I Like Nametags. I Like Asking About Hugs. I Like Getting It Right For People.

You know what I wish everyone wore all the time?  Nametags.
Because I’m bad with names.  I’ll look at a friendly face and remember all the times we’ve been at cons together, and that great conversation we had about Steven Universe, and that time we had a bourbon tasting up in my room… And I’ll get a sort of stoners’ paranoia whenever I talk to them, going “Do I remember their name right?  I know their Twitter handle.  What if someone asks me to introduce them, I can’t introduce them by their Twitter handle, this is going to be awkward.”
I love the nametag.  Because it ensures I get things right, and don’t embarrass people who I know.
Know what else I love?  Asking for hugs.  “Oh, it’s so good to see you!  Are you huggable?”  And they either answer “Yes” and fling themselves into my arms, or they answer “No” and I wave gaily, and I love that answer either way because I’m positive that I’m carrying out their preference.
I don’t want to wrap my arms around someone and feel them stiffen.  I don’t want to surprise people with ninja hugs they didn’t want.  I absolutely adore asking people because I like satisfying their needs when I’m satisfying mine.
And I hear all the time about folks at conventions who Don’t Get It, who run up and hug people who they barely know just because they’re happy to see them – “Oh, it’s an author I like!” or “Oh, we met once!” or “Oh, they’re tiny and they look huggable!” – and it strikes me as a sort of whacko narcissism, wherein people make that very necessary distinction between “I like this” and “Others like this.”
Some people have past traumas where being suddenly mauled is Not Pleasant for them.  Others reserve their physical touch for people they feel comfortable with, which may not be you.  And still others like bodily autonomy.
What I like is being free of that stoners’ paranoia when I’m hugging someone I like.  What I like is being absolutely certain that when I am hugging someone, they have specifically okayed me to hug them, and that they are not merely tolerating my presence.  What I like is feeling someone hug me back instead of that stiff-bodied “Oh, fuck, they’re going to tell me off, aren’t they?”
I like getting it right for people.
Which is why I like to ask.

