Digital Manticore

Two Weeks in the Life: August 3, 2025

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’m back with more big political opinions today, but if you make it to the end of the post, you will be rewarded with photos of my cat. Fritz has not been feeling the best and has thrown up a hairball almost every day this week. I have to assume this is because the weather is getting warmer, which I’m not thrilled about either. I appreciated the weather not getting too hot in July, but of course I can’t expect it to stay cool through August.

I have been keeping busy as usual and I’ve really been enjoying volunteering at the Lavender Library this year. I think I have neglected to mention that, in addition to working the circulation desk, I started volunteering with their collections management committee. It’s gratifying to put my masters degree in library and information science to some use after over a decade. What’s funny though is I’m using my technical writing skills more than my library knowledge. The library has been working on getting some processes documented, which is exactly the kind of thing I do for work. I know my distaste for work is well documented, but I actually don’t mind putting my abilities to use for something I like and that feels important! On Friday, I learned how to prepare books to put on the shelves (like how to apply the barcodes and wrap the hardbacks in their special covering) and I took notes on the process so that we could share that information with the rest of the collections committee. It’s a small thing but it feels good to do something useful.

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Current Events

Hear me out: Believe women

Lots of people are frothing over Trump claiming there is no list of clients of known pedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t feel the need to get into the details of this because many already have. Sarah Kendzior’s book They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent has plenty on this because so much of it has already been reported on and is in the public domain. However, I think the most important detail of this story is that we don’t need some special list because a number of Epstein’s victims have already come forward over the years. As journalist Lyz Lens recently put it “You don’t need Epstein’s list; you need to listen to women.” The only novel thing coming out of the current iteration of this scandal is that MAGA loyalists seem to be cracking, as evidenced by the split in opinion in the MAGA bot farm on X (that is, accounts manned not by real people with real opinions but by imaginary people who post to sway public opinion). If we listened to women, we wouldn’t have people like Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Trump wouldn’t have ever been president, and many other horrors could have been avoided. Yet many people only give a shit about abuse when a man talks about it. This isn’t news.

AI and Fascism Are Best Friends

As the U.S. leans into its fascistic tendencies, I’ve been seeing comments online expressing the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) is the aesthetic of fascism. I’ve been mulling over the connection between these concepts and I thought I’d work it out here on the blog. First, some definitions. Fascism is the term for political movements characterized by, per Encyclopædia Britannica, “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites” and I think it’s very easy to see these aspects in the current political landscape: Trump’s original entrance into the political spotlight by accusing President Obama of not being a U.S. citizen and later insisting the 2020 election was stolen to the point of inciting an attack on the capitol are certainly indicative of “contempt” for democracy. AI refers to the large language models (LLMs) that chat agents like Chat-GPT use as well as image generators like MidJourney.

Here’s a recent example of AI being used as the fascist aesthetic. When the government announced its new concentration camp in Florida, they used the nickname “Alligator Alcatraz” and posted these images on Instagram. These are from official government accounts.

Instagram post from DHS and the Whitehouse of four alligators in a line, each wearing ICE caps. They are in front of what looks like a prison yard surrounding a barbed wire fence. DHS's caption says "Coming soon!" — AI alligators in AI ICE hats in front of an AI prison facility

Instagram post from the WhiteHouse of Donald Trump standing next to three disembodied alligators wearing ICE caps. The image includes the text "Alligator alcatraz: make America safe again" — AI alligators in AI ICE hats in front of an AI prison facility

These images are not what alligators look like (If you’re not convinced that these are AI, please go look at the wikipedia page for alligators. They don’t look like this. [By the way, I’m specifically using Wikipedia as a reference and not just google images because Wikipedia is working hard to keep AI slop out of the encyclopedia]). They kind of resemble an alligator, but that’s because most of us have a cartoon-like idea of an alligator in our minds. I’ve never been up close with one in real life and the odds are good that neither have you. The image on the right is particularly ridiculous, and it looks like the AI pulled references from Jurassic Park or something, giving the gators a velociraptoresque expression.

AI does not have the capacity to make anything new. It “generates” text and images but not in a novel way. When someone asks it to make a picture of video for them, AI makes a collage of all the images its ingested. It doesn’t know what an alligator looks like. It knows that pictures labeled “alligator” have certain patterns. AI is only capable of referencing things that came before it, which is why some are warning that we should be hoarding pre-AI content from an era free of slop.

Fascism, too, can only look backwards. What is the Trump administration’s vision for the future? There isn’t one. His future is a twisted reflection of the past: make America great again. We were once “great” and we’re going to reanimate America’s corpse to bring her back, just like PragerU is by using AI to animate videos of America’s founders. Fascism’s game is nostalgia. Wasn’t it great to live in a time when groceries for affordable and so was college and moms stayed home with their kids and didn’t get divorced? Wouldn’t it be great to bring back all the trappings of that era? We could eliminate no-fault divorce (conservatives literally want to do that) and then women wouldn’t be able to leave their husbands and take men’s jobs! None of those things will actually make America “great,” to say nothing of the fact that this allegedly lost greatness only applied to a very small segment of the population. If they really wanted America to be great for everyone, they would bring back the 90 percent tax rate for people making more than $400,000 (compared to 35 percent in 2021) and not let Taco Bell inflate the price of a burrito by 400 percent, but they’re cowards and they won’t do that.

Tweet that says "Accounting for inflation this burrito should be $1.30 today." There's a picture of a Taco Bell burrito being advertised as costing 89 cents in 2010 and $5.36 today. The screenshot of the inflation calculator says $0.89 in 2010 is $1.32 in 2025. — Are we great yet?

This obsession with the past—even the recent past—is resurgent in our culture. I know that younger generations always have curiosity and nostalgia about the previous generation’s era; there was certainly plenty of fascination with the 70s and 80s when I was growing up. Now we’re seeing Gen Z romanticizing things from just 10 to 15 years ago. In pop culture, practically every big movie is a “reboot” or a sequel of existing intellectual property, and even songs are covering music from the early Millenial era (Doechii’s “Anxiety” comes to mind. And I’m not knocking Doechii! She’s just a ready example). I think it’s getting harder and harder to feel hopeful about the future thanks to politics, global warming, increasing income inequality, and all the rest. When my generation was growing up, we thought things were going to get better. Yes, the 2008 recession knocked us back but, on the whole, we didn’t have the despair that today’s young people are feeling. They’re reaching back for anything that might make them feel a dash of optimism.

Fascism is also sometimes recognized as a union of government and corporate power. This is the part of the essay where I start banging my anti-surveillance drum again. We are being inundated with news about government agencies and corporations abusing their access to our information. ICE is accessing private utility databases to track down immigrants. As the Washington Post reports, “ICE’s use of the private database is another example of how government agencies have exploited commercial sources to access information they are not authorized to compile on their own.” The UK has started requiring IDs for people to access “adult” sites online, which has quickly come to be defined as basically every website, and that means people have to trust any organization whose website they want to visit with their ID. This is a tremendously bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is that corporations and other entities are constantly subject to data breaches. For a recent, terrible example, the Tea dating app was hacked and hackers immediately made a map of all the women who were using it. AI is also being used for “dynamic” pricing that airlines want to use to make us all pay more for airfare, listing ticket prices based on what they think individuals are willing to pay, rather than the actual cost of a ticket. Grocery stores are considering surge pricing that would be powered by AI. As if we aren’t already paying enough for food right now!

I wrote last month about how our data is one of our most sought-after resources. This is why. Corporations have a wealth of data—data that we have often provided unknowingly or in good faith—and now they have the technology to weaponize it in search of profits. This is why we need to be careful about who we give our data to now, especially when it comes to talking to these AI bots/LLMs. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the company that makes ChatGPT, recently said that these chatlogs are not private. If there’s a lawsuit that a ChatGPT user is a part of, the chats would be discoverable and OpenAI would have to provide them. AI is not a person or a character or a ghost in the machine. It’s about as smart as the text predictor on your phone. And the corporation that owns it will not think twice about sharing any you secrets you told it while treating it as a confidant.

All this technology is being used to enrich a handful of assholes who think they deserve to rule the world as technokings (for your consideration: Technofuedalism by Yanis Varoufakis). I keep thinking about the high cost of living and how AI is making it higher. Through things like surge pricing yes, but also more directly with AI data centers forcing power companies to raise their rates. Regular people are paying more just to get electricity because AI needs a tremendous amount of power. We know that rising costs of living are connected to increased homelessness too. Listen, I hate to keep bringing this up, but the Supreme Court made it possible for cities to make homelessness illegal, which means you can go to prison for not having anywhere to live. I will keep citing the fact that prison labor is a huge portion of the workforce producing things here in the US and that Californians did not pass the ballot measure that would make it illegal to compel prisoners to work. What could be more fascist than imprisoning people and forcing them to work so a small group can get rich? Private prison stocks keep going up in response to Trump’s actions. If we want to get really pessimistic, we could also consider the statistics about the aging prison population. The Atlantic recently published a piece explaining that very few young people today are committing crime and going to jail for it, noting that “virtually everyone who ends up in prison starts their criminal career in their teens or young adulthood.” The article continues, “the American prison system is simply not going to have enough inmates to justify its continued size or staggering costs.” But what if the government found a reason to put a lot of new people in jail? Something to think about while ICE gets a budget larger than that of most countries’ military expenditures.

Ultimately, AI is doing a lot more than providing the aesthetic of fascism. It’s a driving force for fascism. AI technology, as it currently stands, is making our lives materially worse and letting the fascists in charge profit off our misery. It’s ruining the environment, it’s raising our electric bills, and worse, it’s fucking ugly. Just like fascism is.

Books and Other Words

hardback book Disco Witches of Fire Island — Disco Witches of Fire Island

Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell is a really great read. It follows Joe, a 20-something, heartbroken gay man and his summer on Fire Island with his friend Ronnie. The story is set at the peak of the AIDS crisis, and deals with the extreme grief that comes along with it, bouncing between summertime hedonism and the existential dread of wondering who is going to be here tomorrow. The titular disco witches are two old queens who take Joe in when he arrives on Fire Island only to learn the “sure thing” bar tending gig his friend lined up didn’t actually exist. The story takes a lot of care for its characters who are working as hard as they can to make life worth living. I’ve read a number of male/male romances written by women in recent years but this book is written by an actual gay man and I could definitely feel a difference. In romances about men by women, it’s more like the male characters are just people and their gender is not necessarily relevant. However, Disco Witches has a palpable appreciation for the male body, which I hadn’t even realized was missing from some other books. The book also focuses on growing into oneself and figuring out who you want to be. Fell leans into gay culture’s stereotypical types of guys, but then showcases the disco witches as people rejecting that paradigm and being who they want to be, even if it’s uncool. In fact, the disco witches point out that they are queering queerness (if you will) by demonstrating nontraditional ways of living based on forming your own queer family and doing what you love (like dancing to disco and practicing witchcraft), rather than forcing oneself to slot into being a certain kind of gay. Finally, I thought it was interesting that the disco witches’ style of dancing to cast a spell was described the same way as the Sufi dervishes. We are hitting the dance floor and spinning with intention, but instead of god, it’s for disco!

hardback book: Everything Is Tuberculosis — Everything Is Tuberculosis

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green starts out with the pithy argument that any event in human history can be traced back to tuberculosis (TB). He says that we can blame World War I on the disease since Franz Ferdinand’s assassins were radicals with tuberculosis who were going to die soon. Obviously this is somewhat reductive, but it underscores Green’s point that TB is a disease that has been with humanity for a very long time. The book alternates between data and the case of a young man named Henry in Sierra Leon who had drug-resistant TB, which puts a charismatic face to a disease that most Americans don’t realize is still around. Of course, the reason Americans think TB is a thing of the past, despite it killing about 10 to 15 percent of people in the US and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, is because of a huge public health campaign. In the 1950s, the US government sent mobile x-ray teams all over the country to find out who had TB and to treat it early, largely eradicating the disease. Unfortunately, the same interventions that were so effective here are seen as too costly for humanitarian organizations to send to countries with fewer resources, even though treating TB early actually has a huge cost savings. As usual, the world’s unbalanced distribution of resources is leading to needless suffering. Heavy stuff aside, one of the most interesting parts of the book to me was a digression on how TB spawned our modern image of beauty. Being waifish, pale, and big-eyed are all effects of disease ravaging the body, but it was so prominent and so thoroughly romanticized that its echoes live in our modern cultural ideals of beauty. Kind of fucking gross when you think about it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

U.S. birth rate hits all-time low, CDC data shows via CBS News. Lol. No shit. Why the fuck would anyone want to have a kid right now. Procreation is currently an that requires a level of bravery and optimism (or, on the other hand, rank ignorance) that most of us can’t muster. Children? In this economy?
Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe via Ars Technica. A very interesting study came out in May suggests that overconfidence is a core piece of why people believe in conspiracy theories. People don’t necessarily want to be on the fringe because humans crave community and shared validation. The study found that people overestimated the number of people who also believed in conspiracy theories, with the author mentioning the example of the conspiracy that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a “false flag” operation. About eight percent of people in one sample that was true and “that 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.” Yikes. I think this means our best answer to people trapped in conspiracy thinking is to hit them with the “oh weird, I’ve never heard that before.”
Curate your own newspaper with RSS via [citation needed]. We are still feeling the loss of Google Reader over 10 years later! This post explains how and why to get your favorite newsletters and posts into an RSS feed instead of your email.

Media

I’ve been playing more video games recently because I realized that I have once again gotten into a rut of hanging out at my computer and just idly clicking stuff. If I’m just idly clicking, I might as well do something a little more fun. I finished playing Puzzle Bobble aka Bust-a-Move on my little handheld emulator. It’s just interesting enough but doesn’t ask much of me, so I find it relaxing. I laughed when I got to the last level because, while this is basically a color-match game, a wizard appears as the final boss. Why is there a wizard? I have no fucking clue. I’ve also been playing a ton of Mario Kart 8 and I’ve let my completionist tendencies take the wheel. I’m gradually working through all the courses at each difficulty level. I like using Donkey Kong as my character and then setting him up in a vehicle that makes it look like he’s going through a mid-life crisis. That just seems like something Donkey Kong would be dealing with.

Languages

I’m proud to report that I’ve published another translation to Spanish Wikipedia on federal pardons in the United States. It seems like good information to disseminate!

Corporeal Form

Well, it turns out I did speak too soon about getting back into a gym routine because now my knee is fucked up. Annoyingly, it’s my “good” knee, that is, not the knee that’s been diagnosed with arthritis. I’m not sure if I sprained it or what (torn ACL, perhaps?), but it’s been bothering me on and off this summer. In tap class last week, I did a buffalo and then my knee went !!!! and I had to sit down. I have no idea what happened because I have shuffled off to buffalo a thousand times at this point. I am going to see my physical therapist about it but in the meantime I am icing and mostly lounging around, since being on my feet for very long is not feeling good and my ankle has started to hurt too. I am feeling discouraged because so much of the health advice for the problems I have (osteopenia, arthritis, etc.) focuses on exercising and staying active, which I am trying to do. It sucks to get injured especially at something I’ve been doing for a while now. I am trying to keep strengthening the area around my knees by doing some floor exercises and wall sits, but hopefully things will get better soon and I can do something more entertaining!

Kitchen Witchery

I looked back at my photos from the last two weeks and the only food I took a picture of was this bowl of corn soup, so I hope that’s enough for those of you who come here for food photos. I haven’t cooked anything noteworthy. I made burritos earlier this week and we had breakfast for dinner featuring waffles last Friday. Just regular food is happening here!

A bowl of corn soup topped with a dollop of sour cream — corn soup!

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat napping in the sun — nap time

Fritz the cat under a small table that is draped with a blanket to create a hiding spot for him — nap time

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 20, 2025

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. This week I had the fun experience of going to the dentist to pick up my next few sets of clear braces. I don’t know what it is about this office that has them chronically invested in not explaining anything in advance, but I learned when I arrived that part of the process would be filing my teeth to make room for them to land in their new configuration, which of course I found alarming (then covered my alarm by asking “can you make my teeth pointy?” Very cool stuff. Make me into a Ferengi). They ultimately only had to file a few teeth by a fraction of a millimeter but my question is why isn’t there some kind of orientation packet for this stuff? Maybe it’s the autism but I really hate showing up for an appointment and then learning I have to have my teeth ground down. Is it too much to warn me? Damn.

