Not too long ago, my neighbor and I threw a house party. The theme of the event was “Waves & Wheels,” based on the Disney Channel film Teen Beach Movie, and the guest list was about 70% women. If you’re unfamiliar with the nature of this blog and my life in general, you might assume that the remaining 30% was all men, but some important context here: my neighbor and I initially met because we went to the same liberal arts school. So that remaining 30% was probably made up of 29% non-binaries (such as myself), and only 1% men. Now if you know anything about the gender divide of humanity, those numbers are way off. Us non-binaries may be loud and have eccentric haircuts but we do not account for 29% of the population. At least not yet.

That 1% manifested as a few gay guy friends of mine and then, most disturbingly, a group of four straight/straight-passing guys (none of whom dressed to the theme) that spent the whole evening talking to themselves in a circle. Just so I don’t have to type out “a group of four guys” every time I want to refer to them, I’m going to call them the Rushmore Boys, because besides One Direction after Zayn left, Mt. Rushmore is the most famous group of four men I can think of, plus the shortest of them had a mustache like Theodore Roosevelt’s. Throughout the party (which some were calling the “event of the century,” no big deal) I sometimes felt bad for the Rushmore Boys. It was apparent, at least to me, that they didn’t quite fit in with the pride parade that is the rest of my friends. Almost everyone I talked to throughout the night asked me some variation of “who are those guys?” or “who invited them?” or “why did nobody teach the little one how to shave?”

My sympathy for the Rushmore Boys instantly evaporated the next day when I saw the little gift that one of them had left me on the guest ball. I’m a person who likes keepsakes, so sometimes when I host an event I’ll have everyone sign something; in this case, guests signed a beach ball, a guest ball if you will. Most people wrote nice things or just a quick “hello”, but one of the Rushmore Boys used the Sharpie I had so generously left out in the hallway for him, and drew a massive penis with his signature next to it: “Sean.” So now, not only did these men invade my space, but now their presence, and more so, their genitals, were immortalized on my poor, innocent beach ball.

Since I never got the names of the Rushmore Boys, I don’t know which one of them it was. If I had to guess, I would say “Sean” is probably Roosevelt, but that could be my anti-mustache bias affecting my judgement. I’ve spent months racking my brain trying to conjure up the image of a “Sean” I know, but I’ve come up short every time, and my neighbor doesn’t seem to know any “Sean”s either. Through process of elimination, I can deduce that the phallic graffiti was done by someone, clearly a psychopath based on the spelling of “Sean” (seriously are you too good to spell it “Shawn”?), and given that I recognize every other name on the ball, the psychopath had to be one of the Rushmore Boys. The only other possibility is that one of my more mischievous female or they/them friends just thought it would be funny to draw a penis; if that is the case though, I ask that you please don’t come forward as I’m already several hundred words into this essay about the role of men in my life and I’m kind of on a roll here. Also, please don’t ever do that again.

I won’t share a photo of the drawing itself (you’re welcome), but I would describe it as… uncomfortably detailed. What I will show you is my creation: All-Knowing Shadow Creature. Several months after the vandalism occurred, I decided to draw over “Sean”’s illustration with one of my own.

As I was scribbling over the penis and the penis vandal’s signature, I couldn’t help but get angry. Sure, All-Knowing Shadow Creature is cute and I do already feel a maternal instinct toward him, but the fact that some random guy came into my house and drew a penis on my beach ball that I wanted to keep as a precious memento (and proof that I have friends) is just infuriating. Even now, a decade removed from the hormonal horrors of middle school locker rooms, the men in my age group still think it’s funny to just draw a penis on something. Why? What is the punchline here? Why do men have to put their bodies everywhere? And more importantly: who the hell is “Sean”?

I don’t have a lot of male friends. Well, straight, cisgender male friends. This could be because I moved to New York City at eighteen and met the majority of my social circle at The New School; a university with a student body made up of roughly 70% women and has a they/them narwhal climate refugee for a mascot (I promise this is not an excerpt from a cocaine-induced Tucker Carlson rant, our mascot really is a non-binary narwhal and yes, they really are a climate refugee). Almost all of my friends from TNS are those aforementioned mischievous she/hers or various gender-expansive baristas who now have fine arts degrees, and pretty much zero are cis men.

Another possible reason for my lack of platonic male connection is that I am a pretty outward misandrist. If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve definitely seen it: my last post had several digs at the very existence of male comedians. I like to believe that my misandry is 51% ironic and 49% real, but the longer I live, the more I start to think it’s the other way around. Sometimes this ‘ironic’ misandry gets out of hand. I noticed this a few years ago when I saw an ad for a real estate agency run by two brothers and said aloud: “God, I hate when men are brothers.” So maybe the men of New York are just accurately reading my energy and staying away. What’s more likely though, is that despite having my pick of reliable male authority figures in my childhood and now, I generally have a hard time trusting and connecting with men.

I hesitate to even immortalize that feeling in writing though. If you replace “men” with any other social group, that sentence becomes pretty problematic. Imagine if I wrote an essay called “Do I have to be friends with bisexuals?” that contained the sentence “I generally have a hard time trusting and connecting with bisexuals,” preceded by several paragraphs about how my friends and I intentionally socially isolated a group of four bisexuals who came to my party. If I were to post that, I’m sure a lot of people would get up in arms pretty quickly. I consider myself a very socially progressive person, so how am I okay intentionally disregarding men just because they’re men?

I won’t waste time repeating the same statistics that pop up in every article written about the modern male experience, but I will say this: I don’t blame anyone for not trusting men. To grossly summarize decades of research and various compounding social factors, the fact is, men do most of the raping, they do most of the killing, and so far, they’ve been responsible for every single war the United States has ever been in. There’s a common response when people express not feeling safe around men or just not “liking” them: “not all men.” And yes, this is obviously true. Not all men are rapists and killers and presidents, a lot of men are perfectly kind, caring people who don’t draw penises on beach balls and have no interest in becoming politicians or comedians. When I say I “hate men” I’m not talking about my father or Pedro Pascal or your hypothetical Uncle Dave who works with shelter puppies and would “never hurt a fly.” I am talking about the substantial number of men who are violent to the point that it’s kind of just a good survival instinct to not be trusting of men you don’t know. Especially strange men with mustaches, who come into your home uninvited. Even outside of specific instances of violence, enough men ‘manspread’ and ‘mansplain’ or listen to the Joe Rogan podcast that even just socially, they can be challenging to be around.

But I, personally, have thus far been lucky enough to not experience any substantial physical violence from men, so does the fact that I find them kind of annoying justify my inability to be friends with them? Another wrinkle though, is that I haven’t always found them annoying. In fact, I used to be very close to a lot of boys my age.

Most of the friends I made at school were girls but because of the fact I was pretty much always on a sports team, I was also friends with a lot of the boys in my grade. Some of my favorite childhood memories are with those boys. I always felt, and perhaps they did too, that I was inexplicably different from them (that difference would turn out to be very explicable) but it didn’t matter. As we grew older and societal norms began to sink their claws into the minds of these boys, I began to realize that those microscopic differences between us were actually much bigger than I initially thought. The sweet, sensitive boys I knew as kids grew up into mean young men, who called their female teachers “bitches” and tore down G.S.A. posters in the school hallways. It felt like with each year, I drifted further and further from them. The first time I heard both the t-slur and the f-slur, two words that would turn out to be… let’s just say relevant to my life, were from boys that were my friends.

For the sake of perhaps making some point about the glass ceiling, and mostly because it’s funny, I’m going to keep using presidential aliases to talk about the men in my life. The f-slur was introduced to me by my frenemy Richard Nixon, who played on my same baseball team. I say frenemy, because like his presidential namesake, Nixon could be a bit of an impulsive hothead. Sure, he never tried to interfere with American democracy or whatever, but he did one time throw the ball to me on third base, even though the other team’s player was running to FIRST BASE, which I will remind you is ON THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE FIELD and when he yelled “heads up,” I turned just in time to get smacked in the face by the ball, chipping my two front teeth. He was also like the real Nixon because he loved to speak ill of minority groups when he thought no one could hear him. One day I overheard him calling a boy on another team a “fucking faggot.” I did not know what it meant, but the sinking feeling in my gut told me it was bad.

The t-slur was introduced to me by a boy I used to walk home from sixth-grade with. I’ll call him George Bush. One day on the way home we were talking about how much Bush hated another boy in our class, let’s call him Al Gore, because he had long hair. I guess because this boy had long hair that made him “a tranny or something,” at least in Bush’s eyes. I told my mom what Bush had said and we decided I was not going to walk home with him anymore.

The last time I truly related to any boys my age is a time I don’t even remember all that clearly. My family was hosting an end-of-season party for some sports team of mine in our backyard when I was about nine or ten. At some point in the evening, our family cat Tiger Lily (pictured at the beginning), came around the side of the house with a dead rabbit in her mouth. A fresh kill. According to my mother, all the kids pretty much immediately started “screaming and running away.” It’s a story that lives on in my family. Each time it’s told it’s framed as comical that Tiger Lily, a female cat who literally weighed like eight pounds, was able to terrify a whole backyard of young boys. To me though, it’s kind of a sad story. I didn’t know it at the time, but that day in the backyard was one of the last times I ever saw those boys express an emotion other than anger or sheer indifference.

Through middle and high school, I would make the occasional class friend with a boy at my table group, but it seemed that the second class was over and they were reunited with their other male friends, I was no longer an interesting table-mate; just another insignificant G.S.A. kid in the background of their lives. The heartbreak of losing old friends to toxic masculinity didn’t set in until I was much older when I noticed that those same boys who screamed and cried when Tiger Lily brought us her prey were now shamelessly bragging about loving Donald Trump (who is not really an icon of the empath community). One even wrote on Instagram that he couldn’t wait to see all the “liberal tears” in the wake of the 2024 election. Were the tears he shed in my backyard “liberal tears”?

Even during the four years I spent in the liberal bubble to end all liberal bubbles, I was still encountering men I couldn’t stand. Sure, they might’ve been aligned with me politically but I still witnessed them “mansplain” basic concepts to female professors, misgender me and others, not to mention, even a school as “progressive” as TNS still has sexual assaults happen on campus. Oh yeah, and one of them drew a penis on my beach ball.

All of this leads me here, now, spending fifteen minutes drawing over a penis on what was supposed to be a treasured memento. Before All-Knowing Shadow Creature (A.K.S.C.) sprang from my brain fully-formed like Athena from Zeus, I did a bit of research on how I could cleverly cover it up. By research, I mean I Googled “How to repurpose penis graffiti,” and as it turns out, there is a whole art form of repurposing phallic graffiti such as this, probably pioneered by middle school teachers trying to keep desks in genital-free condition. Unfortunately, most of the ideas I found still looked like penises to me, so I went with A.K.S.C.

As I was researching, I couldn’t help but think how irritating it was that there was a whole online community dedicated to finding ways to cover up penis graffiti. Why are there so many penises being drawn that this is such a problem?

I don’t consider myself a particularly prudish person. I’ve written the word “penis” countless times in this essay and am only now starting to feel weird about it. So what’s really the problem with what “Sean” drew on my beach ball? What if he had drawn some other body part? Would I have been less angry if “Sean” had done a sketch of a vagina instead? Honestly, that probably would have been funny, but there’s a high chance that I would have found that weird as well. Is there truly no way for men to win in my world?

