Hello, friends and enemies. I like to think that I am not as much of a creature of routine as I am. Sure, I’m autistic and appreciate my routine, but I don’t need it. Well, there’s nothing like the last week or so of the year to disabuse me of that notion. The other night I was freaking out a little bit even though nothing was really wrong and I was feeling generally disregulated. I think exercising—showing up to dance class regularly, for the most part—is doing a huge amount of work in keeping my nervous system from getting too nervous. A week and a half of lying around seems like a great idea until my brain is like “what if … things bad?” Just to be clear, I wasn’t in a dire state but I did start feeling general anxiety and dread. Fortunately, I got Kirk to install some lights in our garage this week so I could go out there and work out even when it’s dark (which, right now, is any time after work). I did a little work out and felt fine the next day. The body is so complex but then all you have to do is run around for a while* and it’s mostly fine (*and take an SSRI).
Another thing I found stressful this week was I had to set up a 401(k) account because, as of January 1, I now work for the new corporate overlords that acquired the company I work. I’ve written about this before, but it’s essentially impossible to invest in any ethical way. The best performing funds always consist of oil, dystopian tech companies, pharmaceutical companies that are ripping us all off, funds about to start another subprime mortgage crisis, and, like, Blackrock. Unfortunately, our economy is set up to make money on things that are extractive and exhibit “growth,” which is not anything that’s long-term sustainable for us as a species or culture. Yet, it’s the only avenue available to me, and to many of us, to save for retirement. We still don’t know if 401(k)s even work for retirement savings because they were only introduced in the early 1980s, so no one has successfully made it through their retirement on a 401(k) alone. I literally don’t think it’s possible for the vast majority of us to save enough to retire. Per Investopedia, “If you need $100,000 per year to live and you can expect an average return of 5% per year from your 401(k) assets, you would need more than $2 million saved up.” Cool. People (media, rich people, Boomers) often complain about how no one has loyalty to their job anymore. Well, jobs have no loyalty to us. I would stay in a job that offered me a pension, a reliable way to retire. The State of California has a pension and you don’t see many people leaving state service for exactly that reason. So, I did not have fun reckoning with the fact that the only way to provide for my retirement is to invest money in things that I find morally reprehensible and that investment probably won’t even be enough to live out my days.
Doing Holiday Stuff (apparently just making food)
Apparently my last regular post was before Christmas, so here are some updates about the holidays. Kirk’s dad came for dinner on Christmas eve and I made clam chowder (by request, since that’s what his family usually does). Clam chowder is not a complete meal so I also made rolls; a broccoli, onion, and blue cheese tart; and then a Danish almond torte (recipe from The Nordic Baking Book) for dessert because my father in law loves marzipan. The cake was very interesting because I’d never made a yeasted cake or a lattice before, but it turned out quite good. On Christmas itself, Kirk and I just like to hang out. I got some nice things and I mostly spent the day reading my books and watching the Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas special. For breakfast, I decided to make my life easy and made a french toast casserole and some bacon. Kirk makes dinner on Christmas day so I didn’t have to do anything! It was kind of weird and annoying having Christmas on a Wednesday because it’s got two days of work on either side of it and barely feels like a big holiday. Alas. Modern life.
New Year’s Eve is kind of my favorite holiday as regular readers can probably tell from my end-of-year posts. The new year always feels full of potential, even though I recognize that the transition from one year to the next is completely arbitrary. Three of my friends came over to hang out and we continued our tradition of watching “weird” movies with a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d only seen it once and it was quite a while ago, so it was fun to watch it again with friends. It also had me reminiscing about how some of my friends in middle school knew all the songs so I learned the lyrics just from them, singing it while having literally no clue what it was from or about (hazards of a religious upbringing). Because New Year’s Eve was also Hannukah, we made latkes just before midnight. So we rung in the new year eating potatoes and talking about what we want to do in 2025. This is as it should be.
Books and Other Words
The First Bright Thing by J.R. Dawson has a lot of things I love, like a circus and time-traveling lesbians. It’s a story about creating the life you want for yourself, which is a message I strongly subscribe to. The protagonist, Ringmaster, aka Rin, neé Ruth, is a “spark,” someone with a magical ability. She can teleport and time travel. Her abusive ex, the Circus King, can make people do what he wants just by telling them to do it. The story is set after World War I and shows the characters trying to figure out how to live after experiencing the greatest trauma they can imagine and, in the case of Rin and her wife and their best friend, trying to figure out if there’s anything they can do to avoid the next war. They use their circus as a way to spread joy and good feelings wherever they go. Most of us don’t have the ability to personally foresee and attempt avert a war, but we can all aim to encourage our fellow humans to be a little better—and to be better for ourselves and our chosen families.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo is about a demon, Vitrine, who loves a city and all the people in it. She’s spent years nudging the city’s development and is on the cusp of finally having a great library built there when a posse of angels arrive to raze the whole place for reasons known only to them. Vitrine is mad as hell about this and curses one of the angels. She stays in the ruins and slowly starts trying to make the city a place where people could live, but she holds a grudge the whole time. She keeps crossing paths with her cursed angel throughout the years and he attempts to pull her out of her grief. He eventually brings her new people to inhabit the city too. That is the basic plot but I don’t feel it describes the book very well. It’s very atmospheric and moody. It made me think a little bit of Good Omens in terms of an unlikely demon-angel relationship, but it isn’t campy like Good Omens is. I enjoyed it and thought it was an interesting short novel.
