Digital Manticore

Two Weeks in the Life: September 17, 2023

Posted on September 17, 2023 by Lindsey

a tablet showing a score of SRD blue 203 points to SRD yellow 188 points. There's a microphone on the table in front of the tablet and a sports floor in the background — Blue v. Yellow 2023

Hello, friends and enemies. Yesterday, I left my enclosure to do a little roller derby commentary. I was on the mic for Sacramento Roller Derby’s first home team game of the season. It feels nice to still be welcomed even though I’m not skating anymore. A little while before the game started, I turned on the mic and said “test, test, test” and the skaters started cheering. Easy crowd, yes, but I’m glad people like to listen to me narrate roller derby. If only this was a skill I could use to make money, haha. I was also glad that my former home team, Blue aka Blue Steel, won.

Books and Other Words

I tried something new for this week’s post. I’ve been writing out my thoughts about the books I read as I finish them instead of waiting two weeks then struggling to remember what I wanted to say. Please enjoy these new and improved book thoughts.

ebook cover of Art in the After-Culture. Huey the cat is next to the book. — Art in the After-Culture

hardcover book: The Saint of Bright Doors — Art in the After-Culture

I bought Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis without knowing much about it (this feels like a recurring theme for me), but I was intrigued by the idea of art criticism through the lens of socialism. This book looks at how art intersects with a lot of topics, from social media influencers to climate change to QAnon, and I learned a whole lot. There was so much trivia in here that I want to remember, like the fact that the DDoS attack was invented as a method of digital protest and first deployed in solidarity with the Zapatistas. I mean, what? The whole book is rich with tidbits like this employed in the larger narrative of examining art’s role in and relationship to modern issues.

I enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. It’s set in an alternate universe version of what seems like southeast Asia. Our protagonist, Fetter, has been raised by his mother to be an assassin and murder his father, who leads a religion (or perhaps a cult, it’s a grey area). This sounds thrilling but it’s not really that kind of book. Fetter grows up and immigrates to a new place and lives in public housing. He goes to his group therapy and gets somewhat accidentally gets involved in a political movement. In the background, the state is imprisoning low-caste citizens (Fetter has to reference an almanac to try to figure out where people fall in the caste hierarchy–and still remains confused). There is plague and revolution but Fetter is really just trying to live his life. In this sense, the book is highly relatable.

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem is a new fantasy novel that takes place in a world based on medieval Egypt (I’m honestly not sure if ‘medieval’ functions as a description for non-European countries but it’s the best I can offer). Our protagonist is the titular Jasad heir, a deeply traumatized orphan whose family was murdered at the hands of another kingdom. She, like the rest of her family and people, can wield magic, but given past atrocities, it’s now illegal to be magic so she suppresses it and lives as a peasant. Naturally her world gets turned upside down in service of the plot. I liked the book well enough. I always enjoy fantasy based on places other than Europe, and it’s especially nice to get something that’s Arab-inspired, although the bar for that field has been set especially high by S. A. Chakraborty and her Daevabad “trilogy.” I’ll be curious to see what Hashem does with this series.

I am a contrarian, a misanthrope, and at times, a hater. So when something reaches a certain level of popularity, I tend to assume it’s not that good (apologies to Taylor Swift fans; no apologies to Twilight fans). Still, I decided to see what all the fuss was about over Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, a gay romance that was recently adapted into a movie. For the first part of the book, I was not that engaged and was thinking about how I prefer science fiction and fantasy with romantic elements to a straight (lol) romance because there’s more to think about. However, this book unleashed a mega fantasy scenario, as unreal as anything set in space. We’ve got the bisexual coming of age story of the first woman president’s son. He goes enemies-to-lovers (more like ‘doesn’t-realize-he’s-bisexual-and-holding-a-grudge to lovers’, but that’s neither here nor there) with an English prince. We’ve got the millennial parent apology fantasy. Most of all, we’ve got a Trump-free world. The main character’s mom becomes president after two terms of Obama. I WANT WHAT THEY HAVE. I think this, as much as anything, explains the appeal of this story. It’s romance in a world where we didn’t have to endure the worst president of all time and slide towards fascism.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy via Mozilla Foundation. So most cars have a big computer in them now and that computer is collecting all kinds of information. Car companies are doing nothing to protect that data, which is troubling. There’s a link at the bottom of the article for a petition you can sign about it, if you feel so moved.
Mexico decriminalizes abortion, extending Latin American trend of widening access to procedure via the Associated Press. Shout out to Mexico for doing the damn thing! Orále!
Did you know that men are just out here, living their lives, and constantly thinking about the Roman empire? There’s a meme of women asking men “How often do you think about the Roman empire?” and recording the answers. Men everywhere are thinking about the Romans a LOT. This is news to women. Very funny news. Why are you thinking about this so much? Why are men not discussing these thoughts? As usual, I’m lead to more and more questions.

TV and Music

We started (and finished, at least of what there is so far) watching Foundation recently. I read the original Asimov novels when I was a teenager and watching the show has me wracking my brain trying to figure out how much I actually remember to compare it to the television adaptation, and this has made me want to read the books again. The show is very good though. It’s pretty, the characters are well developed, and it’s taking us to interesting places. I hope they make more.

Knitting and Crafts

a bit of knitting showing the pattern emerging of the Marsh tee — Marsh tee knitting sample

I’m finally getting back into my knitting and I’ve been working on this marsh pattern. I was struggling with it at first because (I suspect) I wasn’t paying attention enough. After ripping out some 80 rows, I have been more carefully working this piece back up. I’ve re-done 40 rows so far and it’s looking a lot nicer, so even though I was mad about undoing so much work, it was the right call. I need to finish this up and start knitting some holiday gifts before it’s too late!

Kitchen Witchery

The only new and noteworthy food I made this week was this giant skillet cookie, which was as good as it sounds. I added mini M&Ms because there are no rules. I got a great new cooking tip from one of my facebook groups (this makes me sound 100 years old) this week. I saw a suggestion to use a large tea diffuser when cooking beans. You can put all the spices and seasonings in the diffuser ans save yourself the effort of fishing out the bay leaves, chilis, and other bits from the broth at the end. So I bought one and tried it out and it did make my life a lot easier.

One giant cookie filling a cast iron skillet. There are mini M&Ms baked in. — skillet cookie!

dried beans, half an onion, and an open tea diffuser stuffed with herbs and seasonings — skillet cookie!

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Huey the cat illuminated by a patch of sun — Huey the cat in the sun

Huey the cat on her couch blanket, wide-eyed — Huey the cat in the sun

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: September 2, 2023

Posted on September 2, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Around this time last year I started getting really into the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’m still into it, but I’m not as fanatical about digging into Wikipedia to try to solve every single clue like I was at first. I was reminded of this anniversary because the NYT emailed me to inform me that my promotional subscription rate of $6 every 28 days was ending and access to all of the NYT would now cost $25 every 28 days. Note this is not $25 per month—NYT is eking out a thirteenth payment every year with that every 28 days maneuver. I’m galled by their audacity. I’ve switched to the “games” subscription which is still $6 per month(ish). I was briefly annoyed at losing access to the cooking section, however, I can get it through the library, so that’s cool. Frankly, I could be reading the whole newspaper through the library but I always forget that’s an option. Shout out to the public library for saving me at least $18 every 28 days.

Books and Other Words

Sappho is Burning by Page duBois is a book I bought based on it’s title alone, an allusion to the documentary on New York City ball culture Paris is Burning. This book is about Sappho the Lesbian poet, patron saint of modern lesbians everywhere. I didn’t know much about Sappho before reading this book and I kind of still don’t because we just don’t know that much about her. All that has survived are fragments of her poetry, which duBois analyzes as a whole to discuss her themes and philosophy. I’m not much of a classicist, so although I understood the book I don’t have any real analysis to offer. If you’re looking for a rhetorical and philosophical analysis of Sappho’s work, this is it.

I picked up Vampires of el Norte by Isabel Cañas on my library’s “Lucky Day” shelf and checked it out because the author description said she was getting her Ph.D. in near eastern languages and civilizations and I said, “hey, that’s what I got my degree in!” I liked this book a lot. It’s a historical fiction set during the Mexican-American war, focusing on a pair of star-crossed lovers from a rancho just south of the Rio Bravo (which I learned is what they call the Rio Grande in Mexico. Why did it take a random novel to teach me this information? After seeing “Rio Bravo” a few times, I looked it up because I thought, how many rivers in northern Mexico can there be? JUST ONE it turns out.). I enjoyed the writing style and the story itself a lot but, being the person I am, I also liked that the author used a lot of words in Spanish for the world of the story because I picked up some new vocabulary.

What I love about Becky Chabmers’ work is how hopeful it always is and To Be Taught, If Fortunate is no exception. In this novella, She imagines humanity going to space just to explore, with expeditions funded by citizen initiatives and not governments. I liked the technology she came up with to make prolonged space travel safe for humans and I enjoyed the way the characters interacted.

