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Books: Writing Fiction during an Implausible Time

I write legal and technical materials professionally, AND I recreationally write a range of other things. Blogs like this, web pages, a surprising number of letters and postcards, diaries, notes for stories, and fiction. Writing is something I have always enjoyed, and I am always writing something, at least for my own satisfaction.

As with so many other fiction writers, the current pandemic has been a wake up call that the popular fictional narratives we have around plagues are not accurate. Yes, in nearly every popular movie, there is a warning from scientists that goes unheeded, and there is needless suffering. Yes, there are rumors and superstitions and panics, and we see those in films and playing out similarly in real life.

Yet, the level of denial visible in real life in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic is shocking. People are devoting significant time to announcing that the pandemic is: a hoax, a domestic conspiracy (despite its global nature), a foreign plot (it is somehow not real but also a foreign bioweapon), a domestic power grab (preventing illness is oppression?), a disease carried by outsiders (again, somehow it is not real but also something strangers bring? WHAT?), something that isn’t real so they flout precautions, something that isn’t real so they sabotage the medicines (but if it isn’t real, why bother sabotaging medicines?), a situation where the vaccine is free but a counterfeit card that falsely claims you were vaccinated costs $400 (so it would be cheaper to go along with the treatment than pretend you did), a private sector plot to embed microchips into people (for generally unexplained purposes, though when they are explained, it always involves something like the location your smartphone already records, which means an additional device would not be necessary)… In this bizarre current reality, the pandemic is somehow BOTH a situation where precautions against catching the illness are banned by a governor AND a situation where that governor’s state requires federal emergency supplies of hospital ventilators and monoclonal antibody treatments for the seriously ill, which the governor suggests people somehow self-medicate with for this illness he says isn’t serious?

If I had written ANY of these things into a fiction story, my writing would have been rejected as implausible. The publishers would have told me that people are not that stupid, and that I should feel bad about making my fellow Americans look so ridiculous.

-I mean, really.

I want people in my fiction writing to be both realistic and smart, but it feels like I can only have one of those two.

I am inspired to post this after reading the tweet above, about news that a sci-fi movie has been interpreted as reality by the anti-vaccine-far-right (who failed to even grasp basic details about the movie they are basing their nonsensical conspiracies on). Their nonsense has gotten so much press that the screenwriter for this remade sci-fi movie had to make public statements emphasizing that it is fiction:

I Am Legend screenwriter dismisses anti-vax claims based on film’s plot
A sci-fi writer hits back at unfounded rumours that Covid jabs turn people into zombies.

(It is still strange to read something on Twitter and later find the tweets I read subsequently inspired news articles…)

The past several years have inspired many discussions about the death of parody in the face of an absurd reality, but the current absurd reality also is killing off the premise that the vast majority of people could consistently act intelligently. Maybe we could get to half, or nearly half, but not an overwhelming majority.

I want a future where people ARE actually intelligent. I want to WRITE futures in which people are intelligent!

I suppose my defense for stories with predominantly intelligent populations will be: yes, but I told you this is fiction.

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List: My Twelve Inch Record Collection

I’m organizing some of my things for a construction project, and one of those things is my Long Playing Record (LP) collection. My first actual music “album” was an audiocassette of Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog, and the original Sony Walkman made cassettes preferable, so I could take music with me on long transit rides (and somehow, all transit rides were long back then!).

However, records were… special. You would plop down in front of your home stereo and listen to records to listen to records, not just as background music for other things! It was a wonderful activity, and I had some enormous headphones (which surely belonged to my father) with a spiral cord that would attach me to the stereo for HOURS. But it was also good to have friends over to listen to records together.

I don’t buy records anymore, in this era of buying online and having music on many devices — who would have thought I would listen on tiny Bose earbuds to my music ON MY PHONE (!?!?!?) — but I still enjoy my collection.

