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Author: Clio
Number Lines and the Empty Product
The “Empty Product” is the product of all numbers in a group of no numbers at all. To the uninitiated, this sounds like word salad. Mostly because it is: How can you multiply no values together? How does that even make any sense? And on one level, it really doesn’t: We need the Empty Product…
On the Correlation Between COVID Cases and Deaths
So, content warning: This is about COVID deaths. Someone tweeted about case counts correlated to Rep/Dem voting patterns by county showing that the GOP was literally killing its constituents, and someone else rebutted that cases aren’t correlated to deaths because only about one in seven people who test positive die. But a proper correlation would…
Mirrors, Windows, and Nonbinary Literature
A recent conversation about Jeff Garvin’s “Symptoms of Being Human” reminded me of the literary concept of mirrors and windows. Two of my favorite TikTokers are @finngerhardt and @mx.deran, and these two illustrate the concept well. The bulk of @finngerhardt’s TikToks are deliberate windows: The purpose is to educate cis folks about being allies to nonbinary people; these videos…
On Demi Lovato, Cancel Culture, and Fact Checking
So someone asked why Demi Lovato is so controversial and… I can’t tell. I feel like people take every little thing they say and twist it way out of proportion. They accepted a free trip to Israel and were excited about getting baptized in the River Jordan. This becomes: “Demi Lovato is a Zionist!” They…
The Sweet Tooth of Marine City
1 The five and dime where my parents bought my first typewriter is now a candy store that shares its name with a comic book series about the apocalypse, and that makes sense because I feel like I am a hybrid, half-human, half-alien, looking to be made whole, and I feel like it was there—in…
Learning to Breathe: Pronouns
I have come to dislike pronouns. That’s not quite true. I like the concept of pronouns. I was well inducted into the School of Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla. I see that it’s important to be able to refer to a person without having to use, or even know, their name. But English, like its Indo-European siblings, messed it…
Pronouns
I don’t want pronouns that tell you I’m nonbinary. I want pronouns that tell you I’m a person. I want pronouns that don’t remind me of my culture’s need to bucket everyone into “man” and “woman” the moment we look at someone. Gender is important, but only because we’ve made it so. We’re obsessed with…
On “transgendered” (offensive word)
I was watching a Jammidodger video this morning and had a realization that another* problem with the term “transgendered men” (and “… women”) is that it allows for two interpretations. If you believe that transgender men are men, then what does it mean to have been “transgendered”? It would presumably mean that, while you have…
coffee
coffee smells likemy father’s church:stale and detached andemotionally out of reach coffee burns my nostrilswith the memory of abandonmentof another late nightat workbecause he can’t stand her eitherhe can’t be around her eithershe crushes his souland reminds him that he failed as a partneras a parentas a protectoras a provider so he hides at workwhere…