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Texting friends in different states about various permanant climate emergencies and whether they're prepared for them, or how I spent my weekend.

(please consider a portable power station and at the very least keep your backup chargers charged and some reliable flashlights in spots you can navigate to even in the dark.)

These days, in the spheres over which I exercise some modicum of control or influence, the question that occupies me most is not "how". It is "when".

I'm not talking about hustle porn or productivity gospel or even the reality of work and life in a pandemic. I'm talking about the reality of visibility: people want things, and they want things from you, and they want those things on their schedule, and it is of no moment to them that they are not the only ones in the queue (or that they're not paying you).

I used to pay an assistant (Jessica, a legend), and most of what Jessica did for me was triage. This is urgent, this is important, this is neither. If you say yes to this you can't do this other thing; you've said yes to this and you need to carve out the time to prepare for it; you've said you'll think about this and now you need to make a decision. Here's the information you need to make a decision.

Eventually you find that you've been to more funerals than weddings. You know the rituals and how they differ, and indeed how much they are the same.

You've been the person who made sure there was an endless supply of hot, dark, bitter Hong Wing coffee at the wake and you've been the person stammering out the eulogy and you've been the person on the other side of a screen watching as three handfuls of dirt are thrown into a grave thousands of miles away and you will be each of those people again.

Because you were the kind of young person who thought a lot about death, because you were the kind of person whose friends died young over and over again, because you've poured the coffee and paid your respects, because you've gripped the hands of the grieving and been the one bereaved, because you've winced at the typos in the printed materials and appreciated the photo selections in the memorials, because there is no outliving life.
Every wedding brings with it a reminder of the hopefulness of love, every funeral brings with it a lesson in the endurance of love.Ashes, dust.

There's a TikTok video doing the rounds, with associated commentary, of a college student's reaction to being surprised by a visiting girlfriend.

No part of this is surprising - the video, the metacommentary. Folks are attempting to make their names and fortunes by streaming their lives and those of their families and friends. Folks exist in a moment when Facetuning your face and body before you upload your photos and videos isn't just expected, it feels enforced. No part of that is particularly novel anymore. Livecasting, lifestreaming, quantified self, microcelebrity, parasocial relationships - everything is of a piece.As is true whenever one of these crosses the timeline, I think about how glad I am that when I joined Facebook as an undergrad you had to connect a camera via cable to a laptop to upload photos to it, and you still had some modicum of control over whether and how folks were able to tag you in those photos. These days, you can opt-in to wearing glasses that constantly record everything and everyone around you, but you cannot opt-out of being recorded. These days, if feels like the only way to have some control over what parts of your life end up as fodder for commentary on the internet is to make sure that none of your friends and family are prone to the temptations of virality (or participate in ).

A month back in New York.

Two days away from three weeks into the new gig.
A worrying number of as yet unopened boxes of books.A forest of packing materials.Five years away from New York.

Something I finally learned is that you can run out of energy long before you run out of time.

I appreciated this Scalawag piece on the relentlessness of expectations - there are no breaks, there is no time off, evenings and weekends are just more opportunities to be beholden to the endless cycle of obligations, “lunchtime” is an apology in advance, it doesn’t matter if there’s been a hurricane or a wildfire or a pandemic in which millions died.

Why though? What are we running from? What are we running to?

I haven't worked out of an office since November 2019. This week I go back into one, at least for now, because attempting to forecast the contours of this pandemic in the US is a game for people better than me.

It feels slightly like the first day of school. I'm making sure my uniform is immaculate, that my bag is packed, that I know where to go and what time to be there and what's expected of me when I arrive, including the check-in at the testing station.

On Tuesday all the furniture from my previous apartment in Texas will arrive, which means that I will be spending the rest of this week contemplating my relationship to Stuff and Things. Moving really, really makes you interrogate your relationship with capitalism.

A housekeeping note for paid subscribers: I'm working on the note about your subscriptions further to last Sunday's update. Still no action needed on your end.

Moving always forces you to reckon with stuff. It especially forces you to reckon with waste. So much plastic, so much cardboard, so much tape, absolute mountains of bubble wrap.

Trying to figure out , and what will end up in a landfill, and what you can reuse while refreshing headlines about hurricanes and flash flooding and people dying in basement apartments: an abundance of on-the-nose metaphors about abundance and scarcity.

I have never been a fan of those “[person] would be [x] years old if they were alive today” posts, because they’re not alive and what does it matter how old they’d be?

