Two Weeks in the Life: September 1, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been feeling very productive over the last week. I’m determined to start lifting weights in my garage gym again (I haven’t touched anything this year so far!) so I’ve been cleaning and organizing and de-spidering the garage. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of random stuff that we don’t need or didn’t like or missed the return period for, mostly by posting it on the local buy nothing facebook group and having the garbage service come do a junk pickup for all the things that needed to go to the electronics recycling center (if you’re in Sacramento County, you get three free large or bulky trash pickups every year by the way). Some things that people are willing to claim via the buy nothing are not surprising, like some old dumbbells (we got a fancy new set that interlocks so you can get multiple weights from one piece of equipment). Other things are more surprising, like that someone actually wanted the “universal” toilet pump kit that did not work for our old toilet and has languished in the garage for two years. I’m glad people want these items though because they are often perfectly fine, it’s just that they did not work for me. I feel better that someone wants to use them so I don’t have to throw away totally functional objects.

A bookcase in my garage with newly cleaned shelves, some things in neat piles, and some small plastic bins on some shelves
Some garage organization

I’ve realized that if the garage is at all icky, I do not want to be out there. So, to keep the garage organized and limit the amount of spiderwebs and dust that can collect, on Saturday, I organized a big pile of tools and random household stuff into these clear plastic bins. It keeps creepy crawlies out and we can see what’s inside. The bins are not that big so it means they can’t get too heavy and unwieldy and they won’t get overstuffed (plus I put a label on the top with tape so we know what types of things are in there). I’m hoping this helps the garage stay organized. Kirk also suggested that we finally get a new side door on the garage (not the big door that you drive in, but a people door) to keep the critters out. We have been meaning to do this for a while because this door is not really an outside-facing door. It feels like an inside door and doesn’t have a sweep on the bottom. We also need to install some lights out there so I can have the option to work out in the evening after it gets dark. Anyway, home ownership is really as annoying as everyone says it is but I still vastly prefer it to the alternative.

I have not gone outside to work out yet but I am hoping to do it today since the weather isn’t supposed to be too hot and now the garage is fairly clean. I will report back.

A pile of vintage cookbooks including Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, and Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
new (to me) cookbooks

In other topics, last weekend I went with Kirk to his parents’ house because his dad invited me to take any cookbooks I wanted from my late mother-in-law’s collection. She had quite a lot of books, but I just took a few vintage Julia Child and Alice Waters, plus one from the Moosewood Collective. You can’t see it very well in the photo, but she had a thin cookbook from 1897 called Scientific Cookery that I also took. I think it is the source of her clam chowder recipe that she used to make on Christmas eve. I also noticed she left notes in a lot of cookbooks, which I love. I find I am sentimental about these sorts of things that connect us to previous generations of women who perhaps did not have a lot of other avenues for artistic expression.

Books and Other Words

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher is a book that weaves together real people’s stories from Thrasher’s own reporting and the science and sociology of disease. The book discusses ten intertwined vectors of inequality—including racism, the carceral system, and ableism—and how they all work together to make certain groups of people more vulnerable to viruses. Throughout the book, Thrasher compares the recent, ongoing covid-19 pandemic with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which peaked in the 1990s. A lot of the work that LGBT activists did around AIDS laid the groundwork for some of the good ways communities responded to covid, but Thrasher also highlights the fact that, in some areas, we have not learned much, and in fact we are still dealing with a lot of inequality and misinformation surrounding HIV and AIDS today. One major theme in the narrative was that America has a very individualistic culture, which means that a lot of people are not prepared to do things that might be good for the community even if it isn’t necessary for them as an individual, like wearing a mask to reduce the transmission of covid to vulnerable groups like prison populations or disabled people. Some conservative groups have even coopted progressive language (“my body, my choice”) to protest mask mandates. There is a really interesting discussion that wraps up the book about how perceiving ourselves as “owning” a body versus “being” a body feeds into the way we see ourselves (or not) as part of a larger body like a community or a society, which gave me a lot to think about on an existential level. Thrasher also talked about the unfulfilled potential during the height of the covid pandemic to change society and how hopeful things felt, in certain ways, in 2020 when people were acting collectively to limit the spread of disease. He observes that, “Even when tens of millions had no income, we largely accepted that rent had to be paid to landlords.” Which is wild! So many things changed in response to the coronavirus but not rent. Not paying for healthcare. There is still work to do.

I’m on a bit of a non-fiction streak because I also read Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen. This book broadly describes Indigenous history in North America and Indigenous people’s interactions with European settlers. This book is long but any chapter could easily be a book in its own right given that Hämäläinen covers 500 years of history. So, at this point in my life I am well aware of the contentious history and the fact that Europeans killed something like 80% of America’s Indigenous people (directly or through the spread disease), and as I was reading, I was trying to remember what I learned in school about Indigenous people here. I found a big gap. Like, I can remember learning about some specific battles and skirmishes, the story of the “first Thanksgiving” with everyone happily getting together to feast, and some general facts. But I don’t think it was clear to me that Indigenous people were nations (as Hämäläinen describes them and the US used to do before we started calling them “tribes” to delegitimize them) and that they fought tooth and fucking nail to not be killed and displaced and have their way of life paved over. Imagine walking past a house and the front door was open and you thought “cool house, I’m moving in,” but then found people on the couch once you got inside. It would be insane to tell them to get out and that this is your house, right? Yet, that’s what Europeans and then the United States did for several centuries. They claimed land wasn’t in use because Indigenous people weren’t farming it all or using it in the way they thought it should be used. It’s maddening that it seems so clearly wrong when you see it all laid out like this but this is not the story our country tells about itself. Our history is just one big string of broken promises with people who were here first and who we could have coexisted with if our forebearers hadn’t chosen to be genocidal assholes in the name of capitalism and Jesus. When Indigenous people did try to live in the way the local white people seemed to want them to, they still got run out of town (to put it extremely mildly) for being too uppity and coming up against people’s racist beliefs. All this is inextricable from why our government won’t stop supporting Israel as it destroys Palestinian lives. Israel is doing exactly what the US did for centuries. Admitting that Israel is doing something wrong means we have to admit that we were wrong too, and this country doesn’t have the emotional maturity for that.

I picked up Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual because I really liked Cahokia Jazz, which I read a few months ago. Light Perpetual did not blow my mind wide open like Cahokia Jazz did, but it’s still a good story and a very well written book. It is also a tale of alternate history, in this case, imagining the lives of several children who might not have died in the very specific circumstance that one particular bomb did not fall on a particular Wollworth’s in London. The story follows their lives from south London at age five through their 70s as they grow up, have families, and witness the world changing.

Bunny by Mona Awad is a novel that reminds us that friends don’t let friends go to grad school. The book is definitely a little creepy and left me wondering just how reliable our narrator was. It was also darkly funny and definitely took some inspiration from the movie Heathers. Our protagonist, Samantha, is one of five women in a graduate writing program at a prestigious university. Bunny explores how isolating it can be to not fit in with your peers, especially when they have the kind of wealth and comfort that you don’t, and how hard it can be to create art. It also looks into what happens when your peers are absolutely fucking nuts and sharing some kind of hive mind and maybe performing dark magic in their attic. Fortunately, this was not my experience of grad school, but I fear it is all too common.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

TV and Music

Two songs that are really defining the vibe right now for me are The Socialist Vampire Conspiracy Part III (yes, there are parts I and II) by Oli Frost and We’re Fucked by We Are the Dream Eaters. Socialist vampires would at least want to take good enough care of humans and the planet to keep their food source in good shape. But here we are with the capitalists in charge. We’re fucked.

Corporeal Form

Last time, I mentioned that my carpal tunnel was bothering me and making it hard to knit, so I’ve been trying really hard to be responsible and wear my brace. I was reading up online about what carpal tunnel even is and learned there are actually reasons to wear the damn brace at night, which my doctor did not explain. She just said “wear it to bed” and left, basically. My knee-jerk reaction was that I do not want more medical apparatuses added to my sleeping situation, however, given that the wrist often ends up in weird positions during sleep, it’s actually preferable to wear the brace to bed. Wearing it during the day can be detrimental because the muscles weaken. Cool. It would be nice if the doctor actually explained things to me, instead of not explaining things then getting mad at me when I arrive to appointments having read about things online. I literally cannot win. I have been wearing it at night for most of the last week and I do think it’s making a difference. I am not getting the tingling as frequently, so at least it’s getting better even though the remedy is annoying.

I have also previously mentioned that I was semi-convinced that I have POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) because I have a notable number of the symptoms. My doctor said I don’t have it but I do feel that something is wrong with me because I know it’s not normal to feel out of breath and dizzy every time I lean forward or stand up. I was searching online for a place to get independently tested but I found this self-test instead, so of course I administered it to myself. And I definitely do not have POTS! I still don’t know what’s wrong with me but I guess I have to agree with my doctor that it’s not POTS.

Moving It

My dance classes started again this week, which I am very happy about. I really like the feeling of going back to school (not enough to actually do more school haha), but starting a new season of dance class kind of gets me that sensation. I’m keeping on with ballet, jazz, and tap this year. If anyone wants to join me, the studio is Galaxy Dance Arts. We really need more people to join tap in particular because enrollment is kind of low and they won’t keep the class for just me!

Kitchen Witchery

We are rapidly approaching fall, but it is still summer, especially as far as produce (and the weather) is concerned so I am still doing a lot of corn and zucchini stuff. I tried another Smitten Kitchen recipe (her recipe catalog is deep), a corn and bean chowder topped with cotija cheese and other nice things. I liked it and it makes a corn soup a little more filling (you know I am all about that bean life haha). I also made a chocolate zucchini cake because maybe we all need more chocolate cake in our lives. On Friday night, my friend and her daughter (my “niece”) came over for dinner so I got fancy and made enchiladas mineras from Rick Martinez’s Mi Cocina cookbook (you can actually watch him make this on YouTube here). I think I made the sauce a little too watery (my most frequent cooking error) but they were still really good. For dessert we had flourless chocolate cake, which I’ve been wanting to try making for a while. It was good! Obviously! It’s chocolate cake.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: August 18, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve gotten back into Scrabble this week. I read an article about a man using Scrabble to help him deal with going sober. It was a very good essay and an interesting exploration into some people just needing something for their brain to do all the time. But what I really got from this article was the link to a website where people play Scrabble (https://isc.ro/). This is just a regular, old-school website, not a stupid app like ScrabbleGo or Words with Friends. I like Scrabble but their app annoyed me on many levels! It made playing the game feel more like hitting the slots at a casino. Random men were always trying to use it as a way to hit on people (and by “people” I mean me, even though my profile photo was a cat). So far, no one has tried to hit on me on Internet Scrabble Club and I appreciate the low-tech nature of the site. I am having fun! I’m playing too much Scrabble because I can’t do anything without really doing a thing. If you want to play with me, let me know! My screen name is linzomatic.

Current Events

Hey, so, I’m really worried about Trump telegraphing the fact that he intends to be dictator for (the rest of his) life and that he is presumably planning to install an autocratic regime. He told a crowd that they “won’t have to vote anymore” if they vote him into office this time. I don’t think he’s being hyperbolic; I really think that’s his goal. We’ve already seen the ways that Trump-aligned Republicans are trying to suppress the vote and sway the upcoming election in his favor, so I see no reason not to take him literally. I’m sitting here grimacing trying to think of what to say. I think we can all agree that no one wants this future.