I loved Shoestring Theory by Mariana Costa, which is a wonderfully entry to a sub-genre that I call “gay wizards” (sibling of “time-traveling lesbians“). Sad magic man and disgraced court mage Cyril is basically yearning for death in a blighted kingdom but casts a spell that might work or might just be suicide to go back in time and keep his husband, the king, from going off the rails and ruining it all. This book was super fun to read. We got the foppish magic boy and his cat familiar, his besties Prince Euphrates and Princess Tigris, evil plots, court gossip. I mean, it’s just good stuff. I must recommend it to all gay magic enjoyers.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Secret Service Admits It Didn’t Check if People Really Consented to Being Tracked via 404 Media. Uh … yikes. I seriously cannot stress enough that you should keep your phone location off as much as you can. I only turn mine on when I need a map.
- Elon Musk Urged People to Stop Donating to Wikipedia. Here’s Why via Snopes. Fuck Elon. Counterpoint: you should start or continue donating to Wikipedia because it’s a huge repository of knowledge that individuals in many fields contribute to. It’s one of the last free internet places that hasn’t rotted in this era of the web.
- Wading Into 2025: How to Begin via Organizing My Thoughts. I really liked this collection of several activists’ perspectives on things to think about heading into the new year.
- Translation-adjacent via Words Without Borders. A few thoughts on all the work that translators do beyond the work of translating a text.
- Never Forgive Them via Where’s Your Ed At. This is a long essay about how the internet sucks now and that a number of high-powered, rich people in tech chose to make it suck. They have made using the internet, something we all now need to function in society, hostile and adversarial and we’re all suffering from tiny psychic traumas every day because some people are obsessed with “growth” for their stupid companies. From the article, “Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.”
TV and Music
You may not believe it but I saw two whole movies in the last two weeks. Lemon and I went to see Queer without knowing much about it other than gay, 1940s, set in Mexico. It ended up being a pretty fucking weird one because it’s based on a William S. Bourroughs novel. It’s a movie that’s uncomfortable on purpose, but knowing the discomfort is intentional doesn’t make it any better. Still, I did like the movie, especially with its anachronistic soundtrack and use of Jason Schwartzman as a bear.
Like everyone, I also saw Wicked, which I obviously liked. I read the books years ago and I have listened to the soundtrack but hadn’t seen the show, so it was nice to see it in movie form with super lush sets and costumes. I can’t believe they’re making it two movies though. But sure, why not. Maybe two movies will help people understand the concept of fascism.
The most fun album of the year appeared at the end of December: Best of Bootie 2024! It’s a collection of mashups featuring popular songs from this year and it is my preferred way of consuming most pop music.
Corporeal Form
Kirk bought me a really nice gift to try to alleviate my carpal tunnel. It’s a hand massager that sort of looks like an Iron Man prop. I was a little skeptical but it actually feels quite nice. It seems like it’s helping but I have not yet tried to do any knitting. The massager recommends using it twice a day for 15 minutes, so I’ve been doing that for the last week, plus being a good citizen and doing my hand exercises. I’ve been spending an hour of my evenings watching TV, doing my hand stuff, drinking my electrolyes, and maybe doing some feet exercises while I sit there. I find this whole process kind of annoying but I’m trying to make it as enjoyable as possible. I am very tired of body maintenance but there isn’t really an alternative.
Kitchen Witchery
I tried a recipe for prebranac (Serbian baked beans) with my Christmas lima beans because I’m always trying to keep up with my bean subscription! I liked this recipe but the texture of stringy, cooked down onions is not my favorite (it’s fine but after a while I’m like, okay, I get it). I eventually decided pasta could fix this for me, so I mixed some of the leftover beans with noodles, topped that with gruyère and stuck it under the broiler. That was really good gave me some textural variety along with the onions.
I was so mad because I thought this orange tofu and broccoli was going to rule but I hated it! The sauce tasted really astringent to me. Kirk liked it though so that’s something. I liked the idea of the tofu and broccoli cooked together on the sheet pan so I am going to make this again but with a sauce from the store. That will be easier to make anyway.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has started hanging out on the couch again but only if he gets to be on the top, not on a cushion like a normal creature.
