887: Two Is One, One Is None!
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Laura Starcheski, sitting in for Ira Glass. I'd been waiting for months for a certain moment to arrive. Garrett had mentioned it, Chrissy had mentioned it, and here we all were, sitting in their house in the suburbs of D.C., we were in their living room, their son was hopping around with an icy popsicle in his hand, and Garrett's laptop was ripe there, wasn't open yet, but I was on the edge of my seat, and finally she asked me, Chrissy jumped in to hype it up, and it's beautiful, it's excellent, you know, it's a thing of beauty. And Garrett opened the laptop and pulled up a file on her computer called Valkyrie after the Norse women warriors, they were very into the Thor movies around this time, and suddenly, it appeared, a spreadsheet, pulled for a pause. I was looking at many tabs, many rows, many columns, thousands of data points. This is where Garrett is mapping out their whole future. We're getting deep into the inner workings of my mind, okay, you know, I'm a data person by training. And by nature. And by nature, this is very much like part of my DNA. It's also part of their DNA as a couple. Spreadsheets are how they make all their decisions as a family. Like after Garrett finished a PhD in molecular biology, should she go into academia, get a government job, spreadsheet, she crunched the numbers, decided to rejoin the Navy as an active duty scientist. She and Chrissy had a whole plan, she'd serve for 20 years, retire, get a pension, health care, a stable life, where to live, the kids' schools, each and every one. Spreadsheeted with Chrissy's help. Normally, we're pretty good at doing really concrete game planning. I get on the mental carousel and predict the future, and then she makes a spreadsheet to like wrangle it in. So that's how things normally go. But about a year ago, this family found themselves facing a big, complicated, very uncertain new situation. Garrett's trans and a lieutenant commander in the Navy, in last winter, President Trump signed an executive order banning trans people from the military. The order claimed that trans people are dishonest, unfit, and harm-trooped readiness. Garrett and other trans service members immediately brought lawsuits against the ban, so everyone was in limbo. Are we all about to get kicked out? Are we going to be allowed to stay and keep serving? What's going to happen, and when? There was just so little data. All these hypothetical things that could happen, could not happen. All the stress of trying to play chess around them and plan and spreadsheet around all these hypotheticals. Yeah, I mean, you can't make decisions if you don't have information. No matter, they would make a new spreadsheet and more spreadsheets. They would be on alert, they would be light on their feet, because something big was coming for them, and they were going to plan and bring all their skill and diligence and available data to be sure that they had control over how this was going to go down.
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