snot bandana and/or tissues (optional but recommended)
instructions:
gather
share and explain your list of things you need permission for
friends give you permission: i hereby give you permission to….
give permission to self: i give myself permission to….
cry (optional)
notes: kate, our friend tien, and i have been working on various big and new projects (personal and professional), which has brought various big and new feelings into our lives. (“what gives me the right to do this?” i thought. “doesn’t someone else need to sign off on this?!”) to give ourselves permission to lean into these changes, we held a permission ceremony last week. we loved it so much we wanted to share our experience with the fine people of LWON. kate and i hopped on gchat (yes, gchat still exists!) to debrief and explain; our conversation is below.
With so many details to arrange, planning a wedding can feel overwhelming. Don’t worry! So long as you complete the following tasks in the order listed below, you’ll be just fine. Remember: This is about you, your betrothed, your families, and everyone you’ve ever met or might encounter! It’s possible (though by no means certain) that you’ll only do this once, so have fun with it!
12-plus months out
☙ Hire wedding planner ☙ Summon Council of the Wise ☙ Agree on a budget ☙ Order alchemical supplies for transmuting base metals into gold ☙ Hire personal trainer ☙ Plant magic beans ☙ Draw up your guest list ☙ Slay lion with impervious fur of gold and claws sharper than mortals’ swords
My Dad’s birthday is this weekend, and just as I did last year, I’m going to Albuquerque to celebrate with him. Last year, I drove down the day after my second covid vaccine and it felt like the world was on the verge of returning to normal.
We celebrated Dad’s birthday last year on the patio of a nice restaurant and Dad and I went on multiple bike rides during my visit. He’d been tracking his mileage with the aim of riding 100 miles each week, and even at age 77 he had the oomph to pedal up the very steep hill back to the house without any thought.
This year, we won’t be biking on Dad’s birthday. A stroke knocked him down last summer, and he remains unable to use his left side. Mentally, he’s still his old self, but physically he is completely dependent on others (Mom) for Every. Single. Thing.
Being so physically helpless is a difficult turn of events for my tough fighter pilot dad, but the most remarkable thing about it is how resilient and upbeat he has shown himself to be. There are so many things he can’t do (biking, astronomy, driving his old pickup truck, to name just a few), but he’s focusing on the things he can — read, listen to music, visit with friends. And he’s even taken up a few new pastimes, like watercolor painting.
When he’s lying in bed, unable to get up and grab a book or look up at the stars, he’ll sometimes close his eyes and recount happy memories from his life. Some nights, he’ll lay in bed recounting all the flights he’s flown. He revisits the places he’s taken off from, the routes he’s navigated from the air, sights he’s seen, runways he’s landed on.
Some days it breaks my heart to think about all he’s lost, but on others I think about all the friends my age who have lost their fathers and focus instead on how lucky I am to have such a great dad who is still around to tell me stories and share in my life.
A few years ago when I was busy writing my book and without much time to spare, my dad made a comment that has stayed with me. “You are in the prime of your life right now. You’re busy with your work and your own life and that’s how it should be. I remember that time when I was your age,” he said.
I think that what he was saying was that our lives have seasons. Dad has entered a new era, and although his physical capacities have diminished, he is as intellectually engaged as ever. If the last few years were his age of physical motion, now is his time to exercise his mind.
Dad’s mind has always been active, and the fact that he now spends much of his time watching nerdy academics give YouTube lectures on physics and astronomy tells me that he is still totally my dad, as engaged and curious as ever.
We might not be biking up the Grand Mesa together this summer, but we can discuss the latest issues of New Scientist, the new James Webb space telescope and why it’s ok that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. I hope that we’ll even go see an Isotopes baseball game together. I love my dad with all my heart, and I intend to savor every moment we have together.
A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with red flanks (or orange flanks, I guess, depending on who’s looking?) and a blue tail (which isn’t always a big deal?). More to the point, the species normally ranges throughout Asia and Europe, so in the Seattle area it is quite the rarity.
