The World That's Coming

In our search for appropriately mindless, entertaining post-work, post-getting kid in bed nighttime viewing, we’ve arrived at binging seasons of the dearly-departed America’s Next Top Model, and, man. Let me tell you.

How we ended up here was, admittedly, somewhat skewed. A couple of weeks ago, there was an article somewhere on the internet — I saw it excerpted at length on Twitter, and unfortunately can’t remember where it actually came from; Insider, maybe? — that purported to be an expose of just how shittily the show had been run, how poorly it treated everyone involved aside from the show’s host and creator Tyra Banks, and just generally the way in which ANTM was, in fact, the worst of reality television. Chloe and I saw that and thought, as you do, we should watch old seasons.

(I’d say, don’t judge, but it’s fine; you probably should.)

Here’s the thing: I remember, vaguely, watching some of the show when it was airing — I love reality TV, after all — but I was never really a fan, for whatever reason. It seemed over the top, but fine if you liked that kind of thing, if that doesn’t seem too dismissive. Dear reader, I was so, so wrong. America’s Next Top Model is a whole special level of trash television.

It’s not that it’s tacky, although it is, nor that it’s geared towards generating the most amount of interpersonal drama possible between its contestants, even though that’s also the case. (There’s definitely a line to be drawn between the editing manipulation here and the far more successful evolution of the same ideas on something like Below Deck.) It’s not even the shocking ego on display from Tyra Banks, and the way in which everyone else on the show seeks to stroke that ego, shamelessly, for attention and approval, even though, wooooooooooo, that is shocking and hilarious at the same time.

More than anything for me, it’s how cheap the show feels, on every level. Even in the latter seasons when it’s been a hit for more than a decade and produced international spin-offs, Top Model has the air of a show being produced on a shoestring by people promising that, as soon as the check clears, everyone will get paid, really. The tension between the self-declared glamor of the show and the clearly limited budget and effort spent on bringing said show to the screen is, repeatedly, breathtaking and hilarious. It’s impossible to look away from.

I couldn’t not tell you why this happens to be the case, but in the last few days I’ve found myself wanting to write something entirely different from what I normally do; I don’t know if it’s simply needing to take a mental break, or wanting to stretch new muscles or some combination of the two, but it’s been a running theme in my head recently.

Specifically, I’ve wondered what it would be like to write guides to everyday tasks. You know the kinds of things: step-by-step methodologies to things that we all do every day without even really thinking about it, to help someone less skilled in whatever task get better at it. Every morning, as I make tea for myself and Chloe, I think to myself, I wonder what it would be like to write a guide to making a good cup of tea.

Of course, it’s the kind of idea doomed to failure; I couldn’t write something entirely dryly without breaking character, I’m pretty sure — nor, to be honest, something that I’d want to not break character at least once — but also, it’s something that I suspect I’d lose interest in quickly because there are inevitably going to be other things demanding my attention that, you know, pay my bills, and that’s something that tends to win out in the competition for my affections. (I’m so mercenary.)

And yet. And yet.

I want to write something like, if only there were more hours in the day, but the honest fact is, if there were more hours in the day, it would be great to use them on things that don’t involve me sitting in front of a computer or an iPad. What I really mean, I think, is that I occasionally (more than occasionally) wish there was more space in my brain to do things that remind me that writing was a hobby and one I loved, before writing became my job. Even if it means writing instructions for someone to make a cup of tea.

There is, I’m sure, a specific word to describe the feeling I had yesterday when standing outside in a t-shirt and pants — no sweater, no jacket, no hat — basking in the sun and actually, honestly, swear-to-god feeling the warmth of the sun on my head and shoulders and realizing that, maybe really honestly, the winter is coming to an end.

In younger days, I embraced the cold and the overcast; sometimes, I even appreciated the rain, although growing up in the west coast of Scotland, that wasn’t something I did that often. The summer and, more importantly, the idea of enjoying sunshine and warmth was something that I had definitively decided was Something That Other People Did. Not for me, the t-shirt weather of even San Francisco in the summer; I’d ride the bus downtown to work and grimace at the sun in the sky, squinting when it got in my eyes.

Portland, then, felt like a godsend when I arrived. The weather here was just like I’d grown up with, after all, with actual seasons after almost a decade of generic, unchanging Bay Area pleasantness. Within weeks of getting here, there was a snowstorm that I was in no way prepared for, and I was thrilled to freeze my backside off upon discovering that.