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is one of the many non-fiction books I’ve bought and took a while to get around to. I’m trying to just pick a book and start reading instead of spending several days hemming and hawing over what I may or may not be in the mood for. Moods are fickle and these books aren’t going to read themselves. This book is about how radical political ideas get co-opted by the very people the idea was targeting. Think about the idea of “woke.” It started as an in-group description of a certain way of thinking and quickly got picked up by trashbags like Ron DeSantis to vilify everything he hates about modern culture. That’s a form of elite capture. This book is deeply grounded in history and theory and I found it all really interesting. I recommend it if you’re into that kind of thing.

paperback book: Sappho s Burning — Sappho Is Burning

hardback book: Vampires of El Norte — Sappho Is Burning

Meanwhile, on the internet:

It might not be praxis, but we need corporate pride via Welcome to Garbage Town. From the article, “We regular rainbows and allies are just people, and frankly, we are the exact people the right doesn’t and never will listen to. Corporations are who they listen to, because corporations conditioned them to listen over the better part of a century. What sits on the front rack at Target is so much more convincing than anything somebody Uncle Fuck Your Feelings decided not to respect before he even learned how to sit up on his own could possibly say.”
Whatever happened to having taste? via the Washington Post (gift link). Algorithms and social media and consumerism are making us boring!
She competed in a Tough Mudder; a pustular rash was her prize. Hundreds got ill—and angry via Los Angeles Times. You will never catch me schlepping through muck on purpose!

TV and Music

You may remember that last year I wrote about how I stopped using Spotify and started getting reacquainted with my MP3 collection. This week, I finished updating the metadata for all the music I have, some 30+ gigabytes. The digital music I have comes from various sources—ripped CDs from my dad’s collection, music purchased legally, tracks from the heyday of peer-to-peer sharing—so the metadata was all over the place. I realized this disorganization was an active problem for me when I wanted to listen to my B-52s albums were variously labelled “The B-52s,” “The B-52’s, “b-52s,” etc. and I couldn’t get my app to play them all together. So, I did what any reasonable person would do (lol), and went album by album to make sure all the artist names, track numbering, year information, and album art were stored consistently on my computer and got all the file names into a consistent format. I’ve been working on this here and there for at least the last year. But I’m done now! Finally!

It feels really good to know exactly what music I have. This process reminded me of a lot of songs that I have and like but had sort of forgotten about when I abdicated the task of curating my music taste to the Spotify algorithm. I also found a lot of things I apparently downloaded at one point and forgot about, like the entire Yello discography (I have a habit of finding one cool song and then wanting to hear everything else the artist has ever made. And if you think you don’t know who Yello is, yes you do.). When I was listening to music on Spotify, everything started to sound the same because the algorithm figures out what you like then keeps giving you that kind of thing. It definitely would not have recommended me this cool-ass group, which I found on Tumblr of all places. It has been fun to look for music and discover it on purpose. I know you can still do this with Spotify or Amazon music or whatever, but I wasn’t, which brings me to this Anne Helen Petersen article I just read on this same topic. She writes, “Algorithms do the work for cheap, but when they reflect our taste back at us, it feels misshapen and insulting, a crude and unfair representation. When everything is available, all knowledge, all information, all entertainment … nothing is perceived as valuable.” That’s how I’ve been feeling about music. Okay, I can find any song I want (provided Spotify hasn’t randomly made it unavailable in my region), but I have no connection to it. I like having unlimited music, but I’m also nostalgic for when I knew and loved every carefully chosen CD in my collection. So, yes, downloading music and organizing it, to say nothing of finding cool music, is a little more work, but now I’m actually engaged with that music and enjoying it.

screenshot of VLC media player with a playlist of B-52s albums — nice, clean files

Moving It

After two weeks off, I’m back at my dance classes for the fall semester. I am in the very beginnings of the process of working towards being able to dance en pointe, which is exciting. I didn’t really expect that was something I would be able or get to do as someone starting ballet in her 30s, but it’s cool that I have the opportunity to try. I’m in a weird middle place right now though because, ideally, I would add another day or two of class to my schedule to get stronger and improve my technique, but there’s only one adult class. They tried adding a second weekly class, but I’m the only one who signed up. So, I am currently attending a teen class once a week to supplement my dance time and that is a little weird. The youths do not seem to notice or care about having a random old person™ in their midst, which is just as well. Seeing the kids in the class made me think about doing circus classes growing up and had me thinking about if I was as much of a crazed goofball as some of them seem to be (I might have been worse, actually). But that also got me thinking that we had adults mixed in with the kids for some circus acts, so maybe this is all just a normal way of existing and learning new things. Going to school for twelve years gets us too used to learning only with people who are exactly our age, but that’s simply not how life moves.

Kitchen Witchery

It’s cooled down just a little and it seems that’s all I needed to have some kitchen motivation. I made these great walnut and pesto rolls (recipe from The Harvest Baker). The recipe said to put them in a nine-inch cake pan and I, being a genius, thought I’d put them in the spring form so I could get them out more easily. This was, in fact, fucking stupid. The rolls are full of pesto (oily) and cheese (oily at high temperatures) and all that oil seeped out, pooled in the lip of the pan, and eventually overflowed onto my oven floor, where it then started smoking. Fortunately, I did not burn down the kitchen but it did lead to an evening of cleaning the oven. Kirk got us Del Taco for dinner and we saved the rolls for the next day.

As usual, it’s bean-centric cooking out here. It’s what I like to make and eat and now that I’m getting bean subscriptions, I gotta keep up. Fortunately, everything I made the last two weeks has been deemed a keeper. First, we had this brown butter lentil and sweet potato salad (which led to an epistemological debate on what constitutes a “salad;” we have fun here). Next, I cooked a batch of chickpeas so I could mix them with noodles and feta and other flavors for lunch last week (no recipe, just a bit of lemon, chili flakes, and vibes). I used the rest of the chickpeas in a riff on a Pasta Grannies recipe but mixed gnocchi into the sauce with the chickpeas then put a bunch of cheese on top and set it under the broiler for a few minutes. Delicious! Then, I tried this vegetarian tamale pie, which ended up being really good. I tossed in a bit of corn and I used bayo beans and it all turned out great. Finally, I think my season of making rice krispie treats (in my rice krispies era?) is coming to a close, but I wanted to try a black and white version by mixing chocolate and plain rice krispies. No one stopped me so here I am. I also have most of a box of chocolate rice krispies remaining so I will probably make at least one more batch before we shut this category down for the season.

a spring form pan of walnut and pesto rolls, which are bursting up out of the pan — walnut pesto rolls

a bowl of sweet potatoes and lentils topped with goat cheese — walnut pesto rolls

Cat Therapy

Fritz has been an absolute maniac lately. When he was a kitten and started peeing on our bed all the time, one of the suggested solutions was to add another litter box to make sure there were ample sanctioned zones to pee in. So, for the last two years, I’ve had an extra litter box in my office, which I do not like, but I have tolerated. However, this stinky pee boy kept peeing on the floor and on the (washable) rug near the litter box, and I finally lost my mind and threw out the office litter box, vacuumed the floor, and washed and put away the rug until I’m sure Fritz is going to behave. This asshole is adorable 95 percent of the time, but that other five percent is pure demon.

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Here we have Huey camping next to me in my office because she wants me to do things for her. Fritz was annoyed by this so he started being a door troll to be a problem when she tried to leave. We also have Fritz being cute in bed and administering some licks.

Fritz the cat sitting in the doorway to my office on the floor and Huey sitting inside the office just a few feet away — camping my office

Fritz the cat, underneath a sheet, licking Kirk's finger — camping my office

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: August 20, 2023

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Lindsey

Program for The Play that Goes Wrong held up in the theater. Stage and set visible but blurry in the background. — Another night at the theatre

Hello, friends and enemies. Last night I got a little enrichment time outside of the enclosure and went to see a play with Kirk and Abby. We saw The Play that Goes Wrong, which is totally hilarious. I love the actors at B Street Theater because they are so great at physical comedy. I mean, they are also good actors but they way they put their whole bodies into the performance just kills me. Go see it! It will be playing for a few more weeks.

I’m really enjoying becoming a person who goes to the theater now that I have the disposable income and presence of mind to do so. It’s nice to get out of the house and take in some arts. I feel like I have some deeper thoughts on this subject but they haven’t fully coalesced yet. Something about how you can always go back to things that interest you (I was a bit of a theater kid in high school), the fun of having a reason to get dressed up and go places, and enjoying the arts in a public setting. I’ll probably come back to this subject in the future.

