Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 4

All about ALIENS! A new blog series

If you've known me for long, you'll have noticed that I develop weird obsessions from time to time and research them endlessly, more or less until I run out of new material.

OK sometimes it's normal obsessions, like covid or politics, and I'll be citing the latest research papers and poll results for every tiny thing that plays out. (Some friends call me "Professor" due to this tendency!) But this new one, the one that my family and several friends have probably grown sick of hearing me talk about lately, is: ALIENS.

Friends, I have restarted this blog in part so I can tell more people about aliens!

It all started because I learned that the term "UFO" has been deprecated in favor of "UAP" (unidentified aerial phenomenon) and got to wondering how modern UFO thinking has changed over the years. My previous background in the topic had been a steady diet of science fiction and reading some Erich von Däniken books in the 10th grade.

You guys, YOU GUYS. I have not had this much fun since that time in the late 90s when I decided to learn about Scientology, and I regret that you can only learn about Xenu once.

I'm going to have to break this into several installments because there's a whole lot of material to cover. But I'll get started with a few basic observations, so you can start to see the dynamics at work here.

First, certain physicists I know get annoyed whenever aliens come up, because it is wackadoo pseudoscience. But military people I know are absolutely 100% convinced that we are being visited by non-human UFOs all the time, and that the US military knows and has been in on it basically forever. Hmmm.

Second, more science-minded types begin with the Drake equation, and point out that the odds of randomly encountering another alien civilization are incomprehensibly low because the universe is so vast. Believers insist this is irrelevant, and that aliens were not drawn to signs of our civilization — that in fact, the aliens have been here all along, and indeed we may be here because of them, rather than the other way around. (Or they believe that it's not actually aliens at all. But we'll get to that much later.)

Third, this is going to be wild and go places you absolutely never expected. Our adventure will involve such points of interest as antique German paintings, Blink 182's Tom Delonge, and FOIA documents of formerly top-secret CIA programs.

We're gonna have such a great time. Get ready.

Hey There, Hot Stuff

Well hello there! Gosh, it’s been so long, hasn’t it? Not since… mumble mumble but anyway it’s so good to see you! I missed you, babe. I missed what we had together.

I missed having a place to share long-form thoughts with the public at large so that I could discuss them at length in other places with my communities and interesting strangers, on a platform I control so I know it’ll stick around. It was magical. Because you’re magical.

So what have I been up to in this last little… time? That we’ve had? Well I’ve learned a whole lot about epidemiology, I’ve done some time embedded in a team at Amazon Studios learning way more than I ever expected to about Alexa, VR, and how stuff at Amazon works, I’ve been chiseling away at a new novel, and I’ve… you know, survived.

Mostly that last bit. I feel like I’ve made it through something, and this is the new now, and it’s time to stop waiting for some after time because now is all we ever get, anyway.

I’ve got a lot I’ve been thinking about lately, and some of it is about life and culture and philosophy, some of it is about writing, some of it is about how super wild this place is we’re living right now, like, wow the future is really not what it was marketed as, right?

To that end I’m probably going to do a redesign real soon, get America Inc. into the store and suchlike, in general try to kick the dust off of this place and see what I find underneath. I am aware that nobody reads blogs anymore since the death of Google Reader, that if I were smart and canny I’d be starting a Substack or posting on Medium, but honestly I… I don’t want to. I want something that’s all mine.

Maybe I’ll talk about that at some point, too.

Anyway, I’ve gotta run, but honestly it is SO good to see you, so good, I sure hope you’re doing great, I love you to bits, and let’s not be strangers, ‘k?

Zero Murders 2020

In this year 2020, arguably the worst year in modern history, there were zero murders in my household and I am counting this as the year’s biggest win. It’s tough to have your whole family piled up on top of each other for weeks and months on end.

It’s a hard year to look back on, for obvious reasons. But in looking, it was really a stellar year for me personally, though I feel a lot of guilt over it. I shipped good work; I enjoyed a lot of family milestones; I got clarity on a bunch of longstanding health issues; and covid-19 lockdown conditions led me to a number of improvements in my home that will bring me delight for years to come.

