A cartoon by Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a cartoonist. She is @lianafinck on Instagram.

How Merrick Garland, a Supreme Court nominee, spends his Sundays

Even though Merrick Garland can’t convince the Senate to call him for an interview, he is one of the most experienced, sensible and measured judges ever nominated to the Supreme Court. On Sundays, he and his wife read the paper and exercise, like everyone else. Before that, they take turns scrambling the eggs and doing the dishes, a week’s worth. “My wife wants them done every day. I want to always be staring at my phone. Saving them all for Sunday is not the best idea but it’s also not the worst,” Judge Garland, 63, said. “As soon as I’m at the Supreme Court, I’ll be the new swing Justice. I’m already used to imperfect compromise.”

NO SLEEP TIL SCOTUS My Sundays begin Saturday night because I don’t sleep anymore. I used to sleep in Sundays. But now I’m up late, waiting for a call from the Senate, that this will be the week they will interview me. I’ll listen to some audiobooks to quell my mind. Maybe I’ll listen to a left-leaning one about affirmative action, which is settled law, or maybe I’ll listen to a right leaning one about, say, the right to bear arms, which I’d never, ever undermine. Right now I’m listening to a very moderate book about a time there were nine Supreme Court Justices. Typically my phone is on Do Not Disturb, at oral arguments especially, but ever since the President nominated me to replace Justice Scalia, I keep my ringer on. If the Senate calls me, my wife won’t wake up because my headphones are plugged in.

PANDER SCRAMBLE I like a big, energy-rich breakfast. I started ordering eggs from this agribusiness Senator Grassley subsidizes with large grants of government money. I wrote him a postcard letting him know. We’ll make a big scramble, my wife and I. Maybe it’ll be a Democratic scramble and we’ll toss in some smoked salmon or maybe, rarely, it’ll be a Republican scramble. We’ll use red meat, but a centrist amount. My doctor says my blood pressure is high from all the stress over the Senate not calling me, so I should curb my bad fats consumption. I’ll take a bite of the sausage scramble, just for the mouth feel, and then toss the rest to my dogs. We have two beautiful German short hairs, and we adore them. After I feed the dogs, maybe Senator Grassley will call me, thanking me for supporting his great state of Iowa and then remembering he has yet to interview me.

DISTRACTIONS We had a rule with the kids, no distractions at the breakfast table. We’d have the Sunday morning programs on, and we’d just kind of watch, and discuss. We’d talk about current events. No phones, no Gameboys. But now, maybe I’ll keep my phone right on my chair, between my legs, so no one but me notices it. And I’ll keep glancing down and maybe the Chief Justice will call. My wife will wince but I’ll plead with my eyes, and then answer. We’ll talk about baseball probably, or laws we want to strike down, or even the weather, but not climate change because I’m careful not to use trigger words before my interview. When he says “Bye,” maybe he’ll add, “I love you,” and I’ll say, “You say I love you to your colleagues?” And then he’ll say, “Of course, we all love each other, and we love to work with each other. The Supreme Court is amazing. We can’t wait for you to join us.”

TEAR DOWN WALLS After breakfast I’ll do the dishes. There’s a big pile of them because during the week I’m too distracted for chores. We have this window in our kitchen, and I’ve transformed it into a shrine to moderation. There’s a piece of the Berlin Wall to remind me of a time in recent history that was terrible and then suddenly not. There’s also a funeral card with the Prayer of Saint Francis printed on the back. (I’m Jewish.) I can lean my phone up on the chunk of the Wall so that I can read my messages as they arrive. Maybe Justice Ginsburg will text me that she is tired of writing perfect dissents that only bored lawyers read/share on Facebook. She is tired of being a meme. Maybe I’ll respond, “Hey Justice Ginsburg! I’ll be there soon and I’ll sometimes join the majority with you, and we can start making the law.” And maybe she’ll say, “You’re such a good boy and I’m rooting for you.”

COFFEE SHOP CATTINESS After the dishes are done, I’ll go get the paper. We stopped Sunday delivery a couple years ago because who can get through all those pages? I do most of my reading on my phone, which I never let go of. But if I pick up the paper, maybe I’ll run into Justice Kennedy at the coffee shop, and maybe he’ll say, unsolicited, “The center of the Court is so fun. It’s the world’s most important job.” Maybe he’ll get kind of braggy, almost defensive, like, “Don’t you dare become the new center, the new swing vote,” and maybe I’ll be like, “It’s my turn now, Justice Kennedy,” and then maybe other people in the coffee shop, even the barista, the one who waits a beat too long after asking how you’ve been doing, maybe he will grimace. Maybe he’ll say, “Justice Kennedy, that’s enough mouthing off. We want Merrick Garland as our new center,” and maybe the kids on their laptops will start slow clapping and chanting, “Mer-rick, Mer-rick, Mer-rick!”