Books and Other Words

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon. This book is a high-concept science fiction that didn’t quite come together for me. I thought it was a cool idea, but it was honestly very difficult to keep up with all the terms and ideas the author introduced without a whole lot of explanation into the world. I wanted to like it, and I did on certain levels, but I think it needed a stronger editor.
Translation State by Ann Leckie. I loved this entry into Leckie’s Imperial Radch universe. It’s not really a sequel to her Ancillary trilogy, but it inhabits the same space. I think Leckie is brilliant at creating worlds and exploring what it means to be human through science fiction. One of my very early posts on this blog is actually about her book Ancillary Justice. I always say I’m not really a writer but looking at something I wrote almost ten years ago is making me cringe, so I guess I am a writer by at least some metrics (achievement unlocked: be embarrassed by past work). This was no I’ll be famous one day but for now I’m stuck in second grade with a bunch of morons.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan. I enjoyed this novel a lot too. I thought it was a compelling tale and I’m looking forward to the second book. I don’t have any big thoughts about it, but it was good!
Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives by Amelia Possanza. I’m getting on queer history kick in my reading lately. Lesbian Love Story is a work of creative non-fiction work that profiles seven historical lesbians (although some of them may have never used that word for themselves) interwoven with vignettes from the author’s own life as she works to understand her queerness and what it is to be a lesbian. Possanza does an excellent job of making these women real using a combination of archival text and a little creativity to show what their lives might have been like. Highly recommended!

book cover for The Archive Undying shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — The Archive Undying

book cover for Translation State shown on kobo ereader — The Archive Undying

Meanwhile, on the internet:

California COVID surge confirmed by 4% Walgreens positivity rate via The San Francisco Chronicle. Covid is on the rise so please be safe out there! An updated covid vaccine is supposed to come out in late September along with the flu shot.
You either see everyone as a human being or you don’t via Current Affairs. Texas has put buoys in the Rio Grande to keep migrants out. The buoys have saws on them to injure anyone who tries to pass. This is unconscionable. Even if you think we shouldn’t accept immigrants, do you think they deserve to be ripped apart? Awful.
For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching via The Washington Post. This article got me riled up. There are many reasons that public school is difficult and lots of good reasons to homeschool, but the fact that adults can just set up a “school” like an AirBNB for other people’s kids and that these “teachers” have no interest in learning about education or actually giving feedback on student work pisses me off. School already exists! It’s not perfect but there’s a whole system in place to give kids education! There is a system of screening the adults to keep the kids safe! Anyone beating the “school choice” drum is sounding the dog whistle for defunding public education. That’s all this shit is. School is also not a “product,” and anyone telling you it is should be suspect. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hated teaching in public school, but at least I wanted to do a good job and tried. The woman in this article says “that she has no interested in formal training. ‘I could take an exam and say, “I’m a teacher.” I don’t feel there’s really any benefit in doing that.'” YOU DON’T? Why are people sending their children to this woman. Everyone in this article needs to get a grip.
How to uphold the status quo: The problem with small town witch romances via Tor.com. In more lighthearted internet discourse, I found this article about witchy romance stories interesting. The author here is inviting us to stop and think about the power structures that might be represented in these stories, if glossed over for the sake of “coziness.”
Use my new slang in meetings and score accordingly via McSweeney’s. For some levity, get down to goat treats and summer coats in your next meeting using these wonderful new pieces of corporate jargon. Get coned up, idiots.

TV and Music

I watched both season one and season two of Somebody Somewhere over the last two weeks and now I’m sad that there isn’t more. This show is great. We’ve got found family, returning to a hometown and having a lot of feelings about it, and being a well-rounded person with friends and hobbies in your forties. I don’t know how to describe this show. There’s vulnerability and joy. It’s good.

I came across this really cool music website on Tumblr this week. You can select a country and a decade and hear music from there and then. It’s called Radioooo! Go discover some new music before someone forces them to take it down.

Corporeal Form

This might be TMI (too much information) for some of you. If you don’t want to hear about a weird body problem, just skip to the next heading. I want to write about it though because I had never heard of this ailment and because women’s health is often treated as a taboo subject. Okay last chance to stop reading this paragraph … I found out from my gynecologist (here I will spare the details) that I am presently afflicted with something called vulvodynia. It’s pain around the vulva. I’ve read up on it and learned that we don’t know what causes it and we don’t really know how to fix it. Women’s health, am I right? My doctor’s prescription was to take hot baths and massage the area, which sounded very funny but has actually not been as fun as it sounds. You know, because of the pain. What sucks about this is I saw the gyno because I was having pain at certain times, but once I started trying to massage out the tension and identified this specific flavor of pain, I realized I’m actually feeling it often but I had been misinterpreting it as cramps or gut problems or just general discomfort. Apparently, it was my vulva! Neat! (not really!). So, this sucks on its own but the last couple of years have just been a cavalcade of ailments. It needs to stop. I’m not going to have any health body parts left at this rate. I am once again posting this hamster who is at her limit to express my feelings. No more body problems! Whoever is running this simulation needs to give me a fucking break. End program!

a wide-eyed hamster on a couch. Text reads: I can't fucking take it/seriously I'm at my limit — seriously I’m at my limit

Kitchen Witchery

In better news, the weather hasn’t been horrible every day so I’ve been able to make some food. Although I’ve been a little hit and miss when it comes to motivation/my brain being cooperative about doing the tasks of daily life. I made some really tasty pizza beans, roughly based on this Smitten Kitchen recipe to eat for lunch last week. I knew Kirk wasn’t going to like these, so I just made them for myself, which is something you’re always allowed to do. I also tried a soup recipe in the instant pot. It’s a Persian barley-lentil soup from the Milk Street Fast and Slow cookbook, which I have checked out from the library. The instant pot is really saving my ass in this hot weather, I have to admit. I also made another rice krispie treat variation, because I had cereal left over and why not. I mixed in some cinnamon bits and topped it with cinnamon sugar. Recommended!

a casserole dish filled with beans and tomato sauce, topped with melty cheese — pizza beans

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I must again apologize to Huey fans, but Fritz is simply too photogenic. He keeps posing. He knows where the light is. What am I supposed to do?

Fritz the cat lying in the middle of the tunnel toy, attacking a wand toy from inside. His tail is sticking out one end and his crazed face is visible — tunnel-obsessed beast

Fritz the cat lying in the windowsill. It's shady but a shaft of light is shining on his head and upper back. — tunnel-obsessed beast

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: August 5, 2023

Posted on August 5, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I was very sad to learn of Paul Reubens’ death this week. While I am not usually much affected by celebrity deaths, this one did get to me. Watching Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and having Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure on near-constant repeat were formative parts of my childhood. I can confidently say that Reubens had a huge impact on how my sense of humor developed and, certainly, my appreciation of camp (if you don’t think Pee-Wee’s Playhouse is camp, please watch the Christmas special. Seriously). I watched Big Adventure this week as a memorial and that opening music really had me letting go of anxiety and existential dread within minutes. I was surprised at how quickly it took me to a certain emotional place.

me as a baby, looking up at a TV showing a close up of Paul Reuben's face — Portrait of the author watching Pee Wee on the TV

While I am sad that he’s no longer with us, I am happy that his art is still out there for us to enjoy and appreciate and share with others. Thinking about his death made me think about my mom, who is the one who introduced me to Pee Wee and who has always been his biggest fan. My mom is the one who started cultivating my sense of weirdness and my taste for the other from a young age. I realized that appreciation for Pee Wee Herman is one of the main mediums for our relationship. When my sister and I were young (and even not so young), mom liked to take us out to Cabazon, which is located in the middle of nowhere just west of Palm Springs, to see the dinosaurs. It looks like it’s been built up a bit more now but it used to be just the two dinosaurs, a small diner, and a truck stop on the side of the 10 freeway. You could go inside the brontosaurus (and I have, multiple times), but the t-rex was typically not open to the public. I’m not sure whether my mom knew about the dinosaurs before Pee Wee made them famous—although I would not be surprised because she is a true connoisseur of weird and cult shit—but I’ve always associated them with Pee Wee and the movie. Sometimes we just visited the dinos but we would occasionally get lunch at the Wheel Inn, which was also featured in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I used to think it a little cringe-worthy (in the way of young people everywhere who think their parents are being too much) when she would ask to sit at the Large Marge booth. However, I can now say I ate at the restaurant featured in the movie AND in the Large Marge memorial booth. The Wheel Inn is closed now and its delicious peanut butter pie and place in pop culture are lost to us, but I do have the rare distinction of having experienced it myself and with my mom.

In 2010, mom and I went to see Reubens’ new live show in L.A. I had moved back to southern California after college and, while I didn’t have a lot of cash on hand, I had a Ticketmaster gift card that I won in a raffle so I bought us tickets to see the show. We had a lot of fun and we ran into the actress who plays Miss Yvonne on the way out and my mom got to hug her. She still talks about it. A few years later, Netflix released Pee Wee’s Big Holiday on the same weekend that my mom happened to have plans to visit me. We got to watch that together too. Kismet.

My mom and I are both autistic (although she is not formally diagnosed, I know this is true). Autistic people often communicate through bits and pieces of pop culture cobbled together to form their own private lexicon. One example that my mom and I always come back to is “what is that your business?” from the Woody Allen (don’t start. I know.) movie Radio Days. We use this when someone is getting wound up about something that doesn’t have to do with them (as the character does here, complaining about the universe expanding. Troubling!), which happens to us often because we both have anxiety. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure gave us lots of handy phrases to use. There are thousands of uses for corn (said when something is irrelevant). I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel (said to emphasize the ridiculousness of trying to relate to other people). I just wanna get a look at that cute little outfit (said when someone is, in fact, wearing a cute little outfit).

As ever, art is about making us connect with others and feel things in a lonely and indifferent universe. Sometimes it’s hard to find things in common to talk about with my mom but the good news is that we’ll always have ~~Paris~~ the Alamo.

my mom, smiling at the camera, the set of Pee Wee's Playhouse on the stage in the background — mom at the Pee Wee Live Show in 2010

Books and Other Words

I feel like I’m in the middle of a lot of books but I only have two finished books to talk about today. I will also note that I have read 50 books this year so far. Will I make it to the elusive 100-book goal this year? Time will tell (I’m not super optimistic but I remain hopeful).

First, I read Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, an author better known for erotic stories like Space Raptor Butt Invasion, released his first traditionally published (non-erotic) novel last week. It was good! It was spooky but in a way I like, in which religion is a source of terror. The protagonist, Rose, is explicitly autistic and it’s clearly a book written by an autistic person, which I find really interesting. There are not a lot of novels where we see an unmasked autistic thought process, but I hope we get more of them. I found Rose’s thought process familiar and I was surprised both to see my style of thinking on the page and to realize how infrequently I’ve seen it represented in general.

