weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: October 29, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I generally think of myself as productive and not hampered by executive dysfunction, but other times I get completely stymied by how many steps a process has and I’ve really been feeling this lately. For example, I had some shirts to return. This involves going to the post office, and that involves finding a time to go, being willing to stand around in public, and getting dressed beforehand. And if I’m doing all that to go outside, I should probably do some more errands like return my library books. I had to print a return label, which had been the sticking point in this process for the last two weeks. I knew my printer was going to be annoying. I had to connect it to our new wifi network, which changed when we switched to fiber internet last month. Then I knew I would have to run various head cleaning and other maintenance things because the damn thing never prints correctly on the first try. On Friday, I managed to overcome my resistance to doing so many tasks but the head cleaning didn’t fix anything so I just printed a several unusable shipping labels. I finally gave up and sent the label to the local fedex store for printing (more tasks!). The good news is that I did eventually get the shirts in the mail.

Apparently, this kind of view on tasks is very neurodivergent. Most people would just see “print the label” or “return the shirts” as the whole task, whereas I’ve got ten things to do to reach the same goal. It’s exhausting. Another version of this that is wearing me out daily now is our shower. You may remember two posts ago when I said our shower isn’t draining right. It’s still not. We had a contractor come out and agree that it’s shit and the whole floor and 18 inches of tile (at minimum) needs to be ripped up. The original contractor also sent someone out when we asked for them to look at it. Their guy said “This is bad. Who did this?” YOU DID, MY DUDE. We’ve called the contractor to follow up but haven’t heard back from them as promised. Shocking stuff. So, we’re showing in the other bathroom, but the other bathroom is where the cat litter box is. That means that showering now involves moving the cat litter box, putting the bath mat on the floor (we hang it over the shower curtain rod when not in use because, again, cat litter box), and then taking a shower. Plus I have to do the whole thing in reverse afterwards. This is adding way too many steps to a daily process and, it might sound ridiculous, but it’s super draining (unlike my stupid shower!!). I constantly feel like Hal in this scene from Malcolm in the Middle. Although I do feel like I’ve been getting a lot of stuff done lately, the background on that is everything I do has all these little extra steps that are making me crazy.

Current Events

I’ve been reading up on the Israel/Palestine conflict over the last two weeks. I am feeling a bit ashamed of my ignorance because I honestly didn’t know a lot about it. I have heard for my whole life that this issue is just too complicated. What I’ve learned, however, is it’s seriously not complicated. I don’t mean this in a “I read a few articles and now I’m an expert” way, but like, it’s a much more clear-cut issue than I was led to believe. Reading about how Israel was founded was extremely eye-opening. Palestine became a British colony after World War I. According to Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (currently free as an ebook!), which I read last week,

Britain privileged the small Jewish population over the Palestinians. In 1917 there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinians. Nonetheless, Britain gave 90 percent of concessions for projects like building roads and power plants to Jewish capitalists, and by 1935, Zionists owned 872 out of the 1,221 industrial firms in Palestine.

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

Wow! It really always does go back to the fucking British empire. Britain did this, despite being “rabidly antisemitic,” because they wanted to pay someone to keep the Arab population in check and they wanted to support Zionism because they were a powerful opposing force to the leftism otherwise prevalent in Europe’s Jewish working class. It only gets worse. During World War II, Israel’s leadership had opportunities to take in Jews fleeing the holocaust, but they “sabotaged proposal after proposal” because they didn’t want poor and old Jews immigrating. The state also confiscated over a million acres of farmland from Arab people to give to Israelis, often after setting off bombs to level entire villages. It’s just disgusting. This is all public knowledge! This stuff is on Wikipedia. It’s not a secret but it’s also not exactly what they tell you in the news either.

Returning to the present, Israel “imposed a ‘complete siege‘” of Gaza, cutting off supplies and power. Israel has now also shut off internet and phone services, which has cut off Palestinians from the rest of the world. Not to be histrionic, but this is war crime stuff (although, to pause for a little philosophy, shouldn’t all war be crime? But you get my point, I’m sure). Israel is unequivocally wrong here. Another article that stuck with me was this one, which describes how Israel has even limited how much of the sea Palestine has access to. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Palestine had a coast, but of course it is on the Mediterranean. the article explains that, in 1995, “Palestine was allocated a 20-nautical mile zone for economic activities and subsea extraction.” Now they’re down to three. This means Israel reaps the profits for the gas production just 15 miles offshore. Everything I read has me massaging my temples and whispering “Jesus fucking Christ” to myself. Every single thing is like this.

Big, global conflict stuff like this is depressing in part because it feels like there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I know you like it when I provide some concrete ideas, so here are a few things we can do on this issue:

  • The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is working to put economic pressure on Israel similar to tactics used to pressure South Africa to end Apartheid. Here’s some information about companies you can boycott to get you started. One company I am going to start personally boycotting: Sabra Hummus! People on instagram have also been spreading the word about boycotts, calling out L’Oreal, Nestlè, and Disney as brands to boycott, among others.
  • On the other hand, you can buy something from a Palestinian business. One option: Hirbawi, the “last and only” kufiya factory operating in Palestine.
  • For those of us in the United States, contact your elected representatives. Tell them they need to demand a de-escalation and call for a cease fire. Jewish Voice for Peace has a call script you can use. If, like me, you hate calling, you can use something like Resistbot to send your thoughts in via a messenger app.
  • Straight up send cash. I understand that Anera is doing a good job distributing funds. Doctors Without Borders also has a campaign going on for Gaza support.

Books and Other Words

I accidentally got on a Martha Wells kick the last couple weeks. I read her new book, Witch King, which had some really interesting things in it but the plot wasn’t really one of them. The story alternates between past events in which all the characters met and escaped some harrowing circumstances, and the present where they are escaping a new harrowing circumstance and rescuing one of the character’s wives. The world was cool, the characters had a lot of potential, but the resolution had me kinda like “that’s it?” Sorry, Martha! I’ve also been re-reading Wells’ Murderbot series, starting with All Systems Red, in anticipation for a new book coming out in November. Murderbot is a SecUnit, a human/bot construct whose job is to keep clients alive when they go on trips to dangerous places. Murderbot would prefer to do no such thing, and wants to hang around and watch its TV shows. Hilarity ensues. Most fans of the series, myself included, find Murderbot to be very autism-coded and that’s part of the joy of the story. Its a bot construct but really it’s a metaphor for being autistic and dealing with people.

No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-based Eating by Alicia Kennedy is a book I wasn’t sure if I was going to resonate with. I follow Kennedy’s substack, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, because I like what she has to say about food, so I was curious about the book, and it didn’t disappoint. Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not going vegan (or even vegetarian). I’m just interested in food and food discourse. I liked this book and really appreciated how Kennedy got into the politics and consumerism around food, even vegetarian and vegan food. The chapters all dealt with interesting facets of non-meat eating, like the punk roots of veganism with cookbooks like Soy Not Oi! or the chapter about how vegan “cheese” is made (which, shockingly, made me want to try some of the fancy things people are making now, not as a cheese replacement, but just to see what people can do). One theme in the book was not eating meat is about celebrating all the great food that already exists, not making a bunch of faux-meat products to sell at Target so corporations can make money. This resonated with me because I do like vegetarian food but I hate the fake vegan food that’s trying hard to be meat. Just eat a veggie burger made of beans or vegetables! What is the point of making non-meat that approximates meat? Who wants that? Vegans don’t want it. Omnivores would rather eat the meat. Kennedy states that “vegetarianism and veganism reject the consumerist, efficiency-driven, labor-abusing, environmentally taxing status quo on which the US food system is based” and I think that is the most persuasive argument for vegetarianism that I’ve heard yet.

book cover for Palestine: A Socialist Introduction shown on kobo ereader. Huey the cat is sharing the frame.
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction
cover of Witch King by Martha Wells shown on kobo ereader
Witch King
cover for All Systems Red shown on Kobo ereader. Huey the cat is sitting next to the book
All Systems Red
hardcover book: No Meat Required
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-based Eating

Meanwhile, on the internet:

TV and Music

Since we finished watching Stargate: SG-1 last year, Kirk and I have been leisurely working our way through Stargate: Atlantis when we need something to watch. It’s not a brilliant show, but it’s reasonably entertaining. The last two weeks though we’ve been in a rush to finish it because, of course, Hulu is about to remove it from the platform. We have something like 4 days and 5 episodes left. This keeps happening to us. We never finished the last season of Babylon 5 because that also got removed from its platform. It’s annoying because the promise of streaming was that you can watch anything anytime but of course that was a lie and we’re all paying for more and more fragmented services to try to get all the things we want to watch.

Knitting and Crafts

I finally finished a knitting something! This has been a very slow year for knitting for me, which is fine. Hobbies ebb and flow, but it still feels gratifying to make something. This is a new pair of gloves that I made for Mandy. The pattern is spiced cocoa on Ravelry and I used Noro yarn. It was a nice, simple pattern and I like the results. I haven’t blocked them so don’t judge any lumps you may see!

a pair of hand-knit fingerless gloves made in a yarn whose colorway moves from pink to blue, to purple to green
Spiced Cocoa gloves
the palm-side of the fingerless gloves
back of the gloves

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been on a bit of a pumpkin kick because, in at least this sense, I’m pretty basic. I made pumpkin rolls, which is a recipe I love, and I tried a pumpkin cinnamon roll. The cinnamon rolls were good but I think they needed double, or at least one-and-a-half times the filling. I’m a maniac like that. I made a batch of pumpkin and goat cheese macaroni, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before. I probably only make it once per year but we both really enjoy it. By request, I experimented with the concha cookie recipe to make a chocolate topping. I think I ended up adding about two teaspoons of cocoa powder instead of adding food coloring. In retrospect, I should have added a little water or something with it because it came out super crumbly. It was good though. Finally, I made a potato-leek soup with spiced chickpeas. I already had a leek and potato soup recipe that I liked, but this one adds chickpeas into the soup so it’s a little more filling than the strictly potatoes version. Plus the crispy chickpeas on top are enjoyable. As a bonus for Great British Bake Off fans, I’ll note that this recipe is from Chetna!

a pair of cookies on a small plate. The cookies are covered with a very crumbly chocolate craquelin
chocolate concha cookies
two pumpkin cinnamon rolls topped with cream cheese icing on a plate. The rest of the pan of rolls is visible in the background
pumpkin cinnamon rolls
a casserole dish of macaroni and cheese topped with bacon and goat cheese
pumpkin goat cheese macaroni
a close-up of golden pumpkin knot rolls cooling on a wire rack
pumpkin knots
A bowl of smooth soup topped with crispy chickpeas and leeks, plus a swirl of chili oil
potato, leek, and chickpea soup

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Huey has spent almost a whole year loving this little box. It showed up last Christmas and she immediately claimed it. She has even resisted the urge to bite it apart, as she would normally do with anything made of cardboard or paper. Unfortunately, we finally had to throw the box away this week because she pooped in it (reasons unknown!). Kirk threw the box out and Huey spent the next two hours glaring at him and pouting. Sure, it’s Huey’s fault for ruining the box, but she’s still convinced that Kirk did her dirty.

