I'll Be At Penguicon With My AMAZING SPIDER-NAILS

You guys.
I got literally the best nails I have ever had on my body yesterday.  I gave my mad manicurist Ashley license to go nuts, and go nuts she did, with nails so awesome that strangers who’ve witnessed them have dragged me over to other strangers to show it to them.
My inner ten-year-old boy is doing giddy leaps.  These are precisely the fingernails I wanted when I was eight years old and my parents told me that boys could not have fingernail polish.  Oh, how I would show these to the kids on the playground!
…what’s that?
You want pictures?
No, not yet.  These nails are too good.  And I’ll be at Penguicon in Southfield, Michigan tonight, doing a grueling nine panels for your entertainment.  In fact, if you want to see me, I’m not going to list them all but I suspect my better panels will be:
The Guilty Orgasm: Does Traditional Masculinity Make You Worse In Bed?
Friday at midnight
In which I read my FetLife essay (which I think is one of the most important I’ve ever written) and hold a group discussion.
Straight-Razor Shaving: A Semi-Bloody Tutorial
Saturday at 2:00 pm
I’ll be teaching with Alex Drummer, another straight razor enthusiast, and we’ll see whether we can actually shave live for your entertainment.  Expect lively debates of “That’s not how you do it!”
Why Do We Love The 80’s?
Saturday at 3:00 pm
Where I get to be on a panel with Ready Player One author Ernie Cline and my, uh, best friend (and Ernie Cline superfan) Angie.
Fireplay 101: Burninating The Peasants And/Or Girlfriends
Saturday at 10:00 pm
Not a live demonstration, alas – hotels hate that – but I’ll discuss the essentials (and dangers!) of fireplay, along with all my multudinous equipment.
But I’ll be at five other panels.  Readily available, you might say.  And if you want to see the nails of awesome, you must come up to me and say:
FERRETT!  SHOW ME YOUR AMAZING SPIDER-NAILS!
And oh, my friends, I shall unfurl the wonder.
 
 

The Amazing Spider-Man 2: A Review (No Spoilers)

Last night, I Tweeted this:

If I wanted to show a non-writer what a really promising novel looked like about two drafts before completion, I’d show them Spider-Man 2.
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) May 2, 2014