And then there was an election, which went right, and gives me hope that 2021 can actually be better for more people than just me.

Work

My work year started off poorly; I’d been working on an immersive experience to take place at SXSW for an unnamed TV show, and of course SXSW was canceled just before construction was set to take place.

I finally finished America Inc., the political novel I’d been working on the last few years, and it was released to low sales but uniformly excellent reviews. My hope is that it might see a bit of a renaissance after the inauguration, when real politics is boring again, knock on wood.

And through the summer and fall, I got to work on My Daemon, an app for His Dark Materials. I’m tremendously proud of the app and all the care and work that went into it. It was also a fantastic team to work with, and finding excellent new collaborators is always a joy.

I did not begin meaningful work on a new book of my own. Between no summer camp, remote and hybrid schooling, and work-from-home for those who can do so, I no longer have big chunks of time home alone to focus in the way I need to to produce meaningful chunks of fiction. Shepherding my younger child through school and keeping the house plausibly clean are the most I can handle some days. Such are the times we live in, and I’m trying to be kind to myself about it.

Home

One of the silver linings of quarantine, for us, was a renewed focus on home and home life. We weeded through closets and donated many a carload of things we had no need for, but that someone else might. We had a junk hauler come to take away half the contents of our garage (so many paint cans, cardboard boxes, ancient CRT monitors.)

We planted grass and trees, after a year with no shrubs and months with no lawn — we had the property regraded last year, as part of a massive drainage improvement project, but the winter came before it could be completed.

A bookshelf collapsed, and I at last replaced my 25-year-old unfinished pine IKEA shelves in my office with something sturdier and more professional-looking for all of those video calls we have nowadays.

But Not

Of course, there are many things we gave up this year that would have happened, had it been an ordinary year. Some of them were minor, but others absolutely heartbreaking. I had to (hopefully temporarily) leave my choir, because the demands of These Difficult Times interfered too much. There was no travel this year, aside from a few very early college visits; no long-planned summer trip to Europe. We saw Hadestown in February, but then Broadway closed, though we’d planned a week in the city to see shows over spring break. No summer camp.

My older daughter graduated high school this year; she’d landed the lead in the school musical, and the show was canceled one week before, when lockdown started. Going viral was a poor substitute for the moment she’d been working toward for literal years. Prom was canceled. Graduation was a parking lot affair, with no music and little pomp.

And yet life marches on, whether we’re ready or not. My older child got her driver’s license, was accepted to college and went away in the fall; my younger child began to come into her own as she began high school; she got braces on her teeth; we all had our ordinary arguments, ordinary pleasures, we watched Jeopardy together, ate take-out and delivery to support local business; we brushed our teeth and went to bed at night and trusted that one day, we would again be able to plan for a future that includes adventures.

Maybe in 2021.

Election PTSD and Aversion to Hope

Have you been feeling a grasping, cold anxiety over the last several weeks? Has it been getting worse and worse, even as the polls and 538 show the likelihood of a Biden win climbing ever upward? Are you afraid to hope?

Yeah, me too. You’re not alone. You’ve just developed a post-traumatic reaction to an election that went very, very wrong.

It’s only natural. It’s a simple physiological reflex, meant to protect you: just like that time that you had a quesarita left over from yesterday and then threw up, never again to be able to face another quesarito, your body is remembering and trying to keep you from experiencing that same agony again. You felt hope once. Glorious. genuine hope: hope that we were about to elect our first woman president. It was so close that we could practically hear the first State of the Union already.

That went… poorly.

There have been countless other moments of hope since then that also went horribly wrong: hope that the Senate would be honorable. Hope that the Mueller Report would change everything. Hope, again and again, that the right thing might happen, that justice, norms, the rule of law, simple human decency would in the end prevail. And it kept not happening. And not happening. Things just kept getting horribly, unimaginably worse.

