“Don’t make a girl a promise… if you know you can’t keep it.”
— Cortana, Halo II

Her ring wasn’t perfect. After being reshaped, the white gold band was smudged and uneven. The diamond, instead of a traditional, glittering transparent gem, was a canary yellow, her favorite color. She’d spoken at length about her dream engagement ring, how she wanted the diamond to be this specific, light shade of yellow. It looked blemished, yes, but that’s how she wanted it. And that’s how she was, really. Imperfect but still seemingly perfect.

Now, much like the Halo in Halo, it wasn’t the appearance of her ring that mattered. It was the promise that came with it. For the alien Covenant, the large Halo rings promised the Great Journey, a spiritual undertaking that would help them leave the physical world and become Divine. For me, it was a little simpler, yet felt just as serious. It was a promise that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Unfortunately, both in life and in the Halo videogames, neither of these promises were kept.

There are few sentences in the English language that can be as painful as the phrase “I’ve met someone else.” Here are a few of them:

• “I’m seeing someone else.”
• “I’m in love with someone else.”
• “I’m nailing the hell out this tool I met in karate class and while we’ve been driving in my car, you and I have been listening to the terrible mix CD he made me and now you’ll never be able to hear Alkaline Trio without wanting to fucking kill yourself.”

Regardless of how it’s uttered, it is utterly devastating. Especially when that not-so-perfect ring is in your pocket the entire time you’re being told this, tucked away, like a glimmering plasma grenade.

As the months passed the velvet box collected dust in my closet. Supportive friends would ask about it, and I lied and lied:

• “The ring? Ha! Pawned that thing.”
• “What? That thing? Please. I chucked it in the Schuylkill River.”
• “Her engagement ring? Long gone, guys. No, no it isn’t sitting in my sock drawer, where I look at it almost every day, plucking it out now and again, slowly re-cleansing my dress socks with my tears.”

Eventually, unable to sell the ring in-person to anyone, the canary yellow diamond found its way to eBay, sent away in a priority mail, insurance stamped box. Distancing myself from the process made it easier. The funds in my PayPal warmed my heart for the most part, but lurked there, reminding me of what I lost and where that money came from.

I had to get rid of it.

And not just some of it, but every last penny. On something I always wanted, but could never afford. Something that would make me feel a little less empty inside.

So I immediately spent the money on a suit of Master Chief armor.
This wasn’t as sudden or spontaneous as it sounds. The Halo armor was a long time coming. For years, I’d mused over the idea, driving my closest friends mad. One day when I have the money, I’d say, thinking about that canary yellow diamond. I have to be responsible right now.

It’s funny. A lot of my so-called “adult” friends have made major life-purchases with their hard earned real-world-job money: condos, houses, cars, engagement rings for non-cheating, non-soul-destroying girlfriends.

Me? Well, outside of graduate school loans that I’m slowly paying back, my biggest life purchase is this suit of armor, forty pounds of fiberglass and steel, dark green, built by an artist outside Detroit. The helmet, with its glimmering golden visor and bright LED lights, was imported from a legendary Stormtrooper armor-builder in the Philippines. I need two people to help me put it on, it takes up way too much space in my living room, and is terribly uncomfortable and hot when I’m wearing it. At conventions and events, when I opt to show it off, I have to walk incredibly slow, as to avoid tipping over and possibly breaking something — either in the suit or a part of my body.

But I love the damn thing.

I’m aware of the irony in wearing a suit of armor that I purchased with the funds from my ex-girlfriend’s engagement ring. There are plenty of psychological diagnoses my friends have pointed out over the full year it took to build it, the few months that I’ve had it, whenever I wear it someplace or pose for pictures:

• “A suit of armor? You’re protecting yourself.”
• “At events people have no idea who you are. You’re hiding.”
• “No one ever sees the Master Chief’s face. You’re trying to disappear. Sad.”

They are all wrong, although I’m sure a relationship counselor would agree with them (and also charge me the value of a second suit of Master Chief armor for the privilege). I’d wanted the suit for so long, and after such epic heartbreak, receiving each piece of armor—arriving in seven shipments, over the course of eight months—became an unintentionally cathartic process. As the shoulders, forearms, chest-piece, and helmet arrived slowly, one section at a time… well, with each part I got a small piece of myself back.

But what is it to be the Master Chief? Outside of the attention at conventions and the joyfully looks on my friends and coworkers faces when I show off pictures in the suit, why him? I mean, in his life story, he saved the human race. Me? I once adopted a chinchilla off Craigslist.

Here’s the thing.

Master Chief is a faceless man of few words. He’s easy to identify with, his character written nice and distant. The fate of mankind rests on his shoulders and he handles it with the cool demeanor of Clint Eastwood. He destroys ships the size of moons, flies through Earth’s atmosphere, defeats enormous, monstrous creatures, all with a careless grace. Like it’s not a big deal.

Most importantly, even though Master Chief is a legendary character, anyone could be him, even someone nursing a broken heart. Whether you’re a kid swearing at people on Xbox Live or a sad, grown man, he offers up the perfect escape into something extraordinary. He saved the human race, and consequently, saved me.

I feel like there is this misconception about people that are passionate about costumes, whether they are dressed as someone from a videogame, comic book, or anime, and I never quite understood it until I walked my first convention floor. Outsiders think costumers immerse themselves in another character to get away from who they really are — that they are geeks that could never quite cut it, and need to ditch reality for a few hours.

They’re wrong though. Within that shell, whether it’s made of cardboard, plastic, fabric, fiberglass, or steel, hidden away there is a figure worthy of attention. It’s the person who put all their heart and soul into a project, and now they’re wearing their work all over them.

