On Oppression

I recently read a book (for one of the many book clubs I'm in) about the Holocaust. 

In my youth, I was extremely into holocaust books and tbh I'm not totally sure why, but I perhaps it's something to do with my proclivity for sad stories in general. I remember reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry in third grade, and I think that's when I really started seeking out additional holocaust books, but maybe it was even earlier than that. Also worth noting that the books I liked as a kid usually still had happy endings...the main character always survives in a children's book; there's always someone who comes in to save the day. While I think the idea behind books like this was to teach children about the horrors of the past, I think my personal infatuation with the subject may be proof that in addition to respect for the survivors of that brutality, it also had the power to instill children with a belief in a false reality where there are good guys around every corner and the persecuted will be rescued in the end. 

As an adult I got kind of burnt out on these type of stories. Maybe that corresponded to when I realized that the reason survivor stories get told is that only the people who survived the atrocities got to pass their tales down to subsequent generations; the vast majority of the victims of the holocaust didn't get that luxury. It kinda loses the heroic appeal when you can fully grasp the reality. And I've found that more recently, I am really sensitive to reading Holocaust stories because they are so often ripe with Zionism and it weighs heavily on my conscience. I gave up on a book recommended to me by a friend a few weeks ago partly because I couldn't stand to hear the main character's father repeatedly push for his children and their families to "settle" in Palestine as an alternative to staying in any European countries where they may soon be in tumult. Part of me was like, "Yeah, okay, fair enough to get the hell out of Europe!" but there was no acknowledgement in the scenes that I read (which was almost half of the book) of the Palestinians whose houses they had moved into, nothing that acknowledged the ongoing struggle of those displaced people. It made me feel weird and I couldn't do it. 

So, back to this book I actually did finish for my book club. I liked it, and it didn't praise Zionism in an icky way either, so that was a big relief. It was actually about the Holocaust in Romania, a fictionalized novel about the author's own grandmother's lived experiences during those years. It turns out the Jewish citizens weren't all sent off to concentration camps there, but were consistently isolated and alienated from society long before the Nazi's made their way there. There was also a significant push/pull from both Germany and Russia invading at different times. A truly fascinating (and simultaneously horrific) look at a place I knew very little about despite my childhood proclivity for Holocaust stories. 

But here's what did make me feel weird about it all: I looked at the author's social media and there was no acknowledgement of the atrocities still going on in Palestine now. She is apparently on a social media hiatus, which is fine, but in the caption of one of her photos from October I found this: 

Tomorrow, my novel, THE BLOOD YEARS, about my grandmother’s teenage years in Holocaust-era Romania, will be published. Today, I learned of a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor in Israel, kidnapped. In my book, the main character’s grandfather, her Opa, often says, “Everything is cyclical.”

Here is what I know: Murder is always terrible. My heart is broken. I love my grandmother and miss her every day, and I deeply wish I could have met her beloved Opa, Heinrich Fischmann, seen here.

This is a perfectly understandable sentiment (also, how crazy is the timing of her book release with the October attacks?) and I think it's a totally fair reaction; not reacting with additional violence or hatred, just an expression of sadness and acknowledgement of perpetuated hatred that she covers in her historical novel. But it was the complete silence on the violence following that post that got to me. Now, it is not this author's job to publicly reckon with the violence of a whole country. I know that. I don't think she's awful or anything. And I respect that everyone should be taking regular social media hiatuses (I don't think the internet is generally good for our mental health). But at this point in time, an absence of public acknowledgement that Israel is problematic seems to me pretty indicative that a person doesn't have a problem with Israel's continued displacement of Palestinian people.

I realize that this person could have previously posted stories that I missed and have since expired, and could have privately held opinions they kept off their social media as a public figure. I know that. But to be an author publishing a book in 2023 about historical Jewish oppression and not make any permanent public acknowledgement of the ongoing atrocities the nation of Israel is inflicting on another marginalized group seems...myopic at best.

Having this stuck in my head all week has been reminding me of a conversation I witnessed between some coworkers many many years ago. So now, story time! My coworkers were having a conversation bemoaning the fact that Black Lives Matter organizers had a protest at the Mall of America and disrupted holiday shopping. These coworkers, though they weren't there and hadn't been personally affected by this protest, were horrified by the actions of the protesters and infuriated about how it would (in their opinion) unduly affect people trying to buy christmas presents for their kids without causing any real change and how tragic that was. The sentence that has stuck with me for a decade now was "As a Christian in America, I feel oppressed!" I had literally nothing to say about this comment at the time (because I was rendered speechless, but also because I wasn't part of this conversation, just nearby). I also can't recall if there was any explanation or insight to what said oppression was, though if I had to guess, it'd be something along the lines of Christian-owned businesses not being allowed to decide for themselves if they will refuse service to LGBT folks.  Ya know, the ole oppression of not having a legal justification for discrimination- you've heard of that, right? But I realized not that long after overhearing that conversation is that what I should have said was "Not being allowed to oppress other people is NOT the same thing as being oppressed!" I've thought about this many many times in the almost decade since it happened and I stand by that assertion so I'll say it again:

Not being allowed to oppress others is NOT a form of oppression.