As everyone knows by now but I must reiterate to introduce my paragraph, Kamala Harris picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. This man has a certain wholesomeness to him that is borne out in a lot of his policies. He signed a bill into law to provide free meals at schools and another that provides free menstrual products to students. Those things alone make me want to vote for him. He is, obviously, not perfect because no one can be in this political system. While he does seem to be a big climate proponent, he also allowed a “new tar sands pipeline to pass through [indigenous] treaty-protected lands—after explicitly promising he wouldn’t.” Unfortunately, like nearly every politician in this country, Walz is a pro-Israel guy. I’m so deeply conflicted about this election because so many people are saying that voting third party is the only way to show politicians that we are not okay with financing a genocide. Harris doesn’t seem inclined to hear pro-Palestinian protesters out and hasn’t shown any movement in that direction (even though, according to an analysis by the IMEU Policy Project, more voters would show up for her “if she pledges to stop weapons to Israel” or “if Biden secures a ceasefire”). On the other hand, Harris would absolutely be a better president than Trump and we might actually get some decent governing out of her. She recently announced some big policies that sound really great and she is certainly the candidate that will be better for the LGBT community. I don’t want to vote for someone who is still supporting a genocide but where are the alternatives? Our system is broken.

Books and Other Words

I read Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots and I enjoyed it even though it wasn’t exactly what I expected. I thought it was going to be a wacky, mad-cap, Venture Brothers-style take on superheroes but it was a little more Watchmen/The Boys. The main character starts out as a temp worker for super villains—because someone has to do all the administrative work of professional aggression. After a super hero breaks her leg while she’s serving as an extra during a villain’s press conference, she becomes very interested in the cost of all this caped crusading. She starts a blog and tallies up how much it costs every time a hero knocks down a building during a fight, for example. Eventually, this gets her picked up by a major villain and she gets a full-time gig running what’s basically a team dedicated to psychological warfare against heroes. It’s an interesting story and I’m curious to see what happens in the next book.

Moonbound by Robin Sloan is essentially a hero’s journey set over 11,000 years in the future where all animals can talk and beavers are the stewards of the earth’s climate and there’s a college built around a worm-goddess who lives at the bottom of a well (yes, really). I thought this book was really cool. I love seeing ideas for how society can be completely re-imagined (especially after catastrophes) and it’s especially interesting to consider that over such a huge time scale. The book mentions entire civilizations that rose and fell between the humans of today (known as the “Anth,” which I assume is short for “anthropecene”) and the story’s present day. This book has questing, dragon slaying, wizards, a sword in a stone, and a whole city that runs on recycled materials—and none of those things show up in the way you think they might.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village via SI. Can’t afford health insurance? Have you considered qualifying for the Olympics instead? This is like a dystopian short story except it is real life. I’m glad these athletes are getting health care and taking advantage of what’s available at the Olympics but for fucks’ sake, could this country consider taking care of its citizens?
  • Newsom threatens to take money from counties that don’t reduce homelessness via LA Times. Gavin Newsom is big mad about homelessness and not in what I would consider a normal way. Since the Supreme Court said that cities can basically criminalize homelessness, Newsom has been really aggressive about removing homeless people. I, too, would like to see a reduction in homelessness but people need somewhere to go. They can’t afford to live anywhere! Private equity firms are buying up a lot of houses and inflation is kicking us all in the ass. According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, “As many as 40%–60% of people experiencing homelessness have a job, but housing is unaffordable because wages have not kept up with rising rents.” People can be working and still not afford a place to live. And now Gavin Newsom is out there personally clearing out homeless people. What is he trying to do? Look tough so he can run for president in 2028? No one is impressed!
  • The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it via Pluralistic. Here’s another good article from Cory Doctorow. Google lost its antitrust case! It’s officially a monopoly. The question of course is: what are they going to do about it?
  • This disused mine in Finland is being turned into a gravity battery to store renewable energy via Euro News. This is really cool! The idea is that excess wind or solar power could life weights up the mine shaft, and the weights could be slowly released later on to generate power.

Languages

paperback book: El beso de la mujer araña
El beso de la mujer araña

Inspired by my Wikipedia activities, I read El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig (English version: Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was mentioned in the LGBT literature in Argentina article that I translated. I was only somewhat plagued by Argentina-specific Spanish words (Argentina’s Spanish is really something else) and fortunately I was already familiar enough with the country’s history to have some context for the story. El beso de la mujer araña is told almost entirely through dialog between two characters, Molina and Valentín, sharing a prison cell. A lot of the novel involves Molina narrating movies he has seen in great detail for Valentín to help pass the time. I don’t have any serious things to say about this book but I did like it and I am proud of myself for doing some more reading in Spanish, especially of a classic gay work.

Corporal Form

Last week I had a follow up with my GI doctor to talk about my liver health (previously discussed here, here, and here). She asked how my liver was doing, which … you can’t know how the liver is doing. That’s the whole thing. That’s why I had to do a biopsy. So I laughed and basically said, how would I know? It turned out she really wanted to ask me if I’d lost any weight. We went through our usual song and dance of her being like “lose weight … OR ELSE!” and I’m like “that sounds like an eating disorder but I’m making some healthy adjustments in other ways.” She did reveal that all my liver numbers are actually quite good and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have been referred to her or done a biopsy and everything, so I’m not sure why she’s being so aggressive with me. It’s like she wants to be the one who magically inspired me to lose 200 pounds. Sorry, but it’s not gonna happen.

Relatedly, something that is kind of becoming my Roman empire is the link between microplastics and obesity. Short version: we are inadvertently consuming quite a lot of microplastics and there seems to be some scientifically documented connection between microplastics and the risk for obesity. I’m not trying to say here that microplastics are the only reason I’m fat. That isn’t the case. But I do think the whole idea of weight and losing weight is much more complicated than we like to pretend it is. There are people who are skinny no matter what they eat and people who are fat no matter what they eat. I’ve written before about my body image and reconciling some of my adolescent shame on the subject of fatness. Something I’ve also been turning over in my mind is the idea that I may be fat because of my many ailments, not afflicted by ailments because I’m fat (as the doctors love to suggest). One example: I didn’t get diagnosed with sleep apnea until 2018, when I was 32. I’m fairly certain I’ve had sleep apnea since I was a teenager, which means I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in at least 15 years. When you don’t get energy from sleep, the only other way to get energy is food. When you’re tired, it’s also very hard to plan ahead and make a lot of complicated decisions about what to cook and when. So, I don’t know. I’m not going to devote a whole essay to this subject right now, but I do wish people (including doctors) would develop a little empathy and curiosity and remember that there is very little about anyone’s physical form that anyone has consciously chosen.

Knitting and Crafts

Speaking of my many ailments. I’ve been trying to settle back down and work on my knitting. My hobbies always end up on a rotation because I have too many. Lately I’ve been studying my languages and translating Wikipedia a lot, which has eaten up time I might otherwise be knitting. I realized, however, that part of the reason I’ve been avoiding it is because of my carpal tunnel! Pre-carpal tunnel diagnosis, I was noticing that I couldn’t knit for very long before my hand got all tingly. Now I am aware that this is carpal tunnel. I am trying to be good about wearing my wrist brace and do my stretches and we’ll see if it helps. I am tired of ailments.

Kitchen Witchery

I know I have shared multiple pizza photos here but sometimes I make pizza and I’m like “wow, that looks perfect” and I have to share again. So here is my latest pizza.

The only new recipe I tried in the last two weeks is braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto from Smitten Kitchen. It’s topped with burrata and it tasted really good. Kirk said he would like to eat it again so it’s on my list of repeat recipes now. By the way, if anyone ever needs recipe ideas, I am still maintaining my recipe spreadsheet and it continues to gain power.

Cat Therapy

Now that I have two cats to honor, I wanted to create a more elaborate display. I bought this really cool shelf and Kirk helped me put it up in the bedroom. It’s now home to Viola’s and Huey’s remains, plus their paw prints and some photos and other sentimental bits. Nothing feels like enough but this will have to do.

A wall-mounted shelf with containers for Huey and Viola's ashes, their paw prints, and pictures of them both
Cat memorial shelf

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: August 4, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. I was thinking, as I often do, about words this week. I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned “book tube” (the part of YouTube where people talk about books) and it occurred to me that the “tube” in YouTube is a reference to TVs, specifically the old CRT TVs, which used a big tube to make the TV go. Now we’re using “tube” as a suffix and it doesn’t really have any relationship to its original meaning, not unlike “-gate” as in Watergate (which, it should be noted, is the name of a hotel and not a literal gate). Unrelated but also word-related, I was considering the word “interesting.” Interesting is my ultimate compliment because I am at least a little curious about everything so for something to fully take up my attention, it’s serious. I realize I describe things as interesting a lot but I think most people use it as filler. It’s often used for “weird” just “I’m bored and want to say something noncommittal.” Not me though. I’m fucking interested.

Books and Other Words

I picked up The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi because the description said the main character is a translator and I think that’s neat. However, this book is horror and that’s not really my genre. We know something bad is happening so it’s not all that surprising when we get to the horrific thing, but I guess the real horror is the friends we made along the way, or something. The titular “Centre” is a very expensive language learning program in which learners spend 10 days in a sort-of monastic seclusion listening to recordings from a person speaking in their target language. Like magic, partway through the course, the learner suddenly finds themselves fluent and able to understand without having put in any apparent work. I won’t spoil the horror of it, but the novel is ultimately, I think, about colonialism and consumption. What happens when people from a country like England consume a developing country’s culture? How do we perceive people who are lower in the hierarchy—whatever the hierarchy may be—than we are? Furthermore, what would actually make us happy? These are all questions The Centre grapples with.

I was about two-thirds through Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and puzzling over what, exactly, it was trying to tell me. I felt like I had cracked it, but then I read the acknowledgements and laughed. Bradley says she “became unhinged about various antique lads who died in the polar regions.” This book is actually a self-insert fanfic. In The Ministry of Time, a British intelligence agency has discovered a “time door” and they have pulled five individuals out of time. “Bridges” are agents assigned to each time traveler to acclimate them to the present. The story focuses one one bridge and her time expat, Graham Gore (his Wikipedia article has a photo [he’s attractive I guess, but he’s not the type to move me to write a whole novel]), the “antique lad” mentioned in the acknowledgements. In addition to polar explorer fanfic, one could also read this as yet another of our era’s warnings about global warming. We also meet characters from the future who briefly enlighten us about the relative uninhabitability of the earth; even the present is wracked by killer storms and unseasonable heat. I notice the climate crisis seeping into more and more of our fiction because it’s infiltrating our reality too. I think a traditional ending for this line of thought would be to say like “all our little choices add up,” and they do but you don’t need to get a lecture from me right now about what is ultimately a structural problem. Anyway, it was a fun read!

I was inspired to read The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen by this fascinating interview the author did with Anne Helen Petersen in Culture Study. The book is set in 19th century Finland, during a time when the Sami people were being slowly fenced in by settler culture. There are a lot of social and political threads in this story: the reindeer herders running into problems with farmers, the cult-like following that a local preacher has (and his way of preaching is not approved by the state church), young women trying to figure out where they fit into society. I thought this was a really interesting story and I’d love to read more about the Sami and this period. I am also curious about Pylväinen’s other novel, which is based on her childhood growing up in this little-known Finish offshoot of Christianity.