I’ve seen other Master Chiefs. They wander Comic-Con and Wizard World, visit E3 and the Penny Arcade Expo, and their photos often pop up on Tumblr, expertly crafted, painted to look like they’ve actually been in those epic space battles. Did some of them go through the same thing as me? Maybe.

Because they always look the way I feel: battle hardened.

Peach: Where do you think you’re going, stranger?

Nick: Oh, h-hey there, peach. It’s, uh, it’s been a while.

Peach: It hasn’t been that long, has it?

Nick: Heh, I guess not.

Peach: So were you just gonna walk on by without saying a peep to little ol’ me?
Nick: Well, I was just gonna, y’know, just gonna go and look at—

Peach: Look at what, sugar? A barrel full of apples? Some lumpy pears? We both know they can’t give you what I can. You remember the summer, don’t you?

Nick: Hey, that was great and all, b-but—

Peach: But what?

Nick: But things are different now. It’s a new season.

Peach: Don’t say that. We can still have what we had.

Nick: It’s not the same. You were practically in my backyard then. But now, where are you even from? Georgia?

Peach: I… I don’t—

Nick: I’m sorry, I just can’t do the long distance thing. I’ll see you next summer.

Bananas: GOOD EVENING, DIGESTION MACHINE.

Nick: Hi… bananas?

Bananas: WE ARE AVAILABLE FOR CONSUMPTION. WE ARE ALWAYS AVAILABLE, EVERYWHERE.

Nick: Uh, cool, great.

Bananas: DID YOU KNOW WE ARE ALL CLONES? WERE YOU AWARE OF THAT?

Nick: Actually, yeah, I read abou—

Bananas: OUR FLAVOR, TEXTURE, COLOR, AND NUTRITIONAL PROPERTIES ARE CONSISTENT AND DEPENDABLE.

Nick: But doesn’t that make you a bit… boring?

Bananas: CONFORMITY IS BLISS.

Nick: Maybe I should try a plantain or something.

Bananas: IMPOSSIBLE. THEY HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATED.

Nick: They’re, like, right over there.

Bananas: …NUH-UH.

Nick: Hello, pear. Are you having a nice season?

Pear: Thank you, yes, I am. Now come over here, child. There is something I want to tell you.

Nick: Yes, pear?

Pear: Come closer, closer. Listen closely.

Nick: What is it?

Pear: Do not eat me until I am ugly.

Nick: But you look so delicious right now.

Pear: Trust me, child. This is my beautiful secret.

LATER

Nick (sobbing, chewing): Oh pear, you were so right.

Persimmon: Welcome to my humble corner of the market, good sir.

Nick: Hey, you’re a persimmon, huh? I always see you here in the fall, but I don’t think we’ve met. What’s your deal?

Persimmon: First, let me say it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I would be delighted to enlighten you about my venerable family. Ahem. Commercially, there are generally two types of persimmon fruit: astringent and non-astringent. The heart-shaped Hachiya is the most comm—

Nick: Wait a minute, this sounds familiar.

Persimmon: Whatever do you mea—

Nick: You’re just reciting your Wikipedia page, aren’t you?

Persimmon: Bluh, err, heavens no! I am merely tryin—

Nick: And what’s with this fake aristocrat bit? You don’t know shit, do you?

Persimmon: Now hold on—

Nick: You’re a phony!

Persimmon: Hey, listen here, pal. I’m just a working-class fruit trying to make ends meet. But in this country, the average Joe off the street got no idea who I am, so they ain’t gonna pick me up. That means I gotta make them fancy-pantsy chefs think I’m some sort of seasonal delicacy so they’ll put me on the menu. Otherwise, I can’t keep food on the table for my kids. So don’t blow this for me, okay?

Nick: You have a table?

Nick: Apples! It’s so nice to see you all again!

Apples: Hello, Nick! We hope you didn’t get too lonely while some of us were on vacation.

Nick: Well, I missed you guys! I can’t wait to catch up with everyone!

Apples: We missed you too! But don’t worry, all your favorites are back! Gala is here, and Fuji and Cameo and Honeycrisp and Braebur—

Nick: Oh shit, Honeycrisp is here?

Apples: Of course! And all your other favorites too, like Pink Lady and Jonagold and Granny Smi—

Nick: Grandpa, right, awesome. Say, you wouldn’t happen to know where Honeycrisp is staying, would you?

Apples: Ahm, well, Honeycrisp is on the west side of display four; Fuji is on the east, and Cameo—

Nick: Hey I gotta get going but I’ll totally text everyone later. It’s been real y’all.

Apples: Oh… I guess we’ll see you later, then.

Nick: Wait, how could I forget? I have to ask you something.

Apples: Yes? What is it?

Nick: Do you think Honeycrisp would be impressed if I, like, whipped out one of those reusable bags, or should I just keep it classic and go with paper?

My daughter’s Minecraft building style depends on a combination of Howard Hughes-level of paranoia and Brutalist aesthetics: it keeps the mobs out and the player cocooned in a stone-block cell. She gets angry if I knock a window in her fortress or unbarricade the door. For her, the game is little more than sitting in a gray box and listening to the chicken clucks and zombie groans outside her gray walls.

My daughter is engrossed in a game and sitting at the computer. My daughter is in a windowless tower of childhood, unreachable and mysterious, even to herself. I try to ask questions. I try to knock windows in the facade but she is quiet like me. Even “How was school?” causes her panic. I want to know everything, but she’s getting cagey these days and has rote answers that stack like stone blocks in front of her.

“Fine,” she answers. Or “Good.” Or “Stuff.”

