My beloved cat Huey—my first born, if you will—passed today. She had been in increasingly rough shape for the last few months, which I am only really seeing now while reviewing the photos I have of her. She had been struggling for bladder issues on and off for months and we thought she was in the throes of a really bad UTI. We started another round of UTI medicine a few days ago, but it didn’t seem to help. Yesterday morning, I realized it had been a day or two since she’d eaten or had any water. She was lying on the floor in what seemed to be a wet spot and I realized the situation was much more dire than I had thought. We went to the vet that morning and got the bad news that she probably had lymphoma (or perhaps another cancer, the veterinarian wasn’t certain it was lymphoma but was certain about the cancer). Her breathing was labored and she could barely stand. They gave her some fluids and a steroid and said the steroids might perk her up and function as palliative care. In fact, the steroid did nothing at all and she was barely able to stand or move in her final days. This morning, she hadn’t moved from where I’d placed her the night before and she seemed tired and miserable. We took her to the vet to end the suffering this afternoon. It was a rough day but I was glad I got to spend one more day with her, knowing what was coming, and make sure she felt as loved and comfortable as possible.
I got Huey in 2008 when I was living in Seattle. I had been desperately wanting a cat. I’d tried adopting a black cat with a kinked tail about a year beforehand who named Caesar. However, I had to give him up because the fiend kept biting the bridge of my nose when I slept and I soon became delirious and irritated. Huey came from a friend of my then-boyfriend when the friend’s cat had a kitten. Once Huey was big enough, I picked her up in a cardboard carrier and we took a 30-minute bus ride back to my apartment. She screamed the whole way. I had planned to adopted a second kitten from the same person, but the next litter (of also just one kitten) died along with the mother before she was old enough to be adopted. So, sometimes I like to think Huey was narrowly spared the same fate.
Huey was an adorable little kitten and unfortunately, I do not have any photos available. They are all on an external hard drive that my computer refuses to acknowledge (actually I found ONE that I had uploaded to my blog previously. Phew). However, I can tell you she has always had a bitchy resting face that makes everyone who sees her think she’s mad and a hater. She may have been a hater but she loved me and she wasn’t nearly as mad as everyone thought. She just wanted her space. She wasn’t interested in any people besides me and truly never even warmed up to Kirk even though he has been in her life since 2012 and, in fact, he helped take very good care of her.
a baby photo of Huey
Queen Huey, as I came to call her, was the doyenne of the household and scorned all who approached her from her throne on the end of the couch. Huey went through a lot, including moving from Seattle to southern California, then partially doubling back to Sacramento. She endured siblings that she did not ask for or want: Viola and then Fritz after her. She hated to be brushed and she loved to sit on top of me, something she started doing as a kitten and never stopped. She used to lie on my chest while I was in bed but in the last couple years, her arthritis made jumping onto the bed a difficult proposition (plus Fritz emphasized that the bed was his). She converted to lying on me while I was on the couch and got in the habit of what I can only describe as holding my hand.
another day of Huey plotting Fritz’s demise
It feels terribly cruel that pets lead such short lives. I had hoped she’d make it to 20 but it was not meant to be. I just hope she was happy enough. I always feel like I didn’t do enough: wasn’t home enough, didn’t play enough, didn’t let her go outside and lie in the sun on the patio enough. However, looking back at some of these photos, I have to believe she was happy and knew she was loved. She will leave a great void in my heart. She’s been with me for nearly my adult life and I don’t know what I’ll do without her sharp meows meeting me at the door whenever I return home. I’m taking comfort in the fact that she’s no longer in pain because she was truly suffering, especially this last week. I hope wherever she is, she’s getting all the ice water, string cheese, shower water, and whipped cream that her little heart desires.
Mr. Stone feeding Huey ice creamHuey is pleased with the switch to the winter comforter Huey, contemplating the showerHuey owns meQueen HueyHuey in her trash fortHuey in reposeHuey getting some fresh airCommuning with HueyHuey living her best lifeHuey, festive but menacingHuey’s favorite boxA huey cat yawn close upHuey covered in shower waterhome and holding hands with HueyHuey is a lady
Hello, friends and enemies. This weekend I’m visiting my sister in Long Beach. She’s dealing with some shit that I won’t talk about here so I came in to offer some moral support and cook dinner for a few days. What I did not expect as part of this outing was to narrowly miss airports effectively shutting down because of a global tech outage. Fortunately, it seems like I’ll be able to get home just fine because, of course, everyone is working like mad to fix this but, also because I flew Southwest, which has apparently not updated Windows for a very long time and is thus immune to this particular computer-based ailment. It’s wild that one faulty patch can take out almost everything. Maybe we shouldn’t be letting corporations do everything? We especially shouldn’t let just one corporation run security for so many critical systems. The hullabaloo reminds me a bit of when that stupid boat was stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021. Except that was a lot more fun and we had a whole week to generate memes about it. It’s harder to chuckle about this one; people are probably dying because hospitals and health care have been affected by the outage.
Current Events
As usual, I’m not sure that I have any new or novel perspective on what’s happening in the world, but I feel compelled to comment and organize my thoughts here all the same. Let’s start with the “easier” topic, I guess.
The Vice Presidential Candidate
Trump announced his Vice President would be Ohio Senator James Vance (I’m not calling this idiot by his initials). This guy really sucks and that’s a gross understatement. As my friend Abby put it, “he’s someone who would order my death by firing squad without bating an eye.” This is a man who thinks we need to get rid of no-fault divorce because it’s “unfair to men” (I am not going to spend time explaining why we need no-fault divorce). Knowing what we do of Trump, I am sure he picked Vance because he has some level of fame beyond mere politics. Vance is the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which was very popular despite apparently being fairly insulting. It was criticized at the time for its thesis “that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault” (Salon) and for being “primarily a work of self-congratulation, a literary victory lap, and a vindication of a minimalist safety net” (Jacobin). (Side note: if you want to read something that successfully does what Hillbilly Elegy claims to do I recommend Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson and Mill Town: Reckoning with what Remains by Kerri Arsenault). Vance is also no friend of the queer community and is one of those mendacious assholes who thinks all gay people are “grooming” children (It’s never gay people doing this). It’s not surprising that Trump’s running mate is someone with such dangerous views but that doesn’t mean we get to skip talking about the dangerous views.
Actions Have Consequences
a classic tale
In other news, as probably everyone knows by now, Trump got shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend. We know next to nothing about the shooter and his motivations, although my personal theory based on nothing but vibes is he is probably some kind of accelerationist. Still, this isn’t stopping prominent Republicans from claiming that Biden is to blame for this, that he somehow did a Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? through normal campaign rhetoric and statements like “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy.” What these comments are conveniently forgetting is that the Supreme Court ruled just two weeks ago that the president can do whatever he fucking wants. The president has immunity from criminal prosecution. So if Biden did somehow order a hit on Trump (he didn’t), it’s legal! I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that the same Republican party that has been obsessed with jailing Hillary Clinton, the party that did a whole coup attempt on January 6, 2021 is offended by this. But sure, this is somehow Biden’s fault for not being civil enough. Okay.
The gringos are fighting
What’s killing me about this is that the whole Democratic institution seems to be like “that’s a wrap, boys!” and being unwilling to keep on campaigning in the wake of this. Biden has (temporarily?) stopped running political ads. If you really believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy, now is not the time to sit back and let him play for sympathy because of this. Fucking do something! You can keep campaigning without being an asshole about it. You don’t have to run ads like “Joe Biden, unlike some candidates, has never been shot at one of his own rallies” but you can still fight! This taking the high road shit is gonna get us all killed because Trump really is an existential threat to our country. So many democrats seem to think it’s over. You’re not even gonna fight? The election is four months away. You’re gonna say that Trump was lightly shot and there’s nothing else we can do? It’s absolutely maddening that we’re stuck with a political class that either actively wants to kill us (Republicans) or passively does (Democrats, speaking generally, in their refusal to do anything).
Are Women Still People?
We’ve already discussed so much but, unfortunately, there is more.
The Republican Party published their new platform and, wow, it sucks. It sucks for many reasons but today I’m looking at just one reason. Here’s a screenshot in case they decide to pretend they never said this shit later on.
The 2024 Republican platform on abortion
Republicans are attempting to use the Constitution to assert that fetuses are people and have rights that supersede the rights of the person carrying the fetus. This is so fucking scary. Instead of playing around with state-by-state abortion bans, which will never happen across the board (because support for abortion remains high everywhere), they want to make the fetus into a little citizen itself so they can oppress women more effectively. As The 19th reports, “If established by legislation, fetal personhood would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.” Jessica Valenti has a comprehensive analysis of the situation in her newsletter Abortion, Every Day.
If I have fewer rights than a clump of cells in my uterus, am I a person?
Books and Other Words
I was absolutely charmed by Alexandra Rowland’s Running Close to the Wind. All I knew going into it was there would be gay pirates and that another author I really like was singing its praises. I was literally laughing out loud while reading this book because it was so funny. The story centers on a pathetic wet cat of a man (affectionate) named Avra who has recently left his country’s intelligence service and taken up with a group of pirates led by Captain Teveri, with whom he has an antagonistic on-again/off-again relationship. This is complicated by the fact that Avra may or may not have acquired a crucial state secret and that a very attractive monk named Julian has joined the crew and he has, to everyone’s dismay, taken a vow of celibacy. What I liked about this story is it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The goal is to have fun and give these three characters room to go through some emotional growth and figure out how they want to be together. The book is very sex positive (they are pirates and they are down to fuck. Well, except for Julian.), although there’s no actual sex on the page, just a healthy respect for the craft. The story culminates in the most important pirate event of the year: a cake competition that residents of the local pirate town take extremely seriously. What’s not to love?
After I finished Running Close to the Wind, I went in search of Rowland’s other books and discovered I had already bought her book A Taste of Gold and Iron and hadn’t read it yet. This one isn’t nearly as silly as Running Close to the Wind but it was just as charming. In this story we are at the other end of the sociopolitical spectrum: A Taste of Gold and Iron is ultimately about a prince falling in love with one of his bodyguards. Said prince, Kadou, is the sultan’s younger brother in an Ottoman empire-inflected kingdom. His anxiety attacks have ramped up since his sister (the sultan) had a baby and he’s trying to figure out how to be useful as a spare prince. In addition to being quite a tender romance (not exactly enemies-to-lovers but more like “I am immediately smitten with you but then resentful that you didn’t live up to the version of you in my head”), the story is a really effective portrayal of how it feels to have anxiety and be afraid of being vulnerable, needing anything from anyone, or taking up space in the world. These are all very challenging to avoid when you’re a prince and so many people have dedicated their lives to your service. Both this book and Running Close to the Wind mention a break-in to an important government ministry, so by reading both books you see multiple perspectives. The pirates think this is the funniest, best thing to ever happen, while Kadou and his government are panicking and trying to make sure their whole dynasty isn’t run out of town over this.