News of the bluetail left me largely unmoved. I like birds a lot, as people who know me know, but I don’t chase rarities. I don’t have any profound philosophical reasons for this. I’m just lazy, and the thought of skulking around the suburbs for hours only to stand among the peering hordes just this side of some befuddled schlub’s property line so I can stare at some distant smudge in the bushes is not why I got into birding.
On second thought, there might just be a tiny bit of philosophy undergirding my studied disinterest.
Many of my poems are not autobiographical, but this one is. I can still remember that moment: the early-morning air, the flash of blue. The pang I felt.
In the intervening years I’ve gotten to know blue jays much better as a species and as individuals. I’ve spent endless hours reading about them, watching them, talking to them, and listening. I’ve studied an audio glossary of jay calls and songs in the vain hopes of learning to understand at least a little of their language. Still, the birds of this poem have their own private, gleaming little niche in my memory, vivid and tender as a bruise.
Right Then
Ransacking the grass at the edge of the parking lot, the loveliest jay I’ve ever seen.
His features, so fine. His blues, so bright.
He cocks his crest at my idling car :
I sigh behind the wheel.
He screams. Another bird flutters down.
She is smaller than her mate, her neck feathers mute and iridescent as shade-grown violets.
Two hops and he is gone into the brambles. She follows :
Right then. That’s when I miss you.
*
Image via Unsplash. A version of this poem originally appeared in Passionfruit.
In 2016 America, fitness status was strongly correlated with presidential voting preferences. Citizens of counties with high rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity tended to vote for Donald Trump, regardless of their race or education level. Citizens of counties with low rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity tended not to vote for Donald Trump. This led me to wonder—are we underestimating the influence of suffering bodies on the body politic?
Years before Trump became a viable candidate for anything other than the world’s worst coiffed tax cheat, presidential hopeful Barak Obama was accused by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets of being “too fit” to garner a majority of voters. After all, at the time 66 percent of the nation’s voting population was overweight and 32 percent obese. In other words, most of us looked nothing like Obama, with his gazelle grace and silky three-point jump shot. So despite the many carefully orchestrated visits to junk food emporiums and his self-avowed penchant for greasy burgers and fries, many Americans had their doubts that Obama actually swallowed that swill—and remained suspicious that a man who claimed to be one of us was really nothing like us at all.
How is it, I wondered, that physical fitness and stamina became linked to the effete?
This sampling of doggerel originally appeared in 2015. It was one of a series of such samplings from the journals of Bad Science Poet. Just remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™
After five years of breathless headlines about the deepfake threat, it finally happened. Earlier this month, a video purporting to show Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering to Russia was broadcast on a news station in Ukraine, from which it swiftly jumped to social media. Well, it kind of happened. An army of researchers was at the ready, and immediately found the original (real) video that had been used to generate the fake. They debunked it, but also issued a stark warning: the technology is only going to get more convincing and harder to spot.
That line has been in every single article about deepfakes since 2017, when a redditor struck nominative gold by sticking the word “deep” (which was associated with AI) in front of the word “fake”. It sooon became the name for the general practice of using software (AI or otherwise) to create a digital doppelganger of anyone or anything you could possibly desire, and make them do or say anything you want. The face swapping technique that put Zelensky’s face on another actor to puppet him is probably descended from the original used by “deepfake” to swap famous actresses’ heads onto bodies in porn videos. These early videos were only convincing to the people who really wanted to be convinced, but any day now, the story went, such AI-generated images and videos and voices would become so utterly convincing that they would bring the world down around our ears. There would be fake gotcha videos of politicians saying something they never said; public nonconsensual pornography to silence and humiliate marginalised people; fake voices and faces to aid high-tech robberies and phishing scams. It was inevitable.
Three years later, I was working on an article about the evolution of the AI under the technique’s hood. By then, the election loomed (you know the one). Everything was a whirlwind of congressional panels, multimillion-dollar technology accelerators launched to detect and defend against the threat, and impassioned senators railing photogenically against the coming technological calamity.
