Hello, friends and enemies. I’m officially 40 years old now, which regular readers already know since I posted Every Book I Read in my Thirties: Reading from 2016–2026. I celebrated by spending last week not working; week one of vacation was our trip to Seattle and week two was chilling and doing whatever I want. I highly recommend taking time off to do nothing and I think I may do it again this time next year. Although for now I am in PTO debt. Alas.
I got my voter guides posted this week, so please check them out for information about the election. The California election is on June 2! This primary sucks but we still have to get out and vote. Here’s the English guide and here is the Spanish.
Another thing I did last week was go to San Francisco for some appointments. I’m taking part in a study about fatty liver (or formally known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis) in women. The researchers are looking at the relationship between that PCOS (just this month renamed to PMOS: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome). I don’t have PCOS/PMOS, so I’m in the control group. They had me do a fibroscan, blood work, body composition test, and an MRI. When they do MRIs of the liver, they give you periodic instructions about holding your breath. Afterwards, the instructions say “you may resume breathing.” Thanks! That cracked me up and I just know the MRI technicians were like “what the hell is she laughing about.” This is a longitudinal study, so I’ll be going back to do it all again once a year for the next three years. It’s not a clinical trial, they just want to see what might be going on! I hope we learn something interesting.
Something I did not do this week was go to or watch Eurovision. This time last year I was planning to go to Vienna to see Eurovision live, but alas, we canceled the plans because it didn’t feel morally right to go under the circumstances. Eurovision is getting an awful lot of attention for Israel’s involvement—even The New York Times published an article about Israel’s involvement, other countries boycotting the competition, and Israel’s not-exactly-above-board promotions to get people to vote for them. Fortunately, Bulgaria won this year, although it is suspicious that Israel was, once again, very close to winning. I haven’t listened to their song this year but the last few weren’t particularly good or interesting and I have no reason to believe anything different this year (seems like the news on my internet would have had something to say if Israel showed up to Eurovision with a true banger). I think the European Broadcasting Union will have to deal with this situation before it explodes soon. If Israel had won, they wouldn’t have been able to contain the outrage. Apparently they’re talking about moving Israel to the new Eurovision Asia franchise, which doesn’t really solve the problem so much as delay dealing with it. In any case, I wish everyone would stop being morally bankrupt so I could get back to enjoying my high-camp European music competition. Thanks in advance!
Finally, permit me to indulge in my annual circus nostalgia. I think most readers know by now that my hometown has a community circus that I participated in when I was younger. May is when they do their shows so I am always thinking about it at this time of year. This year I suppose I have done a little more than just think about circus since I have been trying to unicycle and juggle again, although only in fits and starts. Perhaps one day I’ll be circusing it up again in some form or another.
Books and Other Words
The fourth and final book of Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle, Tangled up in Blue, was, I felt, not particularly interesting. It’s a prequel that takes place about 15 or 20 years before the events of The Snow Queen, focusing on BZ Gundhalinu and another member of the Hegemonic police force. They get involved in some kind of transfer of a powerful artifact and then the local cartel and the cops start working against them. Anyway it’s not really my kind of tale and I find an end-of-series prequel as a concept to be a little boring. We’re supposed to be excited like “there’s our guy!” but like … I have already seen that guy a bunch. I know him. I am not excited.
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell comes from a sub-field of gender studies called cyberfeminism that focuses on the intersection of feminism and computers (in contrast to much of the discourse around technology, which centers on men). Russell starts by offering some explanations of the term “glitch” itself, which embodies refusal and embraces malfunction, “travers[es] along edges” and gives us space to claim “our right to complexity.” (She also includes the fun etymological fact that “glitch” comes to us from the yiddish verb to slide or slip.) Glitch Feminism explores the relationship of our off- and online selves, and how the way we play with identity online comes with is when we are “AFK” (away from keyboard), a term Russell uses instead of the more common “IRL” (in real life) because at this point, the internet “is reality”. Being a woman online means, much like in the AFK world, inhabiting a space not meant for us. Despite claims to the contrary that the internet is a radical place (although that was perhaps a dream of a younger internet), “all technology reflects the society that produces it, including its power structures and prejudices.” But being a glitch, a failure, provides the opportunity “to build new worlds” and “expand in every direction.” What a great perspective.
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary offers a compelling thesis on world history. Here in the United States, and in the “west” generally, we learn very little about the Islamic world (unless, like me, you make it your business to learn and you get a whole bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern languages and civilizations). Ansary explains this through the idea of two “worlds” developing in parallel: the “middle sea” (the Mediterranean and surrounding area) and the “middle world” (“Central Asia, the Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt”), and both groups “had good reason to think of themselves at the center of human history.” Modern sites of conflict between the “west” and the Muslim world lie along the same fault lines established centuries ago, as far back as the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires before Islam surfaced. Ansary writes in the epilogue that 9/11 was one of the first times in modern history that these two stories of civilization (middle world versus Mediterranean) came into open conflict, which is spurred, in part, by a total lack of understanding about what motivates the other group. Heavy geopolitical events aside, I liked this book a lot. There was some information I already knew, but I also learned plenty. One tidbit that’s staying with me is that the word for “horde” actually comes from the turkic word for “military camp.” Yes, the Mongol hordes are outside the gates … they are literally there making camp. I particularly appreciated the history of the most recent centuries. One of the issues in the Muslim community now is the question of, if Muslims won battles in the past because God made the community strong, then what is wrong now that Muslims are losing battles (either literally or losing the battle of colonialism against the Europeans)? It’s a question that, per Ansary, Muslims are still grappling with in a variety of ways, and this, along with the cultural clash at the borders of the Middle World, is why the Middle East appears so tumultuous to us. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to understand more about this part of the world and the way people there think!