Which is, really, all you need to know about Spider-Man 2. It’s got some really awesome stuff, things I haven’t seen before in a Spider-Man movie.  And it’s also half-baked, strangling its own emotional impact with storylines that could have been magnificent with a bit of tweaking.
Here’s the good: this is the first movie to show Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in full effect. I used to say that Christopher Reeve’s Superman was the only superhero who waved hello and goodbye, giving a little human interaction between his acts of heroism, and that’s what made him great; it told you Superman cared.  All those other heroes swooped in and saved you, then disappeared or soared away.  Superman was about the niceties.
This Spider-Man is clearly The Good Guy.  He remembers people by name.  He stops in mid-chase to brush off the shoulders of the people he’s saved, to encourage them.  He’s not just saving people, he’s chit-chatting, he’s making quips, he’s funny and fun to be around.
This film doesn’t even attempt to make The Daily Bugle’s hack jobs look real.  Everyone in town adores Spider-Man, and that’s that.
And Spider-Man loves what he does.  Teresa Nielsen-Hayden said something on Twitter along the lines of “Spider-Man says there’s nothing wrong with being Spider-Man?  Oh, these people don’t understand the character.”
Except it’s Teresa who doesn’t understand.  Spider-Man is the only good thing about Peter Parker’s life, in many ways: he works a shit job, lives in poverty with his elderly aunt, and he gets to creep out of the house to play the Big Damn Hero every night.  Everything that sucks about being Spider-Man is Peter Parker – his friends get endangered (often through ridiculous plot development), he has to choose between survival and doing the right thing.  If he could only be Spider-Man, he’d be fine.
But eventually, he has to be Peter Parker.
And the film gets that.  And the emotional realism between Peter and Gwen is well-developed, an achingly real first love, where they both realize they’re wrong for each other but think that love can overcome all that.  Nothing matters but love.  And, obviously, when you’re Spider-Man, the universe is going to teach you how that may not be true.
The problem is the movie’s unbalanced.  There’s two villains, and, well, experienced superhero film fans know what that means.  And worse, they’re not really particularly well-created villains.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels like a step back after Sam Raimi’s richly-reimagined Doc Ock and Green Goblin – Electro is a dysfunctional, one-note nebbish who becomes a dysfunctional, one-note supervillain, and could have been taken straight from the 1960s comics.
That’s not a compliment.  Movies have grown, and so have the audiences, and while I won’t hear a bad word said about Ditko and Lee, I will say that copying their simplicity in today’s market doesn’t feel groundbreaking, but simple.
And the second half of the film falls apart, with two half-baked villains trying to take the emotional place of one, and all sorts of scenes that don’t make sense given what we’ve been told before.  We have the clear Idiot Plot, and on the way back from the theater Gini and I thought up several fixes that would have preserved the integrity of the characters and raised the emotional stakes.  Our fixes might not have been perfect, but this film feels like they had several action sequences to film, and an end, and didn’t really think about how to connect them all together in a way that satisfies.
(IMDB informs me that the PG-13 rating they had to keep also played a factor – you couldn’t make the villains too scary, so instead of fighting and trimming, they simply filmed entirely new scenes, much to their detriment.)
And what happens next, well, that enters the land of spoilers.  Over on LiveJournal, I’ll leave a comment discussing some of the problems and how I would have fixed them… but the point is that these could have been fixed.  This is what redrafting is for, to interrogate yourself honestly about the weak points in the plot and to see whether the emotional moments you’re going for are actually earned.  And they’re not, not quite.  The elements are all there, waiting to be honed, reshaped, rearranged.  But what you get is an okay movie – and after the awesomeness of Captain America 2, we really needed better than okay.
(Also: I’d like to tell my ten-year-old self that “By the way, the fifth Spider-Man movie won’t be nearly as good as the second Captain America movie” and watch his little mind go boom.  What a marvelous age we live in.)

Musings On Cancer.

“I’m not worried about Kat’s tumor,” I told Gini.  “I should be.  But instead, I’m depressed for other reasons.”

“Are you sure your depression isn’t because of her?” Gini asked.
“No.  We’re waiting for the biopsy, and… I’m not even thinking about her.  I forget she’s in mortal danger for hours at a time.  Instead, I’m selfishly getting sad about all these other stupid things, deadlines and mean comments and writing, and crying for things that have nothing to do with Kat, and then I think oh, I should be worried about Kat, and I’m just…not.”
“I think you’re worried about her.”
“I’m not.  And I feel worse for being such a shitty friend.”
A week later, Kat got her results back.  They were clear: a benign tumor.
And within two minutes of hearing that news, the depressive funk I’d been in lifted as abruptly as a tarp being ripped off.  The sadness was gone.
I just was so unable to deal with that terror that I sublimated it into all sorts of other sadnesses.  It felt like depression, it felt like my usual chemical neural misfire, but deep down it was my brain being incapable of looking that terror in the eye.

When I look Rebecca in the eye, I don’t see anything wrong.
She’s five years old, and she loves me.  She leaps on me every time I come near.  She wants me to chase her around the house.  She gives me kisses.
And I keep staring at her, trying to understand how this adorable, mischievous moppet isn’t going to live.
She isn’t.  The Meyers tell me that, and I believe them.  They’re bolstering up for the inevitability of Rebecca’s death, shoring up all their defenses, doing their best to squeeze every minute out of her remaining time.
But I can’t see that remaining time.  I have to keep pushing myself, remembering to schedule some Meyer-time, because if we don’t this week then we might never see Rebecca again.  And we go over, and it’s playtime, and she pokes me with a broom and giggles at my jokes, and if I didn’t look at Eric and Kat’s grim faces I’d have no idea that anything was different.
And I’m depressed all the time.  I barely have the energy to get out of bed.  Writing is a slog.  In the evening, I collapse into Gini’s arms and we watch television instead of visiting friends or making dates or anything productive, and again, I don’t think of Rebecca.  Except when I see a Tweet from Eric implying the horrors on the ground. He talks about handing the Do Not Resuscitate order to his child’s teacher, and that’s like a punch in the gut – a literal physical pain, right in the scar where they cut me open for my triple-bypass.  The center of my newfound mortality.
They’re preparing for a future where she will be gone.  A future, too close.
And how can that happen?
We have a convention to go to.  That convention is tomorrow.  And still we’re holding our breath, because Rebecca had some eye pain on Monday and is that a headache or a harbinger?
Everything in our lives will get dropped to be with her, when the time comes.  If we get that chance.  We’re holding, hovering, waiting, because in the future is a big fall and we need to catch the Meyers.  We need to catch ourselves.  We need to catch whatever we can of Rebecca.
We can never unclench.  Except we do.  We’re human.  We unclench for brief periods of time, then feel horribly guilty because how could we have forgotten except memory refuses to store this, and so when we slump home we try our best to work and still, still, still.