My own father used to try to knock down a wall with some uncomfortable early-morning conundrum like: “Jonathan, do you hate yourself?” or “Jonathan, are you hanging around with the homosexual crowd?” I grunted and looked at my feet. To speak is to venture outside of oneself. Some simply do not care to go outside. So I leave my daughter alone in her stone house until she calls to me to vanquish monsters. Someday she will slice her own zombies. For now, I’m always there with a diamond sword to save her. ^[i.]

When she was two years old my daughter and I lived in a swamp house on the island of Pohnpei. The house was a square box made of cinder block and press-board with too many windows and a few half-hearted strokes of yellow paint, from which I couldn’t keep the creepers out.

So we ran away. As we split, I only had time to grab what I thought was important which turned out to be a handful of dirty forks and a machete. I guess I was in a sharp mood.

I left my books, music, and games behind. Everything I had accumulated since college: System Shock, feminist interpretations of fairy tales, a new and interesting translation of the Pentateuch, Half-Life, a series of bootlegged Kinks concerts from the ’80s on audio cassette… when I returned to the swamp house weeks later, my collection of Dickens novels was being used to hold up various pieces of decrepit furniture and to balance wobbly plastic chairs. So that’s one thing an English major is good for.

The loss of my stuff was freeing. I sloughed off my media like a snake sheds its skin. But unlike a snake I had no discernible shape underneath. Who was I now? I defined myself based upon my media purchases, which is a tenuous thing to build a personality upon. Who am I? I am a copy of Alien vs. Predator resting against a copy of Middlemarch. Snatch the books and games away and what is left? ^[ii.]

What was left of me was a strong need to protect and an abundance of love. My daughter and I moved to a solid, concrete house on a hill on the other side of the island. From there, you could see the night crawlers approach and be ready for them. I kept forks and machete at the ready. I was scared someone would snatch her in the night, but the monsters stayed away. We were safe.

Eventually we started to collect things again. I made my daughter a rubber tire out of an old flip-flop and she pushed it around with two sticks. We got ourselves a box of toy bricks and invited the neighbors over to make forts and houses with us.

Now it is years later and my daughter is plugging up holes in her massive, intimidating Minecraft stronghold. Perhaps she is reluctant to punch a hole in the wall because when she was two years old I built walls around her mortared with fear.

In the fairy tale version of this, I am both the evil wizard who locks her away and the knight in white-iron armor who saves her. Or perhaps I’m just the peasant who tends the fields around the castle, grunts to himself, and lets the princess find her own damn way out of her tower.

When I was the age my daughter is now, ten years old, I made forts out of the couch pillows in the basement of my house. I covered the distance from the television to the Intellivision with heavy blankets propped up with the pillows. I sat enraptured, by this new technology, conducting abstract space battles on a monstrous old Zenith that I had to smack every once in a while or the picture would fade. I was happy alone, quiet, and safe in my pillow fort.

In the early ’80s, most game lives were nasty, pixelated, and short. Intellivision’s space games were particularly dire. Star Strike encouraged you to lose so you could see the “awesome destruction of an entire planet.” I enacted the Battle of Thermopylae in my thermal undies in Space Spartans. Space Spartans had “Intellivoice.” A lady who sounded like she was in a cave three blocks away speaking through a Campbell’s soup can on a string counted aliens “three aliens, two aliens, one alien…” This was cool. I spent many hours saving the planet from from the Space Armada (the Intellivision version of Space Invaders). I was so good at Space Armada that I could make it to level 99 where the Armada of Invaders from Space were both invisible and fast. Like many early video games, Space Armada was nihilistic in the extreme. No matter your skill, the armada always landed. The end. Reset.

What I learned from my Intellivision games is best summed up in the Astrosmash instruction booklet: “You’re all alone in a hostile universe of tumbling asteroids and homicidal aliens.”

I occasionally had to leave the pillow fort for Lutheran confirmation class with a reverend whose name I don’t remember. He had two fused fingers on his right hand that I used to contemplate while I was supposed to be learning Luther’s Small Catechism. Rev. Claw explained all of the things that were “most certainly true”: endless extra lives, resurrection, and a poorly realized vision of paradise. I knew better – the game always ends. Defenders can only defend for so long. The missile command cannot stop all of the missiles. If you save the princess from one tower, the bad guy will swoop in and grab her and take her to another and say something like “WAKA WAKA WAKA!” We are all alone in a hostile universe of tumbling asteroids and overly certain clergy and little girls trapped in tall towers and our own crazy synapses struggling to make something of our short lives.

Make your fortress and hide and wait until the end, or spin your Breakout paddle, throw a blip at the blocks and break out. ^[iii.]

I know my daughter is stuck on Minecraft these days because before she goes to sleep she asks me questions like: “Daddy, how do I make paper?”

“I don’t know. Sugar cane? Look it up,” I say.

“I want you to show me. I’m scared of going out of the house,” she says.

I’m not generally one for bedtime stories – I’ve got stuff and things to do! – but I give it a whirl every once in a while, when I feel like imparting some wise lesson.

There once was a scrawny little princess who lived in a windowless tower of childhood. On this tower grew many vines that crawled all over the kingdom and hung from the trees. Adventurers used these vines to swing over snapping crocodiles and avoid falling in pits. There was a duck who wandered the forest believing it was a dragon. Leave the duck alone. Why burst its bubble? There was a little man in a white suit who used to burrow in the ground and inflate the crocodiles until they exploded. In many parts of the forest there was a mailbox and the mailbox was always west of a house, no matter what direction you were looking. It was a strange forest.