BRIDGE TO WHERE Then maybe Justice Kagan will call me and invite me to her bridge game with Senator Lindsay Graham, and maybe I’ll go play bridge with them, and maybe I’ll need a partner and it’ll be Senator McConnell and we’ll talk about how they’re going to interview me this week, because did you watch any of the birther thing, or see the Skittles tweet, there’s no way Trump is going to be President, and you’re the best we’re going to get, probabilistically speaking. Maybe we’ll talk about game theory, and since we’ll be playing an actual game, maybe Senator Graham will demonstrate with the playing cards how it’s in their interest to confirm me, and soon.

CYCLING My wife and I started exercising together when we read somewhere that you’re more likely to work out if you do so with a partner. We’ll lift weights or attend the Pilates classes the Y offers. We love SoulCycle. Maybe we’ll run into Michelle Obama and her daughters at the cycling studio. Maybe I’ll say to her, “Oh hey, Madame First Lady, I haven’t heard from your husband since he nominated me.” And maybe she’ll say, “omg Merrick, I am texting him right now to call you.” I’ll situate my phone on the handle bars, so it will light up if the President calls. Maybe the instructor will say to me, please put your phone away, and I’ll say, I’m expecting a call. Then just as she gets out of her saddle, to confiscate my phone, it will ring, and maybe it’ll be the President. He’ll say, Merrick, look, I haven’t forgotten about you. You’re a once-in-a-generation, middle-of-the-road jurist, and I’m willing to dismantle Obamacare if that’s what it’ll take to get you through. And I’ll say, are you kidding, Mr. President, which I’ll emphasize, so the instructor knows I’m talking to the President, and he’ll say, of course. But Hillary will win, and she promised me she’d keep your nomination.

PARANOIA After I’m kicked out of SoulCycle, I wait for my wife on a park bench. I’m religious but not spiritual, I like to say, so I don’t get a ton out of SoulCycle anyhow. Instead I enjoy scrolling through my phone in the autumn sunshine. Maybe I’ll check my Google alerts. I set them up when I was appointed, and when I have a moment to myself, I’ll verify the spellings, just to be sure Google is netting accurate information. Did I spell Mitch McConnell incorrectly and that’s why I haven’t read anything this week about how he’s changed his mind about me? I just played bridge with him though? Wouldn’t he have said something there? Should I create an alert for Hillary’s assistant, Huma? What if she said something about the sorts of judges Hillary admires?

TAKE OUT We’ll order some take out when we get home. We like this Malaysian place that’s tucked behind a tanning salon. Our daughters love ethnic food about as much as they love Justice Ginsburg memes and before they moved out, they left a list of all the places we like, and the phone numbers, and we hang it on the fridge. Burmese. Dutch. Dominican. But just as often it’s pizza or Chinese. Comfort food. Maybe when I phone in my order, Donald Trump will beep in, and terrified, I’ll take his call. Maybe he’ll say, “Hi Merrick, I won’t call you Judge because soon I’m eliminating the job,” and then I’ll grunt nervously, and then maybe he’ll say, “I’m tearing down the Supreme Court, and I’m building a golden playpen for my son Barron,” and I’ll say, “Isn’t he, like, ten years old?” And he won’t hear me or he won’t know, because he’s already saying, “You’re out of work. Are you handy?” Before I say “No,” because I’m not handy, maybe I’ll throw my phone against the wall, and maybe it’ll break. I haven’t ordered our food yet, but I can relax, which is good, because I need to wind down. Like everyone, I prefer a restful, uninterrupted sleep before the work week begins.

Make today better with one easy click

Good morning. Today is not as bad as you think it is, because the official ranking of weekdays has been updated; please adjust your attitudes accordingly and get with the program. It is bad, however, not because it is a Monday but because it’s the day of the first presidential debate and that’s all you’re going to hear about for the next ten hours. Presumably it’s all you’ve been hearing about for the previous ten!

