Dear JusticeIs21@protonmail.com,

It was great to wake up to your email this morning, August 6, 2023. Exactly five months ago today, on March 6, 2023 I woke up feeling wrong, the right side of my body kinda wonky. I’d learn later that day that I had a Cerebral Vascular Accident (CVA), what is commonly called a stroke.

Part of me feels badly for you. No one deserves a wallop of pain like that.

But part of me feels like this is your comeuppance, this is karma, this is what happens when you’ve been cruel, petty, and judgmental, gossiping about and being malicious toward others with disabilities or mental-health struggles.

And that’s the part of me that won out tonight. You wouldn’t and haven’t thought twice about being a dick.

So yeah, this email was a great way to mark this occasion. Since you are too cowardly to put your name on your viciousness, I don’t know if I have been a jerk to you in the past.

Against the advice of the people who love me best (sorry, EM), I am responding to your email in public. I know your kind of anonymous cruelty is unworthy of my attention, but my best/worst trait is how I love to die on all the hills. ALL OF THEM. The smaller and pettier, the better.

I don’t know a lot about Hinduism and karma, but I’m pretty sure this is not how it works. I don’t think the universe sends a debilitating stroke to people for being a dick. If that’s how it worked most Republicans and Turnip himself would have had much bigger CVAs.

Where did you get the idea that I’ve “been cruel, petty, and judgmental, gossiping about and being malicious toward others with disabilities or mental-health struggles”? I have zero doubt that in my past I have been thoughtlessly cruel. I was not the best version of myself in the 90s.

But recently? Say in the last 10-15 years? I don’t think so.

I don’t have it in me to be intentionally cruel. I’ve lived my whole life in a body deemed other, or as one doctor told me, “a statistical anomaly.” I’ve been bullied and suffered from intentional cruelty for as long as I can remember. I’m not the kind of person who wants others to suffer as I have. I’m the exact opposite. It’s why I so passionately believe student loans should be forgiven even though I’ve already paid mine off.

To say I “wouldn’t and haven’t thought twice about being a dick,” is not true, especially when it comes to the disabled. I’ve spent the last four years or so actively trying to educate myself about disability. Here’s my partial reading list:
Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner; Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones; Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy; A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley; Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig; Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker; Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong; and Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer.

JusticeIs21@protonmail.com, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my own ableism. I’ve said before that one of the hardest things about this stroke is reckoning just how ableist I was and am. I’m not perfect, but I’m working on it.

So, anonymous coward, I really hope you don’t believe a stroke “is your comeuppance, this is karma, this is what happens when you’ve been cruel, petty, and judgmental. . .” Because if it’s what you really believe you’re in for a doozy of a payback.

Sending that email was intentionally cruel and petty. I’m not sure what your intent was. Did you want to kick me when I was down? Did you want to make me feel somehow worse?

Sorry, I’m recovering from a stroke. It’s impossible for me to feel worse than I already do. I’ve been stripped bare. I’m an exposed nerve. I don’t have a lot of dignity or humility left, but at least I’m not the kind of asshole who intentionally tries to hurt people.

Love and kisses,
Jodi

The post Re: Your Stroke appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hey Darling Ones,

Did I ever tell you about the time back in aught-something when I ghosted a man I had been seeing for months on Valentine’s Day? Of course I didn’t because that awful woman ruined the sharing of romantic entanglements for the lot of you.

Ghosting someone after Valentine’s Day is a dick move. I am not proud of it even though I had good reasons for ending the relationship. In hindsight I should have handled it better in the moment.

I can’t remember how many months I had been seeing this guy by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around. Six? Five? Nine? It was a lot of months, especially because when it comes to romantic relationships I’m ol’ Jodi Fortnight. I can’t remember the exact reasons why, but I made it very clear to the dude that I did not want to celebrate or recognize Valentine’s Day in any way, shape, or form. No flowers. No candy. No dinner. No hanky panky. In fact, I’m pretty sure we didn’t even have plans to see each other that entire week. It must have been one of those years where I was anti V-Day. Sometimes I’m very pro V-Day. It all depends on my fickle moods.

