57. Monkeys

Dear monkeys,

I love you. The idea of you even more than the reality— as much as I dig furry nonhuman primates and the way you're like people, only more so, I haven't gotten around to studying you obsessively like I did with dinosaurs when I was six. But I still think you're awesome, and not just because you're almost always funny.

Monkeys, I think my love for you goes all the way back to the Pippi Longstocking books. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's all kinds of things to love about Pippi but her very own monkey pal Mr. Nilsson is a good place to start. And so my brother and I would play at being Pippi and Mr. Nilsson, and he's pretty much been my monkey friend ever since. We forgot about it for awhile when I was busy trying to be cool as a teenager, but fortunately the Muppets came to the rescue with the Tony Bennett episode of Muppets Tonight. For some reason that I can't remember anymore, lounge singer Johnny Fiama gets upset with his helper chimp Sal, and it takes most of the episode and Tony's intervention (musical, of course) to bring the two of them back together. But in the end, all is well. "Who's my little stinky monkey?" Johnny asks, and Sal replies, "I am." And my brother and I have been saying this to each other ever since.

I can point to countless other pop culture monkeys that have helped your species — or more accurately, suborder/infraorder — maintain great power in my heart and mind, but two fictional examples are probably enough. Besides, I also have two anecdotes from my real life that illustrate your deep importance to me. First there was the time my friends Steve and Dan were arguing about evolution. Steve, a big fan of Inherit the Wind, was writing a major research paper on evolution vs. creationism, with an eye towards analyzing the Scopes Monkey Trial. Dan, a rabid atheist, decided to play Devil's Advocate against him for fun, and the argument lasted for weeks until Steve "won" by shouting:

"Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey! Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey! Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey...."

...and Dan had to stop ranting and laugh. The debate was over, and Steve had taken enough notes to lay the foundation for a really bitchin' paper. The moral of the story is: if an argument outlives its fun, to avoid comparing an opponent to Hitler (as we all know, the ultimate rhetorical foul), call on the monkeys to save the day.

But you're not always fun and games, are you, monkeys? I found that out the hard way the time you almost cost me a job. I'd barely started in the hippie natural foods store kitchen when a coworker handed me a marker and suggested I draw something on the wall to celebrate his last day. I drew a monkey, with the ever-original caption, "Ook! Ack!" The next day, the kitchen manager saw my harmless, reversible prank as an act of mutiny, and left a page-long paranoid rant about vandalism and disrespect in the kitchen journal. My coworkers assured me that he'd been plenty unpopular before, but I still felt terrible. So I called him at home to apologize, and stunned him into silence before I could even offer to resign if that was the right thing to do. To this day no one knows how much the so-called "monkey incident" had to do with it, but he quit a few days later and my drawing (by then mostly erased) was hailed as a symbol of liberation. I never really lived it down, to the point where people would hand me markers and gesture at walls when they were unhappy with later bosses. My point is: monkeys, you are powerful stuff.

For all these stories and more, monkeys, I cannot thank you enough. Now and forever, I raise my (usually metaphorical) banana to you and all the joy you bring: Cheers.

Love,
-Tracy

47. Death

Dear Death,

You had better not suck, you hear me? Because my grandfather, my Opa, is inviting you to take him tomorrow — in a little over thirteen hours, to be exact — and you had better be a helluva lot better than the pain and suffering that's led him to this decision. Fuck Dylan Thomas, you be goddamn gentle. Because that's about all I can wish for him at this point. So that's what I'm asking you right now. I'm sure this is not the last time I'll write; I have plenty more to say. But right now none of that matters. Only my Opa does. So you treat him kind. Dammit.

Love,
-Tracy

Published 5 January 2011, title abridged 1 December 2011.

