Author: JennyTrout

Yesterday, I shared with you a few fun stories about my vacation to Disney World. But with the good comes the bad.  Now, there isn’t much that’s bad about a visit to Disney World, but the bad things? Are infuriating. Let’s review a couple:

Double, side-by-side strollers. I don’t know who invented these, but I hope they realize that they’re monsters. I don’t know whose idea it was to make these a real, rentable thing in the parks, but I hope they realize that they’re an even worse monster.

Let me just speak to the inconsiderate double-wide stroller parent directly for a minute. Look, I get it. You have many children. And it’s difficult for the little ones to walk (and the not-so-little ones–we’ll get to that later) or for you to keep track of them all. And there’s nothing wrong with double strollers, in theory. It’s just the way you drive them.

For example, when my family was waiting to watch the Boo To You parade, and you forced your double, side-by-side stroller through a walkway too jammed with spectators that even a very thin person or a small child couldn’t make their way through. The off-duty cast member I’d been chatting with about the Headless Horseman suggested an alternate route that would be less congested; you agreed that way would probably be easier, but you still rammed your stroller into my husband and rolled it over the top of the cast member’s camera bag. Why would you do that?

It was because you were using that stroller. It robbed you of your sense, humanity, and spacial reasoning. You weren’t a pedestrian anymore, you were an Army Ranger at the wheel of an armored vehicle, mowing down sand dunes like they were cul-de-sac speed bumps. You were drunk on the power that double-wide stroller gave you. May god have mercy on your soul.

Jeffrey, you’re eleven years old. Speaking of strollers, let’s talk about children in strollers who are too old for strollers. Jeffrey was one of them.

As I stood under an awning, slathering sunscreen on my vulnerable Michigan skin, a woman pushed her rented stroller up to a bench near us. Her son was grumbling about something, and they were having a tense, under-their-breath exchange as the kid unbuckled himself and climbed out. As he sullenly took a seat on the bench, the woman snapped, “Jeffrey, you’re eleven years old! Act like it!”

Before anyone jumps in to say, “You don’t know if that kid is neurotypical! You don’t know that he wasn’t disabled!” well, you’re right. I have no way of knowing which of the hundreds of children over the age of twenty-five who were riding in rented strollers sized for toddlers were disabled or neurodivergent. But I do know that it’s highly unlikely that all of them were. While I don’t know Jeffrey’s story, I’m using him as an example of the overall attitude of the parents, regardless of his personal circumstances. Everywhere we looked, children who were well past the age where a stroller should be an option were lounging in them, or walking their feet on the ground to pull themselves along in them.

Look, I get it. At the end of the day, is it any skin off my nose that Jeffrey will still be using rented strollers in theme parks when he’s twenty-six? Not really, I guess. But the number of strollers that were in the park was absurd. They hindered you literally everywhere you went. And to see a kid who’ll be old enough to drive a car in five years sitting in one, having a preteen verbal spat with his mother, only made that problem more infuriating. One less stroller in the crowd would have meant one less stroller cutting through my path without so much as an excuse me, one less stroller halting suddenly in front of me without warning, one less stroller blocking a path or a bench. So it’s hard not to begrudge seventh graders lounging around in a stroller, sassing their parents when they could be walking like the rest of us.

Speaking of kids whose names are now burned into my brain… If you’ve ever been to Disney World, you’ve probably seen the ridiculously long line for the Seven Dwarves’ Mine Train. It’s like an hour, forty-five minutes wait at best. Except during extra magic hours, when there are fewer people in the park and the line moves along faster. Because this line is absolutely torturous, near the end there are some fun activities for bored kids who are waiting. One is a casual gaming experience like you could get on your phone, where you sort gems on a huge touch screen. Another is a fountain that releases water lit in various colors when you put your hand under the sensor. The last are some really neat, spinning barrels that project an animated image on the ceiling of the mine portion of the waiting area.

These are all terrible if there’s barely any line. And the reason they are terrible are Gretchen and Baylor.

These kids appeared to be siblings in a group of cousins led by two sisters who were their moms. I gleaned most of this dynamic from their loud conversations about stuff going on “back home,” conversations that were happening while they remained oblivious to the fact that while most of their party had moved up in the line, easily by fifteen feet, two of the kids were still standing at whichever of these activities they’d been captivated by. These kids were probably about thirteen and ten, respectively, and their names were Gretchen and Baylor (guess where one or both of his parents went to college). I know their names, because inevitably, as all of us behind this part stood gnashing our teeth and waiting for the kids to just move the fuck up already, their mother would notice them lagging behind and yell, “Gretchen! Baylor! Don’t make me have to tell you again.” And of course, she would have to tell them again, because she wouldn’t watch them for longer than it took to issue that weak parental non-threat.

