Archive

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.

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 .

No resolutions.

New intentions. Considered outcomes. Intended effects.

You can only control so much when all about you a pandemic swirls, uncontrolled.

Six years ago Phil Hutchinson died.

I didn’t know that then; it took a couple of days for the news that the world had changed for the worse to reach me. I still know exactly where I was when it did; I still know exactly how it did. There are pieces of the immediately after that are missing. Perhaps the clocks did stop that day.

I did not attend his memorial. It is more accurate to say that I could not? Because the US government would not let me travel to get there. Or indeed, it would have let me, so long as I accepted that my green card application would start right back at the beginning.

There are many ways to break someone.

December 2020, and so many people are just about hanging on. It is not clear what they are hanging on to, and how long that grip will last.

I do not want to get used to this. We should not have to get used to this.

Where does the migraine begin and the dread end? Or is it the other way around?

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your waking hours explaining power to the powerful.

Pandemic rituals: at the appointed time on Sunday nights, fire up Twitch and connect my phone to the nearest bluetooth speaker. Start this newsletter while listening to a live reggae broadcast by a friend from high school.

We are the same age; our schools were separated by a wall and the social distancing mechanism of the explicit disapproval of our respective educators at the notion of students fraternizing. We have the same local cultural references, as long as those rely on knowledge that stops roughly around the time I left and he stayed. We still have some of the same friends.

This time last year we were liming in the same bar in the part of the island we both grew up in. This time this year I have no idea when I will see that island again. The bar closed down.

Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barbara Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maude Haviernick. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Maryse Laganière. Maryse Leclair. Anne-Marie Lemay. Sonia Pelletier. Michèle Richard. Annie St. Arneault. Annie Turcotte.

Remember the 14.

Attribution:

We thought Things were Bad, because people were dying. And then more people died, and more people died, and more people died.

What happens when you combine a highly contagious disease with individual selfishness and collective confusion and instituional dysfunction and political ruthlessness is no longer a rhetorical question.

A thing that money buys you is distance. A thing that distance buys you is safety.
Distance is relative. Safety is relational. Deaths are mere statistics until you know their names.

When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time 
it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

I have no way to process this much pain and this much grief. The quiet desperation is everywhere, in the eyes of masked strangers avoiding you on the sidewalk, in the the bodies of the exhausted and terrified “essential workers” who lack the luxury of staying at home, in the voices of the teachers performing courage in classrooms and on screens.

I have no way to process the callousness, the selfishness. The folks with the work-from-home jobs who refuse to wear masks as they collect their delivered meals from someone making less than minimum wage. The conspiracy theorists harassing doctors and nurses and accusing them of perpetuating a mass fraud. The politicians. The politicians. The politicians.

There is no combination of books or bike rides or yoga classes or long walks or medications that is making any of this better.

And so to the group texts, to the love languages of emojis and memes and Good Tweets and Bad Tweets and videos of adorable creatures doing adorable things. The comfort of small gifts and acts of service. The celebration of each others’ smallest victories and commiseration over the enormity of personal and shared tragedy.

It is a powerful thing to affirm to the eyes of a watching world that though you might be the first, you will not be the last.

It is a powerful thing to believe, to be in a position to enable, to decide is worth fighting for.

Every headline about firsts - first woman, the first Black person, the first LGBT person - is an implicit acknowledgement that we have collectively enabled a broken system for tens and hundreds of years. Because the first of the headline is never the first to have been good enough, talented enough, brave enough, enough enough. What they are is the first to have found a way through a system that broke and bent and ignored and worked to erase all who dared before.

What is happening in Texas but really they’re asking is my guy going to win, please tell me my guy is going to win. It’s not always a guy, just usually.

There are people for whom politics has always been a question of life and making a living, a question of fundamental rights, a question of who gets to be a whole person and who’s only 3/5ths.

Existence right now feels like a series of unfinished sentences.

A series of lives ended abruptly.

Of livelihoods upended.

Of families fractured.

My current favourite videogame is about a dysfunctional family.

When last did a single phrase—“good morning, my beautiful son”— reveal so much about so many?

If mere survival requires endless, exhausting performance, where does the energy to thrive come from?

Video game writer (writer for video games) was not on the list of acceptable professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer, extremely educated housewife) at my all-girl high school.

How does one avoid turning every hobby into a hustle?

Life is not like video games, because you stay dead at the end.

It’s still a conspiracy theory when you believe in it.

Everyone is tired. Some of us have been tired.

Do you remember a place differently when you know you can return?

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but notenough. I wasin my bed, around my bed Americawas falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.I took a chair outside and watched the sun.In the sixth monthof a disastrous reign in the house of moneyin the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,our great country of money, we (forgive us)

Sometimes, in a migraine season, you get to a point where what you notice is the absence of pain. You realize, all at once, that you do not feel terrible. You don’t think on this too long, because you know the pain will come back, but you rush to do whatever tasks you can within the parameters of that fleeting relief.

Why do we demand heroism from individuals and not accountability from the systems that ground them down?

There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not cure. It’s the tiredness of grinding uncertainty. Of the certainty of unsettledness. Of the restlessness of the targeted. It is the exhaustion of dread.

How many lives are changed by 200,000 deaths?

Less a realization, and more a remembrance: I am rarely angrier than when someone is wasting my time.

It is possible to feel like entire industries are wasting your time. Entire institutions. Entire classes of people.

We’ve already told you why you’re failing to diversify your teams. We’ve already told you why have taken such entrenched hold on platforms. We’ve already told you why people who benefit from status quo norms and practices decline to consider extending that grace to others. We’ve already told you that people will keep dying and that you will keep believing that those people must have done something, anything to deserve it. We’ve already told you that no one is coming to save us.

People who survived HIV and AIDS in the 80s and the early 90s were bemused when we said the closest antecendent to coronavirus and COVID-19 happened more than 100 years ago.

This was March, then April, then May, as we argued about masks and personal responsibility. Then , and July, and and the bodies piled up, mostly black and brown bodies, as we argued about whether government and local officials were letting people die.

Chadwick Boseman died, and we grieved.

And then there was another scar from another wound, another mark from another lash. Another collective keening.

Another reminder that suffering is unevenly distributed.

One problem with loving words, and with doing some version of words “for a living” is that every day you are confronted with whether you read or you write or you listen.

There are so many books to read, and so many lectures to which I’d like to listen, and so many things I will forget or leave unprocessed if I do not write them down.

I cannot effectively do any two of those at a time. And it feels increasingly difficult to do even one of them, finding the energy to hold the space despite the barrage of doom-filled notifications or the distractions of ecommerce or the mundane emotional reality of trying to survive a pandemic.

I know Saturdays by the rhythm of the chores I do; I know Sundays by the ritual of the newsletter.

Every other day is a blur; every day a new height of pandemic despair and a new low of humanity plumbed, and in the mids mostly work.

Every day I practice naming the joy. I hold on to the moments of reprieve: the amusements of the group text, the salve of the FaceTime calls with the people I trust the most, the solace of drinking tea and watching some high-stakes-but-low-stakes television as far as I can get from the little corner in which I make decisions all day.