Running Close to the WindA Taste of Gold and Iron
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Keep Hunter Biden As Far From the White House As Possible via Slate. It is troubling to me that Hunter Biden is one of the “strongest voices” telling Biden not to step down as president. As Slate put it, “Hunter has been joining the president at a slew of meetings with top White House aides—Jared Kushner–style—during the ongoing fallout.” If Biden wants to make the case that he is better and more ethical than trump, he should keep his kid out of it. We did not vote for Hunter Biden! Hunter is undoubtedly trying to make sure dad wins another term so he can get pardoned.
Last Chance, USA via Sara Kendzior’s Newsletter. I am once again turning to Kendzior because she’s saying it better than anyone else is right now. “Despite his recent moves, Biden and Trump are not the same. It is essential for their mutual backers, and those backers’ plans, that they are different. Trump is the abuser, and Biden is the enabler. This is more effective than overt tyranny.”
The Robots Won’t Cause Massive Unemployment This Time, Either via The Geek Way. Translation may never end up being the job I do for money (but who knows!), but I was still extremely cheered to see that “translator employment has grown in recent years” and “translators get paid almost 20% more than the median US worker.” We love to see it!
Moving It
I finally got the video from my May dance recital. Message me if you want to see it and I’ll send you the link!
Kitchen Witchery
It’s not really soup weather but I don’t respect authority like that anyway and I have tried some new soup recipes. First, I made slow-cooker cauliflower, potato and white bean soup, which I mostly picked because I could make it in the slow cooker. You might think the slow cooker is ideal for winter, but I think it’s great in the summer when I don’t want to get the house any warmer than necessary. It was good and I will definitely make it again, but I think it might work better to substitute cheese for the sour cream and use sour cream as a topping instead of something to stir into the soup. At my sister’s house, I made this red lentil barley stew recipe. I actually used farro instead of barley because it’s what we had on hand and that worked great. It happened that Mia had all the ingredients on hand (even leeks and fennel), so this ended up being a perfect choice for using up some of the things she had lurking in the fridge.
potato, cauliflower and bean soupred lentil and “barley” stew
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. My nephew Neo has the pouty-est little face and it kills me.
Neo being longReceiving cat blessingsthis FACE
And of course I’m not going to skip posting Huey and Fritz.
Hello, friends and enemies. I got two things on my mind: it’s hot as fuck and the U.S. is a fucking joke of a country. Sorry, we’re getting off to a bleak start here.
It’s 111 degrees at nearly 7 p.m. while I’m writing this (it’s 90 degrees at 9:30 when I’ve returned to proofread). It’s been over 100 degrees every day this week and I’m pretty tired of it. It is difficult to be hot! I take SSRIs and I’m not built for this. Even lying around and reading my books, I am hot. I am also having hot flashes on top of it all! Of course I think about global warming and the fact that it’s only getting worse.
The Trump v. United States ruling that the Supreme Court issued this week is about the worst thing that could have happened, despite the fact that this outcome was highly predictable. The justices Trump appointed are doing their job of shielding him from consequences. Biden and his administration haven’t done enough to stop the forces that brought us the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and the continued machinations to get Trump back into power. As the LA Times reports, “The court’s six conservatives, all Republican appointees, said the Constitution has an unwritten immunity clause that shields presidents from being prosecuted or held to account for violating criminal laws when they are exercising their official powers.” And from al-Jazeera, “‘These are certainly the kinds of powers that are much more familiar to dictators than they are to presidents of democratic countries.'” This is obviously alarming. The president could do whatever they want, like jail political opposition (I’m thinking of the ubiquitous “lock her up” chants from 2016), for just one example. I’ve seen some comments that Watergate is retroactively legal, which is wild.
I think this is a major inflection point for our country. What is maddening about this, to me, is Biden has said he “will respect the limits of presidential power.” This would be a noble sentiment in a normal, peaceful time. This is not that time. We know if Trump wins the election, he’s planning to enact Project 2025, which is an extreme right-wing plan to overhaul all levels of government, gut the civil service, get rid of the Department of Education (among others), and many other horrible things. Trump is absolutely going to take advantage of the impunity the office of the president now offers. Even before this ruling, Trump proclaimed “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” While I respect the idea that Biden shouldn’t abuse this power, I also think that he has to, or Trump will make everything so much worse for us all. Maybe if six Supreme Court justices think they’re above the law, Biden should have them detained and appoint all new justices. Maybe he should purge congress of everyone who refuses to codify the right to abortion or single-payer health care until we get the government we deserve. Is this ethically correct? Absolutely not. Do I support authoritarianism? Also no. However, we are on the precipice of something terrible that has been building for at least the last decade (or arguably since Reagan) and there will be no coming back from a second Trump term. Biden now has the power to do something. Just literally anything. Yet, he’s refusing to act out of a sense of morality that belongs to a different century.
Personal Life
I figured I should update everyone after mentioning last time that I was proofreading my blog at 9:45 on Saturday night and still hadn’t had dinner. I did woman up and drive to Del Taco after that, rest assured.
On a more serious note, Kirk’s mom passed away almost two weeks ago now. Kirk and his dad are doing okay, but everyone seems really tired from the emotional blow and the work of caring for her in her final days. Thank you to everyone who has shared nice thoughts about this, I do pass them on to Kirk.
Books and Other Words
I think Jhumpa Lahiri is more known for her novels—and perhaps now her translations of novels from Italian—but I have only read her essays on language and translation. I loved In Other Words, which I read in 2016, in part because I rarely encounter fellow travelers in learning a language for the simple love of the game, but Lahiri wrote a whole book about it in the language she learned as an adult! Her new book, Translating Myself and Others, is in the same vein except she’s speaking from further along this path. She has now published translations of multiple Italian novels and is teaching translation at Princeton. She’s living the dream! This work is a series of essays that blend personal experience and literary criticism on the topic of translation. Lahiri discusses Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a work that serves as a guiding star in her work as a translator (especially the myth of Echo and Narcissus), her thoughts on the Italian books she’s translated, and the compelling character of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci seems to be something of a patron saint of translators for Lahiri and she draws inspiration from him and his corpus of letters and journals composed while he was imprisoned during the Mussolini regime. Lahiri explains that Gramsci dedicated himself to studying his languages while in prison, frequently requesting grammars and dictionaries from his family. He wrote at one point “My state of mind is such that, even if I were sentenced to death, I would continue to feel calm and even the evening before my execution perhaps I’d have a Chinese language lesson.” Antonio Gramsci: Relatable language-learning king. Lahiri includes a list of books for further reading at the end of Translating Myself and Others and now I have ten more books on my reading list.
I have much less to say about this book, but I also read Kate Elliott’s Furious Heaven, the book that follows Unconquerable Sun, which I mentioned in my last post. This book has a lot more space military action than the last one as Princess Sun starts advancing her campaign against the Phene empire. I liked that this book gave us some interesting perspective on the logistics of getting everyone into place for a space battle and I appreciated the ongoing intrigue and character development. Unfortunately, I must wait a few months for the third book in the series to see how things wrap up.
Translating Myself and OthersFurious Heaven
Meanwhile, on the internet:
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden via The New York Intelligencer. I don’t know if Biden has dementia or what but come on. Just retire. This whole generation needs to retire! Why do you want to be 81 and signing up to work for another years? Why be 90 and die in office (Dianne Feinstein, looking at you!) There’s simply no need for this.
The Great Unconformity via Sara Kendzior’s Newsletter. I often turn to Kendzior when real life seems too insane to bear. She’s a scholar of authoritarianism and she hasn’t been wrong yet (unfortunately).
If you’re not listening to Chappell Roan yet, you need to get into it. I don’t have any deep thoughts, but I love her album. I really like Red Wine Supernova (and I am desperately hoping someone mashes it up with Champagne Supernova).
Corporeal Form
I mentioned last month that my doctor wanted to do a heart monitor test (apparently called a “holter monitor,” I thought they doctor had been saying “halter” until I saw it in writing) because I’ve been trying to figure out why I get light headed and my ears pound any time I bend over. I’m pretty sure the body is not supposed to do that, but I guess I’m not a doctor! I wore my little heart monitor thing for 24 hours and the cardiac lab said my lowest heart rate was 45 beats per minute and that they didn’t see anything weird in my data. My doctor followed up with an email to tell me nothing is wrong. Cool! I’m glad to hear that nothing is wrong with me because one particular test didn’t find anything notable (EYE ROLL!). I honestly don’t know where I’m going to go from here. Maybe just straight to med school and do it myself?
Wikipedia
I’ve been slowly working on translating some articles from Icelandic and I have decided I’m going to do all (or as much “all” as one can get) the articles in this topic. I started with an article about Glaumbær, a place in Iceland, and that linked to a bunch of nearby places in Icelandic Wikipedia, but not English, so then I wanted to translate those articles and fill in this little network of information. This has turned into a project of translating all the articles about places in the county of Skagafjörður. I’ve got 40-some short articles in my list to look forward to. I even made a new category for it on Wikipedia (Nine of the articles in there are ones I translated), which was new and exciting for me. What really got me stuck on this subject was learning that, in the 1990s, a bunch of smaller counties, called hreppurs, merged to form modern government entities. There are 11 (I think) of these hreppurs that formed Skagafjörður and none of them had articles in English! So, uh, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m not sure it sounds like this can be fun to other people but I’m really having fun with this and working in a single topic is getting me to really learn some of this vocabulary, so that’s cool too.
Kitchen Witchery
Given the heat, I have been focusing on using the instant pot and the grill and making big batches to avoid cooking. I cannot abide any more heat in my house than absolutely necessary right now. Last Sunday I made albóndigas (Mexican meatballs) from the Mi Cocina cookbook, along with beans and arroz rojo. We had the meatballs for two dinners then I made some chicken in the slow cooker and combined that with the rest of the beans and rice to make burritos. On the fourth, I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, just out of habit I guess. It didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate but we love a good meal and it was too hot to cook indoors so I went for it anyway. The best new recipe I made recently was this slow-cooker peanut butter chicken. It was super easy and really good. This one is going into my regular rotation for sure.
albóndigas with beans and ricegrilling for America I guessslow-cooker peanut butter chicken
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has been obsessed with being inside this particular pair of pants I have that simply belong to him now. He loves being in things and under blankets and there’s something about these pants he just loves. I can now say “do you want to get in your pants?” and he will trot over to get in the pants. Cats are weird and very funny.
Huey cat on the couchHuey loungingFritz in his pantsFritz giving us his goofball face
Hello, friends and enemies. In my recent Facebook “memories,” I discovered this gem (side note: it’s not really a “memory,” it’s a record of posts I’ve made. It’s not the same thing. Stop trying to emotionally manipulate us, facebook).
