Check out Draw A Dinosaur Day, courtesy of the genius Todd Page. This event is officially Peewee Herman and Bloggess endorsed. I’m not even making that up. I don’t think I COULD make that up.

My submission this year:

Darlings! All is busy here — my last full day of work today; the apartment’s half-packed; little things have been pricking me to tears all over town. I’ve also been busily writing fiction.

If you’re inclined to check it out, I have a new piece of very short flash fiction called “A Place to Store the Teeth From Dreams,” up at The Dirty Napkin. Check it out here, if you’d care to!

It might remind you of, oh gosh, way back when I used to write interesting blog posts. Like a few weeks ago?

If you spend your day waiting for inspiration, you’ll spend your day waiting, period.

I’m notoriously difficult to shop for. Not that I don’t give people ideas when gift-giving times roll around. But the things I want aren’t usually the sort of thing you want to run out and get professionally wrapped.

“Hm, Christmas already, you say? Well, I lost my tweezers a few months ago, so I could use another pair. Um, I eat a lot of cereal. I’m running low on paper towels?”

I’m one of the most easily delighted human beings on the planet, and I try to be concretely aware of just exactly why I love the people I love, every day. So when it comes to tangible tokens of that love, I’m a “buy me what I need” kind of girl. My favorite presents ever? A tie between a luggage set my parents gave me when I turned eighteen (and still use to this day) and the pairs of Rainbow flipflops that my nearest and dearest seem to keep buying me as my old ones start to embarrass them in public.

HOWEVER! My twenty-fifth birthday is coming up on July 24, and this year I’ve thought of a sheer-decadence present that would please me more than anything I’ve wanted in my entire life. (Except my Creepy Crawlers set when I was eight. Thanks, mom and dad!)

And the best part: it’s completely free. No shipping costs or anything. Genius, right?

This birthday, I want everyone I love (or like or admire or have ever gotten ice cream with) to record a message from their Five-Years-From-Now Selves to Past Kat, telling me something that’s going on in the year 2016. I’ll listen to them once, on my birthday, then burn them all onto one audio track that I’ll send to a friend for safekeeping, to time capsule until my 30th birthday, when I’ll play them again for maximum hilarity slash poignance.

Doesn’t that sound fun?

“Dear Past Kat, today I hoverboarded to the galactic-store to buy rocket fuel and organic peanut butter. Everything’s fair trade now! It’s crazy! Come join us!”

“Dear Past Kat, I’ve got to admit, things have been a lot more efficient since the robots triumphed in the inevitable Cyborg v. Human Uprising of 2013. Plus, now I can legally marry my waffle-maker.”

“Dear Past Kat, man, get with the program. Nobody says ‘dude’ in 2016. We all call each other ‘brigadier.’ Briiiiiiiig.”

How fun would fifty or so messages of that be?! I might be getting a little choked up thinking about it. But am mostly grinning my biggest dinosaur-hunter grin, imagining all the brilliant, hilarious snapshots of my favorite people I’ll be able to carry with me from year to year.

It’s all of my favorite things: visions of the future from the past; unbridled youthful exuberance; a moderate vein of narcissism; something I will never have to pack up and move cross-country. In fact, this is what I want for every holiday ever, now. You’re welcome, everybody! I will never ask you to buy me tweezers again.

What would five-years-from-now you tell yourself on a milestone birthday? How crazy’s 2016 going to get, y’all?

I just met the love of my life. It was on a bus, of course.

I wake up late this morning and wade through the shower-curtain forest of drying laundry, pick out a floaty cream-colored skirt I always feel most summery in. I get out the door with my hair still wet, tendrils beginning to curl like honeysuckle shoots. I don’t know how it’ll turn out. I don’t know how anything’ll turn out.

One of those days where the sun lays heavy on your skin. I know by mid-afternoon I’ll feel lazier than a city-zoo lion, but in the freshness of morning, I’m happy to be alive.

Small herd at the bus stop, shifting their weight from foot to foot, waiting waiting waiting.

The bus pulls up, and I hang back to leave room for people who have been waiting longer. But a young man stops and ushers me in front of him. Late twenties, I’d guess; angular jaw, small mole on his left cheekbone; plaid button-down shirt tucked into a pair of jeans, brown belt. Imposing as oatmeal. One look and you could see this was the kind of guy so placid he didn’t even mind middle school.

I don’t know why this is the kind of man I like. But experience tells me again and again that it is.

