Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been seeing a lot online lately about the importance of building community. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong because this advice always includes “talk to your neighbors!” Sorry, but that’s not who I am as a person. I’m not talking to the neighbors. I’ve wondered if that means community is something I can’t do or am doing incorrectly. However, I read something this week that made me think maybe I’m already contributing to building community with my blog. It sparks conversations with people and I’ve had some people tell me it inspired them to action. I’m sharing what I learn from the books I read (and maybe encouraging others to read and learn more?) and other tidbits from my online travels and maybe that is a way of doing community. When people say we need community now more than ever I think I’m supposed to be, like, … outside? I don’t know. I’m not trying to absolve myself from doing the work, but I am realizing the work I already do may be accomplishing more than I think. I’m sure I’ll be thinking and writing about this more as time goes on.
Another question I’ve been rotating in my mind this week is what brings me joy. Inspired by Lito asking our group chat what we think the difference is between “joy” and “delight,” and when do we feel those things, I spent some time mulling this over. It is often quite difficult for me to explain emotions and what causes them (I recall when I was getting evaluated for autism and the psychologist asked me to explain “happiness” and I just cried because I couldn’t but I didn’t want her to think I was never happy), so it was a bit of a challenge. I liked what I came eventually came up with so I decided to share it publicly here. Delight seems to me a subset of joy. Delight is fleeting and its arrival is often a surprise. Joy happens when I am doing things that align with how I see myself as a person (or the kind of person I want to be) and what’s important to me. I feel joy doing my Wikipedia editing and translating and I am delighted when I phrase a bit of translation in a way that sits just right. I feel joy riding my bike to the library and delighted when I find something cool on the nee books shelf. Joy is cuddling my cat (or other people’s cats) and delight is when he comes up to me and goes mrrrp. Joy is quality time with my logical family in the real or online in our various chats. Delight is the unexpected group chat callback or in-joke. It’s so important that we cultivate joy now (and always). It feels, once again, like the world is ending, but I’m a firm believer in the idea that life is what you make it. So many things suck. You can go along with that and let everything in your life suck too or rage against the dying of the light and wrest some joy from this would-be wretched existence. In conclusion:
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Books and Other Words
I pre-ordered Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent before it was published in 2022, but only just got around to reading it (draw your own conclusions about why). The theme of Kendzior’s work as a whole is that people in power are failing us and the history of their misdeeds is in the public domain for anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, assembling this sort of information tends to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. However, these issues “are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.” It is true both that people in power can and do conspire and our culture is rife with conspiracy theories because “of course people will flock to conspiracy theories when nearly every powerful actor is lying, obfuscating, or profiteering off pain” (emphasis in the original). Kendzior has been chronicling the “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” for years and uses They Knew to link together some of the overarching problems that many of our country’s elite are wrapped up in, like Trump and his ties to the Russian oligarchs, or apparently everyone’s connections to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She bemoans the tendency on both the left and the right to wait to be rescued—in recent years, by the mysterious “Q” for MAGA adherents or Mueller for liberals—thanks to “the belief that somehow everything will work out on its own, because we could not have possibly gotten to a place where so many severe cataclysms intersect and feed off each other at once.” Kendzior is giving us permission to not trust the government. It’s not a conspiracy theory to point out that the government, especially on the federal level, is not often acting in the best interests of regular people. We have to talk about these issues. We can’t deal with these problems without discussing them. We deserve a government that actually cares about us and we have to acknowledge that there are real and deep-seated problems with our current leadership before we can move on.
Sistersong by Lucy Holland is set in the British kingdom of Dunmonia—I looked it up and this was a real place!—sometime between when the Romans abandoned Britain and the Normans invaded it. The story focuses on and is told through the perspectives of three sisters, the king’s daughters, who are grappling with the expectations of coming of age and with their diminishing magical abilities. The story finds the Dunmonian people at a crossroads; they have welcomed a Christian priest into their midst and the old ways of the Celtic religion are falling away, but abandoning the old ways is causing them to lose their connection to the land and their magic. I like this story a lot but it did take some dark turns, so be warned. It’s great for people who like books about sisters, exploring one’s queerness, or historical fiction/historical fantasy.