Oh, and there were of course many dolphins roaming the forest. (There always has to be dolphins.) Forest dolphins. They chewed gum and danced to music that was annoying to the entire kingdom. This music was sung by an evil witch named Demilovato.

The scrawny little princess was locked in the windowless tower by a yellow-robed wizard, her father.

The princess’s yellow-robed father was a demiurge, a craftsman of the material world. And the princess was young, so she was just a semi-demiurge. One day, her father the demiurge was called away on demi-urgent business. He was on a quest to go tell the evil Demilovato to that darn noise down!

With her father gone, the princess sat alone in her tower and listened to the duck-dragon outside and thought longingly of the dolphins far below in the forest. The princess began to sing and because she was a semi-demiurge her singing created little hemi-blocks of a new reality.

My daughter mumbles, half-asleep. I am getting too abstract.

What I mean is, her singing made the world, made life, made everything – really created it. She was a powerful princess but she didn’t know it yet. She was just learning about that because her father was away on business and she was trying out her voice. She tried to create the perfect note but she couldn’t yet sing a perfect note. She tried just to produce a quaver, one eighth of a perfect note. She couldn’t quite get that note perfect, either. She tried one sixteenth of perfect note, a hemiquaver. Then she tried a demisemiquaver. That wasn’t quite perfect. Finally, she produced the beautiful, small hemidemisemiquaver. And that was enough to create a small, princess-sized diamond pickaxe that the princess used to break out of the tower, dance with the dolphins, swing over the snapping crocodiles on a vine, check the mail west of the house, and generally have a great time outside of her windowless fortress.

The yellow-robed wizard returned, having defeated the evil Demilovato with an acne-causing spell, and found the tower empty. He was happy about this. He sat in the tower all day and listened to the tiny, perfect notes of his daughter’s life rising up above the tall trees of the strange forest.

She is asleep.

Sleeping children are such a relief.

Sartre said that we love to watch other people sleeping because we imagine we can own them completely. But Sartre didn’t have kids. My daughter appears more mysterious asleep than awake. Who knows what’s locked away in there?

I tip-toe down to my study and play Limbo, a new game that looks like a mash-up of Mummenshanz, South Park, and Balinese shadow puppets. It’s relaxing to die horribly in Limbo, start again, and learn from the experience. I’m not sure, but I think this game is telling me something important about letting go.

My daughter will find her own way out of the fortress. Her games will show her how to chip away at the walls.

i. On a Saturday afternoon, a man and his daughter spend equal amounts of time playing Minecraft and wandering alone in a nearby wood. Which activity was more spiritual? Why? Really? Why?

ii. There is a great sequence in Brazil where Robert DeNiro is eaten alive by paperwork. He struggles mightily as the forms-in-triplicate attack him but paperwork always wins. Mine has been a life lived playing, listening, watching, and reading. My torso is a series of whirling hard drive discs. Encoded on those rapidly spinning magnetized metal discs are all the games I ever played from AaAaAA!!! to Zork. Flapping pages of literature are my head. I walk upon legs made of Intellivision cartridges. The entire song catalog of the Kinks forms the spine of my being. La-la-la-la-Lola. If you rummage through this body and soul of digested media, from the hardened arteries of science fiction to the poems on my wrists, you will find nothing essentially me. My essential self was lost between the jewel cases for the essential Leonard Cohen and essential Al Green. I imagine my body like DeNiro’s at the end of the scene in Brazil: dissipating and the pages, discs, records, and cartridges that created my life blowing away, leaving nothing. The essence of who I was populating landfills, second-hand stores, and yard sales.

iii. Suppose some Faustian devil whispered in your ear that he would take away all the video games you have ever played, and the memory of them, and in return would give you back the time and money you spent on them. “Imagine!” says the devil, “What else you might have done if you hadn’t devoted so much time to video games? The people unmet. The novels unwritten. The exercise undone. Just imagine. All that disposable income that wasn’t really disposable; imagine if you could get it back…”

Keep in mind that 1) you have spent a lot of money on video games and 2) you are a poor person whose cat hasn’t peed in two days. The cat probably needs to be taken to the vet (which you can’t afford). Would you do make this deal with the devil? If so, would your life be better or worse?

Image by Kevblog

What keeps you up at night?

• A. My job
• B. My unemployment
• C. A vague but overwhelming sense that my life could fall apart at any moment, without warning
• D. The damn neighbor kid

How many undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the humanities do you hold?*

• A. 1
• B. 2
• C. 3+
• D. Only counting accredited institutions?

*Note: respondents for whom the answer would be “none” are disqualified from this quiz.

What do you feel guilty about?

• A. My race
• B. The social class I was born into
• C. My inability to feel happiness despite outward trappings of success
• D. That time I shoplifted from Borders

When you read the news, what is your reaction?

• A. Jaded resignation
• B. Panic, followed by denial
• C. Prolonged, unflagging despair
• D. The Onion still kills it

Which psychological treatments are you currently undergoing?

• A. Talk therapy
• B. Psychiatric medication
• C. Daily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sessions, large doses of antidepressants, and occasional institutionalization
• D. Sometimes I like to smoke a joint on the weekend

Which author do you most relate to?

• A. Sylvia Plath
• B. Ernest Hemingway
• C. David Foster Wallace
• D. Dan Brown

What is your darkest secret?

• A. My criminal record
• B. My history of drug abuse
• C. My cooperation with a dictatorial strongman
• D. Remember when Keith broke Gina’s laptop? That was actually me; I blamed him because I knew he was blacked out.

How would you describe your attitude toward romantic relationships?