There’s a chance “Sean” drew the penis because he thought it was funny and harmless. The more sinister possibility is that the Rushmore Boys were feeling the social pressure of being the only people at my party who could make it past security at a Young Republicans conference, so “Sean” decided to draw the penis as a way of saying “A STRAIGHT MAN WAS HERE AT THIS WOKE THEY/THEM PARTY.” Maybe the penis on the beach ball was the equivalent of planting an American flag on the moon. Maybe he even muttered “one small step for man” as he added the last ball hair.

Despite everything that “Sean” and the Rushmore Boys put me through (which was really not all that much), I unfortunately think I do have to be friends with men. Or, I at least have to try. I’m not sure if anyone else has heard of this —radioactive levels of sarcasm here— but there’s this little-known phenomenon going on right now called the “male loneliness epidemic,” which is credited with making young men more hostile, especially to women and other minorities. Combine this with the onslaught of “looksmaxxing” trends targeting young men and the general testosterone terrors found in the online “Manosphere” and it’s no wonder that the men of my generation feel the need to assert themselves as valid masculine actors. It’s not really “Sean”’s fault that he drew a penis on my beach ball, in the same way it’s not really Bush or Nixon’s fault that they were repeating slurs. They’re all just products of their environment.

And you know what, I will take a second here to shout out a few straight men that came to my birthday party in May and signed very respectful and normal things on my horse poster. By the end of the night I was starting to feel like a cuckoo clock repeating the same phrase, “please don’t draw a penis on this horse poster,” and getting met with “Why would I do that?” Truly, they are not all bad. Even outside of my birthday party there are plenty of cisgender men in my family or just in my general orbit that I love and respect completely.

We’re in an unpleasant moment, and we’ve been in it for a while. It seems that the very worst of the worst men are still the ones rising to power. What is truly unfortunate for me and other semi-ironic misandrists, is that we are going to need men in order to move forward as a society. Unless certain technologies get really effective and really affordable really fast (here’s hoping), we’re kind of stuck with them if we want to achieve this goal of “continuing the species” or whatever. Besides, socially isolating them is in part what got us here in the first place. Not to mention, being wary of all men can be a bit of slippery slope, considering the often violent stereotypes our society unfairly places on men of color.

So I suppose the answer to the question “Do I have to be friends with men?” is that I guess I should at least try? I’m certainly not going to be in the business of giving men free passes for bad behavior, especially not after spending 3,000 words calling out “Sean”’s crimes, but maybe, the next time I throw a party and some random men show up, I’ll get their names. Maybe, I’ll even have a conversation with them. However, it’s not just up to the she/hers and the non-binaries of the world to be welcoming to them; men need to get it together and hold each other accountable for their actions.

When I ask “Do I have to be friends with men?” I really do just mean: do I, me, as in Ash, as in the writer of this blog, have to be friends with men? I can’t speak for anyone else on this issue. There are people out there who will never fully be able to accept men in their lives because of real, traumatic experiences they’ve had as a result of men’s behavior. While all the slurs I’ve heard growing up and the penis on my beach ball were certainly unpleasant, I just don’t think it’s enough for me to justify cutting men out of my life completely (no matter how much I want to).

As for the boys I used to be friends with, I have no real interest in rebuilding those bridges but I do have some amount of hope for them. Maybe the Nixons and the Bushes of the world just need somebody to open their eyes to their toxically masculine ways, or maybe they’ve already embarked on some journey of self-improvement. I specifically think of the “liberal tears” guy. I wonder if he’ll have a wife or a daughter or a gender-expansive barista friend who will try to help him see the error of his ways. And I hope that one day he does, before all the non-men in his life leave him. If he doesn’t, and he ends up still misogynistic and alone, I hope he lets himself cry. The same way he did the day he was born. The same way he did in my backyard.

This is not a suicide note, it just has a click-baity title! If you read all the way through, you will find that I am not suicidal, not even a little bit. This essay is simply an investigation of if/when it is okay to joke about suicide. I talk about this subject pretty casually, so if this is something that might upset you, I encourage you to skip out on this one. Things will be back to the light and breezy status quo soon enough.

I had an extremely annoying day today. One of those days where every force in the observable universe seems to conspire to frustrate me at every possible point. I woke up hungry, skipped breakfast because my toaster was sending sparks flying everywhere again, missed the M train by 5 seconds, waited 15 minutes for the J, waited 11 more minutes to transfer to the M after taking the J three stops, then arrived at school where I immediately accidentally walked through an ex-friend’s graduation photoshoot, then I got to my job at the school newspaper that does not pay me and refereed an argument over Slack between print designers and writers for almost an hour straight before finally ending up at my evening class which proceeded to go 25 minutes over the already allotted three hours. And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I arrived home to find a cockroach scurrying around in my hallway. Several times on this annoying day to end all annoying days I asked myself one simple question. I asked myself this question while ducking for cover from my volatile toaster, after debasing myself and running in public to catch a train, after staring into the demonic eyes of an ex-friend, and after the interface of Slack was burned into my retinas. I even asked it after I stomped that cockroach with my boot until it was nothing more than a dark red spot on the hallway tile. That one question was: “Should I kill myself?”

I’m not the first person to ask this question, and I’m certainly not the first to ask it after encountering what is, truthfully, just a series of extremely minor inconveniences in an otherwise relentlessly privileged life. Perhaps I could have forgotten about all of these by tomorrow had I not decided to write this essay. But here I am, investigating myself once again.

My tendency to use this question as a crutch to show my disdain for the inconveniences of modern life was born from an interaction between famous rapper Cardi B and a self-declared ‘American media personality’ I had never heard of, Adelle Nazarian. Nazarian wrote, “Cardi B is an embarrassment to women everywhere and so are women who parade themselves on social media with pictures of their half-naked bodies like her….” Rather than meet Nazarian at her level and try to point out the misogynistic nature of her comment, Cardi B simply wrote “Should I kill myself?”

This is possibly the funniest thing anyone has ever done.

After seeing this tweet for the first time a couple summers ago, “Should I kill myself?” was permanently added to my lexicon. “Should I kill myself?” I ask my toaster, the MTA, an ex-friend, a current friend, and finally, a dead cockroach. That last one feels especially cruel. Imagine someone brutally stomping you to death with a shoe and then expressing this sort of post-ironic detachment about the concept of taking their own life before the light can leave your little roach eyes.

But each time I ask myself this question, or let slip a little “just kill me” under my breath, I can’t help but wonder if this little habit that me and Cardi B have is doing more harm than good. Sure, threatening suicide ironically offers a brief respite from whatever is bothering me, and it certainly worked to shut Nazarian up, but suicide is, obviously, a very serious subject. Is it okay for me to joke about something so dark?

While I have had one or two phases of enjoying “offensive” humor in my life, particularly in my pre-teens and early teens, as an adult, I can say that I am (for the most part) against offensive jokes. The term “offensive” is extremely vague, but here are some examples of the types of offensive “humor” I am against. Dave Chapelle is a pretty classic case; he drew a lot of backlash but also a lot of praise for “jokes” that were offensive to the trans community. The only thing more offensive than Matt Rife’s terrible box-bleached hair, is the “jokes” he made in his Netflix special attacking victims of domestic violence. This is the kind of humor I consider to not be okay, and not just because these are both male comedians (which I generally think we have enough of) but because the jokes aren’t really funny. They’re certainly shocking, but I don’t think they’re well-written or well-told. They’re just mean.

My general rule for offensive humor is that if the joke is something you could imagine being said by an ‘edgy’ eighth-grade boy sitting at the back of the school bus, then it’s probably not that funny. In this case “Should I kill myself” and similar punchlines have definitely been repeated ad nauseum in middle-school busses everywhere, so am I truly no better than an eighth-grader?

Throughout my life, I encountered classmates who were on the ‘edgy’ side and would laugh about suicide or tell each other to kill themselves as a ‘joke.’ This kind of language, specifically the use of the acronym KYS (kill yourself), was such a widespread problem at my middle school, that one day, our vice principal, Mrs. Hannigan (not related to the cartoonishly cruel owner of the orphanage in Annie, though the two had similar dispositions), called everybody into the gymnasium for a “special assembly about mental health awareness.” Halfway through her speech about how you should never, ever joke about suicide, someone from the back yelled, “Kill yourself!” After school admin threatened detentions for anyone heard making light of suicide, the jokes quieted down. Instead, kids started saying KMS (kill myself), and then, if caught, claimed to be talking about the nearby Kenmore Middle School. A foolproof excuse.

As an adult, I can see that the very idea of calling a special assembly for middle-schoolers just to tell them not to do something, and then being surprised when they do that thing, is a little bit ridiculous. Asking a middle-schooler to take anything seriously is like asking Matt Rife to tell a funny joke: it’s just not gonna happen. Of course someone told Hannigan to kill herself at the suicide awareness assembly. The same way someone yelled “Shut up, Soul Surfer!” when a one-armed guest speaker pleaded with us to stop bullying one another.

Unfortunately for me, by the time this “special assembly about mental health awareness” rolled around, I was plenty aware of the concept of suicide. You see, at twelve, I had already had a ‘serious’ suicidal thought or two, and I was about to spend a bit more time dealing with thoughts like that. I put ‘serious’ in quotes as, yes I was dealing with these thoughts, but I didn’t really have the means or the guts to put anything into action. As an adult, it’s easy to look back on photos of my twelve-year-old self and think “What did I have to be suicidal about (other than those neon basketball shorts I wore to school everyday)?” But I give myself grace, because making it through middle school is not for the weak.

After surviving the early stages of teenagedom, I emerged to high school fully against the idea of joking about suicide at all. At the end of the day, there really is nothing funny about it, and I don’t want to imply that there is. The concept of someone taking their own life is so profoundly disturbing that many have devoted their lives to preventing it, and those who experience someone close to them taking their own life are never the same after.

It had been made clear to me by forces other than vice principal Hannigan that this was no laughing matter. My middle school, high school, and now liberal arts college student ID cards have all had the suicide prevention hotline number printed on the back. While the world was telling me that suicide was not to be joked about, everybody else my age never seemed to stop casually threatening suicide or telling each other to “go die.” Some kids hadn’t grown out of the back-of-the-bus mentality yet, but were instead diving further into offensive “humor,” which just meant that “kill yourself” was usually followed by the f-slur and then some uproarious teenage laughter. Fortunately for me, purely on the basis of being openly transgender in an American high school, I was already labeled as “too woke,” so not wanting to joke about suicide really was just another woke drop in the woke bucket.

But even I, the wokest of the woke, was not immune to the draw of suicide humor, and over the years, especially now thanks to famous rapper and one-time-Superbowl-halftime-show-extra Cardi B, as well as this one particular GIF of a cartoon fish hanging itself, these dark jokes have found their way back into my repertoire. And it’s not just me — it seems like most people I know now are quick to say “Guess I’ll kill myself” after simply stubbing their toe or accidentally clicking “no tip” at the coffee shop and earning a soul-crushing side-eye from the barista.

But, you have to know your audience. I also learned that quickly. When I told my middle school GSA faculty advisor that I had laughed at Hannigan being told to kill herself, he did not find it funny at all. At the time I thought he was overreacting, because like the rest of us, he hated vice principal Hannigan. But even if someone we couldn’t stand was the butt of the joke, it still crossed some invisible moral line that he could see and I couldn’t.

Sometimes in those moments when I, say, stub my toe on my bedpost and yell aloud, “I’m gonna kill myself,” I can’t help but pause and play that thought out. I mean, think about what I’m really saying here. I’m saying that I want to VOLUNTARILY AND INTENTIONALLY END MY LIFE, because I stubbed my toe. I mean, can you imagine that suicide note?