I’m keeping this post a little shorter this week because I do not have big energy for talking about what’s going on in politics. Are many things happening? Yes. Do I have coherent thoughts and sources at this time? No.

Books and Other Words

book cover of Cults Like Us shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Cults Like Us

You know I’m always going to read a cult book, and Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden is more than just a cult book. Borden traces the history of the US through fringe religious movements (cults, if you will), declaring “We are all in the cult of America.” The book starts, of course, with the Puritans who believed that God wanted them to put “the material world [to use] for a godly purpose” which is holier than just letting the earth be. Although this book is ostensibly about religious movements, the most salient parts of the narrative were, to me, where Borden wove together the threads of religious devotion with our worship of consumerism. She writes about the history of advertising and how the entire concept of buying stuff when you don’t really need it arose after World War One, when business leaders refused to scale back production after the war ended, instead inventing the very concept of consumerism. It turned out to be a short trip from worshiping the good Lord to the almighty dollar. Borden opines, “Americans, including politicians, have been indoctrinated to believe that work is holy, idleness is sin, and the number in a bank account represents the moral character of its holder.” This really comes together in later chapters about multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, which, not coincidentally, often run roughshod through religious communities. Borden notes that two pieces of “Puritan doomsday ideology”—the concept of nature being here for the taking and that poverty is the result of sin—”have collaborated to uncover a new and abundant natural resource: the lower classes.” What a gut punch. She continues, noting that “Between 1975 and 2020, fifty trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.” This doesn’t mean that the Puritans are to blame for all our modern problems, but they certainly laid the groundwork for many of the issues we have today. I really appreciated this book for connecting all these seemingly disparate ideas into a book that makes total sense and helps me understand the hellscape a little better.

paperback book: Intuitive Eating for Diabetes — Intuitive Eating for Diabetes

I need to preface this next book by saying that I do not have diabetes. However, my doctor said my blood sugar was a little into the pre-diabetic range and I want to make sure I don’t develop diabetes. I’m doing some reading because gathering information is how I respond to every problem! That said, I found Intuitive Eating for Diabetes by Janice Dada at the Sacramento Public Library and was very happy that I did. I learned a lot and it made me feel like this is all manageable. The book starts with an overview on some research about weight and dieting, which was not news to me but I am always glad to see it acknowledged: we do not have any research that shows how to make successfully lose weight, and weight cycling (going on and off diets, losing and gaining weight over and over) and can increase the risk for diabetes. She also notes that diabetes itself can lead to weight gain, so it’s kind of fucked up that doctors then prescribe weight loss as a treatment. Seems unfair! Dada continues with explaining the biological process that goes wrong in diabetes and providing information about intuitive eating, a practice of listening to your internal body cues about what to eat. This can be hard for many of us after a life time of replacing innate cues with rules like “you have to clean your plate” or “you can’t eat after 6 p.m.” Dada also lets readers know that you don’t have to do anything drastic like cut out carbs or “white foods” or whatever to treat diabetes. You can eat the foods you like, as long as you’re adding in vegetables and fiber. She offers a framework of dividing a plate into three: carbs, protein, and vegetables, plus adding some fats. I think that’s something I can use, especially since it’s not overly complicated or restrictive. One thing that I also found encouraging was a statistic from a 2018 study that found that “59 percent of the prediabetes patients studied returned to normal blood glucose values in one to eleven years without any treatment.” Good news! In any case, I really don’t think I’m going to end up having diabetes but I’m glad to have some knowledge about how to help prevent it. Health insurance companies always freak out when you get anywhere near diabetes because they don’t want to have to spent money on you for the rest of your life! It’s the one time they’re in a hurry to offer care.

I absolutely loved Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. I also feel very lucky that I was able to check it out of the Lavender Library because the wait list at the public library is a mile long. The story follows Cyrus Shams, who came to the US from Iran as a baby with his dad after his mother died on a plane that the US military accidentally (“accidentally”?) blew up. The novel mostly focuses on Cyrus, but also provides some chapters from the perspective of his family and friends, as well as his dream conversations between people he knows and historical figures. Cyrus is in recovery from addiction, is deeply depressed, is trying to write a book of poetry, and thinks he needs to die in a way that means something. He spends most of the story with, metaphorically speaking, his head up his ass, but in a deeply charming way. I loved the way the story was written; Akbar was a poet before he was a novelist and it really shows in his use of the language. One passage that stayed with me was one about how the “whole Abrahamic world invests itself” in rules about what not to do, “but you can live a whole life of not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.” There were also little details that made me know that Akbar is using the same internet that I am, like in a reference to the “oldest known written complaint” (per Wikipedia) to Babylonian copper merchant Ea-nasir (it’s fine if that doesn’t mean anything to you, it just means we’re spending time in different internet neighborhoods). In conclusion: go read this book!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Medicaid cuts: The how and why via Your Local Epidemiologist. I am sure I am biased since I my job is related to federal healthcare, but I think a lot of people are not realizing how dire these Medicaid cuts are going to be. Your Local Epidemiologist has a very good explanation of how Congress did this and what it’s going to affect. In short, the federal government will be providing less funding to states and “states will have to determine how to fill the resulting funding gaps,” which is almost certainly going to result in reduced coverage.
The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work via 404 Media. A lot of media companies seem to think that incorporating AI into their coverage is going to keep them relevant and financially solvent. They’re probably wrong! From the article: “AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for … The only journalism business strategy that works, and that will ever work in a sustainable way, is if you create something of value that people (human beings, not bots) want to read or watch or listen to, and that they cannot find anywhere else.” Relatedly, author Kameron Hurley recently mentioned on BlueSky that “What tech companies fail to realize in AI-gold rush is human attention span is finite. There are only so many hours in the human day. You can write 5,000 books a year or make 50,000 movies a year, but who has time to ingest them? We are already starting to turn off data inputs due to overwhelm.” She’s right. I already can’t keep up with all the things written by real human people with unique thoughts. Who’s going to look at all that AI slop and get these people their advertising revenue? Will the internet just be bots crawling the web to be advertised at by other bots?
Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance via Electronic Frontier Foundation. Just a heads up for all you Ring camera users, Amazon has walked back their policy on Ring footage and is “easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States.” Also “employees at Ring will have to show proof that they use AI in order to get promoted.” What a nightmare.

Autism Thoughts

I have to share this video from Instagram because it explains so much. It’s from Sol Smith who just published a book about autism (although I haven’t read it yet). He has a lot of really smart stuff to say about autism and ADHD but this one really had me like “holy shit this is my whole life.” This clip explains a concept called “restraint collapse,” which is when we have to use all our cognitive energy during the day to do things we don’t want to do like work or wash the dishes when there are things we want to do so bad! Restraining ourselves is taking up all the energy, so we come home from work tired and unable to do anything else. For many years I have described my anxiety as centering around time: time to do the many things I want to do when I have to do so many things I don’t want to do or maybe just feel neutral about. I have many important tasks! I have Wikipedia to edit! Books to read! But I’m spending all this energy holding myself back from doing what I want so I can do my dumb job and make money to pay for my house. I think what this means is this feeling is maybe not anxiety but another aspect of autism that I’m dealing with. It also makes me feel a little better about being perennially dissatisfied with work even though my job is fine. It’s just not what I want to be doing!

Moving It

I don’t want to speak to soon but I think I may finally be getting into a routine with my garage workouts again. I’ve been out there a few times in the last two weeks. I am sure the relatively cool summer weather is making it a lot easier on me—it hasn’t been excessively hot this month. I’ve been sticking to my plan of not doing anything that will make my knees too crunchy, so no squats and no deadlifts. This kinda sucks because I do find a lot of satisfaction in doing heavy lifts but it will not help me to fuck my knees over. I’m hoping I’m just in a phase of having more knee pain and it will pass eventually. Having arthritis is a drag.

Kitchen Witchery

Given the aforementioned health concerns and continuing the efforts I mentioned last time, I’ve been trying to have more vegetables with my lunches. I tried a roasted corn and squash recipe based on one of the recipes in Ruffage. Instead of zucchini ribbons, I roasted yellow squash (which is what I happened to have on hand) with the corn, then topped it with sour cream and herbs as prescribed. I had that with a sandwich that I made using this multigrain bread, which came out quite tasty. The last few days I had a bowl of soba noodles topped with roasted green beans, sweet potato, and baked tofu topped with some store-bought sauce. That also turned out quite good. I was thinking I should try adding some peanuts on top but I kept forgetting! For dinner recipes, I tried a slow cooker garlic butter chicken and roasted some carrots to go with it. I thought it was just okay but I think I don’t like dropping chunks of uncooked garlic into the slow cooker; I have to sautee them or they taste too bitter to me. Kirk loved it though because he’s a true garlic-enjoyer. Still, I think I will make this again, just with cooking up the alliums before adding them to the pot.

Two freshly baked loaves of bread cooling on a wire rack — two-for-one multigrain loaf

A bowl of stew-y shredded chicken and beans topped with a pile of roasted carrot chunks — two-for-one multigrain loaf

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in a window in a part of the house that lets him see through there into the living room window. He looks alarmed to be seeing me on the other side. — !!

Fritz the cat lying on top of me. I'm on my side, looking at the camera. Fritz has is legs stretched out in front of him — !!

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 6, 2025

Posted on July 6, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s a three-day weekend! I personally believe that all weekends should have at least three days but I shall savor the ones I get anyway. Something fun to start: I’ve started juggling a little bit again. I’ve been following a few jugglers on instagram and thinking about how fun it looks, even though the parts I used to enjoy most were juggling with other people. I got some balls out of the garage and have been trying out a few tricks. I’ve forgotten so many but fortunately jugglers are on the internet and maintaining old websites (in internet terms) for us to learn from. I never forgot how to juggle but I am not as smooth as I once was and I don’t have very many tricks in my repertoire. However, I’m finding it much easier to juggle and learn tricks than I used to, I think because I got my binocular vision dysfunction addressed. Wow, those disabilities will really disable you if left untreated, huh? I’ve been putting on music and practicing a little when I’m bored in the afternoon or feeling a little stressed. People say you should go on a walk to chill out. I don’t want to go on a walk. It’s hot outside. So, for now, juggling.

Current Events

Merchandising the Genocide

It’s apparently not enough for the government to defund basically everything and start building concentration camps. The concentration camp has a stupid name and they’re selling merchandise about it. I think it’s fairly clear that the whole point of the prison, which they are glibly calling “Alligator Alcatraz,” is a place for people to die. I know this because right-wing assholes are out here on the internet chuckling about how the alligators are going to be eating well. They are not keeping their racist fantasies to themselves. They are sharing them because they don’t think we can do anything about it.

Speaking of dying, the “Big Beautiful Bill” is cutting nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid. First, let me sincerely say: fuck everyone who voted for this. Millions of people are going to lose coverage and there will be many preventable deaths. Many hospitals will close. I am not trying to victim-blame, but this makes me return to the idea of literacy in this country. A study last year that a lot of people have negative associations with “Medicaid” but like their state version of Medicaid that probably goes by a different name. For example, in California it’s called MediCal and other states have goofy names like SoonerCare (Oklahoma) or Apple Health (Washington). Too many people are operating on vibes and emotions (curated by propaganda) instead of reading how something will actually affect them. Probably because more than half of American adults are reading below a sixth-grade level. Imagine your average 11-year-old and their level of information literacy. That’s what we’re working with. This is why people hate “Medicare” but love “Medical,” or why people hate “Obamacare” but love the Affordable Care Act. Again, I don’t think it’s the public’s fault that we are now facing huge cuts to Medicare (good luck to anyone trying to pay for a nursing home now, by the way). I think we are being taken advantage of by corrupt politicians who do things like sell off stocks related to legislation they’re about to vote on (this should be illegal). I’m mad that we are removing funds for essential services that keep people alive so we can do stupid things like increase ICE’s budget from $8 billion to $100 billion for the next four years. We could cancel one-tenth of student debt instead and I guarantee it would improve people’s lives way more than this. I’m so fucking mad about all of this and upset that I’m living and paying taxes in a country that only wants to spend money on the worst possible shit.

Our Data Ourselves

I’ve recently been mulling over the concept of data and, specifically, how much our data seems to be worth versus how little we as individuals are getting in return and some of the things that led us here. I was thinking about early Facebook and how, when the social network was young, it was mostly a place where users filled in information about themselves to let everyone know who they were and what they were about. Here’s an example of an early Facebook page. It has the user’s name, school, birthday, and a whole lists of interests. This isn’t unique to Facebook either; it’s just what we did on the internet then. We put information about ourselves online and hoped like-minded people would find us to talk. Ten years later, Cambridge Analytica used data scraped from 50 million users to target voters, which “played a decisive role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.” Users gave that information to Facebook freely, or maybe more accurately, put that information online as a bid for companionship without thinking about “giving” it to Facebook, and in return Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire from selling that very same information to causes that interfere in elections.

I’m far from the first to make this point about users not getting anything out of the apparent wealth that their data generates. I’m sure my thoughts here have also been influenced by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I read in 2020 (I thought it was just a few years ago but I checked my records and nope. Five whole years ago). Now we have an additional layer to corporations profiting off of what Zuboff refers to as “behavior surplus”—in which companies “[claim] private experience as ‘raw material’ for data factories”—with the arrival of large language models (LLMs. Note I am being pedantic here because the “AI” products we have are just glorified auto-complete machines. They are not intelligent. They recognize patterns). OpenAI, for example, is valued at $300 billion, which is insane. But all the data they used to create the model is stolen. It’s stolen from us and everything we’ve ever put online and it’s stolen from authors who had their works fed into databases without their permission. We all made that, but the people at OpenAI are billionaires are the only ones reaping the profits. But, you know, asking “for artist consent would ‘basically kill’ the AI industry.” Now OpenAI has been “awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.” It’s not enough that AI firms have stolen our data, they are now also getting our tax money to find better ways to murder people (I assume).

Parody of "you wouldn't download a car" PSA that says "You wouldn't train AI on someone else's intellectual property without asking first". Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html — I’m recycling this because it’s relevant and makes me laugh. Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

It just sucks that the internet has the potential to be so cool and we’re wasting it on something as stupid as LLMs. Reddit, which has been acknowledged as one of the last holdouts where you can find opinions from real people online, is launching a new ad feature that “‘dynamically integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser’s [content].'” I guarantee those Reddit users did not make those comments to provide free ad copy but here we are. Even if that is buried somewhere in Reddit’s terms and conditions, I would argue that no one would say yest to this specific thing on purpose. Advertising is such big business yet they want to co-opt things people say online? For free? What a trash heap. Even the way we search for information online is getting sucked up by AI garbage. Actual website traffic has tanked because people don’t navigate past the google search page anymore. Google lifts information from other people’s websites and reposts it in the search results. The game is definitely rigged because Google spent years rewriting the rules of the web so people could get revenue from google ads. Now Google has pulled the rug out from under people and is keeping all that delicious ad revenue for itself.

I’m not certain I’m adding anything new to this discourse but I thank you all for coming along for the ride as I sort it out for myself. I think we all have to get a lot more careful about what we share online and how we share it (I say as I write on my public website on the internet), especially as this fascist police state heats up. We all crave human connection and it’s fun to share online! You never know who is going to find you and what weird things you might have in common. I love sharing stuff on my blog because my friends talk to me about it and I learn new things from you in response. I’m probably going to revisit this topic again in the near future. I think there’s a lot more to say here about our data and how it intersects with this strain of evil technology with shit like Palantir and it’s database for tracking immigrants, especially related to the giant budget that congress just awarded to ICE.