And now here we are. Another election. And that rising sense that maybe it will finally be OK turns to terror, because we all know what happened the last time we felt that way, and if it turns out the same way as it did last time, that’s the end of American democracy, the end of voting rights and minority rights, maybe even the end of our biosphere. We’ve lost so much already. So much that we’d always taken for granted that is now in peril.

It still might turn out OK. It might be wonderful! Good things can still happen in the world. But we have to make them happen.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

And don’t let your guard down after that. Because all the bad things aren’t going to magically go away, even if we win the election. It’s a beginning, not an end.

We have our work cut out for us, now and on November 3 and on January 22 and for the rest of our lives. But you can’t create what you don’t dare to imagine. Hope is the first step. Be brave.

Ghost of Tsushima: Some Opinions

It took me a pretty long time — I can’t finish games as fast as I used to because my poor hands can’t take it — but I finished my play through of Ghost of Tsushima a couple of weeks back, and it’s an interesting game. I think I’m going to blog about my media choices up in here for a little while, so let’s talk about it, huh?

First let’s get the obvious out of the way: Ghost is an achingly beautiful game. The scenery and environmental design are some of the most beautiful I’ve seen, possibly because Japan is itself a breathtakingly beautiful place. It’s not quite worth it to play the game just for that, but it’s worth noting the wide variety of climates and environments you’ll find on this journey, from rocky beach to marsh to meadow to several different kinds of forest. Even better: many of these spots have a haiku point, where you compose a poem about your circumstances inspired by the scenery. It was a truly elevating touch.

Pretty isn’t enough, but that’s not all there is to Ghost. The story is well drawn, the acting largely excellent (I never got the sense that the actors were reciting words they didn’t understand, too common in other games) and the themes uncomfortably pertinent to our current day. That’s not to say it’s perfect.

The mechanics were innovative — for example, in a break from the classic glowing trail of sparkles that leads you to your pinned point on the map, the game gives you a wind blowing in the direction you want to go. Lovely! And there was a mechanic to change the weather by playing the flute, though it got short shrift in the game and never much seemed to matter, nor was it even fully explained.

One big mechanical problem with the game, and I’ve never had such a frustrating time making a game do my will: the R2 button does far too much. It’s the button you use to switch stances in combat. It’s also the button you use to open doors, pick stuff up, read signs, and hook onto a grappling point. But the stance-switching ability is the default, and never goes away when you’re not in combat, so it’s easy to get into that menu by mistake because you were a few pixels short of activating the hotspot for what you really wanted to do. The upshot of this was that it was very, very common for me to misfire on the R2 button and accidentally switch to another sword stance, say, in midair, falling to my death instead of grappling the next point. Incredibly frustrating.

The sheer array of weapons available to use was also a bit overwhelming, and switching between them midstream was an ongoing challenge. I never developed muscle memory for switching between Ghost weapons, bows, etc. and so a large part of the game was basically out of reach for me. The game felt like it could have used a couple of extra months of QA and polish to work this stuff out.

There was also a lot of repetition in the game — too many fox dens to find, mainly. It was charming and magical the first few times I followed a fox to find an Inari shrine, but when you’re exploring the wilderness — especially in the beginning — and half of the locations you’re discovering are fox dens, it loses its appeal pretty fast.

As I played through, though, and especially in the second and third acts, the game felt much tighter and the story became more and more compelling. The main premise of the game is that the Mongols have invaded Tsushima, and you, Lord Sakai, must do anything you can to drive them off and save the people of Tsushima. You’re placed in the emotional position of choosing between what you’ve been raised to believe is correct and moral behavior as a samurai, and what will actually be effective in winning against the Mongols, who don’t operate under the same moral code and restrictions.