I’ve stopped being able to remember how old Phil would be on his birthday, because I’ve stopped thinking about how old he was when he died. He died, he stopped living, he grows no older, this gets no easier, every year the grief is the same.

He is often memorialized as “youthful”, a word we sometimes turn to when we mean “always imagining and inventing a better way”, and because he died at one of those ages where the response is always, “oh, he was so young.”

Yes, he was, so were we all. We thought we had so many more birthdays ahead of us, so many more picnics in so many more parks.

Most people born into generations of US passports, most people who are white and comfortably middle class, most people who practice one of the religions not normally casually equated with terrorism, most people do not know what it is like to spend your entire life being the object of someone else’s story, the villain in a narrative written without your knowing and certainly without your consent.

They do not know, and will probably never find out, what it is like for someone to whom you are nothing more than a name or a number in a file to make decisions that will affect or indeed determine the trajectory of your life and your death.

Most people will never know, and will have no reason to experience, what it feels like to have no control whatsoever over fundamental conditions of your existence and survival.

You get to be a whole person. You get to have a complicated story. You are granted the grace of a redemption arc. You are not merely the inevitable casualty of political decisions made before you were born.

I am organizing my books, and the Discourse is misrepresenting Marie Kondo again, because where would we be if the commentariat consistently read the work we were misrepresenting in service of our current polemic.

Organizing my books is really a proxy for being forced to make decisions, like whether I really need to hang on to every one of those books about the 2008 financial crisis, or whether it is more ethical to donate the book by the serial harasser to the library or to recycle it.

Books are not the hardest things for me to organize, though they are materially related to that particular foe: papers and documents.

When you have lived for two decades in countries for which you lack citizenship, you accumulate paper.

I slept a lot this weekend, and not because I’d planned to take the time off.

Earlier this week I had an allergy panel done - I got tested for the severity of my reaction to a few dozen different potential allergens. The panel itself, which involved both skin pricks and skin injections, was what I’d describe as “annoying but minor” on the grand scale of medical procedures. But the next day was…not good. I had to call in sick to a podcast recording, load up on Zyrtec, and slather on a worrying amount of antihistamine creams.

On Saturday I felt incoherent and exhausted; after waking up at a normal hour I went back to sleep just before noon and was competely out until after 6pm. Today I rallied (which meant I caffeinated and gave mysef a pep talk) to get some things done, and then had to have a three-hour nap after.

Deliberately exposing myself to things that make me unwell in service of diagnosis wasn’t the only stressful part of this week, even if it was the itchiest. It was also a period during which I was called upon to defend my values, to manage a series of time-sensitive, expensive, and interdependent decisions, to deliver the goods and above all, to be good.

There was a tiny window when it was possible, if you squinted at just the right angle and allowed yourself an unreasonable optimism, to feel hopeful about the prospects for the world. To feel as if we could be turning a corner on death and suffering.

That window, if ever it was open, seems to have slammed all the way shut this week. As has been true throughout the pandemic, guidance from health organizations tends to be lagging indicator of reality. And as has been true for all of time, the people who have the least to lose and the most to gain can be relied upon to be awful throughout a crisis.

Simone Biles quit the Olympics because, she said, she didn’t trust herself going into the vault and her other events. What courage to say that out loud, and what courage to do what you need to do in full and intimate knowledge of what the reaction will be. Simone Biles is 24.

Editor’s note: As often as is possible I’ll be handing the keys to this newsletter over to paid contributors (pitch me! It’s $450 all-in). These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll also be getting another missive from me this week. - smi

I’ve been taking a voice acting class, which is still a sentence I am not entirely comfortable saying aloud. I am taking this class precisely because merely talking about “performance” is so far outside of my comfort zone and because in the fantasy version of my life I am the kind of person who occassionally contributes to video games.

Early in the first session, the course instructor gave me the note that I don’t seem to be entirely comfortable being playful. So like the Professional Good Student that I am, I immediately resolved to “get better at performing playfulness”. Heh.

Many of us have worked and studied for years to reach a stage in our lives and careers where our primary utility in a given space is how good we are at a thing. That can feel good, or it can feel like a trap. That can lead to coasting, and to boasting. And then we might stop trying (or being pushed) to grow.

I’ve written before about the practice I try to follow of . Taking this class is very much in service of that, too.

A deep resentment borne of the months and months and months spent in collective acknowledgement of the duty of care toward endless unknown others while the powerful and the venal and the powerfully venal undercut that care at every turn.

A rage that comes from seeing that the things you said would happen, have happened, and will persist because the people who said they wouldn’t, there’s no way, are you sure, are you sure you aren’t ovverreacting, are the same people endlessly rewarded with the benefit of the doubt.