Here's how I think this relates to Israel's genocide right now: Israel is oppressing displaced Palestinians and have been doing so for the better part of a century now. They are currently committing a months-long ethnic cleansing that is being pretty well documented in real time for the rest of the world, and a significant amount of the population is still not acknowledging it. I think that's partly because people are afraid of being labelled anti-Semitic. And I understand not wanting to say triggering things about a country populated by a people group who has been so marginalized historically throughout the western world. 

But again, I say: not being allowed to oppress others does not mean you are yourself being oppressed. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of real antisemitism in the world today; I am not at all saying that Jewish folks don't face the reality of discrimination and hate crimes themselves. I know they do. And I know that hatred is perpetuated by the garbage spewed by the kind of creeps who sometimes run for President here in America. But what I am saying is that pretending that what Israel is doing to Palestine isn't racism is morally questionable at best. And calling a spade a spade (or a genocide a genocide) isn't the same thing as oppression (or antisemitism). We can call out and condemn violence and racism from a country, we can decry the continued murder and disenfranchisement of Palestinians, and we can also call out hate speech directed toward Jews because of their race and religion. Being opposed to Israeli occupation of Palestine is not equivalent to hating Jews. 

I think standing up for the marginalized means both calling out Israel AND advocating against antisemitism. I think the actions of Israel as a modern nation are a blight on Judaism; Jews deserve a sense of pride and self-worth untainted by the war crimes of Israel. This, in my opinion, gives Jews in the rest of the world an even bigger incentive to stand with Palestine. I wish "not in our name" was the rallying cry of every single Jew in America. I wish our government could acknowledge that they are choosing to back oppression (then again, when have they ever acknowledged such a thing in the entire history of our country?) and cease financing genocide. I wish nobody considered it controversial to speak out against war.

Life Lately.

 The summer has been hurtling past me, as it always seems to do in adulthood. It's especially weird in Texas since the days are so hot that going outside means risking my entire body becoming drenched in sweat, so unless I'm wearing clothing that will be forgiving of that and/or have plans to go swimming, I tend to stay inside.

Regardless, I've carved out some time to do delightful things with people I care about like see the summer musical at Zilker Park (it was Legally Blonde this year, and it was fantastic) and finally watch the bats fly out from under the Congress Ave bridge at dusk (incredible experience, 10/10 would recommend). 

Possibly my favorite part of August though (at least the one that I can't seem to stop bringing up every time I talk to anybody) is reading a new favorite book. Listen, I realize that NOBODY is shocked that I would want to talk about books. I'm in 6.5 book clubs, so I definitely talk about books during those, which means I'm doing that one or two evenings of any given week. But outside of my book clubs I actually think I don't talk about books all that much considering the sheer volume of books and audiobooks I go through. Sure, there are a handful of people that I know also like to read and I'll pass along a book rec if it's something I think they'll like. But I average about three books a week (and I truly like most of them!) and I'm definitely not telling most people about books that often! So I want a little bit of credit here for reigning in the impulse to gush about books all the time. 

BUT. 

Last week I listened to the audiobook of Rainbow Rowell's new book, Slow Dance, and I absolutely adored it. I have been completely unable to reign in my impulse to tell everyone I talk to about it. I wanted to take my time and savor the first read (I was pretty sure before I even started that I'd want to do re-reads down the road, like I do for all of Rainbow Rowell's books) because you only get ONE first read of a new book! I worked really hard to take breaks from the audiobook, to savor scenes that I loved, to pause and rewind if I found that I'd missed a little bit by getting distracted. 

It took me four days (pretty long for an audiobook I was REALLY enjoying) and by the time I got to the end I was so completely invested in the world of Shilo and Cary that I couldn't even imagine starting a different book and I just rolled it back to the beginning and started the whole thing again. In all the audiobooks I've listened to I have never felt compelled to do that before! I don't think I've ever immediately restarted a physical book after finishing it either. I definitely do rereads of favorites, but I usually wait upwards of a year before undertaking a reread. It only took me slightly over 24 hours to listen through the second time. And then I went out the next day and bought a physical copy because I wanted to be able to do close readings of the specific scenes I liked (it's really difficult to find specific scenes in audiobooks) and also because I was down to the last few hours of my library audiobook loan.