I think Barret Holmes Pitner’s The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America might have rewired my brain. The book’s thesis is that we need a name for the concept of “[destroying] a people’s culture while keeping the people,” and that word, a sister to genocide, is ethnocide. This word makes it possible to describe, for example, what this country did to Black people through the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Black people remain, but their original cultures are lost. This book goes extremely hard on American culture. Just look at this: “American ethnocide represents an inversion of culture so severe that one must question if American society even has a culture.” Pitner continues with “American culture was never a collective culture focused on existence, but a divided culture that valued money more than human life.” This book helped me better understand an idea I have long held to be true: that white people in the US abdicated their history and culture to become homogeneously “white” rather than Italian, Polish, French, Danish, etc. White people perpetrated ethnocide on Black people and then turned around and did it to themselves to maintain power, which has left many people feeling lonely, with a void where their culture ought to be. Whiteness, per Pitner, is about essence over existence, that is, maintaining the idea of whiteness is more important than valuing human life. Look at how mad white culture gets when there is property damage, or how we refer to people as “consumers” rather than “citizens.” Our definition of freedom in this country is the freedom to own things (or, at certain points in history, to own people). Pitner also draws from a variety of other traditions and languages to find ways to describe his ideas and give us the vocabulary to understand them, pulling from existentialism and referencing Camus and Beckett, meditating on the German idea of the soul Geist, and defining a certain kind of vulgarity with the Russian word poshlyi. This book gave me so much to think about and I really appreciated every word. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of American culture and how we can begin to heal it.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Controversial Prop. 65 warning labels about toxic chemicals are effective, study says via the LA Times. You know those warning labels that say something contains “chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects”? They’re actually helping us. From the article, “Now, a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives has concluded that Proposition 65 has curbed exposure to toxic substances in California — and nationally.”
- So What Does That Mean in Practice? via How Things Work. Democrats need to stop focusing on superficial things like slogans and actually do something to improve people’s lives if they ever want to win an election.
- Interdependence is a Survival Skill, But Shouldn’t Feel Like Building a Bunker via Group Hug! I liked these thoughts on community building, especially this: “Community isn’t just about trying hard enough; it’s about what we are willing to feel.” The author mentions that right now many people are talking about building community like they would make a New Year’s resolution, but that is not going to work in the long term. The author offers some good questions to reflect on as we continue the work of connecting with others.
- Maximizing Time for Reading via Dividual. Some thoughts on how and why to read more. One bit I liked from the article: “In general, aiming to ‘understand’ or even have concrete takeaways for what you read is getting the cart before the horse. Again, no one wakes up reading Pynchon and converting it to gold; that’s not the point. The point, if there is one, as with looking at a painting, is that you are exposing your mind to being nourished without needing to define it another way. Too often we try to read with purpose, as if everything we do must have a takeaway; instead, letting the words wash over you, taking what you take from them, and carrying forward tends for me to be a much more effective way of being ‘in’ the book, letting the soul of the book into my consciousness.”
- The Onion buys conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ via The Guardian. No, this is not an article from The Onion. They really did buy the infowars site at auction and they had the support of the Sandy Hook families. This is the best thing that could have happened in our fractured media ecosystem.
TV and Music
One of my favorite new shows right now is Gastronauts on Dropout. It’s a cooking show but a goofy one. Three comedians set off-the-wall cooking challenges for chefs who have 30 minutes to carry them out. The stakes are basically non-existent. Everyone is funny and the food challenges are delightful. In the latest episode, someone asked for food that they could wear as a hat. I mean, so silly. So great. If you’re curious, the first episode is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYj9Wso2Tbc
Moving It
My next dance recital is coming up on December 7! If you are reading this, you are invited. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts. I’ll be performing in tap, jazz, and ballet as usual. There will also be adorable small children and some highly talented older children to watch!
Kitchen Witchery
Most of my kitchen efforts have been in service of Thanksgiving preparation (don’t sleep on using the freezer!) but I have made a few things of note. I made lasagna based on the recipe in How to Cook Everything. I normally make the “American-style” version, which has lots of ricotta and mozzarella, but this time I tried the traditional version with bechamel. It was good! Both versions are good for different reasons and it’s nice to have options. I also made this handsome cocoa-yogurt cake from Snacking Cakes. Honestly, a rainbow sprinkle makes everything more festive.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