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- At last, a pill that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people via Nature. This is incredible news! This drug sounds like it’s a Plan B for covid: people can take it once they have been exposed to the virus and it significantly lowers the risk of developing the disease. The drug, called ensitrelvir, brought the risk of developing covid down from nine percent to three percent.
- Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains via 404 Media. If the people with the strongest case for using chatbot software think the chatbots suck, then what is the point? Why do any of this?
- The Influencer Industrial Complex is Warping Local Politics via User Mag. Social media influencers are inviting political campaigns to pay them to make content supporting their candidate. Unfortunately, there are no laws or regulations that require influencers to disclose these relationships so you have no way to know if the people you see online are talking about politics for the money.
- We Might Have To Get A Little Less Fandom-y via Curmudgeon dot com. This one might not make a lot of sense to people who aren’t frequenting certain internet neighborhoods, but I liked this piece. From the article: “We end up in quite an awkward position here. We have all these expectations about a work that we want to have met, but the way in which those expectations formed mean that we can be blinded by them into not fully appreciating the technical craft behind the work, or, worse, actively protest those aspects of the work which subvert our expectations in interesting ways and push the medium forwards. In this way, fandom can act as something of an enforcement mechanism for the artistic status quo.”
- ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop via 404 Media. Great news: “ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.” The whole academic edifice will crumble if people aren’t faithfully checking their work and their citations. Why be an academic if you don’t want to do this shit correctly? At this point, Wikipedia is maintaining higher standards than many academic publications.
Languages
I wanted to share some Wikipedia articles I translated recently. In Spanish, we’ve got the Manx version of Halloween, Hop-tu-Naa. I do enjoy helping to preserve, in some small way, knowledge of minority cultures. I also translated the article about the Icelandic book Makt myrkranna, or The Powers of Darkness (I translated the English article about the Icelandic book into Spanish. I know how to party!). It’s about the Icelandic “translation” of Dracula, which is not a translation at all. It sounds more like a fan fiction of Dracula, but it might have been based on early drafts that Bram Stoker provided to the “translator.” Wacky as hell! Finally, I’m still working on translating articles about Icelandic women into English. Behold the tale of Anna of Stóruborg: She owned her own farm and shacked up with a shepherd who worked for her. Her brother was pissed off about it and she had to hide her man in a nearby cave whenever the brother dropped in. Then a few centuries later, some guy wrote a novel about it. Good for them!
Moving It
I am saddened to report that I’ve officially stopped taking ballet class. I feel like this is a decision that I’ve been putting off all year. I stopped taking my other dance classes after my December recital, but thought I might be okay to keep taking ballet if I was careful. Unfortunately, it’s been hard to have fun with it when I’m constantly trying not to aggravate my knee and be very careful with how I move. Still, lasting a little over five years in a hobby is a good run. I can’t be too upset.
I’m really glad I was able to take dance class for as long as I did. I learned a lot about my body—not just how to move it but how to inhabit it, and we even learned about some disorders along the way (how did I not know about hypermobility!) My last physical hobby, roller derby, taught me a lot about doing hard things and made me strong. Dance helped me figure out how to move more confidently and how to use my whole body to express myself. I’m glad that I was able to have a venue to perform on stage (albeit mostly for an audience consisting of parents of children in the recital, but don’t they, too, deserve a little razzle dazzle in their lives?), which I hadn’t had much chance to do since I was young. I’m really hoping I can find something else that can do this for me, but I don’t have any ideas yet!
Kitchen Witchery
Since I am no longer taking ballet class and my Saturday morning is relatively free, yesterday we took a little jaunt to the Elk Grove farmers market to get some vegetables. I’m excited to pick up what’s in season and then figure out what to do with it. Today’s surprise was the bunch of garlic I bought. It didn’t occur to me that it was fresh and not dried garlic because at the store all the garlic is dried. I had to look it up and I found out that you need to use it in about seven to ten days, so I guess we’re going garlicky this week. I’m thinking about roasting or doing a confit for most of it then I can use it in my own time. I also found this blog that mentions you can use the membranes of fresh garlic to make a little spread. Lots of things to try!
This week I tried a granola bar recipe. It wasn’t too hard and the granola bars are good! They don’t taste exactly like what you buy at the store (that’s probably good) and the recipe has dates in it (also probably good), so there is more date flavor than I’m used to in a granola bar (normal amount of dates: zero). The recipe has a few flavor variations. There’s a cashew version that I think I’m going to make with white chocolate chips. I will report back.
In terms of actual meals, we had some red lentil soup. I pulled this out of the freezer this week, so it’s not really new, but I did toss some leftover spiced nuts and a bit of olive oil on top and I think that was a great innovation. By the way, I highly recommend freezing leftovers in deli containers and using a dry erase marker to note what’s inside. The marker washes right off. This system works well for us because we are just two people and may not want to eat the same soup three or four nights in one week. So, I freeze it and it’s a pleasant meal for the future.
Finally I made frijoles con veneno from Mi Cocina. This was really good. It’s tostadas topped with refried beans (I used king city pink beans) and pork braised in a chili sauce. This had a long cook time but was fairly easy to make.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
