So Who Wants To Play Some Fiasco?
If you remember my review of Fiasco, the gamemaster-less RPG, you’ll recall that I liked it quite a bit. Playing desperate, Coen Brothers-style people in small towns is quite fun, and a very writerly exercise in trying to map out a story collectively.
Which is why we’ll be playing a game of Fiasco at my house this Sunday with our friends Tim and Dani. The game can support up to six players, and is very heavy on acting and conceptualization. There’s no dice rolls to hit, no hit points, just Scene and Resolution and The Turn. Witty dialogue and surprising characterization is your best bet.
If you’re in Cleveland and would like to play, hit me up via comment or email and I’ll slot you in.
Why Polyamory Has Less Drama, Then More Drama, Then More Drama, Than Monogamy.
It took us a while for Gini and I to come out as polyamorous, mainly because we were so embarrassed by the drama-hungry yahoos who identified themselves as poly. We didn’t want to stand next to them. All those constant breakups, the weird infighting, the immature dorks constantly whining about their evil exes? Most polyamory was a big stew of ugly drama, and we didn’t wanna be associated with that.
As we’ve talked to more poly couples, though, we’ve learned that polyamorous relationships actually have less drama associated with them than monogamous ones. And that’s because every fight affects not just you, but the entire web of relationships.
Which is to say that if I’m dating Margery exclusively and we have a nasty fight that lasts all night, that affects only us. The reason we’re having the fight is, presumably, because we want to keep this relationship going, and we can spend months involved in daily battles trying to figure out how to make this crumbling twosome work without it exhausting anyone but our friends. Are we compatible? Who cares? We think we could be compatible, and so we have the luxury of going at each other like cats and dogs for years! And who knows? Maybe we’ll find a way to spin our dysfunction into gold! Gini and I certainly had a rough start, but we worked it out.
But in poly, I have limited energy to spend, and how I spend that energy affects my whole web of relationships.
See, if I’m also dating Dani, then she’s going to see how strung out I am by my miserable relationship with Margery. Chances are good if it’s a really angsty relationship that we’ll have a few nice times torpedoed by Margery – maybe it’s as direct as a Margery picking a fight with me in the middle of a date with Dani, maybe it’s as subtle as me being worn out and unable to relax when we’re snuggled up because ZOMG WHAT’S GOING ON WITH MARGERY. And unless we have a handy “I don’t want to know” barrier in place, sometimes Dani will be a friend to bounce thoughts about Margery afterwards, which means too many of our conversations will turn into impromptu therapy sessions on WHY IS SHE BEING SO UNREASONABLE.
Which means if I can’t get it together with Margery, eventually it’s going to tank my relationship with Dani.
That’s a thing I haven’t seen written up a lot on in polyamory; the fact that playing nice is not just a good idea, but often a requirement for long-term multiple relationships. The saying in poly is that love is endless, but time is limited. If I only get one date a week with you, and that date has you constantly seething and distracted because of this other dude, then eventually I’m getting starved of my happiness for factors that aren’t under my control. Which becomes unfair. I’ve broken it off with people not because I didn’t think I could have worked it out with them, but because the amount of energy it would have taken to fix things between us would have stolen needed emotional resources from Gini.
So you have to play fair and be reasonable in poly relationships, or else the problem self-corrects. So many healthy polyamorous relationships hum like a fine-tuned engine, with only a couple of major blowups to get past the things that low-key talk can’t solve.
But.
But.
If you’re into drama – and many people love being the star of their own soap opera – then yeah, poly affords you an endless opportunity to entangle yourself in huge webs of villains and heroes (although today’s heros always seem to become tomorrow’s villains). You don’t have to self-improve – all you have to do is find a new partner who doesn’t know you that well! And so you’ll swing from relationship to relationship, always on the verge of a breakup, always convinced that perfection is around the corner, and became a sort of Drama Generation Unit where nothing you do is really cheating or harmful, hey, it’s poly!
It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of the people in any given group are nice, quiet, and sane. But 20% are loud and ugly, and they account for 80% of the terrible stuff that the rest of the world overhears. So yeah, in my experience good poly is usually more low-key than good monogamy… and you never notice that because the good poly relationships are nearly invisible. But bad poly? It’s like they want to draw you in, because they need more people to take sides. And that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, because when you’re in a subculture, all you need is one passionately dysfunctional partner who identifies as X to make all Xs seem crazy.