Next, I read Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama: Inmigración, feminismo y bisexualidad by Daisy Hernández. I picked it up for the Spanish language, bisexuality, and feminism, but stayed for the immigration. This is a memoir in which the author talks about growing up the daughter of Colombian immigrants and becoming a writer. I liked that it felt fairly easy for me to understand! To be fair, memoirs are always easier to read than fiction, but I’m still feeling accomplished.

book cover for Camp Damascus shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Camp Damascus

ebook cover for Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama shown on kobo ereader — Camp Damascus

TV and Music

me, dressed up and posing in the Barbie doll box at the movie theater — Barbie Mode

Like more or less everyone, I saw Barbie last week. The movie is a lot of fun and very entertaining. That sounds like a low bar but considering how many moody, “gritty,” or cookie-cutter super hero movies we get in a year, this is actually high praise. I don’t think enough movies are fun. Barbie, however, is super fun. It’s also fun that it became an event and took on a life of its own. People are dressing up for the theater! You can take a picture in a big Barbie doll box! Girlies are greeting each other with “Hi, Barbie!” That shit is fun. Regular life doesn’t have enough little events to punctuate the monotony. As for the film itself, I don’t think it’s the feminist rhapsody that people are making it out to be. It’s a pretty basic level of feminism. If you’ve read a book or even maybe an article from Jezebel, you probably are operating at a higher level of feminist knowledge than the Barbie movie. However, considering it’s a summer movie made with a toy corporation’s intellectual property, it goes pretty hard. The fact that they use the word “patriarchy” repeatedly will, I hope, have some young people reading up online. For that, Gretta Gerwig is doing the (non-denominational) lord’s work (sometimes people stumble on this blog via search engines so I am going to say that if you liked Barbie and want to read up on patriarchy, try The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls). I do think the story lines that would have been the most interesting were not the focus of the movie. What’s going on in Weird Barbie’s house? Is she living in a polycule with Skipper, Earing Magic Ken, and Sugar Daddy Ken? Does Allan hang out with them? What do the Kens do when not subjecting themselves to the Barbies’ female gaze? How come some of the dolls know about the real world but some don’t? When I was discussing the movie with my friend (and Spanish teacher) Ana, she asked how the events of the movie would affect the real world, considering that we know Barbie Land and our world have some kind of metaphysical connection. Good question! Now that Stereotypical Barbie is gone, will another ascend to take her place? Is she dead to the world? As usual, I have a lot of questions and all of them are fairly pointless. Movies are only good if they get me thinking about their world, so I guess this was a good one.

Like almost no one, I watched the Venture Brothers finale movie, Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart. Venture Brothers is a show that began in 2004 and aired seven seasons over the course of sixteen years. No one waits longer between seasons than Venture Brothers fans. My college roommate introduced the show to me and convinced me to watch it by telling me there were David Bowie references. I have been obsessed with this show for years and was sad to see it end, but I’m glad they got a movie to wrap up some of the series’ ongoing questions. They also used this opportunity to finally pass the Bechdel test, for which we applaud them.

Kitchen Witchery

a pan of rice krispie treats that have chocolate chunks in them and chocolate sprinkles on top — chocolate chunk rice krispie treats

I haven’t been cooking that much, probably because it’s hot. However, I did make carnitas and really good beans and rice this week. I didn’t take a picture of it because it wasn’t new or special but it was delicious. The only other notable thing I made was rice krispie treats, which I had never made before. The New York Times food newsletter included a recipe for it recently and I thought, that’s a good way to eat treats and not make my kitchen hot. I threw in some chocolate to be extra about it, et voila.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. It’s a Fritz appreciation week here on the blog because I got some good pictures of him. My Huey photos are more of the same with her sitting on me. Die-hard Huey fans will have to wait until next time!

Fritz the cat lying on his side on the floor. It looks like he's standing on a patch of sun coming in through the window — Fritz walking on sunshine

Fritz the cat at the center of his new tunnel toy going completely bonkers — Fritz walking on sunshine

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 23, 2023

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. The summer doldrums are here. It’s too hot and I don’t want to do anything. I hate it because there are always many things I want to do. I take an anti-depressant for my anxiety, and I am far beyond feeling bad at my inability to handle the heat, given that these types of medications make it harder for the body to regulate its temperature. So, I have spent the last two weeks reading a lot and longing for cooler days. I’ve been hanging out in my “office” a lot because it’s the shadiest room in the house. I have the air conditioning vent and a fan pointed right at me.

I’ve also been silencing the thermostat dad that lives in my head. I’m not cooling my house to 68 degrees or anything crazy, but I do turn down the AC to 74 degrees at night when it’s too hot to open the windows. When I was growing up, we had a whole-house fan, which is an incredibly loud way to suck outside air into the house. We always ran that at night rather than the air conditioning. My room was right near the fan so I’d be stuck listening to the roar of it all night. I went through periodic phases where I was too scared to leave my window open while I was asleep (I lived in the suburbs and was probably fine, but anxiety), which meant no airflow. Anyway, being an adult is great because I can make my house as hot or cold as I want and I don’t have to put up with a big, stupid fan.

Books and Other Words

Here’s what I’ve been reading:

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. I originally tried to read this book a while ago and wasn’t in the right mood for it, but this time I was. This book is not so much a cookbook as a philosophy on cooking and eating. Adler describes how you can make something delicious from very little or very basic ingredients and offers advice for salvaging dishes gone wrong. Furthermore, her prose is beautiful.
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. This book was excellent. How do you tell someone you love them when there’s no cultural script for that kind of love? That’s what The Book of Goose is about to me.
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig. I picked this up on a whim when I saw it on the new shelf at the library. I thought I was getting a swashbuckling adventure with a ship full of lady pirates. It was actually a reflective novel about a woman who, yes, becomes a pirate, but not as her first choice. We watch her make a series of perhaps questionable decisions in challenging circumstances. Not what I wanted (lesbians at sea), but I liked it all the same.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs. We’ve got magic books, sister drama, romance, intrigue, and a cute dog named Sir Kiwi. This book does it all. It was a lot of fun to read and I highly recommend it.

book cover for An Everlasting Meal, shown on kobo ereader — An Everlasting Meal

hardcover book: The Book of Goose. — An Everlasting Meal

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Ronald Reagan led an actors strike decades before his U.S. presidency via the Washington Post (gift link). I have been following the WGA/SAG strike news and kept seeing that this is the first time the two unions have gone on strike together since 1960. I was shocked to learn that Reagan was involved (doing perhaps one decent thing in his career). I also found it very interesting that the 1960 strike was over a similar issue to today’s strike: getting paid residuals for TV shows.
Hollywood studios’ WGA strike end endgame is to let writers go broke before resuming talks in fall via Deadline. Speaking of the writers’ strike, this is fucking disgusting. The studio heads are literally saying out loud that they are going to wait for writers to start losing their homes before coming to negotiate. Eat the rich!
The art of translation via The New York Times (gift link). This is a look into how a literary translator approaches her work. It’s cool!
Threads won’t kill Twitter if it’s boring via Vox. There are lots of good reasons to ignore Threads, Meta’s new Twitter clone, but the best one is that it’s fucking boring.
‘People need to be riled up’: meteorologist names US heatwaves after oil and gas giants via The Guardian. Honestly, go off. What a mensch. Let’s fucking name and shame these jerks.

Languages

Something I’ve been mulling over in regards to my language learning is that I may never get to a point in another language where I’m as good as I am in English. The English language is my job. It’s my whole business to know how to apply all the rules. Realizing I might never be as good at Spanish (or Icelandic) as I am in English kind of hurts, but it’s also nice to think that I don’t have to be an editor in every language. However, I may find some other niche in these languages as I get better. If my Spanish teacher Ana has anything to say about this, I’m going to become a published author in Spanish, but who knows where I’ll end up?

Autism Thoughts

hardcover book Strong Female Character — Strong Female Character

I read another autism book and of course I now have many more autism thoughts to share. I was barely ten pages into Strong Female Character by Fern Brady when I shouted, “She has my life!” I kept reading and found out that we don’t have our whole lives in common but seeing that she found a lot of comfort in memorizing verb conjugations and enrolled in university with a plan to study Arabic and Persian had me screaming in solidarity. Still, even though, unlike Fern (I should probably refer to an author by last name, but I feel like we’re on a first-name basis), I did not become a stripper in college or have strict Catholic parents and live in Scotland, there was so much about this book that I related to. In one story, she talks about an elementary school teacher bringing a badger to school in a shoe box. Fern has total faith that this is a real badger and she loves it and wants to see it. Eventually some other kids tell her she’s an idiot and it’s just a sock puppet. She’s crushed. This made me think of my own over-trusting nature. I might have written about this before but, as a kid, I had total faith in what adults in my life told me. My parents told me Santa was real so, to me, that was an irrefutable truth of the world. I recognized that the concept of Santa didn’t make logical sense, but my parents wouldn’t lie to me, right? I remember being in fifth grade and still defending the idea of Santa, arguing with other kids. Around twelve years old, I asked my dad directly if Santa, the Easter Bunny, et al. were real. He told me the truth and then I spent the night crying and feeling betrayed.

