Hello, friends and enemies. Please allow me to start with something completely trivial today before we get into the heavy stuff: it makes me crazy when people get mad about the fall time change. “It’s dark by the time work is over!” they cry. “I hate it!” they exclaim. The problem is not the end of daylight saving time. The problem is the Earth’s axis. Winter has less light, no matter how you distribute it. The other problem is capitalism. Unfortunately, we are all expected to maintain the same working pace in the winter when we should clearly be doing only a little work and being cozy at home the rest of the day. Shifting the time an hour isn’t the cause of your woes. Get a grip. Start a revolution or something.
With everything else, I almost forgot that it was Halloween just a week ago. We actually got a few trick-or-treaters this year! Not a lot, mind you, but just enough to justify buying candy and avoid Kirk clowning me for buying a bunch of candy that we didn’t give out (which is what happened last year). I tried turning on some string lights in one of our front windows to emphasize that we are home and handing out treats and maybe that helped. It was also suggested to me that having non-participating Jehovah’s Witnesses as our neighbors on one side might be discouraging people from bothering with the houses in our immediate area, which is a bummer if true.
On with the show.
Current Events
Current events is becoming a permanent feature, I fear. I would rather not spend my energies on this shit but, alas, we play the hand we’re dealt. I have things to say about it all, god help me. The next paragraph is a bit graphic, so skip to the one after if you don’t want to hear about body things.
My period began the day before the election and, thanks to perimenopause, it’s become very heavy. When I woke up on election day, I had bled through my tampon and stained the sheets. There was blood dripping down my legs by the time I made it to the bathroom. I’m not sharing this because I think it’s horrific—on the contrary, women are very familiar with their own blood—but because that morning I watched blood droplets pool on the floor and thought, I hope this is mere coincidence and not an omen. I don’t truly believe in omens; I believe in the chaos and randomness of the universe. Yet, the pull to narrativize this kind of image is so strong. It does feel like it means something that I woke up covered in blood on the day this country elected Trump a second time. It’s hard not to feel like my body was communicating a dire warning.
I’m sure the whole world knows already that Donald Trump won the election. I thought for sure it would be like 2016 where he only won because of the electoral college, or maybe it would be like 2000 and he would win because of the Supreme Court with a little help from the three justices he installed for just this purpose. But no, he won the old-fashioned way with a plurality of the popular vote. Trump received 72.76 million votes to Harris’s 68.09 million (note that millions of eligible Americans do not vote at all). I find it interesting that both the Democrats and Republicans received fewer votes overall than they did in 2020, when Trump lost with 74.22 million votes and Biden won with 81.28 million votes. I’m far from the first person to point this out but I feel it’s an important part of this election’s story. This means 15 million fewer people voted this year election than in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden showed up to vote for Harris this time, she would have won handily, but they didn’t. Why not? We are about to be subject to months (or years) of pontificating on this subject—including my own (haha)!
In my opinion, several big, interlocking issues made Harris lose to Trump. America remains sexist and racist. Voters do not want to vote for a woman (see: 2016 and, I suppose, all of US history), let alone a Black/Indian woman. Let us not forget that Obama is half-white, which I really think made him more palatable for some voters. The other issue is that Harris and her campaign made weird and bad choices. She started off fun with Brat summer but her campaign website (that’s an archive.org link to the pre-election-day version) was vague on many issues. It says, for just one example, that she planned to “protect Social Security and Medicare,” but didn’t offer any vision for how to improve on what we already have. I get that, running against Trump, the important message is that government matters and we’re not going to let this asshole tear everything apart. But you have to go a step beyond and say government matters and here’s what we’re going to do to strengthen it and make everyone’s lives better. She didn’t do that. She also never translated her website into Spanish and I think that’s criminally negligent! The Biden administration should have done more to resolve the issues that brought Trump to power the first time and Trump should have faced some actual consequences for inciting a fucking attempted coup in 2021. When people see the government acting like it’s business as usual, they assume there isn’t a real or serious problem, which translated into a lot of people wrongly thinking there’s nothing wrong with voting for Trump because it’s just another election.
