49. Global Climate Change

Dear global climate change,

I believe in you. Really. Kind of a lot. You don't have to keep proving yourself over and over on my account, especially not with freaky disastrous weather, please.

Is Bangkok such a hotbed of climate deniers as to be in any way deserving of the wreckage you've inflicted there recently? It's a lovely city! Not unlike Monterosso, in northern Italy! When did anyone there ever do anything to offend you? Now my former classmate Christine has gone from writing a dreamy story about gastrotouristic entrepreneurship to documenting the damage from storms and mudslides on her new home in the Cinque Terre. Harsh! (And, yes, I am writing you in a public forum in part to circulate Christine's blog, which includes links to ways people can help out her flood-ravaged region, because thinking about it too long gets me all overwhelmed so I don't know what else to do).

I'll grant that it was nice of you to back down Hurricane Irene until she was just a tropical storm by the time she got to New York City on my birthday. For all everybody's whining we still got in a good round of practice on how to be super-prepared for future extreme weather events, so you were practically performing a civil service. On the other hand, did you have to go and shut down large chunks of Vermont? Was that really necessary?

On a more lighthearted note, I'll grant that it's unfortunate how so many people call you "global warming," when that's an oversimplification and "global weirding" is a much better term (more fun, too!) That's still hardly any reason to snow all over the northeast United States in October, when there's still leaves on trees all over the place, so the weight of "wintry mix" (worst precipitation ever!) breaks extra bonus branches which in bring down turn power lines and more. I mean, I hate this rhetorical device as much as anyone, but: think of the children! You pull these shenanigans on the night before Halloween, for monkeys' sake? Just listen to this sob story from a 10-year-old in the suburbs:

When I found out Halloween was canceled, I was so bummed; it was the worst day ever... I went over to my grandparents’ house in New Milford because they were, like, the only people on the planet who had power. But we still didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. There were too many trees and wires all over the place. So I sat there on the couch and did nothing. I said, "I can’t believe it’s Halloween and I’m sitting on a couch!" This is an outrage!

Ok, I mostly couldn't resist quoting that, because it cracked me up, and I needed the laugh after all that other bad news. I hope that little girl believes in you now, but I promise, I know you're real. You kind of scare the crap out of me any time I think about you too hard, and I don't know what else to say except that I know you can't read this but I'm putting these ideas out in the world to share my hope that people will get better at organizing to be resilient to your effects and maybe even prevent future disasters. That's my hope.

Love,
-Tracy

Published 6 November 2011, last updated 6 June 2014

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.

40. Passive Aggressiveness

Dear passive aggressiveness,

Bite me.

Oh wait, you won't, because then you wouldn't be passive anymore, now would you?

Love,
-Tracy

Started 14 November 2006, last updated 1 December 2006, oh so very to be continued. Title abridged 1 December 2011.

23. Cars Parked in the Bike Lane

Dear cars parked in the bike lane,

Because of you, I used to wish for stickers that said, "I park in bike lanes! It's illegal, dangerous, and rude!" On good days, I'd imagine such stickers made with some kind of easily removable glue, and I'd promise myself that I'd only put them on glass. On bad days, I'd wish they were made with marine epoxy, for extra permanence and property damage. Sometimes I'd leave angry little notes on your windshields, when I had the time to stop, and little bits of paper to write on. But recently, I've had a change of heart.

Clearly, if you're parked in the bike lane, it must mean that your driver is involved in some kind of emergency. (In fact, some of your drivers are wise in the ways of using your emergency lights at these times, and I'm thankful for that, if not the fact that I still have to swerve precariously out into traffic to pass an illegally placed vehicle.) Still, from now on, whenever I encounter someone in a car parked in the bike lane, I'm going to stop and solicitously offer my assistance. I know a little first aid, and I'd be more than happy to call for help, even if it means ringing doorbells in a residential neighborhood until I find somebody who's willing to lend me a phone. I've almost been hit by police cars while trying to avoid bike lane parking jobs like you, so I'm pretty sure our local cops don't care about this problem, but we can always hope for a better response to an emergency call, right? There's really only one way to find out!