This isn’t a chronicle.  It’s an excuse.
I know you’ll accept it, no question, but I’m flaky lately, not responding to certain emails, going dim, forgetting stuff.  And like Kat, I don’t think it’s Rebecca, it feels like my annual SAD, except there’s just a sharper edge buried in this usual sadness.
I’m not at the epicenter of this – that’s the Meyers.  But I’m caught up in because Rebecca’s my goddaughter, and the only kid in that family who really gets my humor, and when I realize I’m not going to get to tell her all of my bad Dad jokes and goof around with her, it feels personal.  It feels like an angry universe decided to smart-bomb my heart in the place I least expected it – Gini?  Fuck, yeah, I’ve been braced for that death for years.  My mother?  My father?  Inevitable.  Even Erin and Amy, my daughters, well, it would devastate me but they’ve gone to college, they’ve fallen in love, they’ve become adults.
But a little fucking girl.
Such dirty play.
What they don’t tell you about cancer is that getting through it involves rationing your strength.  You just won’t have the energy for some things any more, shutting down certain parts of your life – even parts you may enjoy, but there’s a stress in all areas of your life and you just can’t.  And me?  I’m more sapped than I’d have believed by this, and I don’t want to dump in on the Meyers – that is the cardinal sin – but there’s a level of exhaustion because somewhere in the back of my brain it understands just what’s about to happen, it’s screaming, it’s shrieking in the dead spot in my consciousness, and every other brain cell feels that horror and sags to the tune of some unknown fear.
And I keep asking, Well, what’s normal here?  And there is no normal.  There’s no stable place to stand.  There’s only the seesaw riff of happiness and terror and anticipated loss and irrational hopes and logical calculations and rigid planning and bargaining and moping and talking with friends and blogging and throwing away that blog entry and writing and throwing away that writing and realizing that there is no way to communicate because you have to know her, you have to know how precious she is.

Last night, Gini talked me out of cancelling my novel.
Because I got the news that “Hey, you’re going to be a published novelist” on the same day we found out that Rebecca’s tumor had resurged. And I remember kneeling next to the toilet at the children’s hospital when Rebecca was in surgery, trying not to throw up, telling God if you need me to never be a published novelist, I will, if only it saves her.
So there’s a part of me that feels that if only I gave up the novel, walked back on that, that somehow Rebecca would be healed.  Or at least that I should try.
Gini tells me that this is the bargaining phase.  Everyone goes through it, and I had a particularly big thing to give up.  She’s told me in no uncertain terms that the universe does not care enough about me to present me with such a choice, this is random, this isn’t some sign from above, it’s just a coincidence.  And I trust her, as I always have in my depression.
But I would.  If I knew it would help.
I would give up everything, and the Meyers would too, and we all stand ready to sacrifice everything we have to save this little girl.
The horror is that there’s nothing we can give up.  Everything we have to offer is worthless.  It’s all down to the chemical processes in Rebecca’s brain, and whatever help medicine can provide, and nothing else we can do matters.
And so we pray.  And bargain.  And rage.
And give our dwindling hope whatever flame it can.