So imagine my surprise when dude shows up at my place of employment with flowers, candy, and a stuffed animal. Did I say surprise? I mean my utter fury.

I remember walking with my friend Gage from the lobby to my desk. He was helping me carry all the crap.

“Is that your boyfriend?” Gage asked in a sing-songy, grade-school voice.
“Not anymore,” I said.

The guy had made a habit of crossing boundaries I put up. And there were a lot because I have a defensive fortress around my heart. Still, he was one of those guys who would show up where he was not invited. First Ave shows. Bars. Etc. I frequently gave him a pass because I knew he was really into me, but come to my work was not cool. So I just stopped. Shitty. So shitty of me.

The dude forgave me somewhat because we hooked up a few times after the ghosting. So it was only a semi-ghosting, I guess? The first time we slept together after the ghosting he was all, “It was Valentine’s Day, wasn’t it? I knew that was a bad idea.”

A couple years ago when I was re-doing my dining room Sister #2 found that stuffed animal in a box of toys the niblings used to play with when they were little. I was debating on whether to keep all the toys, some of the toys, or whatnot because they reminded me of the nibs.
“This is cute,” she said, turning the monkey around in her hands. “You should keep it.”
“I got that for Valentine’s Day from a guy and then I dumped him.”
“Donate,” she said, tossing it into the box and shaking her head in disgust.

For Valentine’s Day, Darling Ones, I made you another mix tape (I even figured out how to make YouTube playlist, special for you). Last year’s was Paul Westerberg’s 13 Best Songs of Love & Longing. My plan was to tell you about these songs, how if I had the courage I would send this mix to all my crushes personally, but I am a coward and so am sending it to them generally through this post. I was gonna tell you why I love “Bittersweetheart” by Soul Asylum so much.

But this other story popped out instead.

Hauntingly yours,
Jodi

The post A Dick Move on My Part appeared first on I Will Dare.

For as long as I’ve had conscious thought, I’ve known I was tall and fat. I cannot think of a single moment in my entire forty-three years where I wasn’t keenly aware of my too big body. Maybe it was the diets that started when I was four. Maybe it was the doctors who continually tried to solve the puzzle of why I would not stop growing.

I don’t know, but for as long as I can remember my body has been a problem nobody could solve. For the most part it was not something discussed with my family and friends. Usually, around school shopping time, my parents would put me on a new diet that would last until they needed to grocery shop and then it would never be mentioned again. There was the summer they put me on Dexatrim and I never slept. Or the summer of aerobics classes and Slim Fast, but nothing ever stuck.

And so I continued to grow.

My size was a topic off limits for most of my extended family, my dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles. It just wasn’t something we talked about until my cousin Chris married Jim.

Jim is a cousin-in-law, I guess, a short redheaded man who made fun of me one night in my Aunt Rosie & Uncle Fred’s basement because I was so fat and he was amazed I could find clothes that fit, specifically a Twins World Series Champion t-shirt. I must have been fifteen when this happened. I still remember the humiliation and the sense of betrayal. Family events were supposed to be a space where I didn’t have to worry about being teased for my size. Instead they picked on me for liking books, using big words, and being a smartypants, which was way better than the alternative but still, ugh.

For the better part of the last twenty-years I have avoided Jim and that side of the family who made me feel bad for being smart and fat and too tall for words and generally like not one of them, which is the case because my dad adopted me when I was four or five.

So let’s fast forward to Monday, a funeral in Coon Rapids, where we are saying goodbye to my Uncle John. I was pretty anxious for this event. There’s a lot of family drama and politics involved in this story that is too complicated to explain, suffice it to say it fed my anxiety.

When we walked into the funeral home the first thing I noticed was that I am very much taller than everyone in the building. Inches and stories and feet taller than these people. My cousin Cathy’s husband Steve probably comes the closest and I still have a few inches on him. I felt like Godzilla attacking Coon Rapids. The second thing I noticed is that in the middle of the room Jim and another cousin-in-law are talking about me. They kept looking at me, saying something, and then laughing. So now I am aware of my size and the fact that I’m being made fun of.