Maybe it’s just the increasing length of the winters that have changed that — I’m fairly sure that March marked the changeover from winter to spring when I first got here,  although that might be an entirely faulty memory at work — or simply the reality of getting older and less tolerant of atmospheric conditions that are, let’s be blunt, uncomfortable and not entirely enjoyable to anyone with a lick of sense. Nonetheless, just as seasons change, so has my response to said seasons. I may not be becoming a summer person just yet, but I’m at least making it to spring.

That said, it’s gone from high 70s and sunny yesterday to low 50s and blustery today, so perhaps the weather is trying to tell me not to get too comfortable just yet.

It’s one of those weeks where I feel as if I’m preparing for a lot of things, on the work front. I’m still doing a lot of things, but most of them are behind the scenes and not for public consumption — a chunk of this week is actually being spent helping out someone else on their project, entirely behind the scenes, which feels like double-plus not for public consumption — which is something that always leaves me filled with a strange nervous energy, as if failing to produce something that’ll be read by the internet at large is an actual problem that I need to correct as quickly as possible.

Objectively, I know that’s not true, of course; there’s nothing in any of my current contracts that suggests that I have to produce a certain amount of material to be published on a daily schedule. (I do, however, have a lot of deadlines on a number of things to write over the next few weeks; eight or so, by last count, which means that I’ll have to buckle down and make things happen sooner rather than later. But still.) And yet, I’m in recovery for being an internet writer who grew up in an era where daily publication was a must to stay alive and keep a career going. Years later, I still feel as if something has gone wrong if I’m not putting my name out there, day after day.

I assume there’s some kind of study that’s been done on this by someone, just as I assume that I’m not the only person who’s gone through this. After all, there are generations of writers, online and print, who’ve transitioned from daily deadlines to something more relaxed; with that many going before me, there’s no chance that I’m the only one who’s experiencing these kinds of jitters. In fact, maybe I could look into that and then turn that into a story to write for someone. That could work, couldn’t it?

I was talking to Chloe earlier about what we described as our shared inability to accept compliments, but the more we talked, the more it dawned on both of us that the problem was, perhaps, that neither of us were particularly good at even recognizing when we were being complimented in the first place.

The conversation started upon seeing mutual friends take credit for comments that weren’t, necessarily, compliments aimed in their direction, all the while taking great pains to ensure that everyone knew just how humble they really were, of course. It was something that amused both of us, not only in how obvious their egos were, but in the fact that both of us realized quickly that we lacked whatever DNA we needed to do the same thing.

Instead, both of us have something that could, at best, be described as an anti-ego: something that hears a comment about us and immediately assumes, if not the worst, then at least the most bland and generic. We could both receive compliments that seemed on the face of them to be sincere and wholehearted, and instead either hear them as half-hearted attempts in the name of being polite, or else subtle sarcasm intended to suggest that we’re actually the very opposite of whatever was actually being said.

Such an anti-ego can be both a blessing and a curse — although mostly the latter. There is the upside of it preventing either of us from getting a big head, which is always a preferred outcome… but then there’s the fact that neither of us are particularly gracious in the face of people who genuinely are trying to compliment us, because we simply don’t quite believe what they’re saying. Instead, we both just have developed the impulse to mumble semi-gracious thanks before desperately trying to change the subject as quickly as possible.

Thinking about it, it’s good that neither of us have won any kind of award. Just imagine how bad the acceptance speech would be.

I miss eating out.

That’s not a euphemism; with one single exception, I haven’t eaten at a restaurant or cafe or coffee shop or, basically, anywhere that isn’t in the same place where I’ve been sleeping since lockdown started in March 2020, and it’s been long enough that I can admit to feeling really kind of strange about that now.

It’s not that I’ve not eaten food prepared by anyone outside of my immediate family in all that time; I’ve ordered more than my fair share of takeout in that time — what can I say? I really like both fancy American fusion food and McDonalds, and see no real reason to deny myself either as long as I can afford it and don’t overindulge — and eaten some pre-packaged snacks and frozen meals across the past 24 months, as well. But I haven’t actually eaten a meal anywhere that isn’t my house.

(Oddly enough, as I’m writing this, I’m wracking my brain to imagine if I’ve even eaten anything as much as a candy bar outside the house in all that time, and I don’t think I have. That can’t be right, and yet, I have the horrible feeling that it is.)

We’re at the post-lockdown point now where everyone seems to have just… accepted the pandemic as a fact of life and an acceptable risk, with seemingly everyone around me wandering around without masks and the various restaurants allowing sit-in custom again. I have to confess, I’m tempted to just throw caution to the wind and eat out for the first time in two years, just for the thrill of it. Imagine the decadence you’d be feeling!

Except… except, as I said before, there’s one exception to all of this: a birthday meal for a family member at a restaurant, last summer. For the entire meal, I felt anxious and nervous, as if this was the moment when COVID would get me once and for all. I could barely enjoy the food, or the company, the entire time.

