Status Updates From Aggregated Discontent: Conf...

The idea of a trans woman is always easier to stomach than the actual transsexual herself, what with all her wants and needs, however inconvenient they might be. The idea of her, however, can be anything you want it to be. A legacy to celebrate. A walking broken window. She's got more faces than Janus and more forms than Meredith Brooks.

[End of one essay: Date might be an egg, but I could still get laid, haha! Start of next essay:] In the wake of the US military's invasion of Afghanistan, the first strike in a 20-year war that felt distant by design...

....he explained to me the specifics of his particular practice of "ethical non-monogamy," a term that I'd frankly never heard before I started dating straight men. For those of you that might be unfamiliar with the term, it basically means that you're a gay guy over 30, but you're straight, and you also could be 26.

[ded]

[The facts in this dive into Lankton are v cool but I'm finding the essay structure in this collection janky. Walker lays out the zoom out/zoom in approach she's using in an earlier chapter - there's a version of it that works in socioeconomic reportage (if cliched) but here the switch between dishy and journalistic is jarring & the through lines get lost. And here the last zoom in is a very abrupt suicide joke?]

[what is happening with this extended Devil Wears Prada/The Intern/Gone Girl fanfic whatever? did we all really write and read essays like this in 2018? what were we doing with our lives?]