It’s a theme that resonates right now, as progressives across the United States are faced with an opposing party that feels no qualms about breaking with precedent, norms, even laws on their march to victory. I’ve been asking myself: how can we expect for the right thing to happen if we fight with our hands tied? But at the same time, if we break our own moral boundaries in the name of winning and protecting our ability to do what’s right… what are we actually protecting? (Ghost doesn’t actually let you make these choices, mind — the narrative is on rails, and there’s no point where you get to make a meaningful choice. But I didn’t mind the lack, and I don’t think you would, either.)

There are numerous poignant and beautifully written moments in Ghost, compelling character journeys for your companions as well as the main character, and an ending that absolutely nails it. So in summation, I’d say absolutely give it a play, and be patient through the beginning. Maybe don’t play it as a completist, though.

America Inc.: Sales Numbers

It’s official: America Inc. is both the best-received and the worst-selling book I’ve released yet so far.

Don’t feel sorry for me! I’m fine, and that’s not the point of this. I like to share real information as often as I can, so my fellow writers can get a good view of the landscape without any self-aggrandizing bullshit. If we all know what it’s like out there, we’re less likely to get hurt by the potholes and stones along the way.

So let’s break it down.

Does the book suck?!

No! Or at least, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. Reviews have been great. Really, gratifyingly, astonishingly great.

Amazon reviews: 17 reviews for a 5.0-star rating

Goodreads reviews: 14 ratings and 6 reviews for a 4.86 rating overall

Even aside from reviews, there’s the air of surprise and relief I get from people telling me how much they liked it. I have a longstanding neurosis that people tell me my work is good when they dislike it, because they like me and want to spare my feelings. But white lies don’t sound like surprise.

This is also the first book I’ve written where several people have come to me as soon as they’re done reading, unprompted and with no request for feedback, to have long conversations about how much they loved the book and which parts in particular spoke to them. (And no, not just my dad!)

It might suck, but the evidence points to probably not.

So why do your sales suck so bad?

I’m pretty sure it’s because I self-published, and because of how I self-published.

For Revision and A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, I had publishers doing some of the hard work of promotion, sending out review copies, and arranging interviews. This time that all fell on me, and I did a real bad job of it. Frankly my main method of promotion has been Twitter, which has never been a great tool for that purpose. And is probably worse now than it used to be. Basically there hasn’t been enough of a chance for people outside of my personal network to even know the book exists.

I’ve self-published before and made a lot more money! But the missing link here was Kickstarter. I gambled not doing a Kickstarter, and I lost. (At the time I had to make the decision, Kickstarter was involved in union-busting, and I didn’t feel I could justify it.)

What’s so great about Kickstarter?

Kickstarter has two substantial advantages: it creates a false sense of urgency, and it provides a way for more enthusiastic readers to give you more money. The false urgency means people feel motivated to buy NOW, for fear the product might otherwise never come to market or that they’ll miss out on limited-edition exclusives. I got 251 backers for The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart; I got 96 preorders for America Inc.

96 preorders for America Inc.

And the money thing… oof. For Lucy Smokeheart, those 251 backers gave me $7701, or around $30 per backer. The way Kindle Direct Publishing structures its royalties, I can’t make more than $3.44 per book sold. (And sometimes a lot less.)

How bad are we talking?

The mathematically inclined among you will have already noticed that I got no more than $330.24 from preorders.

In total, America Inc. has earned $590.94 so far, including those preorders. That’s 214 books sold and 3,712 Kindle Lending Library pages read. I’m including sales from so far in August, which are negligible. That’s how sales tend to go: high in the beginning, and then hopefully a long tail of a few sales a day or a week, that keep rolling on forever.

There are a lot of wrinkles and complexities to this; Kindle Online Lending Library reads actually give a slightly larger royalty than ebook sales. Paperbacks cost more than twice what ebooks do, but give less royalty for all that, because production costs are a killer. Some markets give a much, much smaller royalty per book, presumably because books cost much, much less in those countries.

I’m unofficially including Amazon affiliate income as part of my book income for now, for the purposes of determining when I’ve broken even; that’s another $47.75 so far. But that still means I’ve earned $638.69. Production costs on America Inc. — editing, cover design, etc. — were about $2500. So that puts me $1861.31 in the hole.

