Two Weeks in the Life: June 8, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. One of the ways I keep track of things I see online has been with Pocket, which I use as something like a temporary bookmark station but it can also function as an archive of stuff you read and find interesting online. Unfortunately, because we don’t get to keep anything good on the internet, Pocket announced it’s shutting down. Well, they say it’s becoming a newsletter or something to deliver “the same high-quality content.” That’s cool and whatever but that’s not what I need. It reminds me of the death of Delicious in 2011, which was an earlier bookmarking tool. They don’t want me to keep an archive of things I read! Conspiracy! I kid, I kid. It’s just very annoying to try to keep a record online when these websites keep deciding there’s no money in … bookmarks. I am not sure if I’m going to start using regular internet browser bookmarking, or perhaps leave tabs open (god help me). If anyone has a good suggestion, please pass it on.

Current Events

I had been thinking for the last few weeks about getting into some discussion of covid and what we know, since that body of knowledge has of course evolved a lot in the last few years. We’re now seeing that a new covid variant, NB.1.8.1, has emerged and there are cases in California, so it seems like a good time to take a look. One reason I wanted to read up and share my thoughts on this is because I am still masking in public places as much as I can. So, I asked myself, am I right to still mask when so many people don’t? If you don’t want to read the rest of this, the short answer is yes, as far as I’m concerned, wearing a mask is still an important way to protect yourself and others from covid, and covid is a lot more serious than just a cold or even the flu.

The FDA recently announced that it will be limiting who can get vaccinated for COVID to “people over 65 or with at least one chronic condition.” Your Local Epidemiologist explains that, while it does sound scientific to say manufacturers “must run a new placebo-controlled trial after a variant arrives,” this contradicts current scientific practices. Scientists don’t run a controlled study with placebos on every iteration of a vaccine because it’s slow and unethical (imagine giving someone a placebo vaccine, that person now thinks they’re vaccinated but they aren’t! You can’t do that!), and because new vaccines are based on previously studied, safe, old vaccines. One good thing is many people will still be able to get vaccinated because the CDC says you can get it if you have one of many chronic conditions like asthma, fatty liver, depression, or you’re just fat (it’s once again a great time to be fat lol). Still, the fact that fewer people will be receiving updated vaccines makes me think it will be more important to mask to try to protect each other.

While the vaccine is important, it’s not the ultimate weapon against covid. The vaccine meaningfully reduces the most severe effects of covid, like hospitalizations, but unfortunately isn’t as effective as something like the polio vaccine is against polio, which allowed us to essentially eradicate the disease. Even though the vaccines don’t do it all, they are an important part of reducing the risk of long COVID, which is, to me, one of the scariest parts about the disease. A piece of research that has stayed with me is that every infection increases the risk of long covid. This contradicts the popular belief that getting infected with covid “builds immunity” (it doesn’t). The study followed over 138,000 US veterans who had covid over the course of two years. The findings showed that covid has a “cumulative” effect, and “the adverse health effects from two infections are worse than one, and three infections worse than two.” As dire as that sounds, I do think one optimistic thing here is that it suggests it’s never too late to start taking covid precautions. If you’ve had covid three times, trying to avoid a fourth round is still important and could be the difference between you and long covid.

The World Health Organization reported that it is observing increases in covid rates worldwide, although currently rates are “relatively low” with 4.8% of samples testing positive for covid. I am not a doctor or public health expert but I feel like one in twenty cases is still a lot. Those are not odds I trust when it comes to my health. The increase in cases may be due to the new NB.1.8.1 variant. Bloomberg reported last month that covid is “spiking” in Hong Kong and Singapore “Severe cases – including deaths – also reached its highest level in about a year.” Cases are also increasing here in California according to L.A. County wastewater data, which is basically the only reliable source of infection rates now. This may lead to a “summer surge” in covid cases.

This is as good a time as any to remind everyone that Biden ending the “COVID-19 national emergency” two years ago was not a declaration that the pandemic ended. All this did was end federal support for covid from an administrative perspective, basically letting the government off the hook for paying for things like testing. No one has ever said that covid is over! Shortly after, the CDC also changed how it reported covid rates, getting rid of the color-coded map that showed infection rates by county. This makes it harder for regular people who are not chronically online like I am to figure out what the fuck is happening and how risky covid may truly be.

I want to be clear that I’m not writing this to make anyone feel bad about how they have dealt with covid. It’s a very personal choice, although the consequences of our individual choices are intertwined. The pandemic is, unfortunately, a group project. I’m writing this for myself and my own records, in part. It’s good to check in with one’s biases now and then. I’m also writing it for anyone who is feeling confused or overwhelmed with covid in the last five years (presumably all of us). It has been difficult to navigate and figure out what is the safest choice, especially since covid is a novel virus, so no one knew what to do at first. I also think it’s important to document what’s happening with covid amid the unhinged rhetoric about vaccines, given that people in our government are promoting the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which I wrote about at length a few weeks ago. The same people erroneously pushing “herd immunity” are the ones telling us vaccines cause autism. Yet, per the The Gauntlet newsletter, “The problem is that we cannot achieve herd immunity to COVID—ever. Herd immunity would mean long-term, durable protection from infection, like we have for viruses like measles, mumps, and rubella.” Herd immunity for covid simply does not exist.

The talk of herd immunity and the “vaccines cause autism” lie are features of eugenics, which seems to be the defining philosophy of our current government (perhaps the current era), and even of the Biden administration, given that he did not exactly promote robust covid mitigation strategies. I am once again going to boldly (selfishly?) come out and say that I don’t think some people should have to die because they’re disabled or have autism or a weaker immune system. The hallmark of a functioning society is how it takes care of the people least able to care for themselves. The government shouldn’t just decide that it’s fine for thousands of people to die because responding to a pandemic is too much work. Yet, that’s exactly what it has done. Masking up and taking covid precautions is a way that you can demonstrate real care for the people around you, which is increasingly important in a society that does not seem to care.

Books and Other Words

cover for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia shown on kobo ereader
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

In Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, philosopher Kate Manne discusses societal forces that make people, especially women, feel like being physically smaller is a moral imperative. Manne begins with discussion of fatphobia and some research on what we know about weight loss. This isn’t news for me but it feels like a gut punch anyway: “there is currently no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make fat people thin.” You can surgically remove half of your stomach, but even then people may not lose much weight, plus bariatric surgery is relatively high risk considering it’s elective. Manne also notes that “several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain” and “it appears that weight gain is the typical long-term response to dieting, rather than the exception.” So everyone who has ever told a fat person to try to lose weight can shut up. One of the saddest parts about fatphobia that Manne chronicles is that fat women, in particular, are taken less seriously and assumed to be stupid and incompetent, which she illustrates with personal experience as an academic and with research that has repeatedly found things like teachers assume girls with a higher body-mass index (BMI) to be “less able readers.” Which, god damn. Children. Another study found that “defendants in a fictional court case were significantly more likely to be judged guilty if they were fat and female.” This stuff is just hateful. I hope I never end up in court. I won’t get into everything I took from this book because there is a lot of good stuff. It’s full of thought-provoking perspective on being fat and, more importantly, how fat women, in particular, are perceived in society. I highly recommend reading it.

Hardback book "A Choir of Lies"
A Choir of Lies

Alexandra Rowland’s A Choir of Lies is the sequel to A Conspiracy of Truths, which I read in April. A Choir of Lies focuses on Yfling, whose teacher, Chant, abruptly liberated him from his apprenticeship a year or two before this story begins. Yfling is writing account of his recent stay and in Heyrland, a place roughly analogous to Holland, and his role in events that are a fictionalized version of tulip mania. I like Rowland’s work a lot so I’m not surprised that I liked this one too. It’s ultimately a coming-of-age story, with Yfling trying to figure out who he is and how he wants to use his abilities in the world now that he’s on his own as an adult. I don’t have any deep thoughts about it, so there you have it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry via The Verge. First of all: good. Second: Nick Clegg is both a former Meta executive and former UK deputy prime minister. He is basically admitting that the only way to make “artificial intelligence”—though we’re really only referring to large language models here—is to steal artists’ work. It’s bonkers that you can make a company founded on stealing intellectual property, but at the beginning of this century, record companies were literally suing children for sharing music files online. So, it’s cool when a corporation does it? I think that’s what we’re learning here: it’s fine to steal when you’re rich.
Parody of "you wouldn't download a car" PSA that says "You wouldn't train AI on someone else's intellectual property without asking first". Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html
For anyone who remembers the “you wouldn’t download a car” PSA. Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html
  • The Human Workforce Behind AI Wants a Union via The Nation. Speaking of AI, here’s your regular reminder that AI is far from a finished product and still requires thousands of real human people working behind the scenes to train it, or, in some cases, to function as a Mechanical Turk. It’s a hard job and every corporation seems hell-bent on making it as miserable as possible on top of that.
  • Admin is crashing out via Read Max. In this newsletter, Max Read explains the current Trump–Elon drama through the theory “that what we think of as ‘social media platforms’ are mostly just million-user message boards, and as such retain–especially among the most frequent and visible posters–many of the ancestral folkways, customs, and cultural conventions of their forum forerunners.” This made me laugh but it’s true. Internet old-heads know that this is just classic internet drama dressed up for the 2020s. Read goes on to state, “I want to underline that this is more than just another example of the ongoing and near-complete convergence between ‘electoral politics’ and ‘television entertainment.’ It is also an example of the ongoing convergence between ‘electoral politics’ and ‘forum drama,’ driven by the overwhelming mediation of politics by various message board-like social-media platforms.”
  • Why Protests Should Be Promises via Time. I liked this reminder that protesting has to be backed by a coherent demand. It’s not enough to be in the streets for its own sake. Táíwò writes “for protests to succeed, they must be backed by movements with the ability to promise to withhold—labor, debt payments, rent payments, or consumer support—and to follow through if demands aren’t met. Protests by such movements consequently morph into real, tangible promises: demonstrations of an ability to escalate, backed by strategic leverage.”

Doing Things

Last weekend was very busy! My mom visited me (I forgot to take pictures but I know she got one of us and posted it on instagram) to see my dance recital. The recital was fun and I think all my pieces were really good! It was nice that my mom came to watch. On Sunday, my friend Lemon and I hosted another food party. This time, we did a garden/tea party and encouraged everyone to dress up. I got a fancy hat for the occasion. I made cheddar and scallion scones, a chocolate-caramel tart, and hibiscus-ginger punch. Unfortunately, the tart melted over the course of the afternoon and caramel was pooling all over, but before that point, it was very good. I want to try making it again (or just make and eat the caramel, who knows).

Languages

I have been extremely focused on my languages over the last two weeks! I’m noticing that Icelandic is feeling a little easier lately. Don’t get confused: I’m still buried in the intermediate level, but I’ve ascended a rung or two on the ladder of fluency. I decided that, if I’m going to learn German for our trip to Eurovision next year, I want to make sure I’m putting in extra effort with the Icelandic so I don’t lose my progress. I’m still studying Spanish too, of course, but I don’t feel it’s at risk in the same way. I’ve been working hard on translating my Wikipedia articles and getting caught up on my flashcards (I was ignoring them so now there’s a huge backlog to review. Alas). Here are two articles I recently translated that have some fun details: Ketubjörg and Úlfsstaðir.

Corporeal Form

Me somewhat grimacing for the camera so my clear braces are visible
braces are here

This week I finally got “braces.” In actual fact, I have “clear aligners,” which is the non-brand name term for Invisalign (my dentist is using some other brand, but that’s the one most people have heard of). About a month ago, the dentist did 3D imaging of my mouth and sent it to a lab that models how the teeth move. They print out “trays”—basically sets mouthguards—that I’ll wear two weeks at a time. The dentist also glued little “buttons,” as they call them, to my teeth to give the trays something to hang on to (you can see them in the photo if you look closely).

I had braces when I was younger and I guess I forgot how awful they are because I’m having a bad time. Granted, I’m only two days in so I suppose it will get easier but I have been in a lot of pain. What I really don’t like is that I have to remove the braces to eat, and removing them and putting them back in are easily the most uncomfortable part since that reminds my mouth that it’s being bullied into place. It’s making me nervous about wanting to binge eat since I don’t want to take the braces out more than I have to, and of course, I don’t want to be hungry. I’m hoping I’ll figure out how to live with it all since they’ve estimated that it’s going to take 15 months to straighten out my teeth, and in my experience these things always take longer than they tell you.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: May 25, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. Another fortnight, another blog post! Today I’m coming in hot with some opinions, but there are snow cones and cat photos if you make it to the end.

Livestreamed Apocalypse

Content warning: the saddest shit in the world

The bleakest thing of all time has been happening on Tumblr. Basically every day, I get direct messages and/or tagged in random posts from people allegedly trying to survive in Gaza. They are begging for money. The messages are almost identical, no matter who sends them, although we have moved through a few iterations of the formula over the last year. Here’s a post I was tagged in this week.

A screenshot of an emoji-riddled tumblr post that starts with "A voice from Gaza... A cry for help" and goes on to explain that the author from Gaza is "writing to you today during one of the hardest moments of my life" and that everything needed to survive is expensive or unobtainable.
Typical Gaza-themed scam post

To me, this post is obviously a scam. It goes on to provide a GoFundMe link, which all of these posts do, but the weird tone and emoji use seems to me like someone trying to get attention and rile us up emotionally so we’ll send money without thinking. I have to say that grifting based on a fucking genocide is the most ghoulish possible choice. There are people out there running legitimate fundraisers to escape disaster but I am sure this isn’t one of them. I’ve received countless messages/been tagged in countless posts just like this in which people are trying to take advantage of the overall generosity and community spirit present among Tumblr users. It’s wearing on me.

In contrast, here’s a direct message I received this week that felt like a fucking gut punch.

A Tumblr direct message reading simply "Please. We are being exterminated. Please help my family. I am begging you."
A desperate message

It’s entirely possible that this was an extremely well-calculated spam message, but this seemed authentic to me. Whether or not it’s an actual person earnestly reaching out to an internet stranger, it certainly feels real. This is the first time out of the many messages I’ve received that I have responded and donated a little to their fundraising campaign. I don’t know if it will help them survive. I’m not even entirely certain that it’s not a scam, but even if it is, I am at least trying to help. This made me think of when I was growing up in the Mormon church and adults would talk about helping homeless people. The prevailing wisdom was you shouldn’t just give out money willy-nilly because they might buy drugs or alcohol and you wouldn’t want to be financing a sin. Instead, you should pop into the nearby grocery store and buy them something to make sandwiches with to give to them. It’s a very condescending approach to helping people in need that prioritizes the giver’s feelings over the recipient’s needs. All this to say, if this does happen to be a scam, it’s none of my business. My heart was in the right place.

I want to be clear that I don’t think receiving upsetting spam messages trying to separate me from my funds is the bleak part of this story (that might seem obvious, but we are on the internet: the bad-faith discourse machine). It’s bleak that Palestinians are being subjected to a genocide and no one seems willing or able to do a damn thing about it. Because it’s easier to understand horrors and agree that they were horrible when we’re seeing them in the rearview mirror: Imagine we had cell phones during World War II and you’re getting text messages from strangers who are desperately contacting any live account saying things like “They put my whole family on the train. Please help me find them,” or “I need to get out of Poland before it’s too late.” They’re going through the worst things a person can experience, but it is still a high psychic toll to bear witness and having next to nothing you can do about it. Every day I come on the internet and get bombarded with suffering, even when I’m not looking for it. I would love to go a week without seeing a photo of a starving child in Gaza. I would love even more for children in Gaza to not be starving.

