nick Nelson was afforded, the kind only available in fiction.
Loquacious
is a fancy word for talkative. I learned it in the second grade and it became my favorite word because it made me feel smarter than the adults in the room. Most days that loquacious child slips further and further into the ungraspable.
Makeup
My mother wakes up and paints her face every morning. She hasn’t left the house without makeup on since her teenage years. Armor is okay to wear as long as it’s pretty.
Narcan Overdose
How many times can you drug yourself back to life?
October
Is my favorite season. Every time it comes around, I think that I might get genuinely scared on Halloween—it seems the perfect time to get away with a violent crime—but miraculously I never get scared. Bravery meets the moment, but it never identifies as bravery at the time.
Poet
“You’re upset with me and quoting Borges in order to cudgel me with your great intellect. Very impressive”
“Fuck you. I don’t need this. I don’t need you lecturing me and I don’t need this bullshit cult of bullshit.”
Cyrus was furious at himself for not having said something more cutting than “bullshit cult of bullshit.” He drove home thinking of better alternatives: limp-dicked Republican church, coven of racist crones. It was soothing, to stop time and rework memory, imagining through the thesaurus multiverse. Vapid temple of words. Scumbag Caesars vivisecting God. He thought about all the poets he’d read whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it. Cyrus realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt even a glimmer of incandescent, effortless good.
Queer
Studies is an academic department now. I’ve read texts about “queering” the environment, queering this and that, but nobody asked me if I wanted to be referred to as that. Just like the Ivy League decided to start calling Lantino’s Latinx, which the majority of Latinos don’t like or use, one day the Ivy League decided we were queer. I know people, young and old, who really identify with the term, and I respect that. But I also know others, young and old, who only heard it as a slur and aren’t interested in reclaiming it and I respect them too. It makes it worse for them to hear wealthy straight liberals use the slur because it’s back in fashion, now the politically correct term. Personally, I didn’t grow up with people using it as an insult, so it feels in some ways like it isn’t mine to reclaim. I’m fine with people in the community choosing to reclaim it, but I would also rather be clear and specific wherever possible.
Queer is often used as a catch all for not-heterosexual and sometimes it feels like people adopt a queer identity to avoid being bisexual, which is to be not queer enough. Living and laughing and loving in the gray area isn’t fashionable, no one wants their loyalty to the alphabet community in question, no one wants to be called “just experimenting.” Maybe I just want everyone who is thinking of loving me to know what they are getting into.
Roulettista
In Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, he tells a story. In Russian Roulette, you load a revolver with one bullet and spin. People place bets on whether you’ll survive as you put the gun to your temple and take a chance. If you win, you get all of the money and all your troubles are over, if you lose, all your troubles are over. No one ever comes back. But there was one man, who one night, played Russian Roulette and won, and the next night he came back. He won again. And again. At this point, people wondered if he was cheating, but they didn’t care. He put a second bullet in the gun. People paid just to say they had seen the Roulettista.
He made enough money to live in a mansion, married, with kids. One night a man broke in with a gun. “Don’t you know who I am?” the Roulettista asked. The burglar shot him dead.
“You are the Roulettista,” a man in a bar tells Derek DelGaudio.
Self-help
Americans are on this unrelenting journey of self-development. We pay oodles of money for other people to tell us who we are, what we need, and how to make our beds in the morning. There is no rest, “self-care” is an action we must dedicate time to in the service of further productivity. We’re so uncomfortable with our contradictions we accept the sophists scam.
Trolley Problem
In the Trolley Problem you have to make a choice. Will you switch the train tracks and kill less people, or will you do nothing, allowing more people to die? If you do not make a choice, then you have chosen the second option. You only have two options. A classic philosophical dichotomy that would never actually happen. The way you solve the Trolley Problem is supposed to tell you about yourself. It says something about your morality when you are forced to choose between two bad options.
Uncle Patrick
I have the signed Rick Springfield records my mom got when she was a kid. When she was a kid, my Uncle Pat was in the hospital— attempted suicide —so my mom explained the situation to Rick Springfield and he signed all of the records for her. My mom passed the records to me shortly after I nearly followed in his footsteps, and my uncle and I have never spoken about this. I want him to know that I know that we’ve been through the same things, but we aren’t a family who talks about our feelings.
Vienna
But then if you're so smart tell me/ why are you still so afraid?/ you got your passion you got your pride/ you know when the truth is told/ that you can get what you want or just get old/ you forgot what you need/ disappear for a while/ you can afford to lose a day or two/ Vienna waits for you
White pill
The red pill community thinks they know the truth and that everyone else has been blue pilled. The red pill community is often angry that no one else can see the truth, that everything is a game. Then there is the black pill, one step after the red pill, into nihilism. No one talks about the white pill. The white pill is where good people don’t give up hope. No one takes the white pill because once you see the truth, optimism is out of the picture. There is no “white pill” community because they are the architects not the arsonists.
Xenophile (Noun):
One attracted to foreign things (such as styles or people); how to hold the parts of oneself together.
Yesterday
I found a whole new set of reasons I couldn’t sleep. Yesterday, I thought of all of the different versions of myself in a one-day-play.
Zoinks, Scoobs
I grew up on Scooby Doo. Every road trip, any time I fell and scraped my knee, when my parents wanted me to shut up, Scooby Doo was the answer. The idea of “healing one’s inner child,” always seemed convoluted to me, but I do wonder if I am dancing with her yellowed curiosity with each mystery I foil.
I love this list! What's a "one-day-play"? Is that like a durational performance or a play that will exist one day?