A separate SFF section in a bookstore: yes or no?

Maybe?

But now that I work in a bookstore, maybe doesn't cut it. The question is no longer academic; I need to decide.

I started with conflicting issues:

- The implication that SFF was somehow less worthy than "general" or "literary" fiction. (Thus the implication that the presence of a spaceship or dragon or the renaming of a city went hand-in-hand somehow with bad writing.)

- That plenty of novels in General are in fact SFF. How do these escape the ghetto? Sometimes by virtue of age, I suspect -- 1984, Brave New World, Day of the Triffids, War of the Worlds -- but others just because the publisher wills it -- Handmaid's Tale, The Night Circus, The Road.

So either everything that's SFF should be in SFF, or none of it should. Either eliminate the ghetto or make its boundaries clear.

Fine. But which should I do? Pick your battles, but first pick a side.

I tended, I thought, towards integration. This is literature too! Ram it down their throats! It's a position I can still support on my more militant, idealistic days.

The reality is though that SFF is the first place I head in any bookshop. I'm disappointed (and I judge the shop poorly) if it's not there. The people in that section: those are my people. The ghetto is an immigrant's small slice of home.

And the SFF that's snuck under the barricades into General? Leave it there. Let it lure in the masses. You like that bagel, yeah? Okay let me tell you about babka and bialys.

Also because this -- small -- section will have only books in it that I have read and would recommend, which means that all my non-SFF-reading colleagues can feel safe in pointing customers toward it.

Related: What would you recommend? Skip anything that's been committed to film -- I already know.

I do not know what to say about America anymore. Only that I am done.

We are done, America. It is over.

For a while I thought NY was separate; I could love NY and leave it, but still maybe one day come back to it. That may not be true now.

My train caught fire last week. At 50th St, the conductor announced that due to an investigation this would be the last stop on our train. I got off, from one of the cars in the back, and started walking forward, not really knowing what to do next. I could switch from the B to the E, but that wasn't remotely useful in terms of getting to work. As I got toward the front of the train though I realized that -- either on the track, directly in front of it, or the front carriage itself was on fire. Like, a big bonfire filling the entire tunnel. I wrapped my scarf around my face and headed back the way I'd come, to wait for an E going the wrong direction, so I could switch to an A...

The next night my B train turned into a D, halfway home. This weekend I took the shuttle to the C, but the C was stopped in the station for a sick passenger. It had been there ten minutes already; I waited ten more, then gave up and got back on the shuttle, which I took to the 4 (because the 2/3 wasn't running), to get to Union Square, which had not been my original destination. At least I got a babka out of it.

The point is NY is no great shakes. It is too hot in summer and too cold in winter. The MTA is crumbling. It may be kind and thoughtful on an individual level (it is! it really is) but en masse, it is hard. Brutal. I love Prospect Park but I don't think I could still be here without it.

And however much I want to separate NY from America, the fundamentals remain the same. Too many cars. Guns. Lack of health care.

We are not okay. This -- none of this -- is okay.

I can't fix it. I can't change it. The best I can do is boycott it.

I will not send my child to school in this country.

Can I raise her with any pride in her American half? Pride perhaps in what was, what could have been, in the idea of an America that never was? Pride in simulacrum. Pride in Disney World and Sesame Street and Mister Rogers and The Parent Trap. Pride in the stories we tell, especially those we tell about ourselves. Pride tempered with the knowledge that we have failed. We dreamed, but it did not come true.

Is this overly pessimistic? I had dinner with an old friend last night and he seemed to think so. He claims humanity will be fine, ultimately. We'll have self-driving cars and yes we're all self-interested but actually that will eventually lead us to utopia. Or something. Anyway he was more optimistic than me.

But he doesn't have children. He can talk about the survival of humanity without worrying about how it will actually feel to be a human. Like sure, humanity survives in Planet of the Apes but dude, that is not how I want my daughter to live. I want to believe the way people in the 50s believed (if they did), that for my children it's all up, up up! from here.

I don't. All I can do is apologize to her, for that.

And then teach her which plants are edible, how to find water and start a fire and climb trees and snare small rodents and incapacitate a person with her bare hands if she needs to.

Not here though.

Bye, America.

(In which I take my own individual experience and apply it as broadly as possible. Because what's the point of a blog that no one reads if not ad hoc argumentation?)

I'd like to call bullshit on some pregnancy myths.

1. Cravings. This has to be the most common question. People seem to want to hear all about the bizarre relationship to food I'm supposedly suddenly having. Except I'm not. Which seems very disappointing for them. As far as I can tell, humans are always in the mood for something or other -- burrito? apple? chocolate? coffee? -- but when they're pregnant they a) start paying a lot more attention, and b) become much more likely to follow that mood whither it leads. In other words, of course I want ice cream, and I'm pregnant so what the hell?

2. Nesting. The kid has closet space, a bassinet, and a changing area. Why? Because it's another person joining our household and she needs to have certain basic needs met; not because I'm riding some kind of hormonal interior decorating wave. I made closet space for R too, when he moved in. I made space for our cat. Now I make space for a baby. And because I enjoy reading design blogs on occasion, and didn't fancy staring at a scuffed white door whilst fussing with diapers, and we had some leftover paint that wasn't being used for anything, I painted the door the changing table sits in front of. Consider us nested.

RECIPE: Roasted Za'atar Chickpeas, because za'atar is delicious and roasting chickpeas is a whole new world of snack food.