Tadek and the Princess is a novella that fills in some of the story for one of the characters from Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron, which I read a few weeks ago. It’s a very sweet and sentimental novella that gives us some backstory for Tadek’s childhood and expands on his relationship with the prince in the story’s present day. I may have cried a little but to be fair, I have been crying a lot this week.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • ICJ says Israel’s presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful via Al Jazeera. From the article, “The court said Israel has no right to sovereignty of the territories, is violating international laws against acquiring territory by force and is impeding Palestinians’ right to self-determination. It said other nations were obliged not to ‘render aid or assistance in maintaining’ Israel’s presence in the territory.” I’m glad we are, as a society, formally recognizing that what Israel is doing is wrong. Now we just need the U.S. government to stop sending them money.
  • Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that via The Guardian. I love to see people making information free! I’m looking forward to reading some of the articles in their Asymptote publication on translation and featuring translated literature.
  • Hacker Shows How to Get Free Laundry For Life via 404 Media. This is just a little feel-good story of a man getting fed up with shitty laundry machines stealing his cash and that man learning how to jailbreak the machine and run it without paying. The instructions are free and online for anyone to use.

Doing Stuff

Last weekend, Abby and I went to see a flamenco show. Flamenco dancing seems like a cousin of tap dancing in a way but it’s much more dramatic, and of course the dancing is connected to the other aspects of flamenco like the singing and the guitar playing. The show just had one dancer, although I kind of thought there would be more. It was very interesting to see her perform with a bravado we normally only see in men. Women’s artistic performances are often smiling or sexual in some way, however I would say this was a sensual, but not a sexualized, performance. I also realized this is definitely not an American art because they don’t make all the performers give a big, fake smile the whole time. The singers and musicians they just had neutral expressions (or even looked a little mad at times but that’s probably just what their faces felt like doing). There was a little girl in the row in front of us who immediately started stomping around after seeing the dancer. I love that. I love the idea of seeing something and immediately proclaiming “that looks fun, let me try!” I wish we had more of that attitude to go around.

Languages

This week I finished translating an article on LGBT literature in Mexico from Spanish to English, which I am proud of. I guess I have decided that queer literature is the subject I want to focus my Spanish to English translations on at the moment, and I’m having fun with it. After that I did a much shorter translation for the book that’s considered the seminal gay Mexican novel, El vampiro de la colonia Roma. I was searching for an English version of the book to find out if it had a different title (translated book titles are not always a direct translation), but I found an obituary for Luis Zapata, the author, which suggested that someone ought to do a new English translation. I haven’t even read this book yet but I’m like “wow, what if I did it!” I don’t know if I’ll do this but I do want to find out if you can just translate something then shop it around to a publisher. How does that all work? Perhaps this really can be my future.

I would also like to note that my translations from Icelandic Wikipedia are continuing. Among other articles, I’ve recently translated pieces about Vestari-Jökulsá (a glacier river) and Tindastóll (a mountain). I’m staying committed to the Icelandic geography beat for now.

Kitchen Witchery

I made a some really good recipes over the last two weeks! We loved this corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta, even though I accidentally ordered a quarter pound of asparagus instead of a whole pound, so it was a little light on the vegetable component. The recipe worked really well with this wide, tubular pasta. I’ve been trying to eat more tofu so I made this tofu with peanut sauce and we really liked that too! You basically can’t go wrong with a peanut sauce. To use the baby lima beans I got in my bean club subscription, I tried this slow-cooker butter beans with pecorino and pancetta recipe. It is pretty good but I made it too brothy (Of course. I always overestimate how much water to add.). I decided to treat it like a soup and tossed in some leftover raviolis and I was quite satisfied with that.

Cat Therapy

A whimsical black and white cat stuffed animal perched on my couch
cat-shaped friend

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Regular readers already know that Huey died last week. I’ve been missing her a lot. I am not as emotionally wrecked as when Viola died since I at least had a little warning. I got out a lot of crying in her last couple of days. I am still crying though. I wish I could have taken a week off work to mope but there is no bereavement leave when your pets die. I got so used to Huey chilling on that spot in the couch that I had to put a different blanket there because I kept expecting to see her on the usual one. I also bought a little stuffed animal to keep me company on the couch because that’s just the kind of person I am. It’s very hard to find a tuxedo cat stuffed animal and this was the best we could do. He’s a little goofy looking, but he’s cute.

Fritz seems to be fine with the current state of affairs. He has ascended to only-child status and is glad he doesn’t have to chase anyone out of “his” bedroom. Feel free to place bets for how long he will remain an only child.

Here’s one more Huey photo for the road.

Huey the cat on my chest. My face is partially visible and it's probably obvious that I'm crying
last call for Huey photos

Obituary: Huey Halsell, May 8, 2008–July 26, 2024

Huey, sitting on the bed with her front legs crossed, staring intently at the camera

My beloved cat Huey—my first born, if you will—passed today. She had been in increasingly rough shape for the last few months, which I am only really seeing now while reviewing the photos I have of her. She had been struggling for bladder issues on and off for months and we thought she was in the throes of a really bad UTI. We started another round of UTI medicine a few days ago, but it didn’t seem to help. Yesterday morning, I realized it had been a day or two since she’d eaten or had any water. She was lying on the floor in what seemed to be a wet spot and I realized the situation was much more dire than I had thought. We went to the vet that morning and got the bad news that she probably had lymphoma (or perhaps another cancer, the veterinarian wasn’t certain it was lymphoma but was certain about the cancer). Her breathing was labored and she could barely stand. They gave her some fluids and a steroid and said the steroids might perk her up and function as palliative care. In fact, the steroid did nothing at all and she was barely able to stand or move in her final days. This morning, she hadn’t moved from where I’d placed her the night before and she seemed tired and miserable. We took her to the vet to end the suffering this afternoon. It was a rough day but I was glad I got to spend one more day with her, knowing what was coming, and make sure she felt as loved and comfortable as possible.

I got Huey in 2008 when I was living in Seattle. I had been desperately wanting a cat. I’d tried adopting a black cat with a kinked tail about a year beforehand who named Caesar. However, I had to give him up because the fiend kept biting the bridge of my nose when I slept and I soon became delirious and irritated. Huey came from a friend of my then-boyfriend when the friend’s cat had a kitten. Once Huey was big enough, I picked her up in a cardboard carrier and we took a 30-minute bus ride back to my apartment. She screamed the whole way. I had planned to adopted a second kitten from the same person, but the next litter (of also just one kitten) died along with the mother before she was old enough to be adopted. So, sometimes I like to think Huey was narrowly spared the same fate.

Huey was an adorable little kitten and unfortunately, I do not have any photos available. They are all on an external hard drive that my computer refuses to acknowledge (actually I found ONE that I had uploaded to my blog previously. Phew). However, I can tell you she has always had a bitchy resting face that makes everyone who sees her think she’s mad and a hater. She may have been a hater but she loved me and she wasn’t nearly as mad as everyone thought. She just wanted her space. She wasn’t interested in any people besides me and truly never even warmed up to Kirk even though he has been in her life since 2012 and, in fact, he helped take very good care of her.

Queen Huey, as I came to call her, was the doyenne of the household and scorned all who approached her from her throne on the end of the couch. Huey went through a lot, including moving from Seattle to southern California, then partially doubling back to Sacramento. She endured siblings that she did not ask for or want: Viola and then Fritz after her. She hated to be brushed and she loved to sit on top of me, something she started doing as a kitten and never stopped. She used to lie on my chest while I was in bed but in the last couple years, her arthritis made jumping onto the bed a difficult proposition (plus Fritz emphasized that the bed was his). She converted to lying on me while I was on the couch and got in the habit of what I can only describe as holding my hand.

It feels terribly cruel that pets lead such short lives. I had hoped she’d make it to 20 but it was not meant to be. I just hope she was happy enough. I always feel like I didn’t do enough: wasn’t home enough, didn’t play enough, didn’t let her go outside and lie in the sun on the patio enough. However, looking back at some of these photos, I have to believe she was happy and knew she was loved. She will leave a great void in my heart. She’s been with me for nearly my adult life and I don’t know what I’ll do without her sharp meows meeting me at the door whenever I return home. I’m taking comfort in the fact that she’s no longer in pain because she was truly suffering, especially this last week. I hope wherever she is, she’s getting all the ice water, string cheese, shower water, and whipped cream that her little heart desires.

Two Weeks in the Life: July 21, 2024

Me and my sister Mia, smiling forthe camera
sisters

Hello, friends and enemies. This weekend I’m visiting my sister in Long Beach. She’s dealing with some shit that I won’t talk about here so I came in to offer some moral support and cook dinner for a few days. What I did not expect as part of this outing was to narrowly miss airports effectively shutting down because of a global tech outage. Fortunately, it seems like I’ll be able to get home just fine because, of course, everyone is working like mad to fix this but, also because I flew Southwest, which has apparently not updated Windows for a very long time and is thus immune to this particular computer-based ailment. It’s wild that one faulty patch can take out almost everything. Maybe we shouldn’t be letting corporations do everything? We especially shouldn’t let just one corporation run security for so many critical systems. The hullabaloo reminds me a bit of when that stupid boat was stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021. Except that was a lot more fun and we had a whole week to generate memes about it. It’s harder to chuckle about this one; people are probably dying because hospitals and health care have been affected by the outage.

Current Events

As usual, I’m not sure that I have any new or novel perspective on what’s happening in the world, but I feel compelled to comment and organize my thoughts here all the same. Let’s start with the “easier” topic, I guess.

The Vice Presidential Candidate

Trump announced his Vice President would be Ohio Senator James Vance (I’m not calling this idiot by his initials). This guy really sucks and that’s a gross understatement. As my friend Abby put it, “he’s someone who would order my death by firing squad without bating an eye.” This is a man who thinks we need to get rid of no-fault divorce because it’s “unfair to men” (I am not going to spend time explaining why we need no-fault divorce). Knowing what we do of Trump, I am sure he picked Vance because he has some level of fame beyond mere politics. Vance is the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which was very popular despite apparently being fairly insulting. It was criticized at the time for its thesis “that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault” (Salon) and for being “primarily a work of self-congratulation, a literary victory lap, and a vindication of a minimalist safety net” (Jacobin). (Side note: if you want to read something that successfully does what Hillbilly Elegy claims to do I recommend Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and Mill Town: Reckoning with what Remains by Kerri Arsenault). Vance is also no friend of the queer community and is one of those mendacious assholes who thinks all gay people are “grooming” children (It’s never gay people doing this). It’s not surprising that Trump’s running mate is someone with such dangerous views but that doesn’t mean we get to skip talking about the dangerous views.

Actions Have Consequences

tweet by @screaminbutcalm dated March 12, 2019 that reads me sowing: haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
a classic tale

In other news, as probably everyone knows by now, Trump got shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend. We know next to nothing about the shooter and his motivations, although my personal theory based on nothing but vibes is he is probably some kind of accelerationist. Still, this isn’t stopping prominent Republicans from claiming that Biden is to blame for this, that he somehow did a Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? through normal campaign rhetoric and statements like “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy.” What these comments are conveniently forgetting is that the Supreme Court ruled just two weeks ago that the president can do whatever he fucking wants. The president has immunity from criminal prosecution. So if Biden did somehow order a hit on Trump (he didn’t), it’s legal! I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that the same Republican party that has been obsessed with jailing Hillary Clinton, the party that did a whole coup attempt on January 6, 2021 is offended by this. But sure, this is somehow Biden’s fault for not being civil enough. Okay.