In October 2023, I started learning more about the issues between Israel and Palestine and wrote that it’s just not that complicated. It’s now almost two years later and I feel confident in saying it is now even less complicated. For example, earlier this month, Israel’s cabinet ministers “approved plans … for its forces to capture the entire Gaza Strip and remain in the territory for an unspecified amount of time.” Yes, and where will the people living there go? I wonder. Another dire issue is that Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid. Israel has admitted only a fraction of the trucks with supplies into Gaza, prompting the UN Secretary-General to call this “the curellest phase of this cruel conflict” and note that the entire population is at risk of famine. The “freedom flotilla,” which was attempting to deliver aid by boat, was hit by drone strikes. We don’t know for sure that Israel sent the drones but like … who else? On May 20, the UN said “14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours if the aid does not reach them in time.” The same day, Netanyahu finally allowed a “handful” of trucks into Gaza and, CBS news notes, “he said he had been pressured into easing the total blockade by allies who could not tolerate ‘images of mass famine.'” I guess he’s able to tolerate these images just fine. After all, what’s a little famine when your army is “systematically forcing Palestinians to act as human shields in Gaza, sending them into buildings and tunnels to check for explosives or militants.”

Meanwhile, my country continues to bankroll the genocide, and apparently never even tried to stop it. Middle East Monitor reported this last month:

Former Israeli ambassador, Michael Herzog, made a startling admission about Biden’s support: “God did the State of Israel a favour that Biden was the president during this period. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.” His remarks encapsulated a broader sentiment that the White House gave Benjamin Netanyahu all the political space he needed to execute the military offensive, which has claimed the lives of more than 52,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children.

“Biden never pressured Israel for ceasefire, as Israeli officials boast of exploiting US support” by Nasim Ahmed in Middle East Monitor on April 29, 2025

Biden of course was at least not so gauche as to share an “AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a Dubai-style paradise.” Trump, as is his custom, said the quiet part out loud. The U.S continues to send an absurd amount of money to Israel. IMEU reports that the U.S. government has appropriated nearly $18 billion for Israel’s military, and “[a]nother $20 billion in weapons transfers to Israel was approved by the Biden administration in August 2024.” On March 1 of this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.” This probably isn’t an exhaustive list of recent contributions, but I’m not looking up every single gift to Israel that’s happened this year. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., research was published this month stating that the “bottom 60% of nation’s earners hold just 22% of disposable income but need 39% for a minimal quality of life.” Savvy readers may note that 60 percent is also the majority of the country. The average household is earning “$38,000 per year, falling more than $29,000 short of the MQL [Minimal Quality of Life].” I remain sickened and mad as fuck that our tax dollars are financing a genocide while the majority of people in this country cannot afford to live. The wanton disregard for human life in Gaza is terrible on it’s own but it feels awful that I’m paying for it, even if just a small part. Even worse, that money could be paying for health care, schools, libraries, and other essential services. Instead we’re mortgaging our society to finance death.

I wish there was more that we could do as individuals to stop this. Short of a tax strike or we all chain ourselves to our Senators’ offices and refuse to leave until they do something, I don’t know. The hard part is that we are all trying to survive too (with 22% of the available disposable income, as previously noted), and you can’t do anything that would risk your job because then you have no health insurance (greatest country in the world!). I’ve written previously about trying to divest my 401(k) from war as much as possible, which is not easy. In response to that, one of my friends told me about Natural Investments, which has financial advisors focused on investing your money in a way that isn’t directly harming the world. You do have to have a certain amount of money to work with most of the advisors though, so this isn’t an answer for everyone. There’s also the BDS movement, which has a targeted list of companies to boycott. Maybe some of you can even find a way to work in some of these simple sabotage for the 21st century suggestions.

Humans have always committed atrocities against other groups of humans. Seeing it play out in real-time on our pocket-sized computers doesn’t make it any worse, but it does force us to consider how we react to atrocity as a global society. It’s much harder to be ignorant of a live-streamed genocide than it was 500 years ago when you’d have to wait months for merchants and news to make their way across the world. What responsibility do we have to people we’ve never met and never will meet?

Books and Other Words

paperback book Living in Your Light
Living in Your Light

Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taia is a novel translated from French by Emma Ramadan (I assumed that first that this was translated from Arabic but it’s not!) The story is about Malika, a Moroccan woman living through the aftermath of French colonization. This short novel is divided into three chapters that focus on different stages of her life as she tries to eke out something for herself in this difficult world. Her first husband goes to fight for the French in Indochina and dies and her second husband is made out to be an idiot but she has nine children with him. In the last chapter, she’s confronted by a friend of her youngest son who is recently released from prison. The author uses the book to explore how hard it is to be a poor woman and what kinds of things one might do to survive, even if her kids think her choices were terrible. It’s also about the toll of having to keep one’s queerness private. Malika isn’t gay, but her first husband is and so is one of her sons. Despite her own struggles and suffering, she can’t manage to acknowledge this particular form of life being difficult. In short: life kind of sucks and everyone is doing the best they know how.

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd is another Lavender Library find. Ackroyd charts London’s history with queerness from the earliest records to the city and the information is fairly interesting but it read more like a series of articles or blog posts than a book. It didn’t feel like there was any kind of unifying narrative or point of view. Still, I picked up a few “fun” facts abotu the origin of gay stereotypes, like that the ancient Greeks were describing homosexuals as having “loose” wrists way back when. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

The sequel to Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera, Space Oddity, is just as madcap as its predecessor. Space Oddity picks up shortly after the events of Space Opera with Decibel Jones on a press tour after scoring high enough in the Metagalactic Gran Prix (the galaxy’s answer to Eurovision) to prove that humans are sentient and thus avoid the destruction of our species. As you might imagine, hijinks ensue. While I loved the first book, I thought this one was just okay. I really enjoy Valente’s nutty, Douglas Adams-esque style, but this book had a lot of just explaining different aliens. It makes sense and it’s important to the story, but it seemed like it required so much exposition scattered throughout the story.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • against the fleeing to europe industrial complex via the late review. From the article, “First of all, I am inherently wary of anything that speaks me in a breathless language of fear. As a woman, I am somewhat inured to being sold things by way of anxiety, though I realize not everyone is. I’ve spent a lifetime having my most intimate fears be seen as fair game for clicks, attention, spectacle, and weaponization. If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated. Hence, it does not surprise me to see that many of these posts purporting to “help you” vis a vis fear are instead selling something: consulting services, affliate links, financial planning resources, access to insider information, guidebooks, a community, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why, throughout any given Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex essay, the tone often changes, bit by bit, from fear to the ersatz reassurance of self help. I did it and so can you.
  • From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty via Organizing My Thoughts. I really liked this piece on what prevents people from being the kind of person they want to be in a terrible historical moment, and what we can do about it. We’re all beleaguered by the need to survive but there are still ways we can participate in activism despite the grind.
  • ‘Somebody needs to do it’ via Taylor Lorenz on YouTube. This video takes a look at the “somebody needs to do it” memes. What is “it”? Well … we shan’t say (just kidding, it’s people wishing Trump was no longer alive). Lorenz goes beyond the meme and explains how this level of nihilism took hold. She links the current mood to what we went through early in the covid pandemic and how the government’s lack of effort to keep us healthy and safe has brought us here.
  • The Era Of The Business Idiot via Where’s Your Ed At? This essay is very long but don’t let that deter you because it is good. In this piece, Zitron coins the term “business idiot,” which he defines as “a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society” and goes on to say that “neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.” I could quote half the article here and still not be satisfied so I highly recommend reading it.

Media

At my request, Kirk got me this great little handheld emulator for my birthday. It’s a little like a GameBoy but it has a few thousand classic video games on it, no game cartridges needed. One game that caught my eye was Cool Spot, which is a Super Nintendo game we had when I was a kid. I don’t know where this game came from because it’s clearly kind of an extended 7-up commercial. I remembered it being very difficult. In retrospect, the game is somewhat difficult but actually mostly badly designed. You should be able to see the next platform you’re supposed to jump to in a game, rather than just be taking blind leaps of faith. That said, it’s still fun overall and I did finish it, which was cathartic; I never thought it could be done. However, the final screen basically said “you finished, but you didn’t really beat the game.” Well. Too bad. I will not be goaded into playing it again.

screen from the Cool Spot game informing me that although I finished the game, I did not beat it.
Played for a fool

Eurovision

Austria won Eurovision and we’re all grateful. The final two came down to Austria and Israel, despite widespread discontent with Israel’s participation in the contest. One theory I saw is that, because there are so many countries people can vote for, one focused voting bloc can significantly effect the public vote tallies. It also seems that Israel paid for ads online encouraging people to vote for their song. This is gauche at best. Some broadcasters are calling for the voting system to be examined after Israel ran away with the public vote this year.

I’m glad Israel didn’t win because I would absolutely not have gone to Israel to see Eurovision. More and more artists, including this year’s winner, and even some countries are speaking out against Israel’s participation in Eurovision, which makes sense. Russia is banned while they’re warring against Ukraine, so why isn’t Israel prevented from laundering its reputation while it’s conducting a genocide against the Palestinian people? Spain’s Prime Minister has publicly noted this “double standard” and stated that Israel should be excluded, and two Belgian government ministers have also voiced concerns. Who knows if this will lead to any changes, but we do know that Eurovision is being tightly edited so we don’t hear all the boos and protests whenever Israel’s representative is on stage. The irony of all this is noted in one damning opinion piece that stated, “If Eurovision were to expel Israel now, it would be the harshest penalty the continent has ever imposed on the nation – and it would be not for mass killing, but for meddling with pop music.” Not wrong!

The politics of Eurovision aside, I ended up being wrong predicting Estonia as a winner, but they did get third place so I wasn’t too far off. Austria’s song by JJ, like last year’s winning song by Nemo, featured operatic elements. I can only conclude that Europe yearns for the opera.

We’re planning a trip to Austria to see Eurovision next May! We don’t know the specific city or dates yet, so much of the planning is currently theoretical. I didn’t realize I was going to have this reaction—though perhaps I should have—but as soon as I saw that Austria won, I was like “I’ll have to learn some German.” Because I’m insane, this has quickly spiraled into “How much German can I learn in just one year?” I understand, intellectually, that I don’t have to learn German to go to a country whose official language is German, but it certainly feels polite to do so. And you all know that I live for this shit.

I’ve currently started the German course on Mango languages, which is an app that the Sacramento Public Library offers for free. So far, it does seem like a good program. I like that it has audio and it introduces several terms then gradually asks you to recall them and combine them into various sentences. It seems like an effective structure. I also found a few textbooks online, which is good because I like to get the explicit grammar instructions (which is not something a language learning app normally offers). The hard thing is going to be balancing learning something new with maintaining my Spanish and Icelandic. Well, I’m less worried about the Spanish. Starting a language feels very fun and exciting because you know nothing so it feels like you’re constantly making discoveries and seeing progress, which is not how it feels at a the terrible intermediate stage (me in Icelandic), or at the advanced stage (me with Spanish), but at least at an advanced stage, I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and read or watch videos in the language. So far I can already talk about the weather and comment on the quality of a hotel breakfast in German, though little else. I also laughed when I learned that the phrase “it is” literally translates to “it’s giving.” Given current trends in slang, this makes every sentence that starts with es gibt very funny.

Corporeal Form

I, and probably most of you, tend to think of anxiety that originates from the brain. However, as I’ve gradually addressed my many bodily ailments, I’ve realized that my anxiety is often originating from the body, not the mind. On Wednesday, I was starting to feel anxious and restless and I was wondering if I needed to go run around to wear myself out. That usually works to calm the mind but it is hot and I didn’t really feel like running around. It eventually occurred to me that I was feeling bad in the body. My carpal tunnel is getting worse and my hand had been bothering me all day. My jaw hurt because I foolishly ate some too-crusty bread that morning. Holding my body up was also tiring, as usual. Until recently I was not able to identify these distinct body sensations. It was just “I feel bad” or “I’m tired” and vague unease. I think peeling back issue after issue has made it possible now to feel the individual problems, which is good. However, I am once again questioning how I fucking made it this far in life without being a total wreck.

Moving It

My dance recital is coming up! I’ll be performing in ballet, jazz, and tap and I’m sure you won’t want to miss it. It’s on May 31st in Elk Grove and tou can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts.

Kitchen Witchery

I wasn’t sure that I would make much use of the snowcone machine but I am fast becoming the mayor of snowcone city. My current favorite is the Icee-brand cherry syrup, which is simple but effective and certainly easier than leaving my house to buy a slushie on a hot day. I am starting to experiment with other types of shaved ice. I froze some chocolate soy milk and ran that through the ice-shaving contraption then drizzled some caramel on top. It does kind of look like dog food (Kirk said, “sure, dog food“) but it tasted good. It wasn’t as refreshing as the regular water-based shaved ice though. In actual food, on Friday I made a lasagna, garlic bread, and roasted green beans. You just can’t go wrong with cheesy noodles.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: May 11, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s my birthday! At least, it will be my birthday when this post publishes. I’m 39 and that feels a little anti-climactic, but that’s okay. I am endeavoring to appreciate each year equally. I don’t have any big birthday plans, but I did volunteer at the Lavender Library on Saturday and I have dance class today. I also bought a fancy cake (which we started in on as a birthday eve treat) and earlier this week I took myself to the local bookstore and bought a few books.

It is currently circus season in my heart even though I’m no longer in a circus. I’ve written before about my hometown’s community circus (see here and here) and that May is when they do their shows, so I always think about it around this time of year. I’ve actually been following a few jugglers on instagram and it’s making me want to start juggling again, although I always enjoyed the social aspect of juggling with others more than the grinding through skills on my own. I do still have all my props though. I am thinking about it! I am realizing that my interests and hyperfixations never really go away, they just lie dormant for years until one day I’m like “I must do that THING.” I haven’t done it yet but I feel the need simmering. In any case, Here are some photos that I’ve shared before. For nostalgia’s sake.

Books and Other Words

book cover of Stop Me If You've Heard This One
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Kristen Arnett’s newest novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, is a perfect book. (I’ll let you decide if it’s objectively a perfect book, or merely a perfect book for me.) The story follows 29-year-old Cherry, a lesbian working at a shitty aquarium supply store in central Florida. More importantly, Cherry is trying to make a career out of her art: clowning. This work is, as usual for Arnett, an exploration of the relationship between humor and grief. Cherry’s older brother died years ago and she feels like her mom thinks the wrong child survived. Cherry subsumes this grief into her clown persona, Bunko the would-be rodeo clown who is terrified of horses (a gag that absolutely kills at children’s parties). At one point, Cherry muses, “How can I turn this into a bit, I wonder. That’s how my brain always chooses to process trauma or grief or anxiety.” Girl, same. We’re all out here living for the bit, being our own little clowns to get through the many garbage things in this life. The novel is about more than just clowning though. This story is rooted firmly in the present and, on the periphery, we see the loss of queer spaces, like a hyper-local gay bar getting closed down, and right-wing protestors showing up to rally against a children’s event that Cherry’s performing at, which includes a drag queen story time. I think Arnett is encouraging us all to be a little bit of a clown in the face of fascism, which is honestly great advice.