She writes too about not fitting in, and being “not like other girls,” which I can relate to. I never fit in with girls at school so I, too, got into that “I’m not like other girls” mentality for a while. It’s true I wasn’t like them, but it was the autism, not some kind of superiority for wanting to hang around with the boys. Boys just follow a less complex set of social rules than teen girls do. Fern writes at one point, “everyone who fitted in and stayed in their home town was the real success. Imagine having the same friends from when you were born? Knowing and liking most people in the local nightclub?” That punched me in the guts too. Whenever people talk about having friends from elementary school or some kind of ridiculous young age, I’m always shocked. How? How do you do this? My oldest friendships date back to college and even then I only have two (hi, Kira and Kael).

When Fern talked about getting an autism diagnosis, which started out rough because a doctor told her she couldn’t possibly be autistic because she had a boyfriend (I wish I could punch that doctor!), she wrote “I knew now everyone would think I was stupid and every A I worked for in school and every effort I made to get my my degree and every hard-won achievement would be invalidated by my diagnosis.” And just … oof. Fern. I hear you. I am embarrassed to say this now but I have obviously learned a lot in the last fifteen or so years, but when it was first suggested to me that I might have autism, my response was “but I’m smart.” I get it though. All that work and then it’s upended by the autism. It’s a transitional feeling on the way to understanding autism and accepting yourself as autistic but I was like, dang, I get it.

I highly, highly recommend this book, especially to any women with autism who may not see themselves in some of the traditional diagnostic criteria. I also recommend it for anyone who is dealing with big meltdowns, which Fern talks about at length in the book. You will be relieved to see that you’re not alone.

Kitchen Witchery

It has been hot but we have to eat so I have been trying to use the Instant Pot or prep food earlier in the day, so I’m not running the oven when it’s 100 degrees (38 C) outside. I tried a butter chicken recipe from the Milk Street Fast and Slow cookbook, which I checked out from the library. I thought it was just okay but Kirk said he would eat it again. We had the opposite situation last night in which I made these beans. I liked them, but Kirk was absolutely not into it. In treats, I tried my hand at another frozen yogurt. I made vanilla yogurt which a chocolate swirl. Unlike the strawberry froyo I made a few weeks ago, this one was a little too tangy to be a hit. The strawberry version had enough other flavor to not be like “hey this is just yogurt,” but not this one. Finally, since it’s summer, I had to make some zucchini bread. I added these cinnamon bits and that was a great addition. I’ll be doing it again.

a bowl of butter chicken over rice, topped with chopped parsley — instant pot butter chicken

a plate of beans and rice and a tart made of puff pastry, carrots, and cheese — instant pot butter chicken

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lying under a blanket, his head, shoulders, and front legs sticking out — he tucked himself in

Huey the cat lying on the floor in the hallway, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight — he tucked himself in

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 9, 2023

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. One thing that you probably already know about me is I love to get interested in things. I’m willing to get obsessed with almost any subject. This weekend, my dance studio held a weekend intensive for the adult dancers, which I attended because I like doing things and learning stuff. I got to try two new styles of dance—hip hop and contemporary—and was like, yeah I could see taking a class in this. Not that I’m going to because I already have full schedule but I could certainly get interested in more things. It made me want to read up on where contemporary dance comes from and get all up in their internecine drama. That of course reminded me that I already have some dance styles I could read more about so I promptly put a hold on a library book about the history of tap dance. I feel like every day I have to talk myself down from trying to start another degree or getting some kind of certification or whatever learning process because the world is full of subjects. It’s not FOMO (the fear of missing out), but it’s maybe the bummer of missing out (BOMO?).

A defining feature of autism spectrum disorder is having special interests. This is an idea that I used to struggle with because I thought I didn’t have one. Or I thought that maybe my interests were too broad. It turns out that you can have multiple special interests and they don’t have to be stereotypically autistic interests like trains or computers. You could have a special interest in reading fantasy and science fiction (like me for my whole life), or it might be something that seems normal (like me in high school getting really into 80s new wave music [NB: I am not that old, I graduated high school in 2004]). Then there was, of course, when I got super into ancient Egypt and thought I was going to be an Egyptologist, to the point that I took graduate-level courses in middle Egyptian as a freshman in college. Very normal! Now my interests are kind of everything, if I’m not careful. Language learning remains a big topic for me and probably always will. Same with reading. I’m currently hot on dance and movement. Every topic I pick up starts linking with new interests. Like knitting goes with Icelandic for me (did you know you can get certified as a master hand knitter? Because I did). I could be working on my French to support ballet. Liking things is a slippery slope.

Autism itself seems to be developing into a special interest for me. I’ve been reading up on it since I got diagnosed, but lately I’ve gotten more academically interested and have been reading publications too. Should I get a Ph.D. in neuroscience with a focus on autism? No, I definitely shouldn’t. But should I read as much as someone with a Ph.D? I might. I’ve been getting increasingly curious about this condition that shapes my brain as I encounter more and more people who share it. It’s mind-boggling to me how little understood it is. I feel like it’s part of my calling to say “Did you know that’s an autism thing?” to people whenever they bring up something connected to it. For example, a friend in my dance class this weekend mentioned hypermobility, which has some kind of connection with autism. I almost hollered across the room “Are you autistic too?” but I restrained myself. When I talked with her after, she mentioned that her daughter is autistic and then I was like ME TOO and I brought up the hybermobility thing. This is why I think autistic people on instagram and tiktok are doing the (non-denominational) Lord’s work by posting about the experience of autism rather than autism from a clinical perspective. What does it feel like to be autistic? So many un-diagnosed/unaware autistic people would recognize themselves if they could see it.

What I am trying to say is that I had a good weekend doing things and being interested in stuff. I lose my fucking mind whenever people say things like “Oh, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have to work” or when I encounter stories in which someone is “cursed” with immortality. I know exactly what I’d fucking do if I were am immortal who didn’t have to work. I’d be learning all the languages, reading all the books, taking up every performing art (and maybe working my way around to visual arts eventually, but you know your girl loves an audience). So if anyone would like to sponsor me to be a loud genius and learn about everything, please get in touch.

Doing Things

a sign that says "Worried about kids? Protest the Catholic church" in marker — one of the protest signs I made

On Friday, our local Elk Grove book store held a drag queen story time. Unfortunately, fascist idiots threatened to come protest this event. Why they wanted to protest a private business doing what they want is baffling to me. I thought letting business do what they want was the whole conservative thing? I don’t know anymore. In any case, a counter-protest was organized in support of the bookstore and the drag queen, so we went to that. What was weird about this whole thing is the anti-drag queen story time protestors never showed up. There was a whole crowd out there waving pride flags and hanging around outside and nary a fascist in sight. This is obviously the best outcome: no fascists, everyone gets to be safe. But it is kind of anticlimactic to go to a protest and then have nothing happen. I am glad nothing happened, yes, but I am not really sure what was going on. Moral of the story: haters can get out of Elk Grove.

Books and Other Words

A Court of Silver Flames ebook cover — A Court of Silver Flames

I’m very happy to report that I have finished the Court of Thorns and Roses series, A Court of Silver Flames, and can now free myself from the Sarah J. Maas fairy-smut industrial complex. Yes, she has other series. No, I am not planning to read them (might I get pulled in by their gravity at some point? I can’t rule it out). I get why people like these books and I even thought some of them were pretty well done. However, there is better fantasy and better smut and better writing out there. The thing that really got me on this last book was that the writing (and editing) got lazy. Don’t have your character shouting “go to hell!” in a world that explicitly does not have Christianity. Hell doesn’t exist here! Invent new swears! You’re not even trying!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The Mysterious Case of the Fake Gay Marriage Website, the Real Straight Man, and the Supreme Court via The New Republic. The Supreme Court is out there doing the fucking most to piss us off and fortify class boundaries with this season’s rulings. There’s a lot to be mad about, but this graphic designer inventing a pair of gay clients asking her to make a wedding website (something that factually did not happen) then suing about it is the limit. The court is not supposed to rule on theoreticals. This is the legacy of Trump. He installed all these judges and now we’re living with getting rights stripped away.
Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away via Bloomberg. I still do not understand why people use AirBnB when hotels exist!
Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it. via The Washington Post. This is your semi-annual reminder to join me on StoryGraph instead (you can even import your Goodreads history).

Kitchen Witchery

I have a few highlights for you from the last couple weeks of cooking. First, I learned that you can make risotto in the instantpot. This is great because I love risotto (affectionately called “fat rice” in our house) but hate standing at the stove for thirty or more minutes to make it. I served it with this chicken with hibiscus barbecue sauce, which I made because I got powdered hibiscus in my spice subscription a year ago and had so far used it for just one recipe. It was surprisingly good! Second, I made ice cream for the Fourth of July. This was the only thing I did for the holiday. We had strawberry frozen yogurt and chocolate ice cream. I also made meringues, which in theory is a great way to use the leftover egg whites produced from making ice cream. In practice, I added the sugar too early and couldn’t get any air into the eggs so I had to start over again. Now I have leftover egg yolks. I’ll have to make more ice cream (oh no). Finally, I made black-ass brownies, which use extra-dark cocoa powder to create this attractive color. They also taste awesome. I threw a chocolate chip blend on top for a little extra excitement.

a square of brownies cut into nine pieces. A variety of chocolate chips dot the top. The brownies are very dark because they use black cocoa powder — black-ass brownies

a plate of chicken with hibiscus barbecue sauce, risotto, and carrots — black-ass brownies

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Huey was aggrieved last night when I refused to take a second shower, thus denying her the opportunity to drink shower water, which is her preferred source of hydration. We also have here a photo of Fritz wrapped up in his favorite pair of my pants. I don’t know what it is about these pants in particular, but I can’t get through folding my laundry without him burrowing inside.