A sadness deepened daily by the tally of the dead and the dying, the bereaved and the berfet, the orphaned and the abandoned, the long hauler and the suddenly gone.

An exhaustion .

Editor’s note: As often as is possible this year (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. The Main Event will be in your inboxes on Sunday, as usual - smi

There are weeks that really feel like inflection points. Oh, the ocean’s on fire? Fire clouds? Sure. Why not.

When I was in high school, I placed second in a public speaking competition (yes) on the basis of my prepared speech about and an improvised speech about triangles. I was an absolute riot in high school.

I have been thinking about Britney Spears, and the absolute horror of her conservatorship.

I grew up in an era in which pop music was defined in no small part by Britney; her videos were events in themselves. What a strange thing to know someone who is roughly your age has been living through a nightmare for more than a decade.

What does it mean, really, to believe women? Is belief any good without agency?

Editor’s note: As often as is possible (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. As a reminder, I’m donating all revenue earned in June from $ subscriptions to the Trevor Project and the . - smi

I’ve learned how to ride bikes a few different times.

As a kid, on a faux-BMX, from a combination of parents and that one uncle who was like a parent and was also, as the ex-boyfriend of one of my aunts whose relationship with us far outlasted theirs, not in fact an uncle. We rode down up and down our little hill and very ocassionally beyond those boundaries and a few, rare times in what I would realize later was my first experience of a velodrome. That bike was red.

Then again in New York, as a function of trying not to be killed by taxi drivers and bus drivers and really all drivers or taken out by car-sized potholes or the pedestrians who’d step nonchalantly and confidently into bike lanes when these weren’t otherwise blocked by parked police cars. To work and back across one bridge or another in the depths of winter, hands kept warm by two layers of gloves. I joined a gym so I could shower there before heading to the office. One day I forgot the code for the locker and stood dripping and frantic and exposed while trying to figure out how to signal the receptionist. That bike is grey and teal.

Then again as the slowest member of a collegiate road cycling team in Silicon Valley. I showed up at one of the team rides on a brand new road bike (and my first that I hadn’t yet had fitted to me. The seat was too low, I didn’t know how to use the shifters, I didn’t know anything about so I was on the stock flat pedals, I was hauling the brutally heavy U-lock I used for my commuter bike, my tire pressure was too low, and I’d spent so long getting lost on campus that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. That might well have been my only ride with that team had it not been for the generous and chatty and low-key champion mountain biker who took me under her wing and taught me how to use all those new gears. That bike is mostly white with hints of blue.

How To Wash Your Makeup Brushes

1) Assemble supplies at a leisurely pace. Pause to contemplate whether you really need three different but functionally identical precision eyeliner brushes.

2) Wash brushes, meditatively. Or while catching up on your favourite beauty influencers, as you and various platforms’ algorithms prefer.

3) Dry brushes, exultantly and overnight.

“He started writing the list in 1984, six years after he first suspected there was something wrong, that patients were suffering symptoms with no explicable cause. He tried to raise the alarm in 1979, two years before anything was reported in the press. He was ignored.”

“On June 5, 1981, a curious report appeared in the Center for Disease Control’s weekly public health digest: Five young, gay men across Los Angeles had been diagnosed with an unusual lung infection known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) – and two of them had died.”

Every week I google “em dash” and then I copy and paste the symbol onto the otherwise empty page.

I have memorized the shortcuts for the acute accent, the grave, the circumflex; I am unfazed by the requirements of the cedilla and the tilde. Be you umlaut or diaeresis, I am ready. I am many years and a graveyard of dead websites past needing to look up routine HTML or markdown.

But not so, the em dash. Every week I must pause to find it. A break in the flow, appropriately.

(In truth it’s rarely the break; it’s the beginning.)

I thought I would send this on Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then Friday. I say the names of the days, but on Wednesday I thought it was Tuesday and on Friday I thought it was Wednesday and today I thought, ah so it’s not Sunday yet.

On Thursday I spent a lot of time waiting. On Wednesday I spent a lot of time getting ready to be waiting. Doctor’s offices, government offices, any setting in which you are regulated by impatience and dread and whatever the specifics of your relationship to transactional authority; there is a distinctive texture to the act of waiting in those spaces.

What is the feeling of waiting for history, through history2?

On Monday, .

Do you ever forget that your friends are dead?

Perhaps in the middle of the movie or the play or the book or the song or the sentence you find yourself thinking, oh I must tell him about this; oh she would love this. A beat, and then the realization, and then the wave.