Book cover for Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak is a fascinating read. It explores attitudes and trends among the last group of people to grow up in the USSR before it collapsed, something that seemed completely impossible to the author’s interview subjects but, once it happened, felt totally inevitable. I read this book through the lens of what is happening now in the U.S., which resulted in some surreal moments, like when I encountered a subheading that read simply “gerontocracy,” which noted that the “average age of the politburo members increased from fifty-five in 1966 to seventy in the early 1980s, with the leading group close to eighty.” Hmmm … that does remind me of a certain congress. One of the big themes in this book is that the forms of performing socialism had overtaken their meaning. Thinking about this made me realize that my autistic ass would not have thrived in Soviet Russia. There were too many unwritten rules. Yurchak describes how the process and format of participating in communism—attending meetings, voting on local issues, filing reports—was more important than the actual meaning attached to those things. The people Yurchak interviews for Everything Was Forever explain that they bent the rules for people they liked and that fit in with their local or workplace communist committees, but applied the full force of rules to people who were being a nuisance. Both over-zealous true-believers and dissidents who objected to the system were considered threats to this system. I know myself and my only two modes are true believer and avowed dissident because when I believe something I completely believe it. (There might have been a secret third option: going high-masking people-pleaser and becoming miserable and burnt out trying to mirror people’s personalities back to them.) There is no way I could have navigated this system.

The rituals of political life overtaking the meaning led to what Yurchak terms “hypernormalization.” Irony and satire flourished in this era and the author describes some genuinely funny stuff, like a group of friends creating a formal certificate for their buddy’s birthday and presenting it during a fake meeting. Over-identifying with the rituals was a way of performing satire, with some groups going so far that it was impossible to tell who they were lampooning. Certain genres of jokes also became very popular, including one called “scary little poems,” short poems that “in gruesome detail, described little children as agents or objects of extreme violence.” One poem goes like this:

A little girl found a grenade in the field.

“What is this, uncle? with trust she appealed.

“Pull on the ring,” he said, “you will find out.”

For a while her bow will be flying about

The poem is dark and that is intentional. Society was also dark and that’s the kind of humor you get when many things are terrible. This reminds me a lot of the current trend in internet memery of circulating 9/11 jokes and Saddam Hussein in the bunker memes (if this doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s probably good. It means you’re not terminally online. That said, please do not make me attempt to explain it). The world is so ridiculous that something as serious as 9/11 or, in the case of scary little poems, children accidentally killing themselves with a grenade, gets filtered into something like people transforming the earnest, ultra-patriotic “never forget” into the humble, satirical “I forgot” in a 9/11 meme.

I could probably go on about this book for a long time, but I recommend instead that you read it if you’re interested in trying to understand why reality feels so weird right now. Read it and then talk about it with me! We’ll have a snow cone and discuss!

The USSR aside, I would like to note that I’m currently 510 days into my reading streak. I’ve made a point of reading at least one page from a book every day. Keeping the streak going helps me not get stuck browsing the internet forever when I’m tired.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • How M.L.M. world works on Instagram and TikTok via Read Max. This article made me think about how pyramid scheme language has infiltrated everyday life. Corporate-speak is nearly indistinguishable from MLM terminology, like when people get a new job and talk about having found a new “opportunity.” Interestingly, MLM’s use of the vague “opportunity” is a way to skirt regulation. Per the article, “If the investment to join an M.L.M. scheme was less than $500 then it wasn’t technically a “franchise,” it was a business opportunity.” Despite the scamminess of it all, MLMs persist because they “[fulfill] a specific ideological function: helping to sell the success of American capitalism.” It makes sense then that this language would filter into real workplaces; everyone is trying to sell us on the success of capitalism, even the legitimate gigs.
  • Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing via Bain & Company. This article is from a marketing blog, but I think it’s a very interesting indicator of the state of the web. Having AI answers on a search engine’s page makes people far more likely to click on nothing at all after running a search. A recent survey found “that about 80% of consumers now rely on ‘zero-click’ results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.” AI answers are pirating all the information people have posted to websites and now no one is getting website traffic. This is a problem for the way the internet works because nearly every website that generates income from ads, which no one will see if they don’t go to a website. Please don’t get me wrong here, you all know I am a fervent hater of advertisements. I’m trying to say this has the potential to collapse the current model of how the internet works. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing but it will surely be a different thing.
  • Wikipedia’s largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems via ABC News (Australia). This article solved a mystery for me. A lot of the Icelandic Wikipedia articles I’ve been translating have been available in the Cebuano Wiki, which is a Filipino language. I wondered who out there happens to speak both Icelandic and Cebuano. What a niche! Alas, a bot has been doing this work and, although its creator had good intentions, creating a huge volume of AI translations has not been great for the Cebuano Wikipedia overall.
  • The Infamous ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ Anti-Piracy Font Was Pirated. But By Who? via 404 Media. I just think it’s funny that the font in the anti-piracy ads was pirated. Maybe you would download a car!

Rampant Consumerism

Recently, my friend Mandy told me she was wishing she had a snow cone and, because I’m the kind of person I am, I said “I think you can just buy a snow cone maker” then immediately bought one. We tested it out on Friday and it was deemed a success by all. I have a Kitchenaid mixer so I bought the shaved ice attachment because that seemed like the thing that would take up the least space in my kitchen. It worked really well! I am curious about experimenting with freezing different liquids. I was originally just planning to use water like a basic bitch, but the machine came with a booklet of wild recipes for things like “s’mores shaved ice” and my mind is now open to the possibilities. I’m thinking about trying a piña colada version with shaved coconut milk ice and pineapple syrup (by the way, this is the brand of syrup I bought and we liked it). I also want to try freezing chocolate milk and seeing how that goes as a snow cone. I have been joking (not really joking maybe) that this will be the perfect recession treat since it’s just water and flavored syrup. We’re getting ahead of the economic downturn over here.

Media

Eurovision is this week! If you don’t know what Eurovision is, you’re missing out on the campiest time of the year! Nearly 40 countries from Europe (plus Australia. Just accept it) send a musical act to compete in the name of peace, love, and music. You can watch all the music videos for this year’s competition on the Eurovision youtube channel here. I really like the songs from Sweden, Australia, Estonia, but there are many fun songs. I am thinking it would be fun to go next year for my 40th birthday so I am hoping the winner is a place it would be nice to visit (the winner’s country hosts the next competition).

Moving It

It is, once again, dance recital season! You’re invited to watch me dance my little heart out on May 31. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts

Kitchen Witchery

I made some good, relatively easy dinners over the last two weeks. I liked this tofu and asparagus stir fry recipe from NY Times and will definitely make it again. The recipe is called tumeric-black pepper chicken with asparagus, but I substituted tofu as the recipe itself suggests as an alternative. It was pretty quick and easy to cook, though it did take me more than the 15 minutes the recipe claims to take. No recipe takes only 15 minutes. That is a myth. The other recipe I tried was also from NY Times Cooking (note that you can access it for free with the Sacramento Public Library! I’m not spending money on this! Go here and scroll down to New York Times Cooking), lentils with chorizo, greens and yellow rice. Although I made lentils and linguica without greens because we like linguica and I am opposed to hot leaves! Do not make me eat a hot leaf! But I do eat vegetables so we had that with a spring asparagus galette for balance. Also very good and easy to make! I’m leaning in to the asparagus since it’s in season.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: April 27, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. Before I get into my big political feelings this week, here’s a picture of my new bed. Keen readers may note it looks exactly like my old bed; that is correct. We got the same bed frame in a larger size and we had already been using a king comforter to end the Blanket Wars. It is much nicer having a little extra room to sprawl. I also really like the Big Fig Mattress. We got the “firm” one, which is actually a little squisher than our old mattress. Kirk claims he would like a harder bed but he also admitted he’s sleeping well on it. This is a man who happily naps on the floor though so we can’t really trust his opinion on whether a bed is comfortable, can we?

new king-size bed with Fritz in the corner looking at something out the window
bed update

Current Events

Okay, this stuff sucks but if I don’t talk about it, my brain will explode.

For the last fucking time: Vaccines do not cause autism

On April 16, Robert F Kennedy Jr, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, stood up in public in front of a microphone and said some of the shittiest things possible about autism. He said that autism is a “disease” and an “epidemic.” He is mad that we all know about autism now and so many people are autistic, unlike when he was a lad and presumably no one was autistic. Here’s the quotation that stuck out to me and that’s been making the rounds on the internet:

These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And we need to put an end to it.

April 16, 2025 Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy News Conference on Autism Rates

My first reaction was “oh, cool, do I not have to pay taxes now?” I know that’s not what’s going on here of course but I’m contractually obligated to joke about these things for mental health reasons. These comments have led to a flood of discourse by autistic people and our loved ones in the theme of “I play baseball! I write poems! I can use the toilet!” Okay, congrats. That is not the point. If you can do all that, this isn’t about you. This is about dehumanizing a group of people with greater needs and making it clear that the government thinks some people do not deserve to live.

But let’s go back a little bit. These remarks were delivered in the context of RFK’s new research focus for the HHS. He thinks we need to find the “toxins” and “environmental exposures” that are causing autism and he has announced that we are going to know the cause of autism by September. The AP reports that “Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort.” This is not a good-faith effort to figure out what causes autism. If it were, we wouldn’t have an end-date a just a few months away and the guy in charge wouldn’t be a known “vaccines cause autism” guy. That’s because this “research” doesn’t actually matter for what is happening now. It doesn’t matter what they “find,” the results are gonna be the same.

For the record, vaccines do not and never have caused autism. There’s a whole-ass Wikipedia article about the original fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield, published in 1998, that started this whole lie. Wakefield is no longer a licensed doctor because of that paper. The Lancet, the journal that published Wakefield’s work, redacted it. There is literally zero evidence that vaccines are linked to autism. Autism is a developmental disorder, which means that autistic kids reach developmental milestones slower than neurotypical peers. The reason people don’t notice autism when their children are little infants is because all they know how to do is shit and scream and that’s considered developmentally appropriate. It takes a little while for their brains and bodies to cook so most parents won’t notice anything amiss until kids are around two or three years old—coincidentally the same age that kids start getting vaccinated.

We do, however, know that genetics are a major factor in whether you get autism or not. That’s why so many parents of autistic kids are getting diagnosed now. The doctor evaluates the kid then looks at the parents and says “you know, you may want to consider …” et voila. I also think a lot of kids from my generation did not get diagnosed earlier because most parents of autistic kids are some flavor of neurodiverse themselves and, when their kid does weird autistic shit, they say “well, everyone is like that.” Spoiler: not everyone is like that. Everyone here is like that because the family is autistic. More people are getting diagnosed because they are comparing notes on the internet in a way that wasn’t possible until recently. Diagnostic criteria have also been updated such that more people can be diagnosed. The 2013 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had updated guidelines that said practitioners could diagnose someone with both ADHD and autism (colloquially known as “AuDHD”). This led to way more autism diagnoses because ADHD and autism appear together so frequently.

a picture of the planet Pluto with the text "'There was no autism diagnosed before 1930.' Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930, Pluto causes autism"
have we considered …?

Reminder: Not being disabled is temporary

The rhetoric is currently focused on autism and ADHD, but that could change. Two things to keep in mind about disability are:

  1. Anyone can become disabled at any time
  2. “Disability” is a social construct (My thoughts on this subject were significantly informed by Imani Barbarin aka crutches_and_spice on Instagram).

You might get arthritis as you age. You might get in a car accident and get a traumatic brain injury. You could go blind. You could lose a hand in an industrial accident. You might develop type 2 diabetes. You might have a major depressive episode. You might, as six to seven percent of adults do, develop long COVID. These are all disabilities. Hell, being near-sighted is a disability but, as a culture, we’ve decided that wearing glasses is fine and a little myopia among friends is nothing to fret over. Anyone can be born disabled or become disabled (or have disability thrust upon them). This is why the response to “Autistic people will never play baseball” isn’t “I’m a professional baseball player.” The response needs to be that people are worthy of living with dignity and as much independence as possible even if they are disabled. Being disabled isn’t a reason to throw someone away. Yes, right now they’re only focusing on autism, but it’s naive to think this won’t progress to any other disability.

What is considered a disability can change. The American Psychiatric Association classified “homosexuality” as a mental disorder until 1973. Being gay wasn’t just a way of being: it was a disease. In the 1940s and 50s, “roughly 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe” with the goal of “reduc[ing] agitation, anxiety, and excess emotion.” Oh, and the vast majority of lobotomies were performed on women (including on RFK Jr.’s aunt Rosemary, just for one example). Being too emotional was a disability worthy of getting your frontal lobe severed.

This is why it should worry you that republicans are pushing concepts like “Trump derangement syndrome,” pathologizing resistance to dear leader.

the top half of a white cat's face, it's eyes narrowed. Small text above its head reads "wack."
so fucking wack

Our society has spent the last five years normalizing mass death, as Sarah Kendzior has often put it, thanks to the covid pandemic. There are still thousands of people dying from covid every month yet our government declared the “public health emergency” was over (which, I know from my job, just meant they weren’t going to support anyone or pay for anything. It was never a declaration that the covid pandemic was over). We’re just supposed to be fine with this. Remember when the Texas lieutenant governor said in 2020 that we would just need to let some old people die as a sacrifice to the economy? Everyone freaked out over this at the time but that’s basically what we ended up doing. So many people are acting like the pandemic is over or vaccines and masking is unnecessary. Yes, the risk is lower than it was but you know what brings the risk down even more? Getting your damn vaccine. Wearing a fucking mask in public. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when this government eventually comes out and says that we need to start letting disabled people die for the economy. We’ve been doing it for years now.

Straight-up Nazi shit

All this shit is eugenics. It was always eugenics and Trump has always been a eugenicist president. It’s not a secret. One of Trump’s early acts as a candidate in 2015 was to mock a disabled reporter. Trump’s speeches have often echoed Hitler and he reportedly keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” in reference to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017. He’s a white supremacist who brings people with the same ideology into his government. Given this, it’s not surprising that RFK Jr. is out here talking about autistic people being a drain on the economy in a way that evokes Nazi Germany’s concept of “useless eaters.”

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this administration seems to be establishing a framework that positions autistic and ADHD people as enemies of America or, at best, freeloaders. There was the February 13 Executive Order Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which explicitly named autism as a “dire threat to the American way of life.” Now, I am only an amateur historian, but I don’t think you need a Ph.D. to see what is about to happen. As usual, I would like to preface this with I desperately hope I am wrong. Alternately, I hope things change and this becomes irrelevant. However, with things as they are, I think this is a very possible path. These are my predictions:

  1. RFK will announce in September that vaccines cause autism. The US will stop funding and researching vaccines. More people will be sick and die from preventable disease and more people will become disabled.
  2. Being autistic will now be “our fault” for being vaccinated. The US will stop providing any kind of disability support. They’re already working on this with ending support for Section 504, which grants disabled people equal access to education.
  3. With all support removed, more autistic people will struggle to be “productive” members of society. The unemployment rate among autistic people is already very high (around 40% per this study from 2017, but there are many studies with varying results). Remember that disabled people who don’t work can get Social Security disability benefits, but DOGE is working hard to dismantle the Social Security Administration. It will be harder to get what little money Social Security provides to disabled people.
  4. The goverment will start rounding up disabled people and letting us die or sending us to work camps. RFK Jr. previously said he wants to send people to camps. I’m not just pulling that idea from the air. He literally already wants to do that.