There are only two seats left on the bus, in the five-seater in the back. I grab the seat between the middle and the window, and this guy takes the middle seat, next to me. My music’s on loud enough that I don’t hear when he tries to get my attention; I look up and find him hovering above the seat next to me, delicately moving aside a flounce of my skirt I’d forgotten to tuck away.

“That’s the thing with skirts,” I apologize, one earbud out. He smells like sweet sunbaked grass.

“I just didn’t want to pin you down.”

I keep the earbud out, in case he wants to talk again, but he pulls out a worn leather-cover Bible and reads a few verses to himself. I reach into my bag and pull out the short story I’m working on drafting, a weird little reflection on Massachusetts and octopi and small towns and making out in storage units and the ache of impatience. I look at him a few times. His lips twitch a little when he reads.

His phone rings, twice, and he takes the calls quietly. When he reaches in his pocket for his phone, he jostles my hip a  little. This does not make me anxious.

A few stops later, the man in the window seat next to me moves, and for the sake of decorum, I take his old seat. Not five minutes in, though, a heavy drop of cold water plinks down on my collar bone. I jump sideways, and my shoulder catches this guy.

“Air conditioning leaking?” His voice is thick but nasal; the apex of the nasality is the exact note of stainless steel scissors whining across a piece of curling ribbon. Is he married? Does he have a girlfriend? Is he on his way to teaching summer Bible camp?

It always seems so pointless, speculating on other people’s lives. There are things he wouldn’t guess about me by looking. There are things about me that, if some people knew them, would guarantee they could never love me. I’m never going to find out this guy’s name.

I get off the bus a few stops early, to walk past the heavy construction traffic. Even taking a detour up a little hill, I beat the bus to my office, and as I’m waiting for the traffic light to change, the bus scoots ahead and I see him sitting in the back, leaning forward with his arms braced on his knees. He looks serious.

Saying goodbye always feels so heavy. But we see people for the last time ever, every day, non-stop. You think you’ll never forget, but you do. You kind of have to.

So, my post on the Hornitos tequila commercial that glamorizes questionably consensual and definitely predatory sex, uh, blew up a bit more than I thought it would yesterday. Page views went kaboom. People shared lots of really great thoughts about the nature of consent. Lots of people wrote letters to the company to complain about the ad. (Awesome! Keep doing that!)

That said. I saw a problem with the ad, and I wanted people to talk about the ad, to retweet it, to post about it on their own blogs — basically, to get a link to the commercial and a means to contact the company in front of as many eyes as possible. In order to do that, my original post took a tone that was wildly vitriolic, quite unsubtle, and maybe a little bit flippant. Is there a place for phrases like “get your rape on” in the quest to get a post retweeted? Yup. Totally. Can it capture nuanced thoughts about the way an advertisement can contribute to rape culture? No, of course not.

Hornitos “Brotherly Love” thirty-second spot.

Attractive actors. Great production value. Absolutely morally  repugnant. Here’s what’s bugging me:

Everything about the ad, right down to the title, suggests that the major ethical violation here is that Skeezy Dave is scamming on Airport Mike’s girlfriend, as a violation of Bro Code. And while I think we can agree that snaking a friend or brother’s girl is an uncool thing to do, as long as the cuckolding is engaged in willfully by both the cheating partner and the non-stellar bro, it’s just garden variety cheating. Sibling rivalry! Wacky hijinks! Monogamy-more-like-monotony-amirite? Not great behavior, but you’re not exactly drop-kicking kittens here.

However, because the narrative of the commercial is so much filtered through the brothers’ perspective, it’s easy to miss that this is not an average cuckold situation, because the woman is not willingly cheating on her boyfriend. He has impersonated his brother to make her think she is having sex with her boyfriend, when in fact she’ll be having sex with someone whom she would not otherwise consent to have sex with.

In a court of law, apparently Skeezy Dave wouldn’t be serving any jail time for this (unless, of course, she noticed mid-coitus, asked him to stop and he continued — ugh, Skeezy Dave, please don’t do that). It is not technically, legally rape. However, the commercial does make a mockery of her right to choose whom she does and does not have sex with.

If this isn’t rape, then it is, at least, violation on a large scale. He is violating her trust and her right to choose her sexual partners. In the future, when she inevitably finds out what has been done to her (“Honey, I’m home!” “Um, yeah, you’re in bed wi—-oh.”), she will realize that she has been deceived and misled into having sex with a partner who was not of her own choosing. It’s hard to imagine that, in that situation, a woman wouldn’t feel that her body had been violated. The situation we are watching unfold will be traumatic to her on so many levels.