I’m sharing a list of my 12″ records sorted by year recorded. This will tell you about my age (eek), and also when my core record-buying years were. Even during those years, my audio cassette purchases were high at the beginning, and my CD purchases overlapped at the end, so this isn’t a complete reflection of my music buying at the time. It does reflect music I took the time to enjoy at home, or took a risk on, since records were reasonably priced (and were what I spent my allowance and job income on). This list includes LPs (long playing records), EPs (extended playing records – collections of 2 or more songs), 12″ singles (songs too long to fit on a 45 single song record, usually because they have been remixed), and various special variations of these (versions released in other countries, picture disks, etc.).

My 12″ Records Sorted by Year of Release, then Artist Name ( 122 Items)

  • 1972
    • Bowie, David – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars — RCA — 1972
  • 1977
    • Bowie, David – Heroes — RCA — 1977
    • Elvis Costello – My Aim Is True — Stiff — 1977
  • 1978
    • Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Armed Forces — Columbia — 1978
  • 1979
    • B-52’s, The – The B-52’s — Warner Bros — 1979
  • 1981
    • Duran Duran – Careless Memories 12″ — Tritec — 1981
    • Duran Duran – Nite Romantics (Japan Edition) — EMI — 1981
    • Idol, Billy – Don’t Stop — Chrysalis — 1981
  • 1982
    • Adam Ant – Friend or Foe — Epic — 1982
    • Clash, The – Combat Rock — CBS — 1982
    • Culture Club – Kissing to be Clever — Virgin — 1982
    • Duran Duran – Carnival (Japan Edition) — Tritec — 1982
    • Duran Duran – Rio 12″ — EMI — 1982
    • Foreigner – Records — Atlantic — 1982
    • Madness – The Rise and Fall – — Stiff — 1982
    • Men At Work – Cargo — Columbia — 1982
    • Depeche Mode – See You (Extended Version) — Mute — 1982
  • 1983
    • Culture Club – Colour By Numbers — Virgin — 1983
    • Def Leppard – Pyromania — Polygram — 1983
    • Depeche Mode – Construction Time Again — Sire — 1983
    • Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know? 12″ — Tritec — 1983
    • Duran Duran – New Moon on Monday 12″ — EMI — 1983
    • Duran Duran – Seven and the Ragged Tiger — EMI — 1983
    • Duran Duran – Union of the Snake 12″ — Tritec — 1983
    • Echo and The Bunnymen – EP Recorded Live a tthe Royal Albert Hall — Sire — 1983
    • Fixx, The – Reach the Beach — MCA — 1983
    • Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Relax 12″ — ZTT — 1983
    • Gene Loves Jezebel – Promise — Beggar’s Banquet — 1983
    • Idol, Billy – Billy Idol — Chrysalis — 1983
    • Idol, Billy – Rebel Yell — Chrysalis — 1983
    • Lauper, Cyndi – She’s So Unusual — CBS — 1983
    • Midnight Oil – 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 — Columbia — 1983
    • New Order – Blue Monday 12″ — Qwest — 1983
    • Tears for Fears – The Hurting — Polygram — 1983
    • Total Coelo – I Eat Cannibals 12″ — Chrysalis — 1983
    • U2 – Under a Blood Red Sky Live 12″ — Warner Bros — 1983
    • U2 – War — Island — 1983
    • Yanks – Only Lovers Left Alive — Orb — 1983
  • 1984
    • Alphaville – Forever Young — Atlantic — 1984
    • Aztec Camera – Knife — Sire — 1984
    • Big Country – Steeltown — Phonogram — 1984
    • Bowie, David – Tonight — EMI — 1984
    • Culture Club – Waking Up with the House on Fire — Virgin — 1984
    • Depeche Mode – Some Great Reward — Sire — 1984
    • Duran Duran – Arena — Capitol — 1984
    • Duran Duran – The Reflex 12″ Picture Disk — Tritec — 1984
    • Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Two Tribes (Annihilation) 12″ — ZTT — 1984
    • Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Welcome to the Pleasuredome — Island — 1984
    • General Public – All The Rage — IRS — 1984
    • Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Junk Culture — Virgin — 1984
    • Simple Minds – Sparkle In The Rain — A&M — 1984