Huey the cat, lying down on the shower floor, glaring at the camera — Doña Huey, displeased

Fritz the cat, rolled up in a pair of pants and sitting photogenically — Doña Huey, displeased

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 25, 2023

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. On my mind today is the news that one of my ballet and jazz classmates, Steve, died recently. I just found out yesterday and I was more emotional about it than I expected. We weren’t necessarily close, but I did see him twice a week and, over the year-ish that we took class together, we fell into a pattern of friendly teasing. On the first day he came to the class, he said he was scared of dancing. I internally chuckled at this because how can someone be scared of dancing. Over time I learned a little bit more and found out that he had been very strongly discouraged from doing anything feminine when he was growing up. Now, as an adult nearing retirement age, he wanted to overcome that fear. What’s saddest to me, as someone who only knew him in this one aspect of his life, is seeing someone who was just discovering a source of joy suddenly die. I saw him last at our dance recital a month ago. He had said he was finally feeling confident enough that he would invite friends to our December recital. Friends, don’t put off your happiness.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to.

Books and Other Words

The Librarian by Mikail Elizarov is a novel translated from Russian. It’s a goofy, satirical, magical realist take on Soviet propaganda. In the novel, there are old works of Soviet propaganda by a writer namedof Gromov. When someone reads a Gromov book, they get supernatural abilities, like a berserker rage or the memories of an idyllic childhood in the USSR. Groups of readers form around the books and literally battle each other to keep their magic book. It’s nuts. It took me a little bit to get into this one, but ultimately I liked it.

A Court of Frost and Starlight is the penultimate book in the Sarah J. Maas Court of Thorns and Roses series. This book made me think of fan fiction. I don’t mean that as an insult. The author clearly just wanted to give her characters a little break and a nice winter solstice party. Good for them! Let those characters have a good time! I’ve already started on the last book of the series and my assessment from the first book still stands. It’s fun, it’s not really filling. I get why people like it. I like it enough to finish the series but I’ll still be glad to move on to some other books.

paperback book: The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov — The Librarian

cover for A Court of Frost and Starlight shown on kobo ereader — The Librarian

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Snapshots of the End of Travel: On Trying to Enter a Personal No-Fly Zone via LitHub. This is a long read but I really liked it. It articulates a lot of the tension I’ve felt between wanting to travel and also being conscientious of not fanning the flames of global warming more than strictly necessary. From the essay, “With a frontloaded caveat or two about suffering, sacrifice, deprivation, or thrift. Underneath which, pulled taut, are the steel cables of our will, our right, and our obligation to travel. And an obligation to use travel as a font and showcase for vitality. This is, at least, how I often have felt about travel: here is evidence for myself, maybe others, that I am fully alive, vigorous, curious.”
Ozempic has won, body positivity has lost. And I want no part of it via The Guardian. Thoughts on being fat, the latest weight-loss drug, and the failure of “body positivity.” From the article, “The goal of this form of ‘body positivity’ is still to have you find yourself lacking, to get you to want, to get you to buy … But there’s one thought I keep coming back to: any activism that does not require you to engage with how you treat your community is not activism at all, and any social progress that is being pushed mostly by market-driven forces has the ability to simply, one day, disappear.”
Workers want to stay remote, prompting an office real estate crisis via The Washington Post (gift link). I’m really curious to see what happens with office real estate. It’s pretty clear that a big proportion of office workers have zero interest in returning to an office environment (full disclosure: including me). We have so many buildings oriented around being in places for 40 hours a week. I hope we, as a society, take this as an opportunity to rethink how we use space and what having a “downtown” can mean.
We should be ambitious about our friendships via Elle. I love this concept. Stop reserving ambition for careers. Let us be ambitious in cultivating and enthusiastically loving our friends instead.

Autism Thoughts

I think I’ve said this already, but seeing autistic people online discuss the experience of autism is doing amazing things for how we understand it and ourselves. I see stuff on social media all the time and am like, “That’s an autism thing?” or like, “THAT IS LITERALLY ME!” It’s shocking to see how not-unique these experiences are, but there wasn’t really a way to know it before. What got me this week is this video on masking at work. In the video, the boss tells the autistic employee that they have an attitude problem and people have been getting a negative vibe. When the autistic person questions this, the boss says they haven’t been smiling enough. Which, oof. The boss also says “when you say you don’t want to work here, it makes me think you don’t want to work here.” Our autistic hero replies, “I don’t.” It may seem like a striking lack of self-preservation, but I’ve had that exact conversation with managers before. They want to know my long-term goals or whatever and I’m like, uh, my goal is not working?? They hate that. They want me to climb the corporate ladder or whatever. I have no interest in this. I am going to show up and do a good job but it’s not because I like work or want to work (at least in this capacity). Is there a complaint about the work I’m doing? No? Then why should it matter that I’m not smiling enough or say what everyone’s thinking: I don’t want to work! No one does! I just refuse to pretend that this system is fun or rewarding. It’s not worth my energy.

Kitchen Witchery

I finally decided to give in and buy myself an Instant Pot. I’d been thinking about it for a little while, particularly since I cook a lot of beans and would like to do so without having to pay attention to them. So, when I saw the news that Instant Pot’s parent company was filing for bankruptcy, I figured this was as good a time as any to buy one (though given the way corporations work, I am certain someone is just going to buy and “restructure” the company and keep selling Instant Pots in some form or another). We have already put the Instant Pot to work! I made a batch of beans (obviously) in it and then some rice (because it’s also a rice cooker) to serve with tacos. I had grand plans of trying an enfrijoladas recipe, but, alas, it was a weeknight and motivation was low.

In non-Instant Pot cooking, I made these lentil “meatballs” (recipe from Cool Beans), which we liked. I served them with noodles and a ricotta loaf (recipe from The Bread Bible). I did almost fuck up the bread though by putting in a mere one-half teaspoon of yeast and not the one-half tablespoon the recipe actually called for. Fortunately, I started early so I let it spend the whole day rising. What a diva! Finally I made something that I thought would be a fancy-ish dessert but we ended up hating it! I tried these saffron-pistachio blondies—delicious in theory—but something about the icing was giving us the ick. A waste of saffron! Jail for NYT Food!

I’d also like to share that my recipe spreadsheet that I’ve been developing for a while now has grown into something super useful. I’ve gradually been paging through my cookbooks to add recipes to my list of successful dishes, rather than leave them in cookbook oblivion where I only stumble onto things on accident or through extreme feats of memory. Today, for example, I went through an ice cream book I’ve had for years (The Perfect Scoop, if you’re curious) and was like, oh yeah, I love some of these recipes. I’ve also got a big list of things I want to cook, and it’s nice having all my internet recipes and book recipes together so I can scan for ideas. This is obviously more work than dumping all your recipe links into a bookmarks folder, but it’s definitely improving my life. Better living through spreadsheets!

a plat with a big pile of rice, beans, and three tacos — beans, rice, and tacos

A pile of noodles topped with lentil meatballs and tomato sauce. A slice of bread is next to the pasta — beans, rice, and tacos

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz, his eyes wide, peeking out from behind a corner of the bed — Fritz ready to go crazy

Huey the cat lying on her side on the floor, one front paw stretched forward — Fritz ready to go crazy

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 11, 2023

Posted on June 11, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Last weekend, we went to Lake Tahoe. We got lucky with absolutely beautiful weather. There weren’t a lot of people around either, presumably because anyone who wanted to go to Tahoe did so the weekend before during Memorial Day. We took it fairly easy with a little bit of walking around and spending some time reading on the hotel room’s balcony (well, I was reading. Kirk was playing the new Zelda game). We tried to go kayaking, but the kayak was not really right for my size and I kept capsizing. Did you know that Lake Tahoe is still fairly cold at this time of year? Still, it was nice to get out of the house and get a little change of scenery.

the moon coming up over the mountains in lake tahoe. Its reflection is visible on the water. Boats and a small marina are in the foreground — moonrise on Lake Tahoe

me, at the end of a pier. The extra-blue water of Lake Tahoe in the background. I'm wearing red sunglasses and have my head titled up — moonrise on Lake Tahoe

Books and Other Words

Here’s what I’ve been reading:

As I started to write about two of my recent reads, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill by Rowenna Miller and Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, I realized that they had a lot in common despite wildly different settings. Both novels are about women’s agency and how we can make our own choices despite oppressive systems. Sometimes those systems are run-of-the-mill, early 20th century patriarchy, and sometimes they’re a fascist, xenophobic space cult. Anyway, they’re both good.

The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag by Sasha Velour. Sasha Velour is one of my favorite queens from Drag Race (I mean.Come on.), so of course I had to read her book. It’s part memoir, part queer history. I loved reading about her childhood obsession with vampires and putting on plays in her backyard. And you can tell she put in the research for the queer history stuff. I learned a lot (plus there were pictures!).

paperback book: The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill — The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

hardback book The Big Reveal. Cover features the author, Sasha Velour, in drag with shiny red lips and her face obscured by a huge fascinator — The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

TV and Music

On the recommendation of my friend Lito, I watched Drag me to Dinner on Hulu this week. Lito described it as being like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which, for me, is an extremely strong endorsement. It’s a “reality” show in which two pairs of drag queens put on themed dinner parties for the show’s judges. It’s so chaotic and stupid and hilarious. I loved it and I’ll be shocked if it gets a second season.

