heterosexual fantasies
Books about reality tv, strange phenomena in Woonsocket, dreaming of an easier life.
Recently, I’ve been listening to books from the library, using the Libby app. The problem is that I listen exclusively to… how shall I put it… books that are not literary fiction. Fluffy books. Books that require little of my emotional and intellectual energy and attention.
Recently I have been on a kick of reading books set in the world of reality TV, none of which are as tonally compelling as Alan Cumming’s show The Traitors. (My brother asked, “Is this ‘camp’?” and the answer is “Yes.”)
I was reading (no, I was listening to) One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware and about two-thirds of the way through, realized that the twist that I really wanted to happen might not happen. I knew that if the twist wasn't going to happen, I didn't want to keep reading the book. So I looked online for spoilers. It turned out that the twist I was aching for wasn’t there. So I'm going to tell you what I wanted to happen.
In One Perfect Couple, a woman reluctantly decides to join a tv show (pitched as Survivor meets Love Island) with her boyfriend. Once on the island, he gets kicked off first, then the crew and production leave the contestants alone on the remote island for the night. That night there's a storm. Production doesn't return on schedule, and the contestants end up stranded on the island for a few weeks. Oh yeah, and they keep on killing each other. The book ends up being a survival narrative about who escapes without dying, but what I wanted to happen was for the abandonment of the contestants on the island to be the plan of the reality tv show production. I imagined that the reality tv show production told them it was Love Island + Survivor but really it was Lord of the Flies and the storm was just a coincidence, a red herring. Can you imagine a reality tv show where contestants really are stranded and we are watching to see who the last one standing would be? That would be such a good plot. I should have known that it wouldn't go there. The characters don't even consider it as a possibility! If I joined a reality tv show, if any disaster occurred, no matter how bad, I would probably wonder if it was all a part of the plan.
For truly brutal reality tv, read Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Breynah.
Reading (listening to) middling romance, crime, and thriller novels does make me want to write, if only to do better. And thinking about plot from a critical lens does help me think about the plot of my novel, even if I haven't opened the thing in *checks date in Finder* over two months.
I have a plan, though. I am taking two weeks off of work at the end of April—because I have to, or I will lose those vacation days—and I am going to WRITE. I am going to finally bang out this revision that's been floating out there for nearly a year. And, now that I have told all of you, I really have to do it!!!
With a year of space between me and this thing, I am going to be able to be brutal. I'm just hoping that I still want to work the novel into shape. I don't want to shelve it.
I've moved on from some of the central concerns of the book, and pessimistically I think that is going to make it hard for me to care, but optimistically I think that might make it easier for me to be honest about what's working and what's not working.
La Petite Rose
In the 1920s and 1930s, a Catholic woman named Rose Ferron lived in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and spontaneously developed the same wounds that Jesus Christ suffered from his crucifixion, including the phenomenon of CRYING TEARS OF BLOOD.
I didn’t know about Rose Ferron when I lived in Woonsocket, but the strange story fits with the strange town, an old mill town with a French-Canadian history, now economically depressed. (Woonsocket is home to one of the U.S.’s longest running Chinese restaurants, which is also a jazz and blues club, a vaudeville era theater, and a church with the largest collection of frescos in North America.)
She is thought to be the first American stigmatist. (A stigmatist is a person who spontaneously develops stigmata. Stigmata are the marks of the crucifixion.) She was the tenth of fifteen children. She predicted her own death when she was 26, then died as predicted at age 33, the same age that Jesus was when he died. She was bedridden for much of her life, though a medical explanation remains murky. When she was a child, she contracted some kind of illness, because of “carrying dinner to her father on a slushy early-spring day” that left one foot and one hand paralyzed. Her lower body was progressively more paralyzed throughout her life. Due perhaps to tetanus, an unknown intestinal issue, and gum disease, she was unable to eat anything other than liquid food for the last decade of her life, and suffered from lockjaw.
Whatever the provenance of her wounds, her popularity was real. Thousands came to her funeral, and tens of thousands visited her remains before her burial.
I can't help but wonder what non-mystical explanations there may be for her life, and if it is harder to be a stigmatist now, with better photography.