On Saturday, Francis and the Lights released/leaked/posted a new album, ‘Farewell Starlite’; so if you need a momentary break from the din, put this is your earbuds:

Farewell, Starlite! https://t.co/NbCanyjT2k

 — @andthelights

You can stream and/or download the full album here; it’s very good. I have been anticipating the full album since the release of the first single, “Friends,” a fun, coursing melody featuring Bon Iver and Kanye West that kind of loops and builds and really doesn’t sound like a song you could dance to but that’s exactly what Francis and friends do and it works.

Click any or all of the above links instead of the “Tweet” button. You’re welcome.

Yes, and you’re also a hero.

Kj Dell’Antonia had a piece in this weekend’s Times wondering if we (meaning, more or less, the people who read the Times on the weekend) are using the growing acceptance of “introversion” as an excuse to skip out on the unpleasant parts of everyday existence. The answer is yes, and it’s apparently a bad thing.

When I skip big gatherings of strangers, I’m not just being a little rude to the individual people around me, I’m being uncivil in a larger sense. The more we isolate ourselves from new people, the more isolated and segregated our society is likely to become. Those casual interactions in dog runs and at kids’ hockey games are the ones that are most likely to cross social and economic barriers. They expand my little world as well as the overlapping bubbles that create a society.

This is a good point, but here is another point: Have you ever actually talked to people? Like, sat down and had a conversation with them? It’s agony. However monotonous you are, your monotony is at least a settled quantity in your own mind: What’s astounding about other people is the dynamic variety with which they are able to express their own tedious thoughts and expressions. Any average person you stop at random will have at least three different ways of being mind-bendingly boring, each of which will be unexpected and only recognizable when it is too late for you to make a polite exit.

We give a lot of shit to the kids these days for their inability to make eye contact and their aversion to conversations that aren’t mediated through technology, but the more I think about it the more I have to believe they are on to something. Each time you talk to someone you die a little inside, particularly if the conversation is at the surface level on which most of our quotidian chats take place. Dell’Antonia suggests that our unwillingness to subject ourselves to these tiny tortures represents some sort of severance of the social contract, but a better way to look at it is that if you choose not to participate in one of these stilted dialogues you are actually saving your conversational partner the discomfort of dealing with your own dullness. The worst thing you can do to another person is make them spend even a second being aware of the ennui and emptiness at the core of your being; by choosing to spare them that glimpse into the void you are, in a way, offering up the greatest token of respect — respect for someone’s time, well-being, and sense of who they are surrounded by as they go about their day — that one human can give to another. If that means you’re a dick, so be it. Would that more dicks had as much dignity and consideration for the rest of us as you do, introvert. You just stay home and keep quiet. We are all in your debt.

Terrible things are about to happen.

I hope you were out and about yesterday because it was a goddamn delight from start to finish, one of those days where no matter how horrible everything else is in your life it somehow seems, for a little while at least, that none of it matters so long as the sun is shining. In any event, that day ended, and now you’re here. And even right now, of a Monday morning, life is still so much less terrible than it is going to get.

That’s right: Tonight is the first presidential debate. You know how Twitter is always a giant, refuse-strewn hole in the ground where every inch is seeded with explosives, and the stench from the body parts of those who stepped on other mines is so overpowering that your throat closes and your eyes sting? Starting this evening it’s going to be so much worse. It’s going to be an Olympics of Idiocy where everyone competes and each competitor gets some kind of medal for being a vacuous, unfunny jackass. And those are just the amateurs. The political “pros,” who, don’t ever forget, know no more than you (and, by virtue of the chronic groupthink and desperate cynicism they try so hard to project, may very well know less), will take what is already an insufferable slog and turn it into an orgy of agony where the terrible contempt in which you hold yourself for simply being an observer is dwarfed by the disgust you feel for all the actual participants and any species which could produce such an abortion of existence. Maybe tonight is a good time to get back into reading books.

Anyway, Twitter is going to be bad forever. Accept it and move on with your life. Here’s something from a Dublin duo called Bad Sea, who are new to me and I guess to being a band. It’s a good start. Enjoy.

★★★ Dazzling light crisscrossed the avenue on the way to the school. The blue of the sky had deepened, but not yet to the new season’s standard, and some haze still stuck to the sidewalk. The heat of the sun couldn’t overcome its loss of position in the sky, so midafternoon was merely tepid. After sundown, though, it was still too hot for a suit. The strong smell of garbage floated on the night air far downtown. From the 102nd floor, the unimpeded lights made the lines of Manhattan legible to the vanishing point.

Fantasies about all of my sweeties.