It’s funny to me that, by the time I’m asking a question like this, I’m already planning to do it. Once I start saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if …,” know that I probably already have a website purchased, a spreadsheet compiled, or damning evidence available. While a blog isn’t exactly a newsletter, you can subscribe (see the Subscribe! tab on the top-right of my website), so in that way I’m not doing anything different than Substack is. I’m actually really happy I started writing regular blog posts. It’s helped me think through a lot of issues and I’m able to share what’s happening in my life in a way better form than what a site like facebook or instagram limits me to. The only thing I miss about writing more on social media is the discussion; although most of my friends aren’t spending a lot of time on facebook these days anyway so it’s kind of moot. People don’t comment on blog posts like they did in the 2010s when blogs were in their heyday. Most conversations I have about what I write are in text messages, which is fine. I just miss the communal discussion options, but the way we use the internet has been broken so I will take what I can get. Writing more here has also led me in directions I did not expect at all, like making voter guides or pulling together resources on various topics. Somehow just having a website seems to grant a certain air of authority when all it really proves is that I pay money for my domain and hosting. Although I’m sure whatever authority (lol) I have on any subject is not just from my beautiful web-log (lol again) but because what I say resonates. Anyway, I’m five years deep into this style of chronicling events and here’s to another five.
On a completely unrelated topic, I do try to confine the blog to my personal business or things happening in public. People in my life aren’t necessarily consenting to be discussed online. That said, I’m really feeling for Kirk and his family because his mom is dying. She’s had dementia for a while now and her body is giving up. I won’t get into details but Kirk has spent most of the last week at his parents’ house, which has left me riding solo (plus cats). It’s definitely the most time I’ve spent alone since we’ve lived together, which we’ve been doing for over ten years. So, in a way it’s a little weird but in some ways it’s nice. My routine is absolutely thrown off though. For example, I’m writing this at 8:30 on Saturday evening and I have not made or eaten dinner (proofreading at 9:45 … still have not eaten dinner). We’ll see what happens. I may be feral by the time Kirk returns to me.
Books and Other Words
Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott has been described as “gender-bent Alexander the Great” in space, which sounds cool but I actually know very little about Alexander the Great so I’m just taking in the work on its own merits. Sun is the daughter of the queen-marshal and heir to the militaristic Chaonian empire. This first book in the series focuses on her, her companions (all young peers from other noble houses), and the interstellar conflict with the Phene empire. I liked the story I think it’s an interesting world. I always enjoy a space opera although sometimes I have trouble getting into the military sci-fi side of things. This story was centered enough on the human activity and not on the ships and the war effort to still be interesting to me. I’m in the middle of the second book now but it’s more than 700 pages long so it’s a bit of a long read.
I picked up Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture by Jenny Odell because I really appreciated Odell’s first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The new book is about work, time, and money, and our relationship to all three. I find philosophical books like these hard to describe, even when I really like them and spend a lot of time mulling over the concepts. It’s hard to distill observations that the author takes an entire essay to develop into something pithy to say here, so I will instead recommend you read the book for gems like “What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose,” “Sociologists have observed that once assembly-line jobs made it difficult to see how well or how hard someone had worked, what became visible instead was how much someone was able to consume. This consumption, in turn, became the new way to signal how hard one had worked,” and “Time is not money. Time is beans.”
Unconquerable SunSaving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
Meanwhile, on the internet:
How Google is killing independent sites like ours and why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google via HouseFresh. Here’s another one for the “why the internet sucks now” file and the “death of the media” file. So many media companies are collapsing and using affiliate links to bring in revenue, so their parent companies are churning out “review” articles that are not based on actual testing and seem to contain bad information (the article cites the example of an air purifier company that has filed for bankruptcy yet appears on recent lists anyway). The internet is getting harder and harder to use and unfortunately I don’t know of any solutions.
California plans to enlist AI to translate healthcare information via the LA Times. I get that using AI seems cheaper than paying people, but the translations will be wrong. I have reviewed some machine-translated articles on Wikipedia (as in, compared the Google translate output in English with the original Spanish to see if things are correct), and they are not good. The machine does not understand the concept of false friends and can’t figure out which definition of a word is best based on context. And in health care? Not to be dramatic but this could get people killed.
AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution via The Washington Post (gift link). Speaking of AI, it uses an inordinate amount of electricity to create so much digital garbage. The new tools require so much power that they’re turning on coal plants to meet demand. Tech companies are hoping for a fusion breakthrough. That would be great but in the meantime … what? We’re just gonna use even more fossil fuels to produce important AI-generated shrimp jesus pictures? Is this necessary?
‘We’re writing history’: Spanish women tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap via The Guardian. This is about a group of women in Spain getting together and writing or editing Wikipedia articles so women have better representation on the site. From the article, “Just under a fifth of Wikipedia’s content, including biographies, is focused on women, while women account for just about 15% of the site’s volunteer editors.” It seems unfair that women always have to make time to reset the imbalances that we did not create, but I’m glad this group is doing it and I’m happy I’m a part of this work too.
Doing Stuff/Music
Vision Video (it’s very hard to get a good picture of people in motion in the dark)
I rarely go to concerts because they generally seem overwhelming to me, but this week I made an exception and went to see Vision Video. They’re a gothy, post-punk band from Georgia. I really like their music and their political message. I expected the show to be good but the lead singer, Dusty, gave us some commentary between each song that really made the show amazing. He started off very strong talking about how our political system is broken, but at least something is still working since Trump got convicted of 34 felony counts. He made some comments about protesting and how important it is to be “non-violent but non-compliant” and suggested that wearing a balaclava is a cheap tool for evading facial recognition technology—then introduced a new song called “Balaclava.” Dusty also talked about some of the darker shit he’s been through like the PTSD from being an EMT and firefighter and disillusionment from deploying with the army in Afghanistan. When things got to heavy, he asked the crowd “Who here likes The Cure?” (certainly every single person at a goth concert does) and we got a cover of Just Like Heaven, which obviously everyone enjoyed. It was really powerful to not just hear great music but also have someone be like, yeah it sucks and we all see that, but you need to get organized instead of depressed. They literally have a song called Organized Murder about the military-industrial complex. But we all contain multitudes so they also have a song called I Love Cats and Dusty asked everyone to show him their best cat photo before they played the song.
Languages
I am very proud to announce that I translated a whole 5,000-word article from Spanish into English: LGBT literature in Argentina. I stumbled on the article and was like, wow, seems like a good topic to translate. It’s also led me to some other articles—I’m currently working on LGBT literature in Mexico, which also doesn’t exist in English Wikipedia! On a related note, I’ve learned that Wikipedia has a Guild of Copy Editors, which I obviously joined. You might think I don’t want to do more work in my free time. That is true but I think editing Wikipedia is fun and interesting so it’s okay. I am using my powers for good. Though I did overdo it and get a little tired of it this week. The Copy Editors’ Guild had a week-long editing challenge to clear out part of the editing backlog (users can tag articles in need of editing and those articles are in the Guild’s to-do list). If you edit a certain amount during the challenge, you get a “barnstar,” which is effectively a digital sticker that goes on your user page. Apparently I will go to great lengths for a fake sticker, so, among other things, this week I copy edited the 18,000-word article List of coups and coup attempts by country. I don’t think I would have been so afflicted by Wikipedia editing mania if Kirk were here, but I thought, I’m alone with nothing better happening, why not do a little hyperfocus as a treat? Wikipedia would literally fall apart without autistic people, that’s all I can say.
Kitchen Witchery
I have been continuing to try to find the balance between low-key and novel food options. Last week, I wanted to try this corn butter farro recipe and grill something so I did both and served the farro with grilled chicken and zucchini. I do not have a recipe for the chicken or zucchini, only vibes. Another vibe-based meal, which I made for just me, was pasta with chickpeas and feta, served with some roasted vegetables. I had leftover chickpeas in the freezer (thank you, past self) so all I had to do was cook pasta then mix it with a little olive oil and seasoning (I used pizza seasoning!). On Friday, I made this cheesy, spicy black bean bake and the southwestern corn spoonbread recipe (kind of like cornbread but a higher corn-to-bread ratio) from The Bread Bible. The beans were good but I was tired and distracted and forgot to put them in the fridge afterwards, so farewell to this batch of beans. Finally, because it is summer and zucchini is cheap and plentiful, I made this version of zucchini bread, which I really liked. This produced a really nice texture and was very simple.
grilled chicken, zucchini, and buttered corn farronoodles and chickpeas and vegetablesreheated black bean bake and corn spoon breadperfect zucchini bread
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
prince of the bedHuey with the double-hand holdFritz being the cutest baby in existence
Hello, friends and enemies. My best news this week is we had ceiling fans installed in our bedroom, my office, and our guest room! I am heading into the summer with an abundance of cool air. I’m happy to replace my stand fans with something more robust and I’m glad to have a better lighting situation in my office—the fan has an overhead light so I can ditch my floor lamp. I’m always shocked that ceiling fans are not standard because my former-electrician dad put them in every room in the house growing up. Why would you not have a ceiling fan? And in California? Anyway, I have now raised my standard of living as it pertains to staying cool and I’m feeling very good about it.
Last weekend, we went to Calistoga (a town north-west of Napa) because I wanted to go to a hot spring. I told Kirk that’s what I wanted for my birthday, but we didn’t make it a day-of birthday event. We’ve found the weekend after Memorial Day a good time to go places because people try to make the most of the three-day weekend so not so many people are is out the following weekend. I had a nice time getting a massage and floating around in geothermal pools of varying temperatures. It was super relaxing and I wish I could do it all the time. I wore a new swimsuit, which I also wore to the dip and dip party we had last month. This probably isn’t notable for most people but it is the first time in my life I’ve had a two-piece swimsuit that shows my midsection. What’s cool is no one actually cares. It feels like a big deal to me but literally no one at the pool gave me a second look (except for the woman who stopped me to say I looked cute).
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because crop tops are coming back into fashion. It reminded me that they were big when I was in middle and high school and I was not allowed to wear them. I also didn’t want to wear them because I was a big rule-follower and I had learned at church that we have to dress “modestly,” which includes covering one’s stomach and shoulders so we don’t encourage the boys to sin. Because shoulders are the devil’s, uh … I dunno, but they’re bad. One time I went to a church dance and they were checking the girls’ outfits at the door. Your skirt or shorts had to be at least as far down your thigh as your fingertips when you had your arms down. We also had to hold our arms above our heads to make sure our shirts didn’t pull up and show our middle. If the shirt was too short, they safety pinned the shirt to the waistband of your pants. I found this rigamarole annoying but not incorrect. I was given a set of rules to follow (showing your midriff = sinful) and I was strict about it. I remember thinking other girls were slutty for wearing cropped shirts. I made a big fuss about getting a dress for prom that wasn’t strapless because I’d spent my adolescence being told that wearing anything less than a capped sleeve was wrong. However, when I started college at Brigham Young University, I learned I wasn’t following the rules firmly enough. I actually got turned away from the dining hall because my shorts were above my knees, which was pretty shocking to me because they were fairly long shorts (just not fully to the knee). Those few inches of thigh will incite people to sin (lol shoot me)!
