Friday Unrelated Information

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information No Comments

1. I’ve discovered Virginia Sole-Smith’s columns about fatphobia and diet culture and kids and have been learning a lot. I’ve never struggled with my weight and I started lifting to get stronger, not smaller, but…no one is immune to fatphobia or the pressure to look a certain way, no matter who (or how old) you are. She linked to this article about posting online about “losing the pandemic weight” and it’s just really eye opening and helpful.

2. So true, from the caption of this Kat Vellos post: “How are you?” can be a hard question to answer when a multitude of positive, exciting, hopeful AND scary, sad, disappointing things are *all* happening AT THE SAME TIME.

3. About to head into the weekend like this:

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Very wholesome: Rep. Katie Porter interviews her mom, who made the quilts hanging in Katie’s offices. (Liz Porter is a Famous Quilter–founder of Fons & Porter!)

2. I started subscribing to Helena Fitzgerald’s essays and the latest, about Martinelli’s sparkling cider, Easter, and the coming end of the pandemic, is wonderful:

I have celebrated seeing friends in person even on the street at distance, shrieking over the fact of them standing there in all their ordinariness like some grand miracle, like they had rolled away the stone and risen from the tomb, walking out into the light.

 

3. Speaking of Easter, it’s time for the annual Bach St. Matthew Passion performance. The Netherlands Bach Society has one that’s almost like being there in person. (Remember live performances?)

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. This was absolutely fascinating, via my friend: “The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make.” I knew “muslin” was in great demand in Europe from about 1800 on but I just assumed it was, like, fancy Liberty-style lawn or voile. No, it was Dhaka muslin, so fine you could pull yards and yards of it through the center of a ring, woven from one species of cotton that grew along the banks of the Meghna river in Bangladesh (then Bengal). Like most things in the countries they colonized, the British ruined it and both the cotton and the skilled labor pool were destroyed–but there’s an effort underway to re-create it. Like I said, just fascinating.

2. Plots of Nineteen-Eighties Movies if Their Protagonists Had Been People of Color

3. Very important info: How to track the big stuck boat

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Expanding on the “We’re alive and we’re lucky but we’re not ok” thought from yesterday: Anne Helen Petersen writes about the impact of collective loss and trauma:

…we have endured nearly a year—a year!—of sustained, slow-motion collective trauma. Some days might not have felt recognizable as such, but our brains are very adept at flattening trauma, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, into something survivable. We have borne witness, in some way, to deaths in our close community, in our homes, in our online circles, in our kids’ schools—to half a million American deaths and 2.56 million deaths globally. We have lived with some level of fear, for ourselves and for those we cherish, for a year.

And then there’s all the other, compounding trauma. Depending on your situation, you have endured unspeakable loneliness, deep anger at those who couldn’t be bothered to care about others, enduring financial precarity, and the feeling like your body is, quite frankly, disassembling under all that’s being asked of it as a parent, worker, partner, person.

 

2. Here for this: Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome 

The impact of systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and other biases was categorically absent when the concept of imposter syndrome was developed. Many groups were excluded from the study, namely women of color and people of various income levels, genders, and professional backgrounds. Even as we know it today, imposter syndrome puts the blame on individuals, without accounting for the historical and cultural contexts that are foundational to how it manifests in both women of color and white women. Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.

 

3. My feelings about the time change:

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information, poems

1. I will read anything Anne Helen Petersen writes about jobs, work, “productivity culture,” and how none of those things benefit the actual workers. This is from her latest newsletter:

 

This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always: “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.”
[…] Capitalism does not care for that reality, or for the human wreckage it leaves behind. Leaders will seek out workers who can meet the new production quotas that technology suggests they can achieve, and dispose of them when they can no longer do so. And do not fool yourself: this is as true for factory and physical labor as it is for the office and “knowledge work.” I’m not scared that a robot is going to be able to write a blog post, or write my next book. I’m scared that I’ll be expected to write five books in the time I would’ve previously been expected to write one — and for the same amount of pay.

 

2. In honor of Valentine’s Day Sunday, here’s a love poem from Naomi Shihab Nye (author of this favorite, too). Those last two lines!

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. There’s some really good stuff in this Times article “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love String Quartets.” I think I’ll put on the full playlist they included at the bottom and remember why I love string quartets.

2. I saw this post this morning; sometimes what’s most helpful about therapy is just having that validation of “yes, this is hard.”

The trick is to keep doing the work.

 

3. I am…jealous of these capybaras. The first thing I’m gonna do after vaccines is have a spa day.

1 2 3 4 5 >»