To me, though, one of the most insidious aspects of this commercial is that so many people miss this fact on their first, third, fifth, twentieth watches. Because she is a bit player to the brothers’ drama — little more than a smoky-voiced, writhing prop — it’s easy to laugh at the dramatic irony of a brother snakin’ his twin’s girlfriend, and miss that she has no say in taking part in the cheating. Her decision has been made for her by sketchy twin’s decision to deceive her about his identity.

When we are not seeing — or, heck, when we’re downright glamorizing — women being deceived and manipulated into sex with people they do not wish to sleep with, we’ve got a problem.

If you stop and evaluate it, this is very clearly a story of sexual predation. But because everyone in the commercial is so good-looking, and sitcoms have taught us that twin-switches are zany fun, and because the drama at the forefront — scammin’ on your brother’s girl — is relatively harmless and told amusingly here, it’s easy to watch this and miss the tone of predation. This concerns me. Greatly.

Sexism in liquor ads is nothing new. Neither is the concept that women are prizes to be won, or even — disgustingly — that the booze these commercials are selling might lower a woman’s inhibitions to the point that she agrees to sleep with you. These things sicken me, personally, because I think they perpetuate a demeaning, derogatory view of women. But as saddened as I am by the mindset behind this kind of advertising, I’m not rushing around saying it should be taken off the air. The female characters in those ads might be portrayed as porn-star fantasies with questionable taste in men, but these are choices they are making.

Where this particular commercial crosses the line for me is in its tacit endorsement of actively deceiving women into having sex with you, when it is obvious they would not willingly give their consent. The commercial glamorizes our resident skeezester for being so clever as to take advantage of the situation. He is so focused on his sexual conquest that he does not realize he is railroading her right to choose her sexual partners, and causing untold psychological damage. She’s hot and the tequila’s cold, the commercial says, so why should he care? And why should we?

We need to care about women’s rights to make their own decisions about their bodies. There are people inside of those bodies. (Yes, even the hot ones.) And the first order of treating them like actual human beings is making sure that all sexual contact is unquestionably consensual. The glamorization of sexual predation in this ad perpetuates exactly the kind of no-consequence, this-is-mine-for-the-taking mentality that leads to sexual assault and, yes, capital-R rape.

I believe, when it comes to consent, that yes means yes. And a big part of that is realizing when we should say no. Violations of trust, fraudulent and deceitful seduction, manipulation and coercion — this is what we need to say no to. This is me saying no. Fuck no. And I hope, even if you missed it the first time you saw the ad, you can look at a situation like this and say “fuck no” too. (In fact, say it to Hornitos, while you’re at it!)

So, since I wrote this (after midnight, expecting like fifteen people to read it), I’ve gotten input from some lawyerly dudes and realized that, okay, the situation described could not be legally charged as rape. Bandying about the word rape inaccurately? Not cool. I’ve never wanted to be the dude who does that. I apologize for being alarmist. That said, please do feel free to read all instances of the word “rape” in the [unedited but bracketed-notes-added] post as “acts of willfully misleading sexual predation to deceive a partner into sexual intercourse that she otherwise would not have given consent to, with no regard for the complicated psychological repercussions when your actions are inevitably discovered.” Holy hell is that phrase long. Maybe, for brevity, “morally repugnant shit you would not want done to your mother.”

Wow. So, watching Hulu this weekend, I was exposed no less than three times to what I can call without question the most sickening advertisement in recent memory. It’s a thirty-second spot for Hornitos tequila (a Sauza product) and runs under the title “Brotherly Love.” I fully encourage you to check it out here, if you don’t mind righteous feminist she-hulking so hard your armpit hair spontaneously grows two inches.

If you’re at work or too lazy to shave your ‘pits after, the premise: guy and girl sexytimes stroll into apartment; “I don’t know what’s come over you tonight, Mike,” she purrs before heading off to grab some Hornitos tequila. Dude’s phone rings to reveal his identical twin brother in the airport. “Dave, did you tell April I wasn’t going to make it?” — but Dave’s too busy watching April clink shotglasses and writhe in sexual foreshadowing to answer, so he hangs up as his cuckolded brother says, “I love you man.” And then Dave goes to rape it up all over town with the woman who’s giving consent to sleep with him under the impression he is her boyfriend.

Seriously, you guys, time travel was invented and no one thought to tell me?! ’cause I can see no plausible excuse that we could actually be in the year 2011 watching a national ad campaign laughing off informed consent like a punchline. Rape. That is motherfucking rape. [Okay, okay, so see note above. It's not rape. But when it spends the night at rape's house, it borrows rape's toothbrush.]