Even though I have long since rejected the rules about what’s appropriate to wear according to Mormonism (most people who see me in real life know I am rarely seen wearing a sleeve), it’s funny (sad) that I have still had a hard time with crop tops. But that’s not just the last vestiges of Mormon upbringing haunting my sartorial choices. I think what made this particular rule so strong with me is that it intersects with what I’ve been told about what you should or shouldn’t wear while fat. When I was growing up, we had Clinton and Stacy of What Not to Wear telling us how to “hide a tummy,” for just one example (see also The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia if you need to be reminded of how rough it was back then). Now I am older and wiser and care less. And I know you can’t hide your fat! Even if I made all the “flattering” choices, wore a different swimsuit to the pool, or maybe, as the linked clip suggests, wore a structured blazer all the time, I would still be fat. People would still know I am fat. There is really no secret way to not look fat if you are fat. That’s okay! There is only being comfortable and confident versus uncomfortable and insecure. I really am happy to see more of a cultural shift happening in how we think about our bodies. It’s not universal of course but there are enough people out there being like “it’s fine, it’s no big deal. Just wear what you want,” that it’s making a difference. I’m happy that I can wear a swim suit that shows my stomach even though that seems like such a low bar to clear.
Books and Other Words
Devil’s Gun by Cat Rambo is a sequel to You Sexy Thing. I did not realize that a third book is due to come out this fall or I might have waited to read this and re-read You Sexy Thing too because I had forgotten a lot of details, but Rambo helpfully gives a summary of events so far at the beginning of Devil’s Gun. It’s a space opera, found-family situation which I am always going to love. The writing style is quick and pithy and I find this to be a highly enjoyable series to read.
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Choen is an exploration of how life looks when a romantic partner isn’t the (or the only) focus of one’s life. There are people out there who are best friends who live together and organize their lives around each other. I think that’s wonderful. Choen proposes that there are other ways to orient our lives than only around romance and looks into the history and politics of the subject while providing several case studies of friends who are centering each other in their lives. One interesting example of how our understanding of friendship has changed was that, in the middle ages, best friends could make a marriage-like vow to each other. Historically, same-sex friends had been socially permitted to hold hands and talk about each other in ways that would now be seen as romantic, but that changed in the last century when the culture shifted and more people learned of homosexuality and started fearing seeming gay (classic!). I really enjoyed this book because friends are also at the center of my life. Although I am happily married to Kirk, my friends are important enough to me that I am trying to make plans around where we all move together in the future. It’s healthy to have a community beyond just a romantic partner, as Choen explains. Having multiple strong relationships takes the pressure off of a romantic partner (who cannot and should not be expected to provide all the support a person needs) and can, in fact, make a romantic relationship stronger. I just love this book and the concept it’s based on. Our lives would be richer with stronger friendship communities and that’s what I want for me and my friends too.
The Other Significant OthersDevil’s Gun
Meanwhile, on the internet (sorry to all the non-subscribers for all the LA Times links, but that’s where I’ve been reading news this week):
Biden signs order tightening border with Mexico when crossings surge via LA Times. From the article “the president can put the border restrictions into effect when average border arrests surpass 2,500 migrants for seven days in a row” and the heightened restrictions “would end two weeks after the number of crossers stopped at the border dips below 1,500 for more than a week. For most of the last nine years, there have been more than 1,500 border stops per day.” What’s wild to me here is that it seems to be a cynical ploy for electability and that some people seem fine with this since it’s Biden doing it and not Trump. According to Pew Research, “While a 59% majority of voters say that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S. legally, this is a substantial drop compared with recent years. In June of 2020, 74% of voters said that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay legally.” So people were against this when Trump did it but a not insignificant number of people are cool because a Democrat is doing the same thing? That should not be how this works. It’s fucked up.
I’m still doing a lot of Wikipedia editing and translating but I haven’t been noting everything on the blog (this is exactly the kind of thing I would have loved to share on Twitter all the time. Alas). This week I surpassed 200 edits on English Wikipedia (I’m over 300 edits across all Wikipedias), which I think is an exciting milestone. I’ve been having fun working through clusters of articles. I finished translating a small group of articles from Spanish to English about the Icelandic annals, which are old manuscripts from the middle ages. I saw that there were a bunch of articles about this in Spanish but they were missing in English, so I thought, who better to translate this? I also translated an article about the Oslo Conservatory of Music into Spanish, then translated articles about its notable students. I’ve also been working my way through a bunch of articles about places in and around Skagafjörður, Iceland. It’s very satisfying to fill in links to everything as I translate more articles.
Something amusing and annoying is an error I keep making with Icelandic. Both Spanish and Icelandic have the word en, but in Spanish, it’s the preposition “in” and in Icelandic, it’s the conjunction “but.” I keep translating the Icelandic as “in” and I not catching it until my teacher is trying to figure out why I’m so wrong. Icelandic’s word for “in” is í, so it’s not even close. It’s cool that Spanish has clearly created a groove in my brain but it’s also annoying that it’s interrupting my Icelandic thought process. Trilingual problems?
Corporeal Form
showing off my new wrist brace for carpal tunnel
Well it’s always some damn thing around here and this week I found out I have carpal tunnel in my left hand (I am left-handed). I went to the doctor because her office called me—six weeks after I had last emailed about a different topic—and said the doctor wanted to see me. When I arrived, the doctor asked me what I wanted to discuss and I was like, uh, you asked me to come but then she didn’t even seem to know why I was there. I suggested she had not been reading my emails and she took the time to read them out loud. You know, as a little review for the whole group. I saw her in April because I wanted to get tested for POTS, but she took a few readings in the office and said I have vertigo (I do not have vertigo symptoms based on how it has been explained to me). It turned out that this time the doctor wanted to do another round of readings relative to POTS and she told me that Kaiser doesn’t even have the standard test used to diagnose the condition (the tilt table test). I don’t know why she didn’t tell me that to begin with back in April when I said I wanted to be referred for the test! In any case, I got an EKG while I was there although it didn’t tell us anything. I’m supposed to do a 24-hour heart monitor thing to see if that provides us with any news we can use. While I was there I complained about my hand going numb a lot. Apparently this is carpal tunnel and not a potential POTS symptom as I thought it might have been. So now I’m supposed to wear my wrist brace for some hours every day. As usual, we have fun here.
You may remember that I said I was participating in a clinical trial related to fatty liver disease. I found out this week that I can’t continue with the study. Last week I went to get an MRI, which is part of the baseline assessment. I wasn’t able to handle it. They started pushing me into the tube, which I knew was going to be a tiny space and was mentally prepared for, but the tube was so narrow that it was pressing down on my shoulders and arms before I was even in to my waist. I can’t handle being in a tiny space where I can’t move and have pressure on my body. That’s too scary. There was not an alternative MRI machine so that’s that. It’s baffling though because there are certainly people out there who are broader of shoulder than I am. You’d think the MRI tube would be a little bigger but apparently not.
Knitting and Crafts
Actually knitting again
I’m happy to report that I have been knitting and actually making a little progress. Part of my problem has been that Huey often sits on me when I’m on the couch—my main knitting location—and I think another part of the issue has been the carpal tunnel. My hand gets tingly after a few rows and I have to take a break because life is deeply annoying in many ways. In any case, this is a small project that I’m hoping will be easy to finish and give me a sense of accomplishment. The pattern is 25 grams of love from Hélène Magnússon.
Kitchen Witchery
I tried a couple of new recipes over the last two weeks. First we had the double brown beans, which was kind of an Indian-style beans and rice. I used vaquero beans for them and they were good and Kirk liked them too. I forgot to take a picture but I’m sure you can manage without it. I made some roasted parmesan cauliflower to eat with that. I guess parmesan doesn’t really go with Indian flavors but that’s what I wanted to make! Finally, I tried another tofu recipe: broccoli tofu stir fry. This was really good and very easy! I left out the eggs for mine because I don’t like them, but I am generous so I did scramble an egg for Kirk to add to his. It’s not his fault I’m a hater.
tofu and broccoli fried riceroasted cauliflower with crispy parmesan
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. We took Huey to the vet again this week because she won’t stop peeing on the floor. I was worried about her kidneys, but the vet said her most recent blood work shows no real kidney problems. It could be another UTI (apparently some older cats just get UTIs all the time) or it could be mobility issues with her hind legs. She seems to have arthritis, so the vet suggested a treatment and it seems like Huey is feeling a little better and like it’s easier for her to move around. The medication is a monthly injection that we’d have to go to the vet to get administered, but if it makes her feel better (and makes her stop peeing on the floor!) it will be worth it.
When we got our fans installed this week, Fritz was being a very scared baby and couldn’t figure out where to hide. He normally hides in the bedroom, but that’s where the trouble was. I draped a blanket over one of his chairs so he could have a little hidey spot and that seemed to work for him. He spent most of the day there, only to be alarmed when he saw the fan in the bedroom! I don’t know if he thought it was a giant bird or something but he was extremely wary of it. Fortunately, he adjusted quickly and is hanging out in the bedroom again like normal.
Huey lounging and mad because I gave her a bathFritz in his tent in the sunHuey in cuddle modefritz in his fort/kitty jail
Hello, friends and enemies. Last weekend was big cultural activities weekend for me. On Saturday, I had my dance recital! It was a lot of fun and I think I did well in my routines. Tap was a challenging (read: high endurance) but really fun piece. Jazz and ballet were nice too. My teacher Dawn styled us with a full-on 1920s hairstyle to match the flapper dresses we were wearing for tap and did our makeup, so I got the full experience. Most of my classes are for adults but I do have some ballet classes with the young people and I was honored that one of the kids specifically made sure I knew he was coming up soon so I could watch his solo. I assume I’m just kind of a weird old woman who isn’t fully a person to them but I guess I am more real than I think to some of them. That’s not a criticism of teens by the way. They have their own lives and I’m not trying to be a different type of weirdo by being like “how do you do, fellow kids!” Still, it’s nice to be included on a certain level.
The next two weeks, we have a break from classes. I always welcome a rest until I start getting restless halfway through and have to invent activities for myself. I’m a little bummed out because the studio adjusts it’s schedule in the summer so most of the ballet classes are in the middle of the day. That’s great for kids who don’t have school (and for parents who will drive their kids around in the middle of the day) but not for me with my dumb full-time job. To be fair, it will be a million degrees in the studio in the afternoon but still … I wish I didn’t have to work and could just do fun things. We need universal basic income or I need to get a MacArthur grant.
ready to tap my little heart outSac Ballet Innovations
The same day as the recital I went to see the Sacramento Ballet because the thing with buying season tickets in advance is that sometimes many things land on the same day. This was another performance with three short pieces. The first was Balanchine’s Apollo. It was a little weird but it seems typical given the several Balanchine ballets I’ve now seen. There’s a lot of arm entangling and the dancers looping around each other. Why? I don’t know, but if you want to see it for yourself, here’s a recording of the same piece by the New York City Ballet in the 1960s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5xNXOE5dyc. The next piece, Salve, was about domestic abuse. It was good but it makes me sad when they pretend to abuse the ladies, even for artistic purposes. Is there no other way to make a point about abuse other than having the men do really aggressive choreography at their women partners? The final piece was Ibsen’s House, based on the works of author Henrik Ibsen. I am only passingly familiar with Ibsen (I read A Doll’s House in high school), but I liked this ballet. The set design was very cool. They used a sheer white curtain between panels of black to create a big picture window upstage. I also liked the 19th-century-ish ballet outfits (you can’t really go full 19th century dress and dance). Obviously, all the dancing was good too but I’m not really an expert so I just write about what stands out to me. However, I have been gratified that I am recognizing more of the moves the dancers are doing. I’m clearly learning something in class.
