It would be a bummer if the zombies came and nobody noticed.

To make sure this won’t happen, May has been declared Zombie Awareness Month. Wear a gray ribbon.

And if you just can’t wait for the zombies to come to you, check out John Skipp’s Rose.

Know how Snoop Dogg does his hair in braids like a four-year-old girl? When I was in the sixth grade I read a book where the girls styled their hair in side ponytails. It seemed cool, so one day I did my hair in a side ponytail. The kids in my math class made fun of me, saying I was missing a pigtail. It didn’t occur to me to re-do my hair. I just withered, and swore off being different. Not that I’d figured out conformity, either, but that trying to be different was just too risky.

Snoop, though. You don’t see anyone making fun of his hair. And if they did — shit-talking is part of the genre — I don’t think it would seriously change the way he felt about himself.

Photo of Snoop Dogg via http://music-video-buzz.com/tag/snoop-dogg

I’ve done a bit of growing since the sixth grade. But I still have that same capacity to be awkward and uncomfortable, unwilling to relax into being different. I’ve always been introverted. I read a lot as a kid. Like, my mother would tell me that seven hours of reading in one day is enough, and it was time to go outside and play. The thing about reading is that it exposes you to more ways of being than you can glean from the hawkish way that you watch the popular kids. (One time in high school, two girls, I’ll call them K and L, ate a rotten orange from a trash can because they thought it might get them drunk.) There are all sorts of examples of how to live.

When I was 12, I didn’t have a good sense of who I was. What’s more, I had a rather nonexistent sense of it being OK to be whatever I was. That sense, call it self-confidence, doesn’t come from supportive parents, or understanding teachers, although I had both. Well, some of the teachers were understanding.

The thing about now is that I’m not 12 anymore. At 28, I still don’t have a good sense of who I am, but I’m starting to let go of that fear of being different. And if you’d told my 12-year-old self that I’d have bleached-blond dreadlocks, I’d have thought you were high. (Actually I probably wouldn’t have understood what “high” was, although I would have pretended I did.)

Snoop Dogg, for the record, is almost 40. Check out his video “Kush” for the hairstyle if nothing else.

Game designer Jane McGonigal has proposed four requirements for happiness:

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

She applies these principles to game design, but in East Oakland, scraper bikes fit the bill.

“Living in Oakland, I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen homicides. I’ve seen dead bodies on the curb. I’ve seen people die in front of my own eyes, in the hood. I’m only 20 years old, I’ll be 21 in December. Oakland’s no joke. You definitely learn how to stand your ground… Scraper bikes is definitely a process, and that process is definitely for the kids, so they can get their mind off of what’s really going on in the streets, to give them that hour or two hours to fix on their bikes…. That’s what a lot of kids out here want. They want to feel like they’re a part of something.”

Video from Make Magazine.

“SF hipsters are sell-outs. Like, ‘Oh, look at me, I live in the Mission!’ The East Bay is more authentic. Because Oakland is crappier than San Francisco, so it’s more ironic that we live here. Plus, we’re a lot poorer than you!”

I seem to be having problems with food lately. First, metal in my pasta sauce, and now the face of Richard Nixon, or some other screaming demon, in my pretzel bag.

So I found a metal spring in the lasagna I’d made. The only way it could have gotten there was via the pasta sauce.

I called the phone number on the side of the jar: you know where it says on the label that they want your feedback? The guy who answers the phone, after I’ve managed to communicate that I found metal in my food, he asks: “Was anyone hurt?”

“Only my trust in your products,” I say.

The irony doesn’t really register. He asks for my address, so that he can send me an envelope, postpaid, for me to send in the offending metal. “And we’ll send you some reimbursement,” he adds.

I picture a check, and wonder how much it’d be. It’s unlikely, given that they clearly have a prepared response for when people find non-food objects in their food.

Sure enough, the envelope arrives, with a letter saying: “We are genuinely concerned when a consumer reports finding anything unexpected in one of our products.” Also four $3 coupons for more sauce.

I understand that there are a lot of moving parts in the system that allows for me to have food. And that despite people’s best efforts, things happen. Sooner or later, you encounter this firsthand, and if it wasn’t this company, it’d be another.

But coupons? Really?

This is actually a very smart idea, locking up your shopping cart so that nobody can steal it.