Apologies Are Easy

I screwed up in an essay I wrote last week, and apologized for it yesterday.  I apologize a lot in this blog; that’s not because I screw up disproportionately, but because I feel no shame about apologizing.
And for that, I can thank my family.
My Mom, Dad, and Uncle Tommy taught me that the apology was but one half of a transaction.  The other half was where the person I’d wronged swallowed the anger and hurt they felt, and accepted the apology, and promised not to bring this up again unless it was absolutely necessary.  (Because if I’d apologized every time I’d left the peanut butter out where the dog could get at it, and the dog had now eaten seven jars of peanut butter, it’s time to bring up past sins in an attempt to fix future dog-related peanut butter poop disasters.)
So for me, an apology is something that’s rightfully owed.  And as it turns out, apologies are terribly helpful in real life.
What an apology means to most people is, “I acknowledge you were hurt by something stupid I did, and I feel bad about hurting you.”  When you give that sort of powerful acknowledgement, it often doesn’t matter what you did – the person feels respected, and heard, and so the inciting incident is forgotten.  (Maybe not right away, but the anger evaporates and the respect they garnered for you remains.)
So apologizing has helped me a lot.  Being able to go “My bad, I’m sorry” and have it be a trivial thing has let me get along with a lot of people.  Because I’m outspoken, and occasionally arrogant, and if I wasn’t able to go, “Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that” at the drop of a hat, then my career probably would have cratered.
But other families taught different lessons.  The lesson they taught was that apologizing handed your family a club to use for as long as they cared to.  An apology was a sign of weakness, and to apologize was to expose your tender underbelly.  So to apologize meant that your family would forever enumerate your sins, because hey, you admitted this was wrong, this means we’ve got a free ticket to always remind you of how stupid you were.
And for people like that, apologies come hard.  To apologize is, in a very real sense, to give up a part of yourself for all time.  So they apologize only when social pressure and evidence heaps up to the point where an apology gets squeezed out of them.
And that’s harmful, in the long run.  Because yeah, there are occasional jerks out there, like their family, who treat every excuse with sneering triumph, raising the apology like a trophy and hoisting it to all.  But most people?  They get the apology, they make a note to be a little wary of you in the future, and move on.  And if you’re sufficiently nice and/or competent going forward, that apology will slough off like a scab.
Whereas I’ve seen the folks who can’t apologize, and good Lord their whole lives are shaped by it.  Their world seems like a constant assault on Normandy Beach, piling up excuses for when they need them, angry denials, shifting blame elsewhere because good God it can’t possibly be that they did wrong.
And it seems like so much work.
I’ll freely admit when I’m wrong.  That, I believe, is a strength.  And I’m really happy my family had the wisdom to guide me in the proper direction on that.

Sorry, Sex Workers.

As an essayist, you take aim at certain people, and find others get caught in the line of fire.  So it was when I wrote my essay, You Weren’t “Nice,” You Idiot, You Were BORING, which fired (correctly) at the sort of idiot who subsumes his entire personality in an attempt to get laid and then bitterly blames all women when his magnificently terrible plan backfires.  And in it, I said this:

You never respected those women the way you claim. If you did, you wouldn’t be writing vitriolic essays years later on what stupid whores they were.
Sorry, buddy. You were the stupid whore. You sacrificed your self-esteem, your opinions, and your labor, masquerading as someone you weren’t in a vain attempt to entice a client into your boudoir… and you couldn’t even manage to do that.