Screenshot of Morphine Love Dion, a Latina, from season 16 of RuPaul's Drag Race. The subtitle reads "The gringos are fighting"
The gringos are fighting

What’s killing me about this is that the whole Democratic institution seems to be like “that’s a wrap, boys!” and being unwilling to keep on campaigning in the wake of this. Biden has (temporarily?) stopped running political ads. If you really believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy, now is not the time to sit back and let him play for sympathy because of this. Fucking do something! You can keep campaigning without being an asshole about it. You don’t have to run ads like “Joe Biden, unlike some candidates, has never been shot at one of his own rallies” but you can still fight! This taking the high road shit is gonna get us all killed because Trump really is an existential threat to our country. So many democrats seem to think it’s over. You’re not even gonna fight? The election is four months away. You’re gonna say that Trump was lightly shot and there’s nothing else we can do? It’s absolutely maddening that we’re stuck with a political class that either actively wants to kill us (Republicans) or passively does (Democrats, speaking generally, in their refusal to do anything).

Are Women Still People?

We’ve already discussed so much but, unfortunately, there is more.

The Republican Party published their new platform and, wow, it sucks. It sucks for many reasons but today I’m looking at just one reason. Here’s a screenshot in case they decide to pretend they never said this shit later on.

The 2024 Republican platform on abortion

Republicans are attempting to use the Constitution to assert that fetuses are people and have rights that supersede the rights of the person carrying the fetus. This is so fucking scary. Instead of playing around with state-by-state abortion bans, which will never happen across the board (because support for abortion remains high everywhere), they want to make the fetus into a little citizen itself so they can oppress women more effectively. As The 19th reports, “If established by legislation, fetal personhood would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.” Jessica Valenti has a comprehensive analysis of the situation in her newsletter Abortion, Every Day.

If I have fewer rights than a clump of cells in my uterus, am I a person?

Books and Other Words

I was absolutely charmed by Alexandra Rowland’s Running Close to the Wind. All I knew going into it was there would be gay pirates and that another author I really like was singing its praises. I was literally laughing out loud while reading this book because it was so funny. The story centers on a pathetic wet cat of a man (affectionate) named Avra who has recently left his country’s intelligence service and taken up with a group of pirates led by Captain Teveri, with whom he has an antagonistic on-again/off-again relationship. This is complicated by the fact that Avra may or may not have acquired a crucial state secret and that a very attractive monk named Julian has joined the crew and he has, to everyone’s dismay, taken a vow of celibacy. What I liked about this story is it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The goal is to have fun and give these three characters room to go through some emotional growth and figure out how they want to be together. The book is very sex positive (they are pirates and they are down to fuck. Well, except for Julian.), although there’s no actual sex on the page, just a healthy respect for the craft. The story culminates in the most important pirate event of the year: a cake competition that residents of the local pirate town take extremely seriously. What’s not to love?

After I finished Running Close to the Wind, I went in search of Rowland’s other books and discovered I had already bought her book A Taste of Gold and Iron and hadn’t read it yet. This one isn’t nearly as silly as Running Close to the Wind but it was just as charming. In this story we are at the other end of the sociopolitical spectrum: A Taste of Gold and Iron is ultimately about a prince falling in love with one of his bodyguards. Said prince, Kadou, is the sultan’s younger brother in an Ottoman empire-inflected kingdom. His anxiety attacks have ramped up since his sister (the sultan) had a baby and he’s trying to figure out how to be useful as a spare prince. In addition to being quite a tender romance (not exactly enemies-to-lovers but more like “I am immediately smitten with you but then resentful that you didn’t live up to the version of you in my head”), the story is a really effective portrayal of how it feels to have anxiety and be afraid of being vulnerable, needing anything from anyone, or taking up space in the world. These are all very challenging to avoid when you’re a prince and so many people have dedicated their lives to your service. Both this book and Running Close to the Wind mention a break-in to an important government ministry, so by reading both books you see multiple perspectives. The pirates think this is the funniest, best thing to ever happen, while Kadou and his government are panicking and trying to make sure their whole dynasty isn’t run out of town over this.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Keep Hunter Biden As Far From the White House As Possible via Slate. It is troubling to me that Hunter Biden is one of the “strongest voices” telling Biden not to step down as president. As Slate put it, “Hunter has been joining the president at a slew of meetings with top White House aides—Jared Kushner–style—during the ongoing fallout.” If Biden wants to make the case that he is better and more ethical than trump, he should keep his kid out of it. We did not vote for Hunter Biden! Hunter is undoubtedly trying to make sure dad wins another term so he can get pardoned.
  • Last Chance, USA via Sara Kendzior’s Newsletter. I am once again turning to Kendzior because she’s saying it better than anyone else is right now. “Despite his recent moves, Biden and Trump are not the same. It is essential for their mutual backers, and those backers’ plans, that they are different. Trump is the abuser, and Biden is the enabler. This is more effective than overt tyranny.”
  • French President Macron’s snap election gamble ‘did not pay off,’ professor says via CNBC. Shout out to France for not electing a far-right government. We salute you! Also, imagine if we could have a “snap” election instead of a two-year presidential campaign grind.
  • The Robots Won’t Cause Massive Unemployment This Time, Either via The Geek Way. Translation may never end up being the job I do for money (but who knows!), but I was still extremely cheered to see that “translator employment has grown in recent years” and “translators get paid almost 20% more than the median US worker.” We love to see it!

Moving It

I finally got the video from my May dance recital. Message me if you want to see it and I’ll send you the link!

Kitchen Witchery

It’s not really soup weather but I don’t respect authority like that anyway and I have tried some new soup recipes. First, I made slow-cooker cauliflower, potato and white bean soup, which I mostly picked because I could make it in the slow cooker. You might think the slow cooker is ideal for winter, but I think it’s great in the summer when I don’t want to get the house any warmer than necessary. It was good and I will definitely make it again, but I think it might work better to substitute cheese for the sour cream and use sour cream as a topping instead of something to stir into the soup. At my sister’s house, I made this red lentil barley stew recipe. I actually used farro instead of barley because it’s what we had on hand and that worked great. It happened that Mia had all the ingredients on hand (even leeks and fennel), so this ended up being a perfect choice for using up some of the things she had lurking in the fridge.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. My nephew Neo has the pouty-est little face and it kills me.

And of course I’m not going to skip posting Huey and Fritz.

Two Weeks in the Life: July 7, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. I got two things on my mind: it’s hot as fuck and the U.S. is a fucking joke of a country. Sorry, we’re getting off to a bleak start here.

It’s 111 degrees at nearly 7 p.m. while I’m writing this (it’s 90 degrees at 9:30 when I’ve returned to proofread). It’s been over 100 degrees every day this week and I’m pretty tired of it. It is difficult to be hot! I take SSRIs and I’m not built for this. Even lying around and reading my books, I am hot. I am also having hot flashes on top of it all! Of course I think about global warming and the fact that it’s only getting worse.

The Trump v. United States ruling that the Supreme Court issued this week is about the worst thing that could have happened, despite the fact that this outcome was highly predictable. The justices Trump appointed are doing their job of shielding him from consequences. Biden and his administration haven’t done enough to stop the forces that brought us the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and the continued machinations to get Trump back into power. As the LA Times reports, “The court’s six conservatives, all Republican appointees, said the Constitution has an unwritten immunity clause that shields presidents from being prosecuted or held to account for violating criminal laws when they are exercising their official powers.” And from al-Jazeera, “‘These are certainly the kinds of powers that are much more familiar to dictators than they are to presidents of democratic countries.'” This is obviously alarming. The president could do whatever they want, like jail political opposition (I’m thinking of the ubiquitous “lock her up” chants from 2016), for just one example. I’ve seen some comments that Watergate is retroactively legal, which is wild.

I think this is a major inflection point for our country. What is maddening about this, to me, is Biden has said he “will respect the limits of presidential power.” This would be a noble sentiment in a normal, peaceful time. This is not that time. We know if Trump wins the election, he’s planning to enact Project 2025, which is an extreme right-wing plan to overhaul all levels of government, gut the civil service, get rid of the Department of Education (among others), and many other horrible things. Trump is absolutely going to take advantage of the impunity the office of the president now offers. Even before this ruling, Trump proclaimed “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” While I respect the idea that Biden shouldn’t abuse this power, I also think that he has to, or Trump will make everything so much worse for us all. Maybe if six Supreme Court justices think they’re above the law, Biden should have them detained and appoint all new justices. Maybe he should purge congress of everyone who refuses to codify the right to abortion or single-payer health care until we get the government we deserve. Is this ethically correct? Absolutely not. Do I support authoritarianism? Also no. However, we are on the precipice of something terrible that has been building for at least the last decade (or arguably since Reagan) and there will be no coming back from a second Trump term. Biden now has the power to do something. Just literally anything. Yet, he’s refusing to act out of a sense of morality that belongs to a different century.

Personal Life

I figured I should update everyone after mentioning last time that I was proofreading my blog at 9:45 on Saturday night and still hadn’t had dinner. I did woman up and drive to Del Taco after that, rest assured.

On a more serious note, Kirk’s mom passed away almost two weeks ago now. Kirk and his dad are doing okay, but everyone seems really tired from the emotional blow and the work of caring for her in her final days. Thank you to everyone who has shared nice thoughts about this, I do pass them on to Kirk.

Books and Other Words

I think Jhumpa Lahiri is more known for her novels—and perhaps now her translations of novels from Italian—but I have only read her essays on language and translation. I loved In Other Words, which I read in 2016, in part because I rarely encounter fellow travelers in learning a language for the simple love of the game, but Lahiri wrote a whole book about it in the language she learned as an adult! Her new book, Translating Myself and Others, is in the same vein except she’s speaking from further along this path. She has now published translations of multiple Italian novels and is teaching translation at Princeton. She’s living the dream! This work is a series of essays that blend personal experience and literary criticism on the topic of translation. Lahiri discusses Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a work that serves as a guiding star in her work as a translator (especially the myth of Echo and Narcissus), her thoughts on the Italian books she’s translated, and the compelling character of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci seems to be something of a patron saint of translators for Lahiri and she draws inspiration from him and his corpus of letters and journals composed while he was imprisoned during the Mussolini regime. Lahiri explains that Gramsci dedicated himself to studying his languages while in prison, frequently requesting grammars and dictionaries from his family. He wrote at one point “My state of mind is such that, even if I were sentenced to death, I would continue to feel calm and even the evening before my execution perhaps I’d have a Chinese language lesson.” Antonio Gramsci: Relatable language-learning king. Lahiri includes a list of books for further reading at the end of Translating Myself and Others and now I have ten more books on my reading list.

I have much less to say about this book, but I also read Kate Elliott’s Furious Heaven, the book that follows Unconquerable Sun, which I mentioned in my last post. This book has a lot more space military action than the last one as Princess Sun starts advancing her campaign against the Phene empire. I liked that this book gave us some interesting perspective on the logistics of getting everyone into place for a space battle and I appreciated the ongoing intrigue and character development. Unfortunately, I must wait a few months for the third book in the series to see how things wrap up.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden via The New York Intelligencer. I don’t know if Biden has dementia or what but come on. Just retire. This whole generation needs to retire! Why do you want to be 81 and signing up to work for another years? Why be 90 and die in office (Dianne Feinstein, looking at you!) There’s simply no need for this.
  • The Great Unconformity via Sara Kendzior’s Newsletter. I often turn to Kendzior when real life seems too insane to bear. She’s a scholar of authoritarianism and she hasn’t been wrong yet (unfortunately).
  • Give us something to believe in via Badreads. This is another perspective on the current political moment that I liked.
  • Despite seismic concerns, last segment of Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail line is cleared environmentally via LA Times. For something good: we’re finally getting somewhere with this high-speed rail! I would love to take a damn train to visit my family in southern California but an Amtrak trip from Sacramento to San Bernardino has a posted travel time of 24 hours. For reference, it’s a seven hour drive.