I also blame Democrats’ propensity to pander to an imagined base of Republican-leaning centerists who will vote Democrat and save the day. Somehow. Allegedly. Why did Harris campaign with Liz Cheney? Who is that for? This alienates the people who are supposed to be the actual Democratic base. If people want to vote for a Republican, that option is available. Why would they vote for Kamala Harris, neoliberal, diet-Republican? I believe Harris would have won if she had campaigned hard on things people actually want like embargoing weapons sales to Israel. The Intercept reports that “a June poll from CBS … showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans” For all the rhetoric about a “divided” nation, we sure seem to agree on not sending weapons to Israel! Additionally, Congresswoman Rashida Talib, a Palestinian-American and critic of the Biden administration’s support of Israel, won her reelection with a two-thirds majority. Other progressive issues won throughout the country, too. Missouri and other states voted to end their abortion bans. People show up when you give them something worth showing up for. The Democrats didn’t give us anything to root for. They’ve been beating us with the “Republicans will repeal Roe v. Wade” stick for the last 15 years and, guess what, they finally did that and Democrats have not been able to save us. We save us. Missouri and other states did it. So, I don’t think any particular minority demographic is to blame and I don’t believe third-party voters are to blame either because their votes were less than the vote differential between Harris and Trump. We need a party that is going to do what people want! The Democrats are ignoring our phone calls and telling people to shut up when they bring up the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. Why would we get excited about voting for her? The Democratic establishment did this to themselves.
Here in California, we had some important things on the ballot (here’s the summary of results from the L.A. Times). We passed propositions 2, 3 and 4, to fund schools, legally confirm that marriage doesn’t need to be heterosexual, and allow the state to issue bonds and spend money on climate-resilliancy projects. That’s all good stuff. I am disappointed that we did not vote to raise minimum wage or end rent control, however I am not surprised about the rent control one because we keep having opportunities to vote for it and landlords keep spending millions to convince us we shouldn’t do it. I am genuinely upset that we did not vote to end slavery for people in prison. We also voted to lower the threshold for felonies, which will no doubt put more people in our overcrowded prisons to do forced labor. As I wrote in my voter guide:
It’s hard not to see forced, low-wage prison labor as a way for corporations to evade hiring non-incarcerated workers and paying them a normal wage. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I must point out the Supreme Court ruling from earlier this year that effectively criminalized homelessness. It seems like an excuse to put homeless people in prison and make them work instead of finding ways to make housing more accessible.
It’s especially troubling that Californians affirmed support for the prison-industrial complex on the eve of Trump’s ascension. He has long threatened to jail political enemies (and I don’t love how loosely that may eventually be defined) and there is no reason to think he won’t do this. Private prison companies are certainly ecstatic over a second Trump term. Geo Group, which has over 100 facilities, saw it’s stock price rise by 32 percent after the election was called for Trump. Isn’t it bleak that we live in a world not only with private prisons, but with publicly traded private prisons? These decisions may haunt us in the years to come.
All that said, I wanted to address the issue of what we might do about it all. I think it’s going to get pretty bad. If Trump’s administration does even a quarter of the shit in Project 2025, things will be rough for us. I am personally worried that I may eventually lose my job because it depends on the Affordable Care Act and I’m indirectly contracted to the federal government. Lots of people are worried about lots of things and although my job is certainly not the most serious potential problem, it’s personal and important to me. Here are some things I’m thinking about as a form of disaster preparedness, if you will.
- Find joy in this life. Do not preemptively cede your joy to this political moment. Doing things for yourself that make you happy, spending time with your friends and family, engaging in hobbies, and doing things just for fun are all important. Joy is radical. Try not to give up things you like in advance. Loving yourself and enjoying life is a protest. Don’t let this grind you down any more than you must.
- I know I sound like an old woman who lived through the depression when I say things like this, but stock your pantry, have backups of any important things you need to live (for me, CPAP parts), and order your medication refills as early as you can so you can have a little buffer. I think we are in for supply chain chaos and Trump’s tariffs are going to make things a lot more expensive. The best defense against inflation is a full pantry. Kirk and I are strategizing about any big house-related purchases we may need to make before Trump gets into office and starts ripping us off. I think if you can afford to do so, make sure you have a little extra of whatever you normally use on hand, it will alleviate some difficulty. I will never forget how insane people went with hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic in 2020 and I am adjusting my purchasing habits accordingly.
- Pick one cause to put your effort into. There will be many things that need attention (I mean, there already are!) in the coming years. Pick one thing in your community that you want to support and volunteer for that. If you can, pick some organizations to support with a monthly donation too. I personally donate to the Elk Grove Food Bank, NorCal Resist, and Women’s Health Specialists (and the Wikimedia Foundation, but that’s not local). I am looking into volunteering for the Sacramento Public Library because that’s something important to me and a volunteer gig that I think I could manage.