Ten Days Of Counting Every Calorie

Food is one of the hardest addictions to quit, because there’s no way to go cold turkey. (Mmmm, turkey.)  Even if you manage to remove, you know, food from the equation – which I tried to do with tasteless-yet-nutritious food replacement Soylent as a test – you walk into a world that’s literally advertising all the goodness of food on every corner.  New strains of food are being made every day, with commercials exhorting you to taste everything. Serving sizes have swollen to vast proportions.
Scant wonder so much of America is fat.
Now, I don’t mind “fat and healthy” – which is, actually, a thing, as I’ve known 250-pound women who regularly run triathalons.  But for Mister Former Triple-Bypass, any extra weight is risking death.  And I’ve been creeping up the scale over the past year, and though I’ve amped my exercise looking in the mirror is still an unpleasant process.
So for my health and my self-esteem, I’m trying some new approaches – with technology!
And for the past ten days, I’ve logged every calorie I eat in into myFitnessPal, which is…. surprisingly enlightening.
The thing I like about myFitnessPal is that it makes it super-easy to track my goals.  I tell it I want to lose a pound a week, and it tells me how many calories I have.  It logs into my iPhone and counts my iPhone steps, and adds those calories to my daily total.  I can scan in foods by their bar code, pretty much every major restaurant chain is included, and I haven’t been able to find a food that’s stumped it yet.
The main benefit, as it turns out, is not counting calories.
The main benefit is tying “food” to “exercise.”
Because I don’t much like having only 2,000 calories to eat a day, but I can up that by taking the dog for a walk or getting on the elliptical.  I frickin’ hate exercise, always have, always will – and don’t tell me “it’s just finding the right exercise,” because what I hate is that sweaty tired feeling – but doing it so I can have an extra glass of milk in the evening incentivizes me to get off my ass.
(And carry my iPhone everywhere so I don’t miss a step.  Every step could be food.)
The other aspect, which I did predict, is that seeing how much of my day is consumed by snacks forces me to consider whether I actually want to eat it or not.  My mother counted calories back in the day, but that was in the 1980s when you had to carry a book around with you, and look things up, and guess a lot because the book was in tiny print and still didn’t cover all the food (also see: America having food everywhere), and then write everything down in another book to do math.
Counting calories now is as trivial as it’s going to get, for the time being.  (There’s talk of an app which can calculate calories by your Instagram snapshots, but that’s not gonna work well for years.)
And being so easy makes you be honest.  I was at Jersey Mike’s the other day, and I saw those little chocolate chip cookies.  They’re tiny, and delicious.  They’re also 190 calories apiece.  But 190 calories doesn’t seem like much, except when you have the math right there to put in three of them and see that it’s basically a quarter of my allotment for the day, and would I enjoy them that much?
Which isn’t to say that I don’t.  I love chocolate milk. A big glass of chocolate milk is like 630 calories, a huge proportion.  But I fucking love it, so some days I have all that milk and am shameless.  But I’m doing so consciously.
But the end result is that I’m forced to consider, which is good.  Being thoughtful about food is good for heart patients, even if it’s not fun.
And I don’t know whether I want to do this long-term.  In September, I know that I’ll be going on a big ol’ book tour soon – visiting Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco, all foodie places – and visiting their finest donut shops.
Will I be able to splurge on my vacation and put that shit in the myFitnessPal?
Can I look my own unhealthy happiness in the eye and enjoy it?
And honestly, I believe that you deserve to go nuts every once in a while.  I want a Voodoo Donut when I visit Portland, and I don’t mind if I don’t lose my pound that week, but I’m not sure I can enjoy a Voodoo Donut knowing that one of them is literally a third of everything I’m supposed to eat that day.
That’s the horse you fall off of.  Sometimes, there’s this hard conflict between “The enjoyment I seek” and “The restrictions I’m under,” and it’s really hard to enjoy yourself on lockdown.  Part of the reason some alcoholics go off the wagon is not that they can’t have a single drink and stick to that, but they want to have the enjoyment of not worrying about their inebriation level all the goddamned time.  And so they go on benders because why the hell would you give yourself an evening where you’re luxuriously not counting beers and not pound ’em down?
So I suspect that myFitnessPal will become like my exercise – something I do for periods of time and better myself, then stop it and be shamed, and then start it up again.  And it’s not as good as exercising and calorie-counting all the time, but it’s better than never doing it, so you wind up with a net benefit even if the net benefit isn’t full-throttle.
But for right now, I had a glass of orange juice.  It’s full of Vitamin C, myFitnessPal tells me, and it was also 143 calories.  I can burn it off with a walk around the block for 167 calories.  Which isn’t even a full Pop Tart.
But combine it with the possibility of hatching a Lickitung in Pokemon Go, and it just might be worth hauling my fat ass out the door.

My Book Tour Announced! I'm Coming To SF, Seattle, San Diego, And Portland!

