Ally > Recent Status Updates

I wasn't sure if she was flirting, or sharing an elliptical "trans women are women" message. The traffic light changed and we parted ways. I felt briefly elated. While waiting for my electrologist, it dawned on me that any time a cis person said I was pretty, my brain would automatically attach an asterisk to the compliment to qualify, "for a trans woman."

[ooof]

...a novel thinking "Oh yes, millions of other novels have already been published. But wait until you read the humdinger I'm going to write." I feel sorry for any person who thinks that way.

[THANK YOU HAZEL JANE PLANTE, LIBRARIAN, FOR WRITING THIS PARAGRAPH. This book is so funny/charming & also like being turned inside out at the same time & there was clearly so much being turned inside out in the writing of it.]

You once told me that I should work in an artsy bookstore, but I don't know if I would feel like creating art if I was constantly reminded of how much of it already exists. It would be like being a librarian who's trying to write a novel. How could you feel like you had something to say if you were always aware of how many books had been published? I mean what kind of narcissist would be able to sit down and write...

A really big sweaty man with sticky hands who had grabbed me too tight and was pulling me close against his body.

[wtf is this explicit rape metaphor doing in this cartoony YA adventure?]

...Only Yesterday, the time travel movie we saw on our second date. But in my drawings, you and I starred in the story, instead of River Phoenix and Lisa Bonet.

[I love this parallel media universe (an anachronistic Donnie Darko?). I'm having trouble placing these events in the early 90s - a high school with an out queer clique? A movie with an interracial romance where that isn't the whole plot of the movie?]

She would infect her friends… her loved ones…

[boooooooooooooo]

I remember being nervous that you were setting me up, because I wasn't like the cooler-than-thou rockers I'd seen you flirting with in the halls. I was one of the weird queer kids who got teased for wearing eyeliner and mostly hung out in an alcove with my weird queer friends.

[I thought we were in the early 90s suburbs here, which makes a self-understood-to-be-queer clique unlikely? Maybe it's like an NYC suburb?]

I've never been this far from a crowd before. Their loud voices, the inadvertent touches, and the scraps of personal information that people always give in passing. All the tiny ways that people help each other to exist.

[Is this casting Sophie's spectrum-y sensitivity as dysphoria about being human? I'm not sure what to make of this.]

"I am so tired of using this clumsy human voice! I never even liked talking! People lie every time they speak! I can finally understand and be understood and oh, of course I am going to do this, I have never wanted anything half as much!"

[ok so this book does have a trans character - kind of love how her spectrum-iness has been emphasized as/when she unmasks about this]

...that first time? I kept thinking of waves. Of a dolphin undulating in the ocean. Maybe that helped me to feel okay about being inside of you.

[This was almost the same image - whale not dolphin - that my first partner of this type brought to me to help me through my version of this dysphoria, before we learned to find approaches that felt mutually receptive.]

It was the prettiest drone. No melody. Pure atmosphere. Their instruments reminded me of a documentary on an avant-garde composer who created dozens of unique instruments to play his experimental songs on.

[Maybe 1974's "The Dreamer That Remains" on Harry Partch?]

It's the city where I have to share space with obsolete versions of myself. [...] Why couldn't I tell you this before I left? I have no idea. If I understood myself, I'd be a different person.

{I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING THAT'S HAPPENING YET BUT I CANNOT DEAL WITH HOW BEAUTIFUL THIS BOOK IS]

"Be careful. The things we cannot outrun are the things we must fight. And you are no fighter. You will need help. You will need me. And I do not provide for liars."

[If the femme / ambiguous theater dandy turns out to be the villain as usual, in a gay YA, I will throw this book across the room so hard I AM WARNING YOU RYAN LASALA]

...their stellar third album, Esperanto A-go-go

[HOW CAN THIS ALBUM NOT EXIST]

"To me, libraries have always represented the best of humanity. The way we all share knowledge and space, and... and how we find ways to look after each other. It's not a perfect system, but it's powerful."