    • Springfield, Rick – Beautiful Feelings — Polygram — 1984
    • Talk Talk – It’s My Life — EMI — 1984
    • Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense — Sire — 1984
    • Time Zone – World Destruction 12″ — OAO — 1984
    • U2 – The Unforgettable Fire — Island — 1984
    • Wham! – Make It Big — CBS — 1984
    • Yanks – Made in the States — DTI — 1984
  • 1985
    • Cult, The – Love — Sire — 1985
    • Depeche Mode – Black Celebration — Sire — 1985
    • Depeche Mode – Catching Up with Depeche Mode — Mute — 1985
    • Elvis Costello and the Attractions – The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions — Columbia — 1985
    • Hooters – Nervous Night — CBS — 1985
    • INXS – Listen Like Thieves — Atlantic — 1985
    • Midnight Oil – Red Sails in the Sunset — CBS — 1985
    • New Order – Low Life — Qwest — 1985
    • New Order – The Perfect Kiss 12″ — Qwest — 1985
    • Oingo Boingo – Dead Man’s Party — MCA — 1985
    • Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Crush — A&M / Virgin — 1985
    • REM – Fables of The Reconstruction — IRS — 1985
    • Scritti Politti – Cupid & Psyche 85 — Warner Bros — 1985
    • Wire Train – Between Two Words — CBS — 1985
    • Yello – Oh Yeah 12″ — Mercury — 1985
  • 1986
    • Alphaville – Afternoons in Utopia — Atlantic — 1986
    • Blow Monkeys, The – Animal Magic — RCA — 1986
    • Crowded House – Crowded House — Capitol / EMI — 1986
    • Damned, The – Anything — MCA — 1986
    • Flock of Seagulls, A – The Best of A Flock of Seagulls — Jive — 1986
    • Gabriel, Peter – So — Geffen — 1986
    • Kraftwerk – Electric Cafe — Warner Bros — 1986
    • REM – Life’s Rich Pageant — IRS — 1986
    • Shriekback – Big Night Music — Island — 1986
    • Smithereens, The – Especially For You — Enigma — 1986
    • The The – Infected 12″ — CBS — 1986
    • XTC – Skylarking — Geffen — 1986
  • 1987
    • 10,000 Maniacs – In My Tribe — Elektra / Asylum — 1987
    • Bolshoi, The – Lindy’s Party — RCA — 1987
    • Cabaret Voltaire – Here To Go 12″ Remix — EMI — 1987
    • Cult, The – Electric — Sire — 1987
    • Cure, The – Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me — Elektra / Asylum — 1987
    • Depeche Mode – Music for the Masses — Sire — 1987
    • Ferry, Bryan – Bete Noire — Warner Bros — 1987
    • INXS – Kick — Atlantic — 1987
    • Isaak, Chris – Chris Isaak — Warner Bros — 1987
    • Midnight Oil – Diesel and Dust — Columbia — 1987
    • New Order – Substance — Qwest — 1987
    • Oingo Boingo – Boi-Ngo — MCA — 1987
    • Pop Will Eat Itself – Box Frenzy — Chapter 22 / Rough Trade — 1987
    • REM – Dead Letter Office — IRS — 1987
    • REM – Document — IRS — 1987
    • Replacements, The – Pleased to Meet Me — Sire — 1987
    • Silencers, The – A Letter From St. Paul — BMG — 1987
    • Smiths, The – Louder Than Bombs — Sire — 1987
    • Smiths, The – Strangeways, Here We Come — Sire — 1987
    • Squeeze – Bablylon and On — A&M – — 1987
    • U2 – The Joshua Tree — Warner Bros — 1987
    • Wire Train – Ten Women — CBS — 1987
  • 1988
    • Beatnik Beach – Beatnik Beach — Atlantic — 1988
    • Book of Love – Lullaby — Sire — 1988
    • Chapman, Tracey – Tracey Chapman — Elektra / Asylum — 1988
    • Church, The – Starfish — Arista — 1988
    • Dead Milkmen, The – Beelzebubba — Enigma — 1988
    • Erasure – The Innocents — Sire — 1988
    • Kon Kan – I Beg Your Pardon 12″ — Atlantic — 1988
    • Morrissey – Viva Hate — Sire — 1988
    • Palmer, Robert – Heavy Nova — EMI / Manhattan — 1988
    • REM – Green — Warner Bros — 1988
    • Smithereens, The – Green Thoughts — Enigma/Capitol — 1988
    • Talking Heads – Naked — Sire — 1988
  • 1989
    • Figures on a Beach – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet 12″ — Sire — 1989
    • Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine — TVT — 1989
    • Replacements, The – Don’t Tell a Soul — Sire — 1989

(I do have more records than this, but these are the ones I’m taking responsibility for.)