21. Newborn Babies

Dear newborn babies,

For what it's worth, welcome to the world. I want to apologize, over and over again, for the state it's in. I know it's not all my fault; for one thing, the way things are now is the product of everything that has come before, less than 26 years of which had me in it, but still. There's so much wrongness that most of the time I can't even think of anything to do to make anything better. I'm just one person, and there are so many people, and speaking as just one single solitary mess of a human being I get overwhelmed by my own stupid petty little problems, let alone those of the entire human race. Some days that makes me angry, some days it makes me sad, and some days it makes me wish I'd never been born. But life isn't something you can choose for yourself, little ones, which is perhaps its greatest irony. The good news is that despite the fact that life is in many ways one long cruel joke, there's a lot to enjoy. Let's start with you.

I hope, in as non-ableist a way as possible, that you're healthy, because life will be easier for you with the standard number of eyes and ears and appendages for a person of any size. Likewise, I also hope you're relatively free of genes that'll make you prone to illness, both physical and mental. But whatever state it's in, that body you've got is a marvel. People have been trying to understand it and things like it since as long as there were people, maybe longer, and there's plenty that's still a mystery. But one of the good things about being a person is there's all this history and exploring and understanding for you to build and grow on if you want to learn it. And that's getting on to the next great gift you've been given, which is your mind. You can think about anything with it, even if you can't always understand everything. Maybe someday you'll think that's pretty awesome. I sure hope so.

Now I want to take a paragraph to write about your family, by whom I mean the people you'll live with at least until you're old enough to wonder why you live with them, but probably longer. It's likely to include the people your immediate family lived with until they were old enough to wonder, too, even if they're unlikely to define their families in quite the same silly cynical and all-inclusive way I do. Anyway. What I'm going to write now is something I wish someone had told me sooner instead of leaving me to figure it out: your family are the people who will see you at your worst, and you will see them at their worst. If you're like me, and I know I am, there will be times when you will hate your family for being such a bunch of freaks, but the fact is no one's normal and everybody's pretty good at hiding it most of the time but not all of the time and comparing your insides to other people's outsides is a surefire way to make yourself feel bad about not just your insides and their outsides but the whole world in general. What's more, since your family are the people you can't hide from all the time, you'll get to know their insides a bit, and comparing what you see there to other people's outsides isn't going to be a picnic, either. Dang. None of that sounds very reassuring at all now that I've written it, but it's still important, at least to me, as a way of keeping things in perspective, and I really don't mean it in an all bad way. What else can I say about family? Well, like life, you didn't choose them, but you're mostly stuck with them, too. And at times you will love them even if they are such a bunch of freaks that it's hard to imagine that just about any other group of people would be at least as freaky if they were stuck together all the time, and I hope the times you love each other for no reason outnumber the bad times by far.

But while I'm talking about the other people in the world, I shouldn't stop with your family. Neither should you. At some point some well-meaning older person may try warning you to never talk to strangers, but like all rules, that's really just a guideline. It should be more like, "Be careful when you talk to anybody, not just strangers, but don't be too careful, because living in fear is no fun." If you never talked to strangers, you might never make any friends, and believe me, friends are way up there on the list of things that are just plain awesome about being human. Maybe more than anything else I could wish for you, I hope you'll make and cherish many good friends, and I hope they become just as close and dear and in their own way impossible to you as those family freaks I was telling you about a bit earlier.

What else? I could've sworn I had more to say than this, but then again I started this letter months ago and I didn't keep very good notes on all the topics I wanted to cover. That said, I wish you luck in training your memory and learning in general and of course figuring out ways to sort through your thoughts and decide what's important to you. There's no pause button on life, unfortunately, or I'd spend a lot of time between moments, thinking, hiding, and generally missing all the good stuff. Go ahead and live all your moments, because there's no way of knowing whether or not the life you've got is the only one you're getting, and you might as well make it a good one even if it turns out I'm wrong about reincarnation. All our lifetimes are full of countless chances to live right, and all we can do is make the most of those chances as best we can.

I know this is a silly letter to write. By the time you're able to read this, you won't be newborn anymore. Even if someone were to read it to you right now, before you got too old to be considered newborn, there's no telling how much you'd understand and absorb, much less remember. But I think about you, little ones, and it fills me with a mix of envy, and relief, and hope, and despair, and love. I guess that's life. Again, for what it's worth, welcome to it.

