Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Has this felt like the longest week ever? I can barely make words go on the page, I haven’t sewn anything, the weather is beautiful but I just sit inside… hopefully a long weekend will help. Also, this is good to remember:

2. A year of quiet collective trauma notwithstanding, it’s been nice to realize that I’m vaccinated and can do things like go to dinner again. I’m meeting a friend for lunch today and meeting her nine-month-old baby (Little Loaf) for the first time!

3. And as we all emerge from our shells into the world this summer, let’s remember CicadaBro:

AWW YEAAAH!

Swole Talk

By in swole

It’s been max week at the gym this week. On Monday, I didn’t try for a squat max since we were focused on front squats and front squats can go straight to hell (still figuring out what to do with my long arms there). On Tuesday, I tried for a bench max but ended up missing my old max by two pounds, since my elbow decided to start hurting. But TODAY, it was deadlift max and I got a new one–210 pounds!

Lifting has been such an exercise in patience for me. After the first few months of beginner gains, my progress slowed (as it does) and it was really hard for me to accept that I might be at my current bench max for years (I have been!), that it might take me another three years to actually do a pullup, that my age is also kind of fighting me even as I get more gains.

But deadlifts are “my” lift, the one where long-limbed people actually have an advantage (unlike squat and bench) and I’ve been working hard on my form. So I’m really proud of this! I left the gym this morning feeling the most accomplished I have in…6 months? Longer?

I’m so glad I picked up this hobby. I love being strong but I love being a beginner at something just as much.

 

 

Wednesday Poem

By in poems

To be completely honest, educating myself about what’s going on in Israel/Palestine has felt like too much lately. My privilege whispers, “But you’re working on being anti-racist! You’re calling out misogyny! You’re getting your head around prison abolition and Asian-American fetishization and doing your own work in therapy and isn’t that all enough?” But the thing about intersectionality (and just being a good human) is–you gotta care about it all. And caring also means learning. So I will start.

This poem was in Laura Olin’s newsletter two weeks ago and it shook me. You don’t need to know the history of the West Bank or the origins of the conflict to feel the panic at the end: “It doesn’t matter/ that 58 seconds isn’t long enough/ to find your wedding album/ or your son’s favorite blanket”. You don’t need to know a lot to know that bombing civilians is wrong.

 

Running Orders
By Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war-time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

Sewjo: Here And Gone Again

By in sewing

We’re going to try another day trip to the hot springs over Memorial Day weekend so I thought, “Why not make a new suit for it?”  I’ve had a bunch of swim fabric sitting in my stash ever since we planned to go to Hawaii in early 2020 (sob) so I used some to test a new pattern.

I got started and had all my sewjo back!

And then I didn’t like the fit of either the top or bottom (a rare Greenstyle miss?) and I didn’t like them together at all. I think part of it is that I’m trying to force a match between the palm print and the neon, plus I could have cut the top a hair smaller. I might still give it a try in the water just to see if it’s worth making again with some tweaks–but that sure was a sad-trombone finish to some momentary sewing excitement.

I have a rash guard cut out for Doc (see above, so much swim fabric; someday we’ll make it to Hawaii) so maybe I can dive into that and recover the elusive sewjo yet again.

Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan

By in Uncategorized

He is 80 today and, while I haven’t listened to much of his stuff past Time Out of Mind, I still remember hearing “Desolation Row” on the local radio station in my late teens and thinking, “Wait, what is this?”

Here’s part of it synced to a live recording and here’s all 11 minutes of its glorious weirdness.

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. A Helena Fitzgerald essay for you to while away some time on a Friday: Here Is The CDC’s New List of Activities in Which Fully Vaccinated People Can Engage Without Masks

Looking at old photos of yourself and not understanding how you could have felt so ugly when you were so obviously beautiful and then not applying this lesson to the present at all.

Adding clothes or home goods or candles or jewelry or fancy cookware or any number of other items that you will without question never in a million years actually buy to an online cart, and then abandoning those carts and leaving the tabs open and finding them still open much later, hanging around like these little ghosts of all the wholly different people whom for a minute you imagined you could buy your way into being.

2. Gym Instagram making it personal:

3. Mental health/artist Instagram with a reminder:

Thursday Poem

By in poems

This was today’s Poets.org newsletter pick and I, for one, think there should be more poems about truck license plates.

 

Looking for the Beautiful Things

Joy Priest

I live in Texas now. & in the next lane over on I-10
BIG JEFF is soaring at twin-speed toward the dusk-pending horizon 

& something base & graceful has taken us over
like, if I took my hands off the wheel, we could lift into the air & become 

part of the indistinguishable wave of laughing gulls above. 
BIG JEFF says his license plate, which I first checked when I let him pass 

10 miles back because his lights behind me
were the Second Coming (or the First Coming, in his case, if we’re making 

the usual jokes about men with big trucks). 
But I don’t want to make unbecoming jokes about BIG JEFF, who is 

right now, accompanying me down this interstate 
of solitude, not leaving me behind or riding my bumper, just gliding 

beside me as if he needs someone too, as if he trusts me 
& said to himself in his blue-lit interior, Hey, I’m gonna hang on her wing.

She seems to know how to get where we’re going.
She’s probably a hellcat. No balls hanging from his tow bar, just BIG JEFF 

on his pearlescent Ford Super Duty, which has a row of three 
headlights on each side & which, I admit, I was more than annoyed by 

when he came up behind me like an astrodome 
on wheels. But Texas is home now & this is the way of things—BIG JEFF 

& NASA, tacos & trucks. The only state with more guns 
than Kentucky, the expert at the range told me before I left. I am an expert 

at beginnings, a Lone Star once again, as I have been 
in every state I’ve lived—the Bluegrass, the Garden, the Palmetto, the Bay—

each time hoping I’m closer to the beautiful things.

Where Is My Sewjo?

By in fabric

I have a literal room full of fabric, a list of what I want to make for the summer, three different machines–and I can’t get anything started. Some of it is the weather (lots of outside projects); some of it is work is taking all my brainpower lately. I also think some of it might be my brain refusing to accept that things are going back to “normal” and I will end up wearing clothes out of the house, after so long.

Has this lack of inspiration stopped me from buying fabric? Of course not. Please enjoy my latest find, checkered double knit in Hot Dog on a Stick colors from a Fabric Mart sale:

I don’t know what I want to make out of it, of course–a jumpsuit? elastic waist pants and a top? a jacket? but at least I’m prepared for when my sewjo comes back.

Where Are The Socks?

By in Tuesday Project Roundup

I’m having another flare up of tennis elbow this spring. I’m being a lot more proactive with exercise mods and ice so it’s a lot better than last year (I really let it get out of control) but I can’t knit–which means my planned Year of Six Pairs of Socks will probably be more like the Year of Two and a Half Pairs.

All that means I picked up the needlepoint project again:

Staying in the “lines” of the design is a little challenging but I’m definitely better and faster than a year ago. Maybe it’s time to really order one of the Kaffe Fassett kits? I bet I could use sock yarn for needlepoint.

Monday Already?

By in Toby

It’s going to be a busy week, but Toby says, “Maybe you can ignore it a little bit.”

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