Archive

Took a few days off (well, mostly: the gyrations in the markets I cover for work meant I was about as connected as not), hit up two bookstores, bought some new glasses, met up with some old friends, had several excellent dinners. A successful vacation, however brief.

How long is long enough for something to feel meaningful? How much is enough for something to be fulfilling? Can you ever really know?

I think you can know, but only in the moment. In advance, mere speculation. In retrospect, narrative creation.

There is so much to learn from being present.

There are so many ways to be absent. Sometimes loud, sometimes silent.

We all know specialists in absence. We all have our own feats of absenteeism.

May we learn how to show up, still.

Attribution

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field.
— In the Airport by Eleni Sikelianos

Things I miss about Trinidad:
- friends
- family
- Diwali, Eid, Old Year's
- mango season
- julie mango
- long mango
- mango chow
- Maracas
- liming until 4am at some random bar powered by a steady infusion of scotch and coconut water
- fetes

A bit ago I reached the threshold of having lived longer outside of Trinidad than having lived within its borders, though I have not lived in any one place for an equal amount of time yet.

Perhaps footloose is just another name for rootless (but wutless is a better word than either).

It is impossible not to think about borders when you are constantly (re)defined by them.

It is impossible not to think about space when you are constantly trying to recreate it.

It is impossible not to think about time, because time comes for us all.

Attribution:

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
— Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver in Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

I am always fascinated by silent edits. Like the one that takes "wasn't as bad as some feared" and turns it into "wasn't as deadly as some feared".

Who is we remains the most useful, least-often asked question in journalism.

"A patient purchased a rifle at 2 p.m. and went on his rampage inside the hospital three hours later. In a letter found on his body, the gunman “made it clear that he came in with the intent to kill Dr. Preston Phillips and anyone who got in his way,” Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said Thursday."

Despite the endless drumbeat of deaths and despair, there's a certain universe of people for whom all of this "could have been worse".

How bad is bad enough, exactly?

Any politics based on empathy dooms all those we deem not our kind, dear - the opposite of the all-important people like us.

Ah, that we. Ever present. Ever dismissive. Ever deadly.

Attribution:

Kids Who Die

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don’t want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

There’s a lot of Discourse swirling right now about academic vs journalistic attribution because of some editorial decisions and assumptions made by reporters and editors at the New York Times.

All I will say about the NYT’s approach is that as a person from a country that produced Eric Williams, CLR James, and a song called “Haiti I’m Sorry” I am clearly not the audience for any reporting that claims to be both the first and the most definitive explanation of the relationship between Haiti’s current economic conditions and France’s demand for reparations.

“The Times reveals how Haiti became the poorest country in the Americas” is something you write if your cultural and educational context is very different from mine. As is the surprise embedded in the choice to describe the fact that “France demanded reparations from Haitians it once enslaved” as a “stunning detail”.

There are many sentences in the reporting in question that are revealing, but the one I cannot stop thinking about comes from somewhere and someone else entirely.

I have been thinking about how I answer questions, and what I choose to obscure when I answer them.

“How come you already know so much about [process, product, protocol]?”

(I get this one a lot). My default response to this is, “because I’m nosy.” Which is a fact. But the truth is that for the entirety of my career I have been drawn to projects for which there is no roadmap or precedent, and the truth is that people like me are rarely given the grace of second chances, and the truth is that the pet to threat cycle gets shorter every time, so the window to try to do good work without being perceived as a problem is narrow.

“Why is this your problem?”

There are days and there are weeks and there are days and there are weeks and they each and collectively feel like there is no reprieve.

How much worse can it get is a question some of us stopped asking because we know what the answer is, because we’ve been telling you to ask better questions.

Why is this happening is a question that really ends two words later, with a whispered, to me.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this is a question that should instead start with who is doing something about this, because someone always, always is and has been and will be doing, even if you hadn’t heard about them before, even if you haven’t heard about them yet, even if you’d never known you need to know.

There’s a James Baldwin quote — indeed, there’s always a James Baldwin quote — about the role of the artist that goes like this: “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”

Perhaps one of the reasons there’s always a Baldwin quote is because of what he said in that same interview, with Life Magazine in 1963: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And read he did, and perhaps because he read, he wrote.

I am trying to read more, again. I am trying to go to the theatre, to go see the exhibition at the museum, to see the film that’s not available anywhere on streaming when it is available for one night at the indie cinema. I am trying to spend unstructured, mostly impromptu time with friends. I am trying, because these are trying times.