We are having the conversation again, about what we will do if / when our immigration status becomes once more a question of life and death.

For the moment we are as okay as it is possible to be when daily you are confronted with the tenuousness of the certification that you are one of the acceptable ones.

Three months? Six months? Two years? Five? I have never really needed certainty, but now I seek safety.

This week a friend said, “I wish it didn’t cost us so much to tell the truth.”

James Baldwin died long before I could read, and decades before I’d find his work and be permanently changed by the encounter. Through him, I found Countee Cullen and so the poets and writers and artists and musicians and photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. Through him, Lorraine Hansberry. Through him, my own voice.

Finding your voice is one thing. Using it is another.

?

Hello.
Last night some of you—I don’t know who or how many of you, because I deleted the emails they sent in error—may have been affected by this:

The more we—our lives, our choices, the defaults we are granted—reflect the status quo, the less time we are called upon to spend explaining and defending.

The more powerful our position, the greater our social status and capital, the less likely it is we will even notice the general absence of conversational hyphens and parentheses from our day to day.

What fascinates me about this dynamic is the reflex of people in these positions to seek affirmation—but never critique, judgement, or even the merest contradiction or correction—from folks with less. Please recognize me as an ally. Please tell me I am not like those other people. Please praise my efforts.

Who did we have time for today?

What does it mean to practice survival?

What does it mean to make time for yourself when all around you the world is burning?

There’s noise and then there’s noise and then there’s joyful noise.

There’s a kind of bone-tiredness you get from being responsible for a constant stream of micro and macro decisions; from constantly context-switching between the personal and the professional and back again; from maneuvering the emotional reality of The Pandemic and the economic reality of The Pandemic and the political reality of The Pandemic and the mundane daily dread of The Pandemic.

And then there is the news (and your role in the news) and then there’s all the isms and all the schisms which are no less exhausting now that everyone thinks it’s time for everyone else to do the things they didn’t want to do, didn’t know they had to do, didn’t realize were things that needed doing. Because sometimes words are only sounds made by people we don’t care to understand.

What do you do, how do you keep going, how do you keep making the sounds?

Open the curtains, fold the sheets, water the plants, tidy the desk, make the coffee, choose that day’s armour/lipstick/outfit/shield, steady the breathing, make the sounds that shape the words, shape the words that tell the story, drink the coffee, drink the coffee, drink the coffee. Go.

There we are all were, thinking we’d by now be getting slowly past the point of needing to measure our days by bunches of bananas turned into bread.

Instead, counts of black and brown bodies. Notes on the , there being too many of those black and brown bodies filling those spaces.

If a man shouts ‘white power’ in a video and you retweet that video and then you delete it hours later and then the people whose job it is to defend and explain your every move say you didn’t hear those words, will media organizations go for “controversial” or “racially charged” in the headline?

If you ran a team, or an org, or a company and you watched as all the brown and black folks left and then you appear on panels as an advocate for diversity or are quoted as saying you’d planned to hire some non-white non-men before all the money ran out, do you also think you have black friends?

If you’re angry that people aren’t wearing masks and you’re rage tweeting from your second home in the town with limited hospital capacity that you escaped to because you didn’t want to be stuck in the city, what are the odds you’re also trying to book your next haircut or manicure?

If you are angry about ‘Karen’ jokes and your name is not Karen, how many times did you mix up the two black or Asian people who worked in your office?

Every day you learn that you can, in fact, be angrier and more exhausted. And so every day you learn how not to let the anger and the exhaustion win.

Joy is an act of resistance. And so you read to your niece and nephew. You buy gifts for friends. You ride bikes. You throw yourself into small chores (watering plants! rearranging spice shelves! dusting!). You read books. You watch well-written animated . You get very into essential oil diffusers (again).

You lose count of the videos. You lose count of the names. You lose count of the circumstances. You cannot escape the knowledge of the deaths. You cannot un-know the knowing that they died, that they keep dying, that you keep needing to defend their humanity in death. Defense against the passive voice. Defense against “officer-involved incident”. Defense against “no angel”. Defense against “threatening”. Defense against “disruptive” (not for us, that word, which might to you be a promise of accolades, and for us a different kind of certainty).

A person. A man. A black man. A black woman. A disabled black man. A black transwoman. The greater the degree of specificity the greater the discomfort, because we know even when we might need deny it to ourselves that we don’t all just get to be a person.

It doesn’t matter how many videos there are, or how many well-meaning journalistic recreations of ~the scene of the incident in question~ there might be, or how many well-intentioned well-i-am-shocked-who-knew-this-was-happening-it’s-ok-i-care-now folks will relaunch themselves off the broken backs of the dead. None of this will matter unless black lives matter.

Attribution:

I have a blood pressure monitor, which is a thing my doctors recommended I get. I haven’t used it in two weeks. I don’t need to. I know what it will tell me. I wake up every day with my heart racing and I go to sleep every night with my heart racing and I spend my waking hours reminding myself to take deep calming breaths as if they will somehow make the hourly onslaught less brutal.

Onslaught of what? I am fine. I am safe. I have a job. I am grateful that those things are true, despite the pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Ah, right, the pandemic. And that grim parade of names memorialized on protest signs around the country and desperately, cynically invoked by #brands trying to stay on the right side of, if not history, as least customers’ purchasing habits.

Now, all at once, everyone has a black friend (but none of those folks are on their boards or in their C-suites). Everyone has an indigenous ancestor. Everyone is very sorry for all the things they are now being reminded that they said and did, up to and including yesterday. Yesterday, they did not know better. Today, though, today they are listening and learning and ~growing as a person~ and they want to make sure you know that.

From my living room, where I have spent the past few days immersed in The News, I can hear and see both protestors and police. The protestors are chanting: “Stop killing us!” and “Don’t shoot” and “Justice for George Floyd”. Some of the police are on horseback and some are on bicycles and through the relatively safety of my window their armour reminds me of the characters in a first-person shooter.

All my open tabs are about violence. “Helmets vs hard hats for rubber bullets”. “Tear gas vs smoke bombs”. “How to treat pepper spray exposure”. The kinds of things you research before you make decisions about whether to ask photographers to go out into the field.

In my inbox, emails from brands oscillating between whatever version of “this is so awful, but we’re down for the cause” they could get their lawyers and PR teams to approve and “get ready for Pride month with 50% off all rainbows!”

In the group texts, shared commiserations about yet another cycle of white acquaintances and friends bleeding their guilt and ~exhaustion~ and their freshly-burnished ally credentials all over us, as if we do not live this every day, as if we have not been here before, as if we will not be here again.

On Saturday night it was bashment, on Sunday afternoon it was Bach. But it is always music.

Even in a pandemic our expectations of each other have not changed; or perhaps, they’ve become more intense. But sheltered in place does not mean endlessly available; staying at home does not correlate with “nothing to do”.

I remind myself - not often enough, because I am still myself - that this means stopping, pausing, resting, sleeping, doing nothing, not being “productive”, not being immediately responsive, not being apologetic for any of the above. I remind myself that news might not stop happening but people need breaks. I am remind myself that these reminders apply to me, too.