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m sorry. I got an owie.

Sometimes, when I get really ahead of myself, I imagine my own funeral. Mourners dressed in all black, (hopefully) devastated that I am gone, line up to look at my coffin and shake hands with my parents. A childhood friend asks my grieving mother, “What happened? They seemed so happy.” All she can say is, “There was a cockroach in their hallway.”

If you were to write down the sentence, “A college student yells alone in their room that they want to kill themselves,” I would probably think, “Oh brother, sounds like that college student is suicidal. They should probably check the back of their student ID card.” Despite this, I feel as though I can confidently say that I don’t want to die, and haven’t seriously wanted to die for a very long time. So why am I so comfortable making these empty threats? And why did I laugh when that kid told my vice principal to kill herself? Shouldn’t that have horrified me? Shouldn’t that have horrified any decent member of modern society? I’m confident that I didn’t actually want her to commit suicide. It was just a joke, right?

Is it ever okay to joke about suicide? Am I “part of the problem” each time I quote famous rapper and borderline prophet Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar (Cardi B)? Am I truly no better than Matt Rife or Dave Chapelle? Or, does my addiction to threatening to kill myself actually make me a better person? Am I, through these jokes, fighting the stigma that surrounds suicide? Short answer: no. Long answer: still no.

Perhaps the internet is to blame for my proclivity for suicide humor. After all, without the internet, the wise words of famous rapper and long-time Bernie Sanders supporter Cardi B would have never reached me. A lot of Gen Z memes revolve around suicide, no matter how trivially. Memes like “drink bleach” or this GIF of Kermit jumping off of a building trivialize the subject of suicide for the purposes of being “relatable,” or just plain trolling. One might not even realize the seriousness of Kermit’s decision to hurl himself off a building when it’s condensed into a reaction GIF. In that scenario, Kermit was so depressed that he wanted to end his life, so he climbed to the top of a building and flung himself off, either dying instantly on impact or facing serious amphibian injury.

At least in my experience, almost all attempts to discuss the subject of suicide seriously with Gen Z have fallen flat. Hannigan’s special assembly makes for a good example. Her effort to make us middle-schoolers understand the gravity of suicide backfired so tremendously that I think it’s why she quit at the end of the school year. But there’s been a ‘special assembly’ or two in pop culture in the last few years as well, the most famous of which is probably the Netflix original series 13 Reasons Why, adapted from a book of the same name. This show drew criticism for it’s depiction of suicide for a variety of reasons, but I wasn’t allowed to watch it when it came out, and still have never seen it (and never want to see it) so instead, I’d like to look at another example.

In 2018, less-famous rapper Logic, and collaborators Alessia Cara and Khalid, took a stab (pun intended) at suicide prevention with a song named after the number of the American National Suicide Prevention Lifeline “1-800-273-8255” (the number has since changed to just 988, not saying they wanted to distance themselves from Logic, but the timing is suspicious). Younger me related to the song in some abstract way when it first came out; Logic’s experiences with suicide sounded like much closer calls than I ever had, but overall the hook of “I don’t wanna be alive” resonated with my edgy, still-recovering younger self. As an adult, several years removed from active suicidality, I now find the song… grating. The “I don’t wanna be alive” hook is fine in concept, but Logic, who can’t help but bring a real youth pastor energy to everything he does, threw in a “WHO CAN RELATE?” in the middle of every single chorus that never fails to make me laugh.

Even this, an objectively serious song covering (presumably) Logic’s real-life experience with being suicidal, I can’t take seriously. The comments on the video are split, with some who, like me, are unable to take it seriously, commenting things like, “Bruh 2 homies chilling in bed is just a homie thing like fr chill,” referring to a scene where the closeted main character of the video is caught in bed with a boy from school. The other side of that split is people like coleallen8182, who earnestly said_, “Ain’t nobody callin’ my phone / Where you been? Where you at? / What’s on your mind … Hits way harder than I let on to be.”

Despite the sheer earnestness radiating from this strangely-worded comment, I can’t help but laugh that a line this simple from a song this annoying is sticking so strongly with Mr. Allen8182. I’ve heard more poetic musings on suicide in middle school cafeterias and suburban mall Hot Topics than anything Logic has ever said.

Part of me worries that my inability to take both Logic and coleallen8182 seriously is a result of these constant throwaway suicide jokes. I fear that with each Cardi B reference or Kermit the Frog GIF or snide comment about Logic’s energy, I’m putting another brick in the ever-growing wall of irony that blocks me off from feeling anything real when it comes to suicide. Have I totally walled myself off from the coleallen8182’s of the world? So I ask myself, what is actually funny about threatening to kill myself over a minor inconvenience?

The other day, I tried out a joke on a close friend that I thought would be hilarious, but bombed horrifically. It was so bad that I literally went home and Googled “what makes something funny?” A question that seems simple, but has no truly definitive answer. To grossly generalize literal centuries of thinking about this question, I’ll just say that broadly, something is funny when it disrupts your expectations in a surprising but still satisfying way. For example, in what is perhaps the most famous joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” we all know the answer is “to get to the other side.” Think about the first time you heard this joke; it’s actually not that funny. The humor, or in this case anti-humor, comes from the set up of someone announcing they are going to tell a joke, only for it not to be overtly funny. So, much like the Matt Rife special, your expectation that something is going to be funny is disrupted by an obvious, unfunny punchline.

Only it’s not anti-humor when Matt Rife belittles a domestic violence survivor because I already expect a straight, white, rich man with straw for hair to not take domestic violence seriously. My expectation is not disrupted. Rather, it is simply and uncritically met when he says “If she could cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.” The only expectation of mine Rife has ever successfully disrupted is the expectation that someone of his socioeconomic standing could afford a better hair colorist.

It’s possible that my own lack of perspective is the punchline of my suicide jokes; people with real problems likely don’t consider suicide over a stubbed toe, so the fact that I would contemplate suicide over it disrupts the expectation of a rational reaction. If me and my privileged life are the butt of the joke, does that make it okay? If I pull that thread too hard though, the whole concept of joking about anything offensive or dark could come unraveled. Some people actually interpret the chicken crossing the road as a suicide joke, arguing that the chicken intentionally walked into traffic to get the “other side” (perhaps he too had just missed the M train). So is one of the most famous jokes of all time offensive to suicidal people? Or suicidal chickens?

Is it okay to joke about anything at all? But if it’s the other possibility —that the punchline comes from making fun of suicidal people like coleallen8182— then does that make me a bad person? For me at least, the humor comes from the fact that I am the one overreacting, but I can’t speak for every person who’s ever ironically threatened suicide. Does intent even matter? Perhaps I am just punching down on suicidal people. Are my jokes just as offensive as that of Dave Chappelle or Matt Rife?

I sincerely wish I had an answer to these questions. The truth is, I have no idea whether or not it’s ever appropriate to ironically threaten suicide. The ‘woke bucket’ that still lives in me (or do I live in it?) instinctively says no, and more importantly, it wants to avoid putting my humor in the same group as any male comedian— let alone Matt Rife. But the part of me that loves to laugh at anything, which is probably the most influential part of me, makes me believe the answer is more complicated. What I do know is that the Cardi B tweet is hilarious, and if we can’t joke about our darkest moments, then what can we do? If we can’t laugh, then should we all just kill ourselves?

A little disclaimer here for this one. I speak very candidly about Utah and Mormonism in this essay. I know that the church doesn’t like the term “Mormon” anymore, but for the sake of my word count I’m not going to type out “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” every time I want to refer to the religion. If that lack of distinction offends you, I’m sure some other things in this essay will offend you, so I encourage you to either skip out on this one, or suffer in silence. Your choice.

“I’m sorry,” is the most common response I get from most of my ‘woke coastal elite’ friends when I tell them I’m going to Utah for the weekend. If you’re at all familiar with the cultural perception of Utah among those outside of its borders, this is probably not surprising to you. With the the rise of ex-mormon YouTubers who pull in millions of views, and reality hits like Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, it seems that at least in my circles, people are becoming more aware of the quirks of Utah culture, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing.

Despite being an aforementioned ‘woke coastal elite,’ (I was born in Seattle and now live in Brooklyn, a woke bicoastal elite even), I’ve spent quite a lot of time in Utah. There’s Utah-ness and Mormonism on both sides of my family. My grandparents on my mom’s side live in one of the Mormon capitals of the world, Provo, and my grandparents on my dad’s side used to spend their summers in the smaller-but-still-Mormon mountain town of Midway. My sister and a few other members of our extended family live in Salt Lake City, and given that on both sides of my family I have not just Mormon, but polygamist Mormon ancestry — meaning that a few generations back, this one guy named Samuel Rose Parkinson had a whole bunch of wives and a whole bunch of kids who proceeded to have even more kids — I’m sure that half of that city is at least a second cousin of mine (the further back you go, my family tree starts to look more like a hedge maze). This means I find myself back in the Beehive State at least once a year to visit family or skulk around Salt Lake trying to ‘accidentally’ run into Jen from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives so I can convince her to leave her husband.

I’m not from Utah, but I’m certainly influenced by it. This means that I’m not homo- or coffee-phobic, but I can certainly down a 48oz Diet Dr. Pepper with raspberry puree and vanilla creamer in 30 seconds. It means that I shop secondhand for “ethical reasons,” but a good chunk of that secondhand clothing is from Deseret Industries, a chain of thrift stores owned and operated by the Mormon Church. I can’t help it if my sense of style is nearly identical to the dead grandfathers of Utah County.

If you’re a born and raised Utah lover, the idea that I’m met with sincere condolences every time I visit my grandparents might be offensive. Unfortunately though, the main reason people say this to me is because, since I apparently need to avoid earnestness at every turn of my personal life, I tend to play up the horrors of going to Utah. I whine about the fact that half of the passengers on my flight will be children under the age of six. I roll my eyes about how there won’t be any good coffee in a one hundred mile radius. I complain about how every store is closed on Sunday. I snark about the American flags hanging by each porch swing and the random Jesus statues towering over people’s front yards. And yes, all of those things are annoying, especially being the only twenty-two year old on an airplane who isn’t already a mother of four, but are they really enough to be met with “I’m sorry”? Is this state truly so terrible that this reaction is justified?

Most of the reasons I just mentioned are petty grievances, but there are genuine reasons I and other ‘woke coastal elites’ want to avoid the state. Despite their main guy (Jesus)’s whole thing being about spreading love, a lot of Christian denominations can be pretty nasty to people like me, and unfortunately, Mormons can be some of the worst offenders. Of course, not all Mormons are homophobic or transphobic, but I can’t ignore the fact that the Latter-day Saint dominated legislature in Utah continues to pass anti-trans laws at an alarming rate, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors; care which saved my thirteen-year-old life, and the lives of countless others.

I’ve seen the damage this ideology can do firsthand. There are members of my family who grew up Mormon and closeted, and it is not for the faint of heart. You can read more about the effects the Church’s stance on homosexuality had on my family in this collection of letters my grandfather wrote to Church Elders across many years (P.S. I designed the cover!). All of this to say, that as a spunky they/them with a pretty gay looking mullet who sometimes likes to dress a little out-of-the-box, I don’t always feel safe in Utah. Of course, there are little bits of sanctuary, like my grandparent’s house which often has a pride flag out front instead of the standard American flag or Encircle, a non-profit LGBTQ+ resource center with locations all around the state, but these safe spaces are few and far between. For the most part, it’s Mormons all the way down.