• A. Self-destructive
• B. Commitment-phobic
• C. I refuse to acknowledge that other people exist
• D. Onanistic

What do you think the world will be like in 100 years?

• A. Ravaged by the consequences of climate change
• B. Torn apart by religious and political strife
• C. Contemplating an unthinkable “population control” scheme in a desperate attempt to staunch the bleeding of the last of the planet’s resources
• D. Probably, y’know… sexbots?

How do you feel about death?

• A. I have come to terms with its inevitability
• B. I welcome it
• C. I feel only apathy, as the universe does for all life
• D. What the FUCK is wrong with you people?

Give yourself 1 point for each A or B, 2 points for each C, and -1 point for each D.

Figuratively speaking, you are:

-10-0: The canopy of a hot air balloon in flight; empty, bloated, and oblivious to the cares of the world
1-2: A bundle of organic kale, missing its yellow band, sold as non-organic
3-4: The mumbled second verse of a marginal pop hit sung at a karaoke bar
5-6: A sexually explicit tweet, intended as a direct message, that is quickly deleted but still propagates to several followers’ clients
7-8: A craft brewer’s failed experiment, foisted on polite friends and relatives for no charge
9-10: Like, some bird
11-12: A bathroom in a hipster bar from which the mirror has been removed because it caused excessive self-consciousness in its patrons
13-14: A keytar purchased as a costume accessory for an ‘80s theme party
15-16: The episode of The Wire where they kill Wallace
17-18: A power strip, forgotten underneath a bed, itself plugged in, but with nothing plugged into it
19-20: The cacophony of footsteps that results when the first act of an open mic leaves the stage, the host returns to introduce the next act, and the multitude of patrons who did not realize it was open mic night flees the establishment

Illustration by Brad Jonas

My name is Juliet. I am 27 years old. I have breast cancer.

One of the first things people ask me after I’ve told them I have cancer is: how did you find it?

For me, it was straightforward and unremarkable: around Thanksgiving, I felt a pea-sized lump in my breast. I worried over it for a month or two, but not enough to pick up the phone and call my doctor. Instead, I hoped the lump would just go away on its own. It didn’t. Then one Saturday night at the beginning of January, I discovered a second lump in my armpit. I knew enough about breast cancer to know that it spreads first to the lymph nodes in your underarms, and, being a bit of a hypochondriac, I panicked.

On Monday morning, I finally called my doctor’s office. In a hushed, almost embarrassed voice, I explained to the receptionist, “I have a lump in my breast.”

She told me to come in that day.

My doctor took a look, touched that tiny bump, and declared it a pimple. Or maybe a cyst.

Huge. Sigh. Of. Relief.

But just to be safe, she was sending me to the breast center, so they could confirm it.

No problem! I felt a sort of feminist pride to be making my first trip to the breast center. Only I waited nearly another month to call them for an appointment.

On February 1, I finally went in. A soft-spoken young ultrasound tech and a motherly nurse with a heavy Filipino accent ushered me onto a bed, squirted some gel onto my breast, and rolled over it a couple dozen times with an ultrasound transducer. As I squinted at the screen, trying to make sense of the black-and-white fuzz, I silently joked with myself that this was not how I pictured my first ultrasound; I’d rather hoped that it would be for a happy thing growing inside me instead of an evil pimple-cyst. The motherly nurse held my hand.

After ten minutes or so, the ultrasound tech looked up and declared it a cyst. Or maybe a pimple.

Huge. Sigh. Of. Relief.

But just to be safe, he wanted to biopsy the lump with a hollow-core needle. I suddenly felt very cold.

After I dressed, they led me to a scheduler, a brisk Indian woman with pictures of two teenage daughters on her desk. She booked an appointment for the next week and ushered me out the door.

The next week, my mom and my husband met me at work, and we walked the six blocks to the breast center together. I went into the same exam room, and was comforted by the same motherly nurse. While the same ultrasound tech prepped his equipment, I cried silently. I didn’t know why — maybe because I had no idea what to expect, or maybe I hadn’t taken any of it seriously until that moment. I can honestly say, though, that it still hadn’t truly occurred to me that I could have cancer.

The biopsy was unpleasant — as any new, slightly painful medical experience is bound to be — but the tech and his nurse were fast and efficient, and soon I was on my way home, ice pack stuffed in my bra and a humorously numb feeling in my breast. After a few hours, the lidocaine wore off, and I promptly forgot the whole thing ever happened. 

At work the next day, around noon, I got a call from a radiologist at the breast center. He had a deep, cartoonish voice and a Midwestern accent. He talked for a few minutes, using lots of incomprehensible science-y words, until I interrupted him.

“I’m sorry, but wait one second: you’re saying it’s benign.” More of a statement than a question.

A long pause.

“No. I’m sorry. It’s malignant.” Another pause. “It’s cancer. We’ve already made an appointment for you to see a surgeon right away.” 

I felt like my legs were going to give out underneath me. I was standing in an empty hallway in my office. The word echoed in my head.

Cancer.

Cancer.

Cancer.

Cancer.

I barely heard another word the radiologist said, and after another minute or so I thanked him politely and hung up. I looked all around the empty hallway, not knowing what to do next. I was shaking uncontrollably. I walked to a coworker’s office: I needed to share the news, to test the reality of the moment, to bump against it a little to see if it had any give. She wasn’t at her desk, but her officemate was. I didn’t care. I closed the door behind me and whispered those impossible words:

“It’s cancer.”

By the look on her face, I knew it was real: horrified, then shocked, then sympathetic. She rushed to give me a hug and rub my arm while I rolled the words around in my mouth a little:

“It’s cancer.”