Slow Dance is Rainbow Rowell's first adult novel published since Landline about a decade ago. Landline has been one of my favorite books since I first listened to it back in 2016 and I've been listening to it every year at Christmastime for the past several years (I don't really consider it a Christmas book, but it is technically set over Christmas and I use that as an excuse to revisit annually). I haven't yet decided if I like Slow Dance even more than Landline...it feels too soon to tell. But what I do know is that it has been a very long time since I read something that made me feel like I was just EXPLODING with love for it at the end, and that is exactly how I felt about Slow Dance. I posted on instagram about it, I stopped by the library to personally recommend it to any and all of my librarian friends who might be working (I found two, but I think I convinced them both to put it on hold!) and I've been passing along the rec to basically everyone I see in person all week. That's a lot more than I usually do; a lot more than I've done for any of the other 105 books I've finished so far this year!

33.

 I skipped a couple weeks here, just because life has been very busy. I actually did have things to write about both weeks, but didn't carve out the time to process and write them all out. 

But yesterday I turned 33. It's kind of wild and kind of scary and also kind of mundane at the same time. I threw myself a big Last Supper themed birthday party last weekend which was a blast but also made it feel like I'd already had my birthday so the actual day was pretty low key. I didn't really end up making any plans for it, and mostly spent the day alone, doing things that I enjoy and taking a much needed rest. The weeks leading up to my party were filled with planning, prepping, baking, and all sorts of work getting ready to host a 13 person dinner.

In my time alone, though, I kept thinking about the ways that my life is different at 33 than I ever thought it would be and the ways it is different than the lives my parents had at this age. In many ways my life is full and rich and everything I want it to be. I get to spend my free time doing exactly what I want. I spend time on crafts, reading books and attending entirely too many book clubs, I hang out at the springfed pool regularly in the summers here and get to sleep in on the weekends. Very little beyond my own whims and fancies dictates how I spend my free time and I love that. But there are other things about my life that still don't feel realized. There are still parts of "being an adult" that feel beyond my capabilities and I'm not really sure why because I look around me and see other people navigating similar situations with seeming ease. 

I was talking with a friend recently about how interesting I find the word "bravery" because it is so extremely up to interpretation. My mother has told me that she thinks I'm brave, and many other people have said the same over the years. I also willingly admit that what I might be is stupid; I am perfectly willing to go for a walk alone at night, which is something I know scares many people, especially many women. I think mostly I've been lucky enough to never be personally traumatised by any terrible outcomes from my brave/stupid decisions because surely if I'd ever been attacked or something equally untoward I would be far less willing to risk my bodily safety on the regular. But as it is, nothing has ever really gone wrong for me and I refuse to let the possibility of something bad happening someday determine how I live my life. But like I said, I don't think that's brave...probably just stupid. And I don't feel brave. I don't think most people feel brave. Which brings me back to my original point on this topic, which is that we assess bravery on a deeply personal level. We see others as brave when they are able to do things that seem scary or intimidating to us regardless of how those people feel about the things they are doing. One of my mother's examples for my bravery was moving across the country alone a couple of times. And for my mom, who has lived in Maine for her whole life, I can see how that would come across as bravery. But it didn't feel like something that required bravery of me; it just felt like the next right step in my life each time I did it. And yes, uprooting my life multiple times has been challenging, but not in a way that felt insurmountable. There are plenty of mundane things that feel completely beyond my comfort level and I avoid those things. There are things that are a breeze to others that fill me with existential dread to the point where I just never deal with them. And I think everybody has things that feel completely beyond their capacity. We've all got boundaries for things that are scary or too hard or too tedious and we all have things that feel routine and easily achievable. The specifics are just different for each person, yet we perceive the ability to face our insurmountable challenges as bravery in others. Which makes sense! I just find it really interesting. 

One of the things I decided while I spent time alone reflecting on my birthday is that this year I want to start tackling more of the obstacles that have felt overwhelming to me. Getting things done that feel scary or hard and that I've simply avoided because of that. It feels like time to face those demons. Maybe that's just because it's fully spring here and I'm slowly emerging from my troll-like winter state. Maybe 33 is the year I finally turn into a real adult? I guess we'll see.

Checks and balances, motherfuckers!

This week I have been listening to the audiobook "We Were Eight Years In Power" by Ta-Nehisi Coates and it's had me thinking extensively about the systemic injustice cooked into the very foundation of America. Very little of it was new information, but it was freshly upsetting to hear about the different racial inequities that have been very intentionally orchestrated at all levels of government, from municipal to state to national levels. 

I listened on my drive to work one morning I thought about how the three branches of government were created to limit absolute power. I think I literally said aloud "Checks! And! Balances! Motherfuckers!" because I was feeling really spicy about the fact that despite the good intentions of this system, our government it pretty warped 250 years down the line. Because while we theoretically have checks and balances between branches of government to cover creation of laws, execution of laws, and evaluation of laws, what we really have is a ruling class of very wealthy people who are generally not interested in protecting the masses. I do think many elected officials are doing their best. But I don't think the majority of them care deeply about much more than appeasing the electorate enough to retain their status and power. And it's just really fucked up.