Because I live in an apartment in Brooklyn and because I am a repressed nerd who struggles in ways both big and small to allow herself to feel pleasure in this world, I do not own a pet. I grew up with pets. I love them. When I’m with other people’s I feel decidedly happier and more calm, but my current lifestyle doesn’t allow me to provide the kind of amenities and resources I’d want in order to care for another complex mammal, so I’m waiting.

Some of my friends are in similar circumstances, and a few months ago, I found a really effective way to jerk all our hearts off that I’m going to share with you now.

If you download the (free! widely panned!) Petfinder app, it allows you to search for adoptable pets using criteria like location, breed, age, and species. In addition to browsing the personal profiles of any relevant animals, you’re also able to save them into a folder called Favorites and revisit them for as long as they’re still adoptable. So if it’s 11:45 p.m. on a Tuesday and you’re suddenly bursting out of your skin because there isn’t a dog within your physical proximity, this might be something to look into.

It gives me what I imagine swiping through Tinder does for other people: a sense of engaging and masturbating with the idea of a future you’re not beholden to follow through on.

Angelo

Yeah, I rescued him two weeks ago from Puerto Rico. He was listed under my zip code for some reason and I was too emotionally devastated by his face to care about the cybermanipulation. It only cost $7 billion to fly him up here to his forever home, and honestly every dollar has been worth it. I mean, how tragic is his body size? Papi. Babi. My building’s not overtly dog-friendly, but I figure we’re in the clear since his weight class after puberty will still be “large bug.”

Harriet

Was moving alone to rural Maine to own land and be a freelance thought-haver a drastic personal decision? Maybe! But we don’t think about things like that here on the farm. When I wake up naturally at 5 every morning to let the elderly rescue donkeys out to pasture, Harriet’s right there beside me, circling around my feet, raring to sprint the full length of The Big Field (But hopefully not into the neighbor’s yard! She’s learning!). Harriet can be a handful during the day, but at night on the secondhand couch under the thick pine beams of my 18th century farmhouse streaming this week’s episode of Ru Paul’s Drag Race: All Stars, she’s just my lil Hairball. Hairygirl? We’re working on it.

Honey

Hello and welcome to my midcentury suburban Connecticut home. As you can see I’ve updated the hardware and appliances, but was careful to preserve the house’s quintessential colonial charm. Oh, don’t mind Honey, she’s great with strangers. She’ll probably zonk out on her Forest Moss L.L. Bean Therapeutic Dog Couch in a second. We were on the plane last week and she was snoring… so loud. Did you see my Instagram of it? Don’t pull it up, I’ll explain it to you.

Stewie

Sure, he jumps up during greetings and scratches the door when he wants to go outside, but Stew Leno’s really calmed down since we started with the regular hikes. Guess we’re both LA bros at heart! And we’ve been living for this desert sun. He walks with me everywhere at this point: to get coffee, to run errands, other places. And I don’t wanna jinx it, but I think he’s starting to come around on the obedience trai—Ah. One sec. He’s tunneling under the fence.

Romancing the archive with Web Safe 2k16.

When computers were younger, most of them could display a maximum of 256 colors. But when you went online, different operating systems referred web browsers to different color palettes of their own design. This led to distortion — accidents in color interpretation both pretty and ridiculous. To fix the problem, computers needed to refer to a standardized color palette. These were the 216 web-safe colors. Six shades of red, green, blue, spaced evenly from 00 to FF: 6 x 6 x 6.

Close your eyes and think of a website you loved (or hated!) in 1997 — say, gurl.com or Asian Avenue — and remember the color of the page. Now look at the web-safe colors. It’s in there, you just need to remember hard enough. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten who you were back then?

The web-safe palette isn’t used any more. It died around the time broadband became widespread. Fearing that we may be forgetting who we were back then, Ben Sisto and Joe Bernardi and I made Web Safe 2k16. Starting February 16 2016, we published one maximum-216 word recollection of a web safe color every day, for 216 days. In our project blurb, we said that we asked our authors “to consider a historical span of roughly 20 years, starting with the widespread availability of VGA monitors and modems in the early ’80s, through O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Conference (2004).” Really, they could write about anything they wanted.

Now, every color has a memory attached to it. It’s not the memory, just a memory. Nothing technical or definitive about it. It’s arbitrary, not organized according to age or gender or race or year or anything like that. Just the hex codes. The finished project is a cabinet of subjectivity, a record of 216 colors experienced by 216 minds.