Illustration by Rebecca Elves

Every profession has its own peculiar jargon, but the language of book reviewers probably comes under more scrutiny than that of any other group (except politicians). If you’ve read more than four book reviews in your life, then you’re familiar with their hyperventilated style. A good book can be a “tour-de-force,” “poignant,” “lyrical,” “un-put-downable,” “pitch-perfect”; a bad book can be “woefully inadequate” or “staggeringly bad,” with characters that are “cookie-cutter” and settings that are “derivative.” Ones that don’t quite fit in one genre or another are described like a mashup: “Nicholas Sparks meets Thomas Pynchon” or some other such formulation. The list goes on.

So it comes as no surprise that there are plenty of specific complaints about the reviewer’s argot. My own favorite is from Dwight Garner, by way of Twitter: “To call a nonfiction book ‘magisterial’ is to get an intellectual hall pass; you no longer have to discuss the book in any meaningful way.”

But out of sympathy for the beleaguered book reviewers out there, and in the spirit of offering solutions instead of merely pointing out problems, I’d like to offer them some suggestions as substitutes for the hoarier chestnuts in their arsenal.

Move the goalposts

Instead of prattling on about things like plot and characters, imagine some new criteria by which to judge books and their authors. Any book without a sex scene in the first 20 pages (5 pages for a romance novel), for example, should be described as “arid.” Young adult novels deal out plenty of life lessons about relationships, but where are the ones that provide sufficient personal finance advice? And perhaps we ought to consider how well writers of transgressive literature describe food handling and preparation.

Commit to hyperbole

If you’re going to lie and say you’ve thrown a book across the room, you may as well take such expressions to their logical extreme. A possible replacement: “I put down the book, scratched a curse in Hermes’s name against the author on a sheet of lead, and nailed it to the wall of the local temple, in the manner of a Roman defixio.” Better to be outrageous than predictable.

Use eponyms instead of synonyms

This neatly sidesteps the “elongated yellow fruit” problem. An author whose prose might be called “achingly beautiful” instead becomes “the Delacroix of literature”; a “darkly funny” book is now a “Rabelaisian comedy.” If fine artists aren’t your thing, then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending” or “Clintonian eroticism.”

Mix highbrow and lowbrow diction

And I mean really go for it.: “Polylogic epistolary novels are the new intradiegetic-homodiegetic narratives.” “Not your father’s textual communities.” “Epizeuxis much?”

Borrow buzzwords from other industries

For example, turn bestsellers into “results-driven novels,” and debut authors into “entrepreneurial writers.” Take a line from restaurant critics and remark on how “toothsome,” “decadent,” or “chocolatey” someone’s writing is. Obviously, “well-crafted sentences” should become “artisanal sentences.”

With any luck, these will all get their own squares in the game of Book Review Bingo sooner rather than later.

Photo by risa-i

Friend: Oh, there’s something in your hair.
Me: What?
Friend: It’s shiny. Right up there, at the top. What is it?

Hair Stylist #1: Isn’t it weird being in your thirties, when your hair starts going crazy?
Me: Crazy? What do you mean?
Hair Stylist #1: Grays, you know. They’re so crazy! Getting older is crazy. Everything changes.
Me: I’m 26.

Mother: You come by it honestly. Your father went gray very early. Very, very early. You both worry too much!

Hair Stylist #2: If you ever start dyeing your hair, it will help with these texture issues.
Me: Texture issues?
Hair Stylist #2: These wiry grays.
Me: Wiry?
Hair Stylist #2: See how this one’s just sticking up like an exclamation point? It’s excited!

Neighbor (19 years old): Oh, hi, do you live here?
Me: Yes, I do.
Neighbor: Can you let me in? I forgot my key, and I don’t think my boyfriend is home.
Me: Sure!
Neighbor: Thanks, Mrs….?

Mother: I mean, my whole head is probably gray now. I don’t even really know anymore. Do you need money to go to a salon?

Colleague: So, what did you do in your time off between undergrad and grad school?
Me: I didn’t take any time off.
Colleague: Oh, but… aren’t you…
Me: I’m 26.

Mother: I was very old when I had you, you know. I was an old mommy!
Me: You were 26.
Mother: So old!

Hair Stylist #3: So what about feather extensions?
Me: Feathers? Like… a Stevie Nicks kind of thing?
Hair Stylist: #3: Like Ke$ha!
Me: How old are you?
Stylist: I’ll be twenty in August! You would look great with these! They’re so popular. Everyone’s going to have them this summer.
Me: How old do you think I am?
Stylist: …

Bouncer (winking facetiously): Young lady, it’s my job to ask you for your ID.

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

Illustrations and freehand by Rebecca Elves

First, you will need to determine your current badass level. Use the following equation:

Once you have your total, enter it into an Excel spreadsheet. Print it off. Put stars around it. This will make it stand out so whenever you look at it, you’ll remember the level of badass you should be striving for.

Post it on the fridge. Unless you are on a diet, in which case post it in your exercise room. If you don’t have an exercise room, put it in your gym bag. If you don’t have a gym bag then you’re probably not that serious about losing weight.

Now that we have that covered, let’s start with the basics.

It’s a known fact that a badasses march to the beat of their own drummer. I suggest your drummer be from a small Mayan village. And that he be seven years old. Some people might think this is young, but trust me when I say that Macuilxochitl’s drumming skills are off the hook.

You and Macuilxochitl Mitnal (“God of Music/Underworld Hell Where the Wicked are Tortured”) will meet in Quetzeltenango. You might think I’m making this place up, but trust me, it exists. What were you doing in Quetzaltenango? Easy. You looked at the map, saw the name and said, “Yeah, that’s where I’m going to go.” Badasses don’t plan their trips. They just fly by the seat of their low-rise dark wash skinny jeans.