I suppose you cannot be a (contemporary) emotional or spiritual historian if you are disconnected from your emotions or your spirituality. I suppose the doom feels more survivable if you can see the glory.

“Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning” was a beautiful sentence in a review of beautiful and not so beautiful things (art!) that included a brief and violent aside on a brief life violently ended. Is there a “good” way to learn about people who were, ahem, overlooked by contemporary news and recent history?

In that obituary, a reflection: “But [Theresa Hak Kyung Cha‘s] death has sometimes overshadowed her work.” There’s a similar (glib!) aside in the first essay: “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience…and…being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump.”

Well then.

In the US, folks are so allergic to grief and grieving that we are attempting to medicalize it, to pathologize it as “prolonged grief disorder”.

Something can be a privilege without being pleasurable. The (absence of) one does not negate the (reality of the) other.

Is rest a presence or an absence? Does it mean the abundance of something or the lack of something else? Is it both? Does it vary? What has to be true for you to rest, to be rested?

What is the difference between rest and restoration?

For me rest is the absence of interruptions, or of the possibility of an interruption at any moment. It is permission to turn off alarms, timers, notifications, alerts. It is permission for immersion. It is the absence of guilt about disconnecting.

What does it mean to be brave? If it is situational, what do these times demand? If it is universal, how are we called to show up?

It feels - absurd! ridiculous! tragicomic! - to ask that question while a war rages, while people are still dying in a pandemic, from a place of relative privilege and safety and comfort. But then there is always a war. (Oceania really has always been at war with Eastasia)

There is always an opportunity to demonstrate courage. Or better, to decide not to be a coward.

The ability to experience what is happening everywhere in the world not just in “CNN international correspondent time”, but in real-time, constantly, filtered and unfiltered, in black and white and colour, in TikToks and in tweets, has not at all been matched by our ability to process all of it.

You don’t have to look at the videos of the bodies in the streets to know that there are bodies in the streets, or to know why they are lying there, why it has gotten to this.

We are talking about Ukraine and Bucha and some of us are also talking about everything all at once, at the same time.

Boycott the oppression olympics and acknowledge instead the unceasing marathon of suffering.

When there’s this much pain to go around the competition for tragedy feels infinitely self-defeating. (When there’s this much pain going around, celebrating joy feels like a miracle)

Musicians are always dying. Bob, Freddie, Kurt, Tupac, Biggie, Amy, Chester, Chris, Taylor. Aaliyah. Selena.

For that, every time, a specific kind of grief. An echoing silence.

Attribution:

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

— I am in need of music by Elizabeth Bishop

"The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images."

"The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling."

Attribution:

This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
— This is the dark time, my love by Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London 1954)

"The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images."

"The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling."

Attribution:

This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
— This is the dark time, my love by Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London 1954)

It’s still war (it’s war still).

We’ve reached the “media organisations reacting to news of journalists being killed while reporting” stage. We are well into the the “worst possible takes you can have on ongoing atrocities” phase. There’ll be more. There’s always worse.

Everything remains everything. People keep going, until they can’t. They persist, until they don’t.

Are we helping people endure, or are we challenging their endurance?

How much doom is too much doom? And is this a test?

This week I will take a deep breath (maybe a hundred, maybe five) and do the things I need to do: the work travel, the panels, the vibe of generally calm professionalism (generally professional calm?) and then I will do it all over again.

A thing about video games is they make time disappear.

If someone knocks on your door and says, you are living in my house, it's time for you to leave - what do you do?

If someone blows your house up and says, I told you it was time to leave - what do your survivors do?

Who would take you in if you'd left, without you even having to ask, without you having anything to offer, without there being an end date in sight? How much of that is a function of where you live right now, and what your passport says?

What would you bring with you? What would you regret having to leave behind?

Attribution:

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be
fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

— from What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich

It is / would be Carnival in Trinidad.

Tabanca.

It is / did it have to be war in Europe.

What emotion do I describe here? Which of them?

I defer to the people doing the work of dealing with the reality of the now: https://razomforukraine.org/

When a country of — overall — nice people
turns — slowly — fascist,
nice people do not notice this transformation all at once.

As when a person we know intimately
goes, next to us, through
an imperceptible process of aging. Imperceptibly, new wrinkles
slice the skin, frightening, deep.

Nice people nod when they run into each other,
and try, more and more, to lower their eyes,
until finally, raising them becomes an inhuman gesture.
—When a country of — overall — nice people by Lyudmyla Khersonska

"A 35-year-old woman was stabbed to death inside her Lower Manhattan apartment early Sunday by a man who had followed her from the street and into her building, the police said.