For all the complaining I do, part of me actually really enjoys going to Utah. Believe it or not, there’s actually a lot to love about this place. For one, Utah has some of the most breathtaking nature of any state in the country. Depending on where you are, you could step out into a Walmart parking lot and be greeted with a downright emotional view of the mountains at sunset, or the mesmerizing red rocks of the southern half of the state. In fact, the view from a Chili’s was so inspiring to Tan France (the fashion gay from Queer Eye) that he decided to move to Salt Lake City. In 2018 he told the Salt Lake Tribune, “I went out to dinner at Chili’s on Fourth South, and at the end of that meal, I said to my friend, ‘I’m going to live here one day… I can see the mountains from this restaurant, and that’s beautiful.” He has since decided to sell his Utah home, leaving some (me and my sister) to speculate if it had anything to do with the closure of that fateful Chili’s. And if Utah’s natural beauty was so inspiring to someone as elegant and worldly as Tan France, imagine how awestruck he must’ve been when he encountered the only thing in the state more beautiful than the landscape: the sodascape.

Since Mormons can’t drink coffee or alcohol, the main drive-through beverage trend in Utah is ‘dirty soda’ (I call it Mormon soda), which is basically soda with syrup and creamer in it. Anywhere you go, you’ll see shops like Swig, Sodalicious, and Twisted Sugar, all selling soda and other sweets. The craze really took hold in the late 2010s, but I personally had been invested in the concept since I first visited the original Swig location in St. George when I was very young. In Utah, you may not always be free to express yourself with the way you dress or the bathroom you use on state property, but you can always express yourself through a ridiculous soda order. My regular drink used to be a Dr. Pepper with watermelon syrup from Swig (which I stand by as being delicious, even if it sounds disgusting), but these days I’ve been more into the ‘National Parks’ from Sodalicious, a Dr. Pepper with huckleberry, raspberry, and fresh lime. Pure bliss in a cup, and it can only be found in Utah (and some parts of Arizona and Texas).

When a soda shop opened in Rockefeller Center in 2024, a lot of people who knew I had a personal stake in the Mormon soda industry asked me what I thought of it. I’ve tried it a few times, and I don’t know what it is, but it just does not hit the same outside of Utah. Maybe the soda fountains in Utah are higher quality, or maybe the air in New York is just less holy, but something wasn’t the same. It’s as if the magic of Mormon soda only exists in its homeland. Also, since it was in New York City, I paid much more for a much smaller cup.

So there’s the nature and the soda, but are those really enough to offset everything else going on in the state? Is that enough to make me look past all the negativity and actually admit that I ‘like’ Utah? Unfortunately, not really. But on my latest trip to Provo, I observed something else about the state I hadn’t really seen before. It happened when I absentmindedly opened up The Dating App.

I only opened it on the night before I was to fly back to Seattle, so I had no real intention of messaging anyone I saw there — it was more of a window shopping experience. Now, this may sound stupid, but as I swiped through the algorithmically curated pile of eligible suitors, it was though, all at once I remembered that there are plenty of other “spunky they/them’s with gay looking mullets” in Provo, most of whom I assume also enjoy a ‘National Parks’ every now and then. You just have to look a bit harder to find them than you do in a place like Bushwick. Despite my lamenting about the heterosexual-ness of Utah culture and all the horror I feel whenever I read about the latest anti-trans attacks coming from the state legislature, at the end of the day, I get to fly back to a blue state. The people who live here and are smiling at me through my screen are the ones who have to bear the brunt of these attacks.

You might be able to see that since I love gays and I love soda, it can be hard for me to decide whether or not I ‘like’ spending time in Utah. It’s a conflict I face each time I end up in the state. Do I enjoy coming here? Would I ever visit if I didn’t have family here? Is there truly no way to capture the magic of a ‘National Parks’ outside of these borders? Was Tan France right? Is there more to Utah than I give it credit for?

To sum up my average Utah experience, I invite you to take a close look at the house I stayed at during my latest expedition to the state. To support the 20+ members of my family coming into Utah County to celebrate my grandma’s 85th birthday, my aunt booked a massive house on The Short-Term Rental App. The house was on an idyllic street, and for the most part, fit the needs of the weekend perfectly. It had more bedrooms than I could count, two dining tables, a built-in trampoline in a backyard that was otherwise mostly waterfall, and even a movie theater in the basement. The overall look was charmingly outdated, clearly built during the Tuscan interior craze of early-aughts, leaving each room feeling like an alternative set for Troy Bolton’s house in High School Musical (which was actually filmed in Utah!).

The house was as alarming as it was charming. Upon entering, I was greeted with two large metal hounds that I momentarily thought were real. Once the door shut, I came face-to-face with the first of what would be many photos of Jesus in the house. For the sake of protecting some amount of the homeowner’s privacy, I have decided not to include any photos of the house, but you should know that I took a lot.

After this first holy encounter, the house started to reveal quirks even faster. A built-in urinal in the first floor and basement bathrooms, a television mounted on the ceiling above the master bed, a three-ring binder of gold plates, and my personal favorite, a motion-activated night light that was just a white square, until it revealed the face of the man himself when you got close. And of course, in true Utah fashion, there was a MAGA-red Trump mug in the kitchen cabinet.

At some point over the weekend, someone mentioned to me that the house actually belonged to the CEO of Blendtec, Tom Dickson, also known as the guy from “Will It Blend?”, a series of infomercials where he put a bunch of random bullshit in his blenders to see if it “would blend.” This explained more than a few anomalies in the house: the built-in blenders in the kitchen and master bathroom, the framed “Will It Blend?” poster in the basement, and the deposition excerpts from some blender-related lawsuit that were accidentally printed on the back of a poem my cousin wrote for my grandma. While it didn’t explain everything (for example, I still have no idea what was up with the mysterious, unlabeled dials that were everywhere or the motion activated paper towel dispenser), the fact that this rental house happened to belong to the guy from “Will It Blend?” adds to the Utah-ness of it all. Mormons are somewhat of a crafty demographic — I guess the reason I haven’t invented anything cool is because I’ve been drinking all that coffee — and anyone you run into in the state could be the CEO of something. In fact, on our way back from the Blendtec’s CEO’s house, we drove past the new multi-home development being constructed by the CEO of Crumbl Cookie (a chain that started in Logan, Utah).

While we could’ve deduced that this home belonged to the host of “Will It Blend?” on our own, my grandparents actually met with Dickson before the weekend. They wanted to “check out” the rental beforehand to make sure it would suit the family’s needs. And in what is perhaps the most “Utah” thing about this whole escapade, they knocked on a complete stranger’s door, explained who they were, and Dickson invited them in to watch the Artemis Launch in the downstairs movie theater.

For all the complaining I do about Utah, this whole Jesus-house-of-blender-related-horrors experience actually captures a few things I love about the state. Not only was our rental house randomly owned by obscure CEO and self-declared ‘homeboy’ Tom Dickson, but he was also neighborly enough to invite complete strangers into his private movie theater. If there’s one thing Utahns do right, it’s hospitality.

What’s unfortunate though, is that for as fun and silly as his house was, Tom Dickson still had that Trump mug. Perhaps he bought it in 2016 before Donald went full-on, outward ‘fascist mode.’ After all, it was kind of hidden in the back of the cabinet. Maybe my homeboy Mr. Dickson is ashamed of his past support for Trump. Maybe he’s had a change of heart. I don’t know about him specifically, but what I do know is that for all the hospitality these Utah locals might offer people like my grandparents, it’s not clear if that same energy would be extended to someone outside of the Mormon mold. Even if Dickson has gone woke, the rest of the state sure hasn’t. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won with an over 20% lead in the state.

What’s even more unfortunate though, is that these strong-held conservative beliefs that so many in Utah have, will come to hurt them in the end eventually as well. While Utah’s ‘bathroom laws’ currently only extend to government buildings and public schools, the notion of forcing people to use bathrooms aligned with their sex at birth, has a documented history of backfiring on cisgender people, especially cisgender women. By electing infamous climate change denier Donald Trump, the Utah electorate has shot itself in the foot when it comes to receiving any federal aid for the looming ecological disaster that is the drying up of the Great Salt Lake. The city’s titular lake has been drying up for years as a result of both climate change and the way Utah distributes its water resources, and if it continues to dry up it could release a whole plethora of toxic chemicals into the air, rendering the region uninhabitable for a good portion of the population. Billionaire and Trump ally Kevin O’Leary is set to build a 40,000 acre data center in the state that would raise nighttime temperatures significantly, and could raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64%. These disturbing developments do not just exist as the short-form news delivered to me on Instagram Reels: they’re real problems and they’re going to cause harm for everyone in the state. My family, Tom Dickson’s family, all those people on The Dating App, Swig employees, Sodalicious employees, and perhaps worst of all, the cast of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Everyone. Regardless of their Jesus night lights and Trump mugs.

I still don’t know if I ‘like’ going to Utah. Though I’m not sure that I’m happy about receiving “I’m sorry” as a response from my friends. I’m not blaming them; God knows Utah has its problems and I have serious qualms with it as well. I think at this point, whether I like it or not, I’ve spent enough time there that the state is a part of me. I’m a woke bicoastal elite, but I also know that the people of Utah aren’t just background characters in the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Those blurred out figures sitting behind Jen while her husband has a public meltdown about her making more money than him, are real people.

A lot of us ‘coastal elites’ like to write-off middle America as a land of racist rednecks, or in Utah’s case, sober racist rednecks. But the truth is, the Utah Mormons are suffering under the same systems as the rest of us, they’ve just been taught that the source of their troubles is immigrants who drink coffee and transgender people who sometimes need to use a public bathroom. Not to mention the queer people and the communities of color in the state, who bear the brunt of this misplaced blame.

I’m not sure how I want my friends to react when I say I’m going to Utah. “I’m sorry” feels too negative and “have fun” just feels sarcastic. But it’s not like I can expect them to say “have a complicated time in a state that hates you but has influenced your life in ways you might not even fully understand yet” every time. I’ll keep the “I’m sorry”’s for now, and I’ll keep whining about the state’s flaws — after all, I love being part of an in-group that’s making fun of the out-group — but my heart won’t ever truly be in it. Every time I catch a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, part of me will wish it were the red rocks of Ivins. When I pay $10 for a smoothie in the East Village, part of me will wish I could have just made it myself in a master bathroom BlendTec. And, most of all, each time I take a sip of coffee, I will always wish it was a ‘National Parks.’

I saw my first car crash at fifteen years old. Well, okay, I saw the aftermath of a car crash. I had my learner’s permit and my father on stand-by to fill the “licensed driver of five years in the passenger seat” requirement, and was carefully maneuvering the family’s 2004 Toyota Sienna through the streets of some part of Washington that was mostly Microsoft buildings. I was already anxious; the car was old and giant and I was young and regular-sized, so I didn’t exactly feel in control of that behemoth of a vehicle. Plus, Microsoft Land had actual cars on the road unlike the empty church parking lots I had been practicing in beforehand. I had just completed one of the greatest feats of my young life (making an unprotected left turn) when a three vehicle pile-up on the side of the road caught my eye.