My goal was to avoid Jim and to greet all my mourning cousins. It was an awkward game of chess, because I don’t blend easily in a crowd. I tried to make a beeline to my cousin Patty, whose family I lived with my senior year of high school. I thought I was pretty safe, some ten feet away from Jim, when I heard him call out across the distance.

“You’re still pretty tall, huh?” He shouted and pointed at me.
I grinned wanly because what the hell else was I supposed to do.
“You haven’t started shrinking yet, like Art,” he shouted.
And I nodded my head before bending down to hug Patty.

Rage boiled inside me and I was thankful I was at an event where you could cry with abandon. I was furious at him for calling attention to my size, which was abundantly clear without the literal shout out. I was furious at him for making me uncomfortable in a place that should have been safe. I was furious that he diverted my attention away from my mourning family and directed toward me.

Once he shouted at me, I hightailed it to the furthest corner of the room where I could sit down unnoticed. And I stewed. My sisters offered to kick his ass, but I decided we didn’t need a rumble at Uncle John’s wake.

I am still angry.

I’m angry that the asshole will forever be linked with saying goodbye to my uncle. I’m angry that he thinks we have this funny jokey thing where he can call attention to my body in a crowded room and it’s okay. And I’m mostly angry because he makes me feel like I don’t belong where in this one room, in this one situation I belonged way more than he did.

The post That One Asshole Who Ruined Everything appeared first on I Will Dare.

I cannot deny that my Joan Jett experience was marred by the fuckers around me. First of all, she played on a stage that was penned in on both sides. On one side we had the beer tents lined with people waiting for beer and not about to budge, and a fence on the other side. This meant that a very large amount of people were all jockeying for position in a narrow space. Generally, I’m not the person that needs to be at the front of the stage. I’m fine taking my 6’5″ self to the back of the crowd and enjoying the view from there. In fact, I usually prefer that because I once had a panic attack in the middle of a Rufus Wainwright concert at First Ave and have enjoyed the edges of the crowd ever since.

However, this was Joan Jett. And while I didn’t need to be in the first row I did want to stake out a semi-decent spot. The nerve!

See, I was already super annoyed before her set even started. I found a pretty decent spot next to a tree. My logic was, “Hey, a tree is taller than me, people shouldn’t complain too much.” Remember this, it comes back to play in this story.

Since Max was off watching GWAR, I was standing next to the tree by myself eavesdropping on trio of hipster twenty somethings — two young women and a dude. The young dude was insufferable, lecturing the women on all things Joan Jett like he was some kind of professor of Joanology. He was both incredulous and condescending at the same time. You know that dude. And the worst part was, he was wrong about half the shit he said. If I were a bigger asshole, I would have been all, “Actually, jackass, ‘Cherry Bomb’ was not Joan’s. It was written by Joan Jett and Kim Fowley and was the track 1 side 1 on The Runaways’ debut album in 1976. She didn’t even sing it, Cherie Currie did.” (Thanks Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways!)

I didn’t have time for too much scorn, because suddenly there she was. Joan Jett on stage in front of me and, I had tears to shed and songs to sing. The crowd stuttering through “Cherry Bomb” was pretty rad, and at one point during “Do You Wanna Touch Me” after Joan had asked the crowd to sing along I leaned over to Professor Chatty O’Bullshit who was saying something about the crowd’s singing and cracked, “When Joan asks you to sing, you sing.”

It was right after that when some jackass behind me had enough of the injustice of being stuck behind someone so gifted with the height and decided to climb the tree next to me. Only the tree next to me wasn’t really that big of a tree and all of the branches were well over my head, making them a good seven feet off the ground. However, this did not stop entitled jackass from shimmying up that tree and kicking me in the head in the process. It hurt. A lot. Did he apologize? No. Did he come out of the fucking tree? No. Instead, he perched up in the tree and rained down small branches and leaves upon the crowd underneath him. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to cause bodily harm to a stranger. In my head I kept thinking, “just grab his foot and pull the fucker down. Just do it. You can reach him and pull him down. DO IT!”