And happy birthday.

Love,
-Tracy

P.S. I tried to write this letter in the most general terms possible, but I would be a big liar if I said the idea of writing it arose full-formed in my brain, unprovoked by events in my world. That said, "Dear Newborn" is dedicated to Stony Raine Lohr III and her parents, Stony and Janelle, on her birthday, 5 February 2005, even if it took me a really long time to write. Hey rugrat: good job on those teeth! I was sort of arbitrarily waiting till you'd been around 6 months, but I appreciate the reminder that it's well past time I declared this letter done and sent it out.

Started 10 February 2005, text updated 14 October 2005, title abridged 1 December 2011. Reformatted 8 September 2013, last updated 6 June 2014.

17. Laws Against Same-Sex Marriage

Dear laws against same-sex marriage,

I used to dream that I would get married someday. That's not too surprising; I grew up in a society with lots of ideas, images, and assumptions about marriage, the kind that get repeated rhetorically by the politicians who claim we need laws like you to protect the foundation of a stable society. Big deal. But regardless of what I absorbed or learned, or whether our society is stable or not, I didn't have a stereotypical little girl's dreams about my wedding day, ceremonies, spectacle, big fancy dresses that would never be good for any other occasion, or even about cake. I'd learned from my parents pretty early on that the ceremonial parts of marriage are a big hoopla mostly for the benefit of the friends and family of the couple getting married, and that people who sign papers at City Hall with a minimum number of witnesses are just as married as the folks who shell out big bucks for a celebration with all the trimmings. My parents got married because otherwise my mother wouldn't have had very many rights in the United States when she came here with my father, and because it made my grandmother happy — though I don't doubt that Oma had been quick to point out the pragmatic benefits of having their relationship legally recognized. My mother never had a white wedding dress, but instead a brown one she wore to many other occasions, and when she was unhappy with the hairstyle inflicted on her by a salon staff over-eager to cater to a bride, she washed it out. That's the kind of woman my mother is, and although we have our differences about plenty of other things, I admire her for this story. I have relatives who lived together in longterm committed relationships that lasted years before legal marriage. One pair of family friends married when he was drafted to go to Vietnam, so that she could collect widow's benefits if the worst came to pass; years later they divorced and continued living together when that arrangement proved more financially beneficial. My family didn't go to church, so the question of whether a marriage was civil or religious wasn't really an issue. So my view of marriage was never religious or romantic, but more practical. And my dreams of marriage were less about ceremonies and flowers, and more about sharing my life with someone and living happily ever after, more or less like my parents did (just don't tell them I said that).

My dreams began to turn sour in 1996, when former U.S. President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act — and when I started to realize that I could be attracted to females as well as males. It was an eye-opening experience, realizing that the law would recognize and support my relationship only if I loved a member of the opposite sex. (And if you'll tolerate one more brief flashback to my childhood, I'd like to point out that the first time I can remember talking to anyone about homosexuality, it was defined in terms of marriage: "gay" was when a man wanted to marry another man, or a woman wanted to marry another woman. Chew on that awhile.) Anyway, I was angered and disgusted by DoMA, and like I said before, whatever sweet marriage dreams I might have had gradually turned sour, and finally bitter, in the following years, as more and more states passed discriminatory laws to limit the definition of marriage to "one man, one woman". These laws prompted me to learn more about the other ways marriage discriminates (why can't bureaucrats create paperwork that separates us into "married" and "unmarried", instead of assuming that the opposite of "married" is "single"?) and better understand my dissatisfaction with the legal and social institution of marriage (again, the religious aspects weren't really relevant to me). In 2000, when the state of Vermont created its same-sex civil unions, the state of California, where I was living at the time, passed its own law — Proposition 22 — so it could refuse to recognize even marriage-like legal relationships created in other states. Today the United States government spends millions to promote marriage as an alternative to welfare, as if somehow it's better for children to suffer poverty as long as their parents are wearing wedding rings — I could go on and on, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 2004, almost the present day, the United States Senate debated a proposed Constitutional amendment that would deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. (I won't say "once and for all", because Prohibition was struck down, but that took a Constitutional amendment, too, and years of misery in between.) Needless to say, the proposed amendment would have been an added layer of redundancy on top of all the unfair laws passed over the years since DoMA, but I wasn't as angry or disgusted as I was in 1996 or 2000. Instead, I was disappointed and sad, even after the amendment failed to pass. Later that year, the state of Oregon, where I live, responded to the city of Portland's decision to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples by passing its own "one man, one woman" referendum, Measure 36. Five months later, I still can't bring myself to take down our sign protesting its injustice.