I was one of those teenagers who’d say things like “if you have no expectations you can’t be disappointed” and who was very into zen kōans and who spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between nihilism and acedia. Add to this a steady diet of Machiavelli (yes, even Discourses on Livy) and Wilde and RATM and Tool and you have someone absolutely insufferable (as my English teachers and principal would especially readily attest).

It’s been a while since I was sixteen, and I’ve spent a couple decades trying to be less of a pain (though my belief that authority figures do not automatically know what they are doing has, in truth, gotten more pronounced with time.) But I have retained the tendency to cope with unusual amounts of uncertainty by throwing myself into music or books. There are worse things, in these times.

I do not know when I will see my family again. Or my friends. I do not know when I will meet most of the people I now work with, people with whom I spend hours per day on various chat programs and video calls. I do not know, just as I have not been able to know for years and years, when the folks with the power to make the call will decide there’s no room here for green card holders with last names like mine.

Today I am thinking about Wanda Cooper-Jones. About Gloria Darden. About Sybrina Fulton. About Geneva Reed-Veal. About Gwen Carr. About Lesley McSpadden. About Samaria Rice.

About the mothers who have lost their children, but who have never stopped mothering.

About the mothers , and about the ones who did. About had .

What does it mean, for tens and hundreds of thousands of people to die? Friends, colleagues, children, grandparents, strangers. What does it mean for their deaths to be dismissed, ignored, questioned, explained away, designated as necessary for progress. What does it mean for the ones left behind to grieve? What does it mean to grieve when you cannot, dare not gather?

Viruses do not discriminate but society does.

Who we police and who we coddle and who we condemn and who we praise and who we see and who we render invisible—those are decisions.

Still safe, still well — such is the drumbeat of my days; an exercise in daily gratitude for what I have and who I have in my life.

Sad, tired, angry — all the time, because how else could one feel, faced with mounting deaths and impressive institutional incompetence and endless, petty cruelty?

Finding joy — in books, in notes from friends, in bike rides, in food, in video games, in soundclashes streamed live on Twitch, in the plants striving toward the sun on my windowsills.

Attempting patience — with myself, for not being able to do everything, be everything.

I think about words, constantly. When I am not writing them, I am editing them. When I am not editing them, I am thinking about how to write them. When I am not thinking about how to write them, I am reading. When I am not reading, I am thinking about what I have read.

Words are how I understand how I feel. They are how I navigate and survive the world. They are also my readiest and deadliest weapons.

This morning I woke up thinking about how words wound; how they can embody and reflect and uphold power structures and bigoted systems. How our very defensiveness over them — it’s just a word! it doesn’t mean anything — gives the game away. How when we insist that they matter — how could you say something like that? — we are considered frivolous, over sensitive, . I’d been dreaming about how I’d explain to someone why and how the words we use (and don’t) to describe this — pandemic, crisis, emergency — matter.

I rode my bike today, for the first time in this new state. Texas, pandemic.

Kept my distance, waited on the lights.

I am angry all the time. At the people casually asking about options for summer rentals, because it would be awful, you know, if they had to stay in the city with the rest. At the people gutting media organizations in a time of crisis. At the people profiteering on medical equipment from the safety of their living rooms while nurses die and doctors die and bus drivers die and train conductors die and grocery workers die. At myself, for being here and feeling like I should be there and there and also there.

Last week I joined the ever-burgeoning ranks of people who’ve been smitten by Animal Crossing: New Horizons, persuaded by a friend and former colleague of mine who has the exact right skillset to knowledgeably advise someone on what games they should be playing.

Since I first downloaded it, I’ve enjoyed several hours of hanging out with that friend, and various others, on our myriad islands. Hot topics on the voice chat have included whether pine cones are a scam, which animal neighbours are The Worst, and the absolute disappointment of thinking you’ve find a fossil and having it be, instead, an earth egg.

In tragedy you are reminded of the difference between being allowed access and belonging.

In tragedy you learn which bonds hold you fast and which hold you down and which were merely illusory.

In tragedy we are shown what we are made of. And that it is not always enough.

A live-streamed funeral, a Zoom birthday party, the thousand ways we make do to make it through.

I am mostly furious, and because this is not a good state for me to be in for an extended period I have been trying to redirect my rage into work and works.

1. aka that thing I said I was working on alongside .

I am a person you can text in a crisis. I am never more calm then when all hell is breaking loose. It is one of the traits that I have sharpened and polished over years and years. It runs in my family, for good or for ill (mostly, though, for good).

And right now, all hell is breaking loose.

And so I am channeling my ability to be calm, to be useful, into work-work and community-work.

Alongside (virtually, because if you are not practicing physical distancing at every opportunity I do not know what to tell you right now) a handful of other folks, I’ve spent the past few days on a collaborative project to help newsrooms facing unprecedented conditions and uncertainty. There’s already a domain and a repo, so you know we mean it.

There are boxes—mostly of books, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me—piled precariously in every room of my current apartment. This is the Desperate Panic, Eh We Don’t Need This Give It All Away stage of moving.

I am donating a dozen or so outfits to my local Dress For Success. I am making difficult decisions about exactly how many travel-sized bottles of shampoo a person really needs.

This is a very stressful time to be a person with compromised lungs who spends a lot of time on airplanes and who is also moving to a city which just cancelled its biggest annual event due to concerns about the coronavirus.

I have a new job, and for the second time in two days, I have a migraine. I haven’t had one in a while (a migraine, not a job) and I had forgotten that you cannot, in fact, power through it.

On the day the new job became public, I had gotten off a plane and had just arrived at the home of a friend and former colleague. We had lunch and a celebratory glass of rosé and we talked about misinformation and voter suppression and the challenges and opportunities of not being part of the default while my phone quietly vibrated.

In as much as I have mostly come to terms with being perceived as a public-ish figure, I have never quite reconciled that with my deep aversion to spotlights. But what I have long come to appreciate is that sometimes the only thing better than solitude is sharing a quiet set of lovely moments with someone you respect and care about to the soundtrack of tinkling wind chimes.

I am the very definition of the so-called “high-information voter”, except for the “voter” part. I am semi-permanently disenfranchised: I am not allowed to vote in the countries I’ve lived in for most of the latter part of my life, and I am rarely able to travel back to the country I was born in time for elections called there.

And I am also a person extremely affected, personally and professionally, by the legislative and political climate in these places in which I am not allowed to indicate my wants and needs through the ballot box or the voting booth.

And because I also consider myself a journalist, even when I am not actively employed by a newsroom, I do not engage in the kinds of campaign-led activities which might otherwise be open to me.

This has had a few different consequences.

A thing about being a person — a non-white, immigrant, female person especially — is that other people sometimes forget both that you are not entirely like them and that you can hear them talking.

And that forgetting, plus the generalized tendency to defend the status quo, puts you in situations where you are listening to people argue that policies that explicitly and implicitly targeted people like you weren’t that bad or or that we should all .

I have been trying to practice yoga daily, or nearly daily (rest, too, is part of the practice).

I had forgotten just how much the act of making space to take care of yourself feels both selfish and indulgent. There’s so many other things I need to do! There’s so many other things I could be doing!

Even though I know I am better able to do those things — I do those things better — when I have taken the time to move and to breathe and to remember how to be still.