Again, don’t feel bad for me! I had the budget for it and knew this might happen. The damage is more to my pride than my quality of life.

Well, what now?

I dunno. If I knew a lot better, I’d have already done it and my sales would have already been higher. I can’t go back in time to Kickstart again!

I’ve been experimenting with Amazon’s advertising platform, and results have been… well… I’ve spent about $15 to sell about 3 books, which cost the buyer $15 but earned me $11.50-ish.

I’ve heard if I can get a lot more reviews, Amazon will put my book in front of more eyeballs, which should lead to more sales, but I feel like I’ve done all I can on that front. I could try to promote more and better… somehow.

I’ll likely do a Kindle Countdown Deal at some point, possible timed to go along with the presidential elections (assuming those happen.) That’s a price cut that expires, to create that false urgency that I lost from Kickstarter.

Maybe my cover design sucks and I should try again? I dunno.

Anyway, that’s how it is right now. I’m more than happy to answer follow-up questions or take advice, either/or. Meanwhile, I guess I’ll just keep on keeping on.

America, Inc.

Remember that one time I wrote a novelette about a corporation-led revolution and people liked it?

So yeah, I wrote a book.

America Inc.: A novel of democracy and dirty tricks

By Phillips, Andrea

It’s not the same story, though it starts where The Revolution, Brought to You By Nike ends, and Corazon is one of the main characters. It’s about a corporation running for president! It’s also about money, power, idealism, pragmatism, and the 2024 election cycle.

Here’s the cover copy:

A corporation is running for president. And that’s the good guys.

Toby Mitchell is a newly minted dot-com billionaire who never saw a problem he didn’t think he could fix — and now he’s setting his sights on democracy. 

Corazon Matapang led a revolution that toppled a president, sponsored by a shoe titan. Now that she’s had a taste of shaping history, she wants more.

Berry Cantor is a subsistence journalist just trying to make rent any way she can.

Together the three of them take the relationship between corporate and political power to places Adam Smith never imagined. America will never be the same.

"Andrea Phillips is a visionary, a serious thinker about the present and the future who wraps her insight in delightful storytelling and delicious characters." Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

Ebooks are available for preorder on Amazon right now; there will be a paper edition, but you may not be able to order it until the release day, which is July 7.

That’s in THREE WEEKS!

This is a self-pub jam, which means that you won’t find it on your local bookstore shelves. And unfortunately, ir means Amazon’s the only game in town for me, because it’s tough to jump down to a 30% royalty vs. a 70% royalty when it’s coming from the place that 95% of your sales will happen. But in order to soothe my conscience, I am donating 15% of net profits from this book to Common Cause, a nonprofit that works to promote and preserve American voter rights.

But that only kicks in if I sell enough copies to make up for production costs — which works out to be 715 copies before I break even.

In the interests of radical transparency and fighting the man, I’ll tell you: right now I have 42 preorders, which is a real long way from breaking even. But I believe in this book, and I believe in my readership.

But I can still sweeten the pot a little, right?

Most preorder promotions promise to send you postcards or stickers or swag that you’re just gonna throw out in a few months or a few years. Let’s not support the capitalist waste cycle, and go another way: I’m going to live tweet movies I’ve never watched before.

If I get to 150 preorders, I’ll watch Twelve Angry Men. Which, no, seriously, I have never seen.

If I get to 250 preorders, I’ll watch Wag the Dog.

If I get to 500, I’ll watch… ugh, Idiocracy. Fine.

And if I get to all 715 preorders needed to break even, I will watch a season of your choice of West Wing. Friends, I have never watched even a single episode of West Wing, if you can believe it.

Anyway, you know what you need to do. Buy my book! Also vote. And wear a mask. We need to be looking out for each other any way we can.

On Symbolic Gestures

We all knew all along Donald Trump would be acquitted by the Senate. Given the perfect storm of partisanship, complicity, and fear of reprisal, there was really no other viable outcome.