In 1996, marriage was just a hypothetical possibility for my future. In 2004, after six years with the same partner, it broke my heart to know that although we, as an opposite-sex couple, could have our relationship legally recognized, we could have at best a pale imitation of such protections and support if we were a same-sex couple. I still hope that someday things will change, that laws will be rewritten to treat all couples equally, but for now all I have is hope. Same-sex marriage is still only legal in one state in the U.S., and it still isn't enough for its opponents to know that same-sex couples are largely excluded from the rights and privileges extended to married people, even by the highest law of the land. Even civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal beneficiary status are controversial, and as if to highlight their separate but hardly equal status, laws providing such limited legal alternatives to marriage routinely exclude opposite-sex couples like me and my partner. I don't dream of getting married anymore, and it's largely because of laws like you.

Love,
-Tracy

Started 23 February 2005, posted 4 May 2005, updated 20 October 2005. Title abridged 1 December 2011.

2. 2004

Dear 2004,

Goodbye. I know, I know, technically you've been gone a week and a half, but I only got around to the traditional New Year's Day meal of blackeyed peas and collards on Sunday, and anyway, you're still on my mind.

I want to say you were a pretty good year, but I can't exactly ignore the fact that you ended pretty poorly. I mean, first there was that stupid U.S. presidential election --- that wasn't very 21st century, was it? I hope not. (In fact, it was a pretty bad election year overall for the U.S., but I've got other letters to write about that.) And then there was the South Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster, eclipsing ever so much other news both good and bad. We're all going to have to wait and see, of course, but I think that last is most likely to put you in the history books, which is a bummer, to put it mildly.

Personally, ignoring the troubles of the world, I did all right in 2004. My partner and I bought a house, for one thing, and I'm still loving it into this new year. Also I held a job for an entire calendar year, January through December, something I'd never done before. Not a full-time job, but then again I don't really want one of those. And sure, it isn't a job even remotely related to my pricey college education, but so far it's a hell of a lot more fun than any job I've had that did relate to all that schooling and stress. Hrm. A hint of bitterness there, something to think and probably write about, but not in this letter; it's way off-topic.

Back to 2004: I began and ended the year in the company of good friends! My friends are awesome, no two ways about it. I got a piano! I started a garden! I lived with people and cats that I love! Despite all of these good, exclamation-point-worthy things, I was still prone to fits of severe depression! Okay, that last was a sarcastic exclamation point. Back to you, 2004.

Is it even fair to judge a year by its events? I suppose they're really all I've got, and what I'll remember the year by, which in itself is a kind of judgment, memory being selective and all. Besides, it's not like I'm blaming the events on the year; that's almost as pointless as a writing project based on letters that can't get replies. But enough with the self-referential cuteness.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment of 2004 was the fact that I didn't do anything lasting and creative. My job throughout the year was playing with food, and I made a lot of awesomely tasty things outside of work, but I didn't really get any writing done. I did, however, get the idea of writing letters, even letters I couldn't send, so at least you helped me find the seeds of something, even if I didn't get it started until 2005. For that, 2004, I thank you.

Love,
-Tracy

idea: 14 December 2004, writing: 11 January 2005, posting 18 January 2005, last update 6 June 2014