Then there’s the fact that breakups are usually a little bit dramatic. Oh, there are good breakups – the ones where you both go, “It’s time” – but most breakups involve a disproportional hurt because one person’s done and the other isn’t. So even if you’re trying to be very good and noble and kind about it, there’s often going to be little spats of childishness on both sides as one person throws a tantrum because dammit why did they go, and the other sullenly says, well, I made the decision to leave, why can’t they get over it?
And maybe it’s not the biggest drama in the world – but when you have multiple relationships, you’re gonna have multiple breakups, and that leads to a little more poly drama. Maybe not a lot, if you’re good, but even a good breakup involves more angst than many are comfortable with.
Regardless, it’s not a race to see which is better; it’s which you’re more comfortable with. I’m not trying to say that that monogamy is better or worse than poly. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses – some day, I’ll write about how in my experience, good monogamy usually involves a lot less maintenance time than good polyamory. And I think if you’re fatally drama-allergic, then polyamory may be a model that you struggle in.
But that’s not my real point. The point is that if you’re in a polyamorous relationship, you have to remember that your drama spreads to touch all the other people on the web – unless they’ve specifically blocked you off for that, which leads to its own challenges in interacting. It’s not just your partner you’re having a huge uproar with, it’s everyone within your circle, and as such it’s in your best interests to be as rational, understanding, and reasonable about it. Or, as noted, the problem will self-correct.
Updates on Shaving, And Bees
Shaving News
Today, I passed a major milestone: the shave I gave myself with my straight razor was far better than I could have achieved with a disposable razor.
Floyd he straight razor’s performance has been, if you’ll pardon the phrase, neck-and-neck with my old Gillette. Trusty Floyd was closer on the flat areas like my cheeks, but turned a little treacherous when it came to the curves of my jaw, leaving me a little patchy. The Gillette was more constant, giving me a mediocre shave all around.
But I learned how to do the triple-pass – I have to shave three times to get the perfect shave – and how to angle Floyd to maneuver around the hollows of my throat. Today’s shave is cut-free and baby-smooth.
Therefore, I’ll say that it takes about two months of straight razor shaving before you get – pardon me again – the edge on the competition.
*takes off sunglasses*
YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
Updates On Our Bees
The bees are a major draw to this blog, but we haven’t updated in a while because of this bitterly cold winter. Every day we’ve been tempted to get all up in our bees, it’s been forty degrees.
What we do know are two things:
1) The mean bees, the ones that stung us, are dead. We haven’t seen a single bee poke its head out. And we’re a little grateful for that, as we’d have had to requeen.
2) Our good bees are struggling. There’s only a handful of them flying out, and we suspect most of them died. We have been feeding them, and it’s been a slow process as they rebuild; I hope the queen is alive in there. We’re hoping to check next week, but it’s not like there’s really anything extra we can do for them at this stage, so there’s no sense opening up their insulated hive to freezing winds. (There’s predictions of snow tomorrow. SNOW.)
Current plan is to get into the dead beehive, empty out the bees, and introduce a fresh box of bees to the old home of the dead ones. A little morbid, but it means those bees will have a jump-start; they won’t need to waste their initial efforts (and food supplies!) on building comb. Which means we can hope these new bees will thrive. The old bees, well, when we get in there, I have a sneaking suspicion they may be trying to birth a new queen. We’ll see when we get in there.
The biggest hope is that after three seasons of beekeeping, we will actually get honey from a hive. No, we have yet to do this. The first year, our bees had produced enough we probably could have taken some, but we were worried that if we skimmed too much honey they might not survive the winter. Last year was a scarcer season, and the queen separator we purchased kept the bees out of the honey super entirely. So not a single drop.
This year. This year will be sweet. I can feel it in my bees.
On Finding The Terrorists: A Bleak Truth.
Here’s the scary thing no one wants to face: anyone with a grudge could be a terrorist.
That’s the only criteria. Could be a white guy, could be a brown guy. Could be a Christian, could be a Muslim. Could be left-wing, could be right-wing.