Maybe I’ll stay in the house for now. But maybe I’ll order some food in, and pretend I’m being fancy, at the same time.

For the majority of my professional writing career, I’ve prided myself on the speed at which I work — an ability to basically sit down, start writing and get to the end of the piece in a surprisingly speedy time, with minimal need to re-read or re-work as much as possible. It’s been something that’s been remarked upon by editors and other writers, with no small amount of jealousy and admiration; hence my lack of modesty about it.

Something has happened in the last couple of months to change that, however. I suspect the change happened earlier than that — I have a feeling it’s closely related to the period of extended writing I did for a couple of long term projects last year, only one of which has come to any kind of fruition as yet — but whatever the timing and whatever the reason, I’ve become a fan of writing things ahead of deadline and leaving them alone overnight, before re-reading them the next day and making whatever changes necessary.

It’s not that I make that many changes the next day; more often than not, I change a couple of words in a vain attempt to get the word count down, or perhaps shift the order of a couple of sentences around. Instead, it’s become a confidence thing, where I find myself feeling far more comfortable just being able to re-approach the piece fresh and see where I’ve gone wrong. It’s a safety net, perhaps, but one I’ve come to rely upon with almost everything I’m writing, these days. (Blog posts aside, of course.)

It’s this safety net that’s had me rework pieces from scratch, knowing exactly what to do to fix them in next-to-no time; it’s the safety net that’s made me more confident in working for larger companies paying me larger amounts of money to write for them. Sure, it’s slowed me down some, but I’m nearing 50. Writing automatic prose is a young person’s game — and it’s not as if waiting one day is going to make a significant change in anyone’s run time, anyway.

It’s been a long winter, and no mistake. Even as I write this, the sky outside is still overcast and looking as if it’s going to piss down absolutely freezing rain any minute; that’s basically what it’s felt like since… the heatwave of August last year, perhaps…? That’s likely an overstatement, but almost certainly since early October, we’ve been gripped by some consistently terrible, cold weather. When it’s not been overcast, that’s almost certainly because it’s been downright stormy with apocalyptic rain. Things have, to say the least, been far from sunny and wonderful.

I’m telling you all this in an attempt to set up the shocking nature of what happened last night. At some point in the middle of the night — at a time when, when I woke up, I knew better than to look at what time it was because it was clearly the middle of the night o’clock, if that makes sense — I woke up because I was, stunningly, too warm to sleep.

I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened; it’s almost certainly last summer during the heatwave — although, even then, I stayed asleep through most of that because I fell asleep knowing how uncomfortably warm it was in the first place. But, no, I woke up because I felt as if I was oppressed by the heat.

I knew, even as I moved the covers off me (keeping the cat as unbothered as possible in the process; I was half-asleep, but not insane, after all), that this was something I probably should have been annoyed by. Who wants to wake up in the middle of the night for any reason, after all? But, no; there was something thrilled about this disturbance, apparently. I was almost gleeful for the unexpected heatwave, and determined to appreciate it even as I made necessary changes to allow me to sleep through the rest of the night.

Of course, I felt somewhat less grateful when I woke up this morning still exhausted, but you can’t have everything, can you? In related news: it’s cold again, now.

A thought occurred the other day, that I’ve been online for so long — by which I mean, working online for such an extended period, as opposed to “I have been sitting in front of my laptop all this time, oh no what have I done with my life” (but also, that) — that I’ve passed through multiple incarnations of who and what my peers are.

I came up with the first wave of what we called the comics blogosphere, and there are names from that period of time, almost 20 years ago, that I still see and have such affinity and affection for that I think of them as smarter and more on top of shit than me on almost every topic. I was part of the launch team for io9, which meant I was a professional blogger and a Gawker Media employee, so my peer group shifted to something more professional, which continued and expanded as I worked through Time, Wired, Playboy, The Hollywood Reporter and so on. And the people I worked beside each time because peers and other people who I feel on the same level as, except when they go on to do something more amazing altogether.

(A lot of people I’ve worked with on those outlets have gone on to write books, video games, TV shows, and the like; others have gone on to found tech start-ups or journalism groups, or edit big magazines or whatever. I feel like a kid compared with them, but I still think of them as peers in some way, somewhat selfishly.)

There are hordes, hosts, of people who have disappeared from the fields that I’ve worked and still work in — people whose losses I feel on a near-atomic level. (I could name names, but that might be embarrassing for everyone involved.) I feel very lucky to still be able to do what I do, and even more so when I think about some of the people who aren’t still doing it beside me on a regular basis.