Hello, friends and enemies. I have recently been beset by the urge to mindlessly click on things. Last week I “beat” the watermelon game, which has been my go-to activity when I want to just click at something for a while, that is, I made two watermelons. I was deeply disappointed that they did not merge and there were no fireworks or anything to mark this accomplishment. The game acted like this wasn’t even an achievement. What a disappointment. I had to find a new thing to click on for when I want to do nothing (perhaps others would feed this urge by scrolling TikTok or something, but I must click and videos are not relaxing), so I’ve started playing minesweeper. I used to play minesweeper a lot as a kid. Of course, back then it came for free with the computer (Microsoft has taken everything from us!). We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the week or during the daytime in the summer, so I would spend a lot of time playing Windows computer games and listening to the radio. There’s something satisfying about just clicking on shit. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a form of autistic stimming. Anyway, I’m keeping myself entertained and away from the infinite scroll.
Current Events
As much as I appreciate being right about things, I would prefer to not have been right about this one. In November, I advised that everyone stock their pantries and refill their medication in anticipation of Trump taking office. It was always possible that Trump was making shit up and wouldn’t set raise tariff rates, but he generally does things he says he’s going to do if those things will be harmful. So, of course, he announced sweeping increases in tariffs (then walked some back after the stock market crashed but I think it’s probably too late for our economy). Too many still seem not to understand that the country the tariff applies to not the one paying. China isn’t paying a 145% tax on imports to us. Great job, something that came from China and will now cost more than double. Meanwhile federal minimum wage is still $7.25. We’re extremely fucked.
The idea I’m stuck on right now is that people do not know where food comes from. I saw a tweet circulating (and it seemed like an earnest one, not a joke) that we grow bananas all over the US, so those prices won’t go up (fact check: you can grow bananas in Hawaii, but not the rest of the US. India and China are the biggest banana exporters). Vanilla comes from Madagascar (47% tariffs) and Mexico. Cinnamon comes from China, Vietnam (46% tariffs), and Indonesia (32% tariffs). And this is to say nothing of coffee and chocolate. Some idiot online suggested that psychopathic YouTube mogul Mr. Beast start growing chocolate in the US. I am not exaggerating when I say people don’t know where food comes from. We are careening into a USSR-like economy because of one man’s hubris and people who think you can grow cacao just anywhere are cheering him on. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, “Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.” Trump believes you’re winning or you’re losing and he thinks this will make us win. Somehow. We’re all fucking losing now though. Just ask anyone about their 401(k) and you’ll hear all about it.
Books and Other Words
Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo started off a little slow for my taste, but I ultimately enjoyed the story and the peek into another culture’s folklore. The story follows Li Lan, a young woman in colonial Malaysia, who gets an offer from a local wealthy family to be a ghost bride, that is, to wed the family’s recently deceased son so he will have a wife in the afterlife. The ghost of the would-be groom turns out to be a real asshole and starts harassing Li Lan in her dreams, which leads her to seeing a medium and taking some kind of remedy to keep ghosts away. Alas, this goes awry and Li Lan herself nearly dies, sending her on a journey through the spirit world. What really seems to suck about this afterlife is that you can be rich or poor depending on the offerings your descendants make for you. The aforementioned wealthy family is wealthy in death too, and there are other spirits who come to work for them. Imagine dying and still having to work as a housekeeper or some shit. The real nightmare here is capitalism.
I do love reading about Egypt and Egyptology, one of my earlier special interests, so when the library’s new book alert newsletter had Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard on it, I had to check it out. This book chronicles the careers of a number of women who worked in the field in its infancy and made it what it is today. This book seems to have required extensive archival excavations because most of these women maybe got a mention on the acknowledgements page of men’s work, or they are named in correspondence, but are not big names in their own right. As in many professions, women in Egyptology were hampered by gendered expectations (that they should get married and care for others, for example) that did not hinder men. One of my favorite chapters was about two women, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome, who copied down the art in the temple of Seti I (someone has a website about them with the art!). A job like that requires so much knowledge and technical skill, yet the men managing the site expected these women to host any visitors and take care of anyone who stopped by for medical support on top of their existing work. That’s a whole extra job! Anyone could make guests comfortable but not just anyone could accurately re-draw temple art. I really felt for all the people in this book who were just trying to learn and share knowledge but had to do all this extra stuff. Another of the women Sheppard profiles, Caroline Ransom Williams, worked for a while for the Metropolitan Museum of of Art and is the person behind the display of the Egyptian tomb they have there. Yet, this woman was cobbling together work while, as Sheppard puts it, caring for her aging mother and her husband. Sheppard also explains that Caroline tried to encourage the Met to hire some of her male colleagues to replace her, but they wouldn’t because that would require paying them way more, even though Caroline had way more experience. So rude.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’ via Michigan Advance. Imagine the most disgusting, fascist shit possible. Whatever you imagined, this is probably worse. These are the people running our country.
- The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and Shifting All Public Communications to X via Wired. Seems like a really bad way to communicate with people who probably don’t use the internet and almost certainly aren’t using “X.”