The only other explanation — and this is way less amusing than time travel — is that the jackoffs at Hornitos don’t understand what rape is. So, I wrote them a letter. If you too are disgusted by the idea of a company laughing off the idea of liquorin’ a girl up and then rapin’ her down, I highly encourage you to write a letter as well.

Dudes,

I just saw your “Brotherly Love” ad spot and found it delightful. It’s so rare to find advertising these days that has the balls to advocate rape! I’ve got a few small questions, though, before I go out and try this maneuver (and your fine product!) on my own:

1) Your commercial’s got me totally rarin’ to go out and get my rape on, but — total bummer — I have no identical twin! Any other ideas how I can liquor a dude up and violate his right to informed consent?

2) When you do liquor a lady up and then seduce her under a false identity and totally fake pretenses, when’s the Hornitos-approved time to reveal the fact that she hasn’t actually given consent to the sexual encounter? Afterwards, when you’re leaving her to clean up the sheets (and the shrapnel of her trust in men)? Or do you wanna do it mid-coitus for that angry-rape-victim bucking bronco effect? Woohoo! Ride ‘em, cowboy!

3) I always forget the official recipe for a Sauza Margarita. Is it two parts tequila to one part rohypnol? Or the other way around?

4) You did a great job with the :30 spot, but don’t be coy! I want to see more! How about the part when she realizes she’s been deceived by someone she trusted, just so he could have sex with her? Or the part where she blames herself for impairing her own judgment by clinking those glasses of (yummy, yummy) Hornitos tequila? Where’s the part where she’s so ashamed of “letting herself” be raped that she isn’t able to go seek help? Where’s the part where we all get out a dictionary and look up the meaning of informed consent?

5) After this ad, I suuuuper want to try your tequila, but I’m not a rapist. Am I still allowed to drink it?

6) Will drinking your product in fact give me the uncontrollable urge to run out and rape someone? (I hope so! You made it look like such zany hijinks!)

7) What kind of ass-backwards, misogynistic motherfucking Mad Men style ad agency are you using that this commercial could go through presumably months of development and be approved for a NATIONAL CAMPAIGN that makes a literal punchline out of the concept of informed consent?

8) Okay, fine, make rape seem casual. Make it seem fun. Make it seem like no big deal. You are creating the world that your sisters and daughters and nieces and granddaughters and and every other woman you will ever love will have to live in. This is a dangerous world to be a woman. This ad campaign shows that you’re committed to doing your part to keep it that way.

Hornitos Tequila: The Official Corporate Face of Gettin’ Your Rape On.

For my money, Hornitos is one of the best tequilas at its price point. Which is a shame, because obviously I will never buy anything in the Sauza family of products again, and obviously it’s my moral obligation to encourage anyone with a vagina or anyone who loves someone with a vagina to do the same.

Rape is not a joke. That your company endorses it bewilders and sickens me in equal measure.

Ugh,
Kat

All I want to do this week is run my stupid post about my Jeopardy! audition. Hey men of the world [who beat, rape and otherwise abuse women], can you please stop beating, raping and otherwise abusing women long enough to let me do that?! Thanks. [The rest of you, just carry on with whatever you're doing.]

[Also, for more even-keeled thoughts about the commercial, and fewer phrases like "get your rape on," a post.]

I had a funny post lined up about making an ass of myself at my Jeopardy! audition, and I’d be delighted to be having the kind of day where I could let that run, but right now, even as I type, I’m seeing something happening outside the window at work that I’d never seen before and hoped never to see.

I can’t say anything else, because it involves my work, but I am reminded today that it’s still a dangerous world to be a woman. We may have jobs and coalitions and our own brand of cigarettes (baby), but that only makes it easier to let ourselves occasionally forget.

Happy Mother’s Day, loves. Be very wonderful to the women in your life, though I know that’s what you were planning on anyway.

Last night, Sister and I went to my last game at Fenway for — not forever. But for a long time. Of the three games we’ve been to, and the few I’ve seen on TV, all have been the Sox versus the LA Angels.

A year and a half ago, she grudgingly passed over the ticket to my first-ever ball game. She chose the Angels because she knew I wouldn’t be able to follow the game, and figured the Disney connection might capture my interest at least. She knows me well.

Baseball is, it seems to me, the most literary sport, and I’ve been reading about it a lot. The ghoulish strains of the organ, the eerie too-white light floodlights cutting through the mothy blackness of a spring night, cutting the warmth of the evening with a cold beer. That deep bright hope — for the team, for the hometown, for the idea of a simpler, better America that we all imagine existed, but that I don’t think any of us has ever known.