Huet the cat lying on her side, curled up in a shallow box
Huey curled up in her favorite box
Fritz the cat stretched out across a chair, looking soulfully at the camera
Fritz, long baby
Fritz the cat lounging in a small tent. A patch of sunlight is on the tent and looks like it's flowing outward from Fritz
Fritz in his tent enjoying the sun
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: October 14, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been on vacation this week! I planned a week off to hang around at home and chill and read my books. Then I filled my time with appointments and social calls. I don’t regret it but I would like another week off to rest now. Alas, I am trapped in this system that permits me a mere 80 hours of paid time off per year and I had barely gotten out of PTO debt from last year’s Iceland trip. Still, I enjoyed the time off, even though it went fast. I got to see another comedy show, did a double Spanish class with Ana, went with Mandy and her four-year-old daughter to a pumpkin patch where we fed the goats, joined Lemon for an outing to the new Beer’s Books location and to try a new pizza place, and got a new tattoo. Plus I did all my usual dance class stuff and got in a little studying. I had pictured laying in my hammock all week, but I’m not mad about how I spent my time.

Current Events

I was going to put these thoughts in my “on the internet” section but I realized I had more than one bullet point’s worth of thoughts, so today we shall introduce a “current events” section. Here goes.

I’ve seen a lot of bad takes on social media about the Israel/Palestine situation over the the last week. I hope I’m not going to be one of them. In fact, there’s a part of me that is like why comment at all but it’s my blog so I can comment if I want. I’m far from an expert, but I do actually have a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, for what it’s worth. My first thought is that whatever people here in the U.S. say, it kind of doesn’t matter. Everyone (myself included), is rushing to take a stance, but who is that affecting? One of the few insightful things I’ve seen online this week is a comment that it’s easy to sit here and say “violence isn’t the answer” when the implied threat of violence from the United States’ 700+ military bases worldwide is actually what’s making it possible to be “nonviolent.” Our government is extremely obsessed with supporting Israel, even though the United Nations has characterized Israel’s occupation of Palestine as maintaining an “open-air prison.” Meanwhile, the U.S. is sending more weapons to Israel while continuing to arm the rest of the Middle East. The weapons that Hezbollah is using in Syria have also come from the U.S., although not directly. While individual U.S. citizens aren’t the ones sending weapons all over the world or asking for these policies, I find it kind of ridiculous for people in this country to be like “well, both sides are bad :-(” because the side that is bad is actually this country arming everyone to the teeth.

All that said, this is not an excuse to be anti-semetic. Just like individual Americans aren’t responsible for supplying arms to the entire Middle East, individual Jewish people aren’t responsible for Israel’s atrocities. By the same token, we can’t judge all Palestinian people by the actions of Hamas or use this to fuel anti-Muslim bias. Still, I feel it’s unfair to be mad at the desperate actions of Palestinians who have been living in this system for decades. Here’s a statistic from the Los Angeles Times, “Before last week, 6,407 Palestinians had died in Israeli strikes since 2008, most of them in Gaza, according to the United Nations. The Israeli death toll from Palestinian attacks was 308. In a single day, Hamas killed four times that many.” So, I think we need to put some of this information in context before we rush to let our social media followers know that we’re a good person.

Facts and figures aside, I admit this is scary and gut-wrenching even though I don’t personally know anyone involved. I don’t know what the solution is, but my first suggestions are that we all have to see each other as fellow humans and maybe we should stop making so many weapons just to turn a profit. It’s also scary that this could be the spark that ignites the whole Middle East in war, inevitably dragging in the U.S. and others.

Books and Other Words

I haven’t read that much over the last two weeks! I think my brain got tired. I’ve been very interested in all the non-fiction books on my reading list but haven’t been able to sustain the energy and attention required to read them. I got through just one book in the last two weeks. Then I went and bought more books. I could live 1,000 years and not read everything I want to read.

a stack of books including: Translating Myself and Others, Debt the First 5,000 Years, Flutes of Fire, and Knit Wear Love
new books
The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei
The Deep Sky

Imagine you’re traveling through space on a mission to establish human life on a new planet with 79 girls you went to middle and high school with. Then someone dies. That’s the basic nature of the plot of Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky. Humanity isn’t handling the climate crisis well and some trillionaire holds a years-long school program/audition for the space mission. Space exploration meets murder mystery, expect it’s all girls you grew up with. I thought it was a good book, I liked the way the characters were developed and, you know, can’t go wrong with a little global warming to spur people into space!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • 911 dispatcher calls labor situation ‘dehumanizing’ via Easy Reader & Peninsula. My sister made her local news for going to the city council about the shitty treatment she and her coworkers endure as emergency dispatchers. The people who work the 9-1-1 phones are not okay! Mia told me this week that she worked seventeen days in a row then got one day off. It’s not sustainable. Maybe next time we’re thinking about giving the cops more money, we should give it to the dispatchers instead of buying a helicopter or whatever.
  • The all-out revolt against knitting.com helps explain boycotts at Reddit and Etsy via Quartz. I would like tech/finance bros to stop being fucking scavengers and getting involved in things they know nothing about just to make money. Go get a hobby.
  • The American dream is a nightmare via Men Yell at Me. This interview with author Molly McGhee made me immediately preorder her book Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. I really liked how she talked about approaching writing as someone who loves to read. McGhee states, “I think of myself as a reader first. I was always a reader. And when people are like, “What do you do?,” I still have to work really hard not to say I’m a reader because that makes no sense. When I’m writing, it’s just because I love reading so much.” Honestly, I totally get that. I love her for this perspective.
  • Meet this year’s MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipients, including a hula master and the poet laureate via AP News. Wow, another year and still none of you nominated me for a MacArthur grant. Unbelievable.

The Case of the Misplaced “S”

I have been wanting to get a tattoo in Spanish for quite a while now, but especially since passing the DELE exam last year, I have been emotionally ready to get it to celebrate my Spanish skills through putting words on my body. I had a little post-it note with the phrase “todo para todos” (everything for everyone) up in my office for a while because I’d seen it somewhere and really liked it. The tattoo has to do double duty; it can’t just be any random Spanish but it needs to say something about my feelings and beliefs. When, about a month ago, I finally got serious about making an appointment I did a little more research on the phrase and realized the original version is from the Zapatista slogan, “Para todos todo, nada para nosotros” (for everyone, everything, nothing for ourselves), which is about mutual aid and taking a socialist position to uplift everyone.

My appointment was, stupidly in hindsight, yesterday, Friday the 13th. I didn’t realize the tattoo shop would be doing a $13 flash tattoo sale and there would be chaos and a line around the building. This left me sitting the lobby feeling a little overwhelmed as an overly chatty and chummy young woman talked our ears off with honestly no prompting for thirty minutes. I was relieved when I finally went back to get the tattoo started, though less relieved to discover that my tattoo guy and the person in the next room were running competing loud musics. So, I was feeling pretty over it by the time we got to the actual tattoo portion of the day.

To avoid burying the lede any further, I’ll let you know now that my tattoo is spelled wrong. Instead of para todos todo I got para todo todos. I feel stupid about it, which is why I’ve set the stage to tell you how overstimulated I was and how ready I was to be done before we even started. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the problem until I left. I was taking a slow video to show the tattoo to my internet friends (hello, all of you) the new tattoo, which runs along the curve of my arm when I realized the problem. I turned off the sound when I uploaded it, but the original has me exclaiming “oh no.”

Para todos todo

What’s annoying is I know exactly how this unfortunately permanent error made it’s way onto my body. Here’s the reference I provided to the tattoo guy:

So he printed it and brought it back and I explained that I wanted the words laid out horizontally across my arm, like my other tattoos, and not vertically. He left to cut up his stencil and returned with the words in a line instead of a stack. He laid it across my wrist and asked me if it looked right. And it did because it kind of disappears over the edge of my arm unless I turn it at a weird angle. I feel to blame for not catching this but also, can you not keep three words in order? Really? I’m asking so little here.

When the guy started working on the tattoo I asked him if he liked to chat or liked to focus and he said “What do you want to chat about?” so I, foolishly, said “Well, I’m not trying to start a discussion about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.” Naturally that’s what we ended up talking about. Fortunately, it was pretty amicable but, uh, this guy was nuts. He said that you can’t believe everything you see on TV and I was like, yeah, of course, propaganda is real. Then he said it’s fear-based mind control and I was like, oh, okay. He added that he won’t be hypnotized and doesn’t want to be a slave. At this point, reader, I was really ready to leave. Unfortunately, the tattoo was only halfway done. When he finally finished, he folded some kind of fancy paper towel over it and taped that to my wrist (as opposed to the traditional plastic wrap) and sent me on my way. I was tired and ready to escape the chaos.

Of course, the question now is what do I do with a misspelled tattoo? I am not chill enough to be like “haha, life is funny that way sometimes.” After extensive consultation with my friend group (and some crying), Abby made the winning suggestion to put proofreading marks on it. This is a great suggestion since it adds another layer of meaning to the tattoo because editing is my job. It lets me take this with a little humor. “Oh, you misspelled this, let me just make a little adjustment.” We were also considering adding more words to the tattoo, but I really liked the original meaning and I don’t want to feel like I have to launch into a big explanation everyone time someone asks me about it. Here’s what I think I want to do:

I texted the tattoo shop to let them know I want a touch up and I am probably going to have a follow-up appointment soon. So, it’s not exactly what I wanted but it’s going to work out.