Saeed Jones, a brilliant poet and memoirist, wrote in January about the ritual of annual determinations: “We don’t make resolutions in this house; we make determinations.”

I don’t make resolutions, either. In 2017 I wrote in another newsletter:

“They have always felt too much like promises with no opportunity cost to breaking them…It's easier for me to do things, than to resolve to do them. Either I read more books or I don't; either I get over my fear of being the slowest and the weakest and go to bike training camp or I don't. I can schedule the time to read or I can lose another night to scrolling through Twitter; I can confirm my attendance to the coach or I can ignore the team email.”

Grief is messy, complicated, unpredictable because people are messy, complicated, unpredictable. The narrative of our lives is not something over which we have total control, and never is that more true than when we die.

And yet in an era of real-time, distributed, public grief — which is not quite the same as collective mourning, though they are related — we tend to demand perfection, neatness, reason.

This person was not perfect, how dare you eulogize them. Or, Or, Or, Or,

[Dear Reader, this is long.]

I have long been one of those people moved to irritation and sometimes anger by misattributed quotes. I once intervened to stop something that Maya Angelou never said from making it into the print edition of the FT’s obituary for her and I no longer even worked there. I feel similarly strongly about unattributed photographs, design, and art — our societal unwillingness to generously and reflexively credit dishonours creativity and undermines the livelihoods of creators.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time (this is, perhaps, a mark of having friends who died young).

Time in the sense of deadlines; time in the sense of opportunities and the cost of opportunities; time in the sense of not knowing how much you really have left.

Some years ago one of the women I admire most told me she was all too acutely aware of the ageism of media, and what that meant for the length and quality of our careers, and therefore for the balances (or lack thereof) in our bank accounts. Who gets to be an executive? Not many women past 40, and not many brown and black women of any kind.

You go very quickly from “too young to be worth listening to” to “just young enough to be the new shiny object” to “just old enough to be taken seriously” to “too old to be worth listening to”. What is that span, even? Eighteen years? More if you’ve got good genes, an expensive dermatologist, and a ruthless personal trainer?

These days, the siren song of ~grad school~ is not quite so loud, replaced by the incessant drumbeat of so what are you doing to reduce all these harms.

There are so many / there are so many ways to show up.

I buy books for the little ones in my life, I read to them, I wonder what the world will be like for them, I wonder how to make the world a better place for them.

As promised, some riffs on news consumption (and production, dear colleagues) in a time of misinformation.

The first thing to remember is that if you think you are “too smart” or “too informed” or “too educated” to be taken in by  misinformation or political propaganda — you will be among the first to fall.

The second thing to remember is that you are up against armies of product managers, designers, data scientists, “growth hackers”, and engineers who spend their days and nights churning out ever more sophisticated ways to monopolize your attention and short-circuit your impulse control.

So think hard before you share that thing about which you, personally, know very little but about which you feel strongly. And then don’t share it.

Instead: Save that thing you really want to say or share in your drafts and then come back to it 30 mins later. Set a timer if you want. Introduce deliberate friction into your decisions and skepticism into your reactive instincts.

It is too easy to be a part of the problem, even and especially when your intentions are good and your anger and frustration justifiable. Make those product designers work for your engagement and your attention and your energy. Spend your time on the things that feel slightly harder than the cycle of scroll -> share -> scroll -> share. Frictionlessness is thoughtlessness.

A note on dunking: what you‘re doing, aside from indulging that sweet rush of dopamine and righteousness, is spreading the thing you are purporting to dunk on. Please do not conflate or confuse dunking with debunking. Their forms and functions differ. At a minimum, remove the emotion from the debunk. If you’re gloating, if it’s the kind of thing you hit send on and then immediately feel the need to trumpet in your group chat or on your favorite listserv, it’s much more likely to be a dunk than a debunk.

I remember those long nights in the library as an undergrad, inhaling Red Bull and speed-reading my way through the set texts on asymmetrical warfare and the Geneva Conventions.

I remember, in high school but not from my high school teachers, learning about Walter Rodney. I remember how hard it was to finish reading The Feast of the Goat. I remember where I was when Dana Seetahal died.

When I was younger I thought I would be, variously, a forensic scientist; a scholar of Shakespeare and Blake (and how they informed Caribbean literature and music); some sort of high-ranking FIFA official; an intellectual property lawyer; an international human rights lawyer; an international humanitarian lawyer; a management consultant.

On Saturday I went to a wedding over which a Presbyterian minister presided and on Monday I attended a funeral held under Muslim rites. On Sunday I played with the children of the friends I’ve known since we, too, were children.

This is what home is.

Shared joy and shared grief are not so unlike. In both you find communion, kinship; in each a kind of ecstasy.

Is there anything more optimistic than faith? Faith in the endurance and triumph of love, faith that a life well-lived will be rewarded with everlasting peace, faith in the next generation to do good and live well.

There is an intimacy about Trinidad that is difficult to describe; a familiarity, a possessiveness, a jealousy. Here I am and am not myself. I am more myself than I can be anywhere else, and yet that self feels increasingly feels like a stranger.

I went a storytelling evening to support some friends — there were jumbies and soucouyants and echoes of parranderos — and then various of us converged at a bar that I last drank in perhaps five years and ago and with roughly the same people. We talk about Walcott and Naipaul and the bad behaviours of the Great Men and about who has the best goat recipe and the difference between mixing and selecting and we each keep one eye on anyone passing by just in case, because these are dangerous times and we are not yet ready to give in.

“Scotch and coconut water right?”
Another night, this time a lime at a friend’s house, this time accompanied by a soundtrack of children’s laughter and babies’ cries. All of us brought together for what (we hope) will be the last wedding in the group, a group that has known each since we were mostly children ourselves. Who are we now, who am I when I am with them, when I am back here, when I am not here.

Housekeeping, ish.

I let some* of my domains lapse this year; the tiniest of concessions to the inevitability of how “” (and my role in it, and willingness to contribute to it) has changed.

As promised, I’m going to experiment a bit more with the $ newsletters. To that end, I’ll be sharing versions of things I’m reading, watching, listening to, or workshopping.

I shared a version of this on Twitter (note: I delete my tweets every quarter or so) in response to some conversations and behaviours I’ve been seeing around hiring.

I realize that part of the anxiety that has been stalking my days is related to an upcoming international trip. What if I don’t get back in? What if they don’t let me go?

It is a weird way to live, trying to make long-term decisions when you don’t know how long that term actually is. Should I go for that job that requires yet more upheaval or should I just stay here, where friends and family are close, and live quietly while I can?

It’s World AIDS Day.

Get tested.

Practice .

There’s a version of my life that is filled with fresh, local, sustainably-harvested flowers and cloth napkins and just enough of everything I want and need. In that version I somehow have a job that pays for all those things, keeps me out of debt, allows me enough time and emotional energy to spend on meaningful interactions with friends and family, and is still intellectually challenging with a positive and meaningful impact on the world.

Every year I get closer to understanding what brings me joy (and I say, entirely seriously, that Marie Kondo was right about a whole lot) and every year I understand a little bit better that the “what” is in fact “who”.