I’ll remind you this was my first time really getting a good look at a crash site (or at least the first time I can remember), so what ultimately may have been a pretty tame collision seemed pretty frickin’ gnarly to me. I could not tell you anything now about the cars other than one was red, and all three of them were banged up pretty bad. I took in the scene as I drove by — momentarily distracted from the giantness of my vehicle — wondering who crashed into who and where these drivers were now. One of the license plates was–

Before I had a chance to really figure out what was happening, my wondering was interrupted and I was snapped back into reality by my dad reaching over and grabbing the steering wheel, yanking it to the right to get me back into my lane. My investigation of the crash site had distracted me from the road, and my family’s tank-sized car had started to swerve into the wrong lane. Ironically, staring at that car wreck for just a few seconds, feeling that curiosity, was the first time behind the wheel I wasn’t just thinking about how afraid I was of crashing.

It was then that I learned about “rubbernecking,” also known as the act of turning your head to look at a car crash while driving, also known as being a nosy bitch. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person on that street who was rubbernecking to get a glimpse of the destruction (after all it’s a phenomenon so common that we have a word for it), but as one of few people in Microsoft Land not driving a Prius, my vehicle happened to be the biggest target. But as my dad told me then, everybody rubbernecks sometimes. It’s only human.

Now, seven years later, I hardly ever drive anymore. I’ve lived in New York City for the vast majority of my adult life, a place where you don’t really need a car to get around. In fact, I’m probably a worse driver now than when I was fifteen, due to a lack of practice and a new reference point of New York drivers, to whom the law is merely a suggestion. Although I’m not driving much these days, I still find myself rubbernecking all the time. And there’s one crash site I just can’t stop looking at.

Let me introduce you to Act on Demand Improv. Act on Demand Improv is an “all inclusive adult improv troupe based in the London Grove Township area” (Eastern Pennsylvania), that recently went viral online. I assume their popularity began on TikTok, though it only reached me via Instagram Reels about a month ago. Given the way the trend cycle works between these two apps, I assume people on TikTok were talking about this many moons ago, but I’m talking about it now.

The average Act on Demand video goes like this: the person filming will introduce the prompt of the scene, usually something like “world’s worst ____,” and then, the members of the improv troupe, usually about five or six people, will take turns performing in response to that prompt. The name of the game is to make the audience laugh. Unfortunately for Act on Demand, these performances are usually met with complete, devastating silence.

The thing that makes Act on Demand so special to me is not just that it appears to be court-ordered, but also that it’s terrible. Now, I’m no improv expert, and in fact as someone who has done improv and watched a lot more of it than I’m comfortable admitting, I have to say, no matter the strength of the performers, the whole ritual of improv can be pretty humiliating. Watching bad improv is like watching a bunch of sad monkeys in a cage dance for their dinner. Watching good improv, though, can be spectacular. Legendary comedians like Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Kristin Wiig, and I’m sure at least one man, all got their start in improv comedy. Watching good improv can be life-affirming, like watching a bunch of happy, free-range monkeys dance just because their favorite song is on.

Act on Demand, though, is not good. In fact, it’s quite awful, made worse only by the glimmering, seemingly infinite confidence of its worst performers. For example, this man, deemed by the comments to be “Black Hoodie Guy” (even when he’s not wearing a black hoodie), is usually one of the first performers to respond to the prompt, and he almost always bombs pretty bad.

Take this video for instance, where the prompt is “world’s worst director,” and Black Hoodie Guy comes out immediately with, “Before we begin, I rewrote the whole story, the writer sucks.”

Save for the one snicker from the camera person, this joke flops. In part because it’s not really a joke. It’s kind of just a punch line, and in Black Hoodie Guy’s defense, maybe it’s the setup of the improv game that’s doing him so dirty here. Improv is difficult, but you usually get the help of a scene partner or a wacky audience suggestion, but in this game all you have is the prompt and about five seconds to do something funny with it.

There’s a lot of non-jokes like this in every Act on Demand video. Another example from “world’s worst director,” is when Red Cardigan comes forward and tells her imaginary scene partners that they “need to be off-book by Thursday.” Much love to this woman, she seems very sweet, like an English teacher who’s nice or at the very least indifferent to the gay kids, but this is really not funny at all. I don’t know what day of the week this performance took place, so if it was a Wednesday then maybe this is funny? But in that case, why not just say ‘tomorrow?’ The punchline has no set up and so the joke bombs, leaving members of her “fandom” to comment things like “hard watch for cardigan fans.”

Sometimes the performers do get a laugh, like this video with the prompt “world’s worst mailman.”

The first performer, Green Shirt Guy, earns a big laugh from the audience, but immediately after, here comes Black Hoodie Guy to ruin it for everybody. This instance is particularly funny to me because after his joke fails spectacularly and he awkwardly laughs himself back into place, the person filming, who I imagine to be the social worker who created this group or the devil himself, says quietly “oh my gosh;” solidifying in just three whispered words how perpetually humorless Black Hoodie Guy is.

Now, I know that driving and watching Instagram Reels are completely different things, but my obsession with Act on Demand is rubbernecking. Digital rubbernecking at least. I’m not keeping up with the content of Act on Demand because I think it’s good, I’m pretty explicitly watching because it’s bad. More than anything, it’s publicly bad. Their videos went mega-viral recently, with several clocking in over one million views on Instagram (and I’m sure many more on TikTok), and the comments are not nice. People hate Act on Demand improv, and in particular, people hate Black Hoodie Guy. Just like me in that Toyota Sienna, the good people of Instagram Reels are slowing down our scrolls to take in just how excruciatingly bad this improv troupe is. We’re all a bunch of rubberneckers.

In fact, there’s a whole community of Act on Demand “fans” that comment on all their videos. They even have their own inside jokes with each other, aside from just referring to the performers by what they wore in their most viral video. There’s one recurring bit, “proper footwear,” that comes from this video, where one of the performers again tells another non-joke, this time for the prompt “world’s worst fitness instructor.” Any Act on Demand video that this one woman is in going forward, certainly has a comment or two mentioning “proper footwear,” and usually one reply of someone who “can’t stop laughing.”

Clearly, there is a very dedicated group of rubberneckers for Act on Demand Improv, myself included (though I’ve never been brave enough to leave a comment of my own). But rubbernecking is dangerous, isn’t it? There’s a reason the licensed driver of at least five years in my passenger seat snapped me out of the spell; my giant car was drifting into the other lane. There’s something sort of poetic about it. If you get too into watching something crash and burn, it won’t be long til it happens to you too.

But the great thing about digital rubbernecking, compared to real rubbernecking, is you’re not actually driving! There’s no risk of your car drifting to another lane, because there’s no car! Surely I’m not setting up a second half of this metaphor!

In my hours spent watching Act on Demand and indulging in the hilariously cruel comment section, there was one particularly earnest user who’s opinion I can’t stop thinking about.

Now, I’m not usually one to take the word of Instagram music producers, but there’s something ‘prod.rainforest’ is getting at that is worth exploring. The fact of the matter is, that everybody in Act on Demand Improv — Cardigan, Red Shirt, Green Shirt Guy, Proper Footwear, even Black Hoodie Guy — all of them, are just people. Ordinary people in Eastern Pennsylvania who signed up to do improv (or were made to sign up by a judge), not knowing that they would be thrust into the public sphere for us to gawk at. They’re not so different from me — God knows I’ve done my fair share of embarrassing things in my life, with the same delusional smile as Black Hoodie Guy. I can’t help but wonder what my life would be like if some of my less flattering high school theater moments were posted online like this, to be ridiculed and rubbernecked for the rest of time.

There’s something so charmingly earnest about the people behind Act on Demand. Despite the overwhelming negativity in the comment section, it doesn’t appear that any of their videos have been taken down, and they’re still producing content and even doing live performances. They’re not letting the rubberneckers stop them. The website refers to the troupe as a “family of weirdos who get together to entertain each other and all of you as well.” And I’d say that’s an apt description. For every inside joke among the rubberneckers in the comments, there’s an inside joke among the actors. Like in “world’s worst director,” Green Shirt Guy gets a laugh for what appears to be a reference to his own perfectionism. Clearly, these people really know each other and perhaps Act on Demand is the only space in their lives that they truly get to relax and try something new. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that Instagram music producer might be right; we’re all hating from a cracked screen, but they’re the ones having fun.

I suppose that’s the danger in digital rubbernecking; not drifting into the other lane, but getting so consumed by humiliation rituals and other people’s failures that we stop being earnest altogether. I’m not saying that me or anyone else who can’t look away from the Act on Demand crash site is a bad person or should stop watching, I’m just saying that your algorithm isn’t going to reach over and course-correct your steering wheel. It actually feeds off your negativity. There’s no licensed driver of five years on the For You page. It’s just you.

As popular culture drifts even further away from earnestness in the name of trying not to be “cringe,” I can’t help but wonder how many great improvisers (perhaps an oxymoron itself) are out there in the world, too afraid of falling into the same fate as Act on Demand to explore their passion for the craft. For every Black Hoodie Guy, there could be ten Green Shirt Guys who are actually capable of making people laugh but are too afraid to do so. The rubberneckers in the comments usually have funny things to say, what if we all redirected that energy somewhere productive?

And perhaps Act on Demand will improve. Everybody starts somewhere. Maybe these repeated, extremely public failures are just what the troupe needs to get better. Or maybe not. Maybe Black Hoodie Guy will spend his life failing, only to end up on his deathbed doing “worst last words ever,” saying in his famous improv cadence, “Uhhh, guess I’m gonna die now,” followed by a devastating “oh my gosh,” from his hospice nurse. No matter what happens, I know I’ll be just a scroll away; craning my rubber neck trying to get a glimpse at the destruction.

From the outside, it may seem that my apartment and the Pacific Ocean have nothing in common. For one, my apartment is on dry land and covers nowhere near 46% of the Earth’s surface. More so, my apartment is a building and the Pacific Ocean is… well, not a building. However, there is one trait this massive body of water and my apartment share: they’re both full of garbage.

I’m sort of casually haunted by the Pacific Garbage Patch. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I have nightmares where the turtles finally get revenge on me for using a disposable straw and choke me out with a plastic bag, rather, this haunting presents itself as a voice in the back of my head every time I dispose of something plastic. Huh. I wonder if that’ll end up in the patch. I can’t help but think about it; the fact that there are multiple massive globs of garbage, bigger than some entire countries, floating in the ocean is so ludicrously dystopian to me that it almost sounds made up.

Sometimes I get too deep into the doom of it all. I see the videos of all that plastic just… floating out there and then I read the Wikipedia page which informs me some actually call it the “Pacific Trash Vortex” which is a much more appropriate and threatening name, and that it is over 600,000 square miles in surface area. Compare this to another garbage patch —my apartment— which is less than 1,000 square feet. That floating vortex of garbage is 3,168,000 times larger than my living space. That is so much garbage. And I’m someone who collects garbage.

It was three months into adulthood that I realized I had a problem. I was eighteen and had just moved from my parents’ house in the pristine white-picket-fenced Seattle suburbs to the glamorous New York City. In those first three months living on my own, I purchased five different souvenir cups. One from Rainforest Cafe, two from movie theaters, one bear-shaped cup from a boba place, and one from Walgreens that was straight-up just a sippy cup. I stand by the fact that this last cup is cute. I do not stand by the fact that it should ever be used by any self-respecting adult.

I have always been a “collector” of some sort. I like to keep things. My childhood room is lined with shelves full of stuff. Snow globes, countless stuffed animals, miniature versions of landmarks I saw on vacation as a child, and at least two scrapbooks, both of which are filled with even more material memories. My dad says I get this little habit from my grandma (his mother-in-law). He acts like I am a hoarder — I say that I’m a sentimental-stuff-keeper. We both agree that’s a nice way of saying hoarder.