Doing Stuff

Last weekend, Abby and I went on another adventure to see a comedian. We drove to Colusa for Atstuko Okatsuka’s “Sacramento” tour stop. Colusa is a weird little place out in the the middle of nowhere but they have a casino and for some reason, that casino hosted the show. Their bingo hall was done up as if for a timeshare or pyramid scheme sales pitch. There were, for reasons no one understood, security guards positioned at either side of the stage. Just … in case? I guess? Abby and I once again struggled to get a pre-show meal, with the casino’s single, casual restaurant advising us of a 30-minute wait (we waited even longer than that). We eventually got food to go. That said, the show was hilarious and I love Atsuko and she loves us. She said she could see who was here as a casino VIP and who her real weirdos were. She also addressed the fact that we were out in the sticks, not Sacramento as advertised. One thing I like about her comedy is that she talks about her relationship with her husband in a way that’s really positive and loving. So many comedians are like “I hate my wife, am I right, fellas?” which was always more sad than funny (hot tip: You can marry someone you like!). Atsuko had some jokes about how she and her husband spend their time together and their inside jokes and it felt very genuine. We just don’t get a lot of representation for weird ladies in heterosexual partnerships who are having a good time. Thank you, Atsuko!

me and Abby smiling at the camera in a dark theater
Abby and I at the Atsuko show
a bad photo of the dark bingo hall where we saw the Atsuko show
weird-ass comedy show venue

Kitchen Witchery

It’s cooling down and that means it’s soup season! I do make soups all year but it’s more satisfying during the fall. Unfortunately, I have no recipes to offer you today because both of these were a freestyle effort. I made a little soup with what I had in the pantry, namely cassoulet beans, a couple of potatoes and carrots, plus a perfect grilled cheese. I also made a bean chili with cornbread.

a bowl of bean, potato, and carrot soup and a grilled cheese
soup and grilled cheese
A bowl of homemade chili topped with cheese and sour cream, a plate of cornbread in the background
chili time

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat, sitting on top of me in bed with the sheet over his back. There are purple lights illuminating the background
Fritz’s TED talk photo
Huey the cat lounging on top of me on the couch
Huey cat sitting on me as is her custom
Huey lounging on the floor with her back legs out at an angle
legs
Fritz the cat lounging in his tube, resting his head on my hand
Fritz being cute as usual
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: October 1, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. We are going through another round of house drama here. We had ants appear in the kitchen, which seems to happen every six months. Fortunately, we dispatched them quickly. Kirk puts some kind of poison near where they enter the house and I disrupt their chemical trail with Windex. It’s a good system. Worse than an ant visitation, we now have water seeping out from under the wall of our shower, which I find frankly offensive considering we had the shower remodeled just four years ago. Keen readers may remember that this drama was well documented. It seems that the drain and its weep holes (fun new vocabulary for us all) were not installed properly. When the water hits the drain, it travels between the floor tile and the liner to the edge of the shower, where it seeps out. We may have to have the floor and 18 inches of wall tile ripped out to repair the floor, which we are not at all pleased about (to reiterate: a vehement ANTI-RECOMMENDATION to Solid Construction in Sacramento). Finally my expensive desk chair broke. This is distressing for a few reasons, not the least of which was me being like “great, I’m fat and can’t have anything nice.” The good news is my chair has a 12-year warranty and the company is going to fix it. The bad news is I had to wait for them to ship me a box so I could send them the chair. Now I am waiting for the chair to return to me in a usable state. Because I am too old for sitting in shitty dining room chairs at my desk, my back has been hurting. I bought a less expensive chair as an intermediate measure. I didn’t really want to buy another chair, but it is useful for me since I usually drag my chair from my main desk to my office every day, which is kinda silly but I don’t know. It makes sense to me. This is too much house drama!

In better house news, we got fiber internet! Our old internet provider, Comcast, had been dicking us around for months. Our internet connection was dropping out around 9:30 every morning, which is a problem for many reasons, not the least of which that we both work from home. Comcast tried to tell us that our router was to blame, which makes no sense. Getting fiber became quite a saga because one of the groups that was supposed to come put little flags on the ground to identify their line didn’t do it and we had to reschedule the install. Then, installation day came and the workers were here for five minutes before telling us the line from our house to the main fiber line was blocked. Someone had to come out and unblocked it. Eventually—finally—we got the new internet installed. The tech who came also told us that, rumor has it, Comcast has is running a nearby casino on the residential internet line, which could explain our internet problems. Assholes! In any case, I am happy to report we’ve had zero issues since switching to fiber.

Books and Other Words

I decided I wanted to read about the Zapatistas so I looked into what the library had to offer. That’s how I ended up reading Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism by Leandro Vergara-Camus. This book compares and contrasts two movements that are pushing for their own form of autonomy and control over their labor: the EZLN (aka the Zapatistas) in Chiapas, Mexico and the MST (the Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil. Vergara-Camus gives us a little background about these movements, then talks about their form of self-governance, goals, and relationship to the state. I don’t recommend this as an introduction to this subject. It’s clearly an academic work written for other people in the field; don’t get into this if you’re not ready for phrases like “post-structuralism” or “Gramscian approach.” Still, I liked the book. I find it fascinating to see the way groups of people band together to demand a better life on their own terms.

Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson had me texting my friends in the first 20 pages to say “You can’t tell me this protagonist isn’t autistic!” Something about the character’s specific brand of detachment from everything—much more than a regular teenager—spoke to me. The story takes place in a middle-of-nowhere town in Tennessee in the 90s. The protagonist, Frankie, and her new friend, a boy who is living in town for the summer, make a piece of art, photocopy it, and anonymously post it all over town. Everyone loses their damn minds as the town goes full Satanic panic about it. I really liked the book. I totally relate to getting totally fixated on something and never wanting to shut up about it.

I don’t usually write about books that I don’t finish, but I am trying something new today. Telling the Bees and Other Customs: The Folklore of Rural Crafts by Mark Norman seemed like the kind of book I would like. Yes, I do want to hear about traditional crafts (sure, we’re calling it “crafts,” but this includes things like, weaving and knitting. The stuff that keeps everyone clothed and alive and some of the main media for women’s art through history) and their associated myths. Unfortunately, this book was totally boring! I gave up around 40 pages in. This is more of a litany of various peoples and their weaving goddess(es) than anything. Where is the analysis? Moreover, where is the drama? Treating this as a dry subject does it a disservice. I will simply have to get a Ph.D. and write my own book instead (I’m JOKING. I do not want to go back to grad school. You’d have to pay me. Plus, how am I supposed to pick just one subject?).

book cover for "Land and Freedom" shown in greyscale on Kobo ereader
Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism
hardcover book: Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Now Is Not the Time to Panic

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Doing Stuff

Abby invited me to go with her to see Aparna Nancherla in San Francisco. I didn’t know anything about her, but I trust Abby’s comedy judgment so I agreed. She was so funny! She talks a lot about anxiety and depression (notoriously hilarious subjects), but I was laughing like a maniac the whole time.

Sign for the Great Star Theater. Features two Chinese-style dragons
The Great Star Theater
Abby and I in a theater, smiling at the camera. It's not a great photo but we're happy.
me and Abby getting enrichment outside of our enclosures

Languages

I have entered my Wikipedia era. I think I mentioned previously that I had been translating some Wikipedia articles from Spanish to English. I took a break for a while but I’ve gotten back into it. I recently translated the article on bedtime procrastination from English to Spanish. It’s of course trickier translating into not my native language, but Ana (my teacher) helped me smooth it out. Now, here it is on Wikipedia! I feel so fancy! Maybe one day translating could be my job, but for now it’s cool to just do it for fun.

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been enjoying making a few treats lately. I tried out an oatmeal sandwich cookie with a brown sugar frosting from Stuffed: The Sandwich Cookie Book, which I borrowed from the library. They were really good! I had to return the book but I saved the recipe. I have completed my recent run of making rice krispie treats with an all-chocolate version studded with mini M&Ms. Kirk said it was too chocolatey for him, but I liked it. I also enjoyed this very simple recipe for gnocchi with peas and sausage. I added more seasoning though because NYT is downright miserly. Put some red pepper flakes in! Live a little! Finally, I made the Smitten Kitchen pumpkin bread because it is fall now and I think pumpkin treats are delicious. I tossed some pearl sugar on top, which seemed like a good idea, but all the sugar escaped when I tipped the bread out of the pan. Alas. It made for a good photo though!

oatmeal sandwich cookie with a bite taken out of it, tilted to show the frosting filling
a bad picture of an oatmeal sandwich cookie
A pan of chocolate rice krispies treats studded with mini M&Ms
super chocolate rice krispie treats
a bowl of gnocchi with sausage and peas
gnocchi with sausage and peas
A tall loaf of pumpkin bread topped with cinnamon sugar and pearl sugar
Pumpkin bread!

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat sitting in the center of his tube, his head tilted back and his eyes wide
Fritz experiencing the cosmic truth of the universe
Huey the cat lying on a folded bath mat
Huey: bathroom queen
Fritz the cat lying flat in bed, his paw on top of my hand, gazing lovingly towards the camera
Fritz being extremely cute
Huey the cat, lying on her side, her head in a patch of sun. There are cat toys scattered around her.
Huey in her sunshine
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: September 17, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey
a tablet showing a score of SRD blue 203 points to SRD yellow 188 points. There's a microphone on the table in front of the tablet and a sports floor in the background
Blue v. Yellow 2023

Hello, friends and enemies. Yesterday, I left my enclosure to do a little roller derby commentary. I was on the mic for Sacramento Roller Derby’s first home team game of the season. It feels nice to still be welcomed even though I’m not skating anymore. A little while before the game started, I turned on the mic and said “test, test, test” and the skaters started cheering. Easy crowd, yes, but I’m glad people like to listen to me narrate roller derby. If only this was a skill I could use to make money, haha. I was also glad that my former home team, Blue aka Blue Steel, won.

Books and Other Words

I tried something new for this week’s post. I’ve been writing out my thoughts about the books I read as I finish them instead of waiting two weeks then struggling to remember what I wanted to say. Please enjoy these new and improved book thoughts.

ebook cover of Art in the After-Culture. Huey the cat is next to the book.
Art in the After-Culture
hardcover book: The Saint of Bright Doors
The Saint of Bright Doors
ebook cover: The Jasad Heir
The Jasad Heir
ebook cover for Red, White & Royal Blue
Red, White & Royal Blue

I bought Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis without knowing much about it (this feels like a recurring theme for me), but I was intrigued by the idea of art criticism through the lens of socialism. This book looks at how art intersects with a lot of topics, from social media influencers to climate change to QAnon, and I learned a whole lot. There was so much trivia in here that I want to remember, like the fact that the DDoS attack was invented as a method of digital protest and first deployed in solidarity with the Zapatistas. I mean, what? The whole book is rich with tidbits like this employed in the larger narrative of examining art’s role in and relationship to modern issues.

I enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. It’s set in an alternate universe version of what seems like southeast Asia. Our protagonist, Fetter, has been raised by his mother to be an assassin and murder his father, who leads a religion (or perhaps a cult, it’s a grey area). This sounds thrilling but it’s not really that kind of book. Fetter grows up and immigrates to a new place and lives in public housing. He goes to his group therapy and gets somewhat accidentally gets involved in a political movement. In the background, the state is imprisoning low-caste citizens (Fetter has to reference an almanac to try to figure out where people fall in the caste hierarchy–and still remains confused). There is plague and revolution but Fetter is really just trying to live his life. In this sense, the book is highly relatable.

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem is a new fantasy novel that takes place in a world based on medieval Egypt (I’m honestly not sure if ‘medieval’ functions as a description for non-European countries but it’s the best I can offer). Our protagonist is the titular Jasad heir, a deeply traumatized orphan whose family was murdered at the hands of another kingdom. She, like the rest of her family and people, can wield magic, but given past atrocities, it’s now illegal to be magic so she suppresses it and lives as a peasant. Naturally her world gets turned upside down in service of the plot. I liked the book well enough. I always enjoy fantasy based on places other than Europe, and it’s especially nice to get something that’s Arab-inspired, although the bar for that field has been set especially high by S. A. Chakraborty and her Daevabad “trilogy.” I’ll be curious to see what Hashem does with this series.

I am a contrarian, a misanthrope, and at times, a hater. So when something reaches a certain level of popularity, I tend to assume it’s not that good (apologies to Taylor Swift fans; no apologies to Twilight fans). Still, I decided to see what all the fuss was about over Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, a gay romance that was recently adapted into a movie. For the first part of the book, I was not that engaged and was thinking about how I prefer science fiction and fantasy with romantic elements to a straight (lol) romance because there’s more to think about. However, this book unleashed a mega fantasy scenario, as unreal as anything set in space. We’ve got the bisexual coming of age story of the first woman president’s son. He goes enemies-to-lovers (more like ‘doesn’t-realize-he’s-bisexual-and-holding-a-grudge to lovers’, but that’s neither here nor there) with an English prince. We’ve got the millennial parent apology fantasy. Most of all, we’ve got a Trump-free world. The main character’s mom becomes president after two terms of Obama. I WANT WHAT THEY HAVE. I think this, as much as anything, explains the appeal of this story. It’s romance in a world where we didn’t have to endure the worst president of all time and slide towards fascism.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

TV and Music

We started (and finished, at least of what there is so far) watching Foundation recently. I read the original Asimov novels when I was a teenager and watching the show has me wracking my brain trying to figure out how much I actually remember to compare it to the television adaptation, and this has made me want to read the books again. The show is very good though. It’s pretty, the characters are well developed, and it’s taking us to interesting places. I hope they make more.

Knitting and Crafts

a bit of knitting showing the pattern emerging of the Marsh tee
Marsh tee knitting sample

I’m finally getting back into my knitting and I’ve been working on this marsh pattern. I was struggling with it at first because (I suspect) I wasn’t paying attention enough. After ripping out some 80 rows, I have been more carefully working this piece back up. I’ve re-done 40 rows so far and it’s looking a lot nicer, so even though I was mad about undoing so much work, it was the right call. I need to finish this up and start knitting some holiday gifts before it’s too late!

Kitchen Witchery

The only new and noteworthy food I made this week was this giant skillet cookie, which was as good as it sounds. I added mini M&Ms because there are no rules. I got a great new cooking tip from one of my facebook groups (this makes me sound 100 years old) this week. I saw a suggestion to use a large tea diffuser when cooking beans. You can put all the spices and seasonings in the diffuser ans save yourself the effort of fishing out the bay leaves, chilis, and other bits from the broth at the end. So I bought one and tried it out and it did make my life a lot easier.

One giant cookie filling a cast iron skillet. There are mini M&Ms baked in.
skillet cookie!
dried beans, half an onion, and an open tea diffuser stuffed with herbs and seasonings
new bean cooking tip just dropped

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Huey the cat illuminated by a patch of sun
Huey the cat in the sun
Huey the cat on her couch blanket, wide-eyed
Huey serving cuteness
Fritz the cat in a nest of blankets
Fritz in the blanket cave
Fritz the cat lounging in his bed, his eyes half closed and his tongue partially out
Blep
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: September 2, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Around this time last year I started getting really into the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’m still into it, but I’m not as fanatical about digging into Wikipedia to try to solve every single clue like I was at first. I was reminded of this anniversary because the NYT emailed me to inform me that my promotional subscription rate of $6 every 28 days was ending and access to all of the NYT would now cost $25 every 28 days. Note this is not $25 per month—NYT is eking out a thirteenth payment every year with that every 28 days maneuver. I’m galled by their audacity. I’ve switched to the “games” subscription which is still $6 per month(ish). I was briefly annoyed at losing access to the cooking section, however, I can get it through the library, so that’s cool. Frankly, I could be reading the whole newspaper through the library but I always forget that’s an option. Shout out to the public library for saving me at least $18 every 28 days.

Books and Other Words

Sappho is Burning by Page duBois is a book I bought based on it’s title alone, an allusion to the documentary on New York City ball culture Paris is Burning. This book is about Sappho the Lesbian poet, patron saint of modern lesbians everywhere. I didn’t know much about Sappho before reading this book and I kind of still don’t because we just don’t know that much about her. All that has survived are fragments of her poetry, which duBois analyzes as a whole to discuss her themes and philosophy. I’m not much of a classicist, so although I understood the book I don’t have any real analysis to offer. If you’re looking for a rhetorical and philosophical analysis of Sappho’s work, this is it.

I picked up Vampires of el Norte by Isabel Cañas on my library’s “Lucky Day” shelf and checked it out because the author description said she was getting her Ph.D. in near eastern languages and civilizations and I said, “hey, that’s what I got my degree in!” I liked this book a lot. It’s a historical fiction set during the Mexican-American war, focusing on a pair of star-crossed lovers from a rancho just south of the Rio Bravo (which I learned is what they call the Rio Grande in Mexico. Why did it take a random novel to teach me this information? After seeing “Rio Bravo” a few times, I looked it up because I thought, how many rivers in northern Mexico can there be? JUST ONE it turns out.). I enjoyed the writing style and the story itself a lot but, being the person I am, I also liked that the author used a lot of words in Spanish for the world of the story because I picked up some new vocabulary.

What I love about Becky Chabmers’ work is how hopeful it always is and To Be Taught, If Fortunate is no exception. In this novella, She imagines humanity going to space just to explore, with expeditions funded by citizen initiatives and not governments. I liked the technology she came up with to make prolonged space travel safe for humans and I enjoyed the way the characters interacted.

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is one of the many non-fiction books I’ve bought and took a while to get around to. I’m trying to just pick a book and start reading instead of spending several days hemming and hawing over what I may or may not be in the mood for. Moods are fickle and these books aren’t going to read themselves. This book is about how radical political ideas get co-opted by the very people the idea was targeting. Think about the idea of “woke.” It started as an in-group description of a certain way of thinking and quickly got picked up by trashbags like Ron DeSantis to vilify everything he hates about modern culture. That’s a form of elite capture. This book is deeply grounded in history and theory and I found it all really interesting. I recommend it if you’re into that kind of thing.

paperback book: Sappho s Burning
Sappho Is Burning
hardback book: Vampires of El Norte
Vampires of El Norte
book cover for To Be Taught If Fortunate shown on ereader
To Be Taught If Fortunate
cover of the book Elite Capture shown on ereader. Huey the cat is in profile with her nose booping the ereader
Elite Capture

Meanwhile, on the internet:

TV and Music

You may remember that last year I wrote about how I stopped using Spotify and started getting reacquainted with my MP3 collection. This week, I finished updating the metadata for all the music I have, some 30+ gigabytes. The digital music I have comes from various sources—ripped CDs from my dad’s collection, music purchased legally, tracks from the heyday of peer-to-peer sharing—so the metadata was all over the place. I realized this disorganization was an active problem for me when I wanted to listen to my B-52s albums were variously labelled “The B-52s,” “The B-52’s, “b-52s,” etc. and I couldn’t get my app to play them all together. So, I did what any reasonable person would do (lol), and went album by album to make sure all the artist names, track numbering, year information, and album art were stored consistently on my computer and got all the file names into a consistent format. I’ve been working on this here and there for at least the last year. But I’m done now! Finally!

It feels really good to know exactly what music I have. This process reminded me of a lot of songs that I have and like but had sort of forgotten about when I abdicated the task of curating my music taste to the Spotify algorithm. I also found a lot of things I apparently downloaded at one point and forgot about, like the entire Yello discography (I have a habit of finding one cool song and then wanting to hear everything else the artist has ever made. And if you think you don’t know who Yello is, yes you do.). When I was listening to music on Spotify, everything started to sound the same because the algorithm figures out what you like then keeps giving you that kind of thing. It definitely would not have recommended me this cool-ass group, which I found on Tumblr of all places. It has been fun to look for music and discover it on purpose. I know you can still do this with Spotify or Amazon music or whatever, but I wasn’t, which brings me to this Anne Helen Petersen article I just read on this same topic. She writes, “Algorithms do the work for cheap, but when they reflect our taste back at us, it feels misshapen and insulting, a crude and unfair representation. When everything is available, all knowledge, all information, all entertainment … nothing is perceived as valuable.” That’s how I’ve been feeling about music. Okay, I can find any song I want (provided Spotify hasn’t randomly made it unavailable in my region), but I have no connection to it. I like having unlimited music, but I’m also nostalgic for when I knew and loved every carefully chosen CD in my collection. So, yes, downloading music and organizing it, to say nothing of finding cool music, is a little more work, but now I’m actually engaged with that music and enjoying it.

screenshot of VLC media player with a playlist of B-52s albums
nice, clean files

Moving It

After two weeks off, I’m back at my dance classes for the fall semester. I am in the very beginnings of the process of working towards being able to dance en pointe, which is exciting. I didn’t really expect that was something I would be able or get to do as someone starting ballet in her 30s, but it’s cool that I have the opportunity to try. I’m in a weird middle place right now though because, ideally, I would add another day or two of class to my schedule to get stronger and improve my technique, but there’s only one adult class. They tried adding a second weekly class, but I’m the only one who signed up. So, I am currently attending a teen class once a week to supplement my dance time and that is a little weird. The youths do not seem to notice or care about having a random old person™ in their midst, which is just as well. Seeing the kids in the class made me think about doing circus classes growing up and had me thinking about if I was as much of a crazed goofball as some of them seem to be (I might have been worse, actually). But that also got me thinking that we had adults mixed in with the kids for some circus acts, so maybe this is all just a normal way of existing and learning new things. Going to school for twelve years gets us too used to learning only with people who are exactly our age, but that’s simply not how life moves.