I was also thinking a lot about a tiktok video I saw many months ago where someone was reminding the viewers that it's OKAY to scrutinize the politicians who represent you, even when they belong to the party that you identify with. It is okay to hold them accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of their constituents while in office. And in fact as part of the public who has elected and employed them to represent us, it is actually our job to hold them accountable because if we don't nobody is. Again, as it turns out the checks and balances thing is deeply questionable at best.

So I was thinking about how fucked up it is that our government can just decide to send billions of our dollars to the Middle East to fund a genocide and there's essentially nothing we can do to stop them. Like, that's kind of insane? That we're just being held hostage in complicity on this one with our own money and by the people we have chosen to give power to. And it's not like this is the first time this has happened; there's so many instances from the Vietnam war, to various US-backed coups and governmental ploys in Latin America and the Middle East throughout what can reasonably considered recent history (I'm not sure where the line gets drawn on recent history, and arguably very little of American history would be disqualified, but within the lifetime of people currently alive feels pretty recent, ya know?). 

I don't have much else to add here. I guess this is more of a rant than anything productive or insightful. But it's what has been roiling around in my brain all week and I am reminded anew of the centuries of disenfranchisement that Black people in America have endured, of the myriad hurdles the white majority have placed on a group of people who have never had a reasonable chance to get ahead or honestly to draw even with their oppressors. 

Just A Few Books.

 Yesterday I participated in a book holiday called Novellus that a friend of mine created last year as a way to ease the drear of post-holiday winter. Eight of us participated and were secretly assigned gift book recipients. Then, we could go onto the website and add our personal book preferences and what we already own lots of etc. We could also send anonymous questions to our assigned recipient to further clarify what they might be interested in. 

I tend to get ridiculously excited for whatever holiday is coming up next. I don't think I really have a favorite holiday, I just like holidays in general. I love a theme and I love having something to look forward to. And it turns out this applies just as much to made up holidays- I was so invested in refreshing the page everyday because, as it turned out, the questions people anonymously asked were answered non-anonymously and publicly visible on our gift exchange page. It was so fun to see what people were asking and answering! And then, about a week after our exchange assignments were made, the questions petered off. I assume this was because people already knew what books they were getting each other, but there were still two weeks left of anticipation and I needed more continuous dopamine hits. Which was when I discovered that anyone could ask anonymous questions of anyone else! So I took it upon myself to become and agent of chaos and ask a question of a different person each day for the two weeks leading up to the exchange. 

I got a lot of good info about what books people were interested in. With all this good information, I took my role as Master of Book Pandemonium to the next level and picked what books I would have gotten for each of them if I had been their assigned gift giver. Then I drew the covers of my book recommendations onto cards for each person (and listed some additional recs inside the cards, too). I thought they came out pretty good, and people seemed excited to receive the additional book recs based on their interests. Only one of my recommendations (The Red Tent) had previously been read by the person I gave it to, and it was one that I had kind of guessed, but on the smallest chance that she hadn't read it, I thought she should because I knew she'd love it. 

In addition to the book recs depicted by the covers, I suggested: The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel, Leg bu Greg Marshall, The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Long Way to A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez, Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, Forty Autumns by Nina Willner, Sourdough by Robin Sloan, and Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory. And the books I actually brought to the swap were The Book of M by Peng Shepherd (for my specific recipient) and Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which I put in the yankee swap because it's a hilarious and absurd quick read and I thought pretty much everyone would enjoy it.

Two days before we met I sent a reminder into the group chat that people should make sure they answered any questions and it was when some of the people realized questions they hadn't asked were being answered by their assigned recipient. A comment went up asking if someone was asking additional questions for "general interest" or if something could have gone wrong and assigned multiple people the same recipient (whoops!). My favorite part of the whole ordeal is that one of my friends was like "We all knew that was Aleena, right? I saw someone was asking people extra questions and was immediately like this is clearly Aleena." While I'm usually a big rule follower, I have to say I am also a fan of lighthearted mischief- especially when it involves books!

In addition to the specifically assigned book swap, we had a yankee-swap style exchange, so everybody brought two books and left with two! It was super fun.

All in all, a really wholesome day and one well spent gathering with friends who share a love of reading.

On Holding Space.

Something about me that most people find out pretty quickly is that I'll talk....probably beyond the bounds of social acceptability for any given situation. I actually have noticed that in public or with strangers and passersby I actually talk less than other people; I'll always use a self-checkout if one is available and I rarely go out of my way to engage with strangers. But put me in a situation where I'm expected to mingle and I will mingle til I drop. I will befriend at least one, if not many, people at a wedding where I know only someone standing at the altar; I will strike up conversation with a group of people at a holiday party I was invited to through a tangential connection; I will ingratiate myself with everyone at the potluck. 