In four weeks, Angry Robot will release the final book in my ‘Mancer series, Fix.  And then, just like I did for the first book, I’m going on tour!
And as usual, when I go on tour, I will not only provide a dramatic reading, but I will also provide you with donuts (because a key plot point in Fix revolves around the choice of a proper donut), and will go out afterwards for drinks with as many of you as care to hang with me!
Last tour was an absolute hoot, and the joy of the tour was introducing my online friends to other friends and watching new and interesting alliances burble out afterwards.  (There have even been a few scandalous hookups.  God bless you people.)
If you’re planning to go, I’d kindly request that you a) say “Yes, I’m going” on Facebook, and b) Invite your local friends who you think would be interested.  Because honestly, I have no idea where any of you people live.  And Facebook said, “Hey, a Seattle event!  Would you like to invite your friends?” and I had zero idea who lived in Seattle except for Amy Sundberg, who I only remembered lived there because she just moved there.  My geography is weak, so if y’all could cover for me by clicking the city link and then inviting interested local folks, that’d be greeeeeeat – I don’t mind people knowing and not attending, but I do mind people who’d want to attend but didn’t know because I am a doof.)
So!  If you’d like to meet a Ferrett, here’s where I’ll be:
CLEVELAND! 
Tuesday, September 6th.
Loganberry Books, 7:00 pm.
13015 Larchmere Blvd, Shaker Heights, OH 44120-1147, United States
SAN FRANCISCO!
Saturday, September 17th.
Borderlands Books, 3 p.m.
866 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110-1739, United States
SAN DIEGO!
Friday, September 23rd.
Mysterious Galaxy, 7:30 p.m.
5943 Balboa Ave Suite 100 San Diego, CA 92111
(With special co-reader J. Patrick Black, author of Ninth City Burning!)
PORTLAND!
Tuesday, September 27th.
Powell’s Books, 7 p.m.
3415 sw cedar hills blvd / beaverton, or 97005
(With special co-reader K.C. Alexander, author of cyberpunk thriller Necrotech!)
SEATTLE!
Thursday, September 29th.
University Of Washington Bookstore, 7 p.m.
4326 University Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98105
There may also be one or two dates to drop for the East Coast and/or Michigan, but those are taking a little longer to fit together. Remember, this is all taking place on my dime, so as much as I’d love to travel to Australia or Abu Dhabi or Texas, me being everywhere just isn’t possible.  (Thanks much to Mike Underwood and Penny Reeve at Angry Robot for making this all possible.)
But you can encourage me to come back by showing up at the signings, if you can! I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me, assuming it is legally permissible to display it in a bookstore.
 
 

Maybe The Biggest Problem In America: Bad Economic Measurements

Here’s one of the huge problems I see driving the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders: our economic measurements have almost nothing to do with how my checkout clerk at Target is doing.
Like, it’s great to have the S&P 500 to tell me how corporations are doing, but Google can be making a fortune and that only really affects people who own stocks.  Which, with 401ks and such, is more people than you’d think – but even then, what happens to people’s 401ks, which sane people don’t touch except in times of emergency or great opportunity, has little to do with their bills this month.
The GDP, likewise, tracks large-scale levels of motion – which has an ill-defined affect on how many people are employed, but it doesn’t say what kinds of jobs they have or their potential for forward motion or their monthly expenses.  The job creation indexes would be just as happy if I got fired from my skilled programming job and had to take the minimum-wage pay of a checkout clerk.  The unemployment index doesn’t count people who’ve given up looking for work because there’s no jobs to be found, though admittedly tracking the inactive is a hell of a task.
The statistics the government uses to set policy, in short, have zero to do with how well Mabel the Target checkout clerk is doing.  That’s why Bernie and Trump have gotten so much traction – what’s good for corporations is often not good for blue-collar Americans, yet everything we have is aimed at corporations.
In a sane world, we’d have some sort of “quality of life” factor for people who don’t have college degrees, or who work nonsalaried jobs – a very finely detailed combination of reports on average debt, average rent/housing expenses, average medical care, average income, so we could have one number that says, “If you’re forced to work down in the trenches, here’s how fucked you are.”
Assuming that quality-of-life measurement was widely touted enough, politicians would be incentivized to use that number as part of the calculations they do to set policy.  And things would get better for Mabel.
But we won’t do that, because then we’d have to admit how crappy things have gotten for Middle America.  Hell, we voters can’t even bring ourselves to acknowledge that Middle America has shrunk to the point of emaciation, and the politicians on either side don’t want to create an index that makes it starkly apparent how much of America they’ve just given up on.  And even if we got it, chances are good that every department that fed numbers into that ultimate report would skew them as pleasantly as they could.
I understand why we won’t get it.
That doesn’t stop me from dreaming of wanting it.