Kitchen Witchery

It’s cooled down just a little and it seems that’s all I needed to have some kitchen motivation. I made these great walnut and pesto rolls (recipe from The Harvest Baker). The recipe said to put them in a nine-inch cake pan and I, being a genius, thought I’d put them in the spring form so I could get them out more easily. This was, in fact, fucking stupid. The rolls are full of pesto (oily) and cheese (oily at high temperatures) and all that oil seeped out, pooled in the lip of the pan, and eventually overflowed onto my oven floor, where it then started smoking. Fortunately, I did not burn down the kitchen but it did lead to an evening of cleaning the oven. Kirk got us Del Taco for dinner and we saved the rolls for the next day.

As usual, it’s bean-centric cooking out here. It’s what I like to make and eat and now that I’m getting bean subscriptions, I gotta keep up. Fortunately, everything I made the last two weeks has been deemed a keeper. First, we had this brown butter lentil and sweet potato salad (which led to an epistemological debate on what constitutes a “salad;” we have fun here). Next, I cooked a batch of chickpeas so I could mix them with noodles and feta and other flavors for lunch last week (no recipe, just a bit of lemon, chili flakes, and vibes). I used the rest of the chickpeas in a riff on a Pasta Grannies recipe but mixed gnocchi into the sauce with the chickpeas then put a bunch of cheese on top and set it under the broiler for a few minutes. Delicious! Then, I tried this vegetarian tamale pie, which ended up being really good. I tossed in a bit of corn and I used bayo beans and it all turned out great. Finally, I think my season of making rice krispie treats (in my rice krispies era?) is coming to a close, but I wanted to try a black and white version by mixing chocolate and plain rice krispies. No one stopped me so here I am. I also have most of a box of chocolate rice krispies remaining so I will probably make at least one more batch before we shut this category down for the season.

a spring form pan of walnut and pesto rolls, which are bursting up out of the pan
walnut pesto rolls
a bowl of sweet potatoes and lentils topped with goat cheese
brown butter lentil and sweet potato salad
a plate of gnocchis and chickpeas covered in tomato sauce and topped with melty cheese
gnocchi and chickpeas in tomato sauce
a bowl of vegetarian tamale pie topped with green onions
vegetarian tamale pie
rice krispie treats made with a mix of regular and chocolate krispies, topped with chocolate
black and white rice krispie treats

Cat Therapy

Fritz has been an absolute maniac lately. When he was a kitten and started peeing on our bed all the time, one of the suggested solutions was to add another litter box to make sure there were ample sanctioned zones to pee in. So, for the last two years, I’ve had an extra litter box in my office, which I do not like, but I have tolerated. However, this stinky pee boy kept peeing on the floor and on the (washable) rug near the litter box, and I finally lost my mind and threw out the office litter box, vacuumed the floor, and washed and put away the rug until I’m sure Fritz is going to behave. This asshole is adorable 95 percent of the time, but that other five percent is pure demon.

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Here we have Huey camping next to me in my office because she wants me to do things for her. Fritz was annoyed by this so he started being a door troll to be a problem when she tried to leave. We also have Fritz being cute in bed and administering some licks.

Fritz the cat sitting in the doorway to my office on the floor and Huey sitting inside the office just a few feet away
camping my office
Fritz the cat, underneath a sheet, licking Kirk's finger
Fritz giving out some licks
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: August 20, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey
Program for The Play that Goes Wrong held up in the theater. Stage and set visible but blurry in the background.
Another night at the theatre

Hello, friends and enemies. Last night I got a little enrichment time outside of the enclosure and went to see a play with Kirk and Abby. We saw The Play that Goes Wrong, which is totally hilarious. I love the actors at B Street Theater because they are so great at physical comedy. I mean, they are also good actors but they way they put their whole bodies into the performance just kills me. Go see it! It will be playing for a few more weeks.

I’m really enjoying becoming a person who goes to the theater now that I have the disposable income and presence of mind to do so. It’s nice to get out of the house and take in some arts. I feel like I have some deeper thoughts on this subject but they haven’t fully coalesced yet. Something about how you can always go back to things that interest you (I was a bit of a theater kid in high school), the fun of having a reason to get dressed up and go places, and enjoying the arts in a public setting. I’ll probably come back to this subject in the future.

Books and Other Words

Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

  • The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon. This book is a high-concept science fiction that didn’t quite come together for me. I thought it was a cool idea, but it was honestly very difficult to keep up with all the terms and ideas the author introduced without a whole lot of explanation into the world. I wanted to like it, and I did on certain levels, but I think it needed a stronger editor.
  • Translation State by Ann Leckie. I loved this entry into Leckie’s Imperial Radch universe. It’s not really a sequel to her Ancillary trilogy, but it inhabits the same space. I think Leckie is brilliant at creating worlds and exploring what it means to be human through science fiction. One of my very early posts on this blog is actually about her book Ancillary Justice. I always say I’m not really a writer but looking at something I wrote almost ten years ago is making me cringe, so I guess I am a writer by at least some metrics (achievement unlocked: be embarrassed by past work). This was no I’ll be famous one day but for now I’m stuck in second grade with a bunch of morons.
  • Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan. I enjoyed this novel a lot too. I thought it was a compelling tale and I’m looking forward to the second book. I don’t have any big thoughts about it, but it was good!
  • Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives by Amelia Possanza. I’m getting on queer history kick in my reading lately. Lesbian Love Story is a work of creative non-fiction work that profiles seven historical lesbians (although some of them may have never used that word for themselves) interwoven with vignettes from the author’s own life as she works to understand her queerness and what it is to be a lesbian. Possanza does an excellent job of making these women real using a combination of archival text and a little creativity to show what their lives might have been like. Highly recommended!
book cover for The Archive Undying shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
The Archive Undying
book cover for Translation State shown on kobo ereader
Translation State
cover for
Daughter of the Moon Goddess
hardcover book: Lesbian Love Story. Huey the cat is next to the book looking deeply unimpressed
Lesbian Love Story (with Huey supervising)

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • California COVID surge confirmed by 4% Walgreens positivity rate via The San Francisco Chronicle. Covid is on the rise so please be safe out there! An updated covid vaccine is supposed to come out in late September along with the flu shot.
  • You either see everyone as a human being or you don’t via Current Affairs. Texas has put buoys in the Rio Grande to keep migrants out. The buoys have saws on them to injure anyone who tries to pass. This is unconscionable. Even if you think we shouldn’t accept immigrants, do you think they deserve to be ripped apart? Awful.
  • For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching via The Washington Post. This article got me riled up. There are many reasons that public school is difficult and lots of good reasons to homeschool, but the fact that adults can just set up a “school” like an AirBNB for other people’s kids and that these “teachers” have no interest in learning about education or actually giving feedback on student work pisses me off. School already exists! It’s not perfect but there’s a whole system in place to give kids education! There is a system of screening the adults to keep the kids safe! Anyone beating the “school choice” drum is sounding the dog whistle for defunding public education. That’s all this shit is. School is also not a “product,” and anyone telling you it is should be suspect. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hated teaching in public school, but at least I wanted to do a good job and tried. The woman in this article says “that she has no interested in formal training. ‘I could take an exam and say, “I’m a teacher.” I don’t feel there’s really any benefit in doing that.'” YOU DON’T? Why are people sending their children to this woman. Everyone in this article needs to get a grip.
  • How to uphold the status quo: The problem with small town witch romances via Tor.com. In more lighthearted internet discourse, I found this article about witchy romance stories interesting. The author here is inviting us to stop and think about the power structures that might be represented in these stories, if glossed over for the sake of “coziness.”
  • Use my new slang in meetings and score accordingly via McSweeney’s. For some levity, get down to goat treats and summer coats in your next meeting using these wonderful new pieces of corporate jargon. Get coned up, idiots.

TV and Music

I watched both season one and season two of Somebody Somewhere over the last two weeks and now I’m sad that there isn’t more. This show is great. We’ve got found family, returning to a hometown and having a lot of feelings about it, and being a well-rounded person with friends and hobbies in your forties. I don’t know how to describe this show. There’s vulnerability and joy. It’s good.

I came across this really cool music website on Tumblr this week. You can select a country and a decade and hear music from there and then. It’s called Radioooo! Go discover some new music before someone forces them to take it down.

Corporeal Form

This might be TMI (too much information) for some of you. If you don’t want to hear about a weird body problem, just skip to the next heading. I want to write about it though because I had never heard of this ailment and because women’s health is often treated as a taboo subject. Okay last chance to stop reading this paragraph … I found out from my gynecologist (here I will spare the details) that I am presently afflicted with something called vulvodynia. It’s pain around the vulva. I’ve read up on it and learned that we don’t know what causes it and we don’t really know how to fix it. Women’s health, am I right? My doctor’s prescription was to take hot baths and massage the area, which sounded very funny but has actually not been as fun as it sounds. You know, because of the pain. What sucks about this is I saw the gyno because I was having pain at certain times, but once I started trying to massage out the tension and identified this specific flavor of pain, I realized I’m actually feeling it often but I had been misinterpreting it as cramps or gut problems or just general discomfort. Apparently, it was my vulva! Neat! (not really!). So, this sucks on its own but the last couple of years have just been a cavalcade of ailments. It needs to stop. I’m not going to have any health body parts left at this rate. I am once again posting this hamster who is at her limit to express my feelings. No more body problems! Whoever is running this simulation needs to give me a fucking break. End program!

a wide-eyed hamster on a couch. Text reads: I can't fucking take it/seriously I'm at my limit
seriously I’m at my limit

Kitchen Witchery

In better news, the weather hasn’t been horrible every day so I’ve been able to make some food. Although I’ve been a little hit and miss when it comes to motivation/my brain being cooperative about doing the tasks of daily life. I made some really tasty pizza beans, roughly based on this Smitten Kitchen recipe to eat for lunch last week. I knew Kirk wasn’t going to like these, so I just made them for myself, which is something you’re always allowed to do. I also tried a soup recipe in the instant pot. It’s a Persian barley-lentil soup from the Milk Street Fast and Slow cookbook, which I have checked out from the library. The instant pot is really saving my ass in this hot weather, I have to admit. I also made another rice krispie treat variation, because I had cereal left over and why not. I mixed in some cinnamon bits and topped it with cinnamon sugar. Recommended!

a casserole dish filled with beans and tomato sauce, topped with melty cheese
pizza beans
a a bowl of pizza beans
a bowl of pizza beans
a bowl of soup with bits of carrot, barley, and onion visible. There's parsley on top and a plate with a grilled cheese in the background
barley-lentil soup
rice krispie treats filled with cinnamon bits and topped with cinnamon and sugar
cinnamon-sugar rice krispie treats

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I must again apologize to Huey fans, but Fritz is simply too photogenic. He keeps posing. He knows where the light is. What am I supposed to do?

