Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

It was so depressing when women depoliticized themselves with hotpants.

“Spending half a day making dinner, that’s ‘action’?” “That’s the role food should play in people’s lives. Food is culture, just like songs and paintings. I’ve had meals that made me cry. Some people are visual, others are tactile, and actually I’m a synesthete so I’m kinda both, but I also get so much meaning in through my mouth.” But so painfully little out from her mouth . . . “Well, air is important too. Should we spend hours every day working on breathing?” “Doy. Ever heard of yoga? I’m only sort of kidding.”

The spreadsheet’s completeness gratified him. Metadata were honest.

All was so douchey, so fug: the Roman sandals and harem pants, feather hair extensions, feather earrings, guys wearing T-shirts of the tech companies they worked for, or that guy wearing . . . cat ears? Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation. Ecosystems needed predators. Yet San Francisco was nothing if not vegetarian.

Stylewise: ease up on academic pleonasms, e.g., “employ” vs. “use,” “explicate” vs. “explain,” “monophonic discourse” vs. “voice.”

she quickly wearied of her classmates’ manuscripts, about characters with pounding hearts and wry grins who’d sigh and shrug and fail to meet her gaze, who held dying grandmothers’ hands, helmed starships, attended dorm parties, came out.

she was too judgmental to be anything but an excellent writer.

It was important to have a friend he could complain about his friends to.

At least his first name was unremarkable and not one of those octogenarian names Asian guys got, Albert, Arthur, Bernard, Chester, Eugene, Joseph, Harold, Howard, Norman, Victor, Vincent, Walter . . . though even those were better than some of Will’s relatives: Phuk and Klit, Bing and Thong, Ing, Eh, Aah, the Wannatits, the Kissaporns.

It was delicious, which was bad because vegetarian food had to be really unhealthy to taste delicious. Wait—was it vegetarian? Fuckin’ A! The brown flecks could’ve been bacon—or some frightened veal calf with shattered legs trembling against its steel peg and collar, baying through snipped vocal cords. She felt pale. I’m sorry, piggy, I’m so so sorry, she thought, ashamed at her childishness, then appalled that she could consider her own earnest moral sentiments childish.

What’s your background? Italian? Black Irish?” “White Jewish.” “Go figure. Smart, hardworking.”

When you accepted a hollow compliment you validated a misperception.

The word that tainted every tongue that spoke it; the self-love that dared not speak its name. Deny you were one and you were one; call yourself one and you were a failed one; criticize one and it backfired instantly, since only the aspiring hip or resentfully unhip had a stake in disparaging hipness. It was a pejorative, but one that boring people overextended to malign all creative people.

My nervousness is a sure sign of unhealthy expectations.

my writing urge has nothing to do with talent or expression. It’s not that I have a way with words; it’s that I have no way without them.

Vanya went quiet as she worked toward inbox zero, leaving Will to quietly process the everyday aggressions of the word actually.