Hello, friends and enemies. As usual, so much is happening. I was thinking about writing a mini-essay on recent events, like our top government officials using a group chat to plan bombing campaigns. I’m not really sure what I can add to this discussion though, so I will refrain from saying much. However, I do want to note that, although it is very funny (funny sad, not funny ha-ha) that they are so stupid that they added the Atlantic editor to the war plans chat (it is also funny that half the group chats in the country are now nicknamed things like “war secrets group chat [secure!]”), it is not funny that they are bombing Yemen. Last I checked, we are not at war with Yemen and Congress has not declared a war. Yet, we’re just bombing countries willy-nilly. What is wrong with this country. Also a celebrated scholar of fascism just left his job at Yale to move to Canada. Seems like a bad sign!
Other than our crumbling society, I had a really interesting conversation while volunteering at the Lavender Library on Friday. I was chatting with a fellow volunteer who has been working there a long time and who is old enough to be my mom, and she mentioned that it’s very hard to keep up with what the younger people are listening to and watching and saying. Our culture is so fractured though that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to “keep up.” I’m certainly not. I just learned who Dua Lipa was last year and she’s a pretty big pop star at this point (it’s okay if you still don’t know who Dua Lipa is). Thirty years ago you could turn on the TV and everyone had more or less the same access to the same culture, maybe your friend had cable or HBO and you didn’t, but even then, there was only so much you could get. With the way the internet is now, you could make a full-time job of watching, reading, or listening to things and it’s possible to have zero overlap with your peers. There’s no Saturday morning cartoons anymore and we have Top 40 radio but it seems like Taylor Swift took that over. The good here is that you can really dig into the things you like. If you love obscure music, you don’t have to travel to the record store two hours away to find your favorites; everything is on Spotify or Apple Music or BandCamp now. Way more people have the ability to create and share their art than they used to, which is honestly one of the best things about the internet. So, the idea of keeping up with the culture kind of doesn’t even exist anymore. Most of us are out of step with our local mainstream in some form or another. I know this is true based on experience—just try telling anyone how excited you are for Eurovision (I am very excited for Eurovision)!
Books and Other Words
I found Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner in the stacks at the Lavender Library and decided to check it out since I haven’t done much reading about bisexuality. I liked this book a lot, especially since it takes a radical perspective. Eisner states that in contrast to “liberal politics, whose goal is to gain access to power structures, radical politics criticizes the very structures and ultimately seeks to take them apart.” This is the best explanation I’ve seen of radicalism yet. The book goes a little further than the usual “bisexual myths” discourse that we are often stuck with. Eisner instead focuses on trying to “extract [bisexuality’s] enormous subversive potential” instead of “normalizing” it the way a lot of works try to do. So, instead of being like “it’s fine an normal to be bi!” Eisner is saying “being bi is different and that actually gives us a unique perspective on society and positions us to make radical change,” which is a very cool approach! One of the most interesting subjects in this book is the concept that bisexuality poses a threat to how society understands itself. Homosexuality is considered more legible to heterosexuals because at least they like just one group of people. Bisexuality makes it harder for people to disavow homosexuality and it calls into question everyone’s sexuality, which freaks people out. Eisner writes that bisexual women are threatening to patriarchy because they “are thought to embody the choice of whether or not to have relationships with men.” Oop!
Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin is a chronicle of a particular brand of madness. It’s an uncomfortable book—deliberately so—which makes it hard to say whether it’s “good” or not and I’m not even sure I liked it, to be honest. The story’s narrator and protagonist is a rich Palestinian woman who has moved to New York. She’s contemptuous of most everyone and everything in America and takes refuge in elaborate skincare routines that she spends hours at a time on after stocking up on products at CVS (thus earning this ritual the name “CVS retreat”). The narrator works as an English teacher at an all-boys school and leads her classes in ways that would probably get most people fired. She befriends a fashionable man who turns out to be homeless and who convinces her to help him with a scam involving luxury handbags. Despite my ambivalence, this is a well-written work. There are some pithy lines like the US being the “only country in the world with the cultural practice of school shootings.” We see the narrator really lose her grip at the end of the book. Is it the pressure of fitting into another culture? Some kind of demonic possession? Just being an insufferable person? The novel is content to leave us wondering.
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I talked about two posts ago. This book is, even more than its predecessor, focused on the question of what it means to be people. Our protagonist from the first book, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, gets dragged into the plot by her former liaison Three Seagrass who has somewhat broken protocol to appoint herself to a mission to help the Teixcalaani empire figure out how to communicate with the aliens that are killing the fleet at an alarming pace. That might sound convoluted but it’s very well done. It’s just hard to stuff this big, science fiction concept into a few sentences. I hope Martine writes more books because I really like her perspective and her world-building.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers via California Department of Justice. If you did a 23andMe DNA test, you truly must delete your account. The company is going out of business and we have no idea who will end up with the DNA data it has collected over the years.
