Year of the Fabulous Socks

Well, 2016 was a year of many things, most of them pretty bad. We lost Prince, and Princess Leia, Colonel John Glenn and Major Tom. Voldemort and his chess set of white supremacists gained entry into the White House when Russia took a page out of the US playbook to help make that happen, putting immigrants and queer folks and women and people of color at even greater risk of the kind of things that made Germany into an object lesson eighty years ago (one we have ignored, it seems).

In the midst of all this darkness, it is difficult, but not impossible, to light a few candles.

1. In February, my union got my colleagues and me a 26% increase in pay over the next three years, because, yes, that’s how little the school had been paying us.
2. In March, I started playing Lesbian Dodgeball on a monthly basis (see #5) with a bunch of overeducated goofballs. This started my collection of Fabulous Dodgeball (and other) Socks.
3. In May, I got a fabulous roommate and her Hello Kitty bestest buddy.
4. In August, I went alone to Boston ComicCon, wearing an Agents of SHIELD uniform and had a pretty good time. This is also where I got my Wonder Woman and Groot socks.
5. In November, I went to the Love Rally on the Boston Common with the abovementioned goofball friends, now in Deeply Serious mode. Then on Supergirl, the Girl of Steel’s sister DEO Agent Alex Danvers figured out that yes, she is into girls, as I had some months before.
6. In December, I went on my first date in eleven years.

Now, when I originally started writing this post, I had some vague idea about writing about the tradeoffs a gal makes shopping in the men’s section, but my pen had other ideas. Still, I stand by my title.

Because we could look back on 2016 as the year we lost so many of the best and brightest: Leonard Cohen, Muhammed Ali, Janet Reno, Richard Adams.

But I will look back on this past year as the year my sock drawer–that oft-ignored repository which, like a bookcase, tells the world through its changes how one’s life is changing–got a little fabulous.

So yes, 2016 will go down as the Year of the Fabulous Socks. And as God is my witness, 2017 will go down as the Fabulous Year.

And when that starts happening, I will get back to talking about traversing the men’s section.

When You’ve Done All You Can Do

Here’s the thing about being a writer. I can spend four months obsessing about three dozen people who do not objectively exist, their hopes and dreams, their heroic actions and tragic mistakes, and consider it completely normal. They call this “writing a novel.” But I meet somebody I like and I spend a week thinking about them from time to time, and yes, writing a few poems, and I think I am getting completely out of hand. I suspect they call this “being human.” Hard to say, as something like this hasn’t happened to me in about twelve years.

So I am sitting here at work with my Wonder Woman mug that my office buddy gave me for Christmas and trying to stop obsessing. Surely if anyone can help me, it’s Diana Prince, Amazon extraordinaire. Sigh. No such luck. I feel like Calvin & Hobbes.

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