Oh, we dreamed of removal from office; we obsessed over it, we spun up elaborate scenarios where it might happen. But these were the political wonk equivalent to planning what you’d do when you win Powerball, in that delicious span between buying the tickets and learning the numbers.

So was it worth it?

Yes. Yes, of course it was.

The hot takes are going to start sizzling any moment now, and all of them are going to revolve around how this affects the scoreboard: approval ratings, election odds, who this process hurt and helped in the Caucus-race of politics. A lot of them will go like this: Republicans won, Democrats 0.

But like that Dodo’s race in Alice in Wonderland, there’s no finish line, and nobody is going to declare a winner. The only thing that matters is what’s happened along the way. And what’s happened is this: one political party has staked out a position that laws don’t matter, ethics don’t matter to them, political processes and precedents don’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning and preserving power.

And that’s exactly why going through the impeachment process has mattered and will continue to matter. Because we need someone in power to visibly advocate for the opposite: that doing the right thing matters, that our laws and oaths matter, that there are some things more important than personal benefit. Sometimes doing the right thing will cost you.

But not doing the right thing has a cost, too. The wrongdoer may not pay it — I’m not a believer in hell and I don’t believe all of them even have a conscience to speak of. But there is a cost to society that all of us will pay, in the end. Because the ability to do good and be good relies upon a group social consensus regarding what values we all share. And if that’s “to each his own” or “fuck you, got mine” or “it’s good if it upsets my rival” then we will all suffer, in the end, from living in a colder, harsher world than we need to.

But people are still trying to do the right thing. Dozens in Congress. Millions in the United States. Billions in the world.

Trump’s acquittal may feel to some of us like a crushing defeat, I get it. But — while I hate to talk about these things purely in terms of winning and losing — there’s one thing I like to keep in mind: You’ve never really lost until you stop trying to win.

The Prednisone Blues

Warning: We’re gonna talk about eye stuff, including a picture, so if that bothers you, check out right now.

I’ve been alluding to various health problems for my last couple of posts, and now is the happy (?) day when I’m gonna actually tell you about one of them! I am suffering from: scleritis, and I have been since some time in September.

What is scleritis? asks the curious reader, which is you. Well! Let me tell you! It is an inflammation of the wall of the eye. Symptoms are: redness; tearing; photophobia; a deep, boring pain. Complications can include vision loss and eye perforation, which is medical talk for “a hole in your damn eyeball.” About half the time, scleritis is caused by an underlying autoimmune disorder, but about half the time they don’t know why it happens.

It looks kinda like… this. Like pinkeye, with lots of extra red inflamed veins. My case is fairly mild, as scleritis goes, and it hasn’t affected my vision at all so far, so that’s nice!

And there’s another silver lining: thanks to extensive testing for an underlying cause, I can now conclusively say that at this point in my life, I do not have: lupus, sarcoidosis, rheumatoid arthritis, spondylizing ankylosis, granulomatosis, Sjogren’s disease, or syphilis. So that’s nice, too!

The problem, though, is that it’s been really hard to kick.

When I first started showing symptoms, I thought it must be pinkeye and went to the urgent care clinic nearby, where they gave me antibiotic drops and called it a day.

A week later, after realizing the antibiotic drops had been about as effective at helping as moonbeams and Goop products would have been, I went to my proper ophthalmologist, who put me on 600mg of ibuprofen three times a day. This is a LOT of ibuprofen.

And then it… got worse, so I went back, and she put me on prednisone instead.

The good news is, the prednisone was super effective and cleared everything up real fast!

The bad news is, it all came back as soon as I tapered off the prednisone a few weeks later.

The worse news is that prednisone is a vile substance with side effects as varied as the stars in the sky, and not fit for long-term use if at all possible.