This may sound far-fetched to some, but I find it all too plausible. The government already said that autistic people are a drain on society. RFK Jr. has already announced that he will be building a registry of autistic people. CBS news reports that “The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new effort to study autism,” and “a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism, which will be integrated into the data.” They also want to use data from “smart watches and fitness trackers.” Wow, what could possibly go wrong? (So, so much.)

This is just one piece of the assault on our freedoms that we’re experiencing under Trump round two. And you know what makes me insane? They fucking told us they would do this. The extreme right-wing nutjobs got together and wrote 900 pages of fanfiction about America and all the terrible things they want to do and now they are making it canon. They are taking advantage of normalized mass death, the many surveillance technologies, and our disregard for other people and weaponizing it to further divide us. The antidote to fascism is radically caring about other people. It is both that simple and that difficult. We all have to grow the fuck up and start giving a shit about others even if they are kind of annoying. “Autistic people will never write a poem.” So fucking what? I bet RFK Jr. hasn’t ever written a poem and can’t even tell you what scansion is but that doesn’t mean he should be left for dead while a worm eats his brain. Lots of people will never write a poem but that may be down to our education system more than anything. The point is this: everyone who is alive is worthy of life. The second you start deciding that some people don’t deserve it, you’re being a fascist. That’s it. That’s been this country’s problem for a long time but it came into stark relief thanks to covid and it’s only getting worse now. We are too quick to say “it’s fine if some people just die.” No, it’s not. That’s not how you get to be a civilization. If society can’t take care of the people least able to care for themselves, then it’s not a society at all.

Books and Other Words

book: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I picked up Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson from the Lavender Library. This autobiographical novel focuses on Jeanette’s extremely religious upbringing in 1960s England. Jeanette grows up going to church, spreading the word of the Lord everywhere she goes, and planning to be a missionary when she grows up. When she finally starts going to public school, the teachers and the other kids are put off by her off-the-charts religious zeal. Her life gets upended when Jeanette starts realizing she’s attracted to girls and she gets shunned by her mother and entire church community. One of the book’s ironies, however, is that nearly all the characters in the book are women. Women are the practically the only people in her life aside from the church pastor and her father (who doesn’t figure into the story at all). Yet, when Jeanette is attracted to women, suddenly women’s company is a problem. I related a fair bit to this book although my upbringing wasn’t nearly as severe as Winterson’s. I remember being weird and religious at school too, like the time my sixth grade teacher asked us to imagine a utopia and I invoked the “law of consecration” (that’s an archive.org link so you don’t have to give internet traffic to the Mormons church), which is basically religious socialism (no need to wonder why I’m a leftist lol). My teacher left a note on my work like “???” I had no idea it was a term specific to church. Mormonism also taught (and presumably still teaches) that it’s “okay” to be attracted to people of the same sex as long as you don’t act on it. Which … it’s not really okay then? Not surprising that it took me until my 20s to realize that I was bi, is it?

book cover for Space Opera featuring a disco ball with rings like a planet. Greyscale on kobo ereader
Space Opera

I re-read Space Opera by Catherynne Valente to refresh myself before reading the sequel, Space Oddity, which was published last fall. The book is very much in the spirit of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in that it’s a madcap tale of humanity’s first encounter with the wide and widely populated in universe. In Space Opera, the galaxy’s various other inhabitants hold a Eurovision-like contest to decide if the species they encounter are sentient. Aging pop star Decibel Jones and what remains of his band, The Absolute Zeroes, get dragged into the song contest to try to prove that humans are, well, human. It’s funny and wacky and emotional and there are lots of very weird alien species. This book came out in 2018 and is what got me interested in Eurovision in the first place (Valente explicitly describes this book as “space Eurovision”), although it was a few years before I actually watched the whole thing live. I also really appreciate the book’s message that the antidote to things being fascist and shitty isn’t to be bummed out but to be as glam and fabulous as possible in the face of it. It’s a highly encouraging perspective and one I am continuously striving to embrace.

book cover for A Conspiracy of Truths in greyscale on kobo ereader
A Conspiracy of Truths

I really loved the Alexandra Rowland books I read last year (notably Running Close to the Wind) so I started working my way through her back catalog with A Conspiracy of Truths. It’s not nearly as wacky as her more recent stuff but it is still a very good story. It follows a nameless man and part of the wandering order of storytellers, called Chants, who gets arrested on suspicion of being a witch, and stays arrested on suspicion of being a spy. The story follows Chant as he literally tries to talk his way out of jail and basically orchestrates a coup in the process. I enjoyed this book enough that I’ve checked out the sequel from the library. I will report back!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Corporeal Form

My dentist recently informed me that I need braces to which I immediately replied “I already had braces.” Alas, it’s possible to need braces again. Such things should be illegal.

a gif of flaming text reading "more fucking body problems"

Apparently the position of my tongue leaves it constantly pushing on my front teeth and it’s shoving the teeth outward, so now my bite is all fucked up. The dentist said that, if I get braces, I’ll have to wear a retainer forever afterwards or I’ll be back to the same issue. So, I was like, okay fine let’s get this over with and I have an appointment this week to have them installed. The braces in and of themselves are annoying but I’m overly upset about it. It’s more like, god, another thing to deal with. We’re living through fascism and now I have to get braces. Give me a break.

Languages and Wikipedia

I’m still working away at my translations and other Wikipedia editing. I passed 2,000 edits on English Wiki this week! Most of my edits are small, but still, I think it’s cool. I’m making progress on translating all the articles about Skagafjörður, Iceland into English. In my list of something like 160 articles, I’ve got around 40 left. Some recent selections include: Hraun in Fljót, Skeiðsfoss power station, and Djúpudalir. In Spanish, I’m currently on a James Thurber kick. He’s best known as the author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—Spanish Wikipedia had articles for both movie adaptations but not the original story. So I translated that and then continued on to the articles about The Unicorn in the Garden and The Catbird Seat. Up next is A Thurber Carnival, which is a stage production. Until I came across this article, I had completely forgotten that I actually did a few scenes from it in high school. My drama III class used it for our end-of-semester showcase. Funny how life is full of details that you can forget about until something prompts you to remember.

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a new dinner recipe, remixed an existing recipe, and made a new dessert over the last two weeks. I liked this skillet vegetable pot pie, featuring green peans and potatoes. I added flagolet beans to it, which kind of made it a green bean pie since that’s where flagolet beans come from. That’s okay though. It was good but I either needed to cut the potatoes smaller or cook the pie longer becase they were a little crunchy, which is not what anyone wants from potato. I also skipped the egg wash because I am not using a whole egg on aesthetics in this economy! I used the rest of the flagolet beans in a version of this butter beans with pecorino and pancetta recipe. I mixed in some tortellini to round out the dish and I thought it was really good! Finally, I made this delicious chocolate cake with brown butter frosting. The frosting was so dang good. It was definitely worth the extra effort.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Just look at this fucking guy.

Two Weeks in the Life: April 13, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. I have recently been beset by the urge to mindlessly click on things. Last week I “beat” the watermelon game, which has been my go-to activity when I want to just click at something for a while, that is, I made two watermelons. I was deeply disappointed that they did not merge and there were no fireworks or anything to mark this accomplishment. The game acted like this wasn’t even an achievement. What a disappointment. I had to find a new thing to click on for when I want to do nothing (perhaps others would feed this urge by scrolling TikTok or something, but I must click and videos are not relaxing), so I’ve started playing minesweeper. I used to play minesweeper a lot as a kid. Of course, back then it came for free with the computer (Microsoft has taken everything from us!). We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the week or during the daytime in the summer, so I would spend a lot of time playing Windows computer games and listening to the radio. There’s something satisfying about just clicking on shit. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a form of autistic stimming. Anyway, I’m keeping myself entertained and away from the infinite scroll.

Current Events

As much as I appreciate being right about things, I would prefer to not have been right about this one. In November, I advised that everyone stock their pantries and refill their medication in anticipation of Trump taking office. It was always possible that Trump was making shit up and wouldn’t set raise tariff rates, but he generally does things he says he’s going to do if those things will be harmful. So, of course, he announced sweeping increases in tariffs (then walked some back after the stock market crashed but I think it’s probably too late for our economy). Too many still seem not to understand that the country the tariff applies to not the one paying. China isn’t paying a 145% tax on imports to us. Great job, something that came from China and will now cost more than double. Meanwhile federal minimum wage is still $7.25. We’re extremely fucked.

Gif from The Matrix of Switch shaking her head and saying "not like this"
It’s cool to be right, but not like this

The idea I’m stuck on right now is that people do not know where food comes from. I saw a tweet circulating (and it seemed like an earnest one, not a joke) that we grow bananas all over the US, so those prices won’t go up (fact check: you can grow bananas in Hawaii, but not the rest of the US. India and China are the biggest banana exporters). Vanilla comes from Madagascar (47% tariffs) and Mexico. Cinnamon comes from China, Vietnam (46% tariffs), and Indonesia (32% tariffs). And this is to say nothing of coffee and chocolate. Some idiot online suggested that psychopathic YouTube mogul Mr. Beast start growing chocolate in the US. I am not exaggerating when I say people don’t know where food comes from. We are careening into a USSR-like economy because of one man’s hubris and people who think you can grow cacao just anywhere are cheering him on. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, “Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.” Trump believes you’re winning or you’re losing and he thinks this will make us win. Somehow. We’re all fucking losing now though. Just ask anyone about their 401(k) and you’ll hear all about it.

Gif from Arrested Development of Lucille Bluth saying "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"
Our future

Books and Other Words

book cover for Ghost Bride shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
Ghost Bride

Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo started off a little slow for my taste, but I ultimately enjoyed the story and the peek into another culture’s folklore. The story follows Li Lan, a young woman in colonial Malaysia, who gets an offer from a local wealthy family to be a ghost bride, that is, to wed the family’s recently deceased son so he will have a wife in the afterlife. The ghost of the would-be groom turns out to be a real asshole and starts harassing Li Lan in her dreams, which leads her to seeing a medium and taking some kind of remedy to keep ghosts away. Alas, this goes awry and Li Lan herself nearly dies, sending her on a journey through the spirit world. What really seems to suck about this afterlife is that you can be rich or poor depending on the offerings your descendants make for you. The aforementioned wealthy family is wealthy in death too, and there are other spirits who come to work for them. Imagine dying and still having to work as a housekeeper or some shit. The real nightmare here is capitalism.

book cover for Women in the Valley of the Kings shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
Women in the Valley of the Kings

I do love reading about Egypt and Egyptology, one of my earlier special interests, so when the library’s new book alert newsletter had Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard on it, I had to check it out. This book chronicles the careers of a number of women who worked in the field in its infancy and made it what it is today. This book seems to have required extensive archival excavations because most of these women maybe got a mention on the acknowledgements page of men’s work, or they are named in correspondence, but are not big names in their own right. As in many professions, women in Egyptology were hampered by gendered expectations (that they should get married and care for others, for example) that did not hinder men. One of my favorite chapters was about two women, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome, who copied down the art in the temple of Seti I (someone has a website about them with the art!). A job like that requires so much knowledge and technical skill, yet the men managing the site expected these women to host any visitors and take care of anyone who stopped by for medical support on top of their existing work. That’s a whole extra job! Anyone could make guests comfortable but not just anyone could accurately re-draw temple art. I really felt for all the people in this book who were just trying to learn and share knowledge but had to do all this extra stuff. Another of the women Sheppard profiles, Caroline Ransom Williams, worked for a while for the Metropolitan Museum of of Art and is the person behind the display of the Egyptian tomb they have there. Yet, this woman was cobbling together work while, as Sheppard puts it, caring for her aging mother and her husband. Sheppard also explains that Caroline tried to encourage the Met to hire some of her male colleagues to replace her, but they wouldn’t because that would require paying them way more, even though Caroline had way more experience. So rude.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Rampant Consumerism

I mentioned in my last post that I was investigating whether I have acid reflux (I do; more on that shortly) and one thing you can do about it is get an incline pillow. I was already seeing a bunch of instagram ads for complicated pillow systems for hypermobile people (because hypermobility means it takes more work to hold your body up, so a big-ass pillow can feel good), and one of them is also billing itself as an “acid reflux relief system” so I was like okay let’s try it. I bought the MedCline pillow and it is very comfortable. It feels really cozy to nest in it and read. I am, unfortunately, still trying to get adjusted to actually sleeping on it though, mostly because you need to lie on your side for it to work right and I usually sleep on my back. Some nights I’m waking up halfway through and swapping in my regular pillows and other nights I try to fall asleep in it and give up. Still, I am hopeful I will adjust. It really does feel like it’s helping. The main downside is that it’s interrupting Fritz’s ability to cuddle with me. He likes to sleep between my feet or in the crook of my arm, neither of which are possible if I’m wrapped around a body pillow. In short: I’m a monster.

With the gigantic new pillow situation, I also suggested to Kirk that we should get a king bed (we have been sharing a queen for years). I’ve brought it up before but he likes to sleep on the very edge like a neglected orphan so he was like “why?” I finally said that I want a bigger bed and he was like, well that’s all you had to say. I also made the case that if we are going to buy anything, we have to do it before tariffs make everything twice as expensive, so we went ahead and ordered a Big Fig mattress and a bigger version of the same Ikea bed frame that we’ve been using (everyone hates change!). The mattress has yet to arrive but I will report back once we get the new bed set up.

Corporeal Form

I’ve learned that some of my health issues have been acid reflux all along! Did you know that it is not normal to burp all the time? I thought it was because most of my family is like that. It’s also not normal to have to blow your nose and cough up gunk all the time, especially when you’re already taking allergy medication (I take a pill and a spray daily as it is). I started taking a daily acid reflux pill and I’m feeling a lot better. I’m once again shocked to learn that I’ve had an ongoing health condition and didn’t realize it because I thought that’s how being alive felt. I didn’t even know I was feeling acidity until I went away. I am glad to finally be taking care of some of these problems but aggravated that I’ve spent years suffering for nothing.

What’s really fucking me up about this situation is that the strategies for dealing with acid reflux are in conflict with things I’m doing for my other ailments. Since I’ve learned more about hypermobility, I’ve accepted that it takes more energy to hold my body up that it does for most people and have made lounging and lying down a big part of my day. It’s great. Unfortunately, acid reflux requires you to stay upright for a few hours after eating so the acid doesn’t come back up and attack you. Another suggestion is to eat more frequent, smaller meals throughout the day. So, if it feels bad to lie down for two or three hours after eating, and I’m supposed to eat less but more often, when does the lying down happen? I am struggling. I have been spending a lot more time at my computer (probably why I’m playing minesweeper!), which kind of sucks because it took me years of practice to not spend all day on the computer. I’m getting stressed out in the evenings about eating dinner early enough so I can lie down. It’s not going great. This all makes me feel like I need to eat a whole bunch in a panic so that I will have lying down time later, which is also a bad idea for several reasons, not the least because I finally learned how to stop binge eating in the last few years (the un-glamorous secret: once you stop restricting calories and telling yourself you can’t have certain foods, you will level out). I’m not sure what to do about this, or if there is anything I can do about this. It’s hard and I’m upset so I’m writing about it. Hopefully things will get easier as I get more accustomed to dealing with this.