The woman, whom police identified as Christina Yuna Lee, was the latest person of Asian descent injured or killed in a string of random attacks in New York City" - New York Times, Feb 13 2022

"The mayor of San Francisco expressed despair over the increase in reported hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders last year, up an astonishing 567 percent from the previous year, according to preliminary figures released by the police department on Tuesday." - AP, Jan 26 2022

"Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. With almost 1 out of every 2 residents of Asian descent in British Columbia experiencing a hate incident in the past year, the region is confronting an undercurrent of racism that runs as long and deep as the historical links stretching across the Pacific." - Bloomberg, May 7 2021

"In a previous statement to The Texas Tribune, Cruz lambasted the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which was introduced into Congress by U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, D-New York, calling it “a Democratic messaging vehicle designed to push the demonstrably false idea that it is somehow racist to acknowledge that Covid-19 originated in Wuhan, China.”" - Texas Tribune, April 22 2021

"By wokeism, I refer to a movement that, on the positive side, is highly aware of racism and social injustice, and is galvanized toward raising awareness. On the negative side, it can be preachy, alienating, overly concerned with symbols and self-righteous." - Tyler Cowen for Bloomberg Opinion, Feb 18 2022

Attribution

Say we no longer bear witness to a body-politic of trauma
after revolution
                by anesthesia or erasure. Say we cover our eyes 
to crossed olive-wood beams on a hill.  Modes of witness   
expose our inadequacy, the human.  Forgetting
is a sign—yes, a thing once existed.
— from Dear Millennium, Inadequate Witness by Karen An-Hwei Lee

There's a game (conversation starter?) called Big Talk. Questions like, what are you thankful for in this moment? And, what can you do right now that couldn't do a year ago and, what advice would you give to a newborn? (Learn all the languages you can)

Questions to ask yourself, questions to ask the handful of people who you really want to know, who you really want to know you.

What a gift for there to be a match between the people you really want to get to know and the people who really want to get to know you.

I love questions. I organize so much of my work around them. I orient so much of my life around how I can answer them. Who are the people you know you can travel with? Where would you like to go with those people, when travel is not just possible but easeful?

I don't always have the answers but I do love asking questions. As I get older, I also want to make it easier to answer the most interesting questions. Time, space, money, energy, not always in that order (rarely in that order). Time to think, space to experiment, the money to keep going, the energy to want to.

Who are the people whose mere presence energizes and inspires you? Who are the people who, well, don't?

I used to think knowing yourself was something you could only do alone, but now I think it's situational. It's not that who you are changes, it's that how you understand yourself does.

Attribution

Why can’t I argue in favor of gone? Go by and pass away—if you can’t stay for a moment— without hesitation—blaming me for a crime—if you can’t stop victimization —if you can’t say something without struggling against the gone of another antagonistic element. Why the agony of the anti and the gone? I’ll make a drama of myself in two parts.
—from Antigone by Giannina Brashci

Folks will line up to defend the powerful, the wealthy, the famous. It doesn't matter the allegation or the platform. People here might not believe in the divine right of kings but they appear to be willing to die on the hill of the divine right of podcasters.

You cannot accept an apology that wasn't meant for you. What do you do when it wasn't even an apology?

Long walks on weekends in the cold, fueled by caffeine and conversation, trying to take the edge off of the reality of politicians praising Nazism as patriotism.

Moments of joy, ekeing out survival, there is so much to endure.

Every year for several years I have reminded myself that what I am doing now, every day, is what I would be doing in a crisis. Because every day for several years has been a crisis, and who we are now is who we are. What can I do to reduce harm? What can I do to stop it? How do I create space for people who will be better than me?

Am I being useful, is a question. Who benefits from my usefulness, is a provocation.

Attribution:

Sometimes it's a call, sometimes it's an email, sometimes it's a text - do you know anyone at [take your pick of large, wildly profitable, multinational tech companies] who can be persuaded to care about [choose an issue of the moment] affecting [select from various vulnerable communities].

This time it was in aid of refugees; sometimes it's for trans kids; I expect given, you know, everything there'll be calls to support abortion access.

I understand the instinct. We live in a time of crisis, and we've been raised (for some version of we) to equate power and privilege with ability. We've long believed (for some version of we) that appeals to benevolent self awareness can work (for some value of work).