I have very mixed feelings about Thanksgiving, not dissimilar to my deep unease with Columbus Day. So every year I aim to balance the ‘spend time with friends and family’ angle with the ‘practice of gratitude for the privileges I have’ with a degree of historical acknowledgement about the harms that got us here.

I moved this weekend, though it feels like I have been in geographic limbo for at least six months.

Which means I once again confronted with the reality of Stuff (how it possible that I own so many hangers? When did I acquire that many bike-related pieces of clothing? How do I still not appear to own a single thing I want to wear for this upcoming Holiday Party Season?)

And so I am recycling and donating and thanking the things and grappling with the guilt of consumer capitalism as I go.

“Very tired” is the only honest answer to the obligatory politesse of “how are you doing?”

“Very tired and about three weeks from a quiet, controlled, and possibly prolonged freak out about how and whether I can make both a positive impact on the world and continue to pay my bills” is the longer form version that one might offer if the question is indeed sincere.

I spent this weekend in Oakland, partly because I moderated a panel at a conference here as one of my last acts as an employee of the secretive fruit company, partly because I need never try too hard to find a reason to spend a weekend in Oakland.

What is it like to be from the place you live? What is it like to have people “no one is really from there, you know?”

I travel frequently, both for work and because of the decisions I’ve made about the architecture of my life.

Over the years I’ve developed a few routines and rituals: I was, for example, wiping down every airplane surface long before Naomi Campbell publicly validated the behaviour.

Before I travel, I try to clean or at the very least tidy up the space I’ll be returning to. There are few things quite so delicious as getting back from a trip, taking a comforting shower, and then settling into the nice clean sheets that you remembered to change before you left. If I’m staying in a hotel, I leave every day.

It is quite a thing, on the day before the first anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre, to see some of the most powerful people in the world defending including an organization with a reputation for outright lies, casual misinformation, racist smears, and antisemitism in a “news” platform on the grounds of “preserving freedom for diverse views.”

Imagine that. Imagine that, then remember that we live that. Because we are all affected by the consequences of this being the perspective that informs the engineering and product and design decisions of the platforms that shape (and in some cases, destroy) lives and economies and democracies. And some of us are affected more than others.

There are many ways to respond to stress. You can drown yourself in books and tea; go for a run; practice yoga; add several new piercings to your collection; eat delicious foods and/or whatever snack is within reach; have dinner with friends; lift heavy things; punch bags; ride bikes; go to church or mosque or synagogue or temple; worship at the altar of other gods; whisper positive affirmations in the mirror; take deep calming breaths; avoid everyone; throw yourself at new projects; buy more notebooks; register another domain; see a therapist; not leave your couch for an entire weekend; you can do all of these things or none of these things or some of these things.

But a key to dealing with stress is acknowledging that your circumstances are not unique in the history of the world; your story is not the first story even if it is the only story you can ever really know.

It helps to further attempt to name just what it is you are running towards and away from; what haunts both your dreams and your waking hours. To go from the shape of a feeling to a thought to an articulation. To know and to know that you know.

Add a healthy helping of empathy and a dash of realism; shake well and serve chilled. Which is not to say that one must be chill (especially if one believes that is a “”).

In Chile the students are marching. In Washington DC, Kirstjen Nielsen is gearing up for the start of her non-apology tour.

In two weeks I will walk out of my office for the last time. In a month I will give a talk about leadership.

There are things you think about— like what it means when you can be black in your own home minding your business and somehow still be killed by police.

When Amber Guyger broke into Botham Jean’s apartment and stole what was left of his life, she imperiled everything we thought we knew about apartment living. Forced intimacies and polite detachment — all of it’s bullshit when the woman who lived in your building and shot you for no coherent reason is a cop.

Botham Jean died, and then Joshua Brown died, and this keeps happening, will keep happening, and we rush to valorize the appearance of forgiveness without doing anything to earn it.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, male students studying at Southern universities regularly mistreated, beat and raped the enslaved men, women and children who catered to their everyday needs, Taylor said. .

What a year this week has been and other such refrains. How does anyone even keep up with everything and other implicit shrugs. I mean what can I even do and other ways of not doing.

Kids marched. Another black trans woman was run off Twitter. Another tech CEO stood up for government agencies charged with detaining and deporting children.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Will not stay still.

If your news organization is comfortable suggesting to its 700K+ social media audience that “having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun”, what is else is your news organization capable of? What is your news organization *not* capable of?

What a jarring thing, that which we have grown so comfortable excusing as “frat boy culture”. What a jarring thing, to think about what we launder in our media and in our lives. Boys will be boys, and girls will pay for it.

The fight is exhausting, but you keep going. You keep going for all the people who never made it into the spaces you now inhabit. You keep going despite all the people who tried to keep you out. You keep going for the people who keep going for you.

misc.misc

—

Sometimes when I say “oh, I wish I were creative” I know that I am channeling the exasperation of all the art teachers whose classes I failed; the disapproval music teachers whose instruments I abandoned; the sighs of the drama teachers who found me most useful among the props.

If you have been on the internet for a long time—say 25+ years—and even if you started being on the internet from the relative distance of a tiny island in the Caribbean with a 14.4 modem and Windows 3.1, you will have been exposed to certain names. Lessig. Ito. Le Meur. Cerf. Mullenweg. Swartz (rest in peace, Aaron). spez. kn0thing. Dash. Brown. Uber.nu (“better than you, daily”). reddit. CreativeCommons. WordPress. Blogger. Odeo. LiveJournal. DiaryLand. Pitas.

Later, much later, you will realize that you grew up wanting to be like those men and build products and companies and services and brands like those men and later than that perhaps you might pause and wonder why there were no women among those names, and you will wonder what happened to those women, what was happening to those women, what those women might have built, what those brands and services and companies and products might have been if women had been at their helms.

Even later, as more and more of those names resurface, you will realize what happened to those women, what was happening to those women, what is happening to those women. You will realize who happened to those women.

When I was a teenager I worked for multiple ~summers~ in a tattoo and piercing studio; I’ve never been afraid of needles — a useful thing when you spend your childhood in and out of hospitals — and I’ve always been drawn to the kinds of environments that democratize vulnerability.

My job mostly involved answering the phone and scheduling appointments and declining to allow goth teens to get Korn lyrics on their upper thighs. Occasionally I’d sterilize instruments or trace patterns or reassure grown men who should really have known better that their new “tribal” tattoo was definitely the right move.

To this day I find these places reassuringly familiar; the very specific art on the walls, the sounds, the music, the scrupulously arranged equipment, the clientele.

I know when I am at my most unsettled when I find myself considering adding yet another hole in my ear to my collection (sometimes while the most recent addition is still healing), or engaging in serious reflection on the merits of half vs quarter sleeves.

I have found myself thinking more and more about consumption, and the costs of consumption. Is there anything I even really need that I do not already have, or have access to?

This manifests in different ways. Weekend trips to Goodwill and donations to Dress For Success after I have expressed gratitude for my clothes and shoes (as is the KonMari way). Riding my bike more and using congestion-causing ride-hailing services less. Finding and using tailors and cobblers. Buying less stuff, or trying to. “Shopping my closet”, or trying to. Unsubscribing from the manufactured FOMO of e-commerce emails Why am I so attached to emails I rarely even open? When I know that dress will not, in fact, change my life? Oh, but perhaps that belt will…

This weekend white supremacists marched, and folks suggested the thing to do in response would be to classify antifascists as terrorists.