Books and Other Words
I somehow read two novels in a row in which girls are being raised by their powerful single dad on an island, which is kind of weird but okay. The first is H. G. Parry’s The Magician’s Daughter. Biddy (short for Bridget) is the adopted daughter of the magician Rowan. They, along with Rowans’ familiar, a rabbit named Hutchencroft, live on a hidden island off the coast of Ireland. Magic in this world is a finite resource; it slips into our world from cracks in reality. Unfortunately, magicians have been using too much too fast, leaving ordinary people without any magic, which, left unattended, might lead to small miracles in their lives. I enjoyed it a lot. It was the right balance of fantasy and reality, giving us flawed characters to root for like Rowan who plays at being Robin Hood by going out every night to try to liberate magic from people who are hoarding it (eat the rich, baby!). The other book in the “raised alone on an island with her dad” genre, although this was a science fiction and not fantasy, was The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. The novel weaves together three strands of of time: present-day narration by the protagonist (Rao’s daughter Athena, now imprisoned), the story of the protagonist leaving her father and joining a group of “exes” (people who reject the worldwide government run by the “Board,” in which all individual citizens are “shareholders”), and the third strand in which we learn about King Rao’s childhood and his ascendance to a Bill Gates/Steve Jobs-like figure as the CEO of the Coconut computer company. It’s a very good story and a bleak-as-hell take on a could-be future in which no one is a citizen, or even a consumer, but a shareholder living in some kind of technofuedalist megastate where unemployed people can get career training as influencers. I really liked the “ex” communities who were finding ways to live and support each other without shareholder government because it’s important that fiction, even dystopian fiction like this, also gives us some ideas for what life could be like.
In non-fiction, I recently finished The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgson. This book has been on my shelf since 2009. One of my college professors recommended the series (there are three volumes) as the definitive history of Islam. I had been meaning to read them all and figured I was finally going to do it this year. When I finished the book, I went to log my reading on LibraryThing, only to find I read this book in 2010! I have literally zero memory of this. I thought I had never touched this book! To be fair, I was kind of going through it in 2010 and the book doesn’t even physically look like it had been read. This is exactly why I have to write about everything I read—to cement it in my mind. I was prepared for this book to be kind of stuffy because it was written in the 1960s, but it is actually pretty fresh. In the introduction that takes up a good 20 percent of this 600-page book, the author lays out a bunch of definitions, including that he rejects the term “middle east” because it centers the European perspective (east of what, right?) and rejects “Muslim world” (too broad of a term), instead favoring the geographical descriptor “Nile-to-Oxus region” (the Oxus is a river running through Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan). The history itself is nothing new or mind-blowing, but it is a comprehensive discussion on everything from the period just before the prophet Muhammad through the Abbasid empire. It’s nice to get back in touch with my academic roots (I have a bachelor’s degree in near eastern studies [“nile-to-oxus region studies” is much clunkier to say, if more precise]).
Finally, I read Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. The book starts with Klein wanting to examine why it is that she and former feminist author/current conservative nut Naomi Wolf are often confused for each other. She initially plans to take a sort of literary criticism route, analyzing books and movies about doubles, but her research leads her to asking a more general question: what is it about our society that leads people to go off the deep end and become conspiracy theorists who are out of touch with reality? It was a very interesting book that covered a lot of ground. I especially liked the chapter she wrote about autism, noting that the “vaccines cause autism” conspiracy laid the groundwork for the anti-vaccine sentiment around covid. (I get super mad about the “vaccines cause autism” shit because the premise is ultimately that you prefer a child dead from a preventable disease to a living autistic one.) One theme Klein has in the book is that the right-wing “question everything” idea is not inherently bad, and maybe some of us on the left could have questioned more or at least offered better explanations instead of being dismissive in the face of conflicting information about the pandemic. There’s a tendency now for right and left to exist in opposition—if the right does it, the left must reflexively reject it. However, this attitude is making it easier for people to get caught up in conspiracy thinking and it gives extreme right-wing operators, like Steve Bannon (whose show Wolf now regularly contributes to), an opening to woo people disaffected with reality. This has led to what Klein calls a “diagonal” (cutting across old left-right political divides) political coalition. One line that made me laugh from the book is a chapter heading “The Conspiracy Is … Capitalism.” The thing about conspiracies, as noted by journalist Sara Kendzior, is that sometimes it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just a straight up conspiracy. Klein brings this up too. The conspiracy is that wealthy and powerful people have each others’ backs. That’s it. “Power and wealth conspire to protect themselves,” Klein writes. That’s really the main point of the book. Klein’s doppleganger, Wolf, is seeing conspiracies everywhere and profiting off her presence in the right-wing ecosystem. People like Steve Bannon are using conspiracy thinking to distract people from real problems and making money doing it. Just about every conservative celebrity is selling a supplement or some kind of garbage. It’s always about making money.
The Magician’s DaughterThe Immortal King RaoThe Venture of Islam Volume 1Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza via The Verge. Google is straight-up fucking broken. It’s AI search results are feeding people shitpost answers after using Reddit, shitpost city, to train its language model. The results are funny, to be sure, but they are not informative! Reminder that “artificial intelligence” is not real. This is glorified text prediction. It is not intelligent, it just guesses which words are most likely to appear in a particular order.
Biden, lawmakers blast ICC’s intent to charge Israeli leaders via The Washington Post (gift link). So, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, among others. Biden thinks that sucks, which is in contrast to what most other countries seem to be saying. In the wake of this news, I learned that the U.S. has a law on the books that includes the “Hague invasion clause,” which “authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague.” Um, yikes. Why would we do that as a country? This became law in 2002 when Bush was heading up the invasion of Iraq. It’s insane that this country is so worried about the possibility of the ICC bringing Americans or our allies up on charges that we need a law for this. I’m shocked, honestly.
Campus protesters want Johns Hopkins to divest. This lab is what they mean. via The Baltimore Banner. From the article, “‘It has become clear that Johns Hopkins is a military research institution with a university as a side project,’ a representative of the Hopkins Justice Collective Palestinian Solidarity Encampment said in a statement.” and “The Department of Defense has awarded the university laboratory $12 billion over the past decade, a review of audited financial statements show. That’s nearly twice as much as it’s made in tuition and fees over the same period.” (emphasis mine).
TV and Music
The YouTube algorithm fed me this DJ set by MËSTIZA and I haven’t been the same since. I don’t typically rely on Al Gore’s Rhythm for finding music and I was frankly surprised to find this delight in my recommendations but I am glad I did find it! They’re so good and so cool! I immediately bought their album.
Corporeal Form
I mentioned a couple of months ago that I think I have oral allergy syndrome but the allergy doctor said probably not (and there’s not a concrete test for it anyway). This is a health condition where eating raw produce can give you an allergic reaction. After eating a sandwich with spinach on it a few weeks ago and getting a stomach ache and having my lips swell after eating applewood-smoked bacon, I decided to stop eating any fresh produce and see what would happen. It’s actually made a significant difference for me. I’m burping a lot less and not spending as much time in the bathroom. I haven’t been having stomach aches. The doctors kept telling me it’s not reasonable to assume that I have OAS but also I should experiment on myself and record the results, so I don’t know if they’re going to believe me, but I know I’m feeling a lot better. I mean, emotionally I feel kind of shitty that this has been an issue for a long time and I just figured it out and that means I kind of can’t eat any kind of salad or fresh vegetables again but, I guess that’s what I’m dealing with. It makes a lot of sense to me because I always have to really force myself to try to eat fruit—some of it tastes okay it’s just hard to get myself to eat it—and I can never manage to eat much. I think I was subconsciously trying to protect myself from being sick. I am going to keep experimenting a little but I do feel very confident that this is at least part of my problems.
The other thing I am fairly convinced I have is POTS, which stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Basically the blood pressure cannot keep up with the rest of the body when you move around, causing your heart rate to spike when you go from sitting to standing causing dizziness and fatigue, and it’s especially problematic when it’s hot outside. I measured my pulse and found it does jump significantly when I have been sitting for a while and stand up (like, 30 bpm, consistent with the criteria for POTS). I asked my doctor to refer me for a test but, after a cursory exam, she said no because my heart rate didn’t jump that much between lying down and standing when they measured in the office. She did not accept my explanation that it takes longer to get to a resting heart rate with POTS and I’d been walking around to get to the office. She instead said I have vertigo, but the way I’m feeling dizzy is not at all what vertigo is supposed to be, which is the spinning all the way around feeling. I’m getting like a head rushing feeling. For the fatty liver study I’m doing, they did an echocardiogram and my resting heart rate was in the 50 bpm range so I still think I’m right. I’m okay with being wrong but, if I am wrong, I need the doctor to explain why I’m getting all these symptoms, plus things like blood pooling in my fingers when I walk around. POTS could also be contributing to my gut issues, so I feel like this is a unifying theory of what’s wrong with me. But I’m not a doctor so I guess what do I know.
Finally, and this may be TMI, I feel it noteworthy to record the fact that I actually had a hot flash for, I think, the first time last week. We were watching the ballet and I just started fucking sweating and feeling really hot from the inside out, which is how I always see hot flashes described. Yay? In any case, menopause seems to be approaching. We have fun here.
Kitchen Witchery
It’s always soup season in my house. I recently made the somewhat Tarascan bean soup from Rancho Gordo and we liked it a lot. Kirk said I should make it again, so we got his seal of approval. He also drew a little smiley face on his soup after I said that the soup was a little boring to take a photo of. What a guy. I made Chicomecoatl corn soup from the Decolonize Your Diet cookbook. I had made this soup before and we liked it but, several years ago, I loaned this cookbook to someone and then never saw them again! I finally bought a new copy, largely for this soup recipe but it is a good cookbook overall. Lastly, I baked a ricotta loaf (recipe from The Bread Bible). I ended up with an excess of ricotta because the grocery store was out of the regular-size container I ordered and substituted a huge one. Naturally, I made bread with it. I was thinking about using it in a cake recipe today (there’s a chocolate ricotta cake in Snacking Bakes) but, alas, I am out of eggs.