Books and Other Words

hardback book: There is No Place for Us — There is No Place for Us

This week’s book that will depress you and make you mad was There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. In this book, Goldstone follows four women with precarious living situations in Atlanta as they struggle to hold their lives together over the course of several years. The story sheds light on the many people in limbo between what the government officially considers “homeless,” that is, living on the street without a car or any kind of shelter, and people who are effectively homeless but are making do living in their cars, crashing on friends and families’ living room couches, or living out of extended-stay hotels. The book is tough to read at times because these families keep trying to make choices to get out of exploitative living situations, but the system is so clearly stacked against them, that they keep failing. Gladstone notes times when some of these women wondered if it was their fault or they were doing something wrong. But what are people supposed to do when they finally get approved for a Section 8 housing voucher and no landlord will accept it? When it costs $50 just to apply to rent an apartment (savvy readers may note there is no actual incentive for a landlord to rent an apartment when they can just keep charging applicants $50 and then denying the applications)? When you finally find an affordable apartment but the owner sells the whole complex six months later and it gets razed to make room for luxury condos? How is someone making $11 per hour supposed to send one or more kids to daycare so they can work and then have any money left over for rent or food? These families aren’t lazy, they’re trying to work and use the support available, but there is very little on offer for people who aren’t sleeping in a tent outside, which is of course something people are doing everything they can to avoid. To go full socialist about it: housing should be a public good. If people can make a profit from owning a place to live, they are going to keep profiting and kicking out residence who don’t pay much in rent to make room for those who will. It’s awful that there are so many rich people in this country while we have so many people—including millions of children—who can’t afford to live. To take it a step further, the reason we have so many obscenely rich people is exactly because of this type of exploitation. As Gladstone shows in the book, the people who own the extended stay hotels know exactly how disgusting they are and they know who’s living there. In one scene, the hotel manager says they’re going to paint over mold in a room. Would it really cost that much more to just clean it? Landlords are taking so much money from people struggling to get by and giving them next to nothing in return. This country is sick.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The Art of the Shakedown via The Present Age. Trump is filing frivolous lawsuits that everyone knows he would lose against media outlets. However, media outlets are paying him millions to settle rather than get tied up in litigation for years. Importantly, the firms are also trying to maintain their attorneys’ security clearances. From the article, “Starting in March, Trump went after Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison with an executive order threatening to yank security clearances from any lawyer who’d worked against him. Without security clearances, these firms would struggle to represent corporate clients. It would, as Paul Weiss noted, ‘destroy the firm.'” It also notes that “These firms also had to promise to gut their DEI programs and pledge allegiance to ‘merit-based hiring.” Trump has collected almost a billion dollars using this method so far! Very normal democracy stuff happening here (sarcasm!).
Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content via Ars Technica. AI slop has proliferated so quickly that the people making AI models are desperate for pre-AI content. Welcome to the post-reality information apocalypse! For the record, I have never used AI to write this blog and I never will. Put this page in the vault.
‘A Black Hole of Energy Use’: Meta’s Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community via 404 Media. Meta is building a data center in Louisiana and it will use as much power as an entire city. The area’s residents will be subsidizing Meta through rate increases. Seems backwards to me! Why doesn’t the billion-dollar company pay the full rate? Hell, why not wipe out everyone’s overdue utility payments as a good-will gesture. Or if you really want to get galaxy-brained about it: don’t build it and stop using AI.
Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum via Wikipedia. I found this on Tumblr and it brought my joy so I’m sharing it. In 530 BCE, Ennigaldi created what we would now understand as a museum in Ur (what is now Iraq). There are artifacts there dating back to the 20th century BCE. Two-thousand-year-old stuff from 2,000 years ago! Earth is full of cool stuff, despite the horrors.

Tweet from @CacoKidOH reading "Fuck chatGPT, wikipedia is my ride or die. If I'mm gonna be misinformed, I want to be misinformed BY THE PEOPLE"

Media

My new favorite TV show is King of Drag! It’s the drag kings’ answer to RuPaul’s Drag Race and I hope you all watch it because I need it to be renewed for season two. It’s free to watch on Revry, either on their website or their TV app. There have only been two episodes so far, but I already love this show. It’s clear that the creators really carefully considered what elements of drag-themed reality TV they wanted to keep after nearly 20 years of Drag Race and what they wanted to do better. One of my favorite parts is actually how they’ve chosen to end each episode. On Drag Race, the eliminated queen from each episode walks to the back of the stage, tries to say something pithy, then starts a walk back to the werk room, offscreen, while the remaining cast dances on the runway. In contrast, King of Drag‘s eliminated king gets knighted on stage by host Murray Hill while the whole cast and the judges stand behind him in support. It’s such a nice contrast to the sad walk of shame and something I didn’t even realize I was missing. I know it’s “just” TV but I think the drag kings are doing something that communicates their views on community in a way that Drag Race has simply never considered. The sappy stuff aside, this show is hilarious and all the kings are so good at what they do. Last week’s celebrity impersonation challenge was so funny. Have you ever wanted to see Ira Glass do pushups? Steve Irwin romance a crocodile with a French horn? Well, now you can. Go watch it! It’s free!

Rampant Consumerism

I bought a bunch of knee-high compression socks since my doctor recommended that for me (I have varicose veins and all my blood likes to flee to my extremities, so the socks will help that from getting worse). I’m not really thrilled about wearing even more clothes in this warm weather but, alas, the things we do for our health. One of my friends recommended Wellow because they have socks for wide calves. They are actually quite cute and comfortable. They’re doing their job just fine but I wish I didn’t need so many things. Wearing the tall socks makes me want to wear shorter shorts. Something has to give! I do feel fairly ridiculous now though because I’ve got the compression socks, braces, and I’m often now wearing my carpal tunnel brace during the day because my carpal tunnels are all fucked up. When will I be released from this mortal form and get to exist as a being of pure light and energy? (note: this is a joke and not a death wish, please don’t get it twisted).

Moving It

I’m proud of myself for actually working out in the garage a few times over the last two weeks. Having a fan out there helps a lot. We also have overhead lighting in there now so I did an evening workout, which was nice and cool. The only bummer right now is that my knee has been bothering me (the so-called “good” knee, in fact). I’ve been trying to find ways to work around that and still use my equipment. I tried doing some Romanian deadlifts, which are a straight-legged lift, instead of original-flavor deadlifts and that worked well. I’m hoping the heat won’t get me down too much this summer and I’ll be able to keep at it. Please send cooling thoughts.

Squat rack with a bar (115 pounds total) in my garage gym. Side door is open to reveal trees — squat setup

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been trying to eat more vegetables and, since I can’t eat anything without cooking it (thanks to my difficult body), this requires some planning. I made a couple of new vegetable dishes over the last two weeks. I’ve picked things that are a little more involved than just roasting vegetables because I’m trying to keep myself interested. To that end, I made roasted carrots with whipped tahini. I liked these quite well. The carrots are topped with a mixture of tahini, yogurt, and seasoning, along with some pistachios and dill. I also made this herbed summer squash and potato torte, which was easier than I thought it would be, probably because I used the mandoline for slicing everything. I liked it but I think it needed a little more seasoning, or maybe I just didn’t use enough herbs. I think I would also make it a little smaller next time because I did get sick of it after a few days.

For regular dinner meals, I returned to one of our standbys, spicy peanut soba noodles and green beans. I’ve shared this before but I want to note that this time I paired it with some baked tofu, which turned out to be a very good choice. It made the meal more filling (I usually make pot stickers to round it out, just the frozen ones you can buy at the store). In new-to-me recipes, I made Tunisian chickpea soup from the Cool Beans cookbook (although I am sure there are many versions of it out in the world). We liked it a lot. Kirk really enjoyed it but I think he just likes anything with harissa in it. Because I’m always cooking beans, I tried the NYT’s pesto beans recipe and served that over some noodles. I also made a red onion, broccoli, and blue cheese tart to accompany it to make sure there were some more vegetables involved. Finally for the fourth, I just grilled some hamburgers and vegetables. I’m eating corn off the cob since my teeth are kind of sensitive thanks to these braces.

a pile of roasted carrot chunks topped with whipped tahini, pistachios, and a sprinkling of dill — roasted carrots with whipped tahini

a big, round, skillet-sized herbed summer squash and potato tart, with thin slices of potatoes and squash topped in parmesan and green onions — roasted carrots with whipped tahini

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This poor baby was very scared of all the loud explosions on Friday (and Saturday because our neighborhood is nuts) night. I was surprised because, in years past, the firework hullabaloo has not seemed to bother him. He spent the evening dashing around between under the table and under the bed, plus spent a little time tucked under the blankets in bed (though once the noise got too aggressive he did flee for safety).

Fritz the cat sitting straight up on the bed and looking away from the camera. — on alert

Fritz the cat bending backwards to bonk his head into my face — on alert

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 22, 2025

Posted on June 22, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’m happy to report that my braces are starting to hurt less. I was very stressed out about it last week but, after a few days, the pain went down, although my mouth is still a little sensitive. It’s been two weeks so I have switched to the next set of aligners. I was worried that they would hurt as bad as the original set did, but thankfully it doesn’t. I’m uncomfortable but not to the point that I feel like it’s not worth taking the braces out to eat, which is what I was afraid of. I’m still not thrilled about the whole ordeal but body maintenance is never ending.

a small plastic bag with a set of clear braces inside — next round of braces

Current Events

I had been mulling over another topic entirely but the US has officially started bombing Iran, so we shall save it for another day. This isn’t going to be my most organized and well thought-out essay, just some thoughts as our idiot president formally kicks off World War III (currently still described on wikipedia as a “hypothetical future global conflict”).

Al-Jazeera reports that the US has bombed three cities in Iran, including Isfahan, which, in addition to being home for almost 4 million people, is the location of one the most famous pieces of Muslim architecture, the Shah Mosque. I’m so tired of this country running endless wars in the middle east. People online have been joking about how this is a repeat of the Iraq war, with just one letter changed and I can’t disagree. It’s okay to leave Middle Eastern countries alone, actually.

The US military used B-2 stealth bombers to carry out the attacks. Each of these planes costs $2 billion. This is what our country is spending money on. Meanwhile, for just one example, in the US we have a child poverty rate of about 14 percent, which more than doubled after the expanded Child Tax Credit (part of the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021) expired since the government chose not to renew it. Granted, it would cost more than three B-2 planes to lift America’s children out of poverty, with an estimated $1.6 trillion to make the expanded child tax credit permanent. Still, this country, when given the option to prioritize its citizens, chooses global hegemony and violence every time. Experts estimate that the US spent $3 trillion on the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan cost $8 trillion. How much will a pointless war in Iran cost? We seem to have money for everything except the things that would improve conditions for the people who live here. I hate that my tax dollars get funneled into killing people and destroying things in other countries.

I guess I’m not surprised that we’re at war with Iran since Trump seems to be obsessed with it. There is, of course the classic tweet from 2013 where Trump claims Obama will attack Iran (projection, I suppose). And does anyone else remember that week in 2020 when we were all on pins and needles wondering if Trump was going to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran? This fucking asshole just wants to bomb people. There’s also the well-documented history of Trump pushing for the US to “partner with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons, basically for the two empires to use nuclear weapons in tandem in order to intimidate other countries.” Really cool, stable stuff here.

A tweet by Donald Trump dated November 10, 2013 that states "Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly. Not skilled!" — A classic Trump tweet

By the way, Congress has not authorized a war. I’m not sure the constitution is worth much at this point, but it is still officially the job of Congress to say whether we can do a war or not. I guess that doesn’t matter. Sixty percent of Americans don’t want a war, but we’re not letting that stop us!

Anyway, here we are. It’s the third (? Or maybe just year 22 of the same) Middle East war in my lifetime. Why the fuck are we doing this again.

Tweet reading "Estados Unidos more like estamos jodidos am I right" — estamos jodidos indeed

Books and Other Words

book: Claiming the B in LGBT — Claiming the B in LGBT

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I found Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative edited by Kate Harrad on the shelves at the Lavender Library. It’s a collection of essays on topics related to the bisexual experience and most of the essays feature anecdotes from bisexual people who seem to have participated in a survey at a bisexual convention in the UK. I’ve appreciated getting some perspective from bisexual literature lately because I didn’t realize I was bisexual until a little later on and I’m obviously in a committed heterosexual relationship, so I have felt somewhat out of touch with it all. However, it seems to be a very common experience to not realize right away that you’re neither straight nor gay and that can be a shock to one’s identity. The book takes on a lot of subjects, beyond simply discovering one’s sexuality and coming out, that intersect with bisexuality like race, disability, and aging. One comment that stuck out to me from the chapter on disability was that “a concern for lots of the disabled bi people we talked to was that having more than one label will make people think they’re trying to be too special. This is hard when society already tells you bisexuals are greedy and attention-seeking.” That’s so true. It can feel like asking too much to have people take in more than one facet of me that’s not the norm. I don’t really believe that, and I think I deserve to be accepted in all my strange and derivative ways, but out in normal culture it doesn’t always feel that way. In any case, this is a good read if you’re looking for a pulse check on what bisexuals are thinking about.

book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras — The Lover

I read Marguerite Duras’s The Lover for an online book club that one of my friends was participating in. I ultimately didn’t join the book club but wanted to read along with my friend! This is kind of a weird little book. The prose is haunting and the story is told through the dreamy haze of trauma. The Lover is autobiographical fiction about Duras growing up in what is now Vietnam (and what was then French Indochina) with her mother and two brothers. The unnamed main character goes to a French school and spends most of the narrative talking about her family being shitty and her assignations with her “lover” (also unnamed), a wealthy, young Chinese man. Notably, a man who is almost 30 while the protagonist is 15 or 16. So … gross. It’s not really clear why the protagonist decides to spend time with this man other than a spirit of contrariness. It doesn’t seem like she particularly likes him, or even men at all; the only named character in the story is her dorm-mate, about whose perfect breasts she rhapsodizes for at least two full pages. So, that’s certainly a choice.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Senator Alex Padilla handcuffed and forcibly removed from Kristi Noem’s LA press conference via The Guardian. Why the fuck is the FBI tackling our elected representative? This does not bode well for us.
You sound like ChatGPT via The Verge. Using large language models like ChatGPT is changing how human people talk to each other! ChatGPT seems to have some favorite words and they are now in more frequent rotation among humans. This part made me laugh: “researchers suspect that AI influence is starting to show up in tone, too — in the form of longer, more structured speech and muted emotional expression.” Congratulations AI, you are making everyone sound more autistic. We salute you.

Corporeal Form

I ended up going to the doctor this week and I was extremely surprised to have found someone who seems to really be paying attention. Regular readers may recall that I have been struggling to find a good primary care doctor. I liked the one I had over the last year, but she left Kaiser so I had to pick someone new. Fortunately, I seem to have made a perfect choice this time and the new doctor is even better than the last. My appointment lasted almost an entire hour, which is simply unheard of. I made the appointment because in dance class this week, I was feeling so warm and lightheaded that I thought something must be wrong. However, the doctor seems to think I’m just a certain type of white person with a very low tolerance for heat (what a great time to be alive for me then, lol). Before we talked about that, I told her I wanted to review everything going on with my body. I made a list on my phone of all the ailments and it low-key sounds like the disclaimer section of a prescription drug commercial. The doctor actually had follow-up questions about my ailments and referred me for some tests! I mentioned osteopenia and she asked me how I knew I had that. It came up in a test result years ago but apparently never migrated to my chart. She said I am young for osteopenia and I sighed because I’ve been hearing “You’re young for that” a lot lately. However, this doctor actually took the next step and wondered why a relatively young person has osteopenia and referred me for some tests. What a crazy idea! I am hopeful that I can get some better healthcare now.