If eulogy is memory is forgetting why there are no new memories a kind of prayer?

Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd just about a year ago. Already a different kind of forgetting.

This week I learned that a journalism school declined to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize winner and a MacArthur genius grantee, in the wake of an outrage campaign fomented by people who find talking about the realities of how the US treats Black people to be insufficiently patriotic.

This week I learned that AP fired a just-out-of-college journalist named Emily Wilder in the wake of an outrage campaign led by the Stanford College Republicans about her participation in pro-Palestine campus activities.

“I turn often to poetry” feels like such a ridiculous thing to say. Do I mean, instead, pretentious? Perhaps I do, despite the years I’ve spent trying to unlearn the internalized and complicated classism that is the hidden curriculum of every single one of the schools I attended.

However I feel about the fact, the fact remains.

This week I sought out June Jordan and .

2021 is a constant bifurcation; good things are happening to people, bad things haven’t stopped happening to people.

Sometimes when kids die we wonder whether it is impolitic to mourn their deaths. Outsourcing morality to politicians always ends well.

It can always get worse. How do we get better?

I’ve spent a large chunk of this weekend on hold with a bank, long enough that I’ve essentially memorized all the transitions in their automated messages.

I am reminded that time is a luxury. One of the reasons I have time to patiently repeat verification details over and over again is because I am do not currently have a “full-time” job.

My last day “in the office” was April 16. In lieu of being defined as a productive member of society, I’ve been using the weeks since to schedule and go to long overdue doctor’s appointments, cranking through errands, making headway on my personal email, reconnecting with friends and family. Appalled to report that I have not played a single video game yet.

Reader, it is Thursday.

Dates are not a strength of mine. For instance: I remember every correction I’ve ever had to issue or have issued on my behalf in the course of being a reporter and editor. Two of them involved dates. What day it is? When is my birthday? How old am I, actually? All questions with which I struggle.

However, it is Thursday (according to multiple sources I checked) which means this newsletter, the first of the additional elements for paid subscribers, is a day late. Sorry about that.

I have wondered for awhile to what extent this date chaos was influenced by having led a professional life largely oriented around intra-day deadlines: the US print edition morning close; the need to get the blog post out with pithy analysis of the earnings top line ASAP; the reality of reporting to C-suite execs for whom five minutes to reply to an email is four minutes and 30 seconds too long.

I have long believed in the power of group texts-as-proxy, for both strong and weak ties. And never more intensely than over the past 14 or so months.

There’s the siblings group and its consistent and casual shade; the extended family WhatsApp for the maternal aunts and uncles and cousins defined by its birthday shoutouts and embarassing stories about everyone’s childhoods. There’s several groups of former colleagues, replete with layers of media and tech commentary.

And then there’s 🛵💕, as much a space for funny tweets and scheduling coordinated fitness classes and dicsussions about in-progess creative projects as it is for daily vibe checks (“how are you holding up” “what vibes do you need”) and the source of many care packages to and from Texas, New York and the Bay Area. There are different ways to try to survive a pandemic and that group text is one of mine.

Several years back the low-key genius Rachel W Miller raved about the work of Cheryl Mendelson, the author of .

There’s an active shooter in Austin today, still at large at the time of writing this. Three people are dead.

Three people in Kenosha. in Indiannopolis. And everywhere, video of Adam Toledo.

Thank you for being a ~ premium ~ subscriber.

I do not enjoy being photographed. I never know what to do - with my face, with my body, with my hands.

But there is one picture of me in which I am looking straight at the photographer (I cannot remember who it was, but this was in Trinidad perhaps ten years ago (fact check: very perhaps) and we are at a club and it is clearly late and my left hand is wrapped around a glass of what can only be a scotch and coconut water, because I am nothing if not the person who will be drinking a scotch and coconut water if it is late in Trinidad and I am liming, and that is all to say there’s a narrowish pool of folks who could be on the other end of that lens).

There is no end to the absolutions those who have wronged you might seek, because there is no end to the stories we will tell ourselves about our goodness.

“There’s so much slippage between “please tell me what I’m doing wrong” and “please tell me that I’ve done nothing wrong”. The suddenness and intensity of the desperation to be seen as being “good” run completely counter to how deeply entrenched, how very old the problems are.”

We like to pretend that the problems are new, because then we don’t have to reckon with the role we played in creating the conditions that brought us here.

Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?

A. It is not for us to cool it.

Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?

Bouncing between the ordinary–hello, welcome to The Main Event: No longer hosted on Substack edition–and the ordinariness of despair.