This weekend the New York Times simultaneously published a gripping commemoration of one of the founding principles of the United States and headline that described Stephen Miller as a “young firebrand”.

There are a few ways to give people their flowers before they die.

You can support their art — buy their work, attend the plays and the films, introduce the essays and poems and stories and novels and albums and songs and paintings and sculptures and on and on that move you to the people you love. You can, if you know them or have access to them and know how to do this appropriately and without being creepy or entitled, tell them what they have meant to you. And if you are so moved and so endowed, enter into conversation with their work. You can interrogate their genius; follow the trails they blazed until you make your own; add to the totality of the projects and the movements they started.

But above all, you can fight to ensure the conditions continue to exist such that art may flourish in the world. Support the libraries, and the after-school programs, and the ability of children without means to attend those after-school programs; support the community theaters and the independent book stores and the journals and the small presses; find and support the legislators and politicians who defend and maintain and increase funding for the music and the arts and write to the ones who don’t. Show up, the way artists have shown up for us over and over again.

Listen, keep going.

Nothing we do will bring back the people who died in El Paso and in Dayton. And so we must ask, “what shall we do to save other people from similar harm?”

None of this is inevitable. Nor are we able to survive any of this alone.

Sometimes all you can manage is a simple acknowledgement that this is a crisis. Honesty, too, is the work.

“But if we don’t do this for each other, who is going to do it for us?” An entirely reasonable question, from a great friend doing a good job of forcing me to examine my premises.

What are we going to do for each other, in this moment of crisis? What are we doing for each other, right now?

These are not abstract questions. These are not rhetorical questions, either. Because this is not an abstract moment and this is not an exercise in rhetoric.

Because it is clear what we are not doing for each other. We are not defending black and brown people to the elected officials who are increasingly comfortable denying their basic humanity. We are not comfortable calling a spade, a spade; we describe them, at best, as dirt-tinged shovels. We are not willing to interrupt the banality of our day to day with an interrogation of how our work enables evil.

I booked the full-workup physical (with bonus fitness test and “BodPod” assessment) because, as I told the charming and helpful medical professionals, I wanted to get back into riding my bike(s) at speeds that scare me slightly.

But also, as I did not tell the charming and helpful medical professionals, I like passing exams.

When I was in undergrad, I was very into passing exams while also trying to casually take over the student media organizations with some similarly up-for-it friends and frenemies. I stacked my weeks with classes in international law (human rights and humanitarian), political philosophy, and all things related to theories of international relations.

I thought, I was convinced, I’d find a way to do Good Things for The People. When I wasn’t considering working for FIFA (we shall never speak of this again); or trying to get an internship at the United Nations; or becoming an IP lawyer who would defend indigenous knowledge; or flirting with management consulting (what can I say, those recruiters talked an excellent game). I passed my exams. I didn’t do any of those things.

Sometimes you can cure a migraine with two Excedrin tablets and a large bowl of ramen to which you have added two eggs and two slices of the alchemy we like to call American cheese.

What probably cured the migraine was the 12 uninterrupted hours of sleep you allowed yourself but the thing that got you there was the permission to get home from work and take the tablets and make the ramen and then go straight to bed without getting dragged back into email.

What I want, I suppose, is for you to feel guilt. Not anger. Too clean, that. Too easy to direct outward at a convenient target and thence to move on with one’s day. Not rage. Unwieldy, unfocused. Not indifference. You didn’t earn that. You don’t get to opt-out of this one. Not sadness, because you didn’t earn that either. Nor even embarrassment, because this isn’t about a situation so much as it is about you. And not shame. Too self-destructive. Too prone to wallowing.

So, guilt. I want you to marinate for a long, long moment in the moral indecency of this present and specifically on the part you played to get us here. Focus, focus.

Two very different shows I’ve been watching, both featuring interesting writing that also happen to provide incisive and hilarious social commentary: What We Do In The Shadows (also recommended: the film) and Los Espookys (the weakest link in which is Fred Armisen). I am watching these shows because they are great and entertainment is wonderful, and also because I am trying to become a better and more effective writer.

I’d known about Marsha P. Johnson, but not about Stormé DeLarverie, drag icon.

On a whim on Friday I left work and headed to a literary event at which I was (surprise!) surrounded by people whose books and poems and essays have long sustained me. Which is to say I spent the evening steadfastly refusing to suggest in any way that I do anything with words that might involve me writing them.

Editor I will cop to; it’s in my actual job title (I tell myself). I love editing! I love making work better! Writer, hah. Hah.

I have not been closely following what is happening in Sudan, and I have been tangentially (at best) paying attention to what is going on in Hong Kong, and why.

On Friday I got home from work before 9pm for the first time in a while; that is to say, with enough time and enough energy left to do laundry and cast an eye in the general direction of similar chores.

I spent most of this weekend working, including a brutal 90-minute long Sunday conference call (the first of two) designed to hash out some details before an important review on Monday.

I share this because I feel the need to explain that I am not exaggerating when I say I sometimes don’t even look at personal email for weeks on end; I share this as an apology to the folks to whom I owe some kind of response to some kind of question or another.

It has taken me until this year to articulate something I’ve known in my bones for a while: I don’t quit jobs because I am tired of them. I quit jobs because I am tired.

It’s June. If you’re involved in corporate rainbows this month, consider this.

Because I am finding it hard to provide answers right now, I have been reminding myself to ask more questions about the work and the worlds over which I have influence:

As part of my “force myself to make decisions” strategy, I am two days into a longish-temporary-stay and being confronted with the reality of housemates for the first time in 12 years. (Product aside: if you work at AirBnB, please show the working of why there’s no annotation of / filter for when a listing is part of a house that includes x other potential rooms at y max occupants each).

(Personal aside: of course I went for an en-suite bathroom, I’m not 22 anymore).

Internal monologue, Sunday.

There are two options when you are moving: give everything away before you attempt to move, or move and then give everything away.

It’s easy to not be attached to things when you have the means to replace them.

I’ve been considering putting an out-of-office reply on my personal email. By “personal” I really mean the email address not given to me by my currently employer, because the inbound messages are 99% “hi, please do a thing” and 1% “hey how’s life” from friends and family.

I feel weird about this, despite having seen versions of this move out in the wild protecting the inboxes of people (women! all of them are women!) I respect.

I feel weird about this because I am not sure I quite “deserve” to ask people to understand that I’m going to take a minute (weeks, really, and probably months) to get to their messages and I’m probably not going to be able to speak at your thing because I have a more-than-full-time job with a compliance department that does not mess around and sometimes on weekends I just want to go to a yoga class or play videogames.

Is there a better feeling than “no more events today”?

Every 9-12 months I realize (admit) my life has become an unrelenting paen to being a workaholic and then I start to take steps to act like a person who values her relationships, her mental health, her physical fitness.

This is an extremely predictable cycle.