When I got my labs done for the osteopenia stuff I also had to get a test for my liver enzymes, which one of my doctors is monitoring now because of the fatty liver situation (by the way, “fatty liver” is being rebranded as “steatotic liver disease,” nice of them to not just put fat in the name). In March, my enzymes spiked for no reason known to me. The doctor in charge of my liver, who is unfortunately a specialist and not my new, good doctor, told me to test again in three months and asked no additional questions. Well, test results show that my enzymes are still going up sharply. I’m not sure why but it is stressing me out because I’m trying to manage it with eating certain foods, taking an omega-3 supplement, etc. I’m certainly not drinking alcohol so I don’t know what’s happening. I’m not looking forward to talking to the doctor about it because the only thing she has ever told me to do is lose weight, but according to other medical professionals, that isn’t the only thing to do. In fact, my new doctor told me that refined sugar is bad for the liver. This sounds obvious now that I hear it, but no one had actually told me that before. Might have been nice to have this kind of information! I’ve been fairly stressed and upset about this. It’s hard to try really hard to take care of myself and simply not have it work.

Moving It

Given all the health stuff, I feel like I really need to get into a positive feedback loop and start lifting weights again. I am at dance class three times a week but I know—and my doctor emphasized this for me—that resistance training is the main thing I can do to take care of my bones and my body. It’s hard though because I am tired, but I think I will have more energy if I have more muscles. Unfortunately, that means I have to just do it tired for a while. So, for what feels like the fifth or sixth time now, I went out to clean the garage and make it habitable for gym activity. For my birthday, my dad sent me a huge fan for the garage gym and I finally got that set up. It seems like it really moves some air! We also cleaned the garage and moved the stationary bike/rower that was in our bedroom to the gym. We haven’t been able to use it because Fritz craves violence and bites the foam seat if he has a chance. I’ve had it all mummified in blankets, which of course makes it deeply inconvenient to use, so I have not. I’m hoping it will be easier now that it’s in the garage, especially since Kirk set up a TV out there. We have a great setup, I just need to use it.

a large swamp cooler fan in my garage — my biggest fan

the garage gym, newly cleaned and with the recumbent bike/rower joining the gym — my biggest fan

Kitchen Witchery

I usually try to avoid re-posting recipes or only posting new or novel food but that’s left me without much food stuff to talk about since my repertoire is getting pretty big. So, here’s some kind of basic but good food. I am still making snow cones. This week, I tried root beer flavor and I liked it. Kirk hated it but that’s okay. It’s a polarizing experience. On Friday, we had Mandy and her daughter over for dinner so I grilled tri tip, using a recipe from Latin Grilling for a chili rub and honey-lime glaze and we enjoyed it. I also made rice krispie treats with rainbow sprinkles.

a bowl of root beer-flavored shaved ice — root beer shaved ice

a plate of tritip, tiny red potatoes, asparagus, and rolls — root beer shaved ice

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. He’s been really into hanging out in his carrier lately. I put it under a table in the bedroom and he seems to think it’s the ultimate spot for being left alone.

Fritz the cat relaxing in his carrier, which is currently underneath an endtable in the corner of the bedroom — under-the-table time

Fritz the cat lying in the sun on the dining table, his paws fully stretched out so his toe beans are visible — under-the-table time

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 8, 2025

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. One of the ways I keep track of things I see online has been with Pocket, which I use as something like a temporary bookmark station but it can also function as an archive of stuff you read and find interesting online. Unfortunately, because we don’t get to keep anything good on the internet, Pocket announced it’s shutting down. Well, they say it’s becoming a newsletter or something to deliver “the same high-quality content.” That’s cool and whatever but that’s not what I need. It reminds me of the death of Delicious in 2011, which was an earlier bookmarking tool. They don’t want me to keep an archive of things I read! Conspiracy! I kid, I kid. It’s just very annoying to try to keep a record online when these websites keep deciding there’s no money in … bookmarks. I am not sure if I’m going to start using regular internet browser bookmarking, or perhaps leave tabs open (god help me). If anyone has a good suggestion, please pass it on.

Current Events

I had been thinking for the last few weeks about getting into some discussion of covid and what we know, since that body of knowledge has of course evolved a lot in the last few years. We’re now seeing that a new covid variant, NB.1.8.1, has emerged and there are cases in California, so it seems like a good time to take a look. One reason I wanted to read up and share my thoughts on this is because I am still masking in public places as much as I can. So, I asked myself, am I right to still mask when so many people don’t? If you don’t want to read the rest of this, the short answer is yes, as far as I’m concerned, wearing a mask is still an important way to protect yourself and others from covid, and covid is a lot more serious than just a cold or even the flu.

The FDA recently announced that it will be limiting who can get vaccinated for COVID to “people over 65 or with at least one chronic condition.” Your Local Epidemiologist explains that, while it does sound scientific to say manufacturers “must run a new placebo-controlled trial after a variant arrives,” this contradicts current scientific practices. Scientists don’t run a controlled study with placebos on every iteration of a vaccine because it’s slow and unethical (imagine giving someone a placebo vaccine, that person now thinks they’re vaccinated but they aren’t! You can’t do that!), and because new vaccines are based on previously studied, safe, old vaccines. One good thing is many people will still be able to get vaccinated because the CDC says you can get it if you have one of many chronic conditions like asthma, fatty liver, depression, or you’re just fat (it’s once again a great time to be fat lol). Still, the fact that fewer people will be receiving updated vaccines makes me think it will be more important to mask to try to protect each other.

While the vaccine is important, it’s not the ultimate weapon against covid. The vaccine meaningfully reduces the most severe effects of covid, like hospitalizations, but unfortunately isn’t as effective as something like the polio vaccine is against polio, which allowed us to essentially eradicate the disease. Even though the vaccines don’t do it all, they are an important part of reducing the risk of long COVID, which is, to me, one of the scariest parts about the disease. A piece of research that has stayed with me is that every infection increases the risk of long covid. This contradicts the popular belief that getting infected with covid “builds immunity” (it doesn’t). The study followed over 138,000 US veterans who had covid over the course of two years. The findings showed that covid has a “cumulative” effect, and “the adverse health effects from two infections are worse than one, and three infections worse than two.” As dire as that sounds, I do think one optimistic thing here is that it suggests it’s never too late to start taking covid precautions. If you’ve had covid three times, trying to avoid a fourth round is still important and could be the difference between you and long covid.

The World Health Organization reported that it is observing increases in covid rates worldwide, although currently rates are “relatively low” with 4.8% of samples testing positive for covid. I am not a doctor or public health expert but I feel like one in twenty cases is still a lot. Those are not odds I trust when it comes to my health. The increase in cases may be due to the new NB.1.8.1 variant. Bloomberg reported last month that covid is “spiking” in Hong Kong and Singapore “Severe cases – including deaths – also reached its highest level in about a year.” Cases are also increasing here in California according to L.A. County wastewater data, which is basically the only reliable source of infection rates now. This may lead to a “summer surge” in covid cases.

This is as good a time as any to remind everyone that Biden ending the “COVID-19 national emergency” two years ago was not a declaration that the pandemic ended. All this did was end federal support for covid from an administrative perspective, basically letting the government off the hook for paying for things like testing. No one has ever said that covid is over! Shortly after, the CDC also changed how it reported covid rates, getting rid of the color-coded map that showed infection rates by county. This makes it harder for regular people who are not chronically online like I am to figure out what the fuck is happening and how risky covid may truly be.

I want to be clear that I’m not writing this to make anyone feel bad about how they have dealt with covid. It’s a very personal choice, although the consequences of our individual choices are intertwined. The pandemic is, unfortunately, a group project. I’m writing this for myself and my own records, in part. It’s good to check in with one’s biases now and then. I’m also writing it for anyone who is feeling confused or overwhelmed with covid in the last five years (presumably all of us). It has been difficult to navigate and figure out what is the safest choice, especially since covid is a novel virus, so no one knew what to do at first. I also think it’s important to document what’s happening with covid amid the unhinged rhetoric about vaccines, given that people in our government are promoting the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which I wrote about at length a few weeks ago. The same people erroneously pushing “herd immunity” are the ones telling us vaccines cause autism. Yet, per the The Gauntlet newsletter, “The problem is that we cannot achieve herd immunity to COVID—ever. Herd immunity would mean long-term, durable protection from infection, like we have for viruses like measles, mumps, and rubella.” Herd immunity for covid simply does not exist.

The talk of herd immunity and the “vaccines cause autism” lie are features of eugenics, which seems to be the defining philosophy of our current government (perhaps the current era), and even of the Biden administration, given that he did not exactly promote robust covid mitigation strategies. I am once again going to boldly (selfishly?) come out and say that I don’t think some people should have to die because they’re disabled or have autism or a weaker immune system. The hallmark of a functioning society is how it takes care of the people least able to care for themselves. The government shouldn’t just decide that it’s fine for thousands of people to die because responding to a pandemic is too much work. Yet, that’s exactly what it has done. Masking up and taking covid precautions is a way that you can demonstrate real care for the people around you, which is increasingly important in a society that does not seem to care.

Books and Other Words

cover for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia shown on kobo ereader — Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

In Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, philosopher Kate Manne discusses societal forces that make people, especially women, feel like being physically smaller is a moral imperative. Manne begins with discussion of fatphobia and some research on what we know about weight loss. This isn’t news for me but it feels like a gut punch anyway: “there is currently no known reliable, safe, and ethical way to make fat people thin.” You can surgically remove half of your stomach, but even then people may not lose much weight, plus bariatric surgery is relatively high risk considering it’s elective. Manne also notes that “several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain” and “it appears that weight gain is the typical long-term response to dieting, rather than the exception.” So everyone who has ever told a fat person to try to lose weight can shut up. One of the saddest parts about fatphobia that Manne chronicles is that fat women, in particular, are taken less seriously and assumed to be stupid and incompetent, which she illustrates with personal experience as an academic and with research that has repeatedly found things like teachers assume girls with a higher body-mass index (BMI) to be “less able readers.” Which, god damn. Children. Another study found that “defendants in a fictional court case were significantly more likely to be judged guilty if they were fat and female.” This stuff is just hateful. I hope I never end up in court. I won’t get into everything I took from this book because there is a lot of good stuff. It’s full of thought-provoking perspective on being fat and, more importantly, how fat women, in particular, are perceived in society. I highly recommend reading it.

Hardback book "A Choir of Lies" — A Choir of Lies

Alexandra Rowland’s A Choir of Lies is the sequel to A Conspiracy of Truths, which I read in April. A Choir of Lies focuses on Yfling, whose teacher, Chant, abruptly liberated him from his apprenticeship a year or two before this story begins. Yfling is writing account of his recent stay and in Heyrland, a place roughly analogous to Holland, and his role in events that are a fictionalized version of tulip mania. I like Rowland’s work a lot so I’m not surprised that I liked this one too. It’s ultimately a coming-of-age story, with Yfling trying to figure out who he is and how he wants to use his abilities in the world now that he’s on his own as an adult. I don’t have any deep thoughts about it, so there you have it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry via The Verge. First of all: good. Second: Nick Clegg is both a former Meta executive and former UK deputy prime minister. He is basically admitting that the only way to make “artificial intelligence”—though we’re really only referring to large language models here—is to steal artists’ work. It’s bonkers that you can make a company founded on stealing intellectual property, but at the beginning of this century, record companies were literally suing children for sharing music files online. So, it’s cool when a corporation does it? I think that’s what we’re learning here: it’s fine to steal when you’re rich.

The Human Workforce Behind AI Wants a Union via The Nation. Speaking of AI, here’s your regular reminder that AI is far from a finished product and still requires thousands of real human people working behind the scenes to train it, or, in some cases, to function as a Mechanical Turk. It’s a hard job and every corporation seems hell-bent on making it as miserable as possible on top of that.
Admin is crashing out via Read Max. In this newsletter, Max Read explains the current Trump–Elon drama through the theory “that what we think of as ‘social media platforms’ are mostly just million-user message boards, and as such retain–especially among the most frequent and visible posters–many of the ancestral folkways, customs, and cultural conventions of their forum forerunners.” This made me laugh but it’s true. Internet old-heads know that this is just classic internet drama dressed up for the 2020s. Read goes on to state, “I want to underline that this is more than just another example of the ongoing and near-complete convergence between ‘electoral politics’ and ‘television entertainment.’ It is also an example of the ongoing convergence between ‘electoral politics’ and ‘forum drama,’ driven by the overwhelming mediation of politics by various message board-like social-media platforms.”
Why Protests Should Be Promises via Time. I liked this reminder that protesting has to be backed by a coherent demand. It’s not enough to be in the streets for its own sake. Táíwò writes “for protests to succeed, they must be backed by movements with the ability to promise to withhold—labor, debt payments, rent payments, or consumer support—and to follow through if demands aren’t met. Protests by such movements consequently morph into real, tangible promises: demonstrations of an ability to escalate, backed by strategic leverage.”

Doing Things

Last weekend was very busy! My mom visited me (I forgot to take pictures but I know she got one of us and posted it on instagram) to see my dance recital. The recital was fun and I think all my pieces were really good! It was nice that my mom came to watch. On Sunday, my friend Lemon and I hosted another food party. This time, we did a garden/tea party and encouraged everyone to dress up. I got a fancy hat for the occasion. I made cheddar and scallion scones, a chocolate-caramel tart, and hibiscus-ginger punch. Unfortunately, the tart melted over the course of the afternoon and caramel was pooling all over, but before that point, it was very good. I want to try making it again (or just make and eat the caramel, who knows).

a baking pan with freshly baked scones. There is melty cheese visible and little bits of green onions — cheddar-scallion scones

Chocolate-caramel tart, scones, and other garden party snacks arrayed on a table — cheddar-scallion scones

Languages

I have been extremely focused on my languages over the last two weeks! I’m noticing that Icelandic is feeling a little easier lately. Don’t get confused: I’m still buried in the intermediate level, but I’ve ascended a rung or two on the ladder of fluency. I decided that, if I’m going to learn German for our trip to Eurovision next year, I want to make sure I’m putting in extra effort with the Icelandic so I don’t lose my progress. I’m still studying Spanish too, of course, but I don’t feel it’s at risk in the same way. I’ve been working hard on translating my Wikipedia articles and getting caught up on my flashcards (I was ignoring them so now there’s a huge backlog to review. Alas). Here are two articles I recently translated that have some fun details: Ketubjörg and Úlfsstaðir.

Corporeal Form

Me somewhat grimacing for the camera so my clear braces are visible — braces are here

This week I finally got “braces.” In actual fact, I have “clear aligners,” which is the non-brand name term for Invisalign (my dentist is using some other brand, but that’s the one most people have heard of). About a month ago, the dentist did 3D imaging of my mouth and sent it to a lab that models how the teeth move. They print out “trays”—basically sets mouthguards—that I’ll wear two weeks at a time. The dentist also glued little “buttons,” as they call them, to my teeth to give the trays something to hang on to (you can see them in the photo if you look closely).

I had braces when I was younger and I guess I forgot how awful they are because I’m having a bad time. Granted, I’m only two days in so I suppose it will get easier but I have been in a lot of pain. What I really don’t like is that I have to remove the braces to eat, and removing them and putting them back in are easily the most uncomfortable part since that reminds my mouth that it’s being bullied into place. It’s making me nervous about wanting to binge eat since I don’t want to take the braces out more than I have to, and of course, I don’t want to be hungry. I’m hoping I’ll figure out how to live with it all since they’ve estimated that it’s going to take 15 months to straighten out my teeth, and in my experience these things always take longer than they tell you.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat giving himself a bath with his back feet in a v-shape, one foot in front of him and one right behind his head — Fritz inventing new positions

Fritz the cat lying on the table in the sun. His head and shoulders are inside his tent. — Fritz inventing new positions

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: May 25, 2025

Posted on May 25, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Another fortnight, another blog post! Today I’m coming in hot with some opinions, but there are snow cones and cat photos if you make it to the end.

Livestreamed Apocalypse

Content warning: the saddest shit in the world

The bleakest thing of all time has been happening on Tumblr. Basically every day, I get direct messages and/or tagged in random posts from people allegedly trying to survive in Gaza. They are begging for money. The messages are almost identical, no matter who sends them, although we have moved through a few iterations of the formula over the last year. Here’s a post I was tagged in this week.