I've often said that talking is my superpower. I can talk about anything or nothing for as long as needed and if I think the other person in the conversation isn't sure what to say or needs some time to warm up, I'll just chatter away until they feel comfier. I'm sure this bothers some people and is less than helpful at times when I'm oblivious to it, but I think overall it's a good quality of mine. 

The downside is that I have a hard time turning my desire to speak off which only worsened in the deep isolation of quarantine pandemic days. I pipe up entirely too often in the myriad book clubs I'm in and sometimes worry that other folks don't get the chance to contribute as much as they want as a result. Granted, this is a deeply ingrained habit from my classroom days, when most kids loathed speaking up in class and I almost always had something readily available to yammer on about. I've seldom, if ever, been afraid to be the first to speak up. 

But I've recently realized that it has a positive side I haven't always noticed, too. My chatter is inclusive. Yes, I can inadvertently monopolize a conversation, but I will do this to everyone equally. And when there is someone who has a harder time communicating, I will put in effort to include them if at all possible, which I've learned is not a trait that everyone shares. This week two people in dramatically different contexts mentioned that their loved ones who speak English as a second language and have a more difficult time connecting with English speakers because of it told me that those folks are more willing to talk to me than anyone else. And I think that's a pretty big compliment!

While I often feel like I should be striving to talk less, it sometimes helps to remember that the very thing that feels excessive can be an advantage to some people. It's always nice to feel included. I'm really glad that my incessant jabbering has opened the door for at least two people I see regularly in my life in Austin to feel like they are included and can talk to me.

I'm not really sure what my point is with all this (other than to brag, I guess) but I think maybe it's about the fact that the things that make us unique are often our greatest assets, even when they feel like things to be embarrassed about. I hope that reading this reminds you to embrace your idiosyncrasies and watch how they enable the people around you to feel safer and more welcome.

On Luddism.

 I've been thinking a lot lately about the appeal of living a life that's less dependent on my phone. I have my phone set up to go into do not disturb mode for all of Saturday each week, and while I do think it has somewhat curbed my desire to waste hours of my free day scrolling mindlessly, it's still not as effective as I'd like it to be. Yesterday I tried turning my phone off for the day, but I didn't last that long because I ended up wanting to listen to my audiobook. While I had my phone off though, I worked on some hand sewing and facetimed some friends. When I mentioned to them that I'd turned my phone off for the day one was like "But you facetimed us!" Which is true, though I started the call from my laptop (which is actually a much easier way to facetime, in my opinion, because you the screen/camera holds itself up and you're free to do whatever you want with your hands and not worry about your phone tipping over mid-conversation). 

Anyway, it occurred to me after the fact that when I say I want to use my phone less I'm not at all talking about cutting back on actual communication (whether it be facetime, voice calls, or just text messages) with my friends and family. It's the mindless suck of scrolling aimlessly, of opening the same few apps for a dopamine hit of more-new-fresh information every ten minutes. And I definitely do that. I'm pretty sure we all do that. It's truly baffling how fixated we've become, as an entire culture, with checking into our tiny little boxes of virtual reality. And sure, technology makes it way easier to plan face-to-face time with real people. But you have to actually make the effort to use it to that end. 

When I say I want to use my phone less, the desire has nothing to do with the communication functions of telephones. What I actually mean is that I want to spend less time looking at my pocket computer. I remember when I was probably five or six years old my dad told my sister and I that by the time we were in college they'd have computers you could hold in your hand. We thought it was hilarious and crazy sounding and I remember feeling like that sounded like some insanely distant future technology. Which, admittedly, to a five year old college is about twelve years away and that is unimaginably far in the future. But lo and behold, iPhones came out when I was still in high school, so we did in fact have handheld computers when I was in college.

Some days I want to get a flip phone. So much of what I want access to with a smartphone can be accessed through a laptop which, at least for me, is a fundamentally less addictive piece of technology. Can I still get sucked into hours of scrolling online on my laptop? Absolutely yes. But I'm less likely to do it with regularity because it's not riding in my back pocket with me at all times. I get lost in laptop rabbit holes once a week (or two or even three) instead of multiple times per day. But then I think about how the things I do use my iPhone for are really really helpful: I use google maps multiple times every day; I listen to hundreds of audiobooks each year for free on the Libby app; I use my phone to play the sound of crashing waves for 45 minutes while I fall asleep each night and use it as an alarm each morning; I can do all my banking from an app and need only my fingerprint to get into it, which eliminates the need to memorize a zillion different passwords. 