For added fun, imagine these names being pronounced with some kind of southern U.S. accent that made them sound like “Gritch-in” and “BAYlooore.” I swear their mothers must have been former Texas pageant queens. And they weren’t the only inattentive parents we encountered. They were everywhere, staring at their phones and ignoring their bored children in long, hot lines. On the bus one night, a kid of about ten was using the straps meant for standing passengers to swing back and forth, nearly kicking another passenger until the bus driver intervened. Only then did his father look up from his phone and mutter, “Yeah, buddy, you can’t do that.”

A fool and his money are soon using the Disney dining plan. Disney World has a reputation for being extremely expensive. Because Disney World is extremely expensive. People have to save up for a long time to be able to afford the resort and the travel costs, and once you get there, you can plan on dropping around fifty bucks per meal, even at the most  modest dining locations. Luckily, Disney provides you with a dining plan option. There are various levels of this plan, but the one I think most people go with, out of a fear of starving to death, offers two “quick service” meals, one “table service” meal, and two snacks, per person, per day. If we had chosen this option as part of our vacation package, it would have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1400.00.

All told, between souvenirs for all four of us (including an outrageous amount spent on a Princess Tiana costume with all the trimmings at Castle Couture), the occasional purchase of over the counter medication or bandaids, and meals, we spent considerably less than that. As in, hundreds of dollars less.

So, if the plan is designed to save families money and make things more convenient for them, why does it seem to be more expensive? Snacks. Every time we stopped for ice cream or a bottled water, someone would be in line near us muttering about how to spend their snacks. They just weren’t using them that often, and were left with tons of these left over opportunities for ice cream or popcorn that they just didn’t want but had already paid for. Or, parents would be standing outside of a “quick serve” restaurant, lamenting the fact that they’d split meals between their two toddlers, leaving them with eight superfluous meals they’d paid for, but simply wouldn’t be able to use up.

I’m sure the dining plan is awesome for some people. I vaguely remember it being awesome when we used it in 2007. But this time, I actually felt relieved that I didn’t have to figure out how to spend money I’d already spent.

Fastpass? More like…slow…pass. Okay, that wasn’t my best work. But I stand by this: Fastpass is ridiculous.  Fastpass is a system wherein you sign up for certain times to ride popular attractions (sometimes you get a Fastpass for priority seating at the fireworks or other shows), then you show up during those times and go to the front of the line.

I won’t go into all the ways various changes to the system have made Fastpass go from an interesting concept to a total frustration, but I will say this: it’s stupid to tell a large group of people to return to one specific spot during a specific time frame in an effort to make things go faster. It just doesn’t make sense. In the mornings, before the first Fastpass windows began, lines for some things could be long, but they moved at a steady pace. Then suddenly, Fastpass people would show up. They’d be put into their own line, which would feed into the main line further ahead, allowing them to skip over huge chunks of the waiting crowd. And since they could only show up during a specific window of time, that Fastpass hour would double the standby line.

There were times that the Fastpass line had a wait time that rivaled the standby line. So what was the point? Instead of standing in a line for twenty-five minutes, you stood in this other line for twenty minutes?

I’m not a crowd control engineer. Maybe Fastpass is a way to keep people from getting in line until they feel they have the incentive to, thus thinning the crowd in the standby line during non-Fastpass hours? But that would really only work if you rode just one time (my son rode Splash Mountain four times on our last day alone). Maybe it really does work great and it’s not observable to the naked eye? But for the average person waiting in either line, it seems like a big old mess.

If you ever win the lottery, though, and you want a true Fastpass? You can hire an official Disney “guide” for between $400 and $600 bucks per hour to let you skip the lines.

So, those are some of my Disney complaints. Overall, the vacation was amazing, but you know me. I love to have something to bitch about. Now I’m going to try to resume normal operations and pretend my neck isn’t crispy from forgetting to put sunscreen on it.

Hey everybody! I’m back from my vacation, and it’s so good to be home. I was thinking I probably wouldn’t post about my vacation, because I don’t think in general anyone is really into hearing all the details about a trip they didn’t take and which doesn’t concern them. Maybe I’m just a dick like that. But there were some things that were too cool (and too infuriating) not to share. Today, the good:

The Headless Horseman’s horse is amazing. My family and I have wanted to visit Disney World during the Halloween season for a long time, because the Magic Kingdom goes all out for it. There was generous trick-or-treating (you could visit the locations as often as you liked), awesome fireworks, a Hocus Pocus-centric stage show, and an amazing parade that’s preceded by an appearance from the Headless Horseman face character. Wait, does “face character” apply when he’s got no head?