Kitchen Witchery

I made a few good dishes this week. I tried the chili con carne recipe from The Bean Book and it was delicious. I simmered it extra long so the meat would be tender and that was a good choice. We had that with biscuits and roasted carrots topped with goat cheese. I tried this NY Times recipe for spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts. The instructions note you can use substitute tofu for the chicken so I gave that a try for lunch a few days ago. I liked the cooking method but the flavor wasn’t that strong. Maybe I used the wrong type of chili or maybe this is a classic case of NYT cooking making something bland. I poured some other sauce I had on hand over the leftovers and liked that, so I think I will keep this as a recipe but just use another sauce. Finally, I’ve been desperately wanting some good coffee cake for the last few weeks, so I made the Smitten Kitchen New York crumb cake. It was so good. This is the correct cake:crumb ratio and I will not be taking questions about it.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: March 30, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. As usual, so much is happening. I was thinking about writing a mini-essay on recent events, like our top government officials using a group chat to plan bombing campaigns. I’m not really sure what I can add to this discussion though, so I will refrain from saying much. However, I do want to note that, although it is very funny (funny sad, not funny ha-ha) that they are so stupid that they added the Atlantic editor to the war plans chat (it is also funny that half the group chats in the country are now nicknamed things like “⁨war secrets group chat [secure!]”), it is not funny that they are bombing Yemen. Last I checked, we are not at war with Yemen and Congress has not declared a war. Yet, we’re just bombing countries willy-nilly. What is wrong with this country. Also a celebrated scholar of fascism just left his job at Yale to move to Canada. Seems like a bad sign!

Other than our crumbling society, I had a really interesting conversation while volunteering at the Lavender Library on Friday. I was chatting with a fellow volunteer who has been working there a long time and who is old enough to be my mom, and she mentioned that it’s very hard to keep up with what the younger people are listening to and watching and saying. Our culture is so fractured though that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to “keep up.” I’m certainly not. I just learned who Dua Lipa was last year and she’s a pretty big pop star at this point (it’s okay if you still don’t know who Dua Lipa is). Thirty years ago you could turn on the TV and everyone had more or less the same access to the same culture, maybe your friend had cable or HBO and you didn’t, but even then, there was only so much you could get. With the way the internet is now, you could make a full-time job of watching, reading, or listening to things and it’s possible to have zero overlap with your peers. There’s no Saturday morning cartoons anymore and we have Top 40 radio but it seems like Taylor Swift took that over. The good here is that you can really dig into the things you like. If you love obscure music, you don’t have to travel to the record store two hours away to find your favorites; everything is on Spotify or Apple Music or BandCamp now. Way more people have the ability to create and share their art than they used to, which is honestly one of the best things about the internet. So, the idea of keeping up with the culture kind of doesn’t even exist anymore. Most of us are out of step with our local mainstream in some form or another. I know this is true based on experience—just try telling anyone how excited you are for Eurovision (I am very excited for Eurovision)!

XKCD comic reading "I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things. Because for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time. If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun."
from XKCD.com

Books and Other Words

Cover of the book Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. It's light purple with an illustration of a raised fist.
Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

I found Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner in the stacks at the Lavender Library and decided to check it out since I haven’t done much reading about bisexuality. I liked this book a lot, especially since it takes a radical perspective. Eisner states that in contrast to “liberal politics, whose goal is to gain access to power structures, radical politics criticizes the very structures and ultimately seeks to take them apart.” This is the best explanation I’ve seen of radicalism yet. The book goes a little further than the usual “bisexual myths” discourse that we are often stuck with. Eisner instead focuses on trying to “extract [bisexuality’s] enormous subversive potential” instead of “normalizing” it the way a lot of works try to do. So, instead of being like “it’s fine an normal to be bi!” Eisner is saying “being bi is different and that actually gives us a unique perspective on society and positions us to make radical change,” which is a very cool approach! One of the most interesting subjects in this book is the concept that bisexuality poses a threat to how society understands itself. Homosexuality is considered more legible to heterosexuals because at least they like just one group of people. Bisexuality makes it harder for people to disavow homosexuality and it calls into question everyone’s sexuality, which freaks people out. Eisner writes that bisexual women are threatening to patriarchy because they “are thought to embody the choice of whether or not to have relationships with men.” Oop!

book cover for The Coin shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
The Coin

Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin is a chronicle of a particular brand of madness. It’s an uncomfortable book—deliberately so—which makes it hard to say whether it’s “good” or not and I’m not even sure I liked it, to be honest. The story’s narrator and protagonist is a rich Palestinian woman who has moved to New York. She’s contemptuous of most everyone and everything in America and takes refuge in elaborate skincare routines that she spends hours at a time on after stocking up on products at CVS (thus earning this ritual the name “CVS retreat”). The narrator works as an English teacher at an all-boys school and leads her classes in ways that would probably get most people fired. She befriends a fashionable man who turns out to be homeless and who convinces her to help him with a scam involving luxury handbags. Despite my ambivalence, this is a well-written work. There are some pithy lines like the US being the “only country in the world with the cultural practice of school shootings.” We see the narrator really lose her grip at the end of the book. Is it the pressure of fitting into another culture? Some kind of demonic possession? Just being an insufferable person? The novel is content to leave us wondering.

book cover for A Desolation Called Peace shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
A Desolation Called Peace

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I talked about two posts ago. This book is, even more than its predecessor, focused on the question of what it means to be people. Our protagonist from the first book, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, gets dragged into the plot by her former liaison Three Seagrass who has somewhat broken protocol to appoint herself to a mission to help the Teixcalaani empire figure out how to communicate with the aliens that are killing the fleet at an alarming pace. That might sound convoluted but it’s very well done. It’s just hard to stuff this big, science fiction concept into a few sentences. I hope Martine writes more books because I really like her perspective and her world-building.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Doing Things

We went to the ballet again and it was cool! I have no big thoughts about it but I was happy to go and hang out with my friends. This was the last show of the Sac Ballet season and we already bought tickets for next season, so now I am looking forward to more outings.

A ticket for Sacramento Ballet Visions 2025 held up. The stage with a blue curtain is in the background.
Visions 2025

Corporeal Form

I’m really going through it with my body. I came to the sudden realization a few weeks ago that it’s become rather difficult for me to breathe. I was emptying the dishwasher like, hey I’m really out of breath right now. And, you know, that’s not a strenuous activity. Everything has been feeling very challenging because of it. You actually need air to function. My friends reminded me that it was probably time to talk to the doctor and of course they were right. I told the doctor that I (really we, since these findings were from the friend quorum) thought I might have asthma. This week I did a pulmonary function test about it. I was worried we wouldn’t learn anything from it and, unfortunately, we only learned that my lungs are functioning fine. This is good but then it’s like, okay, now what. I’ve noticed that doctors have a tendency to see a test result, let you know things look good, then forget that the problem persists despite having nice test results. So, I followed up with my doctor and she ordered a chest x-ray and also mentioned that acid reflux could be a cause of breathing issues, which was news to me.

I have been feeling a little more acidic lately and I had chalked it up to that devil perimenopause, but we have antacids in the house so I figured let’s experiment. I took one and, before long, my airways were free of gunk, and I wasn’t coughing or burping like I often am. And, yes, I was breathing a bit better. That lasted for a few hours and then my throat started hurting again and the gunk reasserted itself. I think I’ve had acid reflux (or worse?) the whole time and not realized it because it always feels that way.

I’m so frustrated with my health because I feel like I’m trying really hard to take care of myself, but I can’t figure out that things are wrong with me if things have always been wrong. When I got a special glasses prescription and started doing physical therapy for binocular vision dysfunction, my head stopped hurting and I realized I’d had a permanent headache. I only registered “headache” when it was worse than usual, without acknowledging the constant, low-grade pain. Once that stopped hurting, I was able to realize that my jaw was bothering me, and I got diagnosed with TMJ dysfunction. I’m peeling away layers of physical issues and I keep discovering more issues underneath that I wasn’t able to isolate from the symphony of physical signals. I’m sure part of this due to the autism, which is infamous for making us struggle to connect to our physical sensations. However, I think a significant part of the problem is that I’ve had to learn to care for myself as an adult in a way I didn’t get when I was growing up. My dad recently told us that he figured we were fine if we weren’t bleeding. It’s taken a long time to unlearn the idea that so much discomfort is normal and it’s good to seek help. I have a kind of learned helplessness about a lot of little things like this. Fortunately Kirk and my friends often help me recognize that there are different ways to do things and I don’t have to be uncomfortable. It feels so stupid to not even realize that my body is hurting but I’m doing my best. We’re slowly getting somewhere.

I’m planning to pick up some more powerful over-the-counter medication and see how I feel. I do feel notably better even with the basic meds, so I am curious to see how this shakes out and report back to my doctor. I’m glad this doctor is being more helpful than most, but I wish doctors would have a little more curiosity. There has to be a better way to help people like me figure out what their problems are. I often don’t even tell the doctor something until I’ve read up on an issue and find myself saying “oh no, I bet I have that too.” I’m often right (not always, but often enough). Why do doctors never ask about symptoms? It’s just, how are you? Ma’am, I have no fucking idea. You’re the doctor.

Kitchen Witchery

Last week I roasted a chicken for dinner and we had that with some vegetables and butternut squash risotto. I have probably said this before (and shared photos that look exactly the same) but roasting a chicken well feels like the pinnacle of a certain kind of cooking to me. I feel so much pride for being able to roast a good chicken. Last week I also made some really good burgers with blue cheese and caramelized onions, but I forgot to take a picture! In desserts, I made these absolutely delicious caramel bars with candied peanuts (recipe from 100 Cookies). They’re kind of like a millionaire’s shortbread plus peanuts. They have a shortbread base, caramel layer, candied peanuts, and chocolate on top. I will certainly make these again because they are fucking good.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This fucking guy.

Two Weeks in the Life: March 16, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. First, the news you are all waiting for: the shower is finally, completely finished. They installed the doors last week and have been using it since. I hope I never have to remodel this shower again. Exhausting! It looks really nice though and somehow it feels like there is more room inside. I’m not sure how, but I’m willing to live with that mystery.

Newly remodeled shower with the door installed and everything
it’s finally done!
Me after getting a haircut. My hair is just a bit past my shoulders
short hairs

As much as I like the look of long hair and being able to style it in fun ways, it was long enough that it was making me insane so on Friday I went to have a bunch chopped off. It feels a lot better! It hasn’t been this short in a while—and it’s not really that short—but it feels a lot different. The only bummer is I won’t be able to do buns on top of my head with short hair, but I suppose I can do it with just the top half of the hair instead. It’s a necessary sacrifice.

Current Events

PSA: Social Security Is Your Money

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is pushing big administrative cuts at the Social Security Administration and looking to cut half their staff. This could, as the former Social Security Commissioner stated, lead to “system collapse and an interruption of benefits … within the next 30 to 90 days.” This could be a precursor to cutting Social Security benefits, as the Center for American Progress notes, given that Musk has publicly stated that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Fact check: it’s not. What makes me insane about this strain of thought is that we all pay into Social Security. It’s not a special gift from the government. When you get a paycheck, you pay 6.2% of it in Social Security taxes and your employer matches that, for 12.4% total. That’s it. So when government-hating conservatives talk about “cutting” Social Security, they are talking about stealing our money that we already earned and paid into the system.

I highly recommend that everyone sets up an account on the Social Security website, https://www.ssa.gov/onlineservices/, and downloads their Social Security Statement. It probably won’t save us, but you will at least have a record of what you’ve paid in to Social Security to date. The statement shows your earnings record (the amount of money your Social Security tax is based on) and an estimate of how much money you will get from Social Security when you retire. If Musk does successfully gut the Social Security Administration, you’ll have a record of how much of your money they stole and it will be easier to make a claim to what you’re owed (in theory). I hope this won’t be necessary but I’m not holding my breath.

Gavin Newsom, Shut Up!

California governor Gavin Newsom has the easiest job in the world right now. All he needs to do is say no to the things Trump wants and keep California on track. It’s that simple. I am certain he wants to run for president in 2028. He could emerge as a leader in sane governance by guiding us through the Trump shitshow.

And yet.

In the last two weeks this fucking idiot has squandered whatever remaining good will he had from liberals and leftists (which wasn’t too much to begin with I think, but still). He also pissed off the entire state workforce by unilaterally demanding that state employees work four days a week in the office instead of the current two (the union is taking a complaint to the Public Employee Relations Board). Gavin took to his new podcast (side note: does this man have nothing better to do right now??) to complain about trans women in sports. Trans people’s rights are under attack across the board, so why is Gavin taking time out of his busy schedule to be a shithead? Beyond the cruelty of this, like … why? So few transwomen are competing in high-level sports and it’s literally the last fucking issue I care about right now. Trump is firing half the Department of Education and Gavin wants to complain about 10 people playing sports? Dude, shut up! Also, what happened to the Mayor of San Francisco version of Gavin Newsom, the Newsom who decided to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples before it was technically legal? Where did he go?

Newsom’s new podcast is apparently specifically for talking to MAGA people that he ostensibly disagrees with, to “understand what the motivations are, the legitimacy of those motivations, and just really understand where people are coming from.” My guy, we are 10 years into Trump world. We know why people support him. You are not even a journalist, so just shut up and govern your state like we elected you to do. There is no need to have a discussion with Steve fucking Bannon. This is a guy throwing Nazi salutes in public and whose political strategy is to “flood the zone with shit” because “the real opposition is the media.” Giving Bannon a platform to “debate” him is just providing him with another opportunity to pretend to be legitimate while spewing more shit. Creating another venue for these people to share their unchecked views is not helping anyone, so: shut up, Gavin!

Tweet from Pop Base that says King Charles is launching a podcast with the comment from user Memeulous "Whether you're a peasant or a king the urge to make a podcast burns like a thousand suns within all of us men"
Men yearn to podcast

More News to Keep an Eye On

I can’t get into every insane thing that is happening, but here are some more important stories:

  • The Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil, “a Palestinian “a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment.” This man has a green card and is a permanent resident, yet they have detained him. This is extremely troubling. From Al-Jazeera, “The Trump administration wants to criminalise any dissent of Israel’s genocide, any dissent of the US’s role in it, and they’re willing to roll back all of our rights to do that.” Later in the week, they arrested another Palestinian student involved in the Columbia University protests. This is really bad.
  • Trump let Musk turn the White House lawn into a car dealership. As Parker Molloy of The Present Age explains, “The whole spectacle was exactly what you’d expect when a billionaire president with a long history of self-promotion teams up with his billionaire buddy who helped bankroll his campaign. It was cronyism in its purest form, taking place on the grounds of what’s supposed to be the people’s house.” The government isn’t supposed to be a money-making venture! That’s why government employees and contractors (like myself) have to take those trainings every year about not accepting bribes or dinner from anyone. It’s a whole thing! There are tons of rules!
  • The recession is about to hit hard. I’m pretty sure it’s already started but we’re not deep into it yet. CNN reports this week that “Dollar General warns low-income Americans’ finances are getting worse.” Unfortunately, many people in this country shop a lot at discount stores like this so I think Dollar General does have its finger on the economic pulse. The article also notes that “Dollar General is seeing middle-income consumers trade down into shopping at stores in recent weeks,” which suggests that middle-income people are either anticipating less money and are tightening their budgets in anticipation, or they may already be losing money or losing ground against inflation.