A smartphone is incredibly useful. I just wish I were better at not squandering time using it for things I don't care at all about. I did a decent job staying off my phone this weekend. Instead, I spent a significant amount of time sewing different projects (hand sewed most of a tote bag that I bought supplies for while in Maine over Christmas and finally put a patch onto my torn duvet cover) and even spent three and a half hours today hanging out with my friend while I sewed up a kaftan for her out of a lovely fabric I found recently. It felt really good to start and finish an entire project in an afternoon, and it also felt really lovely to chat with her about life and what's been going on with both of us lately. I also read a significant amount of the library book I have checked out right now and went for a walk in the sunshine both days. It feels good to spend my weekend doing something refreshing, something that adds value to my quality of life. I think it's fine to occasionally waste many hours scrolling through endless feeds but I don't want it to be a defining benchmark of my life. I don't think any of us do. Yet we all too often collectively fritter away our precious time. 

My screen time reports say that I usually spend between 4 and 5 hours a day on my phone. That's...a lot. It's more than I want. I think that casual usage adds up over time so I would be totally fine with two hours a day. But it turns out that you can spend two hours a day checking the time and weather and playing the daily NYT games and answering actually important texts that have to do with work and checking the route for the stop you need to make on the way home from work and all sorts of other little mindless and necessary tasks. All the things that we actually need (ish...does anyone NEED a smartphone?) our phones for. So what am I doing on there for the extra two to three hours each day? Apparently a lot of Google maps, actually, if my screen time report is to be believed. But also a lot of other random garbage.

I passed this sidewalk art on my walk yesterday. 

It's clearly a relic from the early pandemic days, but it feels still relevant in some ways. There are so many people that I can't wait to hug again. My family, my far away friends. It's not a bad sentiment for regular life, but it was such a fervent desire back when it seemed such a remote possibility. I thought about how nobody is doing street art to express how badly they want to hug the general public anymore. How specific to that one global cultural moment that piece of graffiti was. How it feels a little bit like a time capsule that expressed the longing of the entire planet. Then I thought about the cultural things that feel normal and universal right now and someday might feel extremely dated and 2020s specific. I really hope using our phones all the time is one of the things that falls to the wayside. I'm sure some folks will continue to use them constantly forever, but I hope there is a widespread shift from thinking of our phones as an extension of our bodies (I am absolutely speaking of myself here) to thinking of them as a tool for occasional use to make it easier to live our lives in the here and now. Maybe someday. 

On Warmth.

I've spent a lot of time over the past week thinking about being warm. Mostly because it has been Texas cold for the past couple weeks, by which I mean it's dropped below freezing most nights and I've been wearing lots of layers for highs in the 40s. But some of the days had highs below freezing, too, which is objectively quite cold. So I spent a lot of time harrumphing about that and how I left the North to escape winter so I don't know what the hell Texas is trying to do. Then again, I'll think to myself, a week or two of winter is exactly what I'm looking for- particularly when the "cold" weather is still in the 40s most days. So while I don't enjoy feeling cold, it is overall fairly acceptable to me. 

There was even one freak day this week that was almost 80 degrees and I ate my lunch outside in a tank top and took the kids to a park to run around after school. I am a big fan of tank top weather in January. And then the next day it dropped back down, and while the coming week should be warmer, it's also supposed to be extremely rainy. So. You win some you lose some, I guess. 

But today I was out in pretty cold weather and drizzle to participate in a rally/march in support of Palestine and Yemen. It was a bit chaotic and also miserable weather to be out in and I kept thinking to myself that I was absolutely allowed to bail on the march and head back to my car and my warm, dry house. And each time I thought this, I immediately thought of the people living in these places who don't have homes any more because they've been bombed out. Who don't have families to commiserate with, who don't have any more of their winter clothes, who have lost everything. And a few hours of discomfort while warmth and safety await me afterwards seem like the least I can sacrifice. 

I've never had a problem with paying taxes, because to me taxes feel like a subscription fee for participating in society and help ensure that the people who need help are helped. I realize that taxes fund many more things than just aide, but it's how I like to frame it for myself so that I feel good about them. These days, however, the knowledge that my tax money is currently funding bombs and death weigh really heavily on me. I don't want to be complicit in this brutality. I don't want this blood on my hands. And my heart breaks for the people who are living fragmented lives right now at the hands of my government's corruption. 

As I thought about staying warm, I remembered this piece Neil Gaiman wrote based on crowdsourced information about what being warm means to people. He did it as part of fundraising to help Syrian refugees a few years ago, and it is equally powerful in light of Palestine and Yemen today. (Incidentally, one of the most powerful books I read in 2023 was As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh, which is about a young woman living through the recent terror in Syria, working at the hospital in her city as a pharmacist because even though she only finished one year of pharmacist school she was the most qualified person left, and grappling with whether to flee on a refugee boat or stay and keep helping people there. Absolutely heartbreaking and horrific and easily the book I would point to if anyone wanted to get an idea of what the people of Gaza are going through right now, when every single one of their hospitals have been bombed.) 

I have little new to add about this genocide.  But I will say again that I find it repugnant and am consistently disappointed by how little is changing or improving as the atrocities pile up in the middle east. I hope that wherever you're reading this, you're warm and know where your next meal is coming from. And I hope that someday soon the people left in Palestine will have this security too.