It’s pretty cool to see a headless man riding a coal-black steed and menacing you with a jack-o-lantern, but you’ve got to figure that’s kind of a dangerous stunt. After all, the rider’s visibility has to be severely restricted in the costume, and there are tons of kids watching the parade who could dart into the street at any moment.  He rides at a pretty good clip. It just seems like a recipe for disaster, right?

At the parade, we stood beside a guy who was an off-duty Disney “cast member”, which is what they call everyone who works in the parks. The guy wouldn’t tell us specifically what his job was, which led me to believe he might have been a character and couldn’t say so in front of guests. He explained that the trick to the Horseman wasn’t the rider, but the horse itself. It’s not only trained to know the parade route (including avoiding the treacherous trolley grooves on Main Street), but also to watch for people who might blunder into its path as it races through the Magic Kingdom with its headless rider. It will stop and wait for the person to get out of the way before resuming its fearsome flight.

The ducks. Following on our Headless Horseman theme, there’s a waffle stand that would make Leslie Knope cry with joy just by the entrance to Liberty Square off the main hub of the park. It’s called Sleepy Hollow, and they serve waffles with Nutella, with fruit, with strawberries and whipped cream, cinnamon sugar, they have waffle sandwiches with prosciutto and arugula, it’s really a strange little place (they also make funnel cakes).

And the strange little place has an outdoor seating area that is besieged by ducks.

Both times we ate at the location, pairs of ducks roamed from occupied table to occupied table. They would quack until you made eye contact with them, then they would quack some more and obviously eye your waffles. Mr.Jen tossed one a piece of arugula. It wasn’t interested. It wanted waffles and funnel cakes and whatever anyone had that was baked or deep fried.

When people weren’t feeding them, a few of them gathered in the middle of the seating area and started quacking loudly. I imagine they were making an announcement. Something along the lines of “Attention humans! I’ll just take a minute of your time. We would like waffles. We are not paid employees of the park and make our wages in dropped bits of waffle. If you could find it in your heart to please, sprinkle some crumbs on the ground, we would greatly appreciate it. God bless you.”

Off-Duty Fairy Godmother. Be Our Guest is probably the coolest Disney dining experience I’ve ever had. You get to eat in the Beast’s castle, in one of three themed rooms, including the massive ballroom that mimics the movie down to every last detail. There’s even a night sky behind the windows, as well as the occasional snow flurry. When you order your food, you do it on screens in the lobby, then pick whatever table you want to sit at and a cast member shows up at your table with all your food. How? They use RF transmitters located in your wristbands (look up Disney Magic Bands. They’re a trip) or in a rose they give you when you arrive. It’s a completely cool thing.

I had no idea the location was so popular, so I never made a reservation for it. I’ve since learned that people staying at the resorts should make their reservation something like 180 days in advance. We were like, bummer, maybe next time and left it out of our plans.

On the first night of our vacation, we went to Fantasmic, an elaborate water effects, fireworks, and stage show at Disney Hollywood Studios. While we waited in an enormous line for seating, an older lady started up a conversation with my six-year-old daughter. She asked her how she was enjoying the park, what she planned to do on the trip, and if she was going to eat at Be Our Guest. I said that no, sadly, we didn’t have a reservation. And she asked, “Do you want to go?”

The woman was an off-duty cast member who worked at Be Our Guest. She told us to show up as soon as we could after park open, and to tell them her name and that she’d sent us. And it was as easy as that.

Or, would have been. That night Mr.Jen checked to see if a reservation had opened up, and one had, at 8:55, five minutes before park open. But the fact that this woman decided to do us that solid was fantastic.

There’s a guy who wakes up the ducks. Remember how our restaurant reservation was before park open? They have a system where you can enter the park early, directed to the right place by cast members who make sure you’re staying on track and not using your “reservation” as an excuse to camp out in line for a popular attraction like Anna and Elsa at Princess Hall or the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train or something.

So, we’re walking along this designated path, and near the castle there’s a guy with a duck call, quacking at these ducks who’re sleeping on the grass. I asked him, “Uh, are you waking up those ducks?” He nodded and smiled and said, “Yeah, we like them to be awake when the park opens and the guests are arriving.” Like it was a totally normal thing to be doing.

Seriously. There’s a guy who walks around and wakes up the ducks so they’ll be ready to receive guests.