TV and Music

If you’re not listening to Chappell Roan yet, you need to get into it. I don’t have any deep thoughts, but I love her album. I really like Red Wine Supernova (and I am desperately hoping someone mashes it up with Champagne Supernova).

Corporeal Form

I mentioned last month that my doctor wanted to do a heart monitor test (apparently called a “holter monitor,” I thought they doctor had been saying “halter” until I saw it in writing) because I’ve been trying to figure out why I get light headed and my ears pound any time I bend over. I’m pretty sure the body is not supposed to do that, but I guess I’m not a doctor! I wore my little heart monitor thing for 24 hours and the cardiac lab said my lowest heart rate was 45 beats per minute and that they didn’t see anything weird in my data. My doctor followed up with an email to tell me nothing is wrong. Cool! I’m glad to hear that nothing is wrong with me because one particular test didn’t find anything notable (EYE ROLL!). I honestly don’t know where I’m going to go from here. Maybe just straight to med school and do it myself?

Wikipedia

I’ve been slowly working on translating some articles from Icelandic and I have decided I’m going to do all (or as much “all” as one can get) the articles in this topic. I started with an article about Glaumbær, a place in Iceland, and that linked to a bunch of nearby places in Icelandic Wikipedia, but not English, so then I wanted to translate those articles and fill in this little network of information. This has turned into a project of translating all the articles about places in the county of Skagafjörður. I’ve got 40-some short articles in my list to look forward to. I even made a new category for it on Wikipedia (Nine of the articles in there are ones I translated), which was new and exciting for me. What really got me stuck on this subject was learning that, in the 1990s, a bunch of smaller counties, called hreppurs, merged to form modern government entities. There are 11 (I think) of these hreppurs that formed Skagafjörður and none of them had articles in English! So, uh, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m not sure it sounds like this can be fun to other people but I’m really having fun with this and working in a single topic is getting me to really learn some of this vocabulary, so that’s cool too.

Kitchen Witchery

Given the heat, I have been focusing on using the instant pot and the grill and making big batches to avoid cooking. I cannot abide any more heat in my house than absolutely necessary right now. Last Sunday I made albóndigas (Mexican meatballs) from the Mi Cocina cookbook, along with beans and arroz rojo. We had the meatballs for two dinners then I made some chicken in the slow cooker and combined that with the rest of the beans and rice to make burritos. On the fourth, I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, just out of habit I guess. It didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate but we love a good meal and it was too hot to cook indoors so I went for it anyway. The best new recipe I made recently was this slow-cooker peanut butter chicken. It was super easy and really good. This one is going into my regular rotation for sure.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has been obsessed with being inside this particular pair of pants I have that simply belong to him now. He loves being in things and under blankets and there’s something about these pants he just loves. I can now say “do you want to get in your pants?” and he will trot over to get in the pants. Cats are weird and very funny.

Two Weeks in the Life: June 23, 2023

Hello, friends and enemies. In my recent Facebook “memories,” I discovered this gem (side note: it’s not really a “memory,” it’s a record of posts I’ve made. It’s not the same thing. Stop trying to emotionally manipulate us, facebook).

Screenshot of a facebook post I made on June 13, 2019 that says "What if we all stopped using facebook and started sending weekly newsletters instead?"

It’s funny to me that, by the time I’m asking a question like this, I’m already planning to do it. Once I start saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if …,” know that I probably already have a website purchased, a spreadsheet compiled, or damning evidence available. While a blog isn’t exactly a newsletter, you can subscribe (see the Subscribe! tab on the top-right of my website), so in that way I’m not doing anything different than Substack is. I’m actually really happy I started writing regular blog posts. It’s helped me think through a lot of issues and I’m able to share what’s happening in my life in a way better form than what a site like facebook or instagram limits me to. The only thing I miss about writing more on social media is the discussion; although most of my friends aren’t spending a lot of time on facebook these days anyway so it’s kind of moot. People don’t comment on blog posts like they did in the 2010s when blogs were in their heyday. Most conversations I have about what I write are in text messages, which is fine. I just miss the communal discussion options, but the way we use the internet has been broken so I will take what I can get. Writing more here has also led me in directions I did not expect at all, like making voter guides or pulling together resources on various topics. Somehow just having a website seems to grant a certain air of authority when all it really proves is that I pay money for my domain and hosting. Although I’m sure whatever authority (lol) I have on any subject is not just from my beautiful web-log (lol again) but because what I say resonates. Anyway, I’m five years deep into this style of chronicling events and here’s to another five.

On a completely unrelated topic, I do try to confine the blog to my personal business or things happening in public. People in my life aren’t necessarily consenting to be discussed online. That said, I’m really feeling for Kirk and his family because his mom is dying. She’s had dementia for a while now and her body is giving up. I won’t get into details but Kirk has spent most of the last week at his parents’ house, which has left me riding solo (plus cats). It’s definitely the most time I’ve spent alone since we’ve lived together, which we’ve been doing for over ten years. So, in a way it’s a little weird but in some ways it’s nice. My routine is absolutely thrown off though. For example, I’m writing this at 8:30 on Saturday evening and I have not made or eaten dinner (proofreading at 9:45 … still have not eaten dinner). We’ll see what happens. I may be feral by the time Kirk returns to me.

Books and Other Words

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott has been described as “gender-bent Alexander the Great” in space, which sounds cool but I actually know very little about Alexander the Great so I’m just taking in the work on its own merits. Sun is the daughter of the queen-marshal and heir to the militaristic Chaonian empire. This first book in the series focuses on her, her companions (all young peers from other noble houses), and the interstellar conflict with the Phene empire. I liked the story I think it’s an interesting world. I always enjoy a space opera although sometimes I have trouble getting into the military sci-fi side of things. This story was centered enough on the human activity and not on the ships and the war effort to still be interesting to me. I’m in the middle of the second book now but it’s more than 700 pages long so it’s a bit of a long read.

I picked up Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell because I really appreciated Odell’s first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The new book is about work, time, and money, and our relationship to all three. I find philosophical books like these hard to describe, even when I really like them and spend a lot of time mulling over the concepts. It’s hard to distill observations that the author takes an entire essay to develop into something pithy to say here, so I will instead recommend you read the book for gems like “What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose,” “Sociologists have observed that once assembly-line jobs made it difficult to see how well or how hard someone had worked, what became visible instead was how much someone was able to consume. This consumption, in turn, became the new way to signal how hard one had worked,” and “Time is not money. Time is beans.”

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • How Google is killing independent sites like ours and why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google via HouseFresh. Here’s another one for the “why the internet sucks now” file and the “death of the media” file. So many media companies are collapsing and using affiliate links to bring in revenue, so their parent companies are churning out “review” articles that are not based on actual testing and seem to contain bad information (the article cites the example of an air purifier company that has filed for bankruptcy yet appears on recent lists anyway). The internet is getting harder and harder to use and unfortunately I don’t know of any solutions.
  • California plans to enlist AI to translate healthcare information via the LA Times. I get that using AI seems cheaper than paying people, but the translations will be wrong. I have reviewed some machine-translated articles on Wikipedia (as in, compared the Google translate output in English with the original Spanish to see if things are correct), and they are not good. The machine does not understand the concept of false friends and can’t figure out which definition of a word is best based on context. And in health care? Not to be dramatic but this could get people killed.
  • AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution via The Washington Post (gift link). Speaking of AI, it uses an inordinate amount of electricity to create so much digital garbage. The new tools require so much power that they’re turning on coal plants to meet demand. Tech companies are hoping for a fusion breakthrough. That would be great but in the meantime … what? We’re just gonna use even more fossil fuels to produce important AI-generated shrimp jesus pictures? Is this necessary?
  • ‘We’re writing history’: Spanish women tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap via The Guardian. This is about a group of women in Spain getting together and writing or editing Wikipedia articles so women have better representation on the site. From the article, “Just under a fifth of Wikipedia’s content, including biographies, is focused on women, while women account for just about 15% of the site’s volunteer editors.” It seems unfair that women always have to make time to reset the imbalances that we did not create, but I’m glad this group is doing it and I’m happy I’m a part of this work too.

Doing Stuff/Music

Photo taken during a Vision Video concert. Man with cool hair and goth makeup singing and playing guitar and a woman whose face is blurry on the keyboard
Vision Video (it’s very hard to get a good picture of people in motion in the dark)

I rarely go to concerts because they generally seem overwhelming to me, but this week I made an exception and went to see Vision Video. They’re a gothy, post-punk band from Georgia. I really like their music and their political message. I expected the show to be good but the lead singer, Dusty, gave us some commentary between each song that really made the show amazing. He started off very strong talking about how our political system is broken, but at least something is still working since Trump got convicted of 34 felony counts. He made some comments about protesting and how important it is to be “non-violent but non-compliant” and suggested that wearing a balaclava is a cheap tool for evading facial recognition technology—then introduced a new song called “Balaclava.” Dusty also talked about some of the darker shit he’s been through like the PTSD from being an EMT and firefighter and disillusionment from deploying with the army in Afghanistan. When things got to heavy, he asked the crowd “Who here likes The Cure?” (certainly every single person at a goth concert does) and we got a cover of Just Like Heaven, which obviously everyone enjoyed. It was really powerful to not just hear great music but also have someone be like, yeah it sucks and we all see that, but you need to get organized instead of depressed. They literally have a song called Organized Murder about the military-industrial complex. But we all contain multitudes so they also have a song called I Love Cats and Dusty asked everyone to show him their best cat photo before they played the song.

Languages

I am very proud to announce that I translated a whole 5,000-word article from Spanish into English: LGBT literature in Argentina. I stumbled on the article and was like, wow, seems like a good topic to translate. It’s also led me to some other articles—I’m currently working on LGBT literature in Mexico, which also doesn’t exist in English Wikipedia! On a related note, I’ve learned that Wikipedia has a Guild of Copy Editors, which I obviously joined. You might think I don’t want to do more work in my free time. That is true but I think editing Wikipedia is fun and interesting so it’s okay. I am using my powers for good. Though I did overdo it and get a little tired of it this week. The Copy Editors’ Guild had a week-long editing challenge to clear out part of the editing backlog (users can tag articles in need of editing and those articles are in the Guild’s to-do list). If you edit a certain amount during the challenge, you get a “barnstar,” which is effectively a digital sticker that goes on your user page. Apparently I will go to great lengths for a fake sticker, so, among other things, this week I copy edited the 18,000-word article List of coups and coup attempts by country. I don’t think I would have been so afflicted by Wikipedia editing mania if Kirk were here, but I thought, I’m alone with nothing better happening, why not do a little hyperfocus as a treat? Wikipedia would literally fall apart without autistic people, that’s all I can say.

