Hello, friends and enemies. Happy Halloween! My poor cat Fritz is spooked by the doorbell, people knocking at the door, and the whole concept of opening the door, so I opted for a self-serve trick or treat. It’s a good use for this bird bath in our yard. My display is gradually becoming more elaborate and I think the little candles look festive. Is the bird doing satanic rituals? Who knows.
I would like to remind you all that the election is on Tuesday and you have to vote! Is voting going to change the whole world? No, but it’s really the least you can do. I have a voter guide for you and everything. I even made a Spanish version! By the way, I’ve heard multiple people incorrectly say that Prop 40, the one-time billionaire tax, could lead to increasing taxes for other people. It won’t! Check out the text of the proposed law. It’s very specifically a one-time wealth tax on billionaires. Because it’s a tax on wealth not income, it’s very unlikely that even if it did result in an expanded tax on non-billionaires (it won’t!) there wouldn’t be much to tax for most of us since we do not own loads of stocks, multiple properties, entire companies, whatever. This will literally only apply to the ultra-wealthy, so vote yes on Prop 40!
For Signal users, you can now download my sticker pack. It turns out that anyone can make stickers for Signal, but you have to upload them in a batch, not individually. I’ve been having fun making random “stickers” in my isntagram chats and realized I needed this on Signal, where I do most of my chatting. So we made a bunch out of my cat (obviously), medieval marginalia, and various meme images. I have been getting a lot of mileage out of that beleaguered Ben Affleck image, I’ll tell you that.
Current Events
I almost put these links under my “on the internet” section, but I realized I wanted to connect these ideas a little more. First, the internet is kinda going through it right now. There’s some kind of critical flaw in PHP, a coding language used in a huge number of websites, that has left it vulnerable to attack. So, be careful with your internet usage for a little while while that gets resolved and maybe go update your passwords. Also in tech, they’re saying the AI bubble is bursting in China, which is funny because so much of the AI hype here has been along the lines of “China can’t beat us at AI!!!!” Well, buddy, I think they are beating us to the bubble bursting, but we aren’t far behind because they’re reporting that tech stocks “eras[ed] more than $1 trillion in value” from the stock exchange. I know we’ve been making “recession indicator” jokes for a while now but are we full-on in a depression at this point? Gas costs six dollars a gallon and food is expensive as fuck. Is the AI bubble burst going to be what finally kills the economy for good, or are they going to be “too big to fail” like the banks in 2008?
Our government continues to be shitty. Wired reports that ICE is running a modern COINTELPRO on leftist groups. It’s a good reminder that, when people complain about “leftist infighting,” the problem may well be bad actors, not just people disagreeing about how to get things done. In better news, 41,000 Department of Homeland Security workers, including undercover ICE agents, had their identities exposed in a huge leak. Maybe we can all double check that the people in our groups aren’t ICE agents? Just in case? I hate to have to think about such things, but this is the world we’re living in.
Finally, ghost of a malnourished victorian orphan and so-called “advisor to the president” Jared Kushner has been transferring huge sums of money from a United Arab Emirates bank account that “had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan” for foreign policy causes. This slush fund, “a shared pool of money for off-the-books diplomatic objectives … was a common form of Gulf Arab government corruption” and it is an account that Kushner did not disclose despite his capacity as an “unofficial government employee.” Kushner shouldn’t be anywhere near our government. I’m so sick of endless corruption from everyone in Trump-world.
Books and Other Words
I am not at all surprised that I enjoyed Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske because I love all her books. This one focuses on a group of five students who are taking their exams to become magical medical practitioners because in their world anyone with the magical aptitude for medicine is legally required to go to med school. How awful! The plot progresses in the form of a mystery, with one of the students’ classmates, Ysabel Caudette, found dead on the first day of the exam. I thought there was an almost Twin Peaks-like quality to the story because Ysabel was a star student, involved in everything, and everyone had a story about her. Yet, here she was, dead. It is a Freya Marske book so there is great world-building, lots of class consciousness, and queer romance. Go read it!
Rampant Consumerism
There’s something going on right now in the culture regarding clowns and jesters and weird little guys in general. I think in the U.S. we’re living in a Cabaret-esque moment; world’s on fire so we have to work twice as hard to live our lives. This is perhaps an essay for another day, but one place I am noticing this is in clothing. I am personally delighted by this because I am committed to the jester lifestyle and now I can get some clothes to match. I bought this coat from Selkie and it may be the best item of clothing I’ve ever owned. I can’t wait to wear it. I did have to take it to the tailor because the arms were too tight around the biceps (my gains!!), but they did a wonderful job and you wouldn’t even notice the changes unless you were looking for them (thank you Easy Alterations!).