Understanding Trump: An Imperfect Guide From A Stunned Liberal

I’m not going to claim to understand all of Trump, because frankly, Trump’s nomination is the culmination of hundreds of intersecting cultural trends.  Anyone who claims to have a simple answer for Trump’s appeal and his rise to power and his history is lying as badly as, well, Trump.
But I have figured out a few things.
Trump’s Not A Good Liar.  America Wants To Believe Rich People.
The slightest fact-checking would tell you that Trump has always lied to the press, often when he didn’t need to, often in ways that are trivially verified.  I grew up in the shadow of New York City, so I’ve been watching Trump get away with flagrant and fragrant whoppers almost all my life.
Trump is an awful goddamned liar.  I’ve seen five-year-olds who lie better than he does.  You want to watch a good liar, watch Bill Clinton – his speech of “I did not have sex with that woman” was impassioned, believable, precise in what undeniable truths it left out, and took hard-dug evidence to contradict him.  That’s how you lie convincingly, folks.
But the horror show of America is that Trump doesn’t need talent.
We’re so in love with wealth that we assume anyone with money is telling the truth.
Trump’s always been a consummate bullshit artist, but he’s always had fans because he was born wealthy, and Americans are desperate to believe that wealth is the sign of talent and hard work.  (And, conversely, poverty is the sign of indolence and incompetence.)  To much of America, “having lots of money” means “You made smart decisions, so we should listen to you.”
Thankfully, I grew up Connecticut among trust fund kids, so I am deadened to that lie.  I’ve seen dumb, lazy kids given millions and still wind up with hundreds of thousands.  Being rich and well-connected means you can make catastrophic fuckups that would get other people jailed or bankrupted, and come out with more than most people have.
Now, some people have worked hard for their money and made wise decisions.  I support those guys.  But America’s inability to distinguish between “earned wealth” and “luck wealth” means that all millionaires are essentially self-made Gods to many, these greater-than-human people who don’t err.
People don’t fact-check Trump because that would break the illusion.  They need Trump to be someone who tells the truth, because otherwise millionaires might be fallible human beings, and deep inside they burn for the day when they become wealthy and perfect and inevitable.
We subsidize patently awful lies to keep this illusion going.  Which is why Trump has gotten away with it all along.
Part Of Why You’re Hearing Trump’s Flaws Is Because The Machine Is Turning On Him.  
I posted this Tweet this morning about how Trump asked, repeatedly, during a national security briefing, “…why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”
But.
Note that this unsourced accusation is from Morning Joe, a conservative talk show.  A talk show that, several months ago, was vaguely pro-Trump.
Note how he said this meeting happened “several months ago,” and yet somehow he’s only bringing this topic up now.
I’m not necessarily saying that the accusation is a lie.  In fact, I suspect it’s absolutely true.  (But that’s my anti-Trump bias showing.)
What I am saying is that the conservative party has always held a tight focus in what their journalists have been allowed to say, and Morning Joe would have lost viewers, support, guest access, and support had he allowed this to be spoken on his show when Donald Trump was in favor with the Powers That Be.
I’ve said that you have to keep in mind that the leaks you got about Hillary the DNC was orchestrated by Putin to affect the election.  You can get mad – because what happened there was suuuuuuper shitty – but also keep in mind that someone is purposely magnifying Hillary’s flaws to make her seem unelectable, and keep your outrage, if not checked, at least within a firm context that it’s part of a smear campaign.
Likewise, I loathe Trump, but a lot of the things that are being said by conservatives are things that are allowed to be said now, because key figures to conservative media have finally decided it’s okay to take a potshot at Trump to keep the party together.
Get mad.  But also remember that Trump hasn’t changed; what’s changed is the opinion of the guys who hold the reins on people like Morning Joe.  And you should be asking yourself, “Hmm, I wonder what stories from other Presidential candidates who sucked up more effectively got swept under the rug?”
Because, you know, several months ago Trump was baffled why he couldn’t lob nukes around like tennis balls.  You’re hearing about that now, along with all sorts of other things that are undermining his campaign.  All the facts that fit this “Trump is unfit to be President” narrative were there all along, it’s just that the media chose not to display that until now.
Question that process.
Trump Is What Happens When You Remove All Possibility Of Apologies.
People were shocked when Trump went after Khizr Khan, a grieving father of a decorated veteran. But that was Trump’s only strategy!
Look.  Trump is about two things that appeal to narrow, yet terrifying, portions of the electorate:

