Roll A Wisdom Check

This email contains a photograph of a rat skull

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear One,

Because you are my friend (right?), you have not, to my face, pointed your nose up at the idea of polyamorous people getting married. (But here’s an article about why I did it, in case you point your nose up at this idea when my face is in another room.) When Luke and I got married, we said our vows while our family sat in a circle in a park we loved. (Some footage of that is here.) But (and this is embarrassing) I’ve always been so proud about my vows, that I haven’t thought too much about Luke’s.¹ That is, until recently, when we were driving, and I can’t really remember exactly what I was ranting about (2023 has been The Year of The Rant for your friend Sophie), but Luke said, “Well, you know, it’s like I said in my vows.”

“Right,” I said. And paused. “What part of your vows exactly?”

“The thing about the 20-sided dice,” he said.

Oh, yes. The thing about the 20-sided dice.²

The 20-sided dice are at the center of Luke’s life philosophy, which he talked about during our vows, which I’ll return to in a little while.

In case you don’t play Dungeons and Dragons (I respect this choice, and all choices surrounding D&D, a game that I deem, after much deep consideration, to be truly morally neutral), a quick primer of tabletop role-playing games is necessary here. I am not qualified to give one. But, basically: in an RPG, you play a character, you play the game as the character, you make choices (such as, “I want to throw an apple at that donkey”), you tell the game master about your choices, and then the game master has you roll a die to determine to what degree you succeed or fail. Typically, you roll a 20-sided die, with the numbers one through 20 on it, and the higher you roll, the better you do. So, if you roll a 16 while trying to throw an apple at the donkey — that’s pretty good! The game master would say something like, “You hit the donkey right in his torso and the donkey is annoyed.”

But wait, there’s more! As you play your role-playing game, you can DO THINGS to affect your luck. You can learn tricks or develop skills or build powers or meet falcons with secret knowledge (? IDK, that seems like a thing), and if you spend your time and resources on any of this stuff, you can add little bonuses to your rolls. Say you studied apple-throwing with Gravenstein Seedlingsmith for ten days. Maybe you’d get +3 added to any of your apple-throwing scores. So even if you rolled a lousy old eight when trying to accost the donkey, still, you’d hit him, because with your bonus, you’d have effectively rolled an 11.

Why, why, WHY SOPHIE. WHY ARE WE SPENDING THIS TIME ON THIS? You either (1) already know a lot more than I do about tabletop role-playing games or (2) have actively avoided learning about them for noble and good reasons.

But rats have eaten all my kale. It’s especially devastating because I planted it all from seed, inside, in February. About 80 kales — my favorite (non-pie) food. Two weeks ago, while it was still light outside (!!!!!!), I spied nine (!!!!!) rats in the chicken coop. “Oh no,” I said. “The rats are back. The rats have had babies. There is going to be a rat situation.”

That night, they ate a whole head of collard greens and half a kale. I bought $100 worth of mint oil and sprayed everything with it. I prayed, and I went to bed.

The next morning, five more kales had been taken. Fully taken. Bitten off at the bases. Little piles of poop were left like calling cards near each slaughter.

I had given myself a day to write, do yoga, catch up on rest — but my backyard is my sanctuary, and so I decided to add +3 to my future deterring-rats-from-the-rest-of-the-kale rolls, and spend the entire day in the 90-degree heat digging in my side yard where I knew the rat nests were. (Yes, I am SO BRAVE, and I will accept compliments on my bravery.) (I did not kill any rats, but I frightened them, and I said to them things like, “AND STAY OUT!”) I found live rats, dead rats, rat skeletons, and a rat skull (which I kept for a trophy). I got rid of all of these (except the skull), and thought this was worth +5 at least.

The next morning, ten more kales gone.

I was supposed to work with and for clients that day, but I thought maybe if I cut the rats off at the source, under the chicken coop, I could add another +5 to future rolls. Four hours into it all, the daycare called: my daughter had a fever. Goop was coming out of her eyes. Before I knew it, goop was coming out of MY eyes. Now I had to spend all my time watching my sick daughter while battling my own fever, and the client work would have to be done in the night, and we had to go to Boston next week, and the piles of poop had multiplied, and that meant tons of buzzing flies in my backyard sanctuary space I’d carefully curated.

The rats ate the rest of the kale.

There is a rat infestation under my garage, and that means that, unless I am willing to hire an exterminator (I am not), so long as I grow food that rats want to eat, my deterring-rats-from-the-rest-of-the-kale will have a -10,000 modifier on it. I didn’t realize this until it was too late. The good news is, the infestation will wane on its own, so long as they run out of food (they will); and I can plant basil, mint, and hot peppers all summer, and let go of kale, which is readily available at the market one block from my house for one dollar.

Here’s the thing about the 20-sided dice. Actual life is a series of these rolls. There’s nothing you can do about having to roll them again and again; so much of what ends up happening to you or around you or to the donkey nearby you (by the way — why are you being so mean to this donkey?) you don’t usually have all that much control over. And even when you DO have some control, you never know how the deck might be stacked against you (sorry for mixing metaphors, but you get it). You do get to choose where you want to put your energy to modify some of your rolls in your favor. When, at the end of the day, your kid still gets sick and you still get sick, and green gunk is coming out of everyone’s eyes, you can say, “That’s the thing about the 20-sided dice.” The thing is, mostly you don’t get very much control.

Luke’s vows, by the by, were about how, when you spend your energy on relationships and loving people you really want to love, you end up adding modifiers to a BUNCH of things. He vowed to put his energy into the family we were building; to positively modifying the rolls we would take together from here on in.

“The rats got all the kale,” I texted Luke.

“I hope you can see what a beautiful space this still is for us to enjoy,” Luke texted back.

I had absolutely not been able to see it. I took a long blink. Oh right.

There it was. Putting the time and energy into building this loving family meant +100,000,000 to enjoying the yard all summer long anyway, kale or no kale. Take that, Grinchy rats.

Love,

Sophie

Parenting Paragraph

Well, yes. T has green goop coming out of her eyes. Apparently, this is a rite of passage for one-year-olds, as when I have texted other parents who have had one-year-olds they have been like, “Yes, so-and-so had that and it was VERY SPOOKY.” It IS very spooky because her eyes are all full of goop and so you can’t, like, SEE HER EYES. And then also, she appears to have two black eyes, which I guess is part of it? And she must have bumped her head on something last week because she also has a head bruise, so all in all, she has seen better days in terms of looking not-horrible. On top of that, she obviously FEELS horrible, also. And we are, as you may have caught, traveling to Boston to visit family. As I write this, we are on an airplane. T is conked out on Luke’s lap. I’m so grateful it is his lap. (We are all COVID-negative and wearing lots of masks.)

This Week In Sophie

Sammi and I have a cartoon in The New Yorker (June 12, 2023 print issue) this week:

My friend Cecilia Pinto pointed out that Dear Sophie, Love Sophie was featured on The Chicago Public Library’s website as a “Graphic Novel With A Chicagoland Connection” (and right next to Eve Ewing, it’s in GREAT COMPANY)! This was very exciting for me. No one loves a public library as much as I do. It’s also on their list of “Introspective Graphic Novel Reads Exploring Mental Health.”

1. Except for one, where he promised he would rub my back every night. Which he does! It’s great.

2. Recently, my daughter has gotten into putting 20-sided dice in her mouth — something I fully understand, because a 20-sided die is the perfect size of a mouth-rock. And, apparently, spitting a die is a great way to roll one. And it’s all so symbolic, because she (my daughter) was, herself, a high roll.