Well, I read Metal from Heaven and am about to start Can’t Spell Treason without Tea. And I’ve played the new Stardew Valley update on my Switch for the last two days, so much that I’m well into Summer Year 1.
Last night had dinner in Annalee and Jesse’s garden with a bunch of really lovely people. Loudly shrieked with people about Metal from Heaven (psychically damaged hallucinating fantasy motorcycle bandit lesbian train robber revolutionaries! unions! strikes! with a side of decadent aristocrat prep school girl graduates!). Other fun messing about with Meshtastic with Jesse and Emma H. and then Jesse told us about AREDN. I still need to go get my ham license!! Megan told me about being a Master Birder and then Rick and I just kind of gloriously explained to each other all the facts we know about different kinds of rocks, which is like one of my favorite kinds of conversations, and then about family history things.
Today I had lunch with my parents and later had a video chat with yatima, who has covid and has to isolate – I will bring her soup tomorrow, having just made chicken posole after going to the newly opened (today!) El Chavo supermarket, which is great & I highly recommend it. I went to Stamper and ordered new glasses, the cheapest possible progressives, because I sat on my wonderful glasses that I love. (I did find the same frames used and ordered them from Canada, fingers crossed that works.) Lunch was at the old St. Jorge cafe, which has re-opened with new owners as Tea Rex, and I can report they have a very good quinoa-beet-apple-balsamic salad and excellent coffee. That is it. I am giving myself some space and down time to feel a wide range of things.
Last weekend I had a great time with new friend Tiffany as we wandered around Valencia, had ice cream, dumplings, shopped around in Silver Sprocket, exchanged stickers, and showed each other our tattoos. Danny is still reading me chapters out loud from book 2 of Dance to the Music of Time, from Bangkok, when our schedules overlap.
Everyone is just so shell shocked.
I try to keep my historical perspective and I do know that I am lucky to be alive in a time where I have any rights at all to anything, and I never expected even so to see queer/trans rights and all the legal changes there and the shift in acceptance that we have seen. We hoped that was a done deal – with a little backlash – But no. We then saw our rights to our bodies taken away and people die from pregnancies, miscarriages, infections, women driven into poverty or in the control of abusers. The dynamic here I think is less backlash and more the economic precarity that goes with climate change and rampaging billionaires or whatever, that leads so many people into hate, fear, right down the path to fascism. We are not unique in the world, and other countries are struggling with the same stuff. What to do? I don’t know, probably same as ever but twice as hard and with more determination. I did not get to blow my ridiculous celebratory bugle that i blew in 2020 but I will blow it again soon enough.
I recommend reading (and subscribing to) Erin in the Morning – I found her post This was always going to be a generational fight for transgender people to be heartening today.
Thanks for the call. It helped a lot