Fritz the cat lying in the middle of the tunnel toy, attacking a wand toy from inside. His tail is sticking out one end and his crazed face is visible
tunnel-obsessed beast
Fritz the cat lying in the windowsill. It's shady but a shaft of light is shining on his head and upper back.
Fritz blessed by the sun
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: August 5, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I was very sad to learn of Paul Reubens’ death this week. While I am not usually much affected by celebrity deaths, this one did get to me. Watching Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and having Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure on near-constant repeat were formative parts of my childhood. I can confidently say that Reubens had a huge impact on how my sense of humor developed and, certainly, my appreciation of camp (if you don’t think Pee-Wee’s Playhouse is camp, please watch the Christmas special. Seriously). I watched Big Adventure this week as a memorial and that opening music really had me letting go of anxiety and existential dread within minutes. I was surprised at how quickly it took me to a certain emotional place.

me as a baby, looking up at a TV showing a close up of Paul Reuben's face
Portrait of the author watching Pee Wee on the TV

While I am sad that he’s no longer with us, I am happy that his art is still out there for us to enjoy and appreciate and share with others. Thinking about his death made me think about my mom, who is the one who introduced me to Pee Wee and who has always been his biggest fan. My mom is the one who started cultivating my sense of weirdness and my taste for the other from a young age. I realized that appreciation for Pee Wee Herman is one of the main mediums for our relationship. When my sister and I were young (and even not so young), mom liked to take us out to Cabazon, which is located in the middle of nowhere just west of Palm Springs, to see the dinosaurs. It looks like it’s been built up a bit more now but it used to be just the two dinosaurs, a small diner, and a truck stop on the side of the 10 freeway. You could go inside the brontosaurus (and I have, multiple times), but the t-rex was typically not open to the public. I’m not sure whether my mom knew about the dinosaurs before Pee Wee made them famous—although I would not be surprised because she is a true connoisseur of weird and cult shit—but I’ve always associated them with Pee Wee and the movie. Sometimes we just visited the dinos but we would occasionally get lunch at the Wheel Inn, which was also featured in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I used to think it a little cringe-worthy (in the way of young people everywhere who think their parents are being too much) when she would ask to sit at the Large Marge booth. However, I can now say I ate at the restaurant featured in the movie AND in the Large Marge memorial booth. The Wheel Inn is closed now and its delicious peanut butter pie and place in pop culture are lost to us, but I do have the rare distinction of having experienced it myself and with my mom.

In 2010, mom and I went to see Reubens’ new live show in L.A. I had moved back to southern California after college and, while I didn’t have a lot of cash on hand, I had a Ticketmaster gift card that I won in a raffle so I bought us tickets to see the show. We had a lot of fun and we ran into the actress who plays Miss Yvonne on the way out and my mom got to hug her. She still talks about it. A few years later, Netflix released Pee Wee’s Big Holiday on the same weekend that my mom happened to have plans to visit me. We got to watch that together too. Kismet.

My mom and I are both autistic (although she is not formally diagnosed, I know this is true). Autistic people often communicate through bits and pieces of pop culture cobbled together to form their own private lexicon. One example that my mom and I always come back to is “what is that your business?” from the Woody Allen (don’t start. I know.) movie Radio Days. We use this when someone is getting wound up about something that doesn’t have to do with them (as the character does here, complaining about the universe expanding. Troubling!), which happens to us often because we both have anxiety. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure gave us lots of handy phrases to use. There are thousands of uses for corn (said when something is irrelevant). I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel (said to emphasize the ridiculousness of trying to relate to other people). I just wanna get a look at that cute little outfit (said when someone is, in fact, wearing a cute little outfit).

As ever, art is about making us connect with others and feel things in a lonely and indifferent universe. Sometimes it’s hard to find things in common to talk about with my mom but the good news is that we’ll always have Paris the Alamo.

my mom, smiling at the camera, the set of Pee Wee's Playhouse on the stage in the background
mom at the Pee Wee Live Show in 2010

Books and Other Words

I feel like I’m in the middle of a lot of books but I only have two finished books to talk about today. I will also note that I have read 50 books this year so far. Will I make it to the elusive 100-book goal this year? Time will tell (I’m not super optimistic but I remain hopeful).

First, I read Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, an author better known for erotic stories like Space Raptor Butt Invasion, released his first traditionally published (non-erotic) novel last week. It was good! It was spooky but in a way I like, in which religion is a source of terror. The protagonist, Rose, is explicitly autistic and it’s clearly a book written by an autistic person, which I find really interesting. There are not a lot of novels where we see an unmasked autistic thought process, but I hope we get more of them. I found Rose’s thought process familiar and I was surprised both to see my style of thinking on the page and to realize how infrequently I’ve seen it represented in general.

Next, I read Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama: Inmigración, feminismo y bisexualidad by Daisy Hernández. I picked it up for the Spanish language, bisexuality, and feminism, but stayed for the immigration. This is a memoir in which the author talks about growing up the daughter of Colombian immigrants and becoming a writer. I liked that it felt fairly easy for me to understand! To be fair, memoirs are always easier to read than fiction, but I’m still feeling accomplished.

book cover for Camp Damascus shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
Camp Damascus
ebook cover for Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama shown on kobo ereader
Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama

TV and Music

me, dressed up and posing in the Barbie doll box at the movie theater
Barbie Mode

Like more or less everyone, I saw Barbie last week. The movie is a lot of fun and very entertaining. That sounds like a low bar but considering how many moody, “gritty,” or cookie-cutter super hero movies we get in a year, this is actually high praise. I don’t think enough movies are fun. Barbie, however, is super fun. It’s also fun that it became an event and took on a life of its own. People are dressing up for the theater! You can take a picture in a big Barbie doll box! Girlies are greeting each other with “Hi, Barbie!” That shit is fun. Regular life doesn’t have enough little events to punctuate the monotony. As for the film itself, I don’t think it’s the feminist rhapsody that people are making it out to be. It’s a pretty basic level of feminism. If you’ve read a book or even maybe an article from Jezebel, you probably are operating at a higher level of feminist knowledge than the Barbie movie. However, considering it’s a summer movie made with a toy corporation’s intellectual property, it goes pretty hard. The fact that they use the word “patriarchy” repeatedly will, I hope, have some young people reading up online. For that, Gretta Gerwig is doing the (non-denominational) lord’s work (sometimes people stumble on this blog via search engines so I am going to say that if you liked Barbie and want to read up on patriarchy, try The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls). I do think the story lines that would have been the most interesting were not the focus of the movie. What’s going on in Weird Barbie’s house? Is she living in a polycule with Skipper, Earing Magic Ken, and Sugar Daddy Ken? Does Allan hang out with them? What do the Kens do when not subjecting themselves to the Barbies’ female gaze? How come some of the dolls know about the real world but some don’t? When I was discussing the movie with my friend (and Spanish teacher) Ana, she asked how the events of the movie would affect the real world, considering that we know Barbie Land and our world have some kind of metaphysical connection. Good question! Now that Stereotypical Barbie is gone, will another ascend to take her place? Is she dead to the world? As usual, I have a lot of questions and all of them are fairly pointless. Movies are only good if they get me thinking about their world, so I guess this was a good one.

Like almost no one, I watched the Venture Brothers finale movie, Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart. Venture Brothers is a show that began in 2004 and aired seven seasons over the course of sixteen years. No one waits longer between seasons than Venture Brothers fans. My college roommate introduced the show to me and convinced me to watch it by telling me there were David Bowie references. I have been obsessed with this show for years and was sad to see it end, but I’m glad they got a movie to wrap up some of the series’ ongoing questions. They also used this opportunity to finally pass the Bechdel test, for which we applaud them.

Kitchen Witchery

a pan of rice krispie treats that have chocolate chunks in them and chocolate sprinkles on top
chocolate chunk rice krispie treats

I haven’t been cooking that much, probably because it’s hot. However, I did make carnitas and really good beans and rice this week. I didn’t take a picture of it because it wasn’t new or special but it was delicious. The only other notable thing I made was rice krispie treats, which I had never made before. The New York Times food newsletter included a recipe for it recently and I thought, that’s a good way to eat treats and not make my kitchen hot. I threw in some chocolate to be extra about it, et voila.

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. It’s a Fritz appreciation week here on the blog because I got some good pictures of him. My Huey photos are more of the same with her sitting on me. Die-hard Huey fans will have to wait until next time!

Fritz the cat lying on his side on the floor. It looks like he's standing on a patch of sun coming in through the window
Fritz walking on sunshine
Fritz the cat at the center of his new tunnel toy going completely bonkers
tunnel mania
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 23, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. The summer doldrums are here. It’s too hot and I don’t want to do anything. I hate it because there are always many things I want to do. I take an anti-depressant for my anxiety, and I am far beyond feeling bad at my inability to handle the heat, given that these types of medications make it harder for the body to regulate its temperature. So, I have spent the last two weeks reading a lot and longing for cooler days. I’ve been hanging out in my “office” a lot because it’s the shadiest room in the house. I have the air conditioning vent and a fan pointed right at me.