Yet we yearn in our hearts to have terrorists be a single, concrete mass. It’s why everyone wears identical jumpsuits in fictional bad guy organizations. We want to be able to look at a group of people and go, “There they are. That’s what a homicidal lunatic looks like.”
The truth? A homicidal lunatic looks pretty much like everyone else. Some of them are intense, and weird, and withdrawn…. but so are a lot of people who don’t bomb civilians. Some of them are well-liked in their neighborhood and sunny, and they have zero problem slaughtering anyone who gets in their way. Some were bullied, some are bullies. Some of are intensely religious, some atheists.
The truth is that homicidal maniacs are not a separate group, but a subset of us. They crack in different ways, for different reasons; there’s no real unifying reason that people decide to kill others. Anyone could do it, theoretically. You’d have to know them real well, perhaps better than they’d let you, to realize this shit was boiling inside of them.
The real terror is that it’s fucking hard to tell when someone’s about to snap this way. Nobody wants to think that their neighbors, their buddies, their friends’ sons would ever be capable of violence. So we keep trying to slot the latest terrorist fuckery into some category for our comfort, going, “These are the bad guys.” And then, having determined What Makes People Nuts, we can return to less-concerned lives, where once we deal with Those People we’ll have solved the problem forever and ever.
You can sleep easier once you’re absolutely certain that nobody you know would ever kill. But you have to take some shortcuts to do it.
How My Wife Creeps Up On Me And Then Hampers Me And Then Loves Me.
As someone who works at home, and likes stuff on in the background, I watch a lot of television – usually Netflix streaming. And slowly but surely, if the show is good, my wife takes over.
Because she’s not as picky as I am; left to her own devices, she works in silence. So I put on a show, and if it’s good I start grinding my way through it, episode after episode. And if it’s really good, then Gini will start making comments – “Oh, that was a nice moment,” or “That was a spectacularly well-written scene.”
This has been happening with Justice League, which is fascinating to watch, as Gini has zero familiarity with this mythology. I mean, she knows who Superman and Batman are, but has no clue where Wonder Woman came from or who this “Clayface” guy is. And for a so-called “kid’s” show, Justice League has some really solid plotting – it’s simple, yes, but it’s that much harder to pull off a simple plot. You can’t compensate with elaborate set design or complex characterization.
Yet somehow, Justice League boils these iconic heroes down to the raw elements of character, making purposeful tweaks to make them more interesting. Superman’s got a very angry streak, sometimes tempted more to murder than we’d be comfortable with. Batman’s secretive hubris causes conflict. The Martian Manhunter’s “my planet is dead” angst is occasionally a plot driver. It’s not enough to sap their heroism, but it definitely makes them interestingly flawed.
And so Gini is watching with me, and all of this is new to her. For me, Mongul is old hand, the Warworld is just another tweak. But to her, she’s never seen anything like this, so Mongul becomes an interesting villain in his own right. She has zero idea whether Doctor Fate is a villain or a good guy. She doesn’t remember Aquaman as anything but the prickly monarch of the underwater world. And she’s kind of excited to be getting this window into my world, hearing my commentary on what “classic” Green Lantern is usually like, but happy to finally see what Childhood Ferrett liked in a way that Grown-Up Gini can love.
But last night came the inevitable point of no return; we sat down and watched two episodes together when we weren’t working, just watching the show on its own merits. And I knew that Gini had claimed this show as her fiefdom, and I could no longer watch it without her lest I cheat on her in my heart of media-hearts. This had migrated from a “Ferrett can do solo” to “A couple activity,” which means that I get to watch far less of it. Gini leaves the house two or three times a day to meet with clients, defend people at courthouses, drop off paperwork. That’s cutting into valuable Justice League time.
It’s a loss, and a gain. My next few weeks will be a little draggier at work, because as I won’t have DC entertaining me while I’m refactoring this tangle of spaghetti code. But Gini and I will be able to share our reflections on the show, and when we’re walking outside and holding hands we’ll be discussing how we didn’t see that Superman being banished to the future would involve such a kick-ass moment with Vandal Savage.
It’s a loss, but the gain is so worth it.