Hello, friends and enemies. It’s my birthday! At least, it will be my birthday when this post publishes. I’m 39 and that feels a little anti-climactic, but that’s okay. I am endeavoring to appreciate each year equally. I don’t have any big birthday plans, but I did volunteer at the Lavender Library on Saturday and I have dance class today. I also bought a fancy cake (which we started in on as a birthday eve treat) and earlier this week I took myself to the local bookstore and bought a few books.
It is currently circus season in my heart even though I’m no longer in a circus. I’ve written before about my hometown’s community circus (see here and here) and that May is when they do their shows, so I always think about it around this time of year. I’ve actually been following a few jugglers on instagram and it’s making me want to start juggling again, although I always enjoyed the social aspect of juggling with others more than the grinding through skills on my own. I do still have all my props though. I am thinking about it! I am realizing that my interests and hyperfixations never really go away, they just lie dormant for years until one day I’m like “I must do that THING.” I haven’t done it yet but I feel the need simmering. In any case, Here are some photos that I’ve shared before. For nostalgia’s sake.
Books and Other Words
Kristen Arnett’s newest novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, is a perfect book. (I’ll let you decide if it’s objectively a perfect book, or merely a perfect book for me.) The story follows 29-year-old Cherry, a lesbian working at a shitty aquarium supply store in central Florida. More importantly, Cherry is trying to make a career out of her art: clowning. This work is, as usual for Arnett, an exploration of the relationship between humor and grief. Cherry’s older brother died years ago and she feels like her mom thinks the wrong child survived. Cherry subsumes this grief into her clown persona, Bunko the would-be rodeo clown who is terrified of horses (a gag that absolutely kills at children’s parties). At one point, Cherry muses, “How can I turn this into a bit, I wonder. That’s how my brain always chooses to process trauma or grief or anxiety.” Girl, same. We’re all out here living for the bit, being our own little clowns to get through the many garbage things in this life. The novel is about more than just clowning though. This story is rooted firmly in the present and, on the periphery, we see the loss of queer spaces, like a hyper-local gay bar getting closed down, and right-wing protestors showing up to rally against a children’s event that Cherry’s performing at, which includes a drag queen story time. I think Arnett is encouraging us all to be a little bit of a clown in the face of fascism, which is honestly great advice.
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak is a fascinating read. It explores attitudes and trends among the last group of people to grow up in the USSR before it collapsed, something that seemed completely impossible to the author’s interview subjects but, once it happened, felt totally inevitable. I read this book through the lens of what is happening now in the U.S., which resulted in some surreal moments, like when I encountered a subheading that read simply “gerontocracy,” which noted that the “average age of the politburo members increased from fifty-five in 1966 to seventy in the early 1980s, with the leading group close to eighty.” Hmmm … that does remind me of a certain congress. One of the big themes in this book is that the forms of performing socialism had overtaken their meaning. Thinking about this made me realize that my autistic ass would not have thrived in Soviet Russia. There were too many unwritten rules. Yurchak describes how the process and format of participating in communism—attending meetings, voting on local issues, filing reports—was more important than the actual meaning attached to those things. The people Yurchak interviews for Everything Was Forever explain that they bent the rules for people they liked and that fit in with their local or workplace communist committees, but applied the full force of rules to people who were being a nuisance. Both over-zealous true-believers and dissidents who objected to the system were considered threats to this system. I know myself and my only two modes are true believer and avowed dissident because when I believe something I completely believe it. (There might have been a secret third option: going high-masking people-pleaser and becoming miserable and burnt out trying to mirror people’s personalities back to them.) There is no way I could have navigated this system.
The rituals of political life overtaking the meaning led to what Yurchak terms “hypernormalization.” Irony and satire flourished in this era and the author describes some genuinely funny stuff, like a group of friends creating a formal certificate for their buddy’s birthday and presenting it during a fake meeting. Over-identifying with the rituals was a way of performing satire, with some groups going so far that it was impossible to tell who they were lampooning. Certain genres of jokes also became very popular, including one called “scary little poems,” short poems that “in gruesome detail, described little children as agents or objects of extreme violence.” One poem goes like this:
A little girl found a grenade in the field.
“What is this, uncle? with trust she appealed.
“Pull on the ring,” he said, “you will find out.”
For a while her bow will be flying about
The poem is dark and that is intentional. Society was also dark and that’s the kind of humor you get when many things are terrible. This reminds me a lot of the current trend in internet memery of circulating 9/11 jokes and Saddam Hussein in the bunker memes (if this doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s probably good. It means you’re not terminally online. That said, please do not make me attempt to explain it). The world is so ridiculous that something as serious as 9/11 or, in the case of scary little poems, children accidentally killing themselves with a grenade, gets filtered into something like people transforming the earnest, ultra-patriotic “never forget” into the humble, satirical “I forgot” in a 9/11 meme.