A year of bad days and in none of those did I wake up and engage in a killing spree.

Some housekeeping: I’ll be moving this newsletter off of Substack. This isn’t my first platform switch - I’ve been in the game since the early days of tinyletter - and it probably won’t be the last. I’ve been actively looking to switch since at least the privacy fiasco and the commentary (to say nothing of the “”) from the Substack team haven’t changed my mind.

I traffic in words, but I have run out of ways to explain. Yes, they lifted the mask mandate and all the business restrictions. No, vaccine access here isn’t great. Yes, along the lines you might expect.

Inside I try to keep my plants alive.

.

Feels like it’s been March this whole time.

Disaster anniversaries are a special kind of shock to the system. They mark time. They mark us. And we should mark them, in turn.

Editor’s note: I wrote a version of on Tuesday (a rare day off!) to revise later and then…did not. Slightly revised and updated as of Sunday 28 at 3.30pm CT. There will be a regularly-scheduled missive tonight as usual. It will be more chill. Probabloy.

I have spent most of this pandemic furious. My default state is unimpressed; furious is an escalation.

Furious because so many people have died and so many more are grieving. Because we keep treating this generational trauma, this mass-casualty event, this unrelenting series of tragedies, as if it mere background. Background to the necessity of the endless meetings. Background to the urgency of the daily task list. Background to the “I don’t know if you saw my email but”. Background to the five seconds of deep breathing to make sure you show up smiling to the Zoom call. As if this is a distraction which does not merit our individual or collective attention and could we all shut up and stop complaining and just Furious because for some people all this death, all this suffering, is just an inconvenience, a blip, a slightly longer time between Caribbean vacations.

Editor’s note: As promised, once a month I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to everyone.

This week, .

Halfway through February, nearly a year into the pandemic, and I am losing count of the number of people declaring their despair.

Halfway through February, Carnival Sunday, and the fete tabanca is profound.

Halfway through February, nearly half a million deaths in the US.
Halfway through February, no end in sight to the suffering.

This week I hit a wall. Or perhaps the wall hit me.

I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I felt the bricks come crashing down. Maybe it was when I was trying to order sympathy flowers to commemorate yet another person killed by coronavirus in one browser tab and reply to the “concerned citizen” attempting to bully several of my team by email in another. Maybe it was when I got the WhatsApp message about the family member’s cancer diagnosis and then had to go immediately into a meeting. Maybe it was when the conference organizer asked me to both moderate the panel and “focus on diversity” while the two male co-panelists were each asked to talk about their work. Maybe it was the casualness of the conversations about who is allowed to be a person in media. Maybe it was all of this? Maybe it was everything else?

Why does it matter if someone said the n-word in front of teenagers becomes becomes becomes

This pandemic steals lives (RIP, Francisco Assis da Conceicao, and may all who loved you find peace) and it steals time and it steals, unapologetically and repeatedly.

I am sorry for your loss, I am sorry for all our losses

To survive we keep pretending: we pretend our way through each hour of grief, through each day of upheaval, through each week of uncertainty, through each month of novel disappointment.

Many, many years ago I wrote another newsletter. Technically I still have that newsletter. Technically alot of things are true.

In that newsletter I would sometimes be able to feature my particular universe of talented friends, who are writers and poets and photographers and musicians and dancers and architects and academics and artists. Some of them are many of those things at once; they are impressively chill about it, considering.

The universe is bigger now, but I still have roughly the same number of friends.

I am committed to supporting my friends’ creative pursuits; I will , support their shows, edit the marketing blurb, make the helpful introduction. And I am committed to supporting creative work in general, and especially when the people making that work come from the kinds of backgrounds that lead people to recommend them, but not to want to pay them.

Last year for MLK Day, I compiled a list of resources for folks who might be interested in deepening their knowledge of Dr. King’s words and works.

Here it is again:

First, (1963), or the one in which MLK is exasperated while incarcerated and in :

Unsent Tweets, March 2020-Jan 2021

coping with the pandemic by watching and reading and listening to work created by people so obviously brilliant and good at their jobs it’s almost physically painful

—

Some folks stormed the US Capitol and killed a police officer. They flaunted Nazi paraphernalia and Confederate flags and Q shirts and Proud Boys tattoos. They wore MAGA hats and live-streamed their screams about stolen elections.

Some other folks, politicians and elected officials who’d wink winked dog whistled bull horned in the direction of the folks with the flags and hats and shirts and the tattoos, said we do not condone violence and these are not our supporters and and and .