Hello, friends and enemies. This week I had the fun experience of going to the dentist to pick up my next few sets of clear braces. I don’t know what it is about this office that has them chronically invested in not explaining anything in advance, but I learned when I arrived that part of the process would be filing my teeth to make room for them to land in their new configuration, which of course I found alarming (then covered my alarm by asking “can you make my teeth pointy?” Very cool stuff. Make me into a Ferengi). They ultimately only had to file a few teeth by a fraction of a millimeter but my question is why isn’t there some kind of orientation packet for this stuff? Maybe it’s the autism but I really hate showing up for an appointment and then learning I have to have my teeth ground down. Is it too much to warn me? Damn.
I’m keeping this post a little shorter this week because I do not have big energy for talking about what’s going on in politics. Are many things happening? Yes. Do I have coherent thoughts and sources at this time? No.
Books and Other Words
You know I’m always going to read a cult book, and Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden is more than just a cult book. Borden traces the history of the US through fringe religious movements (cults, if you will), declaring “We are all in the cult of America.” The book starts, of course, with the Puritans who believed that God wanted them to put “the material world [to use] for a godly purpose” which is holier than just letting the earth be. Although this book is ostensibly about religious movements, the most salient parts of the narrative were, to me, where Borden wove together the threads of religious devotion with our worship of consumerism. She writes about the history of advertising and how the entire concept of buying stuff when you don’t really need it arose after World War One, when business leaders refused to scale back production after the war ended, instead inventing the very concept of consumerism. It turned out to be a short trip from worshiping the good Lord to the almighty dollar. Borden opines, “Americans, including politicians, have been indoctrinated to believe that work is holy, idleness is sin, and the number in a bank account represents the moral character of its holder.” This really comes together in later chapters about multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, which, not coincidentally, often run roughshod through religious communities. Borden notes that two pieces of “Puritan doomsday ideology”—the concept of nature being here for the taking and that poverty is the result of sin—”have collaborated to uncover a new and abundant natural resource: the lower classes.” What a gut punch. She continues, noting that “Between 1975 and 2020, fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.” This doesn’t mean that the Puritans are to blame for all our modern problems, but they certainly laid the groundwork for many of the issues we have today. I really appreciated this book for connecting all these seemingly disparate ideas into a book that makes total sense and helps me understand the hellscape a little better.
I need to preface this next book by saying that I do not have diabetes. However, my doctor said my blood sugar was a little into the pre-diabetic range and I want to make sure I don’t develop diabetes. I’m doing some reading because gathering information is how I respond to every problem! That said, I found Intuitive Eating for Diabetes by Janice Dada at the Sacramento Public Library and was very happy that I did. I learned a lot and it made me feel like this is all manageable. The book starts with an overview on some research about weight and dieting, which was not news to me but I am always glad to see it acknowledged: we do not have any research that shows how to make successfully lose weight, and weight cycling (going on and off diets, losing and gaining weight over and over) and can increase the risk for diabetes. She also notes that diabetes itself can lead to weight gain, so it’s kind of fucked up that doctors then prescribe weight loss as a treatment. Seems unfair! Dada continues with explaining the biological process that goes wrong in diabetes and providing information about intuitive eating, a practice of listening to your internal body cues about what to eat. This can be hard for many of us after a life time of replacing innate cues with rules like “you have to clean your plate” or “you can’t eat after 6 p.m.” Dada also lets readers know that you don’t have to do anything drastic like cut out carbs or “white foods” or whatever to treat diabetes. You can eat the foods you like, as long as you’re adding in vegetables and fiber. She offers a framework of dividing a plate into three: carbs, protein, and vegetables, plus adding some fats. I think that’s something I can use, especially since it’s not overly complicated or restrictive. One thing that I also found encouraging was a statistic from a 2018 study that found that “59 percent of the prediabetes patients studied returned to normal blood glucose values in one to eleven years without any treatment.” Good news! In any case, I really don’t think I’m going to end up having diabetes but I’m glad to have some knowledge about how to help prevent it. Health insurance companies always freak out when you get anywhere near diabetes because they don’t want to have to spent money on you for the rest of your life! It’s the one time they’re in a hurry to offer care.