- From X: Young people are calling the em-dash “the ChatGPT hyphen.” They are inventing new ways for me to not sound human! I’ve been called many variations on a robot in my time. I’m sure I’m going to start being told I’m using unedited ChatGPT now all because of my love for the em dash. I’m going to be like that professor accused of being AI in an email (they’re just autistic).
- 2025 stock market crash via Wikipedia. The devil works fast but Wikipedia editors work faster!
- Are People Bad At Their Jobs….or Are The Jobs Just Bad? via Culture Study. It seems like every service we interact with is staffed by people who are bad at what they do. Anne Helen Peterson argues that work is structured in a way that makes it hard for people to do a good job. They’re not hiring enough people or training them well, or they pay structure incentivizes doing a shitty job.
Rampant Consumerism
I mentioned in my last post that I was investigating whether I have acid reflux (I do; more on that shortly) and one thing you can do about it is get an incline pillow. I was already seeing a bunch of instagram ads for complicated pillow systems for hypermobile people (because hypermobility means it takes more work to hold your body up, so a big-ass pillow can feel good), and one of them is also billing itself as an “acid reflux relief system” so I was like okay let’s try it. I bought the MedCline pillow and it is very comfortable. It feels really cozy to nest in it and read. I am, unfortunately, still trying to get adjusted to actually sleeping on it though, mostly because you need to lie on your side for it to work right and I usually sleep on my back. Some nights I’m waking up halfway through and swapping in my regular pillows and other nights I try to fall asleep in it and give up. Still, I am hopeful I will adjust. It really does feel like it’s helping. The main downside is that it’s interrupting Fritz’s ability to cuddle with me. He likes to sleep between my feet or in the crook of my arm, neither of which are possible if I’m wrapped around a body pillow. In short: I’m a monster.
With the gigantic new pillow situation, I also suggested to Kirk that we should get a king bed (we have been sharing a queen for years). I’ve brought it up before but he likes to sleep on the very edge like a neglected orphan so he was like “why?” I finally said that I want a bigger bed and he was like, well that’s all you had to say. I also made the case that if we are going to buy anything, we have to do it before tariffs make everything twice as expensive, so we went ahead and ordered a Big Fig mattress and a bigger version of the same Ikea bed frame that we’ve been using (everyone hates change!). The mattress has yet to arrive but I will report back once we get the new bed set up.
Corporeal Form
I’ve learned that some of my health issues have been acid reflux all along! Did you know that it is not normal to burp all the time? I thought it was because most of my family is like that. It’s also not normal to have to blow your nose and cough up gunk all the time, especially when you’re already taking allergy medication (I take a pill and a spray daily as it is). I started taking a daily acid reflux pill and I’m feeling a lot better. I’m once again shocked to learn that I’ve had an ongoing health condition and didn’t realize it because I thought that’s how being alive felt. I didn’t even know I was feeling acidity until I went away. I am glad to finally be taking care of some of these problems but aggravated that I’ve spent years suffering for nothing.
What’s really fucking me up about this situation is that the strategies for dealing with acid reflux are in conflict with things I’m doing for my other ailments. Since I’ve learned more about hypermobility, I’ve accepted that it takes more energy to hold my body up that it does for most people and have made lounging and lying down a big part of my day. It’s great. Unfortunately, acid reflux requires you to stay upright for a few hours after eating so the acid doesn’t come back up and attack you. Another suggestion is to eat more frequent, smaller meals throughout the day. So, if it feels bad to lie down for two or three hours after eating, and I’m supposed to eat less but more often, when does the lying down happen? I am struggling. I have been spending a lot more time at my computer (probably why I’m playing minesweeper!), which kind of sucks because it took me years of practice to not spend all day on the computer. I’m getting stressed out in the evenings about eating dinner early enough so I can lie down. It’s not going great. This all makes me feel like I need to eat a whole bunch in a panic so that I will have lying down time later, which is also a bad idea for several reasons, not the least because I finally learned how to stop binge eating in the last few years (the un-glamorous secret: once you stop restricting calories and telling yourself you can’t have certain foods, you will level out). I’m not sure what to do about this, or if there is anything I can do about this. It’s hard and I’m upset so I’m writing about it. Hopefully things will get easier as I get more accustomed to dealing with this.
Kitchen Witchery
I made a few good dishes this week. I tried the chili con carne recipe from The Bean Book and it was delicious. I simmered it extra long so the meat would be tender and that was a good choice. We had that with biscuits and roasted carrots topped with goat cheese. I tried this NY Times recipe for spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts. The instructions note you can use substitute tofu for the chicken so I gave that a try for lunch a few days ago. I liked the cooking method but the flavor wasn’t that strong. Maybe I used the wrong type of chili or maybe this is a classic case of NYT cooking making something bland. I poured some other sauce I had on hand over the leftovers and liked that, so I think I will keep this as a recipe but just use another sauce. Finally, I’ve been desperately wanting some good coffee cake for the last few weeks, so I made the Smitten Kitchen New York crumb cake. It was so good. This is the correct cake:crumb ratio and I will not be taking questions about it.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