Web Safe 2k16

Some of the above might read as dumb or wrong or way oversimplified to you. But that’s an important element of the project’s philosophy. Embedded in Web Safe 2k16 is the equal claim laid to the internet’s past by every author who wrote for us.

That time in culture belongs to everybody. It belongs to my mum, who barely used the internet until she got an iPad. Somewhere, there has to have been a very old man who could hear the dial-up song down the hall and didn’t know what it was, and died before he could find out. It belongs to the nerd and the non-nerd — it belongs to us all.

That might sound a little romantic, but that’s appropriate for these materials. Color is emotional, and so is memory. My memories of using the internet in the web safe era are memories of early adolescence, so they are high-pitched and intense. Older writers have written much calmer pieces. Younger writers have written about coding as little kids in school. The past is a romantical place, not a scholarly one.

Colors don’t get lonely, perhaps, but our memories do. They sink down into the deepsea of the brain and disintegrate. Web Safe 2k16 asked: do you have an endangered memory, a memory whose material history is all but extinct, and would you like to leave it with us for safekeeping? Most importantly, our invitation asserted somewhat defiantly that the experience of regular people is worth both preserving and romanticising. It is sometimes important to let people tell their own stories, not just to testify.

Below is the last piece of the project, the one I wrote. My color was #00CC66, which was actually the background of an imageboard on which I fell in love. It was totally lawless, gross, and fun. I’m so pleased it doesn’t exist any more.

Working on the internet is a joy, still. It’s not as lawless as it it was back then, but there is still a little space to make things, if you have the time. A person can still make a project of their very own, independent of gods or masters, and it can matter a little. We made Web Safe 2k16 as much for this reason as any other: to prove that there is still a little wilderness left.

So, that’s what I ended up writing about, instead of the boy on the other side of the world.

There is a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871) about a mirror:

“Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round the little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.”

This parable does not tell us that all things are connected. It tells us that we are each made of the same material. You have led a life with as arbitrary a shape as one of the thousands of scratches upon the screen of the mobile telephone which even now sits inside your pocket or handbag, holding this parable on its surface. Seen in a certain light, all things form a pattern.

This has been a candle

Josephine Livingstone is a writer and academic in New York.

Who should buy Twitter?

In case you are worried about how horrible it’s going to be out there today because of the Facebook news, I have an alternative and slightly better topic for you to focus on: Who Will Buy Twitter?

Twitter may receive formal bid shortly, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

Personally I prefer the idea of Salesforce buying Twitter because I think their cloud logo goes with Twitter’s bird logo a lot better than Google’s (sans serif primary colors logo:

“Google is a really obvious fit,” said The Outline’s Joshua Topolsky this morning. Topolsky also speculated earlier this year about how Twitter might and could end:

The End of Twitter – The New Yorker

Yesterday, Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported some pretty damning statistics about the user experience of reporting abusive tweets:

After Reporting Abuse, Many Twitter Users Hear Silence Or Worse

Not good. Hmmm I wonder what other giant tech companies out there are in the business of buying up other companies and screwing everything up left and right? Oh right:

Yahoo data breach casts ‘cloud’ over Verizon deal

Maybe Verizon can buy Twitter and then Google can buy Verizon and Facebook can buy them both and they can all be rolled into Salesforce and the cloud can get hacked and then the only thing left will be Comcast and we’ll just watch TV and never tweet about it. Sounds like a pretty good existence if you ask me.

People will know about urine whether I tweet about it or not.

This is an occasional series on internet feelings we want to look at more closely.

I have already pissed three times today.

It’s not even noon. At this rate I’m looking at another three pisses before bed, easy.

I’m not bragging, it’s just that sometimes the reality of having a body is really daunting, and one of the most accessible (and funny) metrics to use to try and come to terms with that is pee.

Let me try to explain. Medical websites* seem to agree that peeing 5 times a day is healthy, so let’s say you’re a healthy adult evacuating your bladder 5 times every 24 hours for a year: that’s 1,825 pisses.

And let’s say you live an average life — 71 years according to the UN. Multiply that by your annual rate, and guess what? You’re staring down the barrel of a 129,575-piss career when everything is said and done.

You may not realize it, but your future’s already pretty booked up with just this one project. Not to mention the time you’ll need to factor in for finding bathrooms, waiting in line, and washing your hands. When you add on all of life’s other simultaneous required programming (like pooping or eating or boning), it’s a certified Christian miracle that any person in history has done anything beyond addressing their orifices.