While temporarily made delirious by my newfound financial freedom and the liberating feeling of having a kitchen cabinet 2,000 miles away from the judgemental, financially-literate eyes of my parents, I came to my senses pretty quick when it came to souvenir cups. No matter how cute they may be, or however badly you want to remember the occasion, at the end of the day, that cup has got to go somewhere. These five souvenir cups, along with two I had brought from home, were taking up more and more space in my cabinets.

A pattern began to emerge almost immediately. First, I’d see the cup, wherever I was, and fall in what-I-thought-was-love with whatever mascot adorned it and then become overwhelmed with the urge to drop a ridiculous amount of money on it. Once I bought the cup, I would take it home, use it once or twice before sending it to the graveyard of the kitchen cabinet; only to be used ever again when I wanted to surprise a guest by making them drink out of the slightly terrifying smiling head of Rainforest Cafe mascot Cha Cha The Tree Frog.

And so, after I realized that this souvenir cup habit was eating away at both my bank account and my storage space, I resolved to stop buying souvenir cups, and in a broader sense, stop buying anything that I wouldn’t actually use. In my years at a liberal arts college, I became very familiar with the term “overconsumption.” The fact of the matter was that I had been living on my own for three months, and I already had way too much stuff; including a set of six glasses from IKEA, all just as good as —if not better than— my souvenir cups.

Even now, three years into this resolution, I still struggle to stop myself from buying something useless even if it’s particularly cute. Just a few days ago, a friend had to physically restrain me from purchasing this Mario Galaxy themed popcorn bucket. Look at it. LOOK AT HIS FACE. He is so happy holding that popcorn.

While I still cave to consumerism every now and then —a trip to LegoLand resulted in me buying a Lego-themed souvenir cup that earned me unlimited soda refills in the park for a day (I truly am no better than a Mormon toddler)— but simply thinking before I buy has saved me from a great number of cup-related burdens.

Unfortunately for me, this goal of not collecting any more useless souvenir cups was recently undermined by the reckless behavior of one Regal employee. I had gone to see Elizabeth Olsen’s new movie, Eternity, and in exchange for me buying the tickets, my friend I was with bought me an Icee. Perhaps it’s due to a childhood spent begging for any concession at the movie theater and being told no by my cruel, fascistic parents (who were very reasonably trying to avoid spending $10 on a cup of ice and syrup), but I love to get an Icee at the movie theater. It is one of few earthly delights I allow myself to guiltlessly engage with; so long as that Icee doesn’t come in a souvenir cup.

The Regal employee, revealed by his name tag to be named Tad, disappeared into the back and returned a few minutes later with my Icee. I had ordered a small and Tad had charged my friend accordingly (still $10…), but the Icee that was brought to me was much larger than what I was expecting. Even worse: it was brought to me in a souvenir cup, completely against my will.

Tad wordlessly handed me my Icee in a big plastic Zootopia 2 cup. I stared at it for a second, wondering if there was any way that Tad had misheard my request for a small cherry Icee and thought I asked for a “small ugly eyesore.” I scanned the backdrop of the concessions stand and, bewilderingly, right next to the Icee machine, were two very tall stacks of perfectly good disposable cups. Tad cleared his throat.

“Trying to clear out some overstock,” Tad said.

I just stood there, my eyes darting between Tad and the cup. At that moment, I couldn’t help but think back to something Kanye West said in 2011. Never in my life have I related to Kanye West. I’ve never married a Kardashian, I’ve never founded a shoe company, and I’ve certainly never publicly declared how proud I am to be a Nazi. But Tad, brought out a dark side of me: the side of me that relates to something Kanye wrote on Twitter fifteen years ago. “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me,” Kanye wrote, “like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.”

Now, do I condone all the terrible things Kanye has said and done? Absolutely not. Was that Tweet a subtly brilliant observation about the inconveniences of modern life? Still no, but it certainly stuck with me.

I could’ve started an earnest conversation with Tad about how I’ve been trying to be a more mindful consumer and downsize my souvenir cup collection. I could have raged at him for making me relate to a self-declared Nazi who once said his ancestors were enslaved “by choice.” Instead I just breathlessly said, “Thanks, I guess.” Tad blinked at me and then disappeared.

So now I gotta be responsible for this Zootopia 2 souvenir cup. I’ve included photos so you know what I’m dealing with here.

I could perhaps forgive Tad for stripping me of my souvenir cup autonomy if the cup were particularly cute or had some feature that made it better than any other cup in my cabinet. Purely on a visual level, I am unimpressed. There’s just nothing on it that I actually want to see. The thick plastic shell does not do enough to distract from the fact that the already uninteresting design on the body of the cup is just printed on a piece of paper. I’ll remind you now that I was not there to see Zootopia 2, it’s been out for months at this point and I still haven’t seen it. I was there to watch Elizabeth Olsen be forced to choose which of her two husbands she wanted to spend her eternal afterlife with, but thanks to Tad, I was now the one in purgatory. Since I have not seen Zootopia 2, I am not particularly charmed by this snake character that is featured so prominently. And I don’t love seeing Zootopia’s finest officers Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps imprisoned in plastic every time I want a drink of water because I’m not weird.

When it comes to souvenir cups, I prioritize form over function. Unfortunately for me though, the Zootopia 2 souvenir cup functions about as horribly as it looks. For one, it is awkwardly tall and actually doesn’t fit in my kitchen cabinet. Second, the straw is too short. Unless you hold it up, the straw sits just about flush with the top of the dome lid. This means, if you want to effectively drink out of the straw, you either have to put your fingers on it (contaminating your fingers with saliva and the straw with whatever you’ve touched since your last hand wash) and pull it out of the hole, or awkwardly suck around on the lid until you can get the straw out, all while that stupid snake looks right at you. On top of all of that, sometimes the lid of the cup gets stuck. A little peek behind the curtain for you here: the lid is actually stuck right now, meaning I can’t wash the inside of the stupid thing. I’ll admit this last flaw in the cup’s design could definitely be a skill issue. Maybe I’m just not strong enough to pull the metaphorical sword from the stone, but either way, it makes the cup needlessly frustrating to use.

I know rationally that I could just throw this awful cup away and no one would care. Nobody would even have to know that I threw it away…. But perhaps it’s the character’s beaming smiles or the fact that the plastic feels a bit too nice to dispose of so carelessly, but I just can’t make myself do it. Instead, I now feel this crushing sense of responsibility to this cup, as if it were an orphan left on my doorstep or a water bottle left on Kanye’s tray table. I can just imagine the smug look on Tad’s face if I were to throw it away. He successfully offloaded some garbage onto me, and I disposed of it. Yeah, right.

Another habit of mine you need to understand to fully grasp the existential horror of my predicament with this godforesaken cup is that I drink a lot of water. Like, a lot of water. I also tend to get a bit emotionally attached to my water bottle. That probably sounds weird to someone with a healthier relationship to material goods than me, but let me explain. This thing —a turquoise metal jug with a straw cap— goes with me everywhere. It’s traveled back and forth across the country with me. It’s seen me at my best and it’s seen me at my worst. It’s like a pet that can’t talk or breathe or love me back. The other day I left my beloved pet (water bottle) at the dog park (in the backseat of a friend’s car) which meant that I was going to have to use some other container to hold my daily 96 ounces of water. And so I chose the Zootopia 2 souvenir cup because I’ll be damned if I let Tad win.

For the fifty six hours and twenty nine minutes I was away from my water bottle (but who’s counting?) I tried to get used to using this awful cup. But each time I had to pull the straw out with my mouth or put all of my strength into taking the lid off, or explain to a close friend that I wasn’t suddenly a Zootopia mega-fan, I just kept getting more angry. I didn’t want this cup. I didn’t ask for it to be made. But now it’s mine. And I’m going to use it, even if it means being a little bit miserable.

Each time I go to pull the straw out of the cap and then realize I should wash my hands first, I can’t help but think about those 600,000 square miles of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. Don’t I owe it to the Earth to try and extract as much use out of things like this goddamn Zootopia 2 cup? Shouldn’t I find some purpose for this hard plastic cup that will outlive me, and my children, and my children’s children? Isn’t it my responsibility to pass down this souvenir cup as some sort of sacred family chalice to future generations? So it doesn’t end up as another piece of junk in 600,000 square miles of junk?

But I didn’t make the cup. And neither did Tad. It’s easy to blame someone named Tad, but he’s just the poor schmuck made to give out the cups. But Regal Cinemas made the cup; in partnership with GoldenLink, also known as, “Your one-stop shop solution for film and event related concessions and promotions.” Evidently they made so many of these cups that they are literally giving them out for free to any unsuspecting patron who orders an Icee. Tad and I didn’t make them do that. We didn’t tell them to put out this many useless hunks of plastic into the already booming garbage economy. So when I come home and open my kitchen cabinet and meet the cold dead eyes of Gary De’Snake, it’s as though the very CEOs that are destroying this planet are in there too; reminding me that any action I take will always be undone by the ultra-rich. They did the climate crime, and now they want me and Tad to hide the body.

But I refuse. I will use that goddamn cup until I die. And then, when my time finally comes, my body will be cremated and my ashes will be placed inside that stupid Zootopia 2 souvenir cup. Whoever controls my estate when I pass will have the pleasure of delivering that souvenir urn to the CEO of Regal’s parent company Cineworld (since by the time I die, the ultra-wealthy will have figured out how to live forever), along with a little note that says: Trying to clear out some overstock. Do your own dirty work.

As a kid, when I pictured my dream life, I always imagined this one house I would pass on my way to the dentist. Going to the dentist was, and still is, one of my least favorite activities — there’s something so dehumanizing about having someone stick their fingers in your mouth for an hour (made even worse in my case by my dentist’s attempts to be “funny” while he’s digging around in there). But each time I was forced into the car, kicking and screaming like a dog who heard the word “vet,” I passed this beautiful home with yellow siding and red-brick baseboards, surrounded by a massive garden of flowering shrubs and a spacious driveway. At the end of that driveway: a pristine white mailbox, with a red metal flag. Getting the mail was another one of my least favorite activities growing up, because it was always all for my parents; utility bills, AARP magazine, Christmas cards from cousins we were pretending to still care about, etc. But each time I made the brave trek to my dentist’s office of horrors, I saw that house and I imagined my future self stepping out of it and pulling a stack of envelopes out of that pristine white mailbox; all of which were addressed to me.

Through the years, my vision of my “adult life” morphed into something almost unrecognizable — a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with siding that, maybe at one point had been as bright yellow as that house on the way to the dentist, but was now a faded cream color. While there is technically a mailbox barely clinging on by the front door, I hesitate to call that my mailbox. For one, the locks on the four boxes (each corresponding to a unit in the building) are purely for decoration, and even if they did actually lock, the boxes are so small that the mail would just stick right out of them anyway. More importantly, the mailbox is not mine because none of the mail is mine.

In my previous place, I got used to the fact that, when living in an apartment building that is almost one hundred years old, you are bound to get some mail addressed to previous tenants. There were a variety of characters I’d find in my mailbox at my old place, still getting updates on museums they had memberships to or the occasional Costco magazine. But at my new place, things are different. For one, I swear that the mail carrier distributes the envelopes at random. My apartment’s mailbox, clearly marked “1F,” consistently gets mail for all three other units in the building. Anything that is properly addressed to 1F, isn’t for me. It all comes for one Mr. Andrew R. Porter.