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. After a full week of waking us up at 6:15 every morning, Fritz finally chilled out in the last two days. I’m relieved because I can’t live like that.
long sleepy boyFritz selfieWaiting for shower time
Hello, friends and enemies. This time of year, I always get nostalgic for my circus days. One day I will write a full post about this but I think most know by know that my hometown has a community circus that I participated in when I was a kid and when I moved back home after college (I have written a little about it here). They do shows for the first three weekends in May, so I think of this as circus season. It’s something I miss but I am realizing that I don’t have to do the most special and unique activity to get the same sort of good feelings and fulfillment in my life. I think dance is doing a great job of holding this space for me. I get to do a fun, physical, and artistic activity with interesting people and I get to ham it up on stage once in a while. Here are some circus photos of me from the archives.
1992 circus1993 circusunicycling in 19982009 circus
38 and ready to be in the pool
Yesterday was my 38th birthday! I usually don’t do much in the way of festivities but yesterday we had a little party—the “dip and dip,” the successor to the souper bowl party we had in February. Everyone brought a dip and something to dip in it and then we took a dip in the pool and it was really great. I got to chill in the water and chat with my friends and eat good food and look cute doing it!
Current Events
As you know from reading this blog, I have been thinking a lot about the war Israel is waging against Gaza and, recently, the wave of protests and demands for divestment it has inspired. Something important that I had totally forgotten about but that this instagram video reminded me about, is that I have investments via my 401(k) and that is a site where I can do some divestment of my own. This is, however, proving to be challenging. On my 401(k) account’s site, I can pick which funds I want to invest my retirement in and at what percentage. The funds are a little cagey about what exactly they’re invested in, I assume because that’s the special secret industry knowledge that fund managers are charging for. Unfortunately, this makes it very to difficult to figure out which companies my money is invested in. There are info sheets available for each fund that show the top ten investments, and summarize the broad type of thing the money is going to (“healthcare” or “real estate,” for example). I tried contacting the company that manages me 401(k) to ask if it’s possible to get a full list of what any given fund invests in (I figured not because I assume this is proprietary information). The customer service representative told me I could but the thing they directed me to was the fund info sheets I was already looking at, which do not list every single investment. Alas. But, I am carrying on with the information I do have. One of the funds I was invested in had Meta, Philip Morris, Eli Lily, and Alphabet in the top ten investments. Why in the world are we investing in Philip Morris! A company that makes cigarettes? In 2024?? Also, fuck Meta (for so many reasons but here’s one particularly egregious example).
I know I’m not rich but my 401(k) isn’t nothing and I think every little bit counts. It’s fucked up that so much of the onus of this falls to the individual. I am certain I’m not the only person with retirement investments who would like to make sure their savings aren’t indirectly supporting genocide, but good fucking luck finding an investment fund that’s like “we’re the anti-genocide guys!” The problem is that war remains profitable. The problem is also that I have to play the big international gambling game to save money for retirement. We have only been using 401(k)s as a primary way to save for retirement since 1980. Before that, you relied on regular savings or a pension from your company. So we kind of don’t know if 401(k) savings even work as the main way to fund retirement. We don’t have data about how well people with only 401(k) savings are doing in retirement because it just hasn’t been around that long. People who started their careers around 1980 are just starting to retire now. This could all be a scam! Unfortunately, the possible scam is the only system we have so I’ve got a good fifty percent of my account invested in bonds because I, quite frankly, do not trust the stock market (can you blame me?) but I am also trying to have enough money to not work forever. Modern life is full of insane contradictions and I’m doing my best!
Books and Other Words
I really liked Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. It’s set in an alternate version of the 1920s in which, as the author explains in an afterword, a different, much less virulent variant of smallpox made it to the Americas a few hundred years ago, so European settlers encountered way more Native people when they arrived. The story takes place in the thriving city of Cahokia, a place we know today as a historical site on the Mississippi. Cahokia Jazz is a detective novel that kicks off with some unknown killer murdering a white man in a mimicry of Aztec-style human sacrifice on top of one of the city’s most recognizable buildings. This inflames the city’s existing racial tensions and becomes a big priority for city leaders. I thought this was an excellently done alternate history and an interesting look into what might have been.
Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaicovsky is the third and last book in Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture series. I thought it was a good end to the series. At the beginning of the book, I wasn’t sure I was going to be into it because some of the perspectives shifted to different characters and it felt like too much, but of course once I got going I liked it. It was a fittingly epic end to the series.
Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a dystopian tale from the not-too-distant future in which incarcerated people can elect to join the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program in which they literally fight to the death for a chance at freedom. The corporations behind the program produce multiple TV shows featuring the fights and the day-to-day existence of the “links” (aka the prisoners) and profit considerably off the whole spectacle. What’s effective about this book is that Adjei-Brenyah includes footnotes throughout the work to explain the laws that underpin this horrific system. The vast majority of them are based on real information, like that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has a loophole where people can effectively be punished with slavery if they committed a crime. It reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s stating that there’s nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that there’s “nothing in the book that didn’t happen, somewhere.” Reality is often much more horrific than we give it credit for. I thought this was a good book and a chilling story for sure, but something about it felt heavy handed to me, if, as I said, fairly effective.
Cahokia JazzLords of UncreationChain Gang All-Stars
Anatomy of a Moral Panic via Jewish Currents. The big freak-out over student protests has all the hallmarks of a moral panic.
What Does ‘Choosing the Bear’ Mean? All About This Simple Yet Profound Trend via Glamour. A new meme has emerged. Some men started asking women if they’d rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear. Women are choosing the bear. Men online have responded by lecturing women about how dangerous bears can be because men as a group have no self awareness. I’ve been seeing a lot of funny memes on the subject (like Belle from Beauty and the Beast is choosing the bear, literally) but it’s also deeply sad.
Heat death of the internet via takahē. A poetic little piece about how annoying it is to try to use the internet now.
TV and Music
Eurovision was this week, which feels like a little birthday gift for me. Thank you, Europe, for offering me a gigantic, campy, musical spectacle to honor my birth. It means a lot. I have learned that some people do not know what Eurovision is so: the Eurovision Song Contest started in 1956 as a way for European countries to be friendly and make television together. European countries (broadly defined here, especially because Australia now participates) send a musician who enters one song into the competition. All the countries’ representatives perform their songs and the winner is selected based on a combination of votes from the public and votes from the Eurovision jury (which is kind of like the Electoral College). I only started watching this in the last few years but I have been interested in it for a while. My favorite acts are the ones that do weird stuff because it’s Eurovision and you could do literally anything! I am disappointed when countries send some basic pop music girlie. How boring! Use your imagination a little. My favorite this year was Finland’s unhinged performance by Windows95Man. Where else can you see this? No where. Only Eurovision.
Corporeal Form
Last week, I had my intake appointment for the clinical trial I’m doing to test a medication for non-alcoholic fatty liver. Ironically, this included the longest actual conversation I’ve had with a doctor in some time. Why do I have to sign up for a study to get a doctor to listen to me? I don’t know, but this system sucks. Of interest: I did an EKG, which showed I have a resting heart rate in the 50 bmp range. The doctor saw this and asked if I was really active as a kid, which I suppose I was but I don’t usually think about it that way because I didn’t do any traditional sports (see above, re: circus). It was validating to have a doctor be like “hey, you clearly have done some exercise” because usually they assume I do nothing. I also mentioned my ongoing dizziness/lightheadedness stuff and that my primary care doctor thinks I have vertigo (I think I have POTS but have yet to get anyone to send me for a test). The study doctor told me that vertigo feels like being super drunk and the room is spinning all around. That’s definitely not what I’m experiencing. Crazy what happens when the doctor takes the time to actually chat with you and ask questions!
Moving It
First, here’s a reminder that my dance recital is in less than a week! You can get tickets here or message me for information.
tap shoes: one with the grippy thing and one without
This week we solved a mystery. You may recall that, in February, I sprained my ankle while tap dancing (I am, unfortunately, still not completely recovered. Although I am close). I slipped and fell, which is weird because that hadn’t happened to me before, but I was like, well my new shoes are different I guess. It turns out, I was supposed to put a grippy thing on my new tap shoes and I did not do this! My tap teacher, Dawn, decided she also wanted some custom tap shoes from the same shoe company. She told me the shoes were super slippery until she glued on the grippy pad the shoes came with. I was like, hold on, wait a minute here. Because my shoes came with a rubbery thing but no instructions for what to do with it. You’re supposed to affix the rubbery things to the bottom of the shoe so you don’t slide around and, as I did, turn your fucking ankle! I’m feeling stupid (although how would I have known) and annoyed (why no instructions??) but also relieved that I didn’t injure myself out of the blue because I had been kind of doubting my stability and skills. It was an equipment issue! Annoying!
Kitchen Witchery
I tried a couple of fun recipes for yesterday’s dip party. I made this alubia bean dip with garlic confit. It calls for ‘nduja oil, which my grocery store does not have and I was not motivated to search for. I also wanted to keep it vegetarian since there are some non-meat eaters in the group so I topped the dip with harissa instead. I brought a dessert option too, this s’mores dip. The picture with the recipe looks very dippy but mine was more like casserole, I guess. It has chocolate ganache and marshmallows on a bed of graham crackers. I think, to make it more dippable, I would leave the crackers out and use those to dip. That said, it was good and no one complained that it wasn’t sufficiently dip-like.
dip party action
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
Huey snoozing in her spotworld’s sleepiest boyFritz catching the sun perfectly, as usual
Hello, friends and enemies. Something I have been thinking about this week is that I am not made for that 40-hour work week life. I mean, I don’t think anyone is but perhaps some can handle it better than others. The last two weeks I actually had a lot of work to do (instead of my usual schedule of some work and then keeping the computer awake) and, gang, I’m fucking tired. I’m good at what I do but given my eye issues sometimes I think I picked the wrong career. Then again, what job does not involve looking at things? What would I even do? It seems stupid to complain when I have a pretty tame job that pays well, but I resent that I have to work to live all the same. This week I also had a big reminder that I am a corporate serf. My company is getting acquired by a larger company (pending the FTC’s approval). In one of the big presentations management did about it, one of the executives, while trying to reassure us that we’re not going to lose our jobs, told us without a hint of irony that the new company was “buying the people.” I know that’s true and that’s how it works—the new company wants the projects we have and the people doing the work as part of their portfolio—but you can’t just go out there and say the corporation is buying people. That’s gross. It’s true, but it’s gross.
Current Events
I am not here to report on or analyze the news but sometimes I have to talk about what’s going on in the world. I am definitely not the first or the best person to connect these issues this week but I am compelled to bear witness and record them in my own way. So, here we go on the topic of campus protests in support of Palestine.
Student protests are happening on campuses throughout the country, including here in my state. The students are demanding that their schools divest their endowments from companies that are supporting Israel and their genocide on the Palestinian people. This is not nothing. Universities collectively have billions of dollars in investments (leading to the joke I’ve seen online that universities are just hedge funds with classes). I don’t think this is trivial. The price of college keeps going up (thanks to Reagan worrying that an “educated proletariat” would be problematic, by the way!) and universities are making more and more money. Meanwhile, this week Biden signed a bill that will send Israel $26 billion and the bill that could ban TikTok (sidebar: The Chinese company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, is supposed to sell the company to an American enterprise or get banned from the U.S. This is immensely stupid. Imagine Brazil, for example. telling Facebook/Meta it needs to sell to a Brazilian company or get out. Most of the world is using technology from other countries. America needs to get over itself and pass normal regulations about technology.) Young people are taking on immense debt to go to school so they can hopefully get a job that pays their rent. They are organizing and building class consciousness and making friends online through apps like TikTok. The government is giving Israel money, banning one of the few online places where young people can congregate, and school gets more expensive every year. These kids have already had to go to school through a pandemic and are living in an era where school shootings are common. What do they have left to lose? School is already not a safe place to them. They’re not scared of protesting.