Rampant Consumerism

I have been trying not to buy shit I don’t need, but I do want to share that I bought a delightful new pill organizer from Pill Joy. They sell hand-decorated containers for your medication. It had never occurred to me that I could put my vitamins in something fun. It does, in fact, bring me some joy to see my new, festively decorated, pill organizer.

I also wanted to share that I bought some new shoes. Shoes aren’t always newsworthy but since I was in search of shoes for my plantar fasciitis, I figured all my PF homies needed this update. I bought a pair of shoes from Kuru, and so far they seem very comfortable and high quality. I must also give an anti-recommendation to Vionic shows, which is where I bought my last pair. They seemed okay but then they wore out really quickly. I don’t even wear my shoes that often and they’re falling apart after barely a year.

Autism Thoughts

book cover for Unmasking Autism shown on kobo ereader. Various wall art visible in the background — Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

In the last few weeks, I also read Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price. This book is really important for autistic adults, especially those of us who didn’t find out about our autism until later in life. It explains how we “mask” our autism, even without realizing that’s what we’re doing, to try to fit into neurotypical society and the harm that causes us. I recognized a lot of myself in this book even though I’ve been “out,” if you will, with my autism for over 10 years now. Every day I read things online and I’m like “That’s an autism thing?” Hearing autistic people describe and write about autism is so important for us. This book is part of that niche.

Unmasking Autism has a number of worksheets (like this one) to help autistic people consider how we may have internalized harmful messages and overcompensated in our lives. One that made me feel personally attacked was a section on “Masking as Overcorrection” that explained, “an autistic person who has repeatedly been told they are selfish and robotic might instead wear a mask of helpful friendliness, and become a compulsive people-pleaser or teacher’s pet.” Oop.

I almost cried at various points in the book, from seeing myself so clearly and from the grief of having to do so much to fit into the world. It’s not hopeless though. Price also weaves in an inspired perspective on why autism isn’t the problem. For example, in a discussion about the social model of disability, Price writes, “It’s not actually a bad thing that we are spirited, loud, intense, principled, or strange. These traits are merely inconvenient to systems designed by abled people that don’t take our unique way of being into account.” I am also obsessed with this gem about neurotypical people being confidently wrong all the time: “I used to believe I was horribly inept for not being able to read between the lines of neurotypical speech. Now I realize most neurotypicals aren’t all that good at it, either.” Speaking as someone who edits people’s writing for a living, I couldn’t agree more. Louder for the people in the back!

There’s so much in this book but I feel like talking about it more is basically going to be me paraphrasing the whole book. So you should just read it instead. However, I will add just a few more miscellaneous thoughts. Price gives us some definitions of autism from our perspective, unlike “how the disability impacts neurotypical people,” which is how it’s usually defined (seriously, these diagnostic criteria are written from the perspective of “this annoys me” and not anything to do with how we see ourselves). Price says that “autistic people process the world from the bottom up.” That is, we’re seeing the trees, not the forest. Or perhaps we’re Sherlock Holmes, noticing all kinds of little details. On the topic of “autism is inconvenient for NTs,” I must highlight the fact Ole Ivar Lovaas, that the guy who invented applied behavioral analysis, which is one of the main therapies for autism, is the same guy who invented anti-gay conversion therapy! What the fuck! Don’t treat your kids with the therapy from the gay conversion therapy guy!

Kitchen Witchery

I’m still working through all the beans I got in my Rancho Gordo Bean club subscription. I put the chickpeas to work in this manata with chickpeas recipe from Pasta Grannies. I did not have pasta-making energy that day, but the chickpea sauce was totally good with regular old noodles from the store. I also made marcella beans with leeks and a parsley pistou, served on top of some noodles. Sorry I don’t have a recipe to link for this one, it was on the mailer with the bean club shipment! I liked this recipe but we are learning that Kirk doesn’t like white beans (internalized racism??? lol). I think it could be improved by throwing some feta on top, so that’s how I’m going to eat the leftovers. Because corn is now in season, I made this corn and coconut soup, which we quite liked. Finally, I baked these carrot cake scones with cream cheese frosting. I’d been meaning to make this recipe for like two months and finally god around to it. Worth the wait!

a plate of noodles covered in a chickpea and tomato sauce — manate with chickpeas

a bowl of coconut corn soup topped with toasted coconut, peanuts, and parsley — manate with chickpeas

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I’m making up for the last post’s lack of Huey photos.

Huey the cat lounging in her spot on the couch — Another day, another lounging Huey

Fritz the cat, on his side in bed, apparently attacking a pillow. His butt is towards the camera — Another day, another lounging Huey

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: May 28, 2023

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve felt pretty sluggish in the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been having bursts of productivity here and there. I really wish I could take a month off of work to lie around and not have to do things, but that’s not possible. Instead, I stubbornly try to work all my activities and life maintenance around the 40-hour work week. It’s not ideal! So I’ve been cycling between “I’m going to watch four straight hours of Ted Lasso” and “Time to read every book.” Balance? We don’t know her.

Books and Other Words

Well, I’ve bought into the Sarah J. Maas fantasy smut industrial complex. I criticized the first book in the series for being too basic, but the next two books, A Court of Mist and Fury and A Court of Wings and Ruin, were big improvements. They brought a lot more depth (and sex appeal, lol) to the main characters and added higher stakes.

ebook cover: A Court of Mist and Fury — A Court of Mist and Fury

ebook cover of A Court of Wings and Ruin — A Court of Mist and Fury

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Orcas have sunk 3 boats in Europe and appear to be teaching others to do the same. But why? via LiveScience. I’m sure the orcas have their reasons. Can we get them to start sinking some of those mega yachts?
Sacramento makes U.S. News’ 2023 ‘Best Places to Live’ rankings. Here’s where we sit via The Sacramento Bee. I’ll save you a click. Sacramento ranked 127 out of 150, which is barely newsworthy. The real crime here is that both Fresno and Bakersfield made the list, which I think leaves the whole affair with zero credibility. You can’t tell me Bakersfield is a best place to live. You just can’t. Not even if it’s last place on the list.

TV and Music

I finally gave in and started subscribing to Apple TV so I could watch Ted Lasso. I get why we all love Ted Lasso. It’s great. I appreciate that I don’t have to like sports to enjoy Ted Lasso and that it’s got a huge cast of characters with increasingly wild story lines. I am only disappointed that I got on the bandwagon right as it’s ending. Life is too cruel. All the same, I am deeply invested in the Roy/Keely/Jamie bisexual throuple potential.

Moving It

a view of the theater we had our dance recital in, taken from on stage — dance recital venue

Last Saturday was my dance recital! Performing is always a treat for me. RIP to everyone who gets stage fright, but I’m built different. I was really impressed by how much the crowd reacted to our Footloose-themed tap piece, but I had fun with all three of my dances. If you want to see the recording, let me know and I can send you the link.

Yesterday, I saw the physical therapist for my last session for figuring out how to handle my knee issues. I feel good because she told me I’m in good shape to move forward and take care of my knee. I know what I can do when I’m in pain and I have exercises I can do to help support the joint. It sucks to deal with this at all, but I’m not dead yet.

Doing Stuff

purple ticket for Emergence 2023 with the closed stage curtain in the background — Emergence at Sac Ballet

Last Saturday, the culture gang went to see the last Sacramento Ballet performance of the season. I’m really glad that my friends have gotten interested in going to the ballet with me because it’s a lot of fun to watch and discuss/chuckle about the finer points of the fine arts that we don’t understand. This was another performance composed of several pieces, starting with an aggressive Balanchine choreography that had a lot of flexed feet and hand-holding. Much more enjoyable was the piece that started off with the Mahna Mahna song. It was really the last thing I expected to hear and it made me laugh. Plus the dancers really looked like they were having a good time.

Autism Thoughts

I’ve been seeing more and more discourse online about two aspects of autism: autistic burnout and pathological demand avoidance. I wanted to write about it a little in part because this is the kind of stuff that doctors miss when it comes to autism, so I am spreading the good word. As usual, we have to do everything ourselves.

People with a PDA profile are driven to avoid everyday demands and expectations to an extreme extent. This demand avoidance is often (but according to some PDA adults, not always) accompanied by high levels of anxiety.
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/diagnosis/pda/autistic-adults

When I first started hearing about PDA, I was like, well that’s not me because I get lots of things done. However, the more I thought about it, the more I’m like, oh no, that is me. It’s so hard to make myself do stuff that I want to do. The neurotypicals reading this might be thinking, yeah, I don’t want to do all kinds of things. I’m sure that’s true. But this is like you’re there, you want to do the thing, you need to do the thing, and your brain is like “NO! NO DO!” so you just sit there being anxious about not doing it instead. I feel this all the time with trying to lift weights, or study my languages. I feel this every time I have to start a project at work. I feel this about brushing my teeth before bed. It is annoying! I did not ask for it! Let me do my things!

The autistic burnout one is also sneaky because I’m well-read enough to know what depression looks like, and have been diagnosed with acute depression, and autistic burnout looks a lot like depression on the surface. You don’t want to do anything, you want to lie around. However, the reason is totally different. Autistic people are totally overloaded by everyday life—tasks, stimuli, socializing. We have to take it a lot easier to not get burned out. This also sucks but at least feels more solvable than the demand avoidance.