- Read, read, read as much as you can. Learn about how we got here, how other people have dealt with these times in history, and to figure out how we get to the other side of this. Read fiction to escape from this reality for a while. Go to the library! Build your personal book collection that does not depend on services like Kindle Unlimited (Amazon can cut you off anytime)! Share books and magazines with your friends! We have to educate ourselves because no one is going to do it for us. I get a lot of good political non-fiction from Haymarket Books (and they often have ebook sales so you can get them for cheap. They have ebooks on sale for $2 right now) and AK Press has some free ebooks available right now. I also highly recommend Sarah Kendzior’s newsletter and books (Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew are important works). She’s an expert on authoritarianism and the only person who has correctly predicted all of the garbage we’re dealing with because authoritarians always follow the same script. These people suck and they are not creative.
- Don’t over-rely on the internet and digital world. Websites can easily disappear. Cloud services can be shut down. If you need information, save it to your computer or archive it somehow. You may have noticed I am using some archive.org links in this post instead of linking directly to news stories. This probably sounds alarmist, but who knows if that information will stay online! The internet isn’t as permanent as it seems. Download an archive of your facebook account so you have all your photos in a place that isn’t just facebook. Don’t exclusively rely on the cloud (which is just other computers, by the way). Also, it’s getting harder to navigate a lot of digital spaces and trust the information there because of AI (note that facebook is actively pushing AI content). Figure out which sources you can trust and don’t believe everything you read online, especially if it’s something that gets a big emotional reaction from you.
- Related to the previous bullet: connect with people offline. We are halfway to a surveillance state already and god only knows how much worse it’s going to get. Don’t hold all your conversations through facebook messenger or instagram. Talk to people in the real world or use a private, encrypted messaging service like Signal. Hang out with your friends in real life! Eat snacks outside and feel the breeze.
Let me just say: I hope I’m wrong. I hope all the “it won’t be that bad” people are right and that you fill up your pantry for no good reason. I would love to be wrong about all this. However, I don’t think I will be. Experts in history, politics, and authoritarianism are super worried right now. There are many ways for things to go badly and very few pathways of minimal suffering. I’ll end on this: I was looking for something in an old post and found that I love saying “I would love to be wrong,” which I noted in my post after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade (by the way there are some good suggestions in that post too, if you’re looking for something to do about everything). Unfortunately, I was not wrong.
Books and Other Words
I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time (although I did attempt to read it via Dracula Daily last year, but discovered that I don’t like reading books incrementally in my email inbox) in anticipation of seeing the Sacramento Ballet perform it. It’s interesting to read something that has taken on such a life of its own in pop culture. I thought I knew the story but it turned out I didn’t know much at all, just the sense of Dracula is a character. I’m not going to recap a 100-year-old book, but I want to say that it is obvious to me that Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra are lesbians! Mina is always writing about how good and kind men are and how we couldn’t make it without them. Girl, you’re overselling it. Calm down. I also maintain that Mina is autistic. She has every fucking train schedule for England and the continent memorized. She even tells Van Helsing that she is the “train fiend” when he expresses disbelief that she would know all these train times off the top of her head. A train FIEND. Who but an autistic person would do this and describe themselves that way? FIEND!
Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is situated somewhere in the borderlands between fiction and non-fiction. It’s a novel about the USSR that illuminates how it felt to live through it by imagining what’s in the minds of various real historical figures. We don’t necessarily know if that’s how they thought and what they felt, but Spufford extrapolates from the historical record to give us a sense of the optimism that some people felt at the outset of the USSR, and the pervasive cynicism present by the end. Spufford is insanely talented when it comes to historical and speculative fiction (see this year’s Cahokia Jazz, for example). I learned a lot from it despite it being “fiction,” and I even looked up some of the people and places afterwards to get a stronger picture in my mind. It was very interesting and worth reading.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- State Farm accused of funneling excess profits to parent as it seeks rate hike via the LA Times. Insurance companies suck! State Farm is allegedly pocketing extra profits while simultaneously declining to renew insurance policies for a bunch of homes because the increasing wildfire risk is too pricey for them.
- What does UNRWA do and why has Israel banned it from West Bank, Gaza? via Al Jazeera. This news is almost two weeks old now but I wanted to note it anyway. Israel is banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency “from conducting activities within Israel’s borders.” It’s grotesque to ban a humanitarian aid organization while they continue their genocide.
- Too many Democrats in Sacramento? The downsides of political dominance in California via the LA Times. This article made me laugh. We actually have too many Democrats in the state legislature. Apparently. Well … that’s who we voted for! I think it’s clear we do not want Republican governance in California. If there isn’t enough tension to keep people on their toes, the next step is for the party to splinter so we can get a left-wing branch into office. Just a thought!