A screenshot of an emoji-riddled tumblr post that starts with "A voice from Gaza... A cry for help" and goes on to explain that the author from Gaza is "writing to you today during one of the hardest moments of my life" and that everything needed to survive is expensive or unobtainable. — Typical Gaza-themed scam post

To me, this post is obviously a scam. It goes on to provide a GoFundMe link, which all of these posts do, but the weird tone and emoji use seems to me like someone trying to get attention and rile us up emotionally so we’ll send money without thinking. I have to say that grifting based on a fucking genocide is the most ghoulish possible choice. There are people out there running legitimate fundraisers to escape disaster but I am sure this isn’t one of them. I’ve received countless messages/been tagged in countless posts just like this in which people are trying to take advantage of the overall generosity and community spirit present among Tumblr users. It’s wearing on me.

In contrast, here’s a direct message I received this week that felt like a fucking gut punch.

A Tumblr direct message reading simply "Please. We are being exterminated. Please help my family. I am begging you." — A desperate message

It’s entirely possible that this was an extremely well-calculated spam message, but this seemed authentic to me. Whether or not it’s an actual person earnestly reaching out to an internet stranger, it certainly feels real. This is the first time out of the many messages I’ve received that I have responded and donated a little to their fundraising campaign. I don’t know if it will help them survive. I’m not even entirely certain that it’s not a scam, but even if it is, I am at least trying to help. This made me think of when I was growing up in the Mormon church and adults would talk about helping homeless people. The prevailing wisdom was you shouldn’t just give out money willy-nilly because they might buy drugs or alcohol and you wouldn’t want to be financing a sin. Instead, you should pop into the nearby grocery store and buy them something to make sandwiches with to give to them. It’s a very condescending approach to helping people in need that prioritizes the giver’s feelings over the recipient’s needs. All this to say, if this does happen to be a scam, it’s none of my business. My heart was in the right place.

I want to be clear that I don’t think receiving upsetting spam messages trying to separate me from my funds is the bleak part of this story (that might seem obvious, but we are on the internet: the bad-faith discourse machine). It’s bleak that Palestinians are being subjected to a genocide and no one seems willing or able to do a damn thing about it. Because it’s easier to understand horrors and agree that they were horrible when we’re seeing them in the rearview mirror: Imagine we had cell phones during World War II and you’re getting text messages from strangers who are desperately contacting any live account saying things like “They put my whole family on the train. Please help me find them,” or “I need to get out of Poland before it’s too late.” They’re going through the worst things a person can experience, but it is still a high psychic toll to bear witness and having next to nothing you can do about it. Every day I come on the internet and get bombarded with suffering, even when I’m not looking for it. I would love to go a week without seeing a photo of a starving child in Gaza. I would love even more for children in Gaza to not be starving.

In October 2023, I started learning more about the issues between Israel and Palestine and wrote that it’s just not that complicated. It’s now almost two years later and I feel confident in saying it is now even less complicated. For example, earlier this month, Israel’s cabinet ministers “approved plans … for its forces to capture the entire Gaza Strip and remain in the territory for an unspecified amount of time.” Yes, and where will the people living there go? I wonder. Another dire issue is that Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid. Israel has admitted only a fraction of the trucks with supplies into Gaza, prompting the UN Secretary-General to call this “the curellest phase of this cruel conflict” and note that the entire population is at risk of famine. The “freedom flotilla,” which was attempting to deliver aid by boat, was hit by drone strikes. We don’t know for sure that Israel sent the drones but like … who else? On May 20, the UN said “14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours if the aid does not reach them in time.” The same day, Netanyahu finally allowed a “handful” of trucks into Gaza and, CBS news notes, “he said he had been pressured into easing the total blockade by allies who could not tolerate ‘images of mass famine.'” I guess he’s able to tolerate these images just fine. After all, what’s a little famine when your army is “systematically forcing Palestinians to act as human shields in Gaza, sending them into buildings and tunnels to check for explosives or militants.”

Meanwhile, my country continues to bankroll the genocide, and apparently never even tried to stop it. Middle East Monitor reported this last month:

Former Israeli ambassador, Michael Herzog, made a startling admission about Biden’s support: “God did the State of Israel a favour that Biden was the president during this period. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.” His remarks encapsulated a broader sentiment that the White House gave Benjamin Netanyahu all the political space he needed to execute the military offensive, which has claimed the lives of more than 52,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children.
“Biden never pressured Israel for ceasefire, as Israeli officials boast of exploiting US support” by Nasim Ahmed in Middle East Monitor on April 29, 2025

Biden of course was at least not so gauche as to share an “AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a Dubai-style paradise.” Trump, as is his custom, said the quiet part out loud. The U.S continues to send an absurd amount of money to Israel. IMEU reports that the U.S. government has appropriated nearly $18 billion for Israel’s military, and “[a]nother $20 billion in weapons transfers to Israel was approved by the Biden administration in August 2024.” On March 1 of this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.” This probably isn’t an exhaustive list of recent contributions, but I’m not looking up every single gift to Israel that’s happened this year. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., research was published this month stating that the “bottom 60% of nation’s earners hold just 22% of disposable income but need 39% for a minimal quality of life.” Savvy readers may note that 60 percent is also the majority of the country. The average household is earning “$38,000 per year, falling more than $29,000 short of the MQL [Minimal Quality of Life].” I remain sickened and mad as fuck that our tax dollars are financing a genocide while the majority of people in this country cannot afford to live. The wanton disregard for human life in Gaza is terrible on it’s own but it feels awful that I’m paying for it, even if just a small part. Even worse, that money could be paying for health care, schools, libraries, and other essential services. Instead we’re mortgaging our society to finance death.

I wish there was more that we could do as individuals to stop this. Short of a tax strike or we all chain ourselves to our Senators’ offices and refuse to leave until they do something, I don’t know. The hard part is that we are all trying to survive too (with 22% of the available disposable income, as previously noted), and you can’t do anything that would risk your job because then you have no health insurance (greatest country in the world!). I’ve written previously about trying to divest my 401(k) from war as much as possible, which is not easy. In response to that, one of my friends told me about Natural Investments, which has financial advisors focused on investing your money in a way that isn’t directly harming the world. You do have to have a certain amount of money to work with most of the advisors though, so this isn’t an answer for everyone. There’s also the BDS movement, which has a targeted list of companies to boycott. Maybe some of you can even find a way to work in some of these simple sabotage for the 21st century suggestions.

Humans have always committed atrocities against other groups of humans. Seeing it play out in real-time on our pocket-sized computers doesn’t make it any worse, but it does force us to consider how we react to atrocity as a global society. It’s much harder to be ignorant of a live-streamed genocide than it was 500 years ago when you’d have to wait months for merchants and news to make their way across the world. What responsibility do we have to people we’ve never met and never will meet?

Books and Other Words

paperback book Living in Your Light — Living in Your Light

Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taia is a novel translated from French by Emma Ramadan (I assumed that first that this was translated from Arabic but it’s not!) The story is about Malika, a Moroccan woman living through the aftermath of French colonization. This short novel is divided into three chapters that focus on different stages of her life as she tries to eke out something for herself in this difficult world. Her first husband goes to fight for the French in Indochina and dies and her second husband is made out to be an idiot but she has nine children with him. In the last chapter, she’s confronted by a friend of her youngest son who is recently released from prison. The author uses the book to explore how hard it is to be a poor woman and what kinds of things one might do to survive, even if her kids think her choices were terrible. It’s also about the toll of having to keep one’s queerness private. Malika isn’t gay, but her first husband is and so is one of her sons. Despite her own struggles and suffering, she can’t manage to acknowledge this particular form of life being difficult. In short: life kind of sucks and everyone is doing the best they know how.

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd is another Lavender Library find. Ackroyd charts London’s history with queerness from the earliest records to the city and the information is fairly interesting but it read more like a series of articles or blog posts than a book. It didn’t feel like there was any kind of unifying narrative or point of view. Still, I picked up a few “fun” facts abotu the origin of gay stereotypes, like that the ancient Greeks were describing homosexuals as having “loose” wrists way back when. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

The sequel to Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera, Space Oddity, is just as madcap as its predecessor. Space Oddity picks up shortly after the events of Space Opera with Decibel Jones on a press tour after scoring high enough in the Metagalactic Gran Prix (the galaxy’s answer to Eurovision) to prove that humans are sentient and thus avoid the destruction of our species. As you might imagine, hijinks ensue. While I loved the first book, I thought this one was just okay. I really enjoy Valente’s nutty, Douglas Adams-esque style, but this book had a lot of just explaining different aliens. It makes sense and it’s important to the story, but it seemed like it required so much exposition scattered throughout the story.

Hardback book Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day — Queer City

cover for Space Oddity shown on Kobo ereader — Queer City

Meanwhile, on the internet:

against the fleeing to europe industrial complex via the late review. From the article, “First of all, I am inherently wary of anything that speaks me in a breathless language of fear. As a woman, I am somewhat inured to being sold things by way of anxiety, though I realize not everyone is. I’ve spent a lifetime having my most intimate fears be seen as fair game for clicks, attention, spectacle, and weaponization. If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated. Hence, it does not surprise me to see that many of these posts purporting to “help you” vis a vis fear are instead selling something: consulting services, affliate links, financial planning resources, access to insider information, guidebooks, a community, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why, throughout any given Fleeing to Europe Industrial Complex essay, the tone often changes, bit by bit, from fear to the ersatz reassurance of self help. I did it and so can you.“
From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty via Organizing My Thoughts. I really liked this piece on what prevents people from being the kind of person they want to be in a terrible historical moment, and what we can do about it. We’re all beleaguered by the need to survive but there are still ways we can participate in activism despite the grind.
‘Somebody needs to do it’ via Taylor Lorenz on YouTube. This video takes a look at the “somebody needs to do it” memes. What is “it”? Well … we shan’t say (just kidding, it’s people wishing Trump was no longer alive). Lorenz goes beyond the meme and explains how this level of nihilism took hold. She links the current mood to what we went through early in the covid pandemic and how the government’s lack of effort to keep us healthy and safe has brought us here.
The Era Of The Business Idiot via Where’s Your Ed At? This essay is very long but don’t let that deter you because it is good. In this piece, Zitron coins the term “business idiot,” which he defines as “a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society” and goes on to say that “neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.” I could quote half the article here and still not be satisfied so I highly recommend reading it.

Media

At my request, Kirk got me this great little handheld emulator for my birthday. It’s a little like a GameBoy but it has a few thousand classic video games on it, no game cartridges needed. One game that caught my eye was Cool Spot, which is a Super Nintendo game we had when I was a kid. I don’t know where this game came from because it’s clearly kind of an extended 7-up commercial. I remembered it being very difficult. In retrospect, the game is somewhat difficult but actually mostly badly designed. You should be able to see the next platform you’re supposed to jump to in a game, rather than just be taking blind leaps of faith. That said, it’s still fun overall and I did finish it, which was cathartic; I never thought it could be done. However, the final screen basically said “you finished, but you didn’t really beat the game.” Well. Too bad. I will not be goaded into playing it again.

screen from the Cool Spot game informing me that although I finished the game, I did not beat it. — Played for a fool

Eurovision

Austria won Eurovision and we’re all grateful. The final two came down to Austria and Israel, despite widespread discontent with Israel’s participation in the contest. One theory I saw is that, because there are so many countries people can vote for, one focused voting bloc can significantly effect the public vote tallies. It also seems that Israel paid for ads online encouraging people to vote for their song. This is gauche at best. Some broadcasters are calling for the voting system to be examined after Israel ran away with the public vote this year.

I’m glad Israel didn’t win because I would absolutely not have gone to Israel to see Eurovision. More and more artists, including this year’s winner, and even some countries are speaking out against Israel’s participation in Eurovision, which makes sense. Russia is banned while they’re warring against Ukraine, so why isn’t Israel prevented from laundering its reputation while it’s conducting a genocide against the Palestinian people? Spain’s Prime Minister has publicly noted this “double standard” and stated that Israel should be excluded, and two Belgian government ministers have also voiced concerns. Who knows if this will lead to any changes, but we do know that Eurovision is being tightly edited so we don’t hear all the boos and protests whenever Israel’s representative is on stage. The irony of all this is noted in one damning opinion piece that stated, “If Eurovision were to expel Israel now, it would be the harshest penalty the continent has ever imposed on the nation – and it would be not for mass killing, but for meddling with pop music.” Not wrong!

The politics of Eurovision aside, I ended up being wrong predicting Estonia as a winner, but they did get third place so I wasn’t too far off. Austria’s song by JJ, like last year’s winning song by Nemo, featured operatic elements. I can only conclude that Europe yearns for the opera.

We’re planning a trip to Austria to see Eurovision next May! We don’t know the specific city or dates yet, so much of the planning is currently theoretical. I didn’t realize I was going to have this reaction—though perhaps I should have—but as soon as I saw that Austria won, I was like “I’ll have to learn some German.” Because I’m insane, this has quickly spiraled into “How much German can I learn in just one year?” I understand, intellectually, that I don’t have to learn German to go to a country whose official language is German, but it certainly feels polite to do so. And you all know that I live for this shit.

I’ve currently started the German course on Mango languages, which is an app that the Sacramento Public Library offers for free. So far, it does seem like a good program. I like that it has audio and it introduces several terms then gradually asks you to recall them and combine them into various sentences. It seems like an effective structure. I also found a few textbooks online, which is good because I like to get the explicit grammar instructions (which is not something a language learning app normally offers). The hard thing is going to be balancing learning something new with maintaining my Spanish and Icelandic. Well, I’m less worried about the Spanish. Starting a language feels very fun and exciting because you know nothing so it feels like you’re constantly making discoveries and seeing progress, which is not how it feels at a the terrible intermediate stage (me in Icelandic), or at the advanced stage (me with Spanish), but at least at an advanced stage, I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and read or watch videos in the language. So far I can already talk about the weather and comment on the quality of a hotel breakfast in German, though little else. I also laughed when I learned that the phrase “it is” literally translates to “it’s giving.” Given current trends in slang, this makes every sentence that starts with es gibt very funny.

Corporeal Form

I, and probably most of you, tend to think of anxiety that originates from the brain. However, as I’ve gradually addressed my many bodily ailments, I’ve realized that my anxiety is often originating from the body, not the mind. On Wednesday, I was starting to feel anxious and restless and I was wondering if I needed to go run around to wear myself out. That usually works to calm the mind but it is hot and I didn’t really feel like running around. It eventually occurred to me that I was feeling bad in the body. My carpal tunnel is getting worse and my hand had been bothering me all day. My jaw hurt because I foolishly ate some too-crusty bread that morning. Holding my body up was also tiring, as usual. Until recently I was not able to identify these distinct body sensations. It was just “I feel bad” or “I’m tired” and vague unease. I think peeling back issue after issue has made it possible now to feel the individual problems, which is good. However, I am once again questioning how I fucking made it this far in life without being a total wreck.

Moving It

My dance recital is coming up! I’ll be performing in ballet, jazz, and tap and I’m sure you won’t want to miss it. It’s on May 31st in Elk Grove and tou can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts.

Kitchen Witchery

I wasn’t sure that I would make much use of the snowcone machine but I am fast becoming the mayor of snowcone city. My current favorite is the Icee-brand cherry syrup, which is simple but effective and certainly easier than leaving my house to buy a slushie on a hot day. I am starting to experiment with other types of shaved ice. I froze some chocolate soy milk and ran that through the ice-shaving contraption then drizzled some caramel on top. It does kind of look like dog food (Kirk said, “sure, dog food“) but it tasted good. It wasn’t as refreshing as the regular water-based shaved ice though. In actual food, on Friday I made a lasagna, garlic bread, and roasted green beans. You just can’t go wrong with cheesy noodles.