What Counts As Genocide?

 I regularly attend a lot of monthly book clubs. Like, six (or more) each month. It might actually be too many, but it's fun to see all the different groups of people, so I will likely stick with them all for a while. I attended one on Wednesday where we read "The Lost Year" by Katherine Marsh. The book is a middle grade story that follows three narrators; a boy living through quarantine in 2020 with his mother and great-grandmother, who is 100 years old and was a Ukrainian refugee during the Holodomor. In case you didn't know (as I didn't), the Holodomor was the great Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, which was orchestrated by the USSR government and killed millions of people in Ukraine. The other two narrators in the book are cousins living in Brooklyn, NY and Kyiv, Ukraine during the timeframe of the Holodomor, one of whom is the grandmother in the present-time narration. 

This book was heartbreaking, mostly because of its depiction of a human-made famine. For the most part, Ukrainians would have had enough food for their own survival, but the government wasn't allowing them to keep enough to survive. It calls to mind the more widely known Irish potato famine, where the British forced the Irish to give up what little food survived the potato blight to the point that they Irish weren't able to subsist on the food they had left. At one point in the book, a child gives a description of soldiers coming to demand food from her mother, insisting that they must have kept some hidden for themselves because they hadn't met their quota of contributions, all the while the mother and three children were clearly succumbing to starvation. It was brutal to read and I kept thinking, "Who could do this?!? Who could look at people so clearly malnourished and insist they were being selfish and withholding food meant for others??" 

But the reality is that stories like this are still happening. Look at the forced starvation happening in Gaza right now. Those people have no idea when food or supplies or relief will arrive because it's being withheld from them. This is the most immediate and obvious example in the current world, but another example I thought of while reading was a bit closer to home. 

Right now in Austin, the weather forecast says the temperatures will barely go above freezing for the next week. That's not crazy cold for other places, but it's pretty damn cold for here. Houses here weren't built for weather like this. Almost nobody has a basement and all of the plumbing is directly under the house and still above-ground. When the weather gets close to freezing we're supposed to leave all our faucets dripping to (hopefully) avoid frozen and burst pipes. But these inconveniences are nothing to what the unhoused population in the city faces. Just days ago homeless encampments were being swept out and trashed. What little these people have been able to accumulate for themselves is totally gone in mere hours. What will these folks do when the temperature is deathly cold? There are some resources available, like warming shelters, and the library is an often-used resource for people without homes- but the library will be closed today and tomorrow in observance of MLK day. So that option is unavailable to them during this critically cold time. It's scary.

I brought up homelessness as an example of socially acceptable genocide in our society, and I think it blew the mind of the librarian who runs that book club. Now, the technical definition of genocide according to the Oxford English Dictionary is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Perhaps disregard for people experiencing homelessness doesn't completely fit that definition, but it comes pretty close. Too close for comfort, in my opinion. I don't know how many panhandlers I drive pass each day, but I rarely give out money to them and I know I'm not alone in that. As "successful" members of society, we view these people as a blight, as an inconvenience, as dangerous, as any number of things but most especially as lesser than. These people, who exist on the fringes of society, are barely seen as human. We have collectively decided to overlook them in our daily routines and it often comes at the price of their lives. We look the other way when winter weather comes and kills these people. Or when they die of heat exhaustion in 115° temperatures in the summer. 

I'm not saying that it is each individual's burden to care for every person in need they see, but I do think it's important to address how, on a systemic level, we have deemed certain members of the population sub-human and refuse to give them access to life-saving resources. Because really, in America (or anywhere in the world) if people are dying because of cold or hunger it is because a choice has been made not to help them. There is absolutely no reason for those things to ever cause deaths here, let alone with regularity, and yet people will die in Austin in the next week because they couldn't find somewhere to be safe and warm to ride out the cold snap. People die every day because of preventable hunger. People keep dying in Gaza under Israeli occupation and we, as US citizens, are culpable. I'm not sure how we got to a point where we justify preventable death and even murder. I'm not sure why such cognitive dissonance exists around the value of human life. 

But what I do know is that some day, hopefully not too long in the future, it will be glaringly obvious that what's happening in Palestine right now is genocide. That what's happening there is inherently wrong and evil. And I suspect that someday within my own lifetime, young people who have to learn about this genocide through history lessons will wonder how people could possibly have been so callous about human pain and suffering and we'll have to chose to either face the reality of our decisions or double down on the cognitive dissonance (and based on American history, I wouldn't be shocked if we chose the latter). I know that when we consider how we might have behaved if witnessing the Holocaust or the American Civil Rights movement or any other well documented, state-sanctioned violence, we need only consider how we're reacting right now to human rights atrocities happening in Palestine. 

A Thought Experiment.