I was so angry and annoyed and claustrophobic at that point that I took the time during a song I didn’t know to head to the back of the crowd.

As I was fighting upstream, Joan started the intro to the next song. She was talking about the song and blah, blah, blah and how she invited a friend who was playing on Sunday to play the next song with her. I very nearly pooped my pants. My brain immediately went to her friend Paul Westerberg who was playing Sunday. You’d be amazed how much fan ficton you can write in the space between words. I wrote the War & Peace of fan fiction in the time it took her to introduce Laura Jane Grace from Against Me!

My disappointment was fleeting though, because by the time I made it to a safe space at the back of the crowd, in view of the jumbotron, she started ripping through a trifecta featuring “I Love Rock & Roll,” “Crimson & Clover,” and “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” And if there’s anything that can make you forget a possible head trauma and other minor annoyances, it’s those three songs played by Ms. Joan Jett herself.

The post RiotFest Diaries: Joan Jett Almost Made Me Poop My Pants appeared first on I Will Dare.

Over Christmas vacation Jaycie and Max were here at Supergenius HQ with Sister #4. They were trolling through Hulu showing her their favorite sketches. It was mostly Stefan and Gilly. Sister #4 told them about her favorite SNL characters, specifically Mary Katherine Gallagher, and how she really liked that sketch of the Miley Cyrus show with Steve Buscemi and Maya Rudolph as Whitney Houston.

A lot of the humor of the sketch was lost on Jaycie and Max. They had no idea who Whitney Houston was or why someone would make fun of her. I immediately transformed into an 8th grade version of myself. I rambled on about how Whitney was this beautiful amazing pop singer in the 80s. How she had a ton of #1 hits and it was controversial when she married Bobby Brown who used to be in New Edition and then went solo and he was kind of a bad boy. I’m pretty sure there was some really bad singing included with the lecture. It was effusive and quickly bored my audience. I tried to bring it back to a Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch featuring Whitney in her prime, but we couldn’t find it on Hulu (there’s a shitty version on YouTube).

The short lecture was given by that 8th grade version of myself who thought it was important for posterity to write down that on March 2, 1986 one of my favorite songs was “How Will I Know”.

It was also that 8th grade version of me who shed a few tears last night upon learning of Houston’s death at the age of 48. But it was grown-up me who got pissed off at the callous and, well, just plain meanness of people on Twitter last night.

Now I understand that not everyone is going to care about Houston’s music or her career or her death. That’s fine, different strokes and all that. However, you have to be some kind of cruel, mean-spirited asshole to crack jokes about someone a few minutes after their death is announced. It pissed me off when people did it after Amy Winehouse died and it pissed me off last night.

I just don’t get what motivates people to do that. Sure, I expect the jokes to come eventually. It’s inevitable. I grew up in the 80s, I remember the Christina McAullife jokes that were whispered in the hallways after the Challenger exploded. But it was probably months after the tragedy when I first heard a joke. And it was whispered because we knew it was wrong.

But now, people shout their derision at the moment of death. Are they so desperate for attention that they want to be the first one to make a joke that they can’t even wait an hour, a minute before cracking that joke? What does it say about us as a society? Other than we are cruel, heartless assholes.

I was stunned by a lot of the men (it was all men) I follow on Twitter last night. Usually I take great pride in the progressiveness and sensitivity of the people I follow. My heart swelled when they cheered about the overturning of Prop 8 in California, and when they were outraged by Planned Parenthood being defunded by Susan G. Komen.

Last night I saw a new side of them and it was sad. It was as though the thought of just shutting up about something they didn’t care about never occurred to them. Their jokes about crack being whack and #TooSoon? were not cute or funny. In fact, it just showed that deep down they’re assholes, and that’s really disappointing.

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