I also know that many of these calls, many of these appeals come from people who in other parts of their lives use their networks, use these connections, to secure that internship for a ~talented young person~ whose parents are friends, to guarantee that the ~amazingly impressive fellow member of that non-profit board with the annual celebrity-studded gala~ gets a call back for an interview. Those calls typically work. So why wouldn't an appeal to benevolence on behalf of someone with no social capital at all?

Why indeed.

Very large places have very large resources and diffuse incentive structures that are rarely immediately aligned with "stopping the spread of vaccine misinformation" or "helping refugees get access to shelter and transit" or "standing up for the rights of vulnerable people beyond issuing annual diversity reports in which you celebrate a statistically insignificant decline in the attrition rate of Black women in senior management".

You cannot understand a place without understanding its middle managers.

Sometimes the organizations that are actually doing the work, that are successfully intervening to register people to vote or to get vaccinated or that are making a meaningful difference for and to the lives of people in crisis and on the margins, sometimes those organizations don't have massive marketing budgets and the best websites. Sometimes their websites are in languages we don't speak because they are designed for the people they are trying to help.

Sometimes knowing who those organizations are requires showing up in our neighbourhoods in spaces that confront us with facts that make us uncomfortable about what we are complicit in, and treating people who don't throw dinner parties for CEOs as if they are worth listening to.

How we show up in spaces where no one knows we are is who we really are.

Attribution:

If you knew a mother, any mother, you would care
for mothers, yes? No.

What it is to be lonesome for stacked papers
on a desk, under glass globe,

brass vase with standing pencils,
new orders.

— from Business by Naomi Shihab Nye

People keep saying metaverse. I ask them what they mean.

Games, they might say. Which ones, I say. You know, the ones with lots of people in them; what's the one with the blocks? You know the one? I asked if they've played those games. Their kids have, sometimes.

Virtual reality, they might say. This is often the answer from people trying to convince you to wear glasses that constantly record the people around them and then upload those recordings to places the people being recorded have no awareness of or control over.

I ask them if they've read Snow Crash and what they think of it. We (agree to, in the way that you do when you know the conversation has reached a certain point) change the subject.

There are many books I haven't yet read (as my creaking shelves remind me daily) and there are many things I'll never understand and also I will never try to sell you always-on surveillance glasses.

There are some games (like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, breakout hit of the Season 1 of the pandemic) that are temporally aware: time passes there as time passes without; the seasons are aligned; the world spins on the same axis. When you play games like this you are immersed but not lost in a different world.

Then there are games (like Hades, revered by people who appreciate narrative design and who secretly / not so secretly hope there'll one day be a better set of attempts at turning the Percy Jackson series into movies, or like The Sims, or Breath of the Wild) that are aware only of their own temporality. When you play games like these you might find that you forget what time is, even.

People keep saying metaverse. I wish they could say what they mean.

Attribution:

Circulate riches to every spirit and spine
Stack rhyme schemes and prophecy
Humanity and hypotheses
Guard our stories, stretching from soil to sky
Common and crown, ground level to grand heights
And all of our mass in the middle
Mass, in the middle
The accumulated weight of all our question marks
Our catalog of anxious cells and eager breaths
—from The Library by Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Time (the lack of it, my desire to increase my agency over how is spend it) is one of my primary obsessions.

January 2022, and we are once more in a liminal state - a beautiful phrase for the prosaic, depressing reality wrought by the confluence of omicron and insufficient infrastructure from federal to state to neighbourhood to community to household. Folks once again confronting difficult choices and dwindling options. We are too burned out to talk about burnout anymore.

Doing chores today and thinking about unstructured time, but mostly about unclaimed time. Moments, hours, days when there are no meetings in the diary, no expectations of a response, no "friendly reminders" hanging about. No obligations to anyone but yourself and those to whom you actively extend the privilege.

The thing about a commute - not so much the happiness-destroying, life-shortening extremes, because all things in moderation - the thing about a commute was that for many people it acted as a stand-in for unclaimed time. A built-in window before "the work day" began and a transition between office and home. A time to think or not think, to read, to listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks, to mindlessly scroll the internet or mindfully take-in the walk, the run, the ride, the drive, the trip.

I do not like writing about myself (a curious disclosure, coming from someone who's written what used to be a called a "personal newsletter" every Sunday night for getting close to a decade now). I was raised to distinguish between public and private, intimate and casual, personal and professional.

But every now and again I will decide to write about things that affect me (in this case, migraines) in the hope that it will benefit other people.

So herewith a version of a Twitter thread that, like most of my tweets, will eventually be deleted.