[libraries = hottest possible book boyfriend]

"I don't know how you handle it."

"I don't know. Maybe I just let it overwhelm me. The first time it happened, I was desperate to leave my own body."

[The transness of this book, despite or because of no definite textual transness so far, has been such a gift to me. This pairs with the insight in Light from Uncommon Stars of how hyper-vigilance plays into art-making to explain how much I need it.]

As these things go from being moments that I need to survive right now to things that will always have happened to me, I start to shiver.

[This passage crushed me. For fiction to really wrestle with what it feels like for the people around you to delight in cruelty to you, to be ready to let you die.]

"Time should make you angry, not complacent," Bianca says. "Back on Earth, our ancestors could follow the progress of the sun from horizon to horizon. They saw change roll right over their heads. [...] This awareness made them fight with all their strength."

[Adore this concretization of queer time & the example of false queer historicization - CJA finding the life in dry theory again <3 ]

"Actually, let's do something else," I say. I try to think of the least sexy food I can come up with.

Most food, I realize, is at least a little sexy.

"Nachos?" I say.

[hahahaha I am having so much fun with this one]

If I had a penny for every time I interrupted my own anecdote to debate whether this actually had happened on a Tuesday, or if it had in fact been Thursday, then I'd have at least forty cents, and that's way too big a chunk of my life wasted for way too small of a payout.

[One notch too clever? But also hello, I am in love with this character?]

I looked up the queer dance party venue on my phone, and saw they were having something called the If You Can Feel It, You Can Speak It open mic for people of color that night.

[IYCFIYCSI is a fantastic mic - it survived the Milky Way's closure & is now running at City Hall!]

When I get to the address [of the queer dance party], I realize from the faded letters on the brick smokestack out front that the building used to be a brewery.

[this’d be the Milky Way in JP by Stony Brook - uhoh, depending on what year we’re in this could be bad news for Renita]

The radio, tuned to WILD by her father, or Jam'n 94.5 by the mechanics, Tommy and Blue, was a comfort.

[WILD and Jam'n 94.5!!! See, this is why I'm a fan of research / realistic detail, this sentence alone tells us so much about shop dynamics (WILD: AM & a civic / cultural force; Jam'n: mostly rap, highly commercial (concert giveaways all the time), a big chunk of its audience rebelling suburban white kids).]

Looking at Renita's plate, where the only thing left was a pile of celery, Geneva asked what had happened to the other three points.

[NOOOOOO I AM SO MAD ON YOUR BEHALF, RENITA, THIS GARBAGE WILL MESS ANYONE UP GOOD DON'T ASK ME HOW I KNOW]

The woman who'd broken the back of the Baltimore transsexuals in the early days, when it had been just her and Dr. Raymond, and a few dozen sisters who saw the chance the virus represented.

[Okay, this universe makes a _little_ more sense if it's *actual Janice Raymond* who founded this faction? By leading a guerrilla terrorist unit? At age 78?]

She realized, that in some way she would never unravel, in some strange and hazy confluence of gentleness and violence and self-mortification, Beth was more a woman than she'd ever been.

[THE APOTHEOSIS OF THIS WHOLE THING IS THE PROTAGONIST BEATING THE DEUTERAGONIST AT GENDER!?!?!?!?!?]

She shot back, missed, and blew a passing seagull into blood and feathers. She thought of Randy Johnson's fastball obliterating that bird in midair.

[we have before this moment had no clues that Ramona is either into baseball, or was terminally online when the internet was around]

"It's our turn to do a little raping and pillaging, don't you think?"

[Saturday morning cartoon villain, I am so bored, I wish the book had gotten this bad earlier on so I wouldn't feel compelled to finish]

If it was anyone, it was America, except the feeble old white eugenicists in Washington would never have used men as the vector, would never have risked their precious carcasses, pumped full of teenage blood and transplanted organs.

[does this book seriously take place in the Pizzagate EU?]

The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about Black people in monthly book clubs, the way you'd read about the construction of the London sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them.

[narrator's so weird]