• They want a strong candidate who’s not afraid to go toe-to-toe with anybody.
• They want someone who never apologizes.

For a lot of people, “an apology” is a weakness.  It means you did something wrong – and remember when I said the people who believed Trump were seeking someone who’s infallible?  They don’t want a President, they want a Godhead who dispenses perfect decisions the first time, every time.
Any time Trump breaks that narrative of “Trump is never wrong,” he loses core votes.
So you can’t apologize.  What’s left?  Well, you could ignore the remarks, but strategically, then you look weak if enough people are addressing it – and Trump’s gotta go toe-to-toe.  Once an issue gets enough media attention, which Khizr Khan’s speech did, Trump can’t afford to not bring it up.
So what are Trump’s options?
He’s gotta go on the attack.  When you can’t back down, and you can’t ignore, the only option is to go assault the person and tear them down until they’re no longer a worthy opponent.  You’ve got to go after their moral standing so the things they said are compromised; that’s exactly what he did with Hillary.
And I’m not saying this is a campaign strategy, but it’s the sad strategy of the Alpha Dog who believes very firmly in status.  If someone’s risen to a challenging status, you have to lower their status.
I doubt that even Trump understands what he’s doing, but watch his Tweets – he’s literally confused by the concept that someone, anyone, would get to say nasty things about him and he’s not allowed to respond.  Alpha Dogs can’t ignore threats, and he perceives himself as the ultimate dog.  WHY SHOULD I BE LEASHED.
That’s why he lies all the time.  He can’t say “I was wrong,” because that would indicate weakness.  Instead, he pretends he never said what he said and never did what he did.  This is what happens when you remove “Yeah, my bad” from the equation.
(And if, as a conservative, you’re upset at what Trump has done, keep in mind that y’all opened the door to this when you mocked Kerry’s war record in 2004. Either veterans are deserving of respect no matter when they disagree with you, or you’re mocking a decorated veteran by wearing “Purple Heart” bandages to show that any idiot can get the medal. That is on you.)
Why Does Trump Appeal To Poor White Voters? 
I don’t pretend to know.  But I think this interview with J.D. Vance, who wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy, which discusses the motivations of the white working poor, talks a lot about how desperation and culture affects you. I’d definitely read that; I plan to buy his book.
That said – and read that guy more than me – I’d remind you that “dignity” is a thing that people will literally kill for.  People will tolerate being poor, as long as they’re seen as worthy members of the community.  But they cannot tolerate being shunned or mocked.  And the saddest lesson of history, shown time and time again, is that folks who get the shaft will almost always listen to comforting lies that assure them their lives are worthwhile.
The rise of Trump is fundamentally an upper-class liberal failure.  When we bitch about hicks and idiots, we’re exacerbating the problem.  I’m not sure how to reach to them, because part of the issue is that I don’t connect to people like that on a regular basis.  (I know a lot of poor people, but they’re all Democrats like me.)  But I am smart enough to know that this failure to connect is an issue.
Which is not to say that the people who vote for Trump are somehow correct in what they do, or free from unexamined racism.  But I think the only way to change that culture is to interact with it in more positive and less dismissive ways, and that’s something upper-class liberal twits like me have consistently failed at.
We need to do better.  I need to do better.
But again, read that interview.  And maybe the book.