I absolutely loved Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. I also feel very lucky that I was able to check it out of the Lavender Library because the wait list at the public library is a mile long. The story follows Cyrus Shams, who came to the US from Iran as a baby with his dad after his mother died on a plane that the US military accidentally (“accidentally”?) blew up. The novel mostly focuses on Cyrus, but also provides some chapters from the perspective of his family and friends, as well as his dream conversations between people he knows and historical figures. Cyrus is in recovery from addiction, is deeply depressed, is trying to write a book of poetry, and thinks he needs to die in a way that means something. He spends most of the story with, metaphorically speaking, his head up his ass, but in a deeply charming way. I loved the way the story was written; Akbar was a poet before he was a novelist and it really shows in his use of the language. One passage that stayed with me was one about how the “whole Abrahamic world invests itself” in rules about what not to do, “but you can live a whole life of not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.” There were also little details that made me know that Akbar is using the same internet that I am, like in a reference to the “oldest known written complaint” (per Wikipedia) to Babylonian copper merchant Ea-nasir (it’s fine if that doesn’t mean anything to you, it just means we’re spending time in different internet neighborhoods). In conclusion: go read this book!
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Medicaid cuts: The how and why via Your Local Epidemiologist. I am sure I am biased since I my job is related to federal healthcare, but I think a lot of people are not realizing how dire these Medicaid cuts are going to be. Your Local Epidemiologist has a very good explanation of how Congress did this and what it’s going to affect. In short, the federal government will be providing less funding to states and “states will have to determine how to fill the resulting funding gaps,” which is almost certainly going to result in reduced coverage.
- The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work via 404 Media. A lot of media companies seem to think that incorporating AI into their coverage is going to keep them relevant and financially solvent. They’re probably wrong! From the article: “AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for … The only journalism business strategy that works, and that will ever work in a sustainable way, is if you create something of value that people (human beings, not bots) want to read or watch or listen to, and that they cannot find anywhere else.” Relatedly, author Kameron Hurley recently mentioned on BlueSky that “What tech companies fail to realize in AI-gold rush is human attention span is finite. There are only so many hours in the human day. You can write 5,000 books a year or make 50,000 movies a year, but who has time to ingest them? We are already starting to turn off data inputs due to overwhelm.” She’s right. I already can’t keep up with all the things written by real human people with unique thoughts. Who’s going to look at all that AI slop and get these people their advertising revenue? Will the internet just be bots crawling the web to be advertised at by other bots?
- Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance via Electronic Frontier Foundation. Just a heads up for all you Ring camera users, Amazon has walked back their policy on Ring footage and is “easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States.” Also “employees at Ring will have to show proof that they use AI in order to get promoted.” What a nightmare.
Autism Thoughts
I have to share this video from Instagram because it explains so much. It’s from Sol Smith who just published a book about autism (although I haven’t read it yet). He has a lot of really smart stuff to say about autism and ADHD but this one really had me like “holy shit this is my whole life.” This clip explains a concept called “restraint collapse,” which is when we have to use all our cognitive energy during the day to do things we don’t want to do like work or wash the dishes when there are things we want to do so bad! Restraining ourselves is taking up all the energy, so we come home from work tired and unable to do anything else. For many years I have described my anxiety as centering around time: time to do the many things I want to do when I have to do so many things I don’t want to do or maybe just feel neutral about. I have many important tasks! I have Wikipedia to edit! Books to read! But I’m spending all this energy holding myself back from doing what I want so I can do my dumb job and make money to pay for my house. I think what this means is this feeling is maybe not anxiety but another aspect of autism that I’m dealing with. It also makes me feel a little better about being perennially dissatisfied with work even though my job is fine. It’s just not what I want to be doing!
Moving It
I don’t want to speak to soon but I think I may finally be getting into a routine with my garage workouts again. I’ve been out there a few times in the last two weeks. I am sure the relatively cool summer weather is making it a lot easier on me—it hasn’t been excessively hot this month. I’ve been sticking to my plan of not doing anything that will make my knees too crunchy, so no squats and no deadlifts. This kinda sucks because I do find a lot of satisfaction in doing heavy lifts but it will not help me to fuck my knees over. I’m hoping I’m just in a phase of having more knee pain and it will pass eventually. Having arthritis is a drag.
Kitchen Witchery
Given the aforementioned health concerns and continuing the efforts I mentioned last time, I’ve been trying to have more vegetables with my lunches. I tried a roasted corn and squash recipe based on one of the recipes in Ruffage. Instead of zucchini ribbons, I roasted yellow squash (which is what I happened to have on hand) with the corn, then topped it with sour cream and herbs as prescribed. I had that with a sandwich that I made using this multigrain bread, which came out quite tasty. The last few days I had a bowl of soba noodles topped with roasted green beans, sweet potato, and baked tofu topped with some store-bought sauce. That also turned out quite good. I was thinking I should try adding some peanuts on top but I kept forgetting! For dinner recipes, I tried a slow cooker garlic butter chicken and roasted some carrots to go with it. I thought it was just okay but I think I don’t like dropping chunks of uncooked garlic into the slow cooker; I have to sautee them or they taste too bitter to me. Kirk loved it though because he’s a true garlic-enjoyer. Still, I think I will make this again, just with cooking up the alliums before adding them to the pot.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
