You Listen And You Know You Could Live A Better Life Than You Do, Be Softer, Kinder. And Maybe This Year

"Read Banned Books" a new full page cartoon essay published in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section today.

Blood family

I think that whoever, or whatever, created human kind

They really, really, really,

really

wanted to force the point across that we're meant to socialize on a broad scale. To interact.

And I don't mean that in an emotional, "I saw a stranger on the bus and suddenly I remembered what we're here for" way (I do those too, but not today). I mean it in the barest, most fascinatingly clinical way.

Blood family.

Blood connects you to the most ABSTRUSE kinds of people! They can be such, such fundamentally different people to who you are yourself. Would you have ANYTHING to do your uncle if he weren't blood? Your aunt? It gets real great when you get close to each other in age. Would you have anything to say to your cousin if you met them in school?

It's bizarre. It's fascinating. It's a small but ridiculous. We are born, we are forced to interact with people completely different from ourselves. You choose friends. You don't choose blood family.

It seems so... stoic. Clumsy, brutal. There is no way you can escape the horrid, lovely, interesting, deeply uncomfortable ties to society. Not your society, not the one you create for yourself with friends, but the general one. You are born forced to confront the fact that humanity is as varied as snowflakes, to use a clichéd metaphor.

Do with that what you will. It's a fact. Not a single person can escape it. You always grow up with some kind of family that you're forced to spend time with. An orphanage, a traditional family, a single parent maybe.

Connection. For better or for worse.

i have no plans to have children, but if one day i do, i'm going to break that cycle like a motherfucking glow stick.

I had a vision

I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go

When BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) said "you can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it ok. you need to be better" and "all we have are the connections we make" and "I really should've thought about the view from halfway down" and "sometimes you have to take responsibility for your own happiness" and "you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, you turn yourself around, THAT'S what it's all about" and "things have to get worse before they can get better" and "in real life, the big gesture isn't enough, you need to be consistent" and "if we hadn't met each other until now, we wouldn't be the people we are now" and, my personal favourite, "every day it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it every day, that's the hard part, but it does get easier".

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

@deutsche-bahn geb's zu, hättest du sein können.

When I graduated high school my folks decided to go on a family trip to Europe. I was extremely surly about this as I had an undiagnosed UTI but I was extremely excited to speak German with native speakers, convinced I would be an asset to my family across our travels.

Tragically, it was immediately apparent that three years of public school German meant I could communicate at the level of a first grader.

I was nonetheless elated when a child approached me at the train station to ask “Haben sie ein Kuli?” “Do you have a pen?” I was able to say, “Nein, aber ich habe ein Bleistift!” “No, but I have a pencil!” The kid seemed confused by my triumphant tone but borrowed my pencil anyway.

But my absolute greatest victory in vocabulary came during an airline check. They had me go through a metal detector, and they assumed my belt had set it off. I knew my belt was non reactive metal but! My favorite jeans had lost their zipper and I had them safety pinned shut.

The man approached me with a metal detector and seemed puzzled my belt wasn’t reading. I remembered the safety pin in the front of my jeans and I happened to know the word so I joyously announced, “Ich habe ein Sicherheitsnadel!” “I have a safety pin!”

As if to an infant, the man said slowly, “Nein, das ist sein Gürtel.” “No, that is your belt.”

I waved at my crotch and insisted, “Nein, in mein Hose ich habe ein Sicherheitsnadel!” “No, in my pants I have a safety pin!”

I couldn’t remember the name for zipper but luckily he caught the shine of the metal where a zipper should be and finally realized why this crazy American teenager was gesturing to her crotch. He scanned his machine over the offending pin which pinged and he cleared me to go.

I marched off to board the plane in a glow of pride that I had gotten to use an obscure word and the poor man got to return to his day.