Mr. Porter seems to get his entire life delivered to him, everything except the little slip of paper telling him who to call to update his mailing address on literally anything. Each day I check the mail and he has a whole bunch of “URGENT NOTICE”s from a variety of sources. Letters come from the DNC, the ACLU, and even the now-defunct Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign. The letters are one thing, but what I find truly infuriating about Mr. Porter’s by-mail-lifestyle is the packages. He has evidently signed up for some sort of “vinyl of the month” club or something, because every few weeks, a flat square package shows up at my door, tempting me to open it and find out what he’s been listening to. But out of respect for him, and mostly fear of the fact that opening someone else’s mail is technically a felony, I never do.

I first toured Mr. Porter’s place (at the time, his name was unknown to me), a ground-floor one-bedroom on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, on a suffocatingly humid June afternoon. Mr. Porter was gone, but all of his things were there. It’s truly an odd thing to invade someone’s space in this way. I knew objectively that it was an apartment showing, one of several happening in the building that day, but I felt as though I were popping in somewhere I wasn’t supposed to see. The place seemed to be in okay condition; a bit dirty here and there but overall nice enough. Most of the mess was from things I have no place to judge Mr. Porter for: dishes in the sink, an unmade bed, and cat toys everywhere. The light in the bathroom didn’t work, and I briefly wondered if the person who lived here before sometimes liked to shower in the dark the same way I used to.

After Mr. Porter moved out and before I moved in, management had the apartment “refurbished,” which is landlord lingo for “we cleaned up the obvious problems and are hoping you don’t notice the less blatant ones that will later come to haunt you.” When I arrived, the place seemed clean, the bathroom light had been fixed, and the fresh paint smell was so strong that I surely lost some brain cells while unpacking. Unfortunately, the “refurbishment” of the apartment seems to only have referred to the fixed light and the new paint job.

Sometimes I wish I had been alive longer. 21 years is not that much time in the scheme of things. Maybe if I was a Big Adult instead of a Little Adult, I would know what things to look for when touring an apartment. Maybe if I was a Big Adult I would have noticed that the apartment’s stove was straight out of the 20th century and was in a condition that, frankly, made me question the previous tenant’s sanity (or at the very least his standards of living). Not only was the once-white painted enamel more of a sticky pale brown, but the steel drip plates underneath the burners were absolutely caked in grit, and in some places, completely rusted through leaving sharp metal edges.

I called my mother, figuring that she had been alive long enough to encounter a situation like this. On her suggestion, I attempted to soak the drip plates in my sink, but ended up too afraid of getting tetanus from the rust to reach back into the sink and take them out. My mother, in all her Big Adult wisdom, assured me, “That’s not really how you get tetanus,” but fear won the battle and I begged management for a new stove. Thankfully, they agreed with me that this stove certainly seemed like a safety hazard (regardless of it actually was) and they brought in a new stainless steel one that I now struggle to keep stainless.

Another in the list of things that made me question how Mr. Porter was living: the shower curtain situation. I suppose part of the fantasy of that yellow house with the pristine mailbox was that it had a very nice interior, including a very pristine bathroom. I, of course, have no way to know what the inside of that house looks like, (though I have spent a good deal of time on Zillow waiting for it to be put on the market) but based on the massive exterior of the home I assume the amenities inside are top-notch. The shower in Mr. Porter’s place is another story.

Trying to bathe in Mr. Porter’s place means risking the shower curtain rod giving way and falling on your head. The shower is the typical New York apartment set up, a drop-in tub that takes up the whole width of the bathroom with a shower head mounted on the tile wall. The shower curtain itself hangs from a plastic tension rod, which in theory should hold itself up via physics or whatever, but Mr. Porter, for some reason, tried to drill the ends of the rod into the tile. This, of course, failed spectacularly, and cracked both the tile and the plastic ends of the curtain rod. This may have worked for a little while, but by the time I got to Mr. Porter’s place, the rod had been basically ripped out of the wall, leaving just the stupid screws, rusted like the stupid stove, with the ends of the curtain rod resting between the top of the screw and the wall.

This is very hard to explain verbally, but basically all you need to know is that due to Mr. Porter’s “refurbishments” of the shower, if you pull the curtain a little bit too vigorously, or close the bathroom door a little too hard, the rod will give way and come crashing down. Thankfully, the rod is made of cheap plastic so it doesn’t hurt too much when it falls on your head, though I wouldn’t say it feels good. In fact, the lightness of the rod really only adds to the humiliation of it all.

Each time the curtain falls, which happens at least once a week, I bring a chair from my dining table into the bathroom — a room it is not supposed to be in but nonetheless spends a lot of time in — to use a step-stool to reach those stupid exposed screws and pick up the stupid rod from the stupid tub and return it to its stupid precarious perch. And just when I think I’ve got it back up… it falls again. Every time, without fail, the shower curtain drops on my head and lands back in the tub and I get so frustrated that I just have to sit down on the chair that shouldn’t be in the bathroom and stare furiously at the pile of shower curtain that currently stands in the way of me washing my hair. And as I sit there, my socks slowly start to get wet from lingering water droplets that used to be safely contained within the curtain. I hate this stupid curtain and I hate having wet socks but I hate the thought of getting up even more. So I just sit there, miserable, with wet socks and stare at my pathetic excuse for a shower curtain and think: How many times can this thing fall on my head before I start to have permanent brain damage?

It has landed squarely on my skull at least five times now, each incident more embarrassing than the last. Ironically, it has only actually hit me on the head while I’m trying to put it back up. Thankfully it is yet to collapse on me while I’m actually in the shower. Getting hit on the head is one thing, but getting hit on the head while naked is another. I worry that if it were to fall on me again, I might get knocked unconscious. Like Mr. Porter before me, I live alone. How long would it take for someone to find me?

My dad, in his Big Adult wisdom, assures me that a plastic rod falling a few inches and landing on my head is not enough to knock me unconscious, but I just can’t shake the image of my naked body lying in the tub, half-covered by the shower curtain, with the water still running. I wonder if the rod ever fell on Mr. Porter’s head. Back when he lived here, there was not even any light in the bathroom — is it more or less humiliating to lie naked and unconscious in the dark?

Oh, and then there’s the family living in the walls: the Neighbors. I call them the “Neighbors” because I fear that saying their real name only gives them more power, but I’ll give you a hint, it rhymes with “sockroaches.” I hesitate to even mention the Neighbors as it feels like an indictment of my failure to be an adult that my apartment has… Neighbors. Well, let me clarify, my apartment does not have an infestation itself, my building has an infestation of… Neighbors. And sometimes these Neighbors find their way into my apartment and lay their freaky little Neighbor egg sacks in my closet. Before this, I had seen a good few Neighbors in the city, one or two in my last apartment, but I’d never seen an egg case before. That changes a person.

After five desperate emails to my building’s management, they sent in a pest control guy, who, in his Big Adult wisdom, assures me that I’m not dirty and that the problem is stemming from somewhere else. That doesn’t stop me from still thinking that the presence of these Neighbors is some divine punishment for my sanitation sins. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m a filthy dirty disgusting rat person who should just go die already. I bet a coffin is easy to keep clean.

It’s unclear to me whether or not Mr. Porter was aware of the Neighbors or if he knew about the absolutely massive crack in the drywall of the bedroom closet, which Mr. Pest Control Guy and I believe is their point of entry. Maybe the Neighbors were just waiting for Mr. Porter and his cat to move out so they could invade the now unguarded home of the next poor schmuck taking his place.

Strangers on the internet, likely Big Adults or just preteens with unsupervised internet access, tell me that the most important thing when fighting Neighbors is mindset; see yourself not as a victim, but as a hunter. And so, when I hear a little scuffle in the night or see a low shadow move suspiciously in the corner of my eye, I grab my massive can of… Neighbor-killing spray, and repeat to myself quietly, “Hunter, not a victim. Hunter, not a victim,” and face whatever demon waits for me in the closest. Everyone in my life, even the Little Adults, assures me that the Neighbors are more afraid of me than I am of them. I don’t think everyone understands just how afraid I am. Even as I hunt them, I can’t help but feel like a victim. After all, they are breaking and entering into my home through the closet, one of my most sacred spaces.

It’s unsettling to know that in Mr. Porter’s place, you’re never truly alone. I wonder if the Neighbors are lurking in the shadows, watching me get changed in the morning, making catty comments in their secret pheromone language about my outfit choices. I wonder if they come out when I’m not home and feel how I felt when I first toured Mr. Porter’s place — judging me for the dishes in the sink and the shower curtain in the bathtub. I wonder if Mr. Porter was a hunter or a victim. I wonder if he also got a concerned text from a human neighbor wondering why he was yelling “DIE DIE DIE” and stomping a boot on the ground after a particularly grisly encounter with one of them.

It also appears that Mr. Porter nor building management could figure out how to clean behind the radiators in the bedroom. I can’t blame them, as it is an extremely narrow space between the hot metal radiator and the wall, barely large enough to get a vacuum attachment through. I know that because I actually tried to clean back there, seemingly the first time anyone had reached back there in years. Buried under mountains of dust were two old socks, an orange peel, and a USB drive. Due to the stupid stove, the goddamn shower curtain, the invasive Neighbors, and a friend in the building telling me this apartment always had a “rotting body” smell (what a comforting way to welcome me to the community), I felt as though I had to check the contents of this drive to make sure it didn’t contain evidence of some grisly crime Mr. Porter has previously gotten away with it. The drive housed no evidence of a crime, but rather wedding photos from over a decade ago. It looked like a beautiful day, a small wedding party had gathered in the backyard of a very nice looking house, probably in Southern California based on the palm trees, and the yellow arrow of an In-N-Out Burger sign poking just barely over the fence. I can’t tell who any of these people are, but I can tell that they love each other.

I don’t know if it’s Mr. Porter in those photos. At the time I found the drive the only thing I knew about him was that he likes to get vinyls delivered and that he lived alone. If that was him in the photos, this time in his life seemed long gone. As I stared into the unmoving, digitized eyes of the wedding party I couldn’t help but wonder what went wrong in his life that caused him to end up here: in the land of rusty stoves, stupid shower curtains, and invasive Neighbors. It seems like no place for a Big Adult.

Then there was the day I got a text from Mr. Porter asking if he could come pick up a vinyl that was delivered. I still don’t know how he got my number. I said sure, and we picked time for him to come by and pick it up. But the morning he was supposed to come, he didn’t show. This became a bit of a pattern. He would say he was going to stop by and then would proceed to ghost me like a stoner teenager skipping out on a shift at their fast food job. But in the same way I can’t blame that stoner teenager for not wanting to spend their ever-fleeting youth putting fries in a bag, when I finally see Mr. Porter, I feel that I can’t blame him for being so flaky.

The first time I saw the real Mr. Porter, not just the one I had imagined, when he finally rang on my door bell after literal weeks of scheduling hell, my immediate impulse was to ask “Did the shower curtain ever fall on your head and leave you naked and unconscious while the Neighbors feasted upon your open wounds?” but instead I just said “Here’s your mail.”