Spanish

book cover for "Tema libre" shown on kobo ereader. Photo taken outside. Trees and hammock visible in the background — Tema libre

I’d like it to be known that I am on a roll! I finished another book in Spanish: Tema libre by Alejandro Zambra. I liked reading it, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what it was about. One of the hard parts about learning to read in a second language is that it’s harder to retain the big picture of what’s happening in a book, or at least it is for me. I’ve worked up to the point where I can usually get through a chapter and keep all the ideas in my head, but it falls apart not long after. I think the problem is that I’m basically translating in my head as I read, so I’m trying to remember the translation but it doesn’t stick. I’m pretty sure the only remedy is more practice.

In other Spanish news, I finally got a fancy piece of paper that says I passed the DELE exam. Note that it’s been a year now since I took the test. But, hey, nice that I get a little certificate.

Kitchen Witchery

Apparently I’ve been focused on bread these last two weeks (but maybe I’m always focused on bread. I live by the words let’s get this bread). I tried a very tasty recipe for rooti farmaajo, aka honeycomb cheese bread. It’s rolls with little bits of cheese tucked inside, topped with coconut and sweetened condensed milk. Kirk asked me if it was a dessert and I don’t honestly have a good answer to that. We had the cheese bread with a bean soup I cooked with my new Rancho Gordo Bean Club subscription. I tried a recipe for royal corona beans (huge-ass beans, pictured below) with farro. The soup was good but I wish I had skipped the direction to blend it. The beans themselves have a really good texture so it felt like a waste to smooth it all out. I also made a tasty walnut-onion bread (from the Bread Bible). I’m trying to test out more recipes from my many cookbooks. This one was a success.

rolls cooked in together in a round pan, topped with shredded coconut and a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk — rooti farmaajo (honeycomb cheese bread)

a roll ripped apart to reveal the bit of cheese baked inside — rooti farmaajo (honeycomb cheese bread)

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I have to apologize to fans of Her Hueyness for not getting any good photos of her recently. I will make up for it next time.

a close of up Fritz the cat's face. He's serving himbo. — Resting Fritz face

Fritz the cat lounging on my back. I'm lying on my stomach and taking the photo over my shoulder — Resting Fritz face

weekly update

Some Weeks in the Life: May 14, 2023

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s been a little longer than usual since I last wrote here, but last week my dad visited and I didn’t get a chance to write. But the visit was good! Dad came to ballet class with me and even gave it a little try. Applause!

Me, smiling at the camera, looking cute, being outside — Happy 37th to me

This week I celebrated my 37th birthday. Is this middle age? Who knows, but my birthday was good. I did have to work, of course, but I got to watch Eurovision and read in my hammock and we had good food. It’s hard to get excited about 37 as a birthday because it’s not an exciting 10-year birthday and also because I’m like, wow I’m almost 40. Not that I’m worried about aging or approaching 40, but it’s just a lot of years that I have been alive. Although I expect I have more than 37 years left (in sha’allah!) so perhaps it’s not so many after all. In any case, here’s a little proof of life photo since I know I don’t post my face that often.

Books and Other Words

I’ve read quite a lot in the last few weeks.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth. My Icelandic teacher recommended this to me and said that, if I don’t like it, he doesn’t know me at all. But of course he gets me and I loved it. This is a really fun look at where some of our English words and phrases come from. The topics flow from one to the next because all the words are connected. It’s written with a wry voice that highlights the humor in language.
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by King Tsu. This book documents the history of China’s efforts to be able to interface their language with modern technology, starting with typewriters and telegrams, all the way through the modern computer. It was really fascinating to see all the different approaches they tried out to render Chinese into something you could type. People were really trying to promote typewriters with 4,000 keys to get all the characters. What a nightmare!
Half a Soul, Ten Thousand Stitches, and Longshadow by Olivia Atwater. This series was a lot of fun to read. It’s historical fantasy romance set in the regency era. There’s magic and fairy antics (these are the books that A Court of Thorns and Roses wishes it could be). The romantic aspects are well done and the writing is delightful, but the books also have an eye toward social justice, which I like. For example, some of the plot in the first book revolves around the horrific conditions in London’s workhouses. So, we’re having fun and getting romanced but also making the world a better place. (I forgot to take a photo of the middle book. Whoops!)

paperback book: Half A Soul. Green cover with an illustration of fancy embroidery scissors — Half a Soul

ebook: Longshadow, shown on kobo ereader — Half a Soul

Meanwhile, on the internet:

A new front in the water wars: Your internet use via The Washington Post (gift link). As much at is seems like the internet is something that exists outside of the physical plane, it lives on actually tons of servers. And those servers have to stay cool. Cooling servers in, say, Arizona, takes a whole lot of water. So, uh, that kind of sucks.
The internet isn’t meant to be so small via Defector. Remember when the internet was fun and seemed limitless and not like six websites caught in a never-ending death spiral? “The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.”
Keeping people in a constant state of fear makes the world a violent place via The Present Age. Some thoughts about the way journalists cover and frame crime stories and how that affects us all.
Dracula Daily! This is a substack publishing Bram Stoker’s Dracula in little pieces. It’s a story written through letters and journal entries and the Dracula Daily substack emails you the part of the story that takes place on that day. I’ve never read Dracula, and this has been a fun way to experience it. It’s especially need to see people discussing the book on Tumblr and seeing everyone treat it like a big event. It started on May 3, so it’s not too late to join!

TV and Music

I watched Eurovision for the first time this year! I have been interested in it for a while, but was mystified about the logistics of when and where to watch (if you’re as confused as I was, know that you can stream it on Peacock [in the US anyway]). It was a lot of fun to see the spectacle that (some of) the musicians put on, but some were so boring. You’re at Eurovision and can do literally anything! Yet, there are still acts that are just some guy with a guitar. What a waste! Some acts that, my opinion, got it right were Croatia (with what appears to be some kind of send-up of fascism) Austria (with this song that’s just fun and off-the-wall), Belgium (it’s just a bop, what can I say), and the winner in our hearts, Finnland! I have absolutely been jamming to all these songs and will continue to do so. Maybe next year I can have a Eurovision birthday party.

Languages

book cover: Caperucita se come al lobo shown on kobo ereader. Shows a silhouette of a woman smoking a cigarette. — Caperucita se come al lobo

I’ve been trying to talk myself back into reading some actual books in Spanish and I finally succeeded in the last month. It’s not that I can’t read, but it can feel daunting. The good news is I can read on my kobo and that lets me looks up words just like I would in English ebooks, so I don’t end up derailed not knowing what the words mean. I picked a little book of short stories to read to try to get myself motivated—and it worked! I read Caperucita se come al lobo by Pilar Quintana. It was interesting enough. I will say that the blurb described it as literature but the content was definitely erotic. That’s fine, but I was not really expecting to abruptly be reading about someone’s verga and almizcle de jabalí. Like, go off, I guess. Fluency means everything.

So, after reading Kingdom of Characters, mentioned above, the autistic goblin that operates my brain was like “Wouldn’t it be soooooo interesting to learn a little Chinese?” and I said, yes, brain goblin, it sure would, but my schedule is pretty full. Or, as Kirk put it, “You already complain that you don’t have enough time for Spanish and Icelandic.” But then my brain goblin said, “just a little though?” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Anyway, now I’m doing Chinese on the Drops app and did a few Memrise flashcards about it. Please save me from myself. I just want to know what the characters mean. I’m hoping I can read about it and learn a little then leave it alone.

Moving It

If you’re reading this, you’re invited to my dance recital this Saturday. You can buy tickets online here. I’ll be performing in ballet, jazz, and tap. It’s gonna be fun!

When I saw my physical therapist two weeks ago, she told me I was doing good and to do as much as I want to see what might stress my knee out. I ended up doing nothing extra but still had some pretty bad knee pain this week. I have no idea what I did, but I guess arthritis is one of those things that ebbs and flows. I saw the PT again yesterday and she said it sucks that it hurts but it’s good for me to see her when I’m hurting so she can give me some strategies to deal with it. So, I’ve now learned how to tape up my knee and have been advised to get a knee brace to use when it’s hurting but I want to do things. I’m not thrilled about it all but it is good to know what to do when it’s bothering me.

Kitchen Witchery

I made a few good meals in the last few weeks, including some black beans and rice with fried plantains and corn spoon bread (recipe from The Bread Bible). I have been giving tofu a try lately. It’s not something I have eaten a lot of, but I did like this crispy tofu with cashews and blistered snap peas (you might need an account to read the recipe, but did you know the Sacramento Public Library lets you access NYT cooking for free? I just found out about this myself. This is a library stan account.). For my birthday, I made a coconut cream pie. I don’t have to bake for my own birthday, but some years I choose to do so. And this year, I wanted coconut pie, so here we are.

a plate of black beans and rice, fried plantains, and corn spoon bread — black beans and rice, fried plantains, and corn spoon bread

a bowl of tofu and cashews and snap peas over rice — black beans and rice, fried plantains, and corn spoon bread

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Let it be known that I don’t typically let the cats outside, but sometimes Huey gets a supervised lap in the backyard. She likes to sniff everything and she’s not a flight risk.

Fritz the cat, lying on his side, holding his tail to his face. His eyes are wide and crazy. — Fritz going berserk while bathing himself

Huey the cat walking around our backyard — Fritz going berserk while bathing himself