Here are some things I miss and don't miss about Woonsocket:
The frequent smell of sewage
The kettles of vultures that I could find on any walk around the neighborhood
The one queer bartender at the one brewery
Watching my neighbors be arrested
The skunk I once watched root around in the grass for an hour in the middle of the night
The bat who shared my apartment with me for a terrifying few hours
The hospital that I could walk to, where I got the full series of rabies shots, who sent me a horrifyingly high bill that was still only about 0.5% of the uninsured cost of the series of shots, and then without fanfare forgave the bill a few months later.
The car shop that I could walk to where the people were nice and the prices were cheap
The playgrounds that just seemed to have more birds than the town I live in now (maybe I'm having an end-of-winter bias about how many birds are here)
My elderly neighbor who once invited me to go to a chain steak restaurant with him while I was holding my child
My washing machine worked when it was in that basement and now it doesn't in its new basement
Patriot Diner
The library with books that had been in circulation since the mid-20th-century
The AM radio station that broadcast mostly old radio plays
The Blackstone River
Rhode Island
Living on the border between states
The family-owned Thai restaurant around the corner, literally called Mom's Home Cooking
My landlords
Now I live in what is technically a city and I can't get a handle on the vibe. Part of that—ok most of it—ok all of it—is my fault, because I don't leave the house anymore. I am reasonably broke and also have fewer friends up here, so I don't go out and about. I don't frequent the establishments, unless they are playgrounds or daycare or the library. Even so, I think I like it.
Whether I like it or not is irrelevant. It's mine, and I'm here.
I have a space that I keep clean, and a small dishwasher, and I can run most of my errands by walking, if I have enough time and the weather is good.
I read half of All Fours by Miranda July, then the library demanded it back. I will try to check it out again.
Genre books, heterosexuality
I listened to a book set on a version of The Bachelor, where two of the female contestants fall in love, that was pretty fun (Here for the Wrong Reasons by Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang). I listened to a book with a plus-size bachelorette, which was pretty good except for the guy the narrator ends up with (One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London). I've just barely dipped my toe into romances and I've already learned that I hate them. Where are all of these good and shockingly hot men in the world, waiting for average looking women with a bad attitude to come along? Not that I've tried heterosexual dating anytime in the past fifteen years, but my understanding is that it rarely works that way.
For the past several months, I've harbored these heterosexual fantasies. I've had MORE THAN ONE dream about getting set up in an arranged heterosexual marriage—and liking it. I've had out-of-character attraction to random men.
But there are a lot of barriers to me living my heterosexual fantasy dream life.
One is that I've never had much luck with men—the ones I like don't like me back, I think they can smell the gay on me. The good ones are all taken. I don't know how to play the game of courtship. I don't know if I would like it. I don't want to do it. I want to talk about dating men the way that some people say “Ugh, it would just be so much easier if I was gay.”
I want to be straight for pay. I want to be typecast into a straight relationship and see what it even feels like. I want to know what comfort and conformity feel like, and I want to live in a household where at least one of the members can make a full dollar on the dollar and really maximize that earning potential.
If you know of any eligible cis men in the greater Boston region who are nice and wouldn't look straight through me and are age appropriate and would be down to humor a gay who wants to experiment—
don't send them my way. I don't have time to date right now.
I'm having a good time being single.
All I do is work—I'm working on a response to the travel ban, and trying not to fully freak out, and working on state level policies, and generally hoping that the organization I work for continues to exist. And then in my spare time I'm consulting. Which reminds me, I need to answer some emails. And then do my psychology 101 homework.
Send me book recs and silly stories! If I haven’t texted you back in a long time please forgive me, I have been in a cocoon of single-parenting and work and simply existing.
Snack corner
Ok, so I have been vegetarian (no meat, fish, or poultry, yes eggs and dairy) since I was fourteen or fifteen, but I would still eat candy with gelatin in it. Until recently, when I have been doing my best to avoid gelatin candy. Which is obviously difficult because I love candy and I love gummy candy. Which brings us to some exciting news.
In the Easter candy season, many of the gummy brands that I love make jelly beans. These jelly beans have the same flavors but no gelatin!
Jelly beans to try:
Starburst
Sour Patch Kids
Trolli
Different vibe, but I really like Welch’s jelly beans too
And no, I don’t like licorice flavored jelly beans. Or licorice flavored anything.