 Last year I stayed mostly off of Instagram. Instagram is still an annoyingly necessary source of information for meetups, gatherings, and events I want to go to, so I took the app off my phone and relegated my usage mostly to the occasions I was at my computer (though as the year wound down I found myself increasingly invested in checking up on different people and re-downloaded it for larger chunks of time). This year I want to explore my relationship with that app in a different way, so I'm taking a new approach; one photo from the week posted each Sunday for the entire year, and a coinciding blog post for those who check in here. (So, Nate Johnson. HI NATE! But mostly just for myself and for posterity.) 

The major inspiration for this came from the instagram user @blakeoftoday, whom I discovered only a few weeks ago and who posts video recaps of "this week in fatherhood" and gives a beautifully composed synopsis of some of the highs (or lows) of his week. It is weirdly compelling, partly, I suspect, because he's invested in nice sound equipment and has a good voice for voiceovers, but also because he is insightful. He's reflecting each week on small moments of joy or growth or struggle that make up the mundane existence of everyday and which we so seldom spend time considering while trudging through our own daily routines. I wanted to set aside time for myself to reflect. To think each week about what has happened, how time has moved forward, ways that I feel I am changing or stagnating. Anything, really. So we'll see how this goes, I guess. 

This week, something I've been thinking a lot about is setting goals and intentions. Clearly I'm not alone in this. I think probably more people than not have at least some idea of habits or routines they decide they want to alter and use the new year as a catalyst for starting fresh. That being said, one of my favorite takes on New Year's Resolutions this year was a video of a man explaining that for most of history the "year" started in the spring, and that the gregorian calendar we use moved it to January as part of a way for the church to control people (I've forgotten the specific reasoning there, but honestly the guy who made the video readily admitted that he had heard this and hadn't bothered fact-checking it because regardless of whether it IS true, it feels true and that it enough for him. I feel the same way). In nature, winter is a time of hibernation. Animals are supposed to slow down, sleep more, conserve energy. Really, just survive. Yet the holiday season pushes us to produce, consume, celebrate, socialize! More, faster, better, happier! Then immediately, with the changing of the year, we force ourselves to try to make sweeping lifestyle changes. Become new people! It makes more natural sense to do this in the spring, in the time of new growth. 

And yet. I like the demarcation of the new year as a starting place. I like the introspection of one year coming to a close and a new year being full of possibility. Of course this could happen at any time of year! But culturally, our new year starts on January first. So I still make goals. Though I usually wait until January first to even start thinking about my goals for the year, and then a few weeks in (when most folks have abandoned their resolutions) I finalize a list for myself. 

Yesterday I stumbled upon the account of a hand-dyed yarn company. The yarn was so beautiful! It made me want to buy yarn! And then I noticed that the account had all these photos of beautiful yarns displayed, and very few photos of anything knit out of these yarns. Which, granted, is probably not their goal as a business, but it made me stop and think. I've often walked into a yarn store and just adored looking at all of the beautiful options available for purchase. In college I spent unknowable amounts of money on yarn (if I had to guess, probably at least a thousand dollars over the four years) that I bought without real plans of what I'd use it for; I just saw lovely yarn and wanted to own it. 

The same is true when I walk into fabric stores. Over the past couple years I've started exploring quilting as a creative endeavor and while I really like it and plan to continue, I've already accumulated an amount of fabric that it would take me years to make quilts out of. I actually prefer the aesthetic of quilts made with solid color fabrics, but when I walk into a fabric store I adore looking at all of the cute and beautiful and charming and clever prints and I want to buy them alllllll! (I *don't* buy them all, but I definitely still buy more than I have a real plan for.) I also get this feeling in bookstores; despite owning over one hundred books that I haven't even read yet, if I walk into a bookstore I will almost certainly walk out with at least one new book. I love walking into bookstores even on the rare occasions when I don't buy a new book- even just the feeling of walking into one is thrilling.

As I thought about all of this, I realized that part of the allure in all these stores that sell the individual pieces of my hobbies is the potential. Definitely part of what I love is the doing, the making, the process of creating something or the escape and journey of reading something. But there is a different, very real and separate, joy to walking into a place that holds all the potential for that enjoyment. Walking into a yarn/fabric/book store is stepping into a realm of possibility where there aren't any obligations. It's pure opportunity.  

And that's how I feel about the new year. There's magic in the possibility. A new year is not yet marred by any goals that didn't get accomplished in the year before; it's unadulterated potential for myself and the world around me. 

I've often wished I could own a bookstore. Or a bakery. Or any of these businesses that capture the feeling of bliss I get when walking into one. But then I remember that owning a business is a whole ordeal and not one that I'm particularly interested in. So, at least for now, I will save my excitement for stepping into the many businesses that I patronize to support my hobbies. And for the commencement of each new year, even if the date is arbitrary and misaligned with the natural seasonal time for new growth.