If that was Mr. Porter in those wedding photos, he certainly looks a lot different now. He is likely in his early forties, though he has an ageless aura about him (not in the Hollywood heartthrob way, but rather in a skinny-jeans-have-no-age-limit way). He never wears a tuxedo like the man in the photos and he never smiles, rather he is almost always in a flannel and Converse with a tired grimace on his unshaven face. His hair is consistently greasy, and somehow, he’s always out of breath even though it is less than 5 steps from his car to my stoop. And he’s always wearing this cross body fanny-pack with a bunch of little pins stuck into it. There are two pins that are bigger than the others, a red one that reads “Proud Doctors Without Borders Volunteer” and another, the transgender pride flag in the shape of a heart. Logically, I know that Mr. Porter likely chose these two pins to display proudly by complete chance. Irrationally though, I feel like he picked those two pins on purpose. As if he knew I was annoyed by his constant deliveries and subsequent no-call no-shows and so he put the two pins facing out that make him look more sympathetic to me: a trans person who is generally in favor of the concept of a borderless doctor. I am not, however, generally in favor of taking time out of my week to give Mr. Porter his various packages.

Which brings me to the central question: What to do with an old tenant’s mail? Unfortunately, like most questions in my life I have no answer. I could just throw away the packages, as I do with his deliveries that look generally unimportant, or perhaps I could keep the vinyls for myself. I don’t have a way to play them, but maybe I could hang them on the wall, the way a trophy hunter might display the heads of his victims. A musical graveyard dedicated to the ghosts of Mr. Porter that still haunt my apartment. As if the stove, shower curtain, and radiators weren’t enough to commemorate his existence here.

But then I think of the trans pin on his cross body fanny pack and I think that maybe Mr. Porter isn’t all that different from me. The bathroom light didn’t work when I moved in, and maybe Mr. Porter was okay with showering in the dark because he too went on r/Transgender one day and discovered that some of us shower with the lights off when feeling particularly dysphoric. I think about my vinyl collection back home and how pissed I’d be if some college student started hoarding all my new deliveries due to some neurotic vendetta, worse even if I found out they were airing out all my personal business on Substack. All of these things in Mr. Porter’s place that remind me of my own adult shortcomings must’ve haunted him too. Maybe he too got hit on the head by the shower curtain, or got “tetanus vibes” from the stove, and hell, maybe the tenant before him is the one who set the precedent of never updating his mailing address. Perhaps the Big Adults aren’t that different from the little ones.

My life with Mr. Porter began the day I first toured this apartment in June, and it’s now April. Just today another vinyl came in the mail for him. Part of me wants to send him a photo and say, “You have 24 hours before I start scratching it” but instead I just repeat verbatim what I said last time he got a package delivered here (and the time before that, and the time before that, etc.). “I think I’ve got another one of your packages,” I write. But this time I add a crying face emoji to subtextually indicate my frustration. That’ll show him.

My parents, my classmates, my friends, and my therapist, in their adults-of-various-sizes wisdom say I need to start sticking up for myself and tell Mr. Porter to change his goddamn mailing address. But I just can’t make myself do it. Maybe when I’m a Big Adult I’ll stop feeling this need to please even the most obscure of strangers at the expense of my personal convenience.

Until I unlock that wisdom however, I’m addressing his presence in my life in other ways. Just because I’m living in Mr. Porter’s place doesn’t mean I have to live like him. I am yet to exterminate all my Neighbors, but I’ve patched over the hole in the closet (twice now) and sprayed so much Neighbor spray around my apartment that I haven’t seen one in a while. Every now and then, I do catch one in the hallway (usually stuck in a glue trap), but that’s a public space for anyone in the building so I don’t mind as much. I bought a new shower curtain rod the other day, another tension rod, but thankfully no one is going to drill a hole through the end this time. And I am doing my very best to keep the new stove clean and the space behind the radiators clear of garbage.

Maybe the Big Adults are just Little Adults who grew up a bit. Maybe it’s up to me to be better than Mr. Porter. To be a hunter, not a victim.

Lately, I’ve been sleeping without my phone in my bedroom. This statement may seem banal and to some, quite obvious. I’ve known for years that I should be doing this. There are countless studies that explain in depth the negative psychological and physical impacts of sleeping next to your cellphone, but only recently have I decided to heed these warnings and actually separate myself from the dreaded object at nighttime.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that most of the times I’ve woken up in my life, the first thing I’ve done is check my phone. Before my eyes are even fully open and long before my brain is ready to even accept the fact that I’m awake, I am merging onto an information superhighway. The phone automatically responds to the motion of me picking it up and illuminates the screen, filling my tired eyes with blue light and endless stimulation. Picking up the phone first thing in the morning is an unconscious decision. I don’t decide to check my phone, it just happens. And though some of you may be unwilling to admit it, I’ll bet you do the same thing.

I got my first cellphone for my birthday at eleven years old. To older generations that might seem much too young. To any “Generation Alphas” that might be reading this (if you guys can even read), that might seem way too old. Screen time debates aside, that’s when I was given a cellphone, and I’ve had one ever since. As I aged, my time online moved away from the fantasy worlds of children’s games like Poptropica or Club Penguin and toward social meda platforms. I made my Instagram account on my mother’s phone when I was just ten years old. It wasn’t much later that I joined Facebook, Twitter, and briefly, Vine.

I’m telling you this not to stir up conversations about “kids these days” or to subtly flex my youth, but rather to illustrate that the internet and more than anything, the cellphone, has been a constant presence in my life. While I can remember a time where the only way online was through the “family computer,” those memories are certainly foggy. For most of my life, I’ve loved going online. Especially back when the internet really felt like a place you “went,” instead of a looming shadow constantly hanging over every aspect of modern life.

The first wake up call that my relationship with the internet was souring came in July 2023. At that point, I had spent a good four years on Twitter, rarely tweeting myself but floating silently between different popstar fan communities. A few months prior, Elon Musk had purchased Twitter for a measly $44 billion. He spoke of ditching the iconic bird logo and renaming the platform ‘X.’ I, like many others, thought this would be such a ridiculously shortsighted move of brand suicide that it would never actually happen. However, that fateful July, the app updated against my will and Twitter became X. Instantly, one of my favorite social platforms had been taken over by a right-wing billionaire loser, hellbent on destroying anything that made the platform fun. He had even killed the famous bird logo, just to prove that he could.

After Trump’s second inauguration, all the other platforms fell like dominoes. TikTok openly thanked Donald Trump for reversing the platform’s ban in the U.S., a ban which he himself proposed in his first term. Meta stopped fact-checking posts on Instagram and Facebook, as well as easing their rules on hate speech. They even went as far as to remove the ‘transgender’ direct message theme, a feature which literally just changed the color of message bubbles to a gradient of pink, white, and blue. All in the name of pushing back against ‘woke’ ideology. Thank you Zuckerberg, for protecting us from the dangerous ideals presented by this direct message theme. The world is truly a safer place now.

The question for me became “what now?” These platforms I had sunk years of my life into had given in so easily to the new regime. As someone who tries to be a “mindful consumer,” how can I ethically justify staying on these platforms? How can I justify owning a cellphone at all when their creation inherently relies on the exploitation of labor in other countries? What will happen to the communities and activist groups that use these platforms to organize? Is organization even possible under these conditions?

And for all of those questions, I have no good answer.

As I watched the U.S. transition from being on the slippery slope to fascism into (what at least feels like) full-on fascism, I found myself lost in the haze of bad news. I doomscrolled in the minutes before I went to bed, and the second I woke up. But I still had to live my life. I still had to go to school and work. Work especially, was tough. Not only was I working in a newsroom, but a newsroom that was decorated with wall-to-wall televisions showing a constant live feed of various news channels, each covering a different horrifying development. My only respite from the constant doom was during the brief commercial breaks, in which a rotating cast of celebrities would try to get me to buy Ozempic or subscriptions to their AI chatbot. Was there any way out of this cycle?

I don’t mean to imply that the current political moment came out of nowhere. It’s been a long time coming. It’s just that, for a while there, it felt like we really were pushing back on this country’s far-right swing. But at this point, each year is more disturbing than the last and such, the time I’ve spent scrolling has skyrocketed. Thanks to the iPhone’s handy yet humbling screen time tracking features, I can clearly see that the more disturbing the news, the more time I spend reading it. During the 2024 election week, my daily average of phone screen time jumped to almost six hours. That’s not even considering the time I spent scrolling these same platforms on both my personal and work computers.

Somebody stronger than me might abandon the cellphone altogether. Somebody smarter than me might recognize that humanity has clearly failed the test of whether or not we will use this technology for good and toss their phone into the ocean for some poor sea turtle to choke on. However, I have a mother to text and, more importantly, several reality stars to keep up with on Instagram, so I can’t quite go off the grid yet.

It’s no secret these social platforms are designed to be addictive. There’s a reason the “For You” page (which suddenly exists on every app) never ends. The seemingly infinite content is out there; all you have to do is scroll; a pulling motion that feels an awful lot like tugging on a slot machine’s lever. Beyond the platforms, it’s well known that phones themselves are addictive.

Sometimes, I realize I’ve been absentmindedly swiping through my phone’s home pages, just for the sake of seeing something happen on the screen. Every time this happens, which is more frequent than I’ll admit, I think of Cocomelon; a YouTube channel my Mormon cousins used to put on to briefly pacify their screaming toddlers. Cocomelon is a channel with thousands of animated videos featuring typical children’s content fanfare including nursery rhymes and fairy tales. However, Cocomelon has drawn criticism for allegedly trapping children in an addictive loop of stimulation. Unlike traditional children’s television, which tends to be higher quality and is interrupted by other programming, Cocomelon is basically endless. The extremely bright colors and quick pace (a single shot in a Cocomelon video never lasts more than a few seconds) of the almost 2,000 episodes may just seem like noise to adults, but to children it can easily become addictive. My absentminded home-screen swiping is really no different. In the past, I’ve judged my cousins for subjecting their children to this soulless content, but I now realize that I too have fallen into the exact same dopamine trap as B.Y.U.’s future class of 2039. In the same way my cousin’s children cry when the iPad has to go away, I too feel helpless when deprived of stimulation, away from my phone. We all just want to see shapes and colors on the screen, don’t we? But my addiction doesn’t lead me to the whimsical world of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, it leads me to the real world, one which always seems to be getting worse.

This constant state of needing stimulation, is exactly the state ‘they’ want us to be in. In the same way my cousins pacify their children with Cocomelon, aren’t our tech bro-oligarchs pacifying us? Isn’t it beneficial to them that we wake up and immediately merge onto an endless highway of hopelessness? If it feels like nothing is ever going to change, then nothing is ever going to change. So, at least for me, I’m focusing on small changes, like establishing a consistent, phone-free morning routine.

I won’t lie to you and say it’s easy, but in the grand scheme of things it really is not that difficult at all. Humans have been waking up without checking their phone since the dawn of time. This nasty habit of ours has only developed in the past twenty or so years. While I’m still settling into my new routine myself, there are a few other things I’ve found helpful to do in the morning. Whether that’s sitting on my porch, drinking a whole glass of water in one sip just to see if I can, or doing some deep breathing, I find that my days are better if I start them with literally anything besides the phone. I do still have to merge onto the information superhighway at some point; for school, work, or to keep up with family and reality television stars, but no one should be driving —however metaphorically— before they’ve really woken up.

I am not naive enough to believe that charging your phone in another room is a radical political move. On paper and in practice, it doesn’t do much. However, it lays a much better foundation for one to actually fight back on. Think about how much more we can accomplish, both personally and politically, if we are a little bit more thoughtful about how we start our days. Hopelessness is a privilege that, at least right now, we can’t afford. I’m not leaving my phone in another room because I think that will save democracy, but because I think it might just save me.

Subscribe now