Books and Other Words

Book cover for Iron Curtain shown on kobo ereader
Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum details how the USSR took over Eastern Europe, focusing on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The book is extensively researched and is based on interviews plus historical documents. I wanted to read it both as a student of history and for some perspective on what we’re living through (or, perhaps, about to live through). Applebaum starts by describing the devastation in Eastern Europe after World War II, and how the Red Army arriving to liberate people from the Nazis was something to feel grateful for. As one person noted, “everyone there had the same feeling, that the world would finally turn into a different one, and that it really had been worthwhile for us to be born,” which, oof. I feel like this is something that people in my generation might say too. Of course, the Red Army wasn’t there to help, they were there to further the USSR’s interests. Something I didn’t realize about this period was that, because everywhere was so thoroughly destroyed, after the concentration camps were emptied of Nazi prisoners, the Soviets turned right around and started using the same camps for other purposes because they were one of the only structures still standing. That must have been awful. Another “fun” fact was that lots of people were staying and partying (playing jazz records and dancing) at the YMCA, which eventually got shut down for being a “tool of bourgeois-fascism.” Jazz music and dressing colorfully and festively eventually became signs of resistance, but then, everything was a way to resist when the government was dictating from the top down how to think and act and behave.

The most interesting chapter to me was on “reluctant collaborators,” which refers to the “Millions of people [who] did not necessarily believe all of the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infalible leader, but they did not tear down his portraits.” Of course that made me think about what we’re living through. I think most people don’t want the federal government to be torn apart but a lot of people are perhaps shrugging and not really raging against it either. As Applebaum writes, “The extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism … was the system’s ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest.” I think that certainly applies to our time too. So many people aren’t “interested in politics” or are apathetic in one way or another. Perhaps people would feel less apathetic (more … pathetic?) if we could figure out how to invest in our shared reality. The internet and media have fully fractured our discourse; we have no monoculture and we don’t get our sense of reality from a shared source like the nightly news. The Soviets used the radio for propaganda and seemed to believe that there wasn’t anything propaganda couldn’t overcome. Yet, Radio Free Europe, a station broadcast by the Americans in West Germany, “ultimately proved effective not because it offered counterpropaganda but because it reliably reported the news of the day.” That’s what we need now. We need reliable information that from reporters who aren’t just acting as stenographers and who can explain why things are important. Applebaum concludes, “Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.” The Eastern Bloc countries succeeded in this, but we in the United States of the 21st century aren’t ready.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 via Ars Technica. If you have an Echo, beware. Amazon is changing its policy so that it now keeps all your recordings and uploads them to their servers, presumably to use in training AI. From the article, “Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to ‘Don’t save recordings’ will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked.” Amazon said, let us keep all your data or get fucked!
  • Meet the Feminist Resistance Fighter Who Created the Modern Kitchen via Gastro Obscura. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was an architect and was part of the resistance against the Nazis in Vienna and she sounds like a very cool lady. She designed the Frankfurt kitchen, which most modern kitchen designs are based on. Her architectural work centered women’s needs. I had never heard of her before! Another unsung hero of the modern age.
  • Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages via 404 Media. I don’t claim to understand it but I do find this news fun and delightful.

Wikipedia

I am proud to report that I have now made over 1,000 edits on English Wikipedia, which puts me in the 0.1% of Wikipedians by edit count. I recently got a lot of edits in a short time because I started contributing to WikiProject Short descriptions, which is a project to make sure all the articles have a, well, short description (it’s the tiny summary that pops up under an article’s name in the search results). I can do a lot of them in not a lot of time and it’s moderately interesting and gives me something to click at, so I’ve done a whole bunch (literally hundreds haha).

Wikipedia notification that reads "You just made your thousandth edit; thank you for being a great contributor!"
1,000 Wikipedia edits

Knitting and Crafts

We had a small tear in our fitted sheet, presumably the result of Fritz being a menace, and I bravely decided to mend it. It’s a very small job but I am proud of it so here it is. I used the mattress stitch, which I know how to do from knitting, but I figured it would be the same principle with a needle and thread.

Riding high on the victory from mending the sheet, I then patched up this stuffed animal that has been in need of repair for a long time. It’s easy to make that look neat when all its fluff covers up the stitching! Significant Otter is no longer at risk of losing his stuffing.

Kitchen Witchery

a big glass bowl full of khichdi
instant-pot khichdi

In the spirit of transparency, I am sharing a recipe I did not like. This is instant pot khichdi, which is made of rice and lentils and sounded good to me. Unfortunately, I did not think it tasted good. Perhaps the NY Times version of this recipe is to blame? I think this is the kind of food that every Indian household has their own version of, so maybe there’s one out there I would love. But for this one, I did not appreciate the little chunks of tomato (I thought they would cook down more than they did) and I think the coriander seed bits were bad for my guts. That’s on me though, not NYT Cooking; I should have known better. Anyway, I ate one bowl of it then gave up and discarded the leftovers.

I tried making another loaf from start to finish in the new bread machine and it came out better this time. I learned that I can tell the machine to go to the next part of the process and that I can save that as a setting for next time. The loaf shape looks a little weird to me, but I think that might be because you expect the top of the loaf to puff up in the oven, but in the machine, the sides of the loaf are still touching pan, so the result looks a little funny. However, the bread was just fine. Another loaf or two and I will have the system perfected—and just in time for summer.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This guy just loves being inside of things.

Two Weeks in the Life: March 2, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. You will all be glad to hear that my shower is finally almost done. The contractor worked all week last week and got it basically finished. However, it still needs a door (…details). I’ve been informed that this should maybe show up on Monday. The good news is the work is close enough to done that I was able to clean and start using the en suite bathroom again, which is a great relief to me. The shower looks very nice, I would just like to be able to use it and be done. If I ever have to get this remodeled again, I will scream.

Newly remodeled shower, featuring Fritz the cat sniffing around and investigating
shower inspector

Current Events

This is still not a news blog but I want to gather my thoughts on what’s happening with disabilities right now, starting with vaccines. It’s upsetting that vaccines, which improved population-level health so notably in the 20th century, are being undermined by conspiracy theories and “skeptics.” Vaccines work. For the record, vaccines do not cause autism. Most people start noticing signs of autism in their kids around the same time that kids start getting vaccines. That’s it. People who would rather risk a preventable disease killing their child rather than—in their minds—put them at risk of autism make me so sad. They would rather have a potentially dead kid than a living autistic kid. Speaking as an autistic adult: that fucking sucks. Autistic people deserve to live. If anyone wants sources on this subject, the Maintenance Phase podcast did a thorough episode called RFK Jr. and The Mainstreaming Of The Anti-Vaxx Movement and their website has a bunch of links to their sources.

Anyway, the current part of these events is that our new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., is hard at work doing things that will probably make it harder to get vaccines, or get vaccines at all. This week, he cancelled (or possibly postponed, but it sounds like cancelled) a meeting where scientists determine which strain of the flu they should vaccinate against this year. Does that mean we won’t get a flu shot this year? The Centers for Disease Control and Infection (CDC) was also “ordered to shelve some promotions it created for a variety of vaccines, including a campaign touting seasonal flu shots.” This also sucks because vaccines work better when more people get them. This is all happening amid the worst flu season since before the pandemic and when there’s a measles outbreak that has killed at least one person. Measles had been classified as eliminated since the year 2000, but through sheer grit and determination, Americans have revived it. I can’t top what The Onion has to say about this: RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore. Thanks, guys.

The other aspect of RFK Jr.’s, … I want to say policy positions? Beliefs? Plans? Random wishes he is attempting to manifest? that has been circulating recently is that he does not want any of us on SSRIs (antidepressants), adderall, or basically any drugs that help level out our brains. And he thinks we should be on “farms.” Futurism.com reported on these remarks last summer:

“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,” he said during the broadcast.

This has become a bit of a meme lately and, whenever I see it, I tell my friends I hope we end up on the same farm. But I’m laughing so I don’t cry.

I think this has taken off recently in context of the Executive Order dated February 13, 2025 titled “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.” The EO mentions the rate of ADHD and autism, among other physical health issues, then states:

This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. Seventy-seven percent of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy, and our security.

Autism and ADHD aren’t “threats to the American way of life.” They’re just another way that brains work. The real tell here is they are worried about having enough people to enlist in the military. Just a suggestion: what if we didn’t maintain the world’s largest military and over 700 bases worldwide? That might help with the staffing shortage.

I don’t know what the real end game here is for anyone these right-wing jackasses deem unfit. I do know that there’s an active suit from multiple states attempting to end Section 504, which is what grants all children the right to a free and appropriate education, regardless of what disabilities they may have. I do know that Trump and his administration are tacking “accessibility” onto “diversity, equity, and inclusion” for a “DEIA” acronym when they’re telling federal workers that they’re useless and air traffic controllers that they’re doing a bad job. I do know that many of the pieces of our social safety net that Trump is threatening are key to making sure disabled people can participate in society. Finally, and I hate that this sounds paranoid (but I don’t think it is paranoid), we also know that disabled people were the first victims of the Nazi regime. Do I think Trump or RFK Jr. or Russel Vaught are going to put me on a “wellness farm” because I’m autistic. I don’t know. However, I am deeply troubled that they appear to be laying the legal groundwork to justify doing so. They are going to make it harder to exist as a disabled person so they can complain that we’re a drain on society. They’re making big investments in prisons (discussed in my previous post) to detain immigrants (for now). I don’t think it takes a Ph.D. in history to see where this could go. The U.S. has put people in internment camps before and I believe it could happen again. It’s happening right now, with thousands of people being held in ICE detention centers.

I wish I could end this section with something hopeful or a suggestion for things to do. I don’t know what to do beyond the usual stuff: get involved in your community, participate in mutual aid, stay informed, have a backup plan. I am scared. Seeing the news about that EO really fucked me up. I spent a whole day vibrating with anxiety. I expected Trump round two to be a horrorshow but I didn’t think we’d escalate to “what if we put the disabled people in camps” so quickly. Sometimes I just write about this stuff to not feel crazy. I see things on instagram like “haha we’re gonna be insufferable unmedicated on the RFK Jr. wellness farm!” and I laugh but the blog is where I take the time to look it up and see what did he actually say. Where did that information come from. Did something get lost in translation as it traveled through social media. I think this particular strain of news is as bad as they’re making it out to be online. Things could get really ugly. I don’t know what else to say, so here’s a picture (valued at 1,000 words).

Books and Other Words

cover for the book A Memory Called Empire shown on kobo ereader
A Memory Called Empire

I have a (bad?) habit of reading the first book in a series, buying the following books, then not getting to the rest of the series for years because I want to re-read the first book so I can fully appreciate the next ones. To that end, I recently re-read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire because I still haven’t read the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I was hoping to find what I wrote about this book when I first read it in 2019 because I remember loving it although I got a little lost by the end. However, I read it just before I started writing here regularly. so my opinions are lost to time. I really do remember losing the plot and getting confused, even though it was totally clear to me this time around. It made me reflect on the fact that I think I’ve gotten better at reading, as strange as that sounds, even though reading is a skill like anything else, since doing vision therapy a few years ago. The words I read are staying in my brain more strongly because I’m not using all my energy on physically focusing my eyes. As for the book itself: I love it. It’s about Mahit Dzmare, a woman who grew up on a space station just outside the Teixcalaanli empire. She’s selected to be the station’s ambassador in the empire’s capital. There is, of course, a ton of intrigue and politicking and there is even a revolution and attempted coup (too close to home?). The world Martine created is so detailed and rich, and I think that is because she is also a scholar of the Byzantine empire. There are a number of science fiction writers who are also academics and I find that they are writing some of the most immersive worlds (Ada Palmer is another author who comes to mind). A Memory Called Empire also deals with the tension of not being a part of the dominant, colonizer culture and wanting to belong while also not wanting to lose one’s identity. I also appreciated the linguistic and literary elements in the story; there’s a lot of discourse about poetry and allusion and how the language of the empire works differently than that of Mahit’s native culture.

This probably sounds silly but I feel embarrassed if I only have one book to talk about from the last two weeks. I know no one cares but me, and I certainly wouldn’t care if someone told me they “only” read one book in the last fortnight. And yet. Maybe by my next post I’ll have finished all the books I’m in the middle of.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • 1 in 5 Americans Are Doom Spending via creditcards.com. It’s me. I’m one in five Americans.
  • War Robot Put On a 30-Minute DJ Set at a California Club via Vice. I am once again begging people to make technology that does the boring stuff, like taxes or sorting recycling, instead of making art. Art is the point of being alive. Besides, do you think a robot could do this?
  • Microsoft to Shut Down Skype: Farewell to the ‘Rotary Phone’ of Communications via CNET. Bad news for everyone who meets with their language teachers online: Skype is being decommissioned. Some of you might say “Skype is still around?” but every single person I’ve taken a language class from is using Skype because it’s easy and accessible and does what we need it to do. I’ve been pitching Signal as an alternative since it seems like it does have a screenshare option, but it’s annoying to have to change to new software just because Microsoft doesn’t feel like maintaining it! Make it open source, you cowards!
  • Bone Into Stone via The Dial. I just love Jhumpa Lahiri!
  • How To Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag via Organizing My Thoughts. From the article:

More and more often, I am seeing people live the entirety of their political lives, or at least, the vast majority of their political lives, on social media. I am not talking about people whose organizing largely occurs virtually, as there are many ways that people engage with activism digitally (including meetings, webinars, discussion groups, and other projects that are largely conducted online), but rather, people whose political existence is mostly or completely confined to the infrastructure of social media. For such people, the ability to work across differences is often lacking or entirely absent, because social media does not involve that kind of engagement. Social media is a performance-based technology. Collective action is not performance-based. It is grounded in relationships, cooperation, and an ability to prioritize shared objectives.”

Media

February 24th is Twin Peaks day, so I felt that would be the right day to start watching this cult classic TV Show. I have only heard good things about it, mostly from Lito, whose taste I have complete trust in. My mom also corroborated this and said she loved watching it when it originally came out. My initial thoughts (three episodes deep) are that it is cool and interesting and weird. I do wonder, however, how Laura Palmer had time for all of her activities. She was tutoring someone, running Meals on Wheels, and had like 15 boyfriends? What is going on? Moreover, will I ever know what is going on (based on this show’s reputation: no).

Rampant Consumerism

My bread machine, which served me faithfully for I think ten years, was getting some kind of corrosion on the bottom of the pan where it connects to the thing that makes the paddle spin. I had been coveting a fancy new bread machine for a while (not the least because I was disgusted to find that our pantry moth infestation last year also led to moths in the machine, which I cleared out with a handheld vacuum. I know they were not in my bread but still … yuck). Since buying a new pan cost almost as much as we originally paid for the bread machine, I decided to just get the fancy new one. I am now the proud owner of this Zojirushi bread machine. It has a lot more settings, the pan has two paddles and is wider so when you bake bread in there, it comes out in a normal loaf shape, and it has a little window so you can see the dough! I use the bread machine probably at least weekly so I know I am going to get my money’s worth. I am also looking forward to experimenting with baking cakes and other things in there, especially in the summer when it’s too hot to live, let alone turn on the oven. I tested it for a dough that I baked in the oven and that worked well. I tried out the “homemade” mode, where you can set all the kneading and rising times, then the machine beeps at you so you can take the loaf out and shape it and return it to the machine to bake. I used the recommended timing for this and my dough rose too high and then collapsed during the baking process. It’s still edible but the texture is a little off. It’s going to take me a few tries to get it just right, I think, but we’re gonna get there.