Kitchen Witchery

I have been continuing to try to find the balance between low-key and novel food options. Last week, I wanted to try this corn butter farro recipe and grill something so I did both and served the farro with grilled chicken and zucchini. I do not have a recipe for the chicken or zucchini, only vibes. Another vibe-based meal, which I made for just me, was pasta with chickpeas and feta, served with some roasted vegetables. I had leftover chickpeas in the freezer (thank you, past self) so all I had to do was cook pasta then mix it with a little olive oil and seasoning (I used pizza seasoning!). On Friday, I made this cheesy, spicy black bean bake and the southwestern corn spoonbread recipe (kind of like cornbread but a higher corn-to-bread ratio) from The Bread Bible. The beans were good but I was tired and distracted and forgot to put them in the fridge afterwards, so farewell to this batch of beans. Finally, because it is summer and zucchini is cheap and plentiful, I made this version of zucchini bread, which I really liked. This produced a really nice texture and was very simple.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Two Weeks in the Life: June 9, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. My best news this week is we had ceiling fans installed in our bedroom, my office, and our guest room! I am heading into the summer with an abundance of cool air. I’m happy to replace my stand fans with something more robust and I’m glad to have a better lighting situation in my office—the fan has an overhead light so I can ditch my floor lamp. I’m always shocked that ceiling fans are not standard because my former-electrician dad put them in every room in the house growing up. Why would you not have a ceiling fan? And in California? Anyway, I have now raised my standard of living as it pertains to staying cool and I’m feeling very good about it.

Last weekend, we went to Calistoga (a town north-west of Napa) because I wanted to go to a hot spring. I told Kirk that’s what I wanted for my birthday, but we didn’t make it a day-of birthday event. We’ve found the weekend after Memorial Day a good time to go places because people try to make the most of the three-day weekend so not so many people are is out the following weekend. I had a nice time getting a massage and floating around in geothermal pools of varying temperatures. It was super relaxing and I wish I could do it all the time. I wore a new swimsuit, which I also wore to the dip and dip party we had last month. This probably isn’t notable for most people but it is the first time in my life I’ve had a two-piece swimsuit that shows my midsection. What’s cool is no one actually cares. It feels like a big deal to me but literally no one at the pool gave me a second look (except for the woman who stopped me to say I looked cute).

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because crop tops are coming back into fashion. It reminded me that they were big when I was in middle and high school and I was not allowed to wear them. I also didn’t want to wear them because I was a big rule-follower and I had learned at church that we have to dress “modestly,” which includes covering one’s stomach and shoulders so we don’t encourage the boys to sin. Because shoulders are the devil’s, uh … I dunno, but they’re bad. One time I went to a church dance and they were checking the girls’ outfits at the door. Your skirt or shorts had to be at least as far down your thigh as your fingertips when you had your arms down. We also had to hold our arms above our heads to make sure our shirts didn’t pull up and show our middle. If the shirt was too short, they safety pinned the shirt to the waistband of your pants. I found this rigamarole annoying but not incorrect. I was given a set of rules to follow (showing your midriff = sinful) and I was strict about it. I remember thinking other girls were slutty for wearing cropped shirts. I made a big fuss about getting a dress for prom that wasn’t strapless because I’d spent my adolescence being told that wearing anything less than a capped sleeve was wrong. However, when I started college at Brigham Young University, I learned I wasn’t following the rules firmly enough. I actually got turned away from the dining hall because my shorts were above my knees, which was pretty shocking to me because they were fairly long shorts (just not fully to the knee). Those few inches of thigh will incite people to sin (lol shoot me)!

Even though I have long since rejected the rules about what’s appropriate to wear according to Mormonism (most people who see me in real life know I am rarely seen wearing a sleeve), it’s funny (sad) that I have still had a hard time with crop tops. But that’s not just the last vestiges of Mormon upbringing haunting my sartorial choices. I think what made this particular rule so strong with me is that it intersects with what I’ve been told about what you should or shouldn’t wear while fat. When I was growing up, we had Clinton and Stacy of What Not to Wear telling us how to “hide a tummy,” for just one example (see also The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia if you need to be reminded of how rough it was back then). Now I am older and wiser and care less. And I know you can’t hide your fat! Even if I made all the “flattering” choices, wore a different swimsuit to the pool, or maybe, as the linked clip suggests, wore a structured blazer all the time, I would still be fat. People would still know I am fat. There is really no secret way to not look fat if you are fat. That’s okay! There is only being comfortable and confident versus uncomfortable and insecure. I really am happy to see more of a cultural shift happening in how we think about our bodies. It’s not universal of course but there are enough people out there being like “it’s fine, it’s no big deal. Just wear what you want,” that it’s making a difference. I’m happy that I can wear a swim suit that shows my stomach even though that seems like such a low bar to clear.

Books and Other Words

Devil’s Gun by Cat Rambo is a sequel to You Sexy Thing. I did not realize that a third book is due to come out this fall or I might have waited to read this and re-read You Sexy Thing too because I had forgotten a lot of details, but Rambo helpfully gives a summary of events so far at the beginning of Devil’s Gun. It’s a space opera, found-family situation which I am always going to love. The writing style is quick and pithy and I find this to be a highly enjoyable series to read.

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Choen is an exploration of how life looks when a romantic partner isn’t the (or the only) focus of one’s life. There are people out there who are best friends who live together and organize their lives around each other. I think that’s wonderful. Choen proposes that there are other ways to orient our lives than only around romance and looks into the history and politics of the subject while providing several case studies of friends who are centering each other in their lives. One interesting example of how our understanding of friendship has changed was that, in the middle ages, best friends could make a marriage-like vow to each other. Historically, same-sex friends had been socially permitted to hold hands and talk about each other in ways that would now be seen as romantic, but that changed in the last century when the culture shifted and more people learned of homosexuality and started fearing seeming gay (classic!). I really enjoyed this book because friends are also at the center of my life. Although I am happily married to Kirk, my friends are important enough to me that I am trying to make plans around where we all move together in the future. It’s healthy to have a community beyond just a romantic partner, as Choen explains. Having multiple strong relationships takes the pressure off of a romantic partner (who cannot and should not be expected to provide all the support a person needs) and can, in fact, make a romantic relationship stronger. I just love this book and the concept it’s based on. Our lives would be richer with stronger friendship communities and that’s what I want for me and my friends too.

Meanwhile, on the internet (sorry to all the non-subscribers for all the LA Times links, but that’s where I’ve been reading news this week):

  • Mexico elects leftist Claudia Sheinbaum as the first female president in its history via the LA Times. Congratulations to Mexico!
  • Biden signs order tightening border with Mexico when crossings surge via LA Times. From the article “the president can put the border restrictions into effect when average border arrests surpass 2,500 migrants for seven days in a row” and the heightened restrictions “would end two weeks after the number of crossers stopped at the border dips below 1,500 for more than a week. For most of the last nine years, there have been more than 1,500 border stops per day.” What’s wild to me here is that it seems to be a cynical ploy for electability and that some people seem fine with this since it’s Biden doing it and not Trump. According to Pew Research, “While a 59% majority of voters say that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S. legally, this is a substantial drop compared with recent years. In June of 2020, 74% of voters said that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay legally.” So people were against this when Trump did it but a not insignificant number of people are cool because a Democrat is doing the same thing? That should not be how this works. It’s fucked up.
  • Nikki Haley criticized for writing ‘Finish Them!’ on artillery shell in Israel via LA Times. Speaking of fucked up. This news made me sick to my stomach. Israel is literally bombarding a refugee camp. That’s not cute. No one should be drawing little hearts on the missiles (that our tax dollars paid for!), but especially someone who wants to be president shouldn’t do this. I fucking hate it.

Languages

I’m still doing a lot of Wikipedia editing and translating but I haven’t been noting everything on the blog (this is exactly the kind of thing I would have loved to share on Twitter all the time. Alas). This week I surpassed 200 edits on English Wikipedia (I’m over 300 edits across all Wikipedias), which I think is an exciting milestone. I’ve been having fun working through clusters of articles. I finished translating a small group of articles from Spanish to English about the Icelandic annals, which are old manuscripts from the middle ages. I saw that there were a bunch of articles about this in Spanish but they were missing in English, so I thought, who better to translate this? I also translated an article about the Oslo Conservatory of Music into Spanish, then translated articles about its notable students. I’ve also been working my way through a bunch of articles about places in and around Skagafjörður, Iceland. It’s very satisfying to fill in links to everything as I translate more articles.

Something amusing and annoying is an error I keep making with Icelandic. Both Spanish and Icelandic have the word en, but in Spanish, it’s the preposition “in” and in Icelandic, it’s the conjunction “but.” I keep translating the Icelandic as “in” and I not catching it until my teacher is trying to figure out why I’m so wrong. Icelandic’s word for “in” is í, so it’s not even close. It’s cool that Spanish has clearly created a groove in my brain but it’s also annoying that it’s interrupting my Icelandic thought process. Trilingual problems?

Corporeal Form

Me, cheesing for the camera, my hand and arm covered in a wrist brace in the foreground
showing off my new wrist brace for carpal tunnel

Well it’s always some damn thing around here and this week I found out I have carpal tunnel in my left hand (I am left-handed). I went to the doctor because her office called me—six weeks after I had last emailed about a different topic—and said the doctor wanted to see me. When I arrived, the doctor asked me what I wanted to discuss and I was like, uh, you asked me to come but then she didn’t even seem to know why I was there. I suggested she had not been reading my emails and she took the time to read them out loud. You know, as a little review for the whole group. I saw her in April because I wanted to get tested for POTS, but she took a few readings in the office and said I have vertigo (I do not have vertigo symptoms based on how it has been explained to me). It turned out that this time the doctor wanted to do another round of readings relative to POTS and she told me that Kaiser doesn’t even have the standard test used to diagnose the condition (the tilt table test). I don’t know why she didn’t tell me that to begin with back in April when I said I wanted to be referred for the test! In any case, I got an EKG while I was there although it didn’t tell us anything. I’m supposed to do a 24-hour heart monitor thing to see if that provides us with any news we can use. While I was there I complained about my hand going numb a lot. Apparently this is carpal tunnel and not a potential POTS symptom as I thought it might have been. So now I’m supposed to wear my wrist brace for some hours every day. As usual, we have fun here.

You may remember that I said I was participating in a clinical trial related to fatty liver disease. I found out this week that I can’t continue with the study. Last week I went to get an MRI, which is part of the baseline assessment. I wasn’t able to handle it. They started pushing me into the tube, which I knew was going to be a tiny space and was mentally prepared for, but the tube was so narrow that it was pressing down on my shoulders and arms before I was even in to my waist. I can’t handle being in a tiny space where I can’t move and have pressure on my body. That’s too scary. There was not an alternative MRI machine so that’s that. It’s baffling though because there are certainly people out there who are broader of shoulder than I am. You’d think the MRI tube would be a little bigger but apparently not.

Knitting and Crafts

A small sample of knitting (the beginnings of a shawl in thin blue yarn). Huey cat lounging in the background
Actually knitting again

I’m happy to report that I have been knitting and actually making a little progress. Part of my problem has been that Huey often sits on me when I’m on the couch—my main knitting location—and I think another part of the issue has been the carpal tunnel. My hand gets tingly after a few rows and I have to take a break because life is deeply annoying in many ways. In any case, this is a small project that I’m hoping will be easy to finish and give me a sense of accomplishment. The pattern is 25 grams of love from Hélène Magnússon.