I’ve been doing research for a new project, and am fascinated by the very different ways in which Americans perceive and handle deafness. There are lots of culturally and linguistically self-identified Deaf people who were raised with American Sign Language and understand themselves to be members of a minority group with a cultural depth and heritage just as valid as any other group (including the capital-D Deaf — the same way you’d capitalize African American). This Youtube vlog, by the CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) Brothers, uses ASL and voice to illustrate the ASL-centric point of view — watch out for the ironically loud screaming in the intro:

On the other end of the spectrum, there are lots of hearing parents of deaf infants and children who opt for cochlear implants (surgery which requires drilling into the skull and inserting an electrode into the ear) and oral training, in order to teach their children to hear and speak:

Everyone should have the right to language and culture: the question that hearing parents of a child with hearing loss have to answer is what kind of language and culture. What’s possible, what’s feasible, and what’s best for all concerned? I don’t have an easy answer.

I was asked by John DeNardo to weigh in on the forum Mind Meld, hosted by SF Signal. The topic? Favorite Genre Crossovers. Part of the fun is that I don’t know who else will weigh in, or what they’ll say. Here’s what I said:

When a novel or a movie is marketed as horror, or as science fiction, or any other recognizable genre, you expect that it’ll do what it says on the tin. You know how a romantic comedy will end: if it’s being billed as a “date movie,” whatever else happens, the romance will resolve happily. But if a work is trying to appeal to kids AND adults, or men AND women, or people who like strongly-plotted genre fiction AND people who like deeply meaningful, atmospheric literary fiction, there’s a real possibility that the work is going to run into interference. Because most people know what they DON’T like — and they stay out of the children’s section of the bookstore or library, or the romance section, or the science-fiction section.

Here’s a few works that manage to do more than one thing at a time:

WHITE SANDS, RED MENACE by Ellen Klages (Viking) is a sophisticated, award-winning historical novel about friendship and being different and the relationships between kids and parents; it’s about science and growing up and the morality of war. And while it isn’t directly a science fiction novel, it’s a novel ABOUT science fiction, steeped in science fiction’s concern for the future, and sprinkled with Easter egg references to pulp science fiction stories. It’s also accessible to nine-year-olds.

Shaun Tan’s TALES FROM OUTER SUBURBIA (Scholastic) is a short story collection and an art book and a fantasy book. It’s marketed for ages 12 and up, and the NY Times Book Review said (about Tan’s picture book THE ARRIVAL) that readers will be motivated to “seek out any future graphic novels from Shaun Tan, regardless of where they might be shelved.” (The subtext of this is that normal adults shouldn’t be dinking around in the children’s section, or wherever Tan is shelved, but that they can make an exception here.)

Disney’s WALL-E was utterly brilliant until the people came along, and then it was still pretty darn good. It’s meant to appeal to all ages, with robots, show tunes, adventure, mystery, romance, some complicated emotional truths about loneliness and love, if-this-goes-on cultural commentary, and a happy, redemptive ending.

The secret, I think, to the successful crossover work is that it manages to appeal to multiple audiences WITHOUT the multiple conflicting genre markers chasing people away. When family and friends tell me they like my first novel — even though it’s got zombies — it’s a compliment and an unintentional ding at the same time: kind of like saying, “You look GREAT for your age.” There is a real joy, though, in surprising people with something they had already decided they didn’t like.

Check out the full discussion: SF Signal Mind Meld: Favorite Genre Crossovers

Still catching up with travel photos: ICFA was great, as ever. Meetings and meals with friends including James Patrick Kelly, Gary K. Wolfe, Peter Straub, Andy & Sydney Duncan, John Kessel & Kij Johnson, Ellen Klages, Brett Cox & Jeanne Beckwith, Mark R. Kelly, Russell Letson, Nalo Hopkinson & David Findlay, Ted Chiang, Joe & Gay Haldeman, Rusty Hevelin, and Farah Mendlesohn. Nalo’s Guest of Honor speech was powerful and angry and funny and brilliant. A full conference report with photos will be in the May issue of Locus.

A few photos:

Above: Signing my very first ARC, for James Patrick Kelly (photo by Gay Haldeman)

Ellen Klages and I jump into the pool without swimsuits, per ICFA tradition (photo by Andy Duncan)