“We Made This World – We Can Make Another” by Roger Peet
One of the most interesting cases to me is what’s happening at Cal Poly Humboldt, which has closed the campus after students started protesting and then barricaded themselves in when the cops turned up. Here’s the thing: According to Cal Matters, “A 2018 study found that nearly one in five of the university’s students had experienced homelessness, twice the Cal State system average.” There is not enough housing for kids at this school. They are trying to go to college and they are homeless. These students have already clashed with the police. Last fall, students living in vehicles parked on campus were told to clear out. As many as twenty percent of students don’t have a place to live, the school isn’t helping them (the least they could do is let homeless students park campers on campus, come on), they’re taking on debt and it kinda feels like the world is ending so yeah, they are fucking protesting. The adults in their lives did not keep them safe from school shootings or a pandemic. Now they are taking care of each other and using the skills they learned to keep school shooters out of their classrooms on the police. I salute these young people. I don’t know that I would be brave enough or informed enough to do this if I were in college today (considering I didn’t go to any protests during my time in school, perhaps not.). They are demanding that the world be better. They are saying that we have more in common with the oppressed Palestinians than we do with the ruling class. They’re right.
The protests are also calling attention to the situation in Gaza. The deep irony and sadness is that Gaza no longer has any universities. Israel has systematically bombed them all out since beginning their campaign in October. College students don’t want their money going to a regime that is preventing young people just like them from living their lives and getting an education. The other absolutely horrific news on this subject from this week is that they have uncovered mass graves at Gazan hospitals. Reuters reports that “The Palestinian Civil Defence Team accused Israel of burying a number of bodies in the Nasser complex in plastic bags at a depth of 3 metres (10 ft), where they quickly decomposed concealing evidence of its ‘crimes’, including torture, it said.” The only human response to this is exactly what these students are doing. They are using one of the only methods they have to make it known that, although their tuition and tax dollars may be supporting these atrocities, they don’t. This is not the world they want to inherit.
Ultimately, these protests uncover a failure of our society. If these students felt they were living in a fair world, if their needs for housing were being met, if student loans didn’t take people decades to pay off, if they felt they could be safe at school and in public, they wouldn’t be protesting. If our government invested in its citizens, people wouldn’t be protesting. We know this because Palestinians have been raging against Israel’s occupation since the 1940s and the cause has never gotten as much traction here, in the country that is Israel’s biggest supporter, as it is getting now. The American people are not far from being in the same position as the Palestinians and we can feel it. In fact, many American police officerstrain with Israel’smilitary police force. Why are police training like military? Why are they bringing those skills home to arrest college students protesting America’s involvement in Israel’s war? We’re seeing protests shut down and a primary avenue for sharing information and opinions online under threat. Where and how are people supposed to voice their discontent?
Books and Other Words
Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan takes place in a world full of mythical water creatures. The protagonist is a half-human/half-siren who is dating a water dragon. They live in a half-drowned city (climate change problems from a bygone era, the text suggests) where humans and “fathomfok” live together. This is a good story that allegorically tackles a lot of real-world stuff. Racism, domestic terrorism, immigration issues, capitalism, and plain old having a manipulative jerk boyfriend (not the aforementioned water dragon; someone else’s boyfriend. I don’t want to slander anyone haha). Plus you know, there’s water magic. It seems to be heavily influenced by The Little Mermaid—there’s an Ursula-inspired sea witch, a trade of one’s voice. Unfortunately, The Little Mermaid was never one of my favorite Disney movies. While this is a pretty good book, I’m not sure I’ll feel compelled to read the sequel when it comes out. But that’s just me.
Eyes of the Void is the middle book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture series. I find it difficult to write about middle books in isolation because they’re all about putting pieces in place and making everyone miserable in preparation for the denouement in the last book. What I liked about it is what I liked about the first book! I am reserving additional judgments until I see how the series wraps up.
Why streaming platforms are scrubbing the soundtracks from your favorite shows via Fast Company. Is nothing sacred? Rather than pay for music royalties, streaming companies are altering old TV shows so they don’t feature the music they used to feature. This is also affecting new programs because streamers don’t want to pay for music, so everything has the most basic soundtrack possible. Maybe trusting a few companies with all of our media was a bad idea.
Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again via Ars Technica. The Voyager 1 probe started transmitting junk information to NASA, but they were able to remotely fix it! That is fucking crazy! They rewrote the code and uploaded it to a device that is 15 billion miles away. Sometimes science is cool as hell.
TV and Music
Kirk and I watched Fallout, a new show on Amazon based on the video game of the same name. I haven’t played it, but Kirk has. He likes the way the game is super bleak but overlaid with cheerful music from the 1940s and 50s, which is the kind of thing I appreciate too. The show is set in an alternate universe where atomic bombs have blown up the US. A corporation called VaultTec built a bunch of vaults for rich people to shelter in while they wait out the fallout of a nuclear apocalypse. We enter the story about 200 years after the bombs fell. We learn that life continued on the surface and find our protagonist abruptly met with an urgent reason to leave the safety of the vault. The show mostly focuses on the bombed-out present but there is some world building that shows us what happened leading up to America being blown to bits. I won’t give too much away but (low-context spoliers ahead), it’s wild to me that Amazon, perhaps the most powerful corporation of our era, has produced a show whose first season concludes with a bunch of CEOs in a Dr. Strangelove-style war room debating how they can work together to make vaults profitable. They conclude that the best option is to go ahead and drop them bombs themselves rather than wait for some foreign adversary to do it. The capitalists are explicitly the villains! It really shows how secure the richest people in the country feel about capitalism. We can make our little shows and complain about the system all we want but Bezos doesn’t see that as a threat. I was explaining this thought to Kirk and he said it’s when they stop allowing anything critical of capitalism to make it onto the airwaves that we need to worry.
Rampant Consumerism
This week (perhaps every week?), I have been in the business of making myself more comfortable. My wrist has been hurting during work, so I read up and bought some wrist rests (sorry for the Amazon link but I literally couldn’t find it anywhere else) to pair with my mousepad. I’ve only had them for a few days but it’s already helping a lot. I also bought a lap desk so I can more comfortably use my laptop. I do most of my computering at my actual desk with a PC because I love a real keyboard and mouse and having two monitors. However, I’ve been getting really uncomfortable lately when I have to sit in a chair like a normal person for too long of a stretch. I actually have a nice chair but sitting with my feet on the ground is just making me feel ick and I have to decamp to lounge on the couch or bed more and more frequently. Is something wrong with me? Hard to say! I had a whole thing with my doctor this week where I told her I think something is wrong with me and she was like “it’s just vertigo.” I don’t feel like writing about all of that today but I lowkey think I have POTS or some form of dysatuonomia.
Languages
I’m still having fun doing my Wikipedia translations and last week I actually got a nice comment from a fellow Wikipedian! New pages go through review where a more experienced editor makes sure you’re not publishing something wild and crazy. My reviewer said, among other things, “Thank you for this article – an interesting subject and a nice translation!” Feels good! Here’s the article in question, if you’re curious.
Moving It
It’s dance recital time again! I’ll be performing in tap, jazz, and ballet on May 18. You can buy tickets here. If you’re reading this, you are invited!
My ankle is getting better and better even if it’s not all the way there yet. I was able to a little light jumping yesterday. I’m looking forward to not having to worry about my stupid ankle anymore! It’s exhausting to rehab something like this and I hope I never sprain my ankle again (even though I know that’s statistically improbable)!
Kitchen Witchery
I made pasta alla genovese with flagolet using the beans and fancy pasta from my Primary Beans subscription. I foolishly forgot to buy basil for the pesto element of the dish but I substituted parsley and I daresay I like it better that way. We had this asparagus tart with it, which looks very fancy but it simple. I ate leftover pasta for lunch most of the week but I added in some roasted carrots and goat cheese because that seems to be how I roll now. I’ve been doing a bit of baking too. This morning I made a batch of golden chocolate chip muffins and I added some flax because my liver demands flax (but my heart demands chocolate). I tried the triple chocolate olive oil brownies from the Snacking Bakes cookbook and I liked it a lot! I love butter, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to have alternatives and try different ways of making food. I managed to make a nearly perfectly scored and handsomely brown loaf of bread yesterday. I think I used the “hearth bread” recipe from The Bread Bible, but I increased the wheat/all-purpose flour ratio (because my liver also demands whole grains).
pasta with flagolets; asparagus tartAsparagus tartgolden chocolate chip muffinsTriple chocolate olive oil browniesa perfectly scored loafLoaf interior
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Poor Huey cat got a UTI again, which we knew because she was peeing on the floor and not making it to the litter box. Fortunately, the vet was willing to dispense more medication for her without an exam since we were just there for the same thing two months ago. Huey is doing a lot better already and we are trying to figure out what in the environment is causing these issues. If anyone knows about preventing cat UTIs, I would love for you to share your wisdom.
Fritz on night watchFritz being a cute babyHuey in her spot
Hello, friends and enemies. My sister Mia and I have been talking about how my extended family isn’t very close. You, dear reader, maybe surprised to learn that I have quite a few cousins on my dad’s side (“You have cousins?” one close friend recently asked me). When I was a little kid, we lived near my dad’s two sisters. My aunts were actually next-door neighbors. We’d visit them and the five cousins between the two houses, along with my sister and I, would troop around causing mayhem. I honestly don’t even remember what we did with our time because I was pretty young (my dad is the youngest of five and all my cousins are older than me) but I do remember enjoying their company. I told Mia I had been thinking about starting a cousins group chat and she encouraged me to go for it. We’ve only got three of those five cousins chatting so far but it’s cool to connect and chat a little. It’s nice to remember that I do actually have biological family and not just the family I have chosen out here in the world.
Books and Other Words
I spent maybe the first half of Isle McElroy’s People Collide thinking that every character was totally insufferable and the second half sympathizing with them for being insufferable. The story begins when our protagonist, Eli, wakes up and finds himself in the body of his wife, Elizabeth—the mind is intact but he is inhabiting her physical being. Elizabeth-in-Eli’s-body has left and is nowhere to be found and everyone assumes that Elizabeth husband is an asshole who left her without saying a word. I think this book was supposed to be a mediation on gender, and it is definitely that, but to me it was really about how our parents and our environment shape us. With Elizabeth missing, Eli starts fielding calls from both sets of their parents and we see the way they interact with the person they think is Elizabeth and what they have to say about Eli’s apparent disappearance. Those interactions made the characters much more sympathetic to me. I thought it was an interesting story overall.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
The Car Repair Apocalypse Could Soon Be Upon Us via 404 Media. The article states that “car manufacturers are increasingly moving toward a model where only dealers and authorized repair shops can do certain repairs.” You have a right to repair your car, but car manufacturers are trying to close loopholes in a law so all repairs have to go through the manufacturers’ shops. Seems not great.