Yesterday I woke up, resolved to do yoga First Thing, made the absolutely classic mistake of checking my work email, and then spent the four hours from 9.30am doing a thing I am good at, which is diagnosis and repair.

I think a lot about the responsibilities I have to reduce and prevent harm in the world. Which is sometimes, but not always, similar to using my skills and talents for good. But there is no way, as more and more people die, as more and more people are actively in danger, to be neutral.

Describing a lie that is targeted to put the lives of doctors at risk as an “inaccurate refrain” is choosing to do harm. Ignoring the reality of systemic racism and the dangerous interplay of surveillance and gentrification is choosing to do harm.

This weekend I watched Homecoming, a testimony to work and creativity and art and brilliance and blackness.

I bought a new bicycle, , and rode 11 exuberant miles in short order. I started reading by .

When I am stuck, I read. This week I mostly read Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry and Red Rising by Pierce Brown (both of which I borrowed as e-books using Libby).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the kinds of people to whom resources are not readily given, because those are so often the ones we know should be running the show.

As Sekai Farai put it, “Let the wild ones work. Give them something. Fund them.”

I made time for a yoga practice after work last week, a Jivamukti session with a teacher who always inspires and challenges. It felt like a small victory, being on the mat instead of (still) in the office. I say “after work” as if that is a thing; I own the reality I have created for myself.

Today in the sun under the almost-shade of flowering trees, as friends and family argue animatedly around me and birds ignore all of us. Choosing can feel like winning, even when you’re not quite sure what this fight is for.

I know this year I have decisions to make; I know in truth I have already made them. But there’s often a space between the knowing and the doing.

I have decisions to make because all around me people in positions of power are deciding whether people like me deserve to live. It seems strange to say, but this is where we are. And where we are is increasingly inhospitable, deliberately cruel, actively violent.

“Federal officials at the Mexico border detained a 9-year-old U.S. citizen for 32 hours without her parents in order “to perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship,” according to a statement released Friday by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection…The agency said the 9-year-old had provided "inconsistent information during her inspection." She was taken into custody at 10:15 a.m. Monday and released to her mother on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.”

There’s nothing you can say that will bring back people who’ve been murdered by exactly the same kind of person who has murdered exactly the same kind of people before and before and again and again.

There’s nothing you can say that will console their families, or their friends, or their communities, or the millions of people who could have been them, were almost them, continue to be at risk of having the same horrors done to them.

But why, when given the opportunity to not make things worse, do we choose instead to forge ahead under a misinformed banner of civility and progressiveness?

I buy most of my clothes online, because I have structured my life in a way that makes hitting brick-and-mortar stores difficult. And because I loathe public dressing rooms, most of which feel like they would benefit from a deep, deep clean.

But I do not enjoy online shopping. The mere the act of browsing x product at y retailer - or worse, moving x product into the shopping cart while you consider whether you both want and need it - leads to a series of “hey, come back” emails and targeted banner ads powered by aggressive growth strategies and the ominipresent surveillance tech known as cookies. Oh, and cutesy, cloying subject lines.

This weekend I filled several tote bags with clothes, shoes, and accessories that will go, variously, to Goodwill; to Dress for Success; and to . Some, too beloved and therefore too worn, will go to the landfill.

Over the past few days, thanks to the generosity of colleagues, I attended the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit. I got to hear from Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie, Valerie Jarrett, Stacey Abrams (a force), Cynthia Marshall (a maverick in every sense), and Chaka Khan.

Sometimes words flow out of me, and this newsletter writes itself. Sometimes, like today, I’ve stared at the blinking cursor on the white screen for 45 minutes and I know the words are stuck because I am stuck.

I tend to spend weekends fretting about how much I am not getting done. Last weekend I reorganized drawers and closets until I felt like my apartment felt lighter, freer, closer to ~sparking joy~.

And then I spent Sunday feeling guilty about all the emails I didn’t get to, the mail I haven’t yet sent, the messages to which I haven’t replied.

This weekend I spent time I needed to spend on people, having the conversations I have avoided having. Which meant I didn’t do as much work as I could have done.

It is easy, these days, to give up. Everywhere you look: horror, tragedy, violence. It is easy to despair.

It is human to despair. Have I mentioned the horror, tragedy, violence?

But I am cantankerous, furious, unforgiving. Bad mind and own way from birth. Ask my mother. Ask my siblings. These are my worst traits. These are the traits that have kept me alive.

So it often goes.

This weekend I got to spend an unusual amount of time in the company of people I love, and the notion of showing up came up over and over again.

I am trying to show up, for those people and for myself. And part of how I ensure (how I derive, how I preserve) the energy to do that is high stakes but low stakes television shows.

During the heights of the mid-2000sfinancial crisis I would, after an endless day of covering bank failures and subprime loans and derivative horrorshows, binge-watch . There was, and still is, something reliably thrilling about the exclamation “Tyra Mail!!!”

There are weeks (months, years) when you *gesture broadly at everything* *make glib comments about challenges being great for building character* *laugh/grimace while cosplaying as the shruggie emoji*

is what repeats in your head as you watch in real time as your industry sets lives on fire. It is the armor that gets you through the day despite the news, despite the push notifications, despite the update in the family group chat, despite the phone call.

It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which means I am thinking more than ever today about all the people who died because their neighbours looked the other way when the murderers came, or because their neighbours were the murderers, or because their neighbours sold them out to the murderers.

“It’s not that bad, it’s just talk” always becomes “well, someone will do something” always becomes “we’ll be fine, this isn’t our problem” always becomes “well someone else will do something” always becomes “well they should have said something” always becomes “those people deserved it, they’re not like us, they weren’t good people” and on, and on in an endless trail of revisionism and abdication.

Last week dozens and dozens of people with whom I’ve worked and whose work has made mine better, has made me better contended with a stream of harassment and mockery and hatred while the CEO of the platform enabling their disparagement mused on his intermittent fasting / acceptable disordered eating.

On we go. Somehow. But for a certain value of “we”, we dare not assume someone else will make sure we get there.

Every day, every day a reminder that people in your industries, people you know by professional association, are more likely to defend and excuse casual white supremacists than they are to admit your humanity.

Boys will be boys, teens will be teens, don’t ruin their lives, you were young once too.

Every day, every day another video and another photograph, evidence of how little your lives mean to photo editors and homepage editors and foreign correspondents.

Today I got to talk to someone, let’s call him David, who is both one of the best listeners I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting and one of the most thoughtful people working in that place where media and tech overlap. These qualities are related.

And then this afternoon I went to see Into The Spider-Verse, which was everything I wanted and nothing I expected. Many people more qualified than me have written about the brilliance of the animation. What I cannot get over, in addition to all that, is the writing. Comic books are words and pictures and the best ones elevate both. The people who wrote for Into The Spider-Verse love their medium, but crucially they love the possibilities of the medium even more.

I have on my desk a notepad, a gift from a friend; on each page is the prompt: “imagine everything you ever wanted below”. I have not written anything on the notepad.

Ashley C. Ford, who is wise and wonderful, posed a question: “Why was so much of my foundational learning meant to teach me how to stifle myself or make myself smaller?”