Also, get a badass haircut. When the hairdresser asks you what you want, shrug your shoulders like you could care less. Then tell her to give you bangs. Trust me when I say that badasses rock the shit out of bangs.

If you’re invited to a party, don’t go. Or go, but leave early. Do a jump kick as if to say, “Sorry guys, I gotta blow this joint.” Then open a bedroom window and jump out.

When your friends say, “Boy, you sure missed a great party last night!” do a groin chop as if to say, “Did I really? Or did you miss out on a relaxing night at home?”

If you have a Facebook account, get rid of it. Same with Twitter. Badasses don’t have time to look after their neighbor’s farm crops, or come up with lame hashtags that have a one-in-a-million chance of becoming the next Trending Topic. They’re too busy being badass. If you need to social network in order to feel validated, sign up on LinkedIn. Even total badasses need to work.

Shoot a kitten. If someone asks you why you shot that kitten, who cares? You don’t have to justify your actions. You’re a badass. But when you shoot the kitten make sure you use a finger gun and not a real gun. Only an asshole would shoot a kitten with a real gun.

You want to be the kind of badass that keeps people guessing. That way you won’t get stuck babysitting. Parents will be scared to leave their kids with you because you’re unpredictable. Will he take care of my kid? Or will he just ignore it? A good rule of thumb is if the kid is ugly, you should probably just ignore it.

During your therapy sessions (yes, even badasses go to therapy), challenge everything your therapist says. If she accuses you of getting defensive, say, “Am I really? Or are you the one who’s defensive and you’re projecting your defensiveness on to me? Or, maybe I’m so offensive that I’ve reverted back to defensiveness.” Follow up with a jump kick to her head.

A badass lives by his own rules. If you want to eat breakfast cereal for dinner, well, then you’re damn well going to eat breakfast cereal for dinner! And there’s not a damn thing that anyone can do about it!

Though to be honest, I can’t really see a badass doing that.

Illustration by Madeleine Flores

Writing about Spencer Tweedy is an impossible task.

There are two main difficulties. First, Spencer’s father is Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, so you have to simultaneously deal with that and leave that alone, which is to say that you don’t want to dwell on his lineage, but you don’t want this fact to be glaringly absent, either. Second, Spencer is fourteen years old, and given how gifted he is in a variety of areas — writing, photography, and music, as far as I know — it’s hard not to return to how good he is at things at such a young age (and/or how bad you are at things at 14 + x age by comparison).

Also, what do you ask a teenager who doesn’t yet have a particular specialty? Typically, one interviews experts because they have an impressive depth of knowledge about a particular area. But Spencer is interested in several things, as one probably ought to be — get ready — at his age. He maintains a top-shelf, well-written blog. He has the keen eye of an intuitive photographer. He plays drums well enough to have been in a band for quite some time. But it’s not as though his blog will win a Pulitzer, or his pictures will get displayed in a museum. I don’t even know that his drumming is that virtuosic; it doesn’t make sense to focus on any one area of Spencer’s skill set and declare him an expert.

So why would you want to read about him, other than that he’s his father’s son and he’s an articulate, precocious youth? I guess our collective interest in celebrity can’t help but stare, but our best selves want to believe that we’ll like him for other reasons. It’s like rubbernecking, but then, upon reaching the scene that caused all the traffic, discovering that it’s something spectacular instead of horrific; a unicorn giving birth, or something.

His isn’t the type of celebrity you’re used to witnessing, though. Spencer goes to summer camp. His family vacations in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. He attends a public high school. Maybe that’s what especially compelling about his blog: its normalcy.  

Spencer would tell you himself that he’s not quite sure what he wants to do, ultimately, with his accumulated powers: “I’m not as interested in writing as a career as I once was, but it’s certainly something I like. If I were to go into a writing profession, it’d probably be journalism. I don’t write too much fiction.”

In the time we spent emailing back and forth while six months passed, Spencer wrestled with both the voice and format of his eponymous blog. Since our conversation concluded, he made the switch to Tumblr, promising, “I’m trying to keep this exactly like it was, plus smaller posts.”

The blog came about in 2008, when Spencer was twelve.

“I got the idea of combining my then-budding love for writing with that of tinkering, and a blog seemed like the perfect thing for that. I had pretty avaricious goals in terms of what it would be (besides an expression outlet). The only things I wrote back then were either for school, or reviews of things. I thought people would read them, and the little Google AdSense box would make me millions. So my initial goal was definitely ‘child entrepreneur.’”

At the end of that year, for his birthday, he sat in with Wilco for “The Late Greats” during a performance at Madison Square Garden.

“A few people found out,” he said, and his audience grew precipitously. “Every once in awhile after that, I’d have a super crazy, ‘Wow, I have a decently popular blog’ moment. I still do sometimes.”

At its most popular, last year, his blog averaged between 1,000 and 1,500 hits a day. Since he’s been posting less often, “it hovers around six or seven hundred.”

We know what it means as readers to visit a decently popular blog. We bookmark it, we share its best posts, and we wonder what it is, exactly, about that blog that attracts us to it. Spencer writes with the voice of someone who is — sorry, again — older. (But maybe it’s not age? Maybe we just don’t expect a 14-year-old to be so interesting? Or to care about language?)  There are some great sentences that show up effortlessly, like a regular at a pub who just happens to live upstairs:

• “I finally went and slaved over a hot Walgreens to get my Mexican winter break photos developed.”
• On braces: “I ate a sandwich with a fork and knife at lunch today.”
• “Our senses were dealt a final debilitating blow when some kid threw up in the hallway. The entire building was broken.”
• On the passing of Captain Beefheart: “One of my strongest memories has always been listening to Safe as Milk with my dad on our car rides to preschool.”