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a couple of new recipes over the last two weeks. First we had the double brown beans, which was kind of an Indian-style beans and rice. I used vaquero beans for them and they were good and Kirk liked them too. I forgot to take a picture but I’m sure you can manage without it. I made some roasted parmesan cauliflower to eat with that. I guess parmesan doesn’t really go with Indian flavors but that’s what I wanted to make! Finally, I tried another tofu recipe: broccoli tofu stir fry. This was really good and very easy! I left out the eggs for mine because I don’t like them, but I am generous so I did scramble an egg for Kirk to add to his. It’s not his fault I’m a hater.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. We took Huey to the vet again this week because she won’t stop peeing on the floor. I was worried about her kidneys, but the vet said her most recent blood work shows no real kidney problems. It could be another UTI (apparently some older cats just get UTIs all the time) or it could be mobility issues with her hind legs. She seems to have arthritis, so the vet suggested a treatment and it seems like Huey is feeling a little better and like it’s easier for her to move around. The medication is a monthly injection that we’d have to go to the vet to get administered, but if it makes her feel better (and makes her stop peeing on the floor!) it will be worth it.

When we got our fans installed this week, Fritz was being a very scared baby and couldn’t figure out where to hide. He normally hides in the bedroom, but that’s where the trouble was. I draped a blanket over one of his chairs so he could have a little hidey spot and that seemed to work for him. He spent most of the day there, only to be alarmed when he saw the fan in the bedroom! I don’t know if he thought it was a giant bird or something but he was extremely wary of it. Fortunately, he adjusted quickly and is hanging out in the bedroom again like normal.

Two Weeks in the Life: May 26, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. Last weekend was big cultural activities weekend for me. On Saturday, I had my dance recital! It was a lot of fun and I think I did well in my routines. Tap was a challenging (read: high endurance) but really fun piece. Jazz and ballet were nice too. My teacher Dawn styled us with a full-on 1920s hairstyle to match the flapper dresses we were wearing for tap and did our makeup, so I got the full experience. Most of my classes are for adults but I do have some ballet classes with the young people and I was honored that one of the kids specifically made sure I knew he was coming up soon so I could watch his solo. I assume I’m just kind of a weird old woman who isn’t fully a person to them but I guess I am more real than I think to some of them. That’s not a criticism of teens by the way. They have their own lives and I’m not trying to be a different type of weirdo by being like “how do you do, fellow kids!” Still, it’s nice to be included on a certain level.

The next two weeks, we have a break from classes. I always welcome a rest until I start getting restless halfway through and have to invent activities for myself. I’m a little bummed out because the studio adjusts it’s schedule in the summer so most of the ballet classes are in the middle of the day. That’s great for kids who don’t have school (and for parents who will drive their kids around in the middle of the day) but not for me with my dumb full-time job. To be fair, it will be a million degrees in the studio in the afternoon but still … I wish I didn’t have to work and could just do fun things. We need universal basic income or I need to get a MacArthur grant.

The same day as the recital I went to see the Sacramento Ballet because the thing with buying season tickets in advance is that sometimes many things land on the same day. This was another performance with three short pieces. The first was Balanchine’s Apollo. It was a little weird but it seems typical given the several Balanchine ballets I’ve now seen. There’s a lot of arm entangling and the dancers looping around each other. Why? I don’t know, but if you want to see it for yourself, here’s a recording of the same piece by the New York City Ballet in the 1960s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5xNXOE5dyc. The next piece, Salve, was about domestic abuse. It was good but it makes me sad when they pretend to abuse the ladies, even for artistic purposes. Is there no other way to make a point about abuse other than having the men do really aggressive choreography at their women partners? The final piece was Ibsen’s House, based on the works of author Henrik Ibsen. I am only passingly familiar with Ibsen (I read A Doll’s House in high school), but I liked this ballet. The set design was very cool. They used a sheer white curtain between panels of black to create a big picture window upstage. I also liked the 19th-century-ish ballet outfits (you can’t really go full 19th century dress and dance). Obviously, all the dancing was good too but I’m not really an expert so I just write about what stands out to me. However, I have been gratified that I am recognizing more of the moves the dancers are doing. I’m clearly learning something in class.

Books and Other Words

I somehow read two novels in a row in which girls are being raised by their powerful single dad on an island, which is kind of weird but okay. The first is H. G. Parry’s The Magician’s Daughter. Biddy (short for Bridget) is the adopted daughter of the magician Rowan. They, along with Rowans’ familiar, a rabbit named Hutchencroft, live on a hidden island off the coast of Ireland. Magic in this world is a finite resource; it slips into our world from cracks in reality. Unfortunately, magicians have been using too much too fast, leaving ordinary people without any magic, which, left unattended, might lead to small miracles in their lives. I enjoyed it a lot. It was the right balance of fantasy and reality, giving us flawed characters to root for like Rowan who plays at being Robin Hood by going out every night to try to liberate magic from people who are hoarding it (eat the rich, baby!). The other book in the “raised alone on an island with her dad” genre, although this was a science fiction and not fantasy, was The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. The novel weaves together three strands of of time: present-day narration by the protagonist (Rao’s daughter Athena, now imprisoned), the story of the protagonist leaving her father and joining a group of “exes” (people who reject the worldwide government run by the “Board,” in which all individual citizens are “shareholders”), and the third strand in which we learn about King Rao’s childhood and his ascendance to a Bill Gates/Steve Jobs-like figure as the CEO of the Coconut computer company. It’s a very good story and a bleak-as-hell take on a could-be future in which no one is a citizen, or even a consumer, but a shareholder living in some kind of technofuedalist megastate where unemployed people can get career training as influencers. I really liked the “ex” communities who were finding ways to live and support each other without shareholder government because it’s important that fiction, even dystopian fiction like this, also gives us some ideas for what life could be like.

In non-fiction, I recently finished The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgson. This book has been on my shelf since 2009. One of my college professors recommended the series (there are three volumes) as the definitive history of Islam. I had been meaning to read them all and figured I was finally going to do it this year. When I finished the book, I went to log my reading on LibraryThing, only to find I read this book in 2010! I have literally zero memory of this. I thought I had never touched this book! To be fair, I was kind of going through it in 2010 and the book doesn’t even physically look like it had been read. This is exactly why I have to write about everything I read—to cement it in my mind. I was prepared for this book to be kind of stuffy because it was written in the 1960s, but it is actually pretty fresh. In the introduction that takes up a good 20 percent of this 600-page book, the author lays out a bunch of definitions, including that he rejects the term “middle east” because it centers the European perspective (east of what, right?) and rejects “Muslim world” (too broad of a term), instead favoring the geographical descriptor “Nile-to-Oxus region” (the Oxus is a river running through Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan). The history itself is nothing new or mind-blowing, but it is a comprehensive discussion on everything from the period just before the prophet Muhammad through the Abbasid empire. It’s nice to get back in touch with my academic roots (I have a bachelor’s degree in near eastern studies [“nile-to-oxus region studies” is much clunkier to say, if more precise]).

Finally, I read Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. The book starts with Klein wanting to examine why it is that she and former feminist author/current conservative nut Naomi Wolf are often confused for each other. She initially plans to take a sort of literary criticism route, analyzing books and movies about doubles, but her research leads her to asking a more general question: what is it about our society that leads people to go off the deep end and become conspiracy theorists who are out of touch with reality? It was a very interesting book that covered a lot of ground. I especially liked the chapter she wrote about autism, noting that the “vaccines cause autism” conspiracy laid the groundwork for the anti-vaccine sentiment around covid. (I get super mad about the “vaccines cause autism” shit because the premise is ultimately that you prefer a child dead from a preventable disease to a living autistic one.) One theme Klein has in the book is that the right-wing “question everything” idea is not inherently bad, and maybe some of us on the left could have questioned more or at least offered better explanations instead of being dismissive in the face of conflicting information about the pandemic. There’s a tendency now for right and left to exist in opposition—if the right does it, the left must reflexively reject it. However, this attitude is making it easier for people to get caught up in conspiracy thinking and it gives extreme right-wing operators, like Steve Bannon (whose show Wolf now regularly contributes to), an opening to woo people disaffected with reality. This has led to what Klein calls a “diagonal” (cutting across old left-right political divides) political coalition. One line that made me laugh from the book is a chapter heading “The Conspiracy Is … Capitalism.” The thing about conspiracies, as noted by journalist Sara Kendzior, is that sometimes it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just a straight up conspiracy. Klein brings this up too. The conspiracy is that wealthy and powerful people have each others’ backs. That’s it. “Power and wealth conspire to protect themselves,” Klein writes. That’s really the main point of the book. Klein’s doppleganger, Wolf, is seeing conspiracies everywhere and profiting off her presence in the right-wing ecosystem. People like Steve Bannon are using conspiracy thinking to distract people from real problems and making money doing it. Just about every conservative celebrity is selling a supplement or some kind of garbage. It’s always about making money.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza via The Verge. Google is straight-up fucking broken. It’s AI search results are feeding people shitpost answers after using Reddit, shitpost city, to train its language model. The results are funny, to be sure, but they are not informative! Reminder that “artificial intelligence” is not real. This is glorified text prediction. It is not intelligent, it just guesses which words are most likely to appear in a particular order.
  • When Online Content Disappears: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later via Pew Research Center. The internet isn’t as permanent as we like to believe. Make sure you save and archive things that are important to you.
  • Biden, lawmakers blast ICC’s intent to charge Israeli leaders via The Washington Post (gift link). So, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, among others. Biden thinks that sucks, which is in contrast to what most other countries seem to be saying. In the wake of this news, I learned that the U.S. has a law on the books that includes the “Hague invasion clause,” which “authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague.” Um, yikes. Why would we do that as a country? This became law in 2002 when Bush was heading up the invasion of Iraq. It’s insane that this country is so worried about the possibility of the ICC bringing Americans or our allies up on charges that we need a law for this. I’m shocked, honestly.
  • Campus protesters want Johns Hopkins to divest. This lab is what they mean. via The Baltimore Banner. From the article, “‘It has become clear that Johns Hopkins is a military research institution with a university as a side project,’ a representative of the Hopkins Justice Collective Palestinian Solidarity Encampment said in a statement.” and “The Department of Defense has awarded the university laboratory $12 billion over the past decade, a review of audited financial statements show. That’s nearly twice as much as it’s made in tuition and fees over the same period.” (emphasis mine).

TV and Music

The YouTube algorithm fed me this DJ set by MËSTIZA and I haven’t been the same since. I don’t typically rely on Al Gore’s Rhythm for finding music and I was frankly surprised to find this delight in my recommendations but I am glad I did find it! They’re so good and so cool! I immediately bought their album.

Corporeal Form

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I think I have oral allergy syndrome but the allergy doctor said probably not (and there’s not a concrete test for it anyway). This is a health condition where eating raw produce can give you an allergic reaction. After eating a sandwich with spinach on it a few weeks ago and getting a stomach ache and having my lips swell after eating applewood-smoked bacon, I decided to stop eating any fresh produce and see what would happen. It’s actually made a significant difference for me. I’m burping a lot less and not spending as much time in the bathroom. I haven’t been having stomach aches. The doctors kept telling me it’s not reasonable to assume that I have OAS but also I should experiment on myself and record the results, so I don’t know if they’re going to believe me, but I know I’m feeling a lot better. I mean, emotionally I feel kind of shitty that this has been an issue for a long time and I just figured it out and that means I kind of can’t eat any kind of salad or fresh vegetables again but, I guess that’s what I’m dealing with. It makes a lot of sense to me because I always have to really force myself to try to eat fruit—some of it tastes okay it’s just hard to get myself to eat it—and I can never manage to eat much. I think I was subconsciously trying to protect myself from being sick. I am going to keep experimenting a little but I do feel very confident that this is at least part of my problems.