I cannot remember when I first began to hate December, but it was at least a few years before the Counting Crows released their interpretation of that particular sorrow.

Nothing good ever happened in my life in the last month of the year. And yet when I got the cryptic “do you have a few minutes for me to call you” message that cold New York day as I was leaving the gym I used to self-medicate may way through winter I knew immediately, instantly, that none of my dread had prepared me for this.

You never expect your friends to die, and you never expect them to stay dead.

I am packing for 9 or so days in Mexico, which means there are bags and clothes and shoes strewn about as I whittle the options down into whatever will fit into the proscriptions of a carry on-only lifestyle.

I rarely ever check bags anymore, whether I’m travelling for work or for fun. Here’s an idea of what the bags I take with me will contain (for this trip, I am taking my Osprey Fairview 40 and my Osprey Tempest 20).

It was one of those weeks when I didn’t so much consciously leave the office as find myself collapsing into my apartment at 9pm, 10pm. On Friday night I managed to leave before 8, but by then I was surviving entirely on a combination of respect for the efforts of my team, sheer bad mind, and chocolate cookies.

I don’t write this to fetishize busy-ness; I write this to acknowledge that I am the kind of person who is both naturally prone to working all the time and the kind of person who regularly accepts jobs designed to ensure I have the opportunity to work all the time.

I write this because I cannot be that kind of person all the time. I have friendships I would like to do better at maintaining. I have relationships that I need to show up for. I have a yoga practice I would like to revive. I have a delightful personal trainer I have functionally abandoned. I have a physiotherapist I need to see before my wrists and my neck return to a state of semi-permanent distress. I write this because I need to hold myself accountable to myself, for myself.

And I write this because I am trying to figure out how to spend more time moving us forward and less time ensuring other people don’t push us all backward.

And in their mentions, well you can guess.

I will never forgive the “well it would be an interesting thought experiment if someone who campaigned on explicit white supremacy was handed the reins of a country” dudebros

1.

More of you who say you have black friends need to realize you don’t.

“Why are you doing this?” someone asked me today, at the beginning of our conversation. “Why are you reviewing people’s resumes for free?” Suspicion, sure. Merited, sure.

I thought about the question, and then I gave a good enough answer – it is important to me that the media and tech ecosystems become less homogeneous; it is easier for me as a hiring manager if more people who I might otherwise miss make themselves visible.

I haven’t stopped thinking about the question, and I am not sure that answer was complete. Something closer to, “because I want to burn this whole thing down, and I need more firestarters.”

I baked those cookies again, one of my contributions to a friendsgathering / strategy session I have had the privilege of sharing with a handful of brilliant women this week. I immediately want to follow up this sentence with “I’m not really domestic”, but I am also a person who has been recommending this book to all and sundry. And this weekend I bought a beautiful and pristine 1970s Atlas Pasta Maker (for $10!) at a thrift shop. So.

I have three strong cues that I am successfully taking a vacation:

1. no alarms set

I spent this week wearing a mask, trying to avoid an asthmatic spiral despite the smokiness of the California air. I was mostly successful; and I have inhalers, and can afford doctors if the interventions don’t work. I have not lost anything in these fires, and all I have to deal with is the guilt of being relatively unaffected.

How long will that continue to be true?

I lost sleep night because of a spam call that demanded making contact with the “Social Security Office” immediately at the (fraudulent) number provided; deportation or worse was imminent if I failed to comply. I am a person who is knowledgeable about the mechanics of abusive charlatanism and propaganda; I knew how to check the veracity or lack thereof. And still for hours I lay awake after thinking about the precariousness of whatever time I might have left.

There are no good immigrants, there are no good brown people, there are no good black people, there are no good trans people, there are no good gay people, there is only the demonised other. There is only them and if you think you are still in the us I wonder whose safety you are trading for yours.

Sometimes the answer is one cup of tea after another and the songs that remind you your grief is not novel.

Sometimes the answer is books and .

I said last week that I’d tell you about a lie I tell myself, that I have recently stopped telling myself. That I have mostly stopped telling myself.

It is not my calling to be creative.

When I was a child, my siblings danced and were charmingly, endlessly inventive. At school, I struggled in dance class and was routinely asked to not keep trying out for choir. My clay pots cracked. My embroidery was passable but I resented every stitch for reminding me that my all-girl high school was still designed to turn out wonderfully educated housewives.

What you do, when you are not allowed to vote and the issue at hand is whether you deserve to live, is buy art that reminds you how to survive.

What you do, when you need to channel the courage and the teachings and the rage of those who walked this road before, is read and read and read and write and read.

What you do, when you need to be reminded to keep breathing, is find the places with the food with the music with the accents that signal yes, you are welcome here.

Wake up the next morning and exhale into the bathroom mirror. Square your shoulders and inhale .

For some weeks I have had in my head a quote, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it”.

I cannot quite remember how I first came upon it; I know that I have not stopped reflecting on it. Today for the first time I researched its provenance: Rabbi Tarfon, cited in the .

Still in bed, barely awake, I realize my heart is thrumming in my ears. I am reading the notifications about a fatal shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. I realize it is the second time in almost as many days that I have been hit by a particular emotional cocktail of dread and fear and tension; I have not even really had time to process the “racially charged” murder of two people at a grocery store in Kentucky.

We reach for phrases like and and just as we wring our hands about and hem and haw about . As if we did not know exactly how we got here. As if we were not just recently asking the people who have been saying to stop disturbing the harmony of our dinner parties.

Some years ago I decided to retrain myself from reflexively and excitedly asking the question, “oh boy or girl?” whenever a friend or colleague announced they were adding to their family.

A few different things triggered this series of reflections, including conversations with a trans colleague; many, many nights falling deep into Tumblr rabbit holes; and the exhaustive reporting of the BuzzFeed News team.

Over the course of these years I have worked to engage deeply and with an open mind when it comes to gender, sexuality, and identity. When you grow up in a place like Trinidad, which only this year repealed colonial-era laws that criminalized same-sex relationships, you start this journey at a disadvantage.

I’ve spent several hours of the past two nights sleeping on the floor. Not because of visiting guests or temporary domestic dysfunction, but because of my particular commitment to what I suppose I shall call Method Hobbying.

When I get into, or back into, an activity - tennis, cycling, swimming, running, canning, baking - I get very into its accoutrements. I research (and acquire) the Best Thing for the Thing.

And then for some amount of time - weeks, months, very occasionally years - I get Extremely Into the Thing. But though I have exactly the right gear, I do not always succeed at maintaining the interest. Or the time. Or the energy. Or the willingness to be terrible at something.

In 2017 the San Francisco Public Library chose Black Against Empire for their “One City One Book” campaign. A year later I am finally getting around to reading it, and that meant (as it has, for so long) that I reflexively started to add it to my Amazon shopping cart.

.Issue One.

You may have the privilege of deciding what you will risk. Or you may have no such agency; losing everything, regardless. Sometimes these look the same.

This week I borrowed an e-book of Alexander Chee’s “How To Write An Autobiographical Novel” from the library (shout out to , changing the game) and by the end I knew I also needed to own the book. Among the passages I highlighted were these:

Hi. Would you like to stay awhile?

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