When I asked about his online persona versus the regular him, Spencer said, “My friends have told me before that my writing doesn’t sound like ‘me,’ and I think there’s definitely some dissonance. That’s probably because, when I write, I either think in the voice of my rabbi, or in Amir’s from Jake and Amir. When I talk, I guess I think in the voice of… me.”

As a blog’s popularity grows, so must that consideration of voice.

“I’d like to say that I’ve never really changed anything because of my audience, but that would really be selling them short,” he said. “A more realistic thing to say would be more like I make my blog what I want it to be, but I also care about the people who read it.”

To that end, Spencer is earnest, frequently responds to comments, and seems incapable of snark. For a while, he posted questions and answers from his Formspring. Even the most inane comments — “today i had cranberry scones and tea for breakfast, walked my dog, did yard work/gardening, read a short story in the new yorker, went to the gym and now I will take a shower. Today was a good day, the gardening thing is very zen and makes me very calm and balanced and happy.” — got a thoughtful, personal response: “That’s just wonderful. Those days are nice (when you get a lot of stuff done). I don’t like cranberries.”

Through words and pictures, Spencer also gives us a window into a world where someone with a public face — his father, mostly — occasionally wanders through, but then carries right on. It’s like watching a scuba diver swim amongst, I don’t know, talking walruses, without making a big hairy deal about it. You’re treated to glimpses — the back of Dad’s head from the backseat of a car, or walking hand-in-hand up a sand dune with Spencer’s younger brother, Sam.

When I asked him about his own greatest experiences as a fan, he said, “I regret — as if there’s anything to regret — that for the most-part over the years, I’ve been too young to realize who or how awesome the people I’ve met were (i.e. I sat next to Jody Stephens at a thing like a year ago and totally didn’t get it).” Another time, they got to meet the Rolling Stones. “Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards scared the crap out of Sam.”

I asked Spencer to compare his Madison Square Garden moment with the smaller venues he plays around Chicago with his band, the Blisters. 

He said, “The more intimate, the scarier, and fifteen people is obviously a lot more up-close-and-personal than fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand people are not people. They’re dots in a ginormous room. A really good band should be able to make a stadium feel as good as a living room.”

Maybe that’s the crux of what makes Spencer so readable: writing a blog is simultaneously like playing a stadium and being alone.  

Of course, playing music in front of a small or large crowd is also like playing music in front of people, and Spencer has been doing that for most of his life.

“I started the Blisters with a friend (no longer in the band) when I was seven years old. It was originally meant to be just us two, him on turntables, and me on drums, but through a series of events — price of turntables, impracticality of turntables — we ended up going with the standard rock n’ roll lineup with my friend Henry on keyboards. We played ‘Heavy Metal Drummer’ by my dad for our first show at Second City.”

They later found a guitarist, Hayden, by putting up posters at school, and have recently added Alaina, Henry’s girlfriend, a configuration that’s called the Hungry Pilgrims. Here’s a song they wrote, which sounds as authentic as anything an adult might write about love, frankly.

When I asked about influences, he didn’t name any musicians, maybe out of self-consciousness. Rather, he wrote about “a whole bunch’a blogs and things in my Google Reader subscriptions. Some of my favorites: but does it float, Frank Chimero, Jakob Nylund, Friends of Type, Chromogenic, and TED, to name a few. I like BOOOOOOOM, but sometimes it can get to be a little too much.”

Given how fondly he writes about family trips, it’s obvious that he enjoys and appreciates his family, too. (In his bar mitzvah recap post, he thanked his mother, who “was/is, undoubtedly, a beast party-planner and overall mom.”) 

Like anyone — sorry about this — his age, Spencer is also establishing his discerning palate through comparison with friends’ cultural appetites.

“It’d be an understatement to say that my tastes in things differs from most of my friends,” he said, though going to high school and thus having more than forty-five classmates has exposed him to more people who are aligned with him. “They like good stuff, for the most-part. Some don’t, though, and that’s where I have had trouble staying off a high horse. It’s too easy to say, ‘You suck. That music sucks,’ when, really, there is no such thing as bad music (ref. Merzbow, dammit). That said, most of my friends nowadays are open-minded, non-Neil-Young-bashing people (who may or may not happen to listen to Wiz Khalifa, too).”

And Spencer, for his part, is open to Top-40 work as well.

“Beyoncé, for instance, I think she’s amazing. Kanye’s pretty amazing. Jay-Z rules. I try really hard to not close myself off to anything mainstream or ‘non-indie.’ Why should you?”  

Really, the reason to interview Spencer Tweedy is because of who he is already — a self-aware reporter embedded in adolescence. One imagines that he will be just as interesting — differently interesting — to read as he gets older. For now, though, it’s tempting to transpose our own teenage experience on his, to compare him with us. If you’re a regular visitor to Spencer’s blog or his photostream — and I’m sure if you were a groupie of the Blisters or the Hungry Pilgrims, too — you can recognize what he does as his. Could any of us say the same then? Can we say the same now? Will we be able to see this version of Spencer when we see his work years from now?

Spencer says, “I think that when I’m sixty (god willing), I’ll be a different person, but not fundamentally. We change as we grow, but not totally. Something about [this question] made me think of Benjamin Button, which (a) doesn’t really make sense, and (b) is a movie I’ve never seen.”  

Here’s to the future, then.

All photos taken by Spencer Tweedy