Before I endured my first migraines - in my early teens, certainly, and from memory like before I was ten years old - I experienced them second-hand. I watched how they hit someone else in my family, not fully understanding the white-knuckle debilitation that they wrought.

I have spent most of my thinking life thinking about identity. I am confronted with the disconnect between who I know myself to be (take my name, for instance) and what various developers of various websites and services consider to be a valid entry in a form. Some parts of the US Federal Government will allow a hyphenated first name, some will not; the ones that don't might concatenate, or they might introduce a space. None of them appear to talk to the others.

You are more likely to be aware of your identity if other people are constantly challenging it.

Vos papiers s'il vous plaît.

Last year I spent several months trying and failing to persuade Bank of America that I was who I said I was, that I did indeed live at a given address, that my social security number was indeed mine, that the money they allowed me to transfer into a new account and then sat on for three months while they accused me of being a "fraudulent person" came from the employer listed on the multiple pieces of documentation I presented to them.

I am not much for Decembers.

Rest well, Aunty Maribel.

Love you always, Phil.

Onward to January.

"Why do you lowercase your name" is a question I get asked frequently at work, followed closely by "and how come you get to?"

My go-to answer to the first, which is true, is "a misspent youth that included reading all the e e cummings I could get my hands on". There is another answer, also true, that I give almost never.

That answer involves bell hooks.

I started reading hooks (black and a woman) years after I first encountered cummings (white and a man), which is so often the way of these things. Just as I found Wilde before I found Baldwin, and Olds before Clifton. Such is the nature of a classical, post-colonial education; privilege and disconnection go hand in hand.

Perhaps it is still true now, but it was certainly true then: your IM / chat alias was both code and key, hint and obfuscation, tease and truth.

And mine, for years and years and years, long past the point at which those IRC channels and forums had disappeared from the internet forever, was inspired by Anne Rice.

If you think loving Anne Rice's novels as a teenager in the 90s and early aughts is not a personality I am here to tell you, definitively, that you are quite incorrect. It was possible to organize entire friend groups by their shared book obsessions, and to float between dragons (McCaffrey), cranky sorcerers (Eddings), sprawling epics (Jordan, the original Martin) and horror (Applegate). Rice was often a common denominator; until I bought my own I'd never encountered a copy of her books that wasn't dog-eared from sheer readership.

I started reading the books before I ever watched Brad Pitt immortalize Louis and Antonio Banderas smoulder his way through his scenes as Armand and Kirsten Dunst be frankly terrifying as Claudia. I read the books, and then I re-read them; I tried and failed to get into the Mayfair Witches (save Merrick) because my loyalties were to the Chronicles, old and new.

December, too, is a cruel month. A month of deaths and lives extinguished abruptly, a month of births and promises of the future, a month of shadow and the suggestions of light.

It's dark so early now; I'm lighting scented candles and fluffing the pillows and drinking (even more) tea and trying to slow down even if my thoughts are racing.

There are some traditions that were gifted to us and some that were expected of us and some that we choose to create. What do you keep going, when no one expects you to anymore?

Poinsettias and ponche-de-crème and pastelles and parang even if there are no gatherings because those with whom you want to gather are in countries inaccessible to you, even if the parang is a playlist and not live paranderos, even if the pastelles are made with a tortilla press and the ponche-de-crème lacks the kick of White Oak.

What do you let go of, even when those around you would hold on to them?

Attribution

We are spendthrifts with words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in the air–
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.
—from Words by Pauli Murray

Got boosted, for which I am grateful. Grateful too for the relatively high vaccination rate in NYC, and that the friends and family in various places face fewer access hurdles by the day. Not entirely sure how to handle those folks who decline the opportunity to not endanger themselves and others, but "nah we can't lime" will do the job for now.

One December seemed like a lot. Will we be here again for the third time this time next year? What will that be like? I would prefer not to find out, but I know it is better to be prepared.

How heavy is the weight of five million deaths?

I confess I do not care about the endless tortured discussion that is "return to the office" because what I cannot stop thinking about is the reflexiveness of what we (for some values of we) cling to as normal (for some values of normal).

Sometimes, we is exclusive. Sometimes, we means us. Often, both those phrases mean the same thing.

There are always so many people we leave out. We mean well, we execute poorly. What if we were braver? What if we were better? What if we actively got out of the way of those with the courage and the savvy to be both of those? What if we got out of our own way, when it's us?

Perhaps you find yourself wondering if you are the baddie. A more useful question is, always, what can you differently?