A bowl of unappetizing-looking shaved ice made from frozen chocolate milk — chocolate milk shaved ice

a bowl of shaved ice covered in red cherry syrup — chocolate milk shaved ice

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lounging in an armchair with all but head and shoulders under a blanket — Cozy in his blanket

Fritz the cat inside a sweatshirt with his front legs sticking all the way out — Cozy in his blanket

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: May 11, 2025

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s my birthday! At least, it will be my birthday when this post publishes. I’m 39 and that feels a little anti-climactic, but that’s okay. I am endeavoring to appreciate each year equally. I don’t have any big birthday plans, but I did volunteer at the Lavender Library on Saturday and I have dance class today. I also bought a fancy cake (which we started in on as a birthday eve treat) and earlier this week I took myself to the local bookstore and bought a few books.

a small stack of books including: Less is More, The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery, Sand-Catcher, and The Politics of Art — New books

a cake with a big slice removed revealing alternating white and chocolate layers. The cake is covered in white icing with chocolate accents — New books

It is currently circus season in my heart even though I’m no longer in a circus. I’ve written before about my hometown’s community circus (see here and here) and that May is when they do their shows, so I always think about it around this time of year. I’ve actually been following a few jugglers on instagram and it’s making me want to start juggling again, although I always enjoyed the social aspect of juggling with others more than the grinding through skills on my own. I do still have all my props though. I am thinking about it! I am realizing that my interests and hyperfixations never really go away, they just lie dormant for years until one day I’m like “I must do that THING.” I haven’t done it yet but I feel the need simmering. In any case, Here are some photos that I’ve shared before. For nostalgia’s sake.

Me, six years old, on hands and knees while three other girls lean on me for balance in an arabesque — 1992 circus

Me riding an 8-foot tall unicycle that has a frame shaped like a Z — 1992 circus

Books and Other Words

book cover of Stop Me If You've Heard This One — Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Kristen Arnett’s newest novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, is a perfect book. (I’ll let you decide if it’s objectively a perfect book, or merely a perfect book for me.) The story follows 29-year-old Cherry, a lesbian working at a shitty aquarium supply store in central Florida. More importantly, Cherry is trying to make a career out of her art: clowning. This work is, as usual for Arnett, an exploration of the relationship between humor and grief. Cherry’s older brother died years ago and she feels like her mom thinks the wrong child survived. Cherry subsumes this grief into her clown persona, Bunko the would-be rodeo clown who is terrified of horses (a gag that absolutely kills at children’s parties). At one point, Cherry muses, “How can I turn this into a bit, I wonder. That’s how my brain always chooses to process trauma or grief or anxiety.” Girl, same. We’re all out here living for the bit, being our own little clowns to get through the many garbage things in this life. The novel is about more than just clowning though. This story is rooted firmly in the present and, on the periphery, we see the loss of queer spaces, like a hyper-local gay bar getting closed down, and right-wing protestors showing up to rally against a children’s event that Cherry’s performing at, which includes a drag queen story time. I think Arnett is encouraging us all to be a little bit of a clown in the face of fascism, which is honestly great advice.

Book cover for Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More — Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak is a fascinating read. It explores attitudes and trends among the last group of people to grow up in the USSR before it collapsed, something that seemed completely impossible to the author’s interview subjects but, once it happened, felt totally inevitable. I read this book through the lens of what is happening now in the U.S., which resulted in some surreal moments, like when I encountered a subheading that read simply “gerontocracy,” which noted that the “average age of the politburo members increased from fifty-five in 1966 to seventy in the early 1980s, with the leading group close to eighty.” Hmmm … that does remind me of a certain congress. One of the big themes in this book is that the forms of performing socialism had overtaken their meaning. Thinking about this made me realize that my autistic ass would not have thrived in Soviet Russia. There were too many unwritten rules. Yurchak describes how the process and format of participating in communism—attending meetings, voting on local issues, filing reports—was more important than the actual meaning attached to those things. The people Yurchak interviews for Everything Was Forever explain that they bent the rules for people they liked and that fit in with their local or workplace communist committees, but applied the full force of rules to people who were being a nuisance. Both over-zealous true-believers and dissidents who objected to the system were considered threats to this system. I know myself and my only two modes are true believer and avowed dissident because when I believe something I completely believe it. (There might have been a secret third option: going high-masking people-pleaser and becoming miserable and burnt out trying to mirror people’s personalities back to them.) There is no way I could have navigated this system.

The rituals of political life overtaking the meaning led to what Yurchak terms “hypernormalization.” Irony and satire flourished in this era and the author describes some genuinely funny stuff, like a group of friends creating a formal certificate for their buddy’s birthday and presenting it during a fake meeting. Over-identifying with the rituals was a way of performing satire, with some groups going so far that it was impossible to tell who they were lampooning. Certain genres of jokes also became very popular, including one called “scary little poems,” short poems that “in gruesome detail, described little children as agents or objects of extreme violence.” One poem goes like this:

A little girl found a grenade in the field.

“What is this, uncle? with trust she appealed.

“Pull on the ring,” he said, “you will find out.”

For a while her bow will be flying about

The poem is dark and that is intentional. Society was also dark and that’s the kind of humor you get when many things are terrible. This reminds me a lot of the current trend in internet memery of circulating 9/11 jokes and Saddam Hussein in the bunker memes (if this doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s probably good. It means you’re not terminally online. That said, please do not make me attempt to explain it). The world is so ridiculous that something as serious as 9/11 or, in the case of scary little poems, children accidentally killing themselves with a grenade, gets filtered into something like people transforming the earnest, ultra-patriotic “never forget” into the humble, satirical “I forgot” in a 9/11 meme.

I could probably go on about this book for a long time, but I recommend instead that you read it if you’re interested in trying to understand why reality feels so weird right now. Read it and then talk about it with me! We’ll have a snow cone and discuss!

The USSR aside, I would like to note that I’m currently 510 days into my reading streak. I’ve made a point of reading at least one page from a book every day. Keeping the streak going helps me not get stuck browsing the internet forever when I’m tired.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

How M.L.M. world works on Instagram and TikTok via Read Max. This article made me think about how pyramid scheme language has infiltrated everyday life. Corporate-speak is nearly indistinguishable from MLM terminology, like when people get a new job and talk about having found a new “opportunity.” Interestingly, MLM’s use of the vague “opportunity” is a way to skirt regulation. Per the article, “If the investment to join an M.L.M. scheme was less than $500 then it wasn’t technically a “franchise,” it was a business opportunity.” Despite the scamminess of it all, MLMs persist because they “[fulfill] a specific ideological function: helping to sell the success of American capitalism.” It makes sense then that this language would filter into real workplaces; everyone is trying to sell us on the success of capitalism, even the legitimate gigs.
Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing via Bain & Company. This article is from a marketing blog, but I think it’s a very interesting indicator of the state of the web. Having AI answers on a search engine’s page makes people far more likely to click on nothing at all after running a search. A recent survey found “that about 80% of consumers now rely on ‘zero-click’ results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.” AI answers are pirating all the information people have posted to websites and now no one is getting website traffic. This is a problem for the way the internet works because nearly every website that generates income from ads, which no one will see if they don’t go to a website. Please don’t get me wrong here, you all know I am a fervent hater of advertisements. I’m trying to say this has the potential to collapse the current model of how the internet works. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing but it will surely be a different thing.
Wikipedia’s largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems via ABC News (Australia). This article solved a mystery for me. A lot of the Icelandic Wikipedia articles I’ve been translating have been available in the Cebuano Wiki, which is a Filipino language. I wondered who out there happens to speak both Icelandic and Cebuano. What a niche! Alas, a bot has been doing this work and, although its creator had good intentions, creating a huge volume of AI translations has not been great for the Cebuano Wikipedia overall.
The Infamous ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ Anti-Piracy Font Was Pirated. But By Who? via 404 Media. I just think it’s funny that the font in the anti-piracy ads was pirated. Maybe you would download a car!

Rampant Consumerism

Recently, my friend Mandy told me she was wishing she had a snow cone and, because I’m the kind of person I am, I said “I think you can just buy a snow cone maker” then immediately bought one. We tested it out on Friday and it was deemed a success by all. I have a Kitchenaid mixer so I bought the shaved ice attachment because that seemed like the thing that would take up the least space in my kitchen. It worked really well! I am curious about experimenting with freezing different liquids. I was originally just planning to use water like a basic bitch, but the machine came with a booklet of wild recipes for things like “s’mores shaved ice” and my mind is now open to the possibilities. I’m thinking about trying a piña colada version with shaved coconut milk ice and pineapple syrup (by the way, this is the brand of syrup I bought and we liked it). I also want to try freezing chocolate milk and seeing how that goes as a snow cone. I have been joking (not really joking maybe) that this will be the perfect recession treat since it’s just water and flavored syrup. We’re getting ahead of the economic downturn over here.

A cylindrical attachment on the kitchenaid mixer that makes shaved ice. A bowl of shaved ice with red and yellow syrup below the machine. — new snowcone machine

a bowl of shaved ice topped in red and yellow syrups — new snowcone machine

Media

Eurovision is this week! If you don’t know what Eurovision is, you’re missing out on the campiest time of the year! Nearly 40 countries from Europe (plus Australia. Just accept it) send a musical act to compete in the name of peace, love, and music. You can watch all the music videos for this year’s competition on the Eurovision youtube channel here. I really like the songs from Sweden, Australia, Estonia, but there are many fun songs. I am thinking it would be fun to go next year for my 40th birthday so I am hoping the winner is a place it would be nice to visit (the winner’s country hosts the next competition).

Moving It

It is, once again, dance recital season! You’re invited to watch me dance my little heart out on May 31. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts

Kitchen Witchery

I made some good, relatively easy dinners over the last two weeks. I liked this tofu and asparagus stir fry recipe from NY Times and will definitely make it again. The recipe is called tumeric-black pepper chicken with asparagus, but I substituted tofu as the recipe itself suggests as an alternative. It was pretty quick and easy to cook, though it did take me more than the 15 minutes the recipe claims to take. No recipe takes only 15 minutes. That is a myth. The other recipe I tried was also from NY Times Cooking (note that you can access it for free with the Sacramento Public Library! I’m not spending money on this! Go here and scroll down to New York Times Cooking), lentils with chorizo, greens and yellow rice. Although I made lentils and linguica without greens because we like linguica and I am opposed to hot leaves! Do not make me eat a hot leaf! But I do eat vegetables so we had that with a spring asparagus galette for balance. Also very good and easy to make! I’m leaning in to the asparagus since it’s in season.

A bowl of fried rice topped with stir-fried tofu and asparagus — Turmeric-Black Pepper Tofu With Asparagus

A bowl of bright-yellow rice paired with a lentil and linguica stew — Turmeric-Black Pepper Tofu With Asparagus

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in front of an open window with his face almost pressed to the screen — Taking neighborhood watch seriously

A pile of clean sheets on the bed with Fritz the cat napping in shrimp mode on top of them — Taking neighborhood watch seriously

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: April 27, 2025

Posted on April 27, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Before I get into my big political feelings this week, here’s a picture of my new bed. Keen readers may note it looks exactly like my old bed; that is correct. We got the same bed frame in a larger size and we had already been using a king comforter to end the Blanket Wars. It is much nicer having a little extra room to sprawl. I also really like the Big Fig Mattress. We got the “firm” one, which is actually a little squisher than our old mattress. Kirk claims he would like a harder bed but he also admitted he’s sleeping well on it. This is a man who happily naps on the floor though so we can’t really trust his opinion on whether a bed is comfortable, can we?

new king-size bed with Fritz in the corner looking at something out the window — bed update

Current Events

Okay, this stuff sucks but if I don’t talk about it, my brain will explode.

For the last fucking time: Vaccines do not cause autism

On April 16, Robert F Kennedy Jr, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, stood up in public in front of a microphone and said some of the shittiest things possible about autism. He said that autism is a “disease” and an “epidemic.” He is mad that we all know about autism now and so many people are autistic, unlike when he was a lad and presumably no one was autistic. Here’s the quotation that stuck out to me and that’s been making the rounds on the internet:

These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And we need to put an end to it.
April 16, 2025 Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy News Conference on Autism Rates

My first reaction was “oh, cool, do I not have to pay taxes now?” I know that’s not what’s going on here of course but I’m contractually obligated to joke about these things for mental health reasons. These comments have led to a flood of discourse by autistic people and our loved ones in the theme of “I play baseball! I write poems! I can use the toilet!” Okay, congrats. That is not the point. If you can do all that, this isn’t about you. This is about dehumanizing a group of people with greater needs and making it clear that the government thinks some people do not deserve to live.

But let’s go back a little bit. These remarks were delivered in the context of RFK’s new research focus for the HHS. He thinks we need to find the “toxins” and “environmental exposures” that are causing autism and he has announced that we are going to know the cause of autism by September. The AP reports that “Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort.” This is not a good-faith effort to figure out what causes autism. If it were, we wouldn’t have an end-date a just a few months away and the guy in charge wouldn’t be a known “vaccines cause autism” guy. That’s because this “research” doesn’t actually matter for what is happening now. It doesn’t matter what they “find,” the results are gonna be the same.

For the record, vaccines do not and never have caused autism. There’s a whole-ass Wikipedia article about the original fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield, published in 1998, that started this whole lie. Wakefield is no longer a licensed doctor because of that paper. The Lancet, the journal that published Wakefield’s work, redacted it. There is literally zero evidence that vaccines are linked to autism. Autism is a developmental disorder, which means that autistic kids reach developmental milestones slower than neurotypical peers. The reason people don’t notice autism when their children are little infants is because all they know how to do is shit and scream and that’s considered developmentally appropriate. It takes a little while for their brains and bodies to cook so most parents won’t notice anything amiss until kids are around two or three years old—coincidentally the same age that kids start getting vaccinated.

We do, however, know that genetics are a major factor in whether you get autism or not. That’s why so many parents of autistic kids are getting diagnosed now. The doctor evaluates the kid then looks at the parents and says “you know, you may want to consider …” et voila. I also think a lot of kids from my generation did not get diagnosed earlier because most parents of autistic kids are some flavor of neurodiverse themselves and, when their kid does weird autistic shit, they say “well, everyone is like that.” Spoiler: not everyone is like that. Everyone here is like that because the family is autistic. More people are getting diagnosed because they are comparing notes on the internet in a way that wasn’t possible until recently. Diagnostic criteria have also been updated such that more people can be diagnosed. The 2013 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had updated guidelines that said practitioners could diagnose someone with both ADHD and autism (colloquially known as “AuDHD”). This led to way more autism diagnoses because ADHD and autism appear together so frequently.

a picture of the planet Pluto with the text "'There was no autism diagnosed before 1930.' Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930, Pluto causes autism" — have we considered …?

Reminder: Not being disabled is temporary

The rhetoric is currently focused on autism and ADHD, but that could change. Two things to keep in mind about disability are:

Anyone can become disabled at any time
“Disability” is a social construct (My thoughts on this subject were significantly informed by Imani Barbarin aka crutches_and_spice on Instagram).

You might get arthritis as you age. You might get in a car accident and get a traumatic brain injury. You could go blind. You could lose a hand in an industrial accident. You might develop type 2 diabetes. You might have a major depressive episode. You might, as six to seven percent of adults do, develop long COVID. These are all disabilities. Hell, being near-sighted is a disability but, as a culture, we’ve decided that wearing glasses is fine and a little myopia among friends is nothing to fret over. Anyone can be born disabled or become disabled (or have disability thrust upon them). This is why the response to “Autistic people will never play baseball” isn’t “I’m a professional baseball player.” The response needs to be that people are worthy of living with dignity and as much independence as possible even if they are disabled. Being disabled isn’t a reason to throw someone away. Yes, right now they’re only focusing on autism, but it’s naive to think this won’t progress to any other disability.

What is considered a disability can change. The American Psychiatric Association classified “homosexuality” as a mental disorder until 1973. Being gay wasn’t just a way of being: it was a disease. In the 1940s and 50s, “roughly 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe” with the goal of “reduc[ing] agitation, anxiety, and excess emotion.” Oh, and the vast majority of lobotomies were performed on women (including on RFK Jr.’s aunt Rosemary, just for one example). Being too emotional was a disability worthy of getting your frontal lobe severed.