I’ll (eventually) post a separate list of my audio CDs eventually, and perhaps create a “featurette” page with an inventory of my physical music collection as a whole, organized by artist, especially if I can find one of my old ’80s inventories to fill in the cassette gaps.

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Book: Judy Chicago: New Views by the National Museum of Women in the Arts

This is a gorgeous cover, with the intrusive colored smoke encroaching on the title text. Just fantastic!

Judy Chicago: New Views
by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (U.S.)
published by Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., New York
2019

Judy Chicago’s works, especially her drawings and paintings, always appeal to me. She has a sense shading and gradation that is consistent across her materials, and her drawing compositions are just stunning. She is an artist I have always believed should be more famous, and the folks at the National Museum of Women in the Arts agree! They’ve created and published this excellent book.

There is a lot to appreciate about this volume. It includes works that are held privately, and so you are unlikely to have seen them; it includes details of works you may not have appreciated from a polite viewing distance in a museum, especially for her textile works; and the essays and interview are of exceptionally high quality – and are somehow at just the right length to leave you stimulated and wanting more.

I am personally thrilled to see images of her smoke and firework pieces, which had escaped me previously, but which I should see in larger form at the upcoming Judy Chicago retrospective at the San Francisco deYoung Museum, which opens later this month (August 2021).

I appreciate so much about her body of work. I especially appreciate: the consistency of her compositions across materials (from Prismacolor pencil to sprayed paints on different bases); her elegant use of ranges of color; her direct embrace of female imagery and feminist ideas; her compassion for the suffering of others (including animals), which she renders so skillfully across different media; her in depth, multi-year studies of materials (she enrolled in auto body shop classes, boatbuilding classes, and china painting classes) so she could execute her work at a high technical level; and her utilization and embrace of skilled collaborators to help her achieve some of her monumentally sized works.

While her work evolved in clear directions, I was surprised to be so delighted by some of her early paintings on car hoods, which I wouldn’t recognize has hers (based on later work), but which is charming and bold. The shapes she uses are nearly iconic.

This is an excellent book of very high quality by every measure, with a great selection of Chicago’s work, beautifully reproduced, presented in a well-organized fashion alongside thoughtful writing about her direction and commitment to her themes. I’m so glad I bought it, and feel more prepared to enjoy her forthcoming show!

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Book: Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
by Cathy O’Neil
published by Broadway Books (Penguin Random House), New York
2016 (afterward from 2017)

I’ve finally read this clear and well-organized book about the design of data-centric automation tools, and how their potential has been often squandered or misused. We can do so much better!

O’Neil is a math Ph.D. and professor who went into industry and was distressed at how proprietary algorithms are being used in potentially harmful real life situations without thoughtful oversight. The fact that technology is involved at all leads to something like blind faith from the businesses and organizations that apply it. She firmly believes algorithms CAN be used for good, but won’t under current approaches. You can’t have good outcomes if the goal is to make a quick buck, keep the approach secret, and never improve it! These tools are too often used in ways which only reinforce existing inequities.

Her examples are thoughtful and described in depth.

A major flaw in data automation is the use of proxy data, and I was glad to see this called out. How do you measure if someone is a good teacher, if they would be a good employee, if they should receive a good deal on your product, or if they are a risk to the community? Without a single, obvious thing to measure, people make stuff up that is easier to quantify, and then encode their wacky idea into an “objective” measurement that doesn’t really measure the subject at all. The wacky measurement is then obscured as proprietary secrets, and sold as as a product to businesses, who want answers cheaply more than they want accuracy. The less regulated the industry, the wackier some of the data and measurements become.