Last night’s game wasn’t anything like that, of course.

The evening started off at 57 degrees, sheets of wind, rain periodically cutting down all evening, fast and hard like a special effect from a low-budget crime movie. I was dressed for early summer and got caught in the weather, and was pissed as hell about it. Before we even got inside the park, my clothes had shrank damply on my skin, and the black dye of my flipflops bled up to my feet, dyeing the soles and nails a bloated-corpse green.

Our tickets were standing room, uncovered. Of course.

We came straight from work and hung around the concourse for a while, having the kind of completely demented meal you can only have in a ballpark. Before we headed up to brave the rain, we got soft-serve sundaes from a chatty woman with a thick Southie accent.

“This is my sister’s last game at Fenway,” my sister told the lady, because it was that kind of transaction.

“Oh, you’ll come back,” she said. “You’re a true Bostonian. My sister moved to Las Vegas, and that’s what I told her. You’re a true Bostonian. You’ll come back. She did.”

I’m not a true Bostonian, of course, and I won’t be coming back — not to live, anyway — but it was nice to hear her sound so confident about it.

Up in the stands, it was a miserable night for a ball game. When I signed that dotted line to shoot myself back to California, I broke up with this city. Boston and I are two soon-to-be exes riding out a lease, and the weather of this mopey self-loathing spring — Boston weather, for me, is that roommate who likes to get drunk and pee in the sink, then scatter his toenail clippings all over the bathroom floor. I might look back on it with weird fondness in a few years, but for now it just makes me count down the days.

The elbow ledge of the barrier in front of our section was a giant dew drop. I dug through my bag for a printed draft of an awful story I’d written, and we used it to squeegee away the worst of the water and got ourselves settled. Half an inning in, water had soaked through the elbows of my paper-thin t-shirt and moved up the sleeves and neck through capillary action.

“You want the shirt I wore for work today?” Sister asked. “It won’t make you much warmer, but it might help.” I said yeah and she grabbed it from her bag. Turns out we’d dressed that morning in the exact same shade of purple.

I don’t know. Little things are the hardest to capture.

The game itself wasn’t much. When someone who knows as little about baseball as I do notices the great pitching and outfielding, you’ve got to figure you’re running a game that’s pretty light in the offense. By the bottom of the fourth, the Angels had one hit, and the most action we’d seen from the Sox was one man walked. Then another sheet of the bad special effects rain, and park employees ran out with the tarps for a rain delay.

Have you ever seen them unroll the tarps before? It’s fantastic! Twenty-five guys in matching red shirts running in perfect step with one another, unfurling what looks like an enormous slip and slide (um, yes please), then, through some complicated choreography, reverse-origami-ing it to comically oversized proportions. I was completely transfixed. Hey, if the Angels are going to pitch a no-hitter, you can sign me up to root on the Boston Pro-League Synchronized Tarp Unfurling Expo any day of the week.

Under the lights, the grass of the outfield was a lurid, late-60s-restored-color-sitcom green; all the changing shapes of the tarp brought back childhood field day memories. A slip and slide! The flutter of a make-believe superhero cape! Parachute day in gym class! The downpour held steady, but it started to feel like running through sprinklers.

By the time they were done, Sister and I were the only people left in our area; everyone else was huddled under the lone bar awning for warmth and rain protection.

“Hey,” she finally said, “as much as I’d like to see how this tarp thing plays about, uh, what if we got out of the rain instead?”

So we ducked to the covered section below us, where rain ran in fat drops through all the screws in the steel beams overhead. People streamed out of the seats through the aisle in front of us while we leaned on the leaky beams and sang along with the music pumping through the park.

Familiar strains filtering through the voices around us — “Crocodile Rock,” my parents’ song. The noise of the crowd and crackle of rain covered our voices as we sang along, loud. I took Elton John parts; she always sings the laaaaaaa la la la la la’s. When it got too loud to follow the song, we kept going anyway. I never knew me a better time / and I guess I never will.

We left not long afterwards, chalking it up as a bad night to be playing baseball. Four innings, one hit, no runs. Best damn night of baseball I’ve ever had.  It’s never the things you expect, is what I’m saying.

That, and next time we watch the Sox versus the Angels, it’ll be when she’s visiting me in sunny Southern California, ’cause no way am I shivering my way through 50-degree weather on a May evening ever again, not even if I love the home team.