Earlier this year, I was texting my best friend, Kate. We haven't seen each other in person since 2017. "I'm going to see you this year," I said. "I can feel it." She told me to put my feelings away, as she had the same bad feeling about 2020 that she had about 2016. "This year is cursed," she said. "Other grim shit is looming." Ah, she was so right, as she often is. There was a protest here that I was unable to attend on account of 1) people here cannot even wear masks properly at the grocery store so I am wary of being in a large crowd of people, and 2) I put off something that I had to do until the last minute so I had to spend Saturday doing what I said I would do. This is probably for the best, as they shut down public transit from the protest & then issued a curfew, which is not as bad as issuing a curfew 15 minutes before the curfew started, as other cities did. Anyway. What a nightmare. A very small link roundup: Here is a link where you can make a donation that you can spread evenly across multiple bail funds. You can can also dedicate specific amounts to particular bail funds. Here is a Google Drive link to a PDF of "26 Ways to Be in the Struggle Beyond the Streets". This is the link to the official memorial fund for George Floyd. Campaign Zero's website. Twitter thread of master list of safety tips for protesting. I have been numbing my pain by playing Katamari Damacy. I started (and re-started) a few books: I just got Samra Habib's We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir from the library! I was on the waitlist for it, so I haven't started it yet, but I'm very excited for it. I am still working through Living Out Islam. Re-read: Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present. This is a TOME, y'all. I had a passage marked with a Post-It note: "Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot." That's a quote from Neoclassical sculptor Harriet Hosmer (a quote from 1854!). Apparently she was married twice, both times to women, but this is something I think about often. (See also: Austin Kleon's blog post on work-life balance.) I forgot to write about Southern Lady Code in last week's blog post. Amazon recommended it to me quite a while ago, and I had it on my wish list for a while. (I knew it would be good because someone was offended by one of her essay titles.) It was so funny and lovely. I read it while sunbathing in the yard and it was such a delight. I wish I'd had a mother like Helen's, who always had a polite response to any and every situation: "Helen Michelle, if you're going to commit suicide, what you do is get into a bathtub fully clothed. That way, when you shoot yourself, your brains will go all over the tiles, and it will be easier to clean up. And since you're not nekkid, it will be less embarrassing for the person who finds you." Just started The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. This is another book I picked up because it was advertised at Target. I am so susceptible to advertisement. They say nothing about this book on the ads at Target, they just show the cover and play some Ominous Music while they are showing the cover. I think it is a murder mystery, but I'm not sure yet. It has yet to reach out and pull me completely into the story, so we'll see. This week on repeat: Hayley Kiyoko's Expectations.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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