The other thing I am fairly convinced I have is POTS, which stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Basically the blood pressure cannot keep up with the rest of the body when you move around, causing your heart rate to spike when you go from sitting to standing causing dizziness and fatigue, and it’s especially problematic when it’s hot outside. I measured my pulse and found it does jump significantly when I have been sitting for a while and stand up (like, 30 bpm, consistent with the criteria for POTS). I asked my doctor to refer me for a test but, after a cursory exam, she said no because my heart rate didn’t jump that much between lying down and standing when they measured in the office. She did not accept my explanation that it takes longer to get to a resting heart rate with POTS and I’d been walking around to get to the office. She instead said I have vertigo, but the way I’m feeling dizzy is not at all what vertigo is supposed to be, which is the spinning all the way around feeling. I’m getting like a head rushing feeling. For the fatty liver study I’m doing, they did an echocardiogram and my resting heart rate was in the 50 bpm range so I still think I’m right. I’m okay with being wrong but, if I am wrong, I need the doctor to explain why I’m getting all these symptoms, plus things like blood pooling in my fingers when I walk around. POTS could also be contributing to my gut issues, so I feel like this is a unifying theory of what’s wrong with me. But I’m not a doctor so I guess what do I know.

Finally, and this may be TMI, I feel it noteworthy to record the fact that I actually had a hot flash for, I think, the first time last week. We were watching the ballet and I just started fucking sweating and feeling really hot from the inside out, which is how I always see hot flashes described. Yay? In any case, menopause seems to be approaching. We have fun here.

Kitchen Witchery

It’s always soup season in my house. I recently made the somewhat Tarascan bean soup from Rancho Gordo and we liked it a lot. Kirk said I should make it again, so we got his seal of approval. He also drew a little smiley face on his soup after I said that the soup was a little boring to take a photo of. What a guy. I made Chicomecoatl corn soup from the Decolonize Your Diet cookbook. I had made this soup before and we liked it but, several years ago, I loaned this cookbook to someone and then never saw them again! I finally bought a new copy, largely for this soup recipe but it is a good cookbook overall. Lastly, I baked a ricotta loaf (recipe from The Bread Bible). I ended up with an excess of ricotta because the grocery store was out of the regular-size container I ordered and substituted a huge one. Naturally, I made bread with it. I was thinking about using it in a cake recipe today (there’s a chocolate ricotta cake in Snacking Bakes) but, alas, I am out of eggs.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. After a full week of waking us up at 6:15 every morning, Fritz finally chilled out in the last two days. I’m relieved because I can’t live like that.

Two Weeks in the Life: May 12, 2024

Hello, friends and enemies. This time of year, I always get nostalgic for my circus days. One day I will write a full post about this but I think most know by know that my hometown has a community circus that I participated in when I was a kid and when I moved back home after college (I have written a little about it here). They do shows for the first three weekends in May, so I think of this as circus season. It’s something I miss but I am realizing that I don’t have to do the most special and unique activity to get the same sort of good feelings and fulfillment in my life. I think dance is doing a great job of holding this space for me. I get to do a fun, physical, and artistic activity with interesting people and I get to ham it up on stage once in a while. Here are some circus photos of me from the archives.

Me, outside, wearing red sunglasses and a cute swimsuit, smiling at the camera. My hair is in two buns on top of my head
38 and ready to be in the pool

Yesterday was my 38th birthday! I usually don’t do much in the way of festivities but yesterday we had a little party—the “dip and dip,” the successor to the souper bowl party we had in February. Everyone brought a dip and something to dip in it and then we took a dip in the pool and it was really great. I got to chill in the water and chat with my friends and eat good food and look cute doing it!

Current Events

As you know from reading this blog, I have been thinking a lot about the war Israel is waging against Gaza and, recently, the wave of protests and demands for divestment it has inspired. Something important that I had totally forgotten about but that this instagram video reminded me about, is that I have investments via my 401(k) and that is a site where I can do some divestment of my own. This is, however, proving to be challenging. On my 401(k) account’s site, I can pick which funds I want to invest my retirement in and at what percentage. The funds are a little cagey about what exactly they’re invested in, I assume because that’s the special secret industry knowledge that fund managers are charging for. Unfortunately, this makes it very to difficult to figure out which companies my money is invested in. There are info sheets available for each fund that show the top ten investments, and summarize the broad type of thing the money is going to (“healthcare” or “real estate,” for example). I tried contacting the company that manages me 401(k) to ask if it’s possible to get a full list of what any given fund invests in (I figured not because I assume this is proprietary information). The customer service representative told me I could but the thing they directed me to was the fund info sheets I was already looking at, which do not list every single investment. Alas. But, I am carrying on with the information I do have. One of the funds I was invested in had Meta, Philip Morris, Eli Lily, and Alphabet in the top ten investments. Why in the world are we investing in Philip Morris! A company that makes cigarettes? In 2024?? Also, fuck Meta (for so many reasons but here’s one particularly egregious example).

I know I’m not rich but my 401(k) isn’t nothing and I think every little bit counts. It’s fucked up that so much of the onus of this falls to the individual. I am certain I’m not the only person with retirement investments who would like to make sure their savings aren’t indirectly supporting genocide, but good fucking luck finding an investment fund that’s like “we’re the anti-genocide guys!” The problem is that war remains profitable. The problem is also that I have to play the big international gambling game to save money for retirement. We have only been using 401(k)s as a primary way to save for retirement since 1980. Before that, you relied on regular savings or a pension from your company. So we kind of don’t know if 401(k) savings even work as the main way to fund retirement. We don’t have data about how well people with only 401(k) savings are doing in retirement because it just hasn’t been around that long. People who started their careers around 1980 are just starting to retire now. This could all be a scam! Unfortunately, the possible scam is the only system we have so I’ve got a good fifty percent of my account invested in bonds because I, quite frankly, do not trust the stock market (can you blame me?) but I am also trying to have enough money to not work forever. Modern life is full of insane contradictions and I’m doing my best!

Books and Other Words

I really liked Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. It’s set in an alternate version of the 1920s in which, as the author explains in an afterword, a different, much less virulent variant of smallpox made it to the Americas a few hundred years ago, so European settlers encountered way more Native people when they arrived. The story takes place in the thriving city of Cahokia, a place we know today as a historical site on the Mississippi. Cahokia Jazz is a detective novel that kicks off with some unknown killer murdering a white man in a mimicry of Aztec-style human sacrifice on top of one of the city’s most recognizable buildings. This inflames the city’s existing racial tensions and becomes a big priority for city leaders. I thought this was an excellently done alternate history and an interesting look into what might have been.

Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaicovsky is the third and last book in Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture series. I thought it was a good end to the series. At the beginning of the book, I wasn’t sure I was going to be into it because some of the perspectives shifted to different characters and it felt like too much, but of course once I got going I liked it. It was a fittingly epic end to the series.

Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a dystopian tale from the not-too-distant future in which incarcerated people can elect to join the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program in which they literally fight to the death for a chance at freedom. The corporations behind the program produce multiple TV shows featuring the fights and the day-to-day existence of the “links” (aka the prisoners) and profit considerably off the whole spectacle. What’s effective about this book is that Adjei-Brenyah includes footnotes throughout the work to explain the laws that underpin this horrific system. The vast majority of them are based on real information, like that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has a loophole where people can effectively be punished with slavery if they committed a crime. It reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s stating that there’s nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that there’s “nothing in the book that didn’t happen, somewhere.” Reality is often much more horrific than we give it credit for. I thought this was a good book and a chilling story for sure, but something about it felt heavy handed to me, if, as I said, fairly effective.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

TV and Music

Eurovision was this week, which feels like a little birthday gift for me. Thank you, Europe, for offering me a gigantic, campy, musical spectacle to honor my birth. It means a lot. I have learned that some people do not know what Eurovision is so: the Eurovision Song Contest started in 1956 as a way for European countries to be friendly and make television together. European countries (broadly defined here, especially because Australia now participates) send a musician who enters one song into the competition. All the countries’ representatives perform their songs and the winner is selected based on a combination of votes from the public and votes from the Eurovision jury (which is kind of like the Electoral College). I only started watching this in the last few years but I have been interested in it for a while. My favorite acts are the ones that do weird stuff because it’s Eurovision and you could do literally anything! I am disappointed when countries send some basic pop music girlie. How boring! Use your imagination a little. My favorite this year was Finland’s unhinged performance by Windows95Man. Where else can you see this? No where. Only Eurovision.

Corporeal Form

Last week, I had my intake appointment for the clinical trial I’m doing to test a medication for non-alcoholic fatty liver. Ironically, this included the longest actual conversation I’ve had with a doctor in some time. Why do I have to sign up for a study to get a doctor to listen to me? I don’t know, but this system sucks. Of interest: I did an EKG, which showed I have a resting heart rate in the 50 bmp range. The doctor saw this and asked if I was really active as a kid, which I suppose I was but I don’t usually think about it that way because I didn’t do any traditional sports (see above, re: circus). It was validating to have a doctor be like “hey, you clearly have done some exercise” because usually they assume I do nothing. I also mentioned my ongoing dizziness/lightheadedness stuff and that my primary care doctor thinks I have vertigo (I think I have POTS but have yet to get anyone to send me for a test). The study doctor told me that vertigo feels like being super drunk and the room is spinning all around. That’s definitely not what I’m experiencing. Crazy what happens when the doctor takes the time to actually chat with you and ask questions!

Moving It

First, here’s a reminder that my dance recital is in less than a week! You can get tickets here or message me for information.

Underside of a pair of tap shoes. One shoe has a grippy thing glued to the ball of the foot and the other does not
tap shoes: one with the grippy thing and one without

This week we solved a mystery. You may recall that, in February, I sprained my ankle while tap dancing (I am, unfortunately, still not completely recovered. Although I am close). I slipped and fell, which is weird because that hadn’t happened to me before, but I was like, well my new shoes are different I guess. It turns out, I was supposed to put a grippy thing on my new tap shoes and I did not do this! My tap teacher, Dawn, decided she also wanted some custom tap shoes from the same shoe company. She told me the shoes were super slippery until she glued on the grippy pad the shoes came with. I was like, hold on, wait a minute here. Because my shoes came with a rubbery thing but no instructions for what to do with it. You’re supposed to affix the rubbery things to the bottom of the shoe so you don’t slide around and, as I did, turn your fucking ankle! I’m feeling stupid (although how would I have known) and annoyed (why no instructions??) but also relieved that I didn’t injure myself out of the blue because I had been kind of doubting my stability and skills. It was an equipment issue! Annoying!

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a couple of fun recipes for yesterday’s dip party. I made this alubia bean dip with garlic confit. It calls for ‘nduja oil, which my grocery store does not have and I was not motivated to search for. I also wanted to keep it vegetarian since there are some non-meat eaters in the group so I topped the dip with harissa instead. I brought a dessert option too, this s’mores dip. The picture with the recipe looks very dippy but mine was more like casserole, I guess. It has chocolate ganache and marshmallows on a bed of graham crackers. I think, to make it more dippable, I would leave the crackers out and use those to dip. That said, it was good and no one complained that it wasn’t sufficiently dip-like.

A kitchen counter covered in dips and foods to dip into dips
dip party action

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.