- 25 Years of Indecision With Jon Stewart via The Nation. I appreciated this long profile on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and its influence on political discourse as we now know it. The article also brought to my attention that the quote about reality having “a well-known liberal bias” is from Steven Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ dinner speech, which I either forgot or never knew, despite the fact that I think of this statement often.
Doing Stuff
Last weekend, I went with my friends to see Sacramento Ballet perform Dracula. I didn’t even know they had a ballet of that, but I guess you can ballet anything (I mean the Royal Ballet is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, which is a wild choice and I wish I could see it). It was a very cool production and I’m glad we got to see it! The costumes were cool (I want a giant Dracula cloak), the dancing was great although there was an awful lot of slithering around (it’s how we know Dracula is evil, I guess). I think there ought to be more seasonally themed productions. Sure, Christmas has The Nutcracker, but we should get a spooky Halloween ballet every year too.
Wikipedia
I am proud to report that Ana and I finished reviewing my translation of the Bush v. Gore (2000) Wikipedia article and I published in on Spanish Wikipedia here. I thought it might be relevant to the election so I translated it. It turned out not to be relevant, but now Spanish-speakers can understand what the hell happened in that election. I also learned a lot in the process, so it was good for me if nothing else. Wikipedia says that there have been 251 visits to the page though, so at least someone is looking at it.
Rather than watch election news on Tuesday and Wednesday, I decided to copy edit some long Wikipedia articles. You may not think this is a good way to distract myself from the horrors, but I edited the 2024 Salvadoran general election article. This reminded me that things really could be worse. It is also 14,000 words long so it kept my attention for quite a while so I didn’t spend Tuesday doom scrolling.
I’m still slowly working through translating some articles about the Skagafjörður region in Iceland. Here’s a recent one: Hrolleifsdalur (it’s a valley). I also found that there are some articles connected to this subject in Spanish but not English, like this one about Hjalti Þórðarson, so I have started translating some of those to work on the topic from multiple directions. Doing this stuff is genuinely fun to me and makes me happy. I love filling in the links between articles I’ve worked on. I’m having a good time!
Corporeal Form
For everyone who has told me I am a “high-functioning” autistic person, I want to explain that I have been paying out of pocket for my CPAP supplies since I got diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2018. I have insurance. Insurance would be for these things. I do not understand how to order them through my insurance and, when I first got the CPAP, Kaiser wasn’t paying for the mask I wanted, so I’ve been buying the masks and everything else that insurance probably does have online with my own money like an idiot for years because navigating this stuff is too hard. However, I recently womaned up and figured it out (after six years of not figuring it out lol). I had to talk to five different people on the phone and I did cry at one point but we got it sorted out. I had to get my doctor to tell the sleep clinic people that I still need a CPAP (apparently they stop authorizing you for equipment if you don’t order it every so often which kinda makes sense but also sleep apnea doesn’t just go away??). I finally found out that Kaiser has a third-party company that I have to order through so I am doing this now. This felt extremely difficult but I’m glad it’s done because I literally spend hundreds of dollars a year on it.
Moving It
My next dance recital is coming up on December 7! If you are reading this, you are invited. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts
Kitchen Witchery
I haven’t been doing anything too thrilling in the kitchen lately, but of course I am still cooking because, you know, gotta eat every day. Last weekend I roasted a chicken. It’s both a good meal and part of my Thanksgiving preparations because I like to use homemade broth to punch up my holiday recipes. I a;sp made baked farro and lentils with feta, which I’ve done before but it has become part of my weeknight repertoire. I used this roasted acorn squash recipe to accompany the lentils and I liked it a lot. The squash came out great. Finally, it is soup season so I tried a new-to-me soup recipe from The Daily Soup cookbook: chickpeas with penne and gorgonzola. I thought I would love this recipe but it was just okay to me. The instructions didn’t call for blending it, but it was so oniony and I knew I was not going to like it if I had to keep eating tons and tons of little wisps of wilted onion and leek. Onions are great but I don’t always like how they feel. I probably won’t make this one again but I am planning to keep delving into that cookbook because there are many soups that I haven’t made before.
Of course, we cannot forget that last week was Día de los Muertos, so I had to make a traditional pan de muerto for the occasion. It was good! I love bread!
Cat Therapy
I’ve been missing Huey a lot lately. Whenever I came home, she would be near the door to shout at me, so I was in the habit of looking for her. Since she was black and it’s been getting darker earlier, I keep scanning for her when I open the door so I don’t run into her but, of course, she’s not there. Here’s a Huey photo from the archives.
Finally, here is Fritz for your nerves.