Chinese Manufacturers, Meet American Shitposters via You May Also Like. This one is just for fun. A certain swath of accounts on tiktok and instagram have started making satirical videos about being fans of Donghua Jinglong food-grade gylcine. It’s the logical comedic extension of living in a deeply consumerist society and I think it’s hilarious.
Rampant Consumerism
Suffering but make it cute
I finally decided to treat myself to the Beautiful Genius “suffering” shirt. Nothing conveys my existential pain like a pink unicorn on an oversized bright-colored shirt. I did, however, have two people tell me they read it as “surfing” and one person ask me if I was wearing it to ballet class because class is suffering. If something is making me suffer, I’m not gonna do it (with the notable exception if being alive, hence the shirt). People just don’t understand my vision.
Languages
I translated some Icelandic Wikipedia articles to English over the last couple of weeks and went over them with my teacher. The first one I chose ended up being fairly difficult. I tried to pick something easy so I chose a short biographical article. However, the vocabulary was a little tricky because it was about an abbess at a Benedictine convent in Iceland in the 1500s and there seemed to be quite a record of interpersonal drama. This week I translated an article about an Icelandic artist who works with natural materials, so that was fairly interesting. What I’m realizing is a real problem with translating from Icelandic to English Wikipedia is that the English site is very strict about citations. When you post a new article, someone Wikipedian with greater authority reviews it and they delete anything without a citation. Unfortunately, Icelandic Wikipedia is not very invested in citations, so if I want to be able to publish anything, I have to track down references. This is annoying as a Wikipedia activity but ultimately good as a language learning activity because I’m skimming a lot of websites and archives in Icelandic to rustle up the information.
Corporeal Form
I wrote back in January that I got a fibroscan (a special scan of the liver) as part of a study and received the handsome sum of $25 for my time. Well, the same study group called me back to invite me to do a clinical trial for a drug called HU6 that is supposed to treat non-alcoholic fatty liver. It involves six months of taking the drug (or a placebo, depending on what group you get assigned to; and it’s a double-blind study so I wouldn’t know) and a whole bunch of monitoring, like getting an MRI and an EKG. I am learning toward doing it (I love getting free health care + I’ll get $750 if I do the whole study) because it sounds like the drug is reducing liver fat, which is good. However, I’m a little wary because it ultimately sounds like this is a weight loss drug and I’m old enough to remember drugs like fen phen. So … yeah.
Kitchen Witchery
I’m still taking it fairly easy in the kitchen. I’ve been making a lot of recipes I’ve made before or making easy stuff out of what’s available, like combining roasted carrots with a package of tortellini and some goat cheese, which I ate for lunch most of last week. I tried one new recipe, thai curry risotto with squash and green beans, to serve with a roasted chicken. I gotta say, we did not really like it. I don’t know if it was a bad recipe or if I just expect risotto to be mild and creamy. Also, typical of an NYT recipe, the veggies weren’t seasoned that well. I thought it would be fine because the idea is to eat them with the curry rice but it didn’t work for me. I am also sharing a photo of a pizza I made last weekend. I looks like almost every other photo of pizza I’ve shared but that’s okay. It’s my site and I can upload as many pizza photos as I want.
roast chicken with weird risotto and vegetables
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Unfortunately for Huey fans, I didn’t get a lot of Huey photos this week (please look at past photos of her chilling on the couch if you want to know how she has looked recently. That’s all she wants to do). I am sharing the duality of Fritz. Here he is climbing the walls (technically the bathroom mirror, in this case) and then him being a cute and sleepy baby.
Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve spent this week autistically hyperfocused on Wikipedia. I’ve been having a lot of fun picking out articles to translate and contributing to everyone’s favorite free online encyclopedia. I finished going over a translation with Ana, my Spanish teacher, and published that. I joined the translation of the week group and translated (without editorial supervision) this week’s topic into Spanish too. I also translated an article from Spanish to English. People can tag Wikipedia articles to say “There’s more information about this subject in [language], can someone please translate this?” so I can paw through the list and pick out what looks interesting. There is a whole lot to choose from. I feel like I could do this instead of my job all day and feel completely fulfilled and at peace. Alas, Wikipedia does not pay the bills. However, it did let me know that I’ve made 100 edits to the English Wikipedia, so I feel like a big deal.
100 Wikipedia edits
I’m been loitering around the Icelandic Wikipedia too although I haven’t done anything with it yet. In my Icelandic classes, we just finished working through the A Course in Modern Icelandic textbook and then discussed what I want to do next. One of my ideas is to translate some of the Icelandic Wikipedia articles into English (yes, there is a tag for that too) and review my translations in class. I’m at a point with learning the language where I need to expose myself to more and more of it to start getting a feel for things, so we have agreed that this is a good direction.
Books and Other Words
105-day reading streak
Speaking of reaching 100-something milestones, I’ve been tracking my reading every day on the StoryGraph app because one of my goals this year is to read every day. I’m on a 105-day reading streak at the moment, even if some days I only read a few pages. You may be thinking that we are not yet 105 days into 2024 and that is true, but I started tracking my reading streak in mid-December to see how I felt about it. I wasn’t sure if it would be more stressful than interesting to track my reading every day, but I’m into it so far. It’s been good for days when I’m tired and just want to stare into the void of my phone before bed because I’m like, no I gotta get a page or two in. Once I start reading, I’d rather be doing that than scrolling instagram, so this has been a good way to motivate me to get off my phone.
I’ve only finished one book in the last two weeks: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is a space opera that takes place in a future where humans have spread out to many planets thanks to the skills of “intermediaries” who can navigate unspace with their special mind powers, but horrible aliens called the Architects have destroyed the earth, ripping it open and exposing the planet’s core to space. As I have come to expect from Tchaikovsky (I shared a few thoughts about one of his other books in a past post), he has created lots of wild alien species for us to enjoy, including capatalistic crab aliens that rent out shell space for advertising. I liked the story and I enjoyed the rag-tag band of characters inhabiting the main character’s ship. Because of course we got a found family in space situation here! One of my favorite tropes! I’m very curious about what happens in the next books. I’m waiting impatiently for my library holds to turn up.
Shards of Earth (feat. Fritz)
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Facebook’s Shrimp Jesus, explained via 404 Media. So, facebook’s algorithm seems to be prioritizing any type of AI image, which notably included “shrimp jesus” making the rounds recently. Most of these big facebook pages are just using random AI image junk to get attention and then directing people to random websites to buy things. So, yeah, that’s all fairly troubling to me, especially considering Facebook has also deprioritized news (presumably related to some countries passing laws that social media companies like facebook would need to pay news publishers, so facebook just turned off news entirely in those places). Facebook is a cesspool but we’re kind of stuck with it for lack of better infrastructure.
The 2024 World Happiness Report dropped and, uh, Israel being ranked the fifth happiest country is really suspicious. Did they … did they talk to any Palestinians? 👀
A view source web via The HTML Review. HTML Review is an internet magazine, for lack of a more expansive word, combining writing and programming. This article muses on what it would be like if viewing the source code of webpage—something available to us all on the internet (just right click then select view page source in your browser)—was more visible to us. From the article: “I often wonder what would happen if the ability to view source was made to be more present in the browsing experience—a gesture, or invitation, to see what and how a site is composed. What if the structure of an HTML file spoke further to the content being rendered? If an element had an inner voice, what would it say? Can this history and context be expressed in the way we interact with and learn from view source?”
I did finally meet with an allergy doctor after hassling my primary care for a referral, as I discussed last time. The allergy doctor was very nice but noted that I actually had a blood test for allergies a few years ago, which I had completely forgotten about (also: why did my primary care not mention that. Did she … not look at my chart??), that showed I didn’t have any major allergies. However, I do have to take allergy medication every day to prevent my ears from getting totally plugged up. I went to the doctor about this some years ago because I couldn’t fucking hear anything and was getting mad about it. The audiologist said she couldn’t identify any problems, so she referred me to an ear/nose/throat doctor. He had me taking multiple sprays of allergy medication and saline to the nose every day and, eventually, my hearing did clear up. If I don’t take an allergy pill and a spray daily, I get all gunked up and it sucks. So there is some kind of disconnect between what the test shows and what my actual daily experience is telling me. In any case, the allergy doctor said that he doesn’t think I have oral allergy syndrome because I wouldn’t be having stomach issues (although, about 10 percent of people with OAS experience nausea or stomach upset). He also said that allergy tests have a lot of false positives, so taking a test might not be helpful anyway. He suggested that I might have IBS and that I eat whatever food I think is making me sick and see what happens. I told him I am trying to figure out what’s wrong with me without running experiments on my body and I was informed that’s kinda just how things work. I’m a little annoyed by the IBS suggestion—though I do not deny that my bowels are irritable—because I think doctors say “oh maybe it’s IBS” when they have no idea what’s going on. For now I am avoiding fruit, but I have still been having some gut troubles of unknown origin this week so, you know, we have fun. I’m getting to the point that I have actually been stressed about eating and putting off meals because I don’t want to feel bad, which is not great because we all must eat to live. So, uh, I am open to suggestions because I don’t know where to go from here.
Doing Stuff
Visions 2024
We went to see the Sacramento Ballet last Saturday. This was one of their collections of shorter, contemporary works. I enjoy these because I like seeing how dance can tell different kinds of stories and I think the pared down look (compared to, say, the Nutcracker) gives them a lot of freedom to do interesting things. That said, this wasn’t my favorite program of the ones we’ve seen so far. It was still really good but it just didn’t hook me as much as some of the other pieces they have done. Could it be because most of the costumes seemed to include what I can only describe as basic-ass, Fruit of the Loom undies? Perhaps. I’m sure they were trying to say something profound by wearing plain chonies but I don’t know what.
On the topic of ballet, I am still going to class and rehabbing my ankle, which is getting better but is not yet recovered. I’ve been going to the pre-pointe class but I still hadn’t gotten a pair of demi-pointe shoes (a type of shoe that’s not as hard as a pointe shoe that you can use to build up to pointe) because of my apparently much-too-wide feet. I went back to the shoe store to try again and ended up with a pair of full-on pointe shoes since I guess there are no demis in my size. I can’t use them yet because of my ankle, but I do have them so that’s something. I’m looking forward to my ankle getting better and being able to try it out.
Kitchen Witchery
I haven’t cooked anything new or of particular interest in the last couple weeks except for these cookies. They’re peanut butter and oatmeal. I did deviate from the recipe to add chocolate chips because that’s simply who I am as a person.
oatmeal peanut butter cookies
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
Huey loungingHuey in her box in the sunFritz being a model in bedFritz and his reflection