Collection Management, or Digital Housekeeping

I’ve started working on organizing my ebooks recently after it was brought to my attention that Amazon would no longer allow people to download ebooks books they’ve purchased, except directly to a Kindle device or app as of February 26 (unfortunately I did not get this news to the people before that deadline; I only heard about it myself a few days beforehand. Then again, I am not a journalist or news outlet). Amazon can choose to be shitty about digital content people have bought, paid for, and theoretically own because of DRM, or “digital rights management,” which exists thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. Because of DRM, Amazon (or any digital bookseller) can dictate how you use and access your books, or even remove the books because content with DRM is really something you’ve leased, not something you own. Amazon even uses a proprietary file format (previously mobi and now AZW) for ebooks instead of the open epub format, which prevents users from reading their books on anything but a Kindle device or the Kindle app.

I stopped buying books from Amazon years ago and switched to Kobo, which is still not perfect but does a much better job than Amazon, and offers some DRM-free books. Still, I have a lot of Kindle books that I want to be able to read but don’t because they’re trapped in Amazon’s ecosystem. Unfortunately, I spent many years taking advantage of ebook sales so I have hundreds of books there. Kirk sent me this video explaining how to download your Kindle books and convert them using Calibre and this de-DRM plugin. I almost didn’t try it because I attempted to do this many years ago and it didn’t work and I got frustrated. However, I am better at using the computer and perhaps computer people are better at explaining how to do things now, so this time I was able to succeed. Here’s what I did:

  • Downloaded all my 500+ Kindle books. I can confirm that the option to download from the website is no longer available. I am guessing you could download books to a Kindle device then transfer them to a computer, but I don’t know that for sure. If anyone tests it and let’s me know, I’ll update the post!
  • While I was at it, downloaded all my Kobo books (here’s how).
    • I had a hard time figuring out where the Kobo books downloaded to on my computer. This website explains where to find them.
    • The Kobo books with DRM download as ASCM files that only open with Adobe Digital Editions. This program is free to download. You can open the ASCM files with it and convert them to epubs.
  • Set up de-DRM plugin (if you’re doing this, make sure to add your Kindle serial number per the directions, or it won’t work).
  • Added books by dragging them all in to Calibre (or you can use the Add books button). I dropped in my epubs (books that were natively epub and others that I converted from ASCM) and AZW format books.
  • Converted the non-epubs using the Convert books button. Ta-da. Now everything is a DRM-free epub and I can use it however I want!

This might sound like a lot of work for books that I already have access to but it’s the principle of the thing. If I buy a book, I should be able to read it however I want. I am also concerned that Amazon, in particular, might start being more aggressive in its censorship. Consider, for example, that Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, announced that he is now directing the paper’s opinion section to be “[writing] every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Yikes. How likely is he (or someone working for him) to decide that ebooks need to also be in “defense of personal liberties and free markets”? I don’t know, but the point is that he could do something to fuck up access to all the books you bought. Call me a radical libertarian if you must (just this once [but please don’t lol]), but I think you should own the stuff you buy!

Now that I have all my ebooks downloaded, converted, and in once place, I’ve been working on getting the metadata organized. You know I love organizing metadata (this is not sarcasm!). I’m like an autistic child happily stacking blocks over here except I am tagging my books consistently. This is very similar to what I did with my music collection two years ago and what I did with my flashcards last year (in fact this is ongoing. I get bursts of productivity then ignore it for weeks. It’s very hard to double check and tag literally thousands of vocabulary flashcards). I guess the books are this year’s digital housekeeping project. As with both of those previous projects, I do feel like this is something I should have been doing all along to keep my library organized, but unfortunately, I abdicated control of my digital possessions to a corporation. Much like streaming or storing information on the cloud, letting someone else manage my ebooks means that whoever is managing can make decisions that I don’t like. It means I’m stuck with some stupid app that is probably going to advertise at me even when I’m paying a subscription fee—it means I’m paying a fucking subscription fee to study flashcards! As I wrote about social media last month, “We trade our data and sanity and convenience.” That’s true here too. It does take a little more effort to manage my own media but I know it is mine and can’t disappear or have features randomly eliminated. Yes, all roads on this blog apparently lead to complaining that we have ceded too much control over many aspects of our lives to corporations. It keeps happening so I’m gonna keep talking about it as I try to claw my way out (and hopefully drag some of you with me).

Calibre library

Kitchen Witchery

Aside from the new bread machine adventures, I tried out this recipe for oatmeal cream pie bars. I do really love the Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies, so when I saw this recipe I was excited for a low-effort, homemade version. They are very good. My only disappointment is that I didn’t get my frosting all huge and fluffy like it is on the recipe website. Still, I’m not complaining.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Is Fritz the world’s most photogenic cat?

Two Weeks in the Life: February 16, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. Let’s just get this out of the way: the shower drama is ongoing. Our contractor scheduled a plumber for Monday, but he was sick and couldn’t make it. Then I didn’t hear from the contractor all week and I was forced to email them to ask if this is the only plumber in the tri-state area or what. I’m told they are “in talks” with another plumber as if this is a Middle East peace summit. Anyway, our bathroom has been torn up for a month. Very fun and cool! In other homeownership drama—because these kinds of things tend to happen all at once—we had a totally different plumber come by this week to fix the sink in the bathroom that isn’t currently torn up because it had all but stopped draining. Fortunately that was a comparatively easy operation. Then, the spring on our garage door broke and we couldn’t get the door open. We actually keep our car in the garage, so you can understand how this could be a problem. We were able to get someone out the same day to fix it. We ended up spending quite a bit of money because we replaced the entire garage door mechanism; the repair guy pointed out that it probably only had a year or two of life left and we could visibly see the chain slackening in a significant and worrying way. I am complaining about this but I do still prefer it to living in an apartment. Hazards of the job, I guess. I would also rather replace something like the garage door opener now before the supply chain falls apart/tariffs make everything insanely expensive. Yes, this is what I’m thinking about during every transaction now.

Current Events

There’s still a lot happening and I’m assuming a lot will stay happening for the duration. I think one of the hardest things right now is not getting battered by the deluge of shit the government says it’s doing. Yes, it is tempting and seems briefly satisfying to dunk on something patently idiotic like Representative Carter (R-GA) proposing H.R. 1161 to “To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as ‘Red, White, and Blueland.'” It’s easy to look at this and be like, Republicans and everyone who supports them are stupid as fuck. However, as Sarah Kendzior often says, these people “cover crime with scandal.” The same day that Carter introduced this fucking nonsense, he also proposed H.R. 1160, which would make doctors and other medical professionals into independent contractors. This would destabilize an entire industry. We don’t need more precarity in our workforce, especially for a career that requires a lot of specialization and continued education, and that costs a lot of money to get into. Another example of stuff to not get bogged down in, in my opinion anyway, is Trump announcing he’s going to levy a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, only to walk back the tariff the next day. The same day, Elon Musk was getting access to the Treasury’s payment system. The tariffs are definitely harmful, but to me they seem like a way to bury the much more serious issue of known grifter Elon Musk tapping into the system the government uses to pay everyone. I will note, in fairness, that a judge told Elon to stop. But, as even The New York Times explains, “If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced.” Yeah, I bet. The president is encouraging him or at least letting him do this so … who would stop him?

There are other pieces of news I want to point out but that I’m not getting deep into:

  • The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) act is rearing its ugly head in congress. It would require Americans to present a birth certificate or passport to prove that they are eligible to vote. This is a problem because “the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.” It would also be a problem for any transgender people who have changed their name but don’t have a matching passport. Sounds like a great way to disenfranchise millions of people who probably won’t vote for conservatives! I don’t know how likely this is to become the law but I don’t think we can assume anything good at this point. If you can, I highly recommend getting a passport or changing your name immediately. This also alarms me in the context of Project 2025’s stated goal of ending no-fault divorce. Seems bad!
  • Wired reports that “The United States government has been secretly amassing a ‘large amount’ of ‘sensitive and intimate information’ on its own citizens.” Long story short: the government thinks it’s okay to purchase sensitive data about us, as long as it’s not acquiring that data directly via surveillance. Cool loophole. What could possibly go wrong.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia recently got some good press that I thought was interesting. I’m not their PR department but I am doing my part to improve the people’s encyclopedia, so it feels nice to see people say that Wikipedia is a good thing, actually. A columnist on CNN called it “one of the most reliable places on the internet.” It’s one of the internet’s most popular website and the only one not owned by a corporation. It’s troubling that so much of our time online is mediated by giant companies that make money off our attention, but that’s an essay for another day. Wikipedia was also in the news for becoming recognized as a digital public good. This means that the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a “UN-endorsed initiative that facilitates the discovery and deployment of open-source technologies,” said that Wikipedia is doing a good job and sort of acting like a public utility (to make a broad analogy).

Square image in contrasting shades of blue that reads "Editing Wikipedia is not a crime"
image by BlueRaspberry via Wikimedia Commons

I mention this stuff in part because I like Wikipedia and think it’s cool but also because we are heading into an information apocalypse. AI and fascism and a lack of critical thinking and reading skills are making it really hard to access information and know what’s true. That’s why people like Elon Musk are fucking mad at Wikipedia—they can’t control the narrative. There’s a great, long, explanation of the right-wing “crusade against Wikipedia” on Molly White’s newsletter [citation needed] that is a worthwhile read if you’re interested in all the details of this fight. Ultimately, Musk is mad that even being the world’s richest jackass isn’t enough to make people say nice things about him on Wikipedia (talk about “citation needed”). I think a lot of conservatives also get mad when people do things that aren’t just for themselves. Breaking out of our culture’s cult of individualism is a major threat to power. Why edit Wikipedia? To help other people find information? What’s the profit motive? Oh, there isn’t one. You can’t buy off people who are in it for the love of the game. Unfortunately, Musk isn’t the type to just leave it alone after someone tells him no. The Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that oversees Wikipedia) is working on ways to protect editors and help maintain privacy, as 404 Media reports. I’m not very worried for myself personally since I’m not working on particularly charged topics, but this stuff is still troubling given the current environment. Part of me thinks I should do something to be more careful but I don’t know what that would be and it is super easy to figure out who I am in real life given that I’m constantly talking about my Wikipedia activities here on my blog under my real name. Access to information is important to me and I have no plans to stop what I’m doing, even as a Wikipedia editor without a tremendous amount of contributions (yet). I will be raging and writing about information literacy from the gulag if it comes to that.

Prison, honey

Speaking of the gulag, let’s check in on the fortunes of America’s private prison companies. Immediately after the election, stock prices for private prison company GEO Group jumped by 32 percent. Last week, Business Insider noted that stocks for GEO Group and Core Civic (another private prison company) are “tending” in response to the news that the “U.S. is building a massive facility to house up to 30,000 deported migrants” in Guantanamo. Forbes reports that “data from 2023 shows that some 90% of ICE detainees were being held at private institutions with an estimated 80% of those housed at CoreCivic and Geo Group facilities” and that both companies are ready to scoop up more government business if Trump deports as many people as he has promised to do.

Two pieces of prison-related news came out recently. First, Trump announced he is “sending nonviolent, ‘low-risk’ migrant detainees” the the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which they are converting into a “large-scale immigration detention site.” People will be “held there until they can be deported.” What I don’t understand—and have yet to find an explanation for—is why they want to send people to Guantanamo. Is the point to cut them off from anyone who could help them? Put them to work (don’t make me bring up AP’s Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands article again)? Are they hoping we’ll forget if it’s offshore? Is the cruelty the point?

The second news item is that El Salavdor’s president Nayib Bukele (who, by the way, per Reuters, “labels himself as the ‘coolest dictator’ and a ‘philosopher king.'” These fucking people.) has offered to let the US jail people in El Salvador’s giant prison complex that can house 40,000 people. Bukele stated, “The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.” I assume this is just another way to get in on those sweet prison profits. Even if you accept that prison is necessary, should companies be turning a profit from it? It’s also strange and troubling because it is unconstitutional to deport American citizens. I don’t know if that will stop them from doing it, but I hope it would at least slow them down. I do worry that this could become a way to remove dissidents. This may sound far-fetched at the moment but I don’t think it’s safe to assume it couldn’t happen (but we should all be raging to prevent such things from happening). President Bukele is definitely operating in the same style as Trump. El Salvador’s constitution used to say that presidents could only serve a second term after waiting ten years (seems like a great idea to me), but Bukele-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned this, paving the way for him to become president for a second consecutive term (I learned all about this from editing Wikipedia!). This is a case of dictators supporting dictators!

Books and Other Words

book: Notorious Sorcerer. Cover features the silhouette of a man in a red coat, holding a flame in his hand
Notorious Sorcerer

I really enjoyed Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans. I accidentally bought the second book in this series when I was browsing my local bookshop and then had to double back and get the first book, Notorious Sorcerer, from the library. The story follows Siyon Velo who makes his living “delving” between dimensions to acquire alchemically charted materials, which he sells to local practitioners. He’s a member of the Bravi, which seems like a cross between a gang and a theater troupe (perhaps … this is all gangs?). Alchemy is technically illegal in Siyon’s city, but rich people practice it and, if you have money—which Siyon does not—you can learn it at the university. The author’s world is very rich and has a cool magic system, which the wealthy magic practitioners think they understand, but maybe not so well as they believe. I don’t want to spoil anything but I will say there are lots of good characters—including a rich twat consigning himself to another realm because he’s in love with a creature, pretty and useless men (per the author’s description! that’s not me)—card games that may or may not be inspired by forgotten magic, and at least one trip to the opera. I’m looking forward to the other books.

book cover for Let This Radicalize You shown on Kobo ereader
Let This Radicalize You

The title of Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s book Let This Radicalize You comes from one of the author’s frequent sayings: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” The book offers perspectives on organizing and activism and includes thoughts from experienced activists on various themes. I loved this book and I highlighted so much wisdom as I read (and I am resisting copying it all out here). It’s really important, especially now, to figure out what we can do to avoid despair and connect with others. Hayes and Kaba emphasize that the key to activism is caring about other people (and yourself!) and building relationships. Connecting with other people is how movements are built; just reminding people of “horrifying facts” does not change people’s minds (My number one pitfall: assuming people will change their mind with sufficient information. Alas). The authors explain that hope is something you do and that “taking action is a practice of hope.” If we want to transform the world, “the most important thing you can do … is act.” We have to fight for the world we want, in person. We don’t all have to do everything, but we all have to do something. One observation that really hit me hard was that reading the news and consuming information about politics feels like being engaged in a political practice, but it’s actually just a hobby. Scrolling twitter and getting upset about every new piece of shitty legislation or whatever Elon is doing is not the same as being politically engaged. As the authors put it, “Debating the latest headline protest is ‘no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.'” Ouch. It’s also a good reminder to not to listen to criticism from anyone who isn’t putting in the work. It made me think of a recent article from 404 Media called You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism and, yeah, you can’t. You have to do uncomfortable things, like deal with people whose views don’t perfectly align with our own. We have to do things and connect with people. Per Hayes and Kaba, “When people delve into activism, they often grapple with questions like, ‘Am I willing to get arrested,’ when often the more pressing question for a new activist is ‘Am I willing to listen, even when it’s hard?'” The also ask “how much discomfort is the world worth?” Oof! Finally, I must share this quote on reading and educating oneself: “We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition … but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from.”