I’ve also been silencing the thermostat dad that lives in my head. I’m not cooling my house to 68 degrees or anything crazy, but I do turn down the AC to 74 degrees at night when it’s too hot to open the windows. When I was growing up, we had a whole-house fan, which is an incredibly loud way to suck outside air into the house. We always ran that at night rather than the air conditioning. My room was right near the fan so I’d be stuck listening to the roar of it all night. I went through periodic phases where I was too scared to leave my window open while I was asleep (I lived in the suburbs and was probably fine, but anxiety), which meant no airflow. Anyway, being an adult is great because I can make my house as hot or cold as I want and I don’t have to put up with a big, stupid fan.

Books and Other Words

Here’s what I’ve been reading:

  • An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. I originally tried to read this book a while ago and wasn’t in the right mood for it, but this time I was. This book is not so much a cookbook as a philosophy on cooking and eating. Adler describes how you can make something delicious from very little or very basic ingredients and offers advice for salvaging dishes gone wrong. Furthermore, her prose is beautiful.
  • The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. This book was excellent. How do you tell someone you love them when there’s no cultural script for that kind of love? That’s what The Book of Goose is about to me.
  • Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig. I picked this up on a whim when I saw it on the new shelf at the library. I thought I was getting a swashbuckling adventure with a ship full of lady pirates. It was actually a reflective novel about a woman who, yes, becomes a pirate, but not as her first choice. We watch her make a series of perhaps questionable decisions in challenging circumstances. Not what I wanted (lesbians at sea), but I liked it all the same.
  • Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs. We’ve got magic books, sister drama, romance, intrigue, and a cute dog named Sir Kiwi. This book does it all. It was a lot of fun to read and I highly recommend it.
book cover for An Everlasting Meal, shown on kobo ereader
An Everlasting Meal
hardcover book: The Book of Goose.
The Book of Goose
hardcover book Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea
cover of Ink Blood Sister Scribe shown on kobo ereader
Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Languages

Something I’ve been mulling over in regards to my language learning is that I may never get to a point in another language where I’m as good as I am in English. The English language is my job. It’s my whole business to know how to apply all the rules. Realizing I might never be as good at Spanish (or Icelandic) as I am in English kind of hurts, but it’s also nice to think that I don’t have to be an editor in every language. However, I may find some other niche in these languages as I get better. If my Spanish teacher Ana has anything to say about this, I’m going to become a published author in Spanish, but who knows where I’ll end up?

Autism Thoughts

hardcover book Strong Female Character
Strong Female Character

I read another autism book and of course I now have many more autism thoughts to share. I was barely ten pages into Strong Female Character by Fern Brady when I shouted, “She has my life!” I kept reading and found out that we don’t have our whole lives in common but seeing that she found a lot of comfort in memorizing verb conjugations and enrolled in university with a plan to study Arabic and Persian had me screaming in solidarity. Still, even though, unlike Fern (I should probably refer to an author by last name, but I feel like we’re on a first-name basis), I did not become a stripper in college or have strict Catholic parents and live in Scotland, there was so much about this book that I related to. In one story, she talks about an elementary school teacher bringing a badger to school in a shoe box. Fern has total faith that this is a real badger and she loves it and wants to see it. Eventually some other kids tell her she’s an idiot and it’s just a sock puppet. She’s crushed. This made me think of my own over-trusting nature. I might have written about this before but, as a kid, I had total faith in what adults in my life told me. My parents told me Santa was real so, to me, that was an irrefutable truth of the world. I recognized that the concept of Santa didn’t make logical sense, but my parents wouldn’t lie to me, right? I remember being in fifth grade and still defending the idea of Santa, arguing with other kids. Around twelve years old, I asked my dad directly if Santa, the Easter Bunny, et al. were real. He told me the truth and then I spent the night crying and feeling betrayed.

She writes too about not fitting in, and being “not like other girls,” which I can relate to. I never fit in with girls at school so I, too, got into that “I’m not like other girls” mentality for a while. It’s true I wasn’t like them, but it was the autism, not some kind of superiority for wanting to hang around with the boys. Boys just follow a less complex set of social rules than teen girls do. Fern writes at one point, “everyone who fitted in and stayed in their home town was the real success. Imagine having the same friends from when you were born? Knowing and liking most people in the local nightclub?” That punched me in the guts too. Whenever people talk about having friends from elementary school or some kind of ridiculous young age, I’m always shocked. How? How do you do this? My oldest friendships date back to college and even then I only have two (hi, Kira and Kael).

When Fern talked about getting an autism diagnosis, which started out rough because a doctor told her she couldn’t possibly be autistic because she had a boyfriend (I wish I could punch that doctor!), she wrote “I knew now everyone would think I was stupid and every A I worked for in school and every effort I made to get my my degree and every hard-won achievement would be invalidated by my diagnosis.” And just … oof. Fern. I hear you. I am embarrassed to say this now but I have obviously learned a lot in the last fifteen or so years, but when it was first suggested to me that I might have autism, my response was “but I’m smart.” I get it though. All that work and then it’s upended by the autism. It’s a transitional feeling on the way to understanding autism and accepting yourself as autistic but I was like, dang, I get it.

I highly, highly recommend this book, especially to any women with autism who may not see themselves in some of the traditional diagnostic criteria. I also recommend it for anyone who is dealing with big meltdowns, which Fern talks about at length in the book. You will be relieved to see that you’re not alone.

Kitchen Witchery

It has been hot but we have to eat so I have been trying to use the Instant Pot or prep food earlier in the day, so I’m not running the oven when it’s 100 degrees (38 C) outside. I tried a butter chicken recipe from the Milk Street Fast and Slow cookbook, which I checked out from the library. I thought it was just okay but Kirk said he would eat it again. We had the opposite situation last night in which I made these beans. I liked them, but Kirk was absolutely not into it. In treats, I tried my hand at another frozen yogurt. I made vanilla yogurt which a chocolate swirl. Unlike the strawberry froyo I made a few weeks ago, this one was a little too tangy to be a hit. The strawberry version had enough other flavor to not be like “hey this is just yogurt,” but not this one. Finally, since it’s summer, I had to make some zucchini bread. I added these cinnamon bits and that was a great addition. I’ll be doing it again.

a bowl of butter chicken over rice, topped with chopped parsley
instant pot butter chicken
a plate of beans and rice and a tart made of puff pastry, carrots, and cheese
beans in a peanut tomato sauce and a carrot tart
a bowl of frozen yogurt laced with a chocolate sauce. It's served in unattractive chunks rather than nice little scoops
vanilla frozen yogurt with chocolate ripple
a slice of zucchini bread on a plate with the rest of the loaf on a cutting board
obligatory zucchini bread

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lying under a blanket, his head, shoulders, and front legs sticking out
he tucked himself in
Huey the cat lying on the floor in the hallway, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight
Huey in the afternoon sun
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 9, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. One thing that you probably already know about me is I love to get interested in things. I’m willing to get obsessed with almost any subject. This weekend, my dance studio held a weekend intensive for the adult dancers, which I attended because I like doing things and learning stuff. I got to try two new styles of dance—hip hop and contemporary—and was like, yeah I could see taking a class in this. Not that I’m going to because I already have full schedule but I could certainly get interested in more things. It made me want to read up on where contemporary dance comes from and get all up in their internecine drama. That of course reminded me that I already have some dance styles I could read more about so I promptly put a hold on a library book about the history of tap dance. I feel like every day I have to talk myself down from trying to start another degree or getting some kind of certification or whatever learning process because the world is full of subjects. It’s not FOMO (the fear of missing out), but it’s maybe the bummer of missing out (BOMO?).

A defining feature of autism spectrum disorder is having special interests. This is an idea that I used to struggle with because I thought I didn’t have one. Or I thought that maybe my interests were too broad. It turns out that you can have multiple special interests and they don’t have to be stereotypically autistic interests like trains or computers. You could have a special interest in reading fantasy and science fiction (like me for my whole life), or it might be something that seems normal (like me in high school getting really into 80s new wave music [NB: I am not that old, I graduated high school in 2004]). Then there was, of course, when I got super into ancient Egypt and thought I was going to be an Egyptologist, to the point that I took graduate-level courses in middle Egyptian as a freshman in college. Very normal! Now my interests are kind of everything, if I’m not careful. Language learning remains a big topic for me and probably always will. Same with reading. I’m currently hot on dance and movement. Every topic I pick up starts linking with new interests. Like knitting goes with Icelandic for me (did you know you can get certified as a master hand knitter? Because I did). I could be working on my French to support ballet. Liking things is a slippery slope.

Autism itself seems to be developing into a special interest for me. I’ve been reading up on it since I got diagnosed, but lately I’ve gotten more academically interested and have been reading publications too. Should I get a Ph.D. in neuroscience with a focus on autism? No, I definitely shouldn’t. But should I read as much as someone with a Ph.D? I might. I’ve been getting increasingly curious about this condition that shapes my brain as I encounter more and more people who share it. It’s mind-boggling to me how little understood it is. I feel like it’s part of my calling to say “Did you know that’s an autism thing?” to people whenever they bring up something connected to it. For example, a friend in my dance class this weekend mentioned hypermobility, which has some kind of connection with autism. I almost hollered across the room “Are you autistic too?” but I restrained myself. When I talked with her after, she mentioned that her daughter is autistic and then I was like ME TOO and I brought up the hybermobility thing. This is why I think autistic people on instagram and tiktok are doing the (non-denominational) Lord’s work by posting about the experience of autism rather than autism from a clinical perspective. What does it feel like to be autistic? So many un-diagnosed/unaware autistic people would recognize themselves if they could see it.

What I am trying to say is that I had a good weekend doing things and being interested in stuff. I lose my fucking mind whenever people say things like “Oh, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have to work” or when I encounter stories in which someone is “cursed” with immortality. I know exactly what I’d fucking do if I were am immortal who didn’t have to work. I’d be learning all the languages, reading all the books, taking up every performing art (and maybe working my way around to visual arts eventually, but you know your girl loves an audience). So if anyone would like to sponsor me to be a loud genius and learn about everything, please get in touch.

Doing Things

a sign that says "Worried about kids? Protest the Catholic church" in marker
one of the protest signs I made

On Friday, our local Elk Grove book store held a drag queen story time. Unfortunately, fascist idiots threatened to come protest this event. Why they wanted to protest a private business doing what they want is baffling to me. I thought letting business do what they want was the whole conservative thing? I don’t know anymore. In any case, a counter-protest was organized in support of the bookstore and the drag queen, so we went to that. What was weird about this whole thing is the anti-drag queen story time protestors never showed up. There was a whole crowd out there waving pride flags and hanging around outside and nary a fascist in sight. This is obviously the best outcome: no fascists, everyone gets to be safe. But it is kind of anticlimactic to go to a protest and then have nothing happen. I am glad nothing happened, yes, but I am not really sure what was going on. Moral of the story: haters can get out of Elk Grove.