This is why it should worry you that republicans are pushing concepts like “Trump derangement syndrome,” pathologizing resistance to dear leader.

the top half of a white cat's face, it's eyes narrowed. Small text above its head reads "wack." — so fucking wack

Our society has spent the last five years normalizing mass death, as Sarah Kendzior has often put it, thanks to the covid pandemic. There are still thousands of people dying from covid every month yet our government declared the “public health emergency” was over (which, I know from my job, just meant they weren’t going to support anyone or pay for anything. It was never a declaration that the covid pandemic was over). We’re just supposed to be fine with this. Remember when the Texas lieutenant governor said in 2020 that we would just need to let some old people die as a sacrifice to the economy? Everyone freaked out over this at the time but that’s basically what we ended up doing. So many people are acting like the pandemic is over or vaccines and masking is unnecessary. Yes, the risk is lower than it was but you know what brings the risk down even more? Getting your damn vaccine. Wearing a fucking mask in public. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when this government eventually comes out and says that we need to start letting disabled people die for the economy. We’ve been doing it for years now.

Straight-up Nazi shit

All this shit is eugenics. It was always eugenics and Trump has always been a eugenicist president. It’s not a secret. One of Trump’s early acts as a candidate in 2015 was to mock a disabled reporter. Trump’s speeches have often echoed Hitler and he reportedly keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” in reference to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017. He’s a white supremacist who brings people with the same ideology into his government. Given this, it’s not surprising that RFK Jr. is out here talking about autistic people being a drain on the economy in a way that evokes Nazi Germany’s concept of “useless eaters.”

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this administration seems to be establishing a framework that positions autistic and ADHD people as enemies of America or, at best, freeloaders. There was the February 13 Executive Order Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which explicitly named autism as a “dire threat to the American way of life.” Now, I am only an amateur historian, but I don’t think you need a Ph.D. to see what is about to happen. As usual, I would like to preface this with I desperately hope I am wrong. Alternately, I hope things change and this becomes irrelevant. However, with things as they are, I think this is a very possible path. These are my predictions:

RFK will announce in September that vaccines cause autism. The US will stop funding and researching vaccines. More people will be sick and die from preventable disease and more people will become disabled.
Being autistic will now be “our fault” for being vaccinated. The US will stop providing any kind of disability support. They’re already working on this with ending support for Section 504, which grants disabled people equal access to education.
With all support removed, more autistic people will struggle to be “productive” members of society. The unemployment rate among autistic people is already very high (around 40% per this study from 2017, but there are many studies with varying results). Remember that disabled people who don’t work can get Social Security disability benefits, but DOGE is working hard to dismantle the Social Security Administration. It will be harder to get what little money Social Security provides to disabled people.
The goverment will start rounding up disabled people and letting us die or sending us to work camps. RFK Jr. previously said he wants to send people to camps. I’m not just pulling that idea from the air. He literally already wants to do that.

This may sound far-fetched to some, but I find it all too plausible. The government already said that autistic people are a drain on society. RFK Jr. has already announced that he will be building a registry of autistic people. CBS news reports that “The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new effort to study autism,” and “a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism, which will be integrated into the data.” They also want to use data from “smart watches and fitness trackers.” Wow, what could possibly go wrong? (So, so much.)

This is just one piece of the assault on our freedoms that we’re experiencing under Trump round two. And you know what makes me insane? They fucking told us they would do this. The extreme right-wing nutjobs got together and wrote 900 pages of fanfiction about America and all the terrible things they want to do and now they are making it canon. They are taking advantage of normalized mass death, the many surveillance technologies, and our disregard for other people and weaponizing it to further divide us. The antidote to fascism is radically caring about other people. It is both that simple and that difficult. We all have to grow the fuck up and start giving a shit about others even if they are kind of annoying. “Autistic people will never write a poem.” So fucking what? I bet RFK Jr. hasn’t ever written a poem and can’t even tell you what scansion is but that doesn’t mean he should be left for dead while a worm eats his brain. Lots of people will never write a poem but that may be down to our education system more than anything. The point is this: everyone who is alive is worthy of life. The second you start deciding that some people don’t deserve it, you’re being a fascist. That’s it. That’s been this country’s problem for a long time but it came into stark relief thanks to covid and it’s only getting worse now. We are too quick to say “it’s fine if some people just die.” No, it’s not. That’s not how you get to be a civilization. If society can’t take care of the people least able to care for themselves, then it’s not a society at all.

Books and Other Words

book: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit — Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I picked up Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson from the Lavender Library. This autobiographical novel focuses on Jeanette’s extremely religious upbringing in 1960s England. Jeanette grows up going to church, spreading the word of the Lord everywhere she goes, and planning to be a missionary when she grows up. When she finally starts going to public school, the teachers and the other kids are put off by her off-the-charts religious zeal. Her life gets upended when Jeanette starts realizing she’s attracted to girls and she gets shunned by her mother and entire church community. One of the book’s ironies, however, is that nearly all the characters in the book are women. Women are the practically the only people in her life aside from the church pastor and her father (who doesn’t figure into the story at all). Yet, when Jeanette is attracted to women, suddenly women’s company is a problem. I related a fair bit to this book although my upbringing wasn’t nearly as severe as Winterson’s. I remember being weird and religious at school too, like the time my sixth grade teacher asked us to imagine a utopia and I invoked the “law of consecration” (that’s an archive.org link so you don’t have to give internet traffic to the Mormons church), which is basically religious socialism (no need to wonder why I’m a leftist lol). My teacher left a note on my work like “???” I had no idea it was a term specific to church. Mormonism also taught (and presumably still teaches) that it’s “okay” to be attracted to people of the same sex as long as you don’t act on it. Which … it’s not really okay then? Not surprising that it took me until my 20s to realize that I was bi, is it?

book cover for Space Opera featuring a disco ball with rings like a planet. Greyscale on kobo ereader — Space Opera

I re-read Space Opera by Catherynne Valente to refresh myself before reading the sequel, Space Oddity, which was published last fall. The book is very much in the spirit of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in that it’s a madcap tale of humanity’s first encounter with the wide and widely populated in universe. In Space Opera, the galaxy’s various other inhabitants hold a Eurovision-like contest to decide if the species they encounter are sentient. Aging pop star Decibel Jones and what remains of his band, The Absolute Zeroes, get dragged into the song contest to try to prove that humans are, well, human. It’s funny and wacky and emotional and there are lots of very weird alien species. This book came out in 2018 and is what got me interested in Eurovision in the first place (Valente explicitly describes this book as “space Eurovision”), although it was a few years before I actually watched the whole thing live. I also really appreciate the book’s message that the antidote to things being fascist and shitty isn’t to be bummed out but to be as glam and fabulous as possible in the face of it. It’s a highly encouraging perspective and one I am continuously striving to embrace.

book cover for A Conspiracy of Truths in greyscale on kobo ereader — A Conspiracy of Truths

I really loved the Alexandra Rowland books I read last year (notably Running Close to the Wind) so I started working my way through her back catalog with A Conspiracy of Truths. It’s not nearly as wacky as her more recent stuff but it is still a very good story. It follows a nameless man and part of the wandering order of storytellers, called Chants, who gets arrested on suspicion of being a witch, and stays arrested on suspicion of being a spy. The story follows Chant as he literally tries to talk his way out of jail and basically orchestrates a coup in the process. I enjoyed this book enough that I’ve checked out the sequel from the library. I will report back!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

“What the shroom-ghost of J.C. says here in Revelations is exactly the problem with Democrats” via Deez Links. From the article, “I hate Republicans because they’re my political enemies, and in a democracy, politics is the way we make decisions that we would otherwise make by killing each other … Republicans want the world to be worse, whereas Democrats merely don’t want it to be better.”
At Home with the Bean King via Alta. I enjoyed this profile of Steve Sando, the founder of Rancho Gordo, which is where I buy most of my beans!
Just your non-religious blessings for making it through the week via @longlivenewro on instagram. This is my favorite thing right now. The Pink Eminence is blessing us for surviving the week.

Corporeal Form

My dentist recently informed me that I need braces to which I immediately replied “I already had braces.” Alas, it’s possible to need braces again. Such things should be illegal.

a gif of flaming text reading "more fucking body problems"

Apparently the position of my tongue leaves it constantly pushing on my front teeth and it’s shoving the teeth outward, so now my bite is all fucked up. The dentist said that, if I get braces, I’ll have to wear a retainer forever afterwards or I’ll be back to the same issue. So, I was like, okay fine let’s get this over with and I have an appointment this week to have them installed. The braces in and of themselves are annoying but I’m overly upset about it. It’s more like, god, another thing to deal with. We’re living through fascism and now I have to get braces. Give me a break.

Languages and Wikipedia

I’m still working away at my translations and other Wikipedia editing. I passed 2,000 edits on English Wiki this week! Most of my edits are small, but still, I think it’s cool. I’m making progress on translating all the articles about Skagafjörður, Iceland into English. In my list of something like 160 articles, I’ve got around 40 left. Some recent selections include: Hraun in Fljót, Skeiðsfoss power station, and Djúpudalir. In Spanish, I’m currently on a James Thurber kick. He’s best known as the author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—Spanish Wikipedia had articles for both movie adaptations but not the original story. So I translated that and then continued on to the articles about The Unicorn in the Garden and The Catbird Seat. Up next is A Thurber Carnival, which is a stage production. Until I came across this article, I had completely forgotten that I actually did a few scenes from it in high school. My drama III class used it for our end-of-semester showcase. Funny how life is full of details that you can forget about until something prompts you to remember.

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a new dinner recipe, remixed an existing recipe, and made a new dessert over the last two weeks. I liked this skillet vegetable pot pie, featuring green peans and potatoes. I added flagolet beans to it, which kind of made it a green bean pie since that’s where flagolet beans come from. That’s okay though. It was good but I either needed to cut the potatoes smaller or cook the pie longer becase they were a little crunchy, which is not what anyone wants from potato. I also skipped the egg wash because I am not using a whole egg on aesthetics in this economy! I used the rest of the flagolet beans in a version of this butter beans with pecorino and pancetta recipe. I mixed in some tortellini to round out the dish and I thought it was really good! Finally, I made this delicious chocolate cake with brown butter frosting. The frosting was so dang good. It was definitely worth the extra effort.

a bowl of soupy pot pie with potato, beans, and green beans topped with puff pastry — skilled vegetable pot pie

a plate with a big pile of tortellini mixed with beans and pancetta, plus broccoli and a slice of bread — skilled vegetable pot pie

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Just look at this fucking guy.

Fritz the cat laying on his side tucked under a sheet. His head and shoulders are sticking out at the top and the tip of his tail at the bottom — absolute baby

Fritz the cat lying on a dining chair in the path of the sun — absolute baby

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: April 13, 2025

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I have recently been beset by the urge to mindlessly click on things. Last week I “beat” the watermelon game, which has been my go-to activity when I want to just click at something for a while, that is, I made two watermelons. I was deeply disappointed that they did not merge and there were no fireworks or anything to mark this accomplishment. The game acted like this wasn’t even an achievement. What a disappointment. I had to find a new thing to click on for when I want to do nothing (perhaps others would feed this urge by scrolling TikTok or something, but I must click and videos are not relaxing), so I’ve started playing minesweeper. I used to play minesweeper a lot as a kid. Of course, back then it came for free with the computer (Microsoft has taken everything from us!). We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the week or during the daytime in the summer, so I would spend a lot of time playing Windows computer games and listening to the radio. There’s something satisfying about just clicking on shit. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a form of autistic stimming. Anyway, I’m keeping myself entertained and away from the infinite scroll.

Screenshot of the watermelon game showing two watermelons stacked on top of each other surrounded by a few other, smaller fruits — The watermelon game mocks my successes

a completed game of minesweeper on expert mode — The watermelon game mocks my successes

Current Events

As much as I appreciate being right about things, I would prefer to not have been right about this one. In November, I advised that everyone stock their pantries and refill their medication in anticipation of Trump taking office. It was always possible that Trump was making shit up and wouldn’t set raise tariff rates, but he generally does things he says he’s going to do if those things will be harmful. So, of course, he announced sweeping increases in tariffs (then walked some back after the stock market crashed but I think it’s probably too late for our economy). Too many still seem not to understand that the country the tariff applies to not the one paying. China isn’t paying a 145% tax on imports to us. Great job, something that came from China and will now cost more than double. Meanwhile federal minimum wage is still $7.25. We’re extremely fucked.

Gif from The Matrix of Switch shaking her head and saying "not like this" — It’s cool to be right, but not like this

The idea I’m stuck on right now is that people do not know where food comes from. I saw a tweet circulating (and it seemed like an earnest one, not a joke) that we grow bananas all over the US, so those prices won’t go up (fact check: you can grow bananas in Hawaii, but not the rest of the US. India and China are the biggest banana exporters). Vanilla comes from Madagascar (47% tariffs) and Mexico. Cinnamon comes from China, Vietnam (46% tariffs), and Indonesia (32% tariffs). And this is to say nothing of coffee and chocolate. Some idiot online suggested that psychopathic YouTube mogul Mr. Beast start growing chocolate in the US. I am not exaggerating when I say people don’t know where food comes from. We are careening into a USSR-like economy because of one man’s hubris and people who think you can grow cacao just anywhere are cheering him on. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, “Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.” Trump believes you’re winning or you’re losing and he thinks this will make us win. Somehow. We’re all fucking losing now though. Just ask anyone about their 401(k) and you’ll hear all about it.

Gif from Arrested Development of Lucille Bluth saying "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?" — Our future

Books and Other Words

book cover for Ghost Bride shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Ghost Bride

Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo started off a little slow for my taste, but I ultimately enjoyed the story and the peek into another culture’s folklore. The story follows Li Lan, a young woman in colonial Malaysia, who gets an offer from a local wealthy family to be a ghost bride, that is, to wed the family’s recently deceased son so he will have a wife in the afterlife. The ghost of the would-be groom turns out to be a real asshole and starts harassing Li Lan in her dreams, which leads her to seeing a medium and taking some kind of remedy to keep ghosts away. Alas, this goes awry and Li Lan herself nearly dies, sending her on a journey through the spirit world. What really seems to suck about this afterlife is that you can be rich or poor depending on the offerings your descendants make for you. The aforementioned wealthy family is wealthy in death too, and there are other spirits who come to work for them. Imagine dying and still having to work as a housekeeper or some shit. The real nightmare here is capitalism.

book cover for Women in the Valley of the Kings shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Women in the Valley of the Kings

I do love reading about Egypt and Egyptology, one of my earlier special interests, so when the library’s new book alert newsletter had Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard on it, I had to check it out. This book chronicles the careers of a number of women who worked in the field in its infancy and made it what it is today. This book seems to have required extensive archival excavations because most of these women maybe got a mention on the acknowledgements page of men’s work, or they are named in correspondence, but are not big names in their own right. As in many professions, women in Egyptology were hampered by gendered expectations (that they should get married and care for others, for example) that did not hinder men. One of my favorite chapters was about two women, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome, who copied down the art in the temple of Seti I (someone has a website about them with the art!). A job like that requires so much knowledge and technical skill, yet the men managing the site expected these women to host any visitors and take care of anyone who stopped by for medical support on top of their existing work. That’s a whole extra job! Anyone could make guests comfortable but not just anyone could accurately re-draw temple art. I really felt for all the people in this book who were just trying to learn and share knowledge but had to do all this extra stuff. Another of the women Sheppard profiles, Caroline Ransom Williams, worked for a while for the Metropolitan Museum of of Art and is the person behind the display of the Egyptian tomb they have there. Yet, this woman was cobbling together work while, as Sheppard puts it, caring for her aging mother and her husband. Sheppard also explains that Caroline tried to encourage the Met to hire some of her male colleagues to replace her, but they wouldn’t because that would require paying them way more, even though Caroline had way more experience. So rude.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’ via Michigan Advance. Imagine the most disgusting, fascist shit possible. Whatever you imagined, this is probably worse. These are the people running our country.
The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and Shifting All Public Communications to X via Wired. Seems like a really bad way to communicate with people who probably don’t use the internet and almost certainly aren’t using “X.”
From X: Young people are calling the em-dash “the ChatGPT hyphen.” They are inventing new ways for me to not sound human! I’ve been called many variations on a robot in my time. I’m sure I’m going to start being told I’m using unedited ChatGPT now all because of my love for the em dash. I’m going to be like that professor accused of being AI in an email (they’re just autistic).
2025 stock market crash via Wikipedia. The devil works fast but Wikipedia editors work faster!
Are People Bad At Their Jobs….or Are The Jobs Just Bad? via Culture Study. It seems like every service we interact with is staffed by people who are bad at what they do. Anne Helen Peterson argues that work is structured in a way that makes it hard for people to do a good job. They’re not hiring enough people or training them well, or they pay structure incentivizes doing a shitty job.