So many employees with visible disabilities. You know what I’ve hardly ever thought about? How invisible people with visible disabilities are in the service industry.

That all changed after my week at Disney. Every day I saw people in wheelchairs, people with prosthetic limbs, people using forearm crutches, doing things like serving food or checking us in at the front gate. Things that you wouldn’t normally see a person with a visible disability doing, because frankly, employers would fear that abled guests would feel uncomfortable.

This was rad, but also kind of disheartening, because I realized I’d never seen so many visibly disabled people working in visible service positions like that before. It shouldn’t be novel to see a person with a visible disability working in hospitality, so why is it?

Now, there isn’t much that’s bad about a visit to Disney World, but the bad things? Are infuriating. I will complain about them at length in tomorrow’s post.

Hi there! This is just another reminder that I’m on vacation. I’ll be back next week, and better than ever!

Well, probably not. In fact, probably slightly less better because I’ll be tired. But I’ll try, damn it!

When I return, I vow there will be more The Afflicted, another chapter of Biter for my Patreon buddies, and a return to our regular recap schedule, because I don’t have to travel again until March.

So many months without travel. I’m salivating just thinking about it.

Anyway, thanks for your patience with all of my absences this year. I feel like someone should call a truancy officer or something.

Hey everybody! While I spend the week in the happiest place on Earth, you can read this new book imagining the happiest place Earth could be. I have a short piece in here, and there are fifty-six other contributors (including Janet Mock and Melissa Harris-Perry), all imagining a world with true equality for all genders.

What do we want?

In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty cutting-edge voices, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie, invite us to imagine a truly feminist world. An abortion provider reinvents birth control, Sheila Bapat envisions an economy that values domestic work, a teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music, Katherine Cross rewrites the Constitution, and Maya Dusenbery resets the standard for good sex. Combining essays, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and short stories, The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given—and inspires us to demand a radically better future.

Amazon • Barnes & Noble • iBooks

My town has been seeming taken over by scarecrows. Here is the saga (ignore my bike helmet’s askew-ness. One of the pads fell out at the post office today and wouldn’t stick back in, so it just kept slipping back. I assure you, I don’t usually wear it so high up on my damn head) (also, the videos are filmed vertically because it’s hard to ride a fucking bike and use a phone, okay?).

*next one has NSFW language

To recap: Cyrus is an alien, his alien girlfriend is on her way with a space war ship, Ellie the cum burping gutter slut is an agent of the Majestic and apparently so is Benji, and space stuff is finally happening.

You write a book. You think it’s excellent. Your beta readers love it. You send it off either to a freelance editor that you hired with the intention of self-publishing, or to a publisher. In the latter case, let’s assume your book gets accepted, and it undergoes a round of edits. Either way, you get your manuscript back and it’s covered–absolutely covered–with notes. Maybe the editor felt a character’s motivations weren’t strong enough. Maybe there were factual inaccuracies in your book. But that doesn’t matter. You know in your heart that your book is perfect, and the editor is trying to stifle your creative voice.

I’ve edited fiction as both a freelancer and for a small press, and in that time I worked with authors who were genuinely grateful for my feedback, as well as authors who had mistakenly confused “editing” with “uncritically praising and applauding” and did not like the dose of reality they received. Some of my greatest hits:

• An author whose manuscript contained the n-word over three hundred times. When asked to remove every instance of the word, the author balked and insisted that it was needed to maintain the historical accuracy and realism of the book’s Old West setting. It was a vampire book. Bonus: the word was almost exclusively used against indigenous Plains people. Author’s response: “They didn’t have bad words for Native Americans back then.”
• An author who called me at home after ten p.m. on release day because a minor character who never appeared “on-screen” and whose name was mentioned once in the first chapter of the novel had the wrong middle name when mentioned for the second and only other time at the end of the book. This was my fault, she informed me, because a “true professional” would have caught it (though she didn’t during numerous passes of her own manuscript). The author insisted that “hundreds of readers” had reported the mistake to her, but real-time sales data showed that the book had been purchased twice.
• A freelance client who refused to pay me for the work I did on her over 100k word manuscript because she felt I was “too critical.” The work was later published, though whether she took my advice, I don’t know. What I do know is that she cheated me out of nearly $700.00.

It may seem obvious to you that this behavior isn’t acceptable, but I find it astonishing how many authors don’t. That’s why I’ve consulted some other editors I know to share–anonymously–their favorite cautionary tales.