I could probably go on about this book for a long time, but I recommend instead that you read it if you’re interested in trying to understand why reality feels so weird right now. Read it and then talk about it with me! We’ll have a snow cone and discuss!
The USSR aside, I would like to note that I’m currently 510 days into my reading streak. I’ve made a point of reading at least one page from a book every day. Keeping the streak going helps me not get stuck browsing the internet forever when I’m tired.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- How M.L.M. world works on Instagram and TikTok via Read Max. This article made me think about how pyramid scheme language has infiltrated everyday life. Corporate-speak is nearly indistinguishable from MLM terminology, like when people get a new job and talk about having found a new “opportunity.” Interestingly, MLM’s use of the vague “opportunity” is a way to skirt regulation. Per the article, “If the investment to join an M.L.M. scheme was less than $500 then it wasn’t technically a “franchise,” it was a business opportunity.” Despite the scamminess of it all, MLMs persist because they “[fulfill] a specific ideological function: helping to sell the success of American capitalism.” It makes sense then that this language would filter into real workplaces; everyone is trying to sell us on the success of capitalism, even the legitimate gigs.
- Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing via Bain & Company. This article is from a marketing blog, but I think it’s a very interesting indicator of the state of the web. Having AI answers on a search engine’s page makes people far more likely to click on nothing at all after running a search. A recent survey found “that about 80% of consumers now rely on ‘zero-click’ results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.” AI answers are pirating all the information people have posted to websites and now no one is getting website traffic. This is a problem for the way the internet works because nearly every website that generates income from ads, which no one will see if they don’t go to a website. Please don’t get me wrong here, you all know I am a fervent hater of advertisements. I’m trying to say this has the potential to collapse the current model of how the internet works. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing but it will surely be a different thing.
- Wikipedia’s largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems via ABC News (Australia). This article solved a mystery for me. A lot of the Icelandic Wikipedia articles I’ve been translating have been available in the Cebuano Wiki, which is a Filipino language. I wondered who out there happens to speak both Icelandic and Cebuano. What a niche! Alas, a bot has been doing this work and, although its creator had good intentions, creating a huge volume of AI translations has not been great for the Cebuano Wikipedia overall.
- The Infamous ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ Anti-Piracy Font Was Pirated. But By Who? via 404 Media. I just think it’s funny that the font in the anti-piracy ads was pirated. Maybe you would download a car!
Rampant Consumerism
Recently, my friend Mandy told me she was wishing she had a snow cone and, because I’m the kind of person I am, I said “I think you can just buy a snow cone maker” then immediately bought one. We tested it out on Friday and it was deemed a success by all. I have a Kitchenaid mixer so I bought the shaved ice attachment because that seemed like the thing that would take up the least space in my kitchen. It worked really well! I am curious about experimenting with freezing different liquids. I was originally just planning to use water like a basic bitch, but the machine came with a booklet of wild recipes for things like “s’mores shaved ice” and my mind is now open to the possibilities. I’m thinking about trying a piña colada version with shaved coconut milk ice and pineapple syrup (by the way, this is the brand of syrup I bought and we liked it). I also want to try freezing chocolate milk and seeing how that goes as a snow cone. I have been joking (not really joking maybe) that this will be the perfect recession treat since it’s just water and flavored syrup. We’re getting ahead of the economic downturn over here.
Media
Eurovision is this week! If you don’t know what Eurovision is, you’re missing out on the campiest time of the year! Nearly 40 countries from Europe (plus Australia. Just accept it) send a musical act to compete in the name of peace, love, and music. You can watch all the music videos for this year’s competition on the Eurovision youtube channel here. I really like the songs from Sweden, Australia, Estonia, but there are many fun songs. I am thinking it would be fun to go next year for my 40th birthday so I am hoping the winner is a place it would be nice to visit (the winner’s country hosts the next competition).
Moving It
It is, once again, dance recital season! You’re invited to watch me dance my little heart out on May 31. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts
Kitchen Witchery
I made some good, relatively easy dinners over the last two weeks. I liked this tofu and asparagus stir fry recipe from NY Times and will definitely make it again. The recipe is called tumeric-black pepper chicken with asparagus, but I substituted tofu as the recipe itself suggests as an alternative. It was pretty quick and easy to cook, though it did take me more than the 15 minutes the recipe claims to take. No recipe takes only 15 minutes. That is a myth. The other recipe I tried was also from NY Times Cooking (note that you can access it for free with the Sacramento Public Library! I’m not spending money on this! Go here and scroll down to New York Times Cooking), lentils with chorizo, greens and yellow rice. Although I made lentils and linguica without greens because we like linguica and I am opposed to hot leaves! Do not make me eat a hot leaf! But I do eat vegetables so we had that with a spring asparagus galette for balance. Also very good and easy to make! I’m leaning in to the asparagus since it’s in season.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