Rampant Consumerism

I mentioned in my last post that I was investigating whether I have acid reflux (I do; more on that shortly) and one thing you can do about it is get an incline pillow. I was already seeing a bunch of instagram ads for complicated pillow systems for hypermobile people (because hypermobility means it takes more work to hold your body up, so a big-ass pillow can feel good), and one of them is also billing itself as an “acid reflux relief system” so I was like okay let’s try it. I bought the MedCline pillow and it is very comfortable. It feels really cozy to nest in it and read. I am, unfortunately, still trying to get adjusted to actually sleeping on it though, mostly because you need to lie on your side for it to work right and I usually sleep on my back. Some nights I’m waking up halfway through and swapping in my regular pillows and other nights I try to fall asleep in it and give up. Still, I am hopeful I will adjust. It really does feel like it’s helping. The main downside is that it’s interrupting Fritz’s ability to cuddle with me. He likes to sleep between my feet or in the crook of my arm, neither of which are possible if I’m wrapped around a body pillow. In short: I’m a monster.

With the gigantic new pillow situation, I also suggested to Kirk that we should get a king bed (we have been sharing a queen for years). I’ve brought it up before but he likes to sleep on the very edge like a neglected orphan so he was like “why?” I finally said that I want a bigger bed and he was like, well that’s all you had to say. I also made the case that if we are going to buy anything, we have to do it before tariffs make everything twice as expensive, so we went ahead and ordered a Big Fig mattress and a bigger version of the same Ikea bed frame that we’ve been using (everyone hates change!). The mattress has yet to arrive but I will report back once we get the new bed set up.

Corporeal Form

I’ve learned that some of my health issues have been acid reflux all along! Did you know that it is not normal to burp all the time? I thought it was because most of my family is like that. It’s also not normal to have to blow your nose and cough up gunk all the time, especially when you’re already taking allergy medication (I take a pill and a spray daily as it is). I started taking a daily acid reflux pill and I’m feeling a lot better. I’m once again shocked to learn that I’ve had an ongoing health condition and didn’t realize it because I thought that’s how being alive felt. I didn’t even know I was feeling acidity until I went away. I am glad to finally be taking care of some of these problems but aggravated that I’ve spent years suffering for nothing.

What’s really fucking me up about this situation is that the strategies for dealing with acid reflux are in conflict with things I’m doing for my other ailments. Since I’ve learned more about hypermobility, I’ve accepted that it takes more energy to hold my body up that it does for most people and have made lounging and lying down a big part of my day. It’s great. Unfortunately, acid reflux requires you to stay upright for a few hours after eating so the acid doesn’t come back up and attack you. Another suggestion is to eat more frequent, smaller meals throughout the day. So, if it feels bad to lie down for two or three hours after eating, and I’m supposed to eat less but more often, when does the lying down happen? I am struggling. I have been spending a lot more time at my computer (probably why I’m playing minesweeper!), which kind of sucks because it took me years of practice to not spend all day on the computer. I’m getting stressed out in the evenings about eating dinner early enough so I can lie down. It’s not going great. This all makes me feel like I need to eat a whole bunch in a panic so that I will have lying down time later, which is also a bad idea for several reasons, not the least because I finally learned how to stop binge eating in the last few years (the un-glamorous secret: once you stop restricting calories and telling yourself you can’t have certain foods, you will level out). I’m not sure what to do about this, or if there is anything I can do about this. It’s hard and I’m upset so I’m writing about it. Hopefully things will get easier as I get more accustomed to dealing with this.

Kitchen Witchery

I made a few good dishes this week. I tried the chili con carne recipe from The Bean Book and it was delicious. I simmered it extra long so the meat would be tender and that was a good choice. We had that with biscuits and roasted carrots topped with goat cheese. I tried this NY Times recipe for spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts. The instructions note you can use substitute tofu for the chicken so I gave that a try for lunch a few days ago. I liked the cooking method but the flavor wasn’t that strong. Maybe I used the wrong type of chili or maybe this is a classic case of NYT cooking making something bland. I poured some other sauce I had on hand over the leftovers and liked that, so I think I will keep this as a recipe but just use another sauce. Finally, I’ve been desperately wanting some good coffee cake for the last few weeks, so I made the Smitten Kitchen New York crumb cake. It was so good. This is the correct cake:crumb ratio and I will not be taking questions about it.

A bowl of chili con carne—beans and chunks of meat are visible—topped with sour cream — Chili con carne

A skilled full of udon, tofu crumbles, and peanuts, festively topped with chopped chives — Chili con carne

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in a too-small play tent on top of the dining table. His legs are hanging out one end and we can see his face through a little window. — this ridiculous child

Fritz the cat in a corner in front of the mirrored closet door. The sun is hitting him directly and reflecting off the mirror to sun his back, — this ridiculous child

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 30, 2025

Posted on March 30, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. As usual, so much is happening. I was thinking about writing a mini-essay on recent events, like our top government officials using a group chat to plan bombing campaigns. I’m not really sure what I can add to this discussion though, so I will refrain from saying much. However, I do want to note that, although it is very funny (funny sad, not funny ha-ha) that they are so stupid that they added the Atlantic editor to the war plans chat (it is also funny that half the group chats in the country are now nicknamed things like “⁨war secrets group chat [secure!]”), it is not funny that they are bombing Yemen. Last I checked, we are not at war with Yemen and Congress has not declared a war. Yet, we’re just bombing countries willy-nilly. What is wrong with this country. Also a celebrated scholar of fascism just left his job at Yale to move to Canada. Seems like a bad sign!

Other than our crumbling society, I had a really interesting conversation while volunteering at the Lavender Library on Friday. I was chatting with a fellow volunteer who has been working there a long time and who is old enough to be my mom, and she mentioned that it’s very hard to keep up with what the younger people are listening to and watching and saying. Our culture is so fractured though that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to “keep up.” I’m certainly not. I just learned who Dua Lipa was last year and she’s a pretty big pop star at this point (it’s okay if you still don’t know who Dua Lipa is). Thirty years ago you could turn on the TV and everyone had more or less the same access to the same culture, maybe your friend had cable or HBO and you didn’t, but even then, there was only so much you could get. With the way the internet is now, you could make a full-time job of watching, reading, or listening to things and it’s possible to have zero overlap with your peers. There’s no Saturday morning cartoons anymore and we have Top 40 radio but it seems like Taylor Swift took that over. The good here is that you can really dig into the things you like. If you love obscure music, you don’t have to travel to the record store two hours away to find your favorites; everything is on Spotify or Apple Music or BandCamp now. Way more people have the ability to create and share their art than they used to, which is honestly one of the best things about the internet. So, the idea of keeping up with the culture kind of doesn’t even exist anymore. Most of us are out of step with our local mainstream in some form or another. I know this is true based on experience—just try telling anyone how excited you are for Eurovision (I am very excited for Eurovision)!

XKCD comic reading "I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things. Because for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time. If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun." — from XKCD.com

Books and Other Words

Cover of the book Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. It's light purple with an illustration of a raised fist. — Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

I found Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner in the stacks at the Lavender Library and decided to check it out since I haven’t done much reading about bisexuality. I liked this book a lot, especially since it takes a radical perspective. Eisner states that in contrast to “liberal politics, whose goal is to gain access to power structures, radical politics criticizes the very structures and ultimately seeks to take them apart.” This is the best explanation I’ve seen of radicalism yet. The book goes a little further than the usual “bisexual myths” discourse that we are often stuck with. Eisner instead focuses on trying to “extract [bisexuality’s] enormous subversive potential” instead of “normalizing” it the way a lot of works try to do. So, instead of being like “it’s fine an normal to be bi!” Eisner is saying “being bi is different and that actually gives us a unique perspective on society and positions us to make radical change,” which is a very cool approach! One of the most interesting subjects in this book is the concept that bisexuality poses a threat to how society understands itself. Homosexuality is considered more legible to heterosexuals because at least they like just one group of people. Bisexuality makes it harder for people to disavow homosexuality and it calls into question everyone’s sexuality, which freaks people out. Eisner writes that bisexual women are threatening to patriarchy because they “are thought to embody the choice of whether or not to have relationships with men.” Oop!

book cover for The Coin shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — The Coin

Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin is a chronicle of a particular brand of madness. It’s an uncomfortable book—deliberately so—which makes it hard to say whether it’s “good” or not and I’m not even sure I liked it, to be honest. The story’s narrator and protagonist is a rich Palestinian woman who has moved to New York. She’s contemptuous of most everyone and everything in America and takes refuge in elaborate skincare routines that she spends hours at a time on after stocking up on products at CVS (thus earning this ritual the name “CVS retreat”). The narrator works as an English teacher at an all-boys school and leads her classes in ways that would probably get most people fired. She befriends a fashionable man who turns out to be homeless and who convinces her to help him with a scam involving luxury handbags. Despite my ambivalence, this is a well-written work. There are some pithy lines like the US being the “only country in the world with the cultural practice of school shootings.” We see the narrator really lose her grip at the end of the book. Is it the pressure of fitting into another culture? Some kind of demonic possession? Just being an insufferable person? The novel is content to leave us wondering.

book cover for A Desolation Called Peace shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — A Desolation Called Peace

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I talked about two posts ago. This book is, even more than its predecessor, focused on the question of what it means to be people. Our protagonist from the first book, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, gets dragged into the plot by her former liaison Three Seagrass who has somewhat broken protocol to appoint herself to a mission to help the Teixcalaani empire figure out how to communicate with the aliens that are killing the fleet at an alarming pace. That might sound convoluted but it’s very well done. It’s just hard to stuff this big, science fiction concept into a few sentences. I hope Martine writes more books because I really like her perspective and her world-building.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers via California Department of Justice. If you did a 23andMe DNA test, you truly must delete your account. The company is going out of business and we have no idea who will end up with the DNA data it has collected over the years.
Tesla owners are trading in cars at record rates amid Musk backlash via The Washington Post. Lol. Lmao even. By the way, they’re recalling almost all the Cybertrucks. I love to see it.
The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces via Media Matters. Despite conservative complaints about the “liberal media,” the online media ecosystem is “dominated” by right-wing opinions, and conservative shows are much more popular than liberal ones. The report found, for example, that “Nine out of the 10 online shows with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million.” Yikes.
The Pandemic Never Ended via The New Republic. On the ongoing pandemic, long covid, and the way the government is handling (ignoring) it all. From the article, “Today, people say ‘during the pandemic’ when they mean ‘during lockdown.’ This distinction—or lack thereof—upsets me; though I try to remember that people don’t mean to offend. This is the product of ignorance and misinformation, coming from the top down.”

Doing Things

We went to the ballet again and it was cool! I have no big thoughts about it but I was happy to go and hang out with my friends. This was the last show of the Sac Ballet season and we already bought tickets for next season, so now I am looking forward to more outings.

A ticket for Sacramento Ballet Visions 2025 held up. The stage with a blue curtain is in the background. — Visions 2025

Corporeal Form

I’m really going through it with my body. I came to the sudden realization a few weeks ago that it’s become rather difficult for me to breathe. I was emptying the dishwasher like, hey I’m really out of breath right now. And, you know, that’s not a strenuous activity. Everything has been feeling very challenging because of it. You actually need air to function. My friends reminded me that it was probably time to talk to the doctor and of course they were right. I told the doctor that I (really we, since these findings were from the friend quorum) thought I might have asthma. This week I did a pulmonary function test about it. I was worried we wouldn’t learn anything from it and, unfortunately, we only learned that my lungs are functioning fine. This is good but then it’s like, okay, now what. I’ve noticed that doctors have a tendency to see a test result, let you know things look good, then forget that the problem persists despite having nice test results. So, I followed up with my doctor and she ordered a chest x-ray and also mentioned that acid reflux could be a cause of breathing issues, which was news to me.

I have been feeling a little more acidic lately and I had chalked it up to that devil perimenopause, but we have antacids in the house so I figured let’s experiment. I took one and, before long, my airways were free of gunk, and I wasn’t coughing or burping like I often am. And, yes, I was breathing a bit better. That lasted for a few hours and then my throat started hurting again and the gunk reasserted itself. I think I’ve had acid reflux (or worse?) the whole time and not realized it because it always feels that way.

I’m so frustrated with my health because I feel like I’m trying really hard to take care of myself, but I can’t figure out that things are wrong with me if things have always been wrong. When I got a special glasses prescription and started doing physical therapy for binocular vision dysfunction, my head stopped hurting and I realized I’d had a permanent headache. I only registered “headache” when it was worse than usual, without acknowledging the constant, low-grade pain. Once that stopped hurting, I was able to realize that my jaw was bothering me, and I got diagnosed with TMJ dysfunction. I’m peeling away layers of physical issues and I keep discovering more issues underneath that I wasn’t able to isolate from the symphony of physical signals. I’m sure part of this due to the autism, which is infamous for making us struggle to connect to our physical sensations. However, I think a significant part of the problem is that I’ve had to learn to care for myself as an adult in a way I didn’t get when I was growing up. My dad recently told us that he figured we were fine if we weren’t bleeding. It’s taken a long time to unlearn the idea that so much discomfort is normal and it’s good to seek help. I have a kind of learned helplessness about a lot of little things like this. Fortunately Kirk and my friends often help me recognize that there are different ways to do things and I don’t have to be uncomfortable. It feels so stupid to not even realize that my body is hurting but I’m doing my best. We’re slowly getting somewhere.

I’m planning to pick up some more powerful over-the-counter medication and see how I feel. I do feel notably better even with the basic meds, so I am curious to see how this shakes out and report back to my doctor. I’m glad this doctor is being more helpful than most, but I wish doctors would have a little more curiosity. There has to be a better way to help people like me figure out what their problems are. I often don’t even tell the doctor something until I’ve read up on an issue and find myself saying “oh no, I bet I have that too.” I’m often right (not always, but often enough). Why do doctors never ask about symptoms? It’s just, how are you? Ma’am, I have no fucking idea. You’re the doctor.

Kitchen Witchery

Last week I roasted a chicken for dinner and we had that with some vegetables and butternut squash risotto. I have probably said this before (and shared photos that look exactly the same) but roasting a chicken well feels like the pinnacle of a certain kind of cooking to me. I feel so much pride for being able to roast a good chicken. Last week I also made some really good burgers with blue cheese and caramelized onions, but I forgot to take a picture! In desserts, I made these absolutely delicious caramel bars with candied peanuts (recipe from 100 Cookies). They’re kind of like a millionaire’s shortbread plus peanuts. They have a shortbread base, caramel layer, candied peanuts, and chocolate on top. I will certainly make these again because they are fucking good.

A plate with a chicken leg, roasted carrots and green beans, butternut squash risotto, and a roll — chicken dinner photo that is probably identical to a past photo

cross section shot of caramel bars with candied peanuts showing a shortbread base, a thick layer of caramel topped with caramelized peanuts, and covered with chocolate — chicken dinner photo that is probably identical to a past photo

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This fucking guy.

me and Fritz. Fritz is leaning against my chest. His back fee and one of his front feet are in my hand and his head is tucked upsidedown into my elbow — cuddle cat

I'm lying on my stomach and titling my face up to the camera. Fritz is standing on my back and giving the camera a wide-eyed stare — cuddle cat