I will miss the petty satisfaction of kicking your car doors from the street as I pass, risking life and limb because your drivers were too inconsiderate to find a safe and legal place to stop. Those drivers always gave me the best shocked looks, like deer in headlights, only more offended. But no more. Now they will give me shocked looks when I try to be helpful. And I guess I still want those stickers.

Love,
-Tracy

started 7 November 2004, first posted 20 January 2005, updated 11 March 2009, after reading this lovely comic here. Title abridged 1 December 2011.

7. Restaurant Customers

Dear restaurant customers,

You may or may not already know this, but there's a good chance that the last meal you ate out was cooked by someone like me: someone who, without even knowing you, personally hates your guts.

Okay, so that's not exactly true. Most of you are probably pretty cool, but some of you are such whiny bitches that they make the rest of you look bad. For instance, some whiny bitches waste time and money by sending servers back and forth to the kitchen to ask questions instead of simply reading the menu. The ones who don't read the menu are among my favorites. "I didn't know this had bacon in it" when that's the first ingredient listed among the fillings in an omelet? We get to deal with you bastards, and you're why I can never be a server because at least in the kitchen you probably can't hear me cursing your mothers. In fact, I think I hate you extra on behalf of the floor staff, who aren't allowed to cuss and throw things nearly as much as I am back in the kitchen. The servers don't seem to believe me when I say I could never do their job, but it's true. I would laugh at stupid customers constantly. I know part of why you people come out to dinner is to have someone else take care of you, but that doesn't include remembering the details of your diet or reading the menu for you. Nor does it mean putting up with your shit when you're having a bad day, especially if you don't tip well. Waitstaff are simply not paid well enough to pretend they're your best friend, or your mom, or your shrink. But back to me in the kitchen.

I'm not really trying to write this letter for you customers who are good enough to know your dietary requirements and pay attention to the menu descriptions of food, and order carefully based on what you know you can and will eat, and make small changes before the kitchen's already started your order (more on sending plates back in a bit). Even people who, before ordering, send servers back to make sure a given food doesn't contain an allergen or whatever are okay in the grand scheme of things. I'm fine with "I'm lactose intolerant; please hold the cheese and sour cream"; in fact when I see orders come back asking for no cheese, I check for other possible trouble ingredients in the item because it would be really rude to accidentally put mayo on a vegan's soyburger, especially when the new menu's got a typo so it looks like the avocado burger doesn't have mayo on it. But ultimately we have a menu for a reason; it describes what the kitchen is set up to produce. If we wanted you to make shit up, we'd just give a list of ingredients and tell you to go hog wild. But it would slow service down even more than you people who put back nonstandard orders ("No toast, no home fries, substitute three strips of bacon and a side of sausage links? I can probably get you a whole dead pig, you Fatkins freak.") And we'd definitely have to charge you more for the privilege of writing your own menu, and then you'd probably complain about that instead. There's no winning with you people, is there?

Now. About sending back a plate. It's one thing if I made a mistake; most of the time it'll end up becoming somebody's employee meal for the shift and I'll remake your food correctly at no charge. But if you didn't read the menu right, or better yet you changed your mind about what you wanted after the food got to your table, then that's your mistake and it cost us money. It probably cost us more money than we'll make on your whole party, unless you ordered some really expensive drinks. And that's just ingredients. We're not talking about the time it cost to send the server back and forth, and for the kitchen to remake the order. And then of course there's the karmic cost of all the hate you've generated, which is pretty huge.

Long story short (too late!), part of going out to eat is that you have to trust the people cooking your food to do their job, not second-guess their every move. If you're so particular about your food that you don't trust the kitchen to make it right, you're in the wrong restaurant, or maybe you shouldn't even be going out to eat when clearly you could do better for yourself cooking at home.

Love,
-Tracy

P.S. Tip your servers well or be destroyed.

started 18 January 2005, published 28 January 2005, last updated 8 September 2013 (just formatting on that last).

5. U.S.A.

Dear United States of America,

So as of today, George W. Bush is sworn in as President, and even cynical little me has to admit he was probably elected this time around. At least this time we didn't have to get the Supreme Court involved, right? That's got to count for something, right? Okay, I'm grasping at straws here.

