Annabeth Albert: Status Update

Initially, Status Update was readable; I kind of drifted through it for a day and a half, picking it up when I had time. I was never excited about going back to it, I just wanted to finish it. But so much for that intention, I ended up dropping it. Just past halfway though–the end of chapter 11, to be exact–I encountered something that made me uncomfortable and the story didn’t draw me in enough for me to want to see how it played out.

There are somethings that are a little enh that can be funny, not outright hilarious, but the situation can make you chuckle. In all seriousness, it’s not actually funny, but a number of things can converge to make the situation humorous. The writing needs to be able to support it; the scene has to have some sort of emotional tag, among other things, in order to play it off or at least to convince me to not throw the book away at that point.

The scene was this: Adrian and Noah are at Adrian’s sister’s wedding and, Strike One, there’s a kid in the scene. I just can’t deal with kids; they’re always too sassy or too precocious or just too much. So the kid, right before the procession, runs over to Adrian and Noah, and he’s loud in the church, and now I’m thinking please control your kid. It’s Adrian’s nephew, so Adrian tries to quiet him and sits him between himself and Noah. As the procession starts, Adrian tells his nephew to be nice to Noah because he doesn’t think he knows a lot of little boys and Noah says, “I have a nephew. Two actually. And a niece.” The nephew stands up on the pew and turns around to see people coming in and starts saying oh there’s so-and-so and so-and-so and then he yells, “Grandma, Uncle Adrian brought a Noah! He likes little boys just like Uncle Adrian!”

Yeah that just wasn’t… I just couldn’t get past that. Adrian is gay, his family knows he’s gay. Noah is gay, but no one except for Adrian knows that he’s gay. He is so very deep in the closet. He’s a believer who hasn’t reconciled his sexuality with his faith. He also works for a Christian college and him being gay would be a problem for him, especially because he willingly signed the school’s morality clause when he accepted the job. His sexuality is grounds for termination. I feel uncomfortable with this joke being made at the expense of someone who is not entirely comfortable with their sexuality and is in the situation he’s in. It’s two gay men in a church–that whole atmosphere just does not lend itself to that moment being funny or humorous. It was in poor taste if you ask me and you’re reading this, so, in a sense, you are.

So I dropped it. Annabeth Albert may get another chance somewhere down the line, but, right now, I’m too turned off by this.

One final note, considering the title, I expected there to be talk about social media accounts. Not to say that there aren’t, but there wasn’t much to speak of in the first half of the story. I found that odd.