• “In recent memory, my worst author response was actually a non-response. I encourage every author to tell me what he/she needs–even if that means they need a different editor. This is a business. I don’t take it personally if a client needs a different editorial style. Just buck up and be honest. Recently, an author emailed me just a few days before her book was due. She said it wasn’t written. I was kind; these things happen all the time. Less than a week later…she released said book.

Now, it was a full novel. She couldn’t have had it written, edited, and revised in 6 days. So clearly, she hired a new editor but didn’t want to tell me. So she lied instead…despite knowing I’d see her posts on her personal profile and author page on FB.

I don’t wish her ill will, and I hope the book sells. But the fact is, she cancelled with too little time for me to fill the hole in my schedule, which means I didn’t earn a paycheck that week. I suspect authors forget sometimes that when they mess with an editor’s schedule, they’re also messing with her livelihood. I take great care to meet my deadlines. It’s a point of pride. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to ask clients to do the same.”

• “I once had an author tell me that she was working really hard, trying to get her book finished as quickly as she could by a fast-looming deadline. Not more than ten minutes after receiving that email, I saw that the same author was tweeting about going to the salon to get her hair colored and her nails done and after that she was meeting her husband for lunch and a movie. “

• “I worked for a publishing house that, despite preaching author equality, had a vastly different set of rules for their bestselling authors vs. the rest of their author pool. Company policy was that all manuscripts must be ‘finaled’ (edited, proofed, formatted, etc.) and turned in to management two weeks prior to the release date.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone has still not learned her lesson about buying Cheez-Its to keep in her office. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
25. Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
26. Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
27. Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
28. Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
29. The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
30. This show caters to the straight female gaze like whoa.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 

CW: Rape

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece about how smart phones are destroying the next generation. I always find it interesting that it’s always the next generation that’s being destroyed, but the generation writing think pieces about that destruction have always been mercifully spared. While the article does note that parents are as addicted to technology as their children are, it swiftly moves on to discussing the myriad ways teens aren’t communicating correctly.

I could mock this piece by scrounging up anecdotes about similar changes in technology that lead to dire warnings of societal collapse. There are plenty of examples: the internet. The telephone. The novel. I’m sure that even the harnessing of fire was criticized as a civilization ender, with middle-aged cave people lamenting the good old days when everyone lived in mortal dread of being eaten by a bear in the dark. But we don’t have to reach so far back for this one; smart phones and social media are providing all of us–not just the doomed “next generation”–with a level of connectivity to our fellow humans that we’ve never experienced before, and it’s all become possible in a very short span of years. All of us, even those who are writing disparaging think pieces, remember a time we would now consider unbearable. In the movie Hot Tub Time Machine, a teenager who mysteriously finds himself trapped in 1985 is astounded when a girl reminds him that there’s no way to text or email her. If he wants to talk to her, she explains, he has to come and find her. His response? “That sounds exhausting.”

And it was exhausting. And boring. And isolating. I grew up in a rural area, in a house where I was the only child. If the school year ended and I didn’t have a friend’s phone number, I didn’t speak to them until September–an interminable wait when you’re young and time seems so much longer. If I wanted to meet with my friends and spend time, the arrangements were contingent upon whether or not our parents had the means or inclination to get us into the same place at once. With no neighbor children to play with, summers could be very lonely.

My son, however, never spends his summers alone. Though he can’t always be with his friends in person, they gather online via Skype to play Minecraft or watch “let’s play” videos together on YouTube. They talk and they giggle and socialize, and some of them are doing this with the aid of smart phones.

Those lonely summers I spent might have been less lonely if we’d had smart phones. I could have texted or emailed my friends, rather than having to work up the courage to call them. To this day, I have debilitating phone anxiety that makes a single phone call an all day project as I sit and talk myself into dialing the number. I could have had long conversations via Facebook messenger, seen pictures from their summer vacations and shared my own. And failing all that, I could have downloaded books, rather than waiting for a weekly trip to the library.

I don’t begrudge my children the technology that provides them an adolescence filled with more conveniences than I had in mine. Will they grow up differently than I did? Of course they will, but every advance changes our way of life. That’s the point of advancement. We strive for change, but fear it when it arrives. Since we don’t want to blame ourselves for causing it, we resent the next generation for using the tools we’ve created for them.

Maybe kids these days don’t communicate the way kids did twenty years ago. Maybe it’s making them different. But kids twenty years before that were different, too. Our luddite insistence that any behavioral change caused by technology will spin us into a grim dystopia foretold in 1950’s science fiction novels proves that the only true constant is the human ego. Because how can the next generation possibly thrive or surpass us unless they duplicate our experiences exactly?