To which some people correctly pointed out that whoah, yeah, you’re using the language that those guys use, but that language is pretty mean to sex workers.
Aaaaand guilty.
So just to be clear: I’m sex-positive.  I’ve got lots of friends who do sex work of one sort or another, whether that’s camgirling or pro-Dommeing or even stripping (which is the source of an endless debate on whether stripping counts as “sex work,” but hey, for me it’s sexish work).  And for me, what they do is just another job – society places the accent on the “sex,” but I personally plop that accent firmly on the “work.”  Many love it, some are lukewarm on it but like the money, and some are looking for a better employer or a different line of work altogether.
As far as I’m concerned, yes, they’re selling their body, but so is the guy who scrubs toilets at McDonald’s, and often for less money.  I’m only really worried if someone’s stuck in a job they consider to be personally humiliating – to which the obvious rejoinder is “But sex work is inherently degrading!” to which I reply, “…and standing behind the McDonald’s counter while customers flick fries at you is empowering?”
To me, a lot of work is degrading.  It’s just that society only gives a crap if it’s degrading in a way that we disagree with.  If your boss at your “traditional” job yells and belittles you, and tells you that you should be grateful just to have a job, now go read the telemarketing script to angry customers in an attempt to rip them off, well, hey, that’s fine.  That dude’s a job creator!  He’s bringing lightness and profit to the world!  You should thank him for your paycheck!
But if someone decides to make money by taking their top off, whether they personally enjoy that or not, then suddenly that’s a horrible despicable thing that should be stopped.
Nah. I’m against workers feeling degraded, and I think pillorying sex work often obscures the very real problem that workers can be – and are routinely! – degraded in non-sexual ways.  And those workers, regardless of their career, should feel free to get out of those humiliations.
To me, if you’re okay with what you do, and nobody’s getting hurt, then I’m cool – and I think society should be, too.
(Which is why I’m not okay with the involuntary sex workers, of whom there are an unfortunate percentage out there, and as such I support whatever laws we as a society can create to quash this sort of abuse.  But I think, much like drug laws, that driving the process underground with humiliation and illegality merely encourages the process.  We can disagree in good faith on “What sort of laws/environment makes for the safest possible place for sex workers to function,” of course, but my end goal is that nobody’s enslaved to any job that they do not want.)
That said, I wouldn’t recommend sex work as a career to most people.  I liken it to professional football – it’s a body-based job where you can rake in a lot of money early on in your career, but chances that you’ll be earning that same cash in your mid-fifties is slim.*  (Not non-existent – fuck yeah, Nina Hartley! – but slim.)  If you are smart enough to get in, save a stockpile of cash, and transition out to another (possibly related) career so you’re set for life, then I say go for it – but between society’s shaming of sex work and the number of people who can’t plan financially, that’s often difficult to do.  It’s not bad work, but it takes considerable jiggering to make a career of it, if that distinction can be made.
Regardless, when I wrote “You were a stupid whore,” I intended to place the emphasis on the word “stupid” – as in, “You made all of these sacrifices in an attempt to sell yourself, and you sacrificed the wrong things.”  But thanks to surfing a lot of anti-sex-worker sentiment, what may have come across to a lot of people was the word “stupid whore,” as if whoring itself was so awful that the only people who would get involved in it were stupid.
Nah.  I know a lot of very smart women who sell their body on a regular basis.  I’m proud to know them.  And I’m sorry I tarred y’all with a bad brush.
* – Some would also say that, like football, the risk of a career-ending injury for sex workers is unacceptably high.  That depends on the type of work.  Not all sex workers engage in sexual contact – a lot of Dommes barely touch their clients, and many camgirls don’t come within a thousand miles of their clients.  So that parallel can be accurate, but is not invariably accurate.

The Bees Are Back In Town (With Video)

We had thought the cold snap killed our remaining hive of bees.  Turns out it didn’t, though we haven’t had the time to do a full hive inspection yet.
But we did have another hive, dead from last year after the queen died and our requeening attempt failed, and so we ordered a box of bees from Queen Right Colonies.
NOTE: When you get the notification that “your bees are in,” you are on deadline.  The bees have been trapped in a box for a week as they’ve made the cross-country trip from California, dying off slowly, eating only syrup from a can for nutrients. You wait another week to pick up your bees, they’ll be dead.  You wait a couple of days, the hive will be weak.
And so, when I got a call from Queen Right on Saturday saying, “Hey, we sent an email on Wednesday, are you coming to pick them up?” there was an oh shit moment.  Because today was Gini’s birthday party, and our friends Jeremiah and Laura had come in for the weekend, and could we abandon them for three hours in a mad rush to drive down to Amish country to get our bees in time?
Then I realized: Wait.  Jeremiah and Laura are into crazy shit like this.
Then I said: “Hey, do you guys want to come down with me to pick up my bees?”
Then they said: “FUCK YES WE WANT TO SEE YOUR BEES.”
Yay for good friends!
So after some discussion of what to do – they had a two-year-old girl, and could we trust her not to get stung or panic while we navigated through swarms of bees to get to the pickup area? – Gini stayed at home to take a long luxurious birthday bath, and we headed down.  Everything went fine; little Lois was a champ.  (As was her mother, who is terrified of insects but fascinated by the process.)  And we got a box of bees, and then I got to ask Jeremiah the question he’s been waiting to hear all his life:
“Hey, do you want to put the bees in the hive?”
Oh, the joy on that man’s face.
His wife took the video.  And shaking 10,000 bees into a box looks like this:

Am I Too Grumpy Online?

