The DRC robots are not the perfect heroes I’d hoped for, but I love them anyway. I love them specifically. I love them right now, without assuming they will someday be better at doing the things they’re meant to do. I love them for reminding me that when you are working toward a large good thing, it’s the small stuff that often feels impossible.

The song hasn’t changed, but everything around it has.

There’s a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit which my sister asked me to read at her wedding. I thought I was up for the task—it’s a children’s book, for fuck’s sake—but when the time came, I cried all the way through: “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time,

But it was undercover-earnest, too. It was sweet and it was dumb and I could not have loved that blanket more.

What if boundaries and borders are actually the only way people can love each other equally and freely? What if, without those boundaries, love becomes an act of humanitarian aid?

But now, years later, I’m still here, doing the bee skits. It’s Funnyman’s longest-recurring gag. And I find myself wondering: But will I ever celebrate my sixtieth wedding anniversary like my grandparents? Will I ever be young and beautiful and pregnant by the sea? I will not, I will not, I will not. Many futures are possible but these particular

Unless, of course, your last partner did a number on you, and afterward you didn’t feel quite like yourself anymore. Weren’t sure, anymore, who you were. Unless, of course, you remember. Remember every not-great experience you’ve ever had with a partner. How they made you feel wary and angry and fearful and then, how they also told you to stop

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that whenever a couple is shouting and fighting, what they are actually shouting at each other is “You are are not enough people.” Because we have deluded ourselves that a human can be happy living alone with one or two other people in this world. But we need so much more than that.

The shame of having been wrong about him, doubled down on being wrong, on and off, for six years, was almost worse than the heartbreak. Almost.