I have been scooping up cool stuff when I see it because it’s rare to find interesting clothes that fit! And I know this jester trend won’t last, so I must build my wardrobe now and stay jesting forever. Aside from the Selkie coat, I have become enamored of the offerings from the Hush Fall Archives and I also bought a cute little outfit from Isabella Eve. Now you all know my secrets.
Spanish
I finished another book for my fake masters degree in Spanish! Las malas is a 2019 novel by Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada. It’s a work of autofiction that details Villada’s young adulthood as a transwoman and sex worker and it has almost a picaresque quality to it. Our protagonist, Camila, frequents a park with a group of local travestís looking for work. For example, one time, when hiding from the police in a ditch, they discover a baby, who their group’s de facto leader, La Tía Encarna, adopts and names El Brillo de los Ojos. While there are some funny and tender moments, this story is really sad, which is not surprising given the difficulty of being transgender. Still, there is hope in this story in the way that women help each other to get through the horrors and how trans people are able to find themselves, despite it all. For anyone interested in this book, you don’t have to know Spanish to read it. It’s available in English as Bad Girls.
As I mentioned earlier, I got the Spanish version of the voter guide posted this week. It’s a long process to get the whole thing translated—I copied the whole thing into a Google doc so Ana could edit it and it was 20 pages long. My Spanish is better every time we do these, but I still have a lot to learn. If you’re curious about how much editing it goes through, I’ve included two screenshots of the tracked changes. Some paragraphs I get by with hardly any corrections and others we have to do a lot more work on.
Doing Stuff
Two weeks ago, I went to the Saclastic Book Fair, which was an event for adults that aimed to capture the spirit of the Scholastic Book Fair. There were so many people there! It was insane! The people yearn for the book fair. They had local bookstores and vendors selling books, local authors, flash tattoos, food, and all kinds of stuff. It was really cool, but there were so many people that it was a little overwhelming. Still, I hope they do it again next year and perhaps in a bigger space so we have room to browse!
Last weekend we saw the Sacramento Ballet. They did three pieces, Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments (here’s a video of the New York City Ballet doing it), Long and Winding Road, and the Julia Feldman piece Hearts. The more Balanchine pieces I see, the more I am realizing he was really obsessed with doing weird criss-cross arm movements. Yes, it’s beautiful and whatever, but why are the dancers always tying themselves in knots around each other? Long and Winding Road was set to orchestral versions of Beatles songs. I’m not a huge Beatles fan, but that’s okay. I only recognized a few songs when converted to symphony music (not sure what that says about the Beatles?).
Moving It
Why is one $300 pillow a load-bearing device for my entire well-being? This is not an ad, this is my real life. I bought a Noble Pillow a little over two years ago (thank you, blog archive for this information) because my back was hurting so much that it was waking me up at night. I have been just fine since I started using it but I think my pillow has gotten too flat and now my back is hurting again. I’ve been cobbling together an interim pillow solution but it’s just not the same, which is why I have had to spend another $300 on a pillow. The good news is the company does have a service where they restuff your pillow, so I think once I get the new pillow, I will send the old one to be stuffed so I do not end up with these problems again. All this to say, once again my gym efforts have been stymied, but this time because it hurts every time I bend over. Anyway, enjoy a few stickers.
Kitchen Witchery
Fall is upon us and so is my desire to make soup and such things. I made some red beans and rice (recipe from The Bean Book) along with a delicata squash galette, which is one of my favorite ways to use delicata squash! We had potato soup with bacon and that was very good. I like this recipe because you can just use broth instead of milk, which I guess was always an option. I made a chili (also roughly based on The Bean Book) but it’s just beans and fake vegetarian meat crumbles with a little corn. The chili was good but the true highlight of the meal was this maple pumpkin cornbread! It’s amazing! Even Kirk, who is at best neutral on cornbread, said it was great and tasted like a dessert, so I will be making that again. For my ongoing efforts to just make food without a recipe, I cooked up some corona beans and mixed that with pancetta and noddles and a little parmesan to enjoy for some lunches. Recommended!
I forgot to take a photo but I made some white chocolate macademia cookies for Kirk’s birthday and they were tasty. I just use the recipe on the back of the Guittard chocolate chips bag, but I of course swapped the regular chips for the white chocolate and the macademias for the suggested walnuts. I did not forget to take a photo of the pan de muerto I made in honor of Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). I feel like I did an extra-good job this year.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
