Our nation’s capital looks like a military dictatorship, 100,000 people are dead from a pandemic we could have been prepared for, nearly 40 million people are out of work but corporations got over $500 billion in stimulus money, everything from policing to educational systems are dysfunctional… this could be a really long list.
A friend sent this last week and I have been watching it on repeat when I can’t mentally add to that list any more.
Tag yourself, I’m the freight train at :12.
I never said anything here about how much White Fragility shook me last year because..what if I said the wrong thing? What difference would my words make? This is a place for things I like, and wow does talking about race make me uncomfortable. Maybe I could sign a petition or two instead?
Well, guess what? It’s not about me. Being able to ignore race because it doesn’t affect me, or makes me uncomfortable, or to read one book about racism and call it good, is a massive privilege. As for what difference my efforts would make, I have to go back to seeing the Dalai Lama in 2016:
You should not think of world problems as huge and that one individual cannot do much. This is wrong thinking. A peaceful world/[an anti-racist world] starts with one person, then spreads to one family, then 10 families, then 1,000 families and whole communities.
So I apologize for my past silence. It needs to be talked about. Like I saw once in a tweet about therapy, “Everything you ignore just goes down to the basement to lift weights and get stronger.” White America has 400 years of racial violence we’ve organized, benefited from, and ignored to address now.
I’m going to start by reading and posting about the essays in The 1619 Project at the New York Times every week. Then I want to work through the original (free!) Me and White Supremacy Workbook by Layla Saad. Then I want to work my way through the reading list here.
I want to learn. I want to listen. I want to be able to speak up. I want to do better.
(I found all of these resources through this Google Doc, which has everything from books to podcasts to social media accounts to follow. There are literally hundreds of links to anti-racism resources being shared right now; just search.)
To paraphrase a post Doc showed me, “You know things are bad if Utah is rioting.” And things are bad. As someone whose race and privilege has made sure all my interactions with police are safe and cordial, I have no right to talk about “the right way” people should protest.
But this isn’t right, either:
Nor is this:
It’s more than “one bad cop.” It’s more than police brutality, even. It’s this:
(and if that quote makes you feel immediately defensive, can I suggest reading White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo? I read it last year and yeah, it’s uncomfortable, but that’s the point)
1. It was Bob Dylan’s 79th birthday this week; Austin Kleon had a nice post (with lots of Dylan quotes) about the guy’s creative process.
2. It’s a Twitter thread, so it’s not ideal to read, but the thesis is fascinating: “in the history of disney animated movies there have been exactly 18 types of songs, and i’m going to tell you about each of them.”
3. This is really, really accurate, especially on week 12 of working from home as sewing reaches a fever pitch. (The irony is, of course, that 90% of what I’m making isn’t WFH wear.)
(via)
I found the PunHub account on Instagram and, in the words of…someone: “For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.” (I like it. My dad likes it. Doc and his whole family like it. We are Pun People.)
Anyway, if you need me today I’ll be looking at these:
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was wondering why my elbow hurt all the time and making a fist was painful. Some googling and some forced rest (no gym for 8 weeks) made me realize it was probably tennis elbow. Knitting would also make it hurt, so I spent some (many) idle lockdown hours looking into needlepoint kits.
I really, really wanted to get a Kaffe Fassett pillow kit but they were 1.) at least $100 and 2.) the company wasn’t shipping due to the rona. So instead I was reasonable and got a cheap eyeglass case kit to see if I would even like needpoint.
I do like it! But I am very bad at it! I’ve been working bottom up and you can see some incremental improvement but…this isn’t going to win any awards. (I think some of the issue is that I refuse to admit I need a lot more light to stitch than I do to knit, so I can’t always quite see what I’m doing.)
It’s fun, though, in the same way a paint-by-number painting was fun when I was a kid: all the fun of colors AND all the fun of just following instructions and knowing it will all work out. (A good pandemic project after all.)
It’s going to be hot all week but the weekend was just perfect: blue skies, big clouds, just the right intensity of sun. Bradbury-rereading weather for sure:
Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
(The opening of Dandelion Wine, the summer book)
1. It’s the end of week 10 working from home for me. I think. What is time? I’m just glad I can go to the gym again, bros.
2. I had no idea people were still doing the [illegal] Cannonball coast-to-coast speed drive, but they are and someone just set a new record of 26 hours. Road and Track does NOT approve but honestly this sounds bonkers and amazing:
All we know about this new set of scofflaws is that there were three, maybe four of them, and that they were driving a white 2019 Audi A8 sedan with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt.
3. Put this in the dictionary under “joy”. Might as well put it under all the other words too because it’s such a delight:
PUDDLES !!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/TXjpJGW0Jl
— 🎸𝐆𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩𝐲 🤘 𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐭𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐧🎸 (@ScotsmanGrumpy) May 17, 2020
I’ve found a couple new-to-me artists and, um, some astrology memes:
Seen first here, but astrology memes are all over so I don’t have an original source.
Anne Helen Petersen is back with a longer piece about spending less during the last couple months of lockdown. She unpacks a lot in it–the economic boom of the 50s that still imforms today’s thinking, the amount of debt Americans have, how “supporting the economy” got to sound noble. Check it out: I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore
Near the end, Petersen says this:
In this moment, the primary tension in America is how, and when, life is going to “return to normal.” But that “normal” was an economy that, even before COVID-19, was built on a form of consumption that felt compulsory, with household debt as normalized as the exploitative work conditions that make those daily consumption habits possible. A “normal” in which the vast majority of people still felt economically precarious, burned out, and swallowed by their student debt, and most still struggled to cobble together enough savings to protect them from medical or financial catastrophe. A “normal” in which the various manifestations of the gig economy—and the lack of healthcare, labor protections, or the general safety net that accompanies them—have been, well, normalized.
So what if we don’t actually want to go back to that?