For whatever reason, pee is one of my brain’s favorite frameworks to use for trying to reconcile my autonomy as an Adult Womxn with the reality of my own mortality. I have a lot of control over myself! Except for all of the ways that I have no control whatsoever! The fact that both of those exclamations are true at the same time and probably will be for all of my days pleases me to no end.

Sometimes the supreme tension of having a physical form doesn’t phase me. I pee, I wipe, I check my notis on my phone (I am very popular). Other times, the enormity of the project gets overwhelming—especially when you stack it day by day, week by week, year by year over the span of a lifetime. Sure, you can dream and have a career and do a gallery wall in the den, but one thing is for certain no matter who you become or where you are: there will be piss.**

As with most things that are stupid, I’ve tweeted about the futility of pissing an above-average amount. My earliest one dates back to 2010, where I lamented from my dorm room about both having to — and not wanting to get up to — pee. There have been dozens since then: suggestions for an elegant catheter, loud sighs about perpetrators of “if it’s yellow let it mellow.” What’s significant for our purposes is that I am the only person in my feeds who seems to be this worked up.

ugh i have to pee” – me, every 2-3 hours until the day i die

 — @christinefriar

In the tiny ecosystem of my Twitter, Facebook, Insta, and Snap feeds, ongoing pee frustration and analysis is something I specifically am bringing to the table. Don’t get me wrong, it’s by no means important work, but it’s a bandwagon I’m not seeing other people hop onto, so it defaults into a position of feeling like it’s mine. Like when you evangelize an underrated movie or a hot new celebrity, I am contributing to the thoughtscape.

blissed, cis, and full of piss

 — @christinefriar

So today, when I was catching up on the Girly Bullshit Facebook page, I felt a little betrayed. I liked the account a couple weeks ago after encountering posts like, “It doesn’t get GIRLIER than cookin on that GRILL,” and “Skeletons are GIRLY and they have been since THE DAWN OF TIME so get with the program sweetie!” What a fun premise! Masc is dainty! Butch is femme!

But a gross feeling hit me when I got to this:

It was a little like hearing a friend repeat something you’ve said before and get a laugh—My idea! My voice!—but with some complicating factors: I was on a computer, and this was not my friend. When you tell a joke at a dinner table, no one’s expecting you to add “shoutout to Darryl for the inspo,” but online, that’s not the case. We’re all out here hyper vigilant and holding each other accountable 25/8. RT me, dog. So encountering someone in space and time who found pee funny the same way that I found it funny felt like a violation of that honor system.

The pang of ego stuff over this sick meme dissolved as quickly as it appeared, though, and for good reason—this is obviously not my joke. Think of the turns of phrase people use on a daily basis that evoke this exact concept: pissing your life away, peeing into the wind. People have been knowing and will continue to be knowing about urine whether I tweet about it or not. So why the kneejerk frustration? Why, when someone else made a (fun, good) observation about how we spend our time, did it feel like they showed up to the party in my signature lewk?

I think I didn’t just feel ownership over piss, I felt authorship. Somewhere in the bog of my psyche, after talking about something a handful of times on my own Twitter account and accruing an unremarkable amount of favs and replies along the way, I’d equated the validation and acknowledgement of those thoughts with proof of my being A Person Who Is Special and Funny, and that’s a false emotional premise. Favs aren’t patents, your idea doesn’t have to be new to get one.

It’s a little like going to Summer camp and realizing for the first time that “how we do it at my school” is both an incredibly specific and incredibly boring conversation to have. We are all unique and we are all identical. At your school, maybe everyone wears Sambas and vapes, but they’re still fingering each other in that one remote stairwell during passing time like all of the other red-blooded American teens.

Internet feelings are tight. I like to catch em and look at em and watch em propagate within me like I’m my own personal ant farm—and, just like thinking about pee in great detail, subscribing to Girly Bullshit a gave me a peek into what is gross and true and cool about my own self.

I have been to somebody else’s school, and guess what, fam? They’re talking about piss over there too.

*That I found in the first 3 results for “normal amount of times to pee a day.”

**I think what bugs me most is that peeing’s inefficient. There’s no way to streamline or condense any part of the process. We need water all the time, which means we’re going to be excreting water… all the time. Forever. And there’s no way to monetize it, either. There’s no one out there I’ve seen solving the fuel crisis with a piss engine.

We work at our jobs to earn money to buy toilet paper to wipe the pee we have no choice but to produce. There’s an entire world economy profiting off of the fact that I cannot for the life of me opt out of pissing. Damn.