Books and Other Words

A Court of Silver Flames ebook cover
A Court of Silver Flames

I’m very happy to report that I have finished the Court of Thorns and Roses series, A Court of Silver Flames, and can now free myself from the Sarah J. Maas fairy-smut industrial complex. Yes, she has other series. No, I am not planning to read them (might I get pulled in by their gravity at some point? I can’t rule it out). I get why people like these books and I even thought some of them were pretty well done. However, there is better fantasy and better smut and better writing out there. The thing that really got me on this last book was that the writing (and editing) got lazy. Don’t have your character shouting “go to hell!” in a world that explicitly does not have Christianity. Hell doesn’t exist here! Invent new swears! You’re not even trying!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Kitchen Witchery

I have a few highlights for you from the last couple weeks of cooking. First, I learned that you can make risotto in the instantpot. This is great because I love risotto (affectionately called “fat rice” in our house) but hate standing at the stove for thirty or more minutes to make it. I served it with this chicken with hibiscus barbecue sauce, which I made because I got powdered hibiscus in my spice subscription a year ago and had so far used it for just one recipe. It was surprisingly good! Second, I made ice cream for the Fourth of July. This was the only thing I did for the holiday. We had strawberry frozen yogurt and chocolate ice cream. I also made meringues, which in theory is a great way to use the leftover egg whites produced from making ice cream. In practice, I added the sugar too early and couldn’t get any air into the eggs so I had to start over again. Now I have leftover egg yolks. I’ll have to make more ice cream (oh no). Finally, I made black-ass brownies, which use extra-dark cocoa powder to create this attractive color. They also taste awesome. I threw a chocolate chip blend on top for a little extra excitement.

a square of brownies cut into nine pieces. A variety of chocolate chips dot the top. The brownies are very dark because they use black cocoa powder
black-ass brownies
a plate of chicken with hibiscus barbecue sauce, risotto, and carrots
chicken with hibiscus barbecue sauce, risotto, and carrots
two bowls of ice cream, each with a scoop of strawberry frozen yogurt and of chocolate ice cream. There is a meringue underneath the ice cream and whipped cream on top
fourth of july ice cream

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Huey was aggrieved last night when I refused to take a second shower, thus denying her the opportunity to drink shower water, which is her preferred source of hydration. We also have here a photo of Fritz wrapped up in his favorite pair of my pants. I don’t know what it is about these pants in particular, but I can’t get through folding my laundry without him burrowing inside.

Huey the cat, lying down on the shower floor, glaring at the camera
Doña Huey, displeased
Fritz the cat, rolled up in a pair of pants and sitting photogenically
Fritz in his favorite pants
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 25, 2023

Posted on by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. On my mind today is the news that one of my ballet and jazz classmates, Steve, died recently. I just found out yesterday and I was more emotional about it than I expected. We weren’t necessarily close, but I did see him twice a week and, over the year-ish that we took class together, we fell into a pattern of friendly teasing. On the first day he came to the class, he said he was scared of dancing. I internally chuckled at this because how can someone be scared of dancing. Over time I learned a little bit more and found out that he had been very strongly discouraged from doing anything feminine when he was growing up. Now, as an adult nearing retirement age, he wanted to overcome that fear. What’s saddest to me, as someone who only knew him in this one aspect of his life, is seeing someone who was just discovering a source of joy suddenly die. I saw him last at our dance recital a month ago. He had said he was finally feeling confident enough that he would invite friends to our December recital. Friends, don’t put off your happiness.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to.

Books and Other Words

The Librarian by Mikail Elizarov is a novel translated from Russian. It’s a goofy, satirical, magical realist take on Soviet propaganda. In the novel, there are old works of Soviet propaganda by a writer namedof Gromov. When someone reads a Gromov book, they get supernatural abilities, like a berserker rage or the memories of an idyllic childhood in the USSR. Groups of readers form around the books and literally battle each other to keep their magic book. It’s nuts. It took me a little bit to get into this one, but ultimately I liked it.

A Court of Frost and Starlight is the penultimate book in the Sarah J. Maas Court of Thorns and Roses series. This book made me think of fan fiction. I don’t mean that as an insult. The author clearly just wanted to give her characters a little break and a nice winter solstice party. Good for them! Let those characters have a good time! I’ve already started on the last book of the series and my assessment from the first book still stands. It’s fun, it’s not really filling. I get why people like it. I like it enough to finish the series but I’ll still be glad to move on to some other books.

paperback book: The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov
The Librarian
cover for A Court of Frost and Starlight shown on kobo ereader
A Court of Frost and Starlight

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Snapshots of the End of Travel: On Trying to Enter a Personal No-Fly Zone via LitHub. This is a long read but I really liked it. It articulates a lot of the tension I’ve felt between wanting to travel and also being conscientious of not fanning the flames of global warming more than strictly necessary. From the essay, “With a frontloaded caveat or two about suffering, sacrifice, deprivation, or thrift. Underneath which, pulled taut, are the steel cables of our will, our right, and our obligation to travel. And an obligation to use travel as a font and showcase for vitality. This is, at least, how I often have felt about travel: here is evidence for myself, maybe others, that I am fully alive, vigorous, curious.”
  • Ozempic has won, body positivity has lost. And I want no part of it via The Guardian. Thoughts on being fat, the latest weight-loss drug, and the failure of “body positivity.” From the article, “The goal of this form of ‘body positivity’ is still to have you find yourself lacking, to get you to want, to get you to buy … But there’s one thought I keep coming back to: any activism that does not require you to engage with how you treat your community is not activism at all, and any social progress that is being pushed mostly by market-driven forces has the ability to simply, one day, disappear.”
  • Workers want to stay remote, prompting an office real estate crisis via The Washington Post (gift link). I’m really curious to see what happens with office real estate. It’s pretty clear that a big proportion of office workers have zero interest in returning to an office environment (full disclosure: including me). We have so many buildings oriented around being in places for 40 hours a week. I hope we, as a society, take this as an opportunity to rethink how we use space and what having a “downtown” can mean.
  • We should be ambitious about our friendships via Elle. I love this concept. Stop reserving ambition for careers. Let us be ambitious in cultivating and enthusiastically loving our friends instead.

Autism Thoughts

I think I’ve said this already, but seeing autistic people online discuss the experience of autism is doing amazing things for how we understand it and ourselves. I see stuff on social media all the time and am like, “That’s an autism thing?” or like, “THAT IS LITERALLY ME!” It’s shocking to see how not-unique these experiences are, but there wasn’t really a way to know it before. What got me this week is this video on masking at work. In the video, the boss tells the autistic employee that they have an attitude problem and people have been getting a negative vibe. When the autistic person questions this, the boss says they haven’t been smiling enough. Which, oof. The boss also says “when you say you don’t want to work here, it makes me think you don’t want to work here.” Our autistic hero replies, “I don’t.” It may seem like a striking lack of self-preservation, but I’ve had that exact conversation with managers before. They want to know my long-term goals or whatever and I’m like, uh, my goal is not working?? They hate that. They want me to climb the corporate ladder or whatever. I have no interest in this. I am going to show up and do a good job but it’s not because I like work or want to work (at least in this capacity). Is there a complaint about the work I’m doing? No? Then why should it matter that I’m not smiling enough or say what everyone’s thinking: I don’t want to work! No one does! I just refuse to pretend that this system is fun or rewarding. It’s not worth my energy.

Kitchen Witchery

I finally decided to give in and buy myself an Instant Pot. I’d been thinking about it for a little while, particularly since I cook a lot of beans and would like to do so without having to pay attention to them. So, when I saw the news that Instant Pot’s parent company was filing for bankruptcy, I figured this was as good a time as any to buy one (though given the way corporations work, I am certain someone is just going to buy and “restructure” the company and keep selling Instant Pots in some form or another). We have already put the Instant Pot to work! I made a batch of beans (obviously) in it and then some rice (because it’s also a rice cooker) to serve with tacos. I had grand plans of trying an enfrijoladas recipe, but, alas, it was a weeknight and motivation was low.

In non-Instant Pot cooking, I made these lentil “meatballs” (recipe from Cool Beans), which we liked. I served them with noodles and a ricotta loaf (recipe from The Bread Bible). I did almost fuck up the bread though by putting in a mere one-half teaspoon of yeast and not the one-half tablespoon the recipe actually called for. Fortunately, I started early so I let it spend the whole day rising. What a diva! Finally I made something that I thought would be a fancy-ish dessert but we ended up hating it! I tried these saffron-pistachio blondies—delicious in theory—but something about the icing was giving us the ick. A waste of saffron! Jail for NYT Food!

I’d also like to share that my recipe spreadsheet that I’ve been developing for a while now has grown into something super useful. I’ve gradually been paging through my cookbooks to add recipes to my list of successful dishes, rather than leave them in cookbook oblivion where I only stumble onto things on accident or through extreme feats of memory. Today, for example, I went through an ice cream book I’ve had for years (The Perfect Scoop, if you’re curious) and was like, oh yeah, I love some of these recipes. I’ve also got a big list of things I want to cook, and it’s nice having all my internet recipes and book recipes together so I can scan for ideas. This is obviously more work than dumping all your recipe links into a bookmarks folder, but it’s definitely improving my life. Better living through spreadsheets!

a plat with a big pile of rice, beans, and three tacos
beans, rice, and tacos
A pile of noodles topped with lentil meatballs and tomato sauce. A slice of bread is next to the pasta
unpleasantly plated lentil meatballs
cross-section of a loaf of bread made with ricotta in the dough. I cut the loaf before it had cooled, so the crumb looks all smooshed.
Ricotta loaf, cut before fully cooled
pistachio and cardamom blondies with saffron cream cheese icing. The icing ended up an unfortunate mustard-yellow color. This should have been the first red flag.
pretty but actually disgusting blondies

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz, his eyes wide, peeking out from behind a corner of the bed
Fritz ready to go crazy
Huey the cat lying on her side on the floor, one front paw stretched forward
Huey, showing off her legs
Fritz the cat half-asleep on the bed. His tail is practically touching the camera but his body is further away. His eyes are almost closed.
Fritz, a sleepy boy