- Tesla owners are trading in cars at record rates amid Musk backlash via The Washington Post. Lol. Lmao even. By the way, they’re recalling almost all the Cybertrucks. I love to see it.
- The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces via Media Matters. Despite conservative complaints about the “liberal media,” the online media ecosystem is “dominated” by right-wing opinions, and conservative shows are much more popular than liberal ones. The report found, for example, that “Nine out of the 10 online shows with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million.” Yikes.
- The Pandemic Never Ended via The New Republic. On the ongoing pandemic, long covid, and the way the government is handling (ignoring) it all. From the article, “Today, people say ‘during the pandemic’ when they mean ‘during lockdown.’ This distinction—or lack thereof—upsets me; though I try to remember that people don’t mean to offend. This is the product of ignorance and misinformation, coming from the top down.”
Doing Things
We went to the ballet again and it was cool! I have no big thoughts about it but I was happy to go and hang out with my friends. This was the last show of the Sac Ballet season and we already bought tickets for next season, so now I am looking forward to more outings.
Corporeal Form
I’m really going through it with my body. I came to the sudden realization a few weeks ago that it’s become rather difficult for me to breathe. I was emptying the dishwasher like, hey I’m really out of breath right now. And, you know, that’s not a strenuous activity. Everything has been feeling very challenging because of it. You actually need air to function. My friends reminded me that it was probably time to talk to the doctor and of course they were right. I told the doctor that I (really we, since these findings were from the friend quorum) thought I might have asthma. This week I did a pulmonary function test about it. I was worried we wouldn’t learn anything from it and, unfortunately, we only learned that my lungs are functioning fine. This is good but then it’s like, okay, now what. I’ve noticed that doctors have a tendency to see a test result, let you know things look good, then forget that the problem persists despite having nice test results. So, I followed up with my doctor and she ordered a chest x-ray and also mentioned that acid reflux could be a cause of breathing issues, which was news to me.
I have been feeling a little more acidic lately and I had chalked it up to that devil perimenopause, but we have antacids in the house so I figured let’s experiment. I took one and, before long, my airways were free of gunk, and I wasn’t coughing or burping like I often am. And, yes, I was breathing a bit better. That lasted for a few hours and then my throat started hurting again and the gunk reasserted itself. I think I’ve had acid reflux (or worse?) the whole time and not realized it because it always feels that way.
I’m so frustrated with my health because I feel like I’m trying really hard to take care of myself, but I can’t figure out that things are wrong with me if things have always been wrong. When I got a special glasses prescription and started doing physical therapy for binocular vision dysfunction, my head stopped hurting and I realized I’d had a permanent headache. I only registered “headache” when it was worse than usual, without acknowledging the constant, low-grade pain. Once that stopped hurting, I was able to realize that my jaw was bothering me, and I got diagnosed with TMJ dysfunction. I’m peeling away layers of physical issues and I keep discovering more issues underneath that I wasn’t able to isolate from the symphony of physical signals. I’m sure part of this due to the autism, which is infamous for making us struggle to connect to our physical sensations. However, I think a significant part of the problem is that I’ve had to learn to care for myself as an adult in a way I didn’t get when I was growing up. My dad recently told us that he figured we were fine if we weren’t bleeding. It’s taken a long time to unlearn the idea that so much discomfort is normal and it’s good to seek help. I have a kind of learned helplessness about a lot of little things like this. Fortunately Kirk and my friends often help me recognize that there are different ways to do things and I don’t have to be uncomfortable. It feels so stupid to not even realize that my body is hurting but I’m doing my best. We’re slowly getting somewhere.
I’m planning to pick up some more powerful over-the-counter medication and see how I feel. I do feel notably better even with the basic meds, so I am curious to see how this shakes out and report back to my doctor. I’m glad this doctor is being more helpful than most, but I wish doctors would have a little more curiosity. There has to be a better way to help people like me figure out what their problems are. I often don’t even tell the doctor something until I’ve read up on an issue and find myself saying “oh no, I bet I have that too.” I’m often right (not always, but often enough). Why do doctors never ask about symptoms? It’s just, how are you? Ma’am, I have no fucking idea. You’re the doctor.
Kitchen Witchery
Last week I roasted a chicken for dinner and we had that with some vegetables and butternut squash risotto. I have probably said this before (and shared photos that look exactly the same) but roasting a chicken well feels like the pinnacle of a certain kind of cooking to me. I feel so much pride for being able to roast a good chicken. Last week I also made some really good burgers with blue cheese and caramelized onions, but I forgot to take a picture! In desserts, I made these absolutely delicious caramel bars with candied peanuts (recipe from 100 Cookies). They’re kind of like a millionaire’s shortbread plus peanuts. They have a shortbread base, caramel layer, candied peanuts, and chocolate on top. I will certainly make these again because they are fucking good.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This fucking guy.