For example, good teaching is hard to measure, so instead the system may measure a change in test scores… but if the students were already getting all As, there is no improvement possible, so the teacher may be marked down, and not know why. Unscientific personality tests may be used to screen potential employees, or robots may just scan applicant resumes for keywords, without any real indication that those tools result in better employees.

Many of these approaches are NOT ready for real world use, but are used just the same. O’Neil cites the Michigan automated unemployment auditing system that falsely accused thousands of unemployment fraud, which destroyed livelihoods (and marriages), as a great example. That error is still playing out, and will play out in the courts for a long time, per this Detroit Free Press article: Judge: Companies can be sued over Michigan unemployment fraud fiasco by Paul Egan & Adrienne Roberts (March 26, 2021). To quote from the article, “The state has acknowledged that at least 20,000 Michigan residents — and possibly as many as 40,000 — were wrongly accused of fraud between 2013 and 2015 by a $47-million computer system, purchased from FAST, that the state operated without human supervision and with an error rate as high as 93%.” Officials blindly launched this system without human checks, because yaaay, technology?

As someone who keeps being asked by one credit agency about cars I’ve never owned and pet insurance I’ve never purchased, I know that we’ve already automated some data projects badly. O’Neil cites other professional data scientists who have proposed sensible industry standards, and she has additional, more specific suggestions on top of this.

I can hope that the popularity of this book, which was a NYT Bestseller, can push decision makers into making better, more ethical, more fair decisions as a result of her ideas.

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Life: An Unstructured Day

Yesterday was my first weekday with no appointments or work in AGES.

It was AMAZING.

I completed some chores in the morning, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, and then fled the fog belt to test some film in sunlight. I wandered! I had lunch at a restaurant! I had a beer! (How long has it been?) I enjoyed an iced matcha drink while sitting in the shade! I RODE A CABLE CAR! (Yes, they are back now, after a very long hiatus.) I took more than 17,000 steps!

Unstructured time without appointments or commitments can be so beautiful.

I have countless obligations, chores, and tasks to complete, but taking a day to enjoy myself was a great thing to do. I’m lucky to have chosen to do this, lucky to live here in the Bay Area (and SF in particular), and so very lucky to be in good enough health to freely wander on foot around San Francisco in my purposeful “spare” time.

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Climate Emergency Life: Smoke Forecasts

In easier times, we look at the weather forecasts before going out. With the climate crisis making itself more apparent, now now also check smoke forecasts! Our environmental agencies have modeling just for this, and it is smartphone-friendly.

I regularly use airnow.gov or fire.airnow.gov to know if I need to wear a particulate filtering mask. These services are provided by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Park Service (NPS), NASA, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and host of local agencies.

Fire and Smoke Map
In 2021, several features have been added to the information available when you click or tap a monitor or sensor icon. We’ve added a dashboard that gives you quick access to key information you can use to help plan your activities:

In recent days, the smoke coverage in satellite photos has been alarming, and sunlight has had a strangely yellow tinge to it. That’s is caused by high level smoke, but we also need to know if the smoke is close to the ground, because then we have to take precautions for our breathing and overall health. Waiting to smell it isn’t enough – it may come and go, and catch us unprepared.

The National Weather Service delivers on this surface smoke forecasting need!

I recommend following your local National Weather Service office on Twitter. Mine is NWS Bay Area, and they do a fantastic job!

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Food: Wheat nostalgia (2): steamed buns

STEAMED BUNS. I miss them. I crave them.

I haven’t had the little ones in many years, but the thought of them earlier today has me daydreaming about them. I spent too much time searching on the internet for a place that makes a gluten free version, and came up short.

The ones I like best are filled with stewed spinach or mustard greens (or both!). Yes, there are some good mushroom buns, but the ones with greens have such a fresh edge to them. There are larger ones sold in restaurants, but they are often strangely bland, and have too much dough relative to the filling (for structural reasons?).