I've been meaning to write you a letter since November 2004, of course, when the election happened and I couldn't bring myself to call it a re-election, but I also couldn't bear to think that we averaged 70,000 votes worth of fraud per state this time around. Of course, most of my letters started out, "Dear U.S.A., what the fuck?" and didn't get much more eloquent from there. It was the popular vote that really turned my stomach. I mean, I was glad it matched the Electoral College results for a change, not that I particularly like the Electoral College, but that's a topic for another letter. But G.W.B. didn't win the popular vote in 2000, and carried on like it was a landslide anyway, so the thought of what he and his team would do with even a slim majority was pretty sick-making. So was the thought that a majority of people cast "Please sir, can I have some more?" votes, and wondering what the hell was going on in their minds, and feeling like an alien maybe a little more than usual even. Also I really didn't like the thought that people with opinions and ideas like mine (and a lot of people with opinions and ideas a lot less extreme than mine, for that matter) were going to be thorougly ignored for another four years. I wrote about wanting to leave the country, like a lot of people did when post-election despair was strongest, but then I found, to my surprise, that some parts of me actually identify with you after all.

I've always been something of a foreigner here, from the fact that I was born with dual nationality and grew up speaking two languages, to the fact that my family didn't go to church. On the other hand, I always had the reassuring knowledge that there's another country I could easily call home if I so chose, even if as I got older I gradually learned that the Netherlands was not the land of gifts and unconditional love --- that was just my grandparents' house, which happens to be in the Netherlands. Still, the growing-up realization that I would probably never fully fit into either country didn't particularly make me like the United States any better. So why was I suddenly discovering in myself this sudden refusal to leave?

Part of it was just stubbornness, and the knowledge that if everybody like me left the U.S.A. it would make the administration's job that much easier. Part of it was the fact that damn it, my house is here. But to my everlasting surprise, there was more.

Dear United States of America, you're my country, too. I may be a second-class citizen in a lot of ways: I'm a woman, sure, and to make matters worse I'm a woman who's had an abortion. I'm an atheist, I'm a foreigner, and I'm a queer. But despite all those things, I was born here, and that makes this my country even if I don't always like it, and I'm not going to cut and run just yet. I've made a list of things that would make me leave: another war, one that threatened to draft my partner; a national law against same-sex marriage; a national law making abortion illegal. Even the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court might not be enough to make me leave you, U.S.A., because if Roe went down I'd have work to do, making sure that women in states banning abortion had ways of getting to free states. I might join a new Underground Railroad if that's what it took to help keep women from dying from unsafe illegal abortions again, okay? And (I know this is getting off topic and it isn't even addressed to all of you) shut the hell up about abortion being dangerous and traumatic, because 1) it's still safer than childbirth and 2) I for one am living proof that they're not going to leave every woman who has one crying and wishing for the child they could have had, assuming they stayed safe and healthy and didn't miscarry. Okay, I can get back to my main point now.

Long term, I'm worried about my ability to keep living here, United States of America, because the writing on the wall seems to be that we might soon be paying taxes only to support international imperialism instead of to take care of our citizens. Call me a socialist if you want, but I'm not particularly interested in being ruled by a government that thinks guns are more important than feeding and sheltering and providing for the health of its citizens. Maybe that makes me an anarchist, too. Whatever. My point, United States of America, is I'm still a part of you, even though I'm not a rich white Christian male imperialist capitalist bastard, which seems to be what we're stuck having in charge today. And for your information, I'm by far not the only non-white, non-rich, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, non-capitalist, non-imperialist motherfucker out here. I'm pretty sure we're the majority, even if your last election's popular vote didn't reflect that too well.

Have you noticed that I haven't once yet called you America? It's tempting, don't get me wrong; I want to quote that Ginsberg poem with all my heart, but that abbreviation happens to ignore the inhabitants of all the other countries on this continent and the one to the south, and that's pretty poor form if you ask me. Just a thought.

I'm running out of steam, so I'm going to finish this letter here and send it as is. Long story short, U.S.A., is "Howdy. I'm still here." For now, we're stuck with each other --- I hope we can play nice, because it turns out I don't want to take my ball and find a new home.

Love,
-Tracy

Started 2 November 2004, first posted 20 January 2005, last updated 6 June 2014.