Attribution:

There is, by every measure, reason for fear,
concern, a concert in the balcony of anxiety
made of what has also always been inside of us:
a kind of knowing that everything could break.
But it hasn’t quite yet and probably won’t.
What I mean to say is, I had a daydream
and got lost inside of it.
—from The Birds Outside My Window Sing During a Pandemic by Lee Herrick

"Let me know when you reach home" is an expression of love and fear that I learned in Trinidad, a place where teenagers fuelled by alcohol, exhaustion and ego crashed their cars and died with unrelenting frequency. Is it fear, or resignation? I suppose the worst kind of nightmare is the one you know will eventually come true.

If you know what the hipster PDA is, if the sight of fresh index cards and a small bulldog clip sends a frisson of potential productivity through your fingertips - well we probably read the same six blogs back in the day. That instinct, that with the right pen and the right paper and the right system and just-so conditions and a can-do attitude you can power through whatever personal, creative or professional responsibilities loom, that instinct comes from a desire for wish fulfilment. I wish to have some ability to control my circumstances; I wish to draw a neat and definitive line between my actions and my outcomes; I wish to succeed because of the system and not despite it.

Whether because of weather or tradition we are entering a time of slowness and contemplation. It is not "fine" to need to rest and reflect; it is just a need. We so often qualify needs; we so often apply justificatory adjectives to things that keep us alive. We "deserve", we "earned", we're "allowed" when in fact we must.

Perhaps you will give thanks this week and perhaps you will self-consciously acknowledge the people whose land you're on and perhaps for you it is a day of mourning and perhaps you will opt-out entirely and perhaps none of this means anything at all, because the world is large and we are small.

Attribution

“How do you do what you do” / “How did you get to be doing what are doing” are questions I am never quite sure how to answer because I am not always sure what it is I am doing.

But because questions tend to require answers, and because I am in the business of both asking questions and trying to find the answers to them, I have offered, variously:

- I am good at identifying the (most important) problem and the team required to start to solve that problem
- I don’t get attached to solutions
- I love to win
- I love to know things
- I have an exceptionally high tolerance for uncertainty and for risk
- I come from a long line of people who have had to figure things out
- I come from a long line of people who are particularly strong at figuring things out under intense stress and pressure
- Seriously, I love to win
- I am committed to preventing and reducing harm
- I am exceptionally impatient with conditions that enable or increase harm
- I have no interest in being the only one, and if I am the first I am committed to not being the last
- I have learned not to tie my identity to the source of my income
- I will do the work required to be excellent at the thing
- I will take the time necessary to be excellent at the thing
- I don’t tolerate people who are assholes or cowards, and I will not allow them to use me to appear to be braver or better than they are
- I try to surround myself with people who are smarter, more interesting, and different from me and to listen to them with curiosity and gratitude
- I try to get out of my comfort zone and to keep a beginner’s mindset
- I trust my instincts
- I don’t share everything I think or believe and I am always in the process of interrogating what I think or believe
- I think optimism about the future requires a commitment to studied criticism of the present
- I know what my limits are and how they change over time
- I know who my people are and I know that I need to do better by them

Attribution:

I've spent a month of hours on the phone and in branches at Bank of America trying, fruitlessly, to first convince them I was a real person and then to attempt to get the money back they'd allowed me to transfer into a bank account before they decided I didn't properly exist.

I am a person who is more than passingly familiar with identity verification and its discontents, with how the financial services sector works and fails to work, and with both the technological and managerial failures underpinning this saga. Nonetheless, I still have neither a bank account nor my money back.

Every day, or most, because of the work I've done and because of what I'm interested in, I encounter people who enthusiastically, uncritically, and unquestioningly believe that "the blockchain" or "algorithms" or "personalization" or "automation" will solve all the world's problems. Equally, and perhaps both more vocally and less effectively, there are folks who maintain that each of those are the cause of the world's problems.

“Hey, I see you talking about this! I’m now going to argue you’re a terrible person who can’t be taken seriously because you didn’t talk about this other thing” is a rhetorical technique I saw today applied to someone who was warning about genocidal rhetoric from the leader of a country with a recent history of genocide.

Let’s call it weaponized whataboutism: The validity or veracity or relevance of an argument, comment, position or critique is entirely a function of what someone else thinks you should care about.

It is a close cousin of “some of my best friends are black” and “I don’t mind protests but causing traffic is bridge too far” or “I’d support your cause if you didn’t make me feel like I was part of the problem.”

If you’re not in multiple overlapping WhatsApp groups with relatives across geographical and generational lines then it’s more than likely your understanding of what counts as the atomic unit of family stops at a single household.

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.