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? via The Life of a Femcel. It sounds like the job market is even worse than when I graduated into the recession in 2009. I feel for these young people. From the article, “My other main point is this: we are in such late stage capitalism that even the people, perhaps especially the people, who have done everything right by interning, getting a good degree from a top university, networked, worked hard, are screwed. The only way to get a job now is through a connection, and much of that is timing, luck, and class.”
  • On the recipe as object via From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. A piece that asks “If recipes and cookbooks have historically been significant ways to understand people and places better, spanning geography and time, what does the digital glut and onslaught of recipes tell us about our current moment?”
  • How Can You Spot an Inaccurate Dinosaur? AO Wants to Know. via Atlas Obscura. This is an article about one man’s mission to illustrate the inaccuracies in dinosaur toys and show what they should look like, based on what we currently know. We love to see an autistic person (I can only assume) thriving.

Corporeal Form

Is anyone else just … feeling physically bad? I know it’s not just me because Culture Study had a whole piece a few days ago called Who Else Is Feeling This In Their Body and all the comments are like YES, ME TOO. I’ve been pretty tired and everything feels extra hard lately, even for things I want to do. I didn’t think I was sleeping that poorly since my brain never saves information about if I’m waking up at night, but a few nights ago I dreamed that I took an all-day nap. How exhausted do you have to be to need sleep in a dream? Also my knees are feeling bad, which includes my “good” knee doing something weird. I don’t know what but it doesn’t feel right and I’m a little scared to investigate. Let’s hope it’s just the weather. I cannot abide another ailment.

Doing Stuff

We had the second annual SOUPer Bowl two weeks ago. It seems like this was long enough ago that it should have been in my last post, but it just missed the cutoff. It was really great and everyone made good soup. Getting together with friends for a low-stakes food-based activity is actually amazing. I made Senegalese peanut soup from The Daily Soup Cookbook and it was well received. I can’t ask for more than that! I feel like there ought to be more to say about it, but what is there I can say about the joy of getting together with the gang and eating soup on a rainy day?

This weekend we saw the Sacramento Ballet do Romeo and Juliet and they had a live orchestra and everything! I like seeing these classic ballets in part because it’s fun to see the origin of songs I often hear in ballet class, like this one. I thought the choreography was very playful. I have no idea if that is typical for this ballet; they said they used new choreography (with the traditional Prokofiev score). I also thought it was interesting that the choreography seemed to reference the play’s dialogue, like when Romeo and Juliet first kiss, they do a bunch of moves with their hands touching and I thought that was a cool allusion to the line about letting lips do what hands do.

Kitchen Witchery

I haven’t gone too wild in the kitchen recently, continuing my trend of taking it easy. I made some good Indian food, all stuff I’ve made before: matar paneer (peas and cheese), lentils, and rice, plus some roasted cauliflower for good measure. I was very satisfied with this potato soup that I made a couple of nights ago. It’s a New York Times recipe so I will note that I added a little more seasoning, in case anyone is planning to try it.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. For anyone hoping for updates about Fritz’s poor litter box behavior: he is making progress. He started pooping in the bathtub instead of in places around the house, which we encouraged because that’s at least next to the litter box and maybe will make him feel better about being in the bathroom. He has been using the box more readily and even did so without anyone observing it! He normally thinks using the bathroom needs to be a family activity. Don’t let anyone tell you that cats are anti-social.

Two Weeks in the Life: February 2, 2025

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope we are all staying as sane as possible in these wild times. I myself am feeling a little nuts but I’m hanging in there. I’m trying to stay offline and read my books and talk to my friends. I hope you are all doing the same.

I know a lot of people get to my posts through social media, but as we know social media is crumbling and a lot of people are not using it as much. So, I’d like to remind you that you can subscribe to my blog here. You’ll get every post in your inbox as an email. You can even reply to it and it will come straight to me!

Current Events

It hasn’t even been two weeks of Trump round two and everything feels insane. There’s a pervasive sense of unreality that I think is probably very similar to what people in the USSR felt. Rules are changing, it’s about to be very hard to buy anything (including food) thanks to these tariffs, and we have no idea what kind of kleptocratic bullshit the administration is going to do next. I was commenting to my friend that we were planning a trip to Costco before their teamsters went on strike (averted at the last minute, by the way) and I was like, wow, what a Soviet-ass statement. I fear that the era of getting everything we want when we want it is coming to an end. I’ve got two books on the top of my reading list to help me think about this topic: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. I’ll let you know what I learn.

I am trying to avoid the news, not completely but enough to keep me sane. I know we need to know what’s going on but I don’t think the palace intrigue and propaganda press announcements and minuta are going to help me. I spent Trump’s first term on Twitter non-stop and, in retrospect, that was not a great choice. Unfortunately, since I work as a federal contractor, a lot of news is coming directly. They are sending notices about the executive orders Trump is issuing and the resultant policy changes to my work email. They keep saying that these messages are “legitimate and can be trusted,” which … if you have to announce that about yourself, I think you know you’ve already lost. It’s a little scary and I’m hoping my program doesn’t get canceled. I’m just glad I’m not a full federal employee because then I’d be losing all my work towards my pension and benefits if I got laid off (as it is, I just have to hope the stock market doesn’t crash and take my 401(k) with it … -desperate laughter-). There are also much bigger problems beyond one small program that supports the Affordable Care Act, like the fact that Elon now has “access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.” For all the bad stuff that is happening, this could be seriously terrible. This is all the government’s money. I’m sure there’s no connection, but Elon did spend $44 billion buying twitter, which came from a combination of personal funds, money from investors, Qatar, and a Saudi prince. Apparently, it’s not enough to be the richest guy in the world, he also has to make sure no one else has any money at all. I hope he drops dead.

Books and Other Words

book cover for The Crescent Moon Tearoom shown on kobo ereader
The Crescent Moon Tearoom

The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski is about three magical sisters—triplets, in fact—who run a tea house in late 19th century Chicago. The girls bake nice treats and read their customers’ tea leaves, making it a very popular stop for the ladies of Chicago. The story is about the tension of discovering yourself and what you want even if that’s not what you thought your life was going to be, which of course is heightened by having identical sisters who thought they would all be together all the time. The story is cute but it’s working overtime to be “cozy” to the point that it borders on saccharine. The prose didn’t really do it for me, either. The author fell back onto the same imagery a lot (so many references to the scent of marigold and the “candy-striped” circus tent, and feeling sensations all the way down to one’s toes) and, as an editor, I unfortunately notice these things. I do appreciate that there’s a circus in this book, though it’s not the main event. One of the sisters falls for a handsome performer whose personality seems to just be trapeze artist with “inky black curls” (his job is just trapeze). But I suppose who among us would be immune to an empty-headed and attractive trapeze performer who listens to our problems? So, while I love witches and circuses and often appreciate a tale of sisterly relationships, this book was just okay in my opinion.

This is a rare post featuring just one book. I’ve been reading a lot of Don Quijote, but it’s going to be a while before I finish it. I’m about three-quarters through a quite good fantasy book, but you’ll have to wait for next time to hear about it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • what the fuck are we doing anymore via the late review. Thoughts on the state of social media and journalism and writing, and how things are now terrifying and making us all insane.
  • The Social Media Sea Change via Culture Study. More thoughts on social media but more practical with musings on how it feels to be on social media less.
  • Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions via The Onion. This headline speaks for itself.
  • If you were rich, would you fold laundry? via Inner Workings. From the article, “An ideal is emerging for me, a triad of types of work: The work you do to get paid, the life maintenance tasks like laundry, and the creative things you do for you. The economy-oriented work, the basic needs work, and the soul work, each of which brings something different to a full life. Three legs that create a solid foundation. I think the benefits of the paid work and the creative work are more obvious, but I would argue the maintenance work also has benefits. The role of these tasks in this triad is to anchor me to the world. They remind me how life is sustained. They remind me to value such work at the level it should be valued.”

Now That’s What I Call Shower Drama vol. 8

Regular readers are well acquainted with our ongoing shower saga (original saga: 1, 2, 3. extended saga: 1, 2, 3, 4). Because apparently nothing can be easy, it continued this week. We were originally slated to start last Thursday—we signed a contract for the work in October but had been waiting for all the materials to arrive and then the holidays to end—but they had to push it back slightly and I was told they would tentatively start on Monday. On Sunday night, I texted the project manager to ask what was going on and he said he’d been furloughed and didn’t know. I kind of assumed the work would be further delayed since no one had confirmed with me, but in fact people showed up bright and early on Monday morning to rip out the shower. It was Wednesday before I got ahold of anyone at the construction company to find out what was going on. We have a new project manager who wanted to come over and “talk through” the project. I was very cross when he said he needed to check if they had all the materials and that the job started “earlier than [I] expected.” There’s a huge difference between that and people showing up without letting me know that they were for sure coming. I still am not certain when someone is next planning to come over and continue working on this shit, which means we’ve had a full week without using this bathroom because people can’t fucking communicate. Fortunately we have a second bathroom, but that’s where we keep the cat’s litter box so it’s not like I want to leave my toothbrush in there! I am having a bad time!

The space where my shower has been removed, exposing the inner walls, pipes, and insulation
here we go again

Doing Stuff

A shelf of bound periodicals with five volumes of "Lesbian Connection"
I went to the Lesbian Connection and everyone knew you

After the election, one of the things I wrote was “Pick one cause to put your effort into. There will be many things that need attention (I mean, there already are!) in the coming years. Pick one thing in your community that you want to support and volunteer for that.” I may have discovered my thing. Yesterday I went to volunteer orientation at the Lavender Library, Sacramento’s queer library and archive. It’s completely run by volunteers, and people can go there to read, check out books, or participate in community programs. I think it’s really cool and I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this sooner. All the volunteers work the circulation desk to keep the library open, and there is the option of joining committees and doing other activities to keep the library going. I may finally put my masters in library and information science to use, some ten years later.

Big neon sign announcing the Crest theater with the marquee listing "Maria Bamford"
Maria Bamford at the Crest

Abby invited me to see comedian Maria Bamford with her. I went in knowing nothing about Bamford, just trusting Abby’s taste, and it was so hilarious. I mean, she opened with a bit where she rolls on the ground and says “I’m doing my job … I’m clocking in to work.” Yeah, that’s how it feels to work lately. I’m rolling on the ground. I am a worm. None of this makes sense but I’m here to put on my little show and get paid. It was good to just laugh for an hour and a half and be in a group where everyone is just as mad about how much everything sucks. Both Bamford and her opener hit us with a few comments about how much everything is insane and the crowd was like WOO YEAH. We’re all feeling it. We are not alone in this. So yeah, go out and laugh and be reminded that you are not an island.

Pump up the (Monster) Jam

me standing in front of a Scooby Doo-themed monster truck at Monster Jam
Monster Jam

A monster truck rally is probably one of the last places you’d expect to find me; yet, I went to one last weekend. My “niece” (biologically speaking: my friend Mandy’s kid. spiritually speaking: my niece) has been talking about monster trucks and how much she wants to see them for a while so we womaned up and took her to see Monster Jam! My niece had a great time but we were kind of bored by the whole thing. It’s just … big trucks? I don’t know. I’m not in the target demographic, I guess. I was surprised to notice that the primary audience is children, and probably autistic children, if I’m any judge of such things. The crowd mostly consisted of families with young kids. At the venue, they were selling ear protection in the form of headphones shaped like monster truck tires that light up, and little constellations of LED lights dotted the arena.

I found it fairly boring that the show was each car coming out, doing a trick, then ceding the floor to the next one. I was expecting a race, or perhaps a battle of some sort? It turns out the trucks do not fight. In between these stunts, there was a lot of commentary, which I found kind of grating. I felt like only one of the drivers, the woman piloting the shark-themed Megalodon, really understood the assignment. She seemed to get the cartoonish nature of the whole affair and really played up to the crowd. In contrast, the lady driving the Scooby Doo truck looked kind of dead behind the eyes. Lady, it’s a truck shaped like a dog and the tail wags. Get into it! Anyway, I’ve now seen for myself the kind of thing that could only be popular in America.

Nostalgia!!

In an effort to stay off the internet, I’ve been playing a lot of original Super Nintendo games over the last couple weeks. I signed up for Nintendo Online on the Switch (sidebar: why is everything a fucking subscription now? A rant for another day) so I could play old games. I actually still have my old Super Nintendo, but there’s no way to hook it up to a modern TV. I have been delighted to realize I still remember where all the secrets are in Super Mario 3. That shit is just in my brain for life. When I was a kid, there was a year when we got a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine and at the time they included a guidebook to Super Mario All-Stars (consisting of Mario games one through three plus Lost Levels) that showed the layout of each level and what was in it. I absolutely revered this book. “Cheating!” some might say. Well, we didn’t have YouTube back then so this was one of the few ways to really learn everything in the game. The other day I searched online to see if anyone had preserved it, and of course someone has! It’s in the Internet Archive. Thank you to whoever put this online for me to enjoy.

The Passamackey Mystery

I am encountering lots of new terms as I read Don Quijote and there are about a billion footnotes in the Spanish edition to explain the archaic usage of many words (I passed lucky footnote number 1,000 this week). Surprisingly, my friends reading in English are also finding some unfamiliar words. Lito brought up the word “passamackey,” which appears in the John Rutherford translation and apparently literally nowhere else on the internet, in our group chat. The text reads “… all the Turkish sailors and soldiers were convinced that they were going to be attacked there, and had their close and their passamackeys, or shoes, ready to flee over land without waiting for the assault.” We could tell from context that it’s a type of shoe but we had no idea where this word came from. I checked the Spanish version to see if we could figure it out, but the it wasn’t a whole lot more useful, it uses the word “pasamaques,” which suggests that the translator merely anglicized the word and called it a day. The Spanish version did have a helpful footnote explaining that passamaques are a type of sandal. I had to dig deep on the internet to get more information, but I eventually found a document called Notas etimológicas a “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, dated 1899, in Wikisource (thank you Wikipedia). It explains that the term comes from the Turkish word بشامق‎ or baxámac, which is a type of sandal that “even Turkish emperors used.” Lito also confirmed with a Turkish friend that the modern word is paşmak, formerly written as başmak (Turkish during the Ottoman empire was written in the Arabic script, which does not have a p, so it would have been written with a b instead. This is why the word appears to change from başmak to paşmak), which means shoe, although the word originally referred to a palace, as that is where they were worn. This was hard-won knowledge so I am writing it down for the next poor soul who is trying to figure out where the hell this word came from. You’re welcome!

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been cooking normal stuff and I’m still trying new tofu recipes. I revisited the orange tofu and broccoli, which I previously mentioned came out terribly, and used the Panda Express-branded orange sauce that they sell at the grocery store. This was a good choice. It tastes good and the result is a very easy meal, since you just roast the tofu and broccoli together in the oven then apply the sauce. On Friday night, I tried the kung pao tofu recipe from Bean by Bean and we loved it. I was pleasantly surprised by how good this recipe is. It’s a great time to find more tofu recipes to love considering the cost of groceries (laugh/cry)! Finally, it’s been cold, so I made stew and biscuits! I use the recipe from How to Cook Everything as a starting point, but I use the slow cooker and add some extra stuff for flavor like a packet of Lipton onion soup.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has truly been serving lately.