It causes, in no particular order: migraines (relentless); weight gain (boy howdy); stomach upset (lo I am become a font of noxious wind); mood swings (…so angry); tremors (some mornings I shake so bad I can barely write the name of the month in my bulletin journal). And that’s not counting the increased risk of cataracts, bone loss, diabetes, and infection! It’s some serious business, prednisone. No fun at all, but probably slightly more fun than a hole in your eyeball? I guess?

So it was on to a rheumatologist for me, in order to get an immunosuppressant. A “steroid-sparing treatment,” they call it. Immunosuppressants can take several weeks to kick in, so my ophthalmologist offered me… eyeball injections. I declined, because while it looks very bad, the pain was not so severe at that point. And then I felt extremely sorry for myself and had a lot of wine when I got home. Like you do.

And in the meanwhile… back on the whopping dose of prednisone, and all of its glorious side effects.

The problem with immunosuppressants is that they are also serious business. The one I’m on now is methotrexate, which is technically a chemotherapy drug. It is so serious that I only take it once a week, and that’s not even a chemotherapy dose — that’s the much milder dose they give to people with rheumatoid arthritis.

Immunosuppressants also suppress your immune system, of course, which raises your risk of getting random infections. (Though I had a lingering ear infection of all things in the middle of just the prednisone, so same diff as far as I’m concerned.) And even beyond that, this one can nuke your liver, so no booze and monthly blood tests to make sure that your life-sustaining organs are all still plugging along the way they should be.

It seems to be working, at least. I’m ramping up the methotrexate, and I’m down to half the dose of cursed prednisone already, and we seem to be holding steady. So there’s an end to the prednisone in sight, though perhaps not for several more weeks. Meanwhile I’ve been avoiding travel whenever possible — it turns out that even spending a day in Manhattan makes me flare up for reasons I can’t guess at — and I’ve been trying harder than usual to get enough sleep.

But the big question now is when I can go off the methotrexate, too. I asked my rheumatologist, and she avoided giving me anything like an answer. Dr. Internet tells me scleritis can go away on its own after a few weeks (hah) or it can last for months or even years. And even once it’s gone, it might always flare up again.

So that’s where I’m at right now: shaking, stricken by intermittent brutal headaches, and dry as the moon. It could be better, but you know, it could be a lot worse, too: I could have something worse, or something uncontrollable; and at least I have easy and affordable access to all of these doctors and tests and medications — and the time and flexibility to deal with all of this.

I’m lucky, really, in the grand scheme of things. Like I always am. That’s perspective for you.

War and Rumors of War

I remember watching Shock and Awe live on CNN, and crying.

At the time, I cried in a self-centered and American way. I was in high school and suddenly terrified for all of my friends who might be at risk of being drafted. I was also a military brat, and I was scared for my legions of ersatz aunts and uncles — my mom's friends and squadron-mates — who might be injured or die in action.

I should have been sorrowful for the Iraqi people, and for the pointless loss of life and destruction they would experience. Their suffering far outpaced anything experienced by Americans, and indeed, it continues to this day.

History doesn't repeat, they say, but it does rhyme. 

Today, I am sorrowful for the Iranian people, because the United States has yet again provoked a war. This time a president suffering narcissistic injury has lashed out without Congressional authorization for war and initiated a military action — the assassination of the Iranian General Soleimani, of a political stature similar to the U.S. vice president — that could embroil all the world in a devastating war. 

This is the email I've sent to my representation in Congress:

I'm writing to register my shock and horror at the assassination of General Soleimani.

This action was an overstep of presidential authority and clearly unconstitutional. The president should be held to account for his actions, which will certainly lead to the loss of countless Iranian lives. It doesn't matter if Soleimani was a monster or not; there is value in doing the right thing in the right way, lest we become monsters ourselves. 

Please, find a way to stop this from becoming a conflagration that murders thousands or millions of innocents. We need to do and be better than this.

It's uncertain yet how events will play out. Perhaps there will be no war after all. But even I, the endless optimist, ca' find a silver lining here. Nothing good can come from this, and America is yet again washing her hands in rivers of other nations' blood.