In real life, I sing songs to my dog all the time: “A pet to the dog, and I’m too late – you give dogs a bad name,” I sing as Shasta runs away from me to try to play “Catch the dog.”  Gini’s continually giving me a cocked eyebrow as I’m doing some goofy monologue to our puppy.
I’m also telling terrible puns pretty much 24/7.  We were out to breakfast the other day, and discovered our friend Laura had never had Eggs Benedict.  Jeremiah her husband said he’d have to whip out the cooking equipment and make his own special version for her.  I told him he’d better have chrome plates.  Why, he asked?
Because there’s no plate like chrome for the Hollandaise.
Astoundingly, they did not hit me.
But if you look at my blog, it’s all “Here’s a condemnation of ‘nice guy’ culture, here’s an analysis of an opening chapter, oh Christ what the fuck did they do on Game of Thrones, here’s Yet Another Serious Analysis of Polyamory.”  And I worry that maybe my blog makes me seem to be a grim and kinda complainy guy, the sort of grouch who lives to just carp at things, whereas I think most of my friends know me as “That doof who sends me otter videos.”
It gets slightly better on my Twitter account, where I get to say silly things in 140 characters, but even then I do a lot of GRAH SOCIAL INJUSTICE linking.
It’s a concern, because I have unfriended people for being relentlessly grim.  I’m sure they’re fun in real life, but their feed consists entirely of negative reactions to things – this movie was awful, this news item is heartbreaking, these people are racist morons, and while they’re rarely incorrect eventually I shriek, “Don’t you ever enjoy anything?”
They probably do.  I assume they’re not curled up in a hole searching out awful things to say.  But what they present as their electronic persona is unremittingly bleak, a constant stream of anger and complaint and All That Is Wrong With The World – and while they have the absolute right to do that, I also have the absolute right to say, “I can’t deal with the all-anger channel” and sign off.
It’s a matter of taste.  And I personally don’t wanna come off as Mr. Omni-Downer in my blog, continually dissecting all the awful things in the world, never talking about all the fizzy awesomeness of the world we live in.  But I though I can fret about how I come off, I can’t actually diagnose it, because I’m me.  Blog-me – the dude you’re talking to right now – is an entirely different person, a sort of avatar – I send him out into the world with a flurry of posts, and people have Very Firm opinions on him, and in most cases I actually have no idea what those opinions are.
As I’ve said many times, there’s a disjunct between Who I Am and Who I Come Off As In This Blog, an inescapable schism, and though I try to make it an accurate reflection there’s always gonna be some distortions.  I can’t blog 24/7.  I wouldn’t want to blog 24/7.  So there’s gaps, and movies I meant to review, and funny anecdotes I didn’t bother to share, and all that falls through some hole in the world where I actually, you know, live my life.
And I have zero idea how I’m perceived.  I get some nice feedback, but that’s from fans.  And if I’ve learned anything from Kitchen Nightmares, it’s that dissatisfied customers don’t write you an elaborate letter stating their complaints… they just don’t come back.
All I can do is hope that people realize I can be both contemplative and goofy, and that my writings convey some of the full spectrum of me – from depressive despair to HEY CAPTAIN AMERICA WAS AWESOME, and that people think of Blog-Me as someone who’d be fun to talk to.  And I hope that when I talk about the problems with the world, I also convey that there’s also a lot of wonder in it at all that people are as kick-ass as they actually are, that I think the average person is actually really fascinating, and that puns and bad songs about dogs are a vital portion of a balanced breakfast.
I don’t know what you think of me.  But I’d like to think that you think that I’m a positive person, if that makes any sense.  A positive person who ponders.
I could live with that alliteration.