I like them with a side sauce of Vietnam-style chili garlic paste mixed with soy sauce and just a little rice vinegar. Spicy, salty, and sour. A little sauce goes far on the absorbent buns.

I last ate them regularly more than a decade ago. I found a brand from China that was available frozen in a favorite local Chinese specialty market. (It was also my source for fresh lychees!) They were a great food to bring to pot lucks, as a few minutes in the microwave and a jar of home-mixed sauce would always get rave reviews. They were a great snack, too, and there were three vegan flavors I could get. (The vegan part is why I rarely got them in restaurants – most don’t bother with veggie versions.)

The internet is suggesting that I’ll need to make them from scratch if I want them, and that I’ll need many ingredients I don’t usually have on hand to do it (rice flour, tapioca flour, yeast, agave sugar(?)…), but the great thing about them was that someone else made them, and made many of them!

I miss you, spinach-stuffed steamed buns!

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Internet: Updates to my phone photo blog

When Google+ shut down, I migrated my posts over to my smartphone photo weblog (a Blogger blogspot site) with some fan-made software, and it seemed to go well enough… but it really didn’t. A hundred or more posts were just error symbols, and they’ve been that way since 2019, to my enduring (but mild) shame.

I’ve finally purged all the broken posts. I can hold my head up a little higher now.

Mobilelene
Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

It’s “just” phone photos and migrated link-based posts from Plus account, but I want it to be clean. It has more than 3,500 posts (even after all the deletions from the 2011 – 2019 plus posts that were merged in), and I’ve been working on it since 2008, so tidying up seemed like a small investment of time relative to what I’ve already put in!

(While reviewing the older posts, I learned that I’ve been taking photos of our antique streetcar collection for even longer than I remember. 🙂 I am so… Consistent. Predictable. Both.)

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Life: A Year of Cheerful Hair

During the pandemic, I decided to change a few things about how I was living, and one of them was my hair color. I had previously spent late 2019 and early 2020 trying to go a respectable shade of gunmetal gray, a color that looks very modern in architectural settings, and which would match nearly all of my black and gray clothes. But, for whatever reason, the gray never really stuck. The dyes were permanent and were being professionally applied by a real colorist, yet it always faded back to an ambiguous, ashy near-blonde that didn’t quite have its own name.

In March 2020, the pandemic ended professional salon hair color visits, and I was left to my own, not-fully-respectable devices. I noodled around a bit with gray, purple, and rose tints, some of which lasted a day, some of which stuck but didn’t stay true. I watched my roots grow out (and out, and out). I had to see my roots often, because I spent five hours daily on video calls for work, and I did not like what I saw. So, I decided to change direction. In August of 2020, I went pink, a color I had never seriously considered in the past. Pink hair. On ME, a middle-aged woman who showed visible signs of being cooped up indoors for too long. It seemed… unlikely to succeed.

September 2020 reflection in pink, with matching shirt and giant, noise-reducing headphones

And yet.

Pink hair inspired people to respond differently to me on video calls. They smiled more. They were more outgoing to me than they had been previously. When my employer was acquired, I met many people at the new parent company by video meeting, and it was fun to watch their faces change when my camera turned on. Yes, I was still a legal department representative, yes, we were going to discuss serious business, but their faces visibly brightened. The mood softened. They were professional, always, but also warmer than people usually are with legal department folks.

During the long, dark dread of the 2020 pandemic, that felt REALLY NICE.

2021 arrived, and as my hometown’s vaccination campaign succeeded and infection levels dropped, I left the house and learned that this cheerfulness toward me also happens in real life. Women say nice things to me every day I go out now. We don’t even need to be talking: I was smiling at a woman walking past with her dog, and she just said, “Yaaay, pink hair!” unexpectedly. I am awash in cheer and compliments, and it surprises me every time. It’s like I’m carrying a kitten on my head, or am dressed as a huggable mascot.

I’d already picked out my next color, but it won’t be as…soft, so perhaps I will stick with my friendly pastel pink (PINK! A color I didn’t own any clothes in until recently, and would not have been caught dead in during my youth!) for a while longer, so it can continue to soften my way as I readjust to the world.

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