2022

A notebook.

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I finished “Essential Labor” thinking about how care became so intertwined with its opposite, which is exploitation. The question brought me back to the work of David Graeber. His book “The Dawn of Everything” was published last fall, about a year after his death, at the age of fifty-nine, from pancreatitis. In it, he and David Wengrow write about the sixteenth-century Guaicurú, a society of warrior-foragers who raided villages and captured slaves. The Guaicurú primarily enslaved women, who then served as domestics and nursemaids, “non-persons” who allowed Guaicurú children to become “warriors, princesses, ‘human beings’ of a particularly valued and special kind.” Graeber and Wengrow write, “Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure.” It was fearsome to consider that the violence undergirding what passes as the American care structure endures because of the thing it can be undone by, which is love.

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Both approaches aim to solve the same photographic problem. The problem is that photography is subversive. It subverts our intentions, desires, and expectations at every turn, in a thousand ways, and then bestows its gifts whimsically and serendipitously. Some pictures work and some don’t, for reasons that are perpetually surprising. More precisely, a few work and most don’t. 

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Games like Candy Crush suck our leisure time — our snatches of empty mental space, our interstitials — but unlike actual hobbies or leisure or boredom, give us nothing in return. Boredom, after all, can make the mind come alive, similar to seemingly “mindless” activities (weeding, walking, knitting, woodworking, baking) that allow the mind to exhale. Candy Crush is like a sharp inhale, over and over. It’s not stressful, per se, but nor is it restful.

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Hello again, world. It's been a whirlwind two weeks, month, semester . . . two years. I had a quiet hour and found myself wandering back on here. I forgot that I posted back in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. What a small gift to myself, to us, these breadcrumbs from the past, like ghost shadows. Oh right, I was there.

I miss writing, and journaling. I miss those old parts of me. The city wanderer. Marveler of life. I miss standing still just to watch life go by. Standing still to witness.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and take the bus or a bike into the office, and I'm going to throw myself into reading the new draft regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act. I'm going to like it, because I know behind those words are people trying to do something right. Every now and then, I'm going to think about how crazy it is that I know at least two people who worked on those words. I'll chuckle, in my head. At lunch I'm going to talk and hope for a connection I already know isn't there. That's disappointing, the pretending. But I think I will appreciate it for what it is, because I'd like to do that. People mean well. And I feel good when I remember that.

I wonder when all of me will come together, what day that will be, like the conference of the Parts of Me. Is it silly to believe that that would be the day I feel complete? Full happy? Is it silly of me to think that a day will actually come?

I miss so many things about the past.

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june 19, 2015

From an Evernote: This is the time in New York when I was the only person in a subway car, from Canal Street down to World Trade Center on the E train. 

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I say I love writing but really it is thinking I love — the rush of thoughts — new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue […] In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking…”

Oliver Sacks (via usernamesarehard123)

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Louis sees literature to a large extent as a political project, one that he believes may accomplish more than politics itself; the language of politics, he argues, is meant to conceal rather than reveal the truth.

“I Always Write With a Sense of Shame”, NYT 

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It’s strange, because Amiens, for me. ... ” He trailed off. “Often when you try to reinvent yourself, there are intermediary places in the reinvention of the self,” he said. “You think it’s a place of arrival, but in fact it turns out to be a place of departure.

Édouard Louis, NYT

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The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

“Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.“

“The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.“

“It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.“

“After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. “My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia,” says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics.“

“Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.“

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-defense-production-act.html

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Things to Do

https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/

https://actorsfund.org/about-us/news/stars-house

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things i did today

went for a run (cut short by the astonishing amount of people outside, it was hard to always keep a distance from others) 

video chatted with my aunt, mom and sister

did the dishes

cleaned the kitchen

donated to gothamist

Some things I’m wondering as I work through the links in my email inbox:

What would our economy look like right now if laptops and dependable wifi didn’t exist? What would happen to Google and Twitter and my company? Would we be forced to continue going to work, to keep the business running? What is worse, our reality or this alternative? 

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Coming late to celebrity, the star has felt the burden of representing all Asian-Americans.

Wow, what a piece.

“Archibald moved us to a quieter room to resume the exploration of Wu’s role. He told me about one of the techniques they use. “Very often, it’s helpful for actors to see themselves as either a plant or an animal,” he said.“Animal work is a big thing,” Wu said.Archibald explained that choosing an animal that a role resembles “helps you feel the essence of it.”The pair had decided that, in this film, Wu’s character was fundamentally a plant. “In my mind, Grace, when she dies, literally enters the soil and is put at the base of this monkey-pod tree,” Wu said. She added, grinning, “This is the first time I’m being a plant!”“This the first time you’re being a plant,” Archibald affirmed serenely.“But it works!” she cried, with an almost childlike glee.“

Wu wondered if role models—“and I don’t want to be a fucking role model, I’m an artist”—should be allowed to be a little less pure. “Wouldn’t that make people feel a lot less lonely when they were having the feelings and emotions that weren’t the prescribed ones?” she asked.

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New York Times, Times Machine

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I’ve often thought about how odd it is that anything that happens before the day you are born feels like it all happened in the same rough time period: a long, long, fuzzy time ago. Even if it’s something huge that happened just the day before you were born. Like I was born in 1992, three years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Three years is such a short amount of time. I remember three years ago like it was yesterday. Three years ago Donald Trump was elected president. But the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, those events might as well have come just after the Civil War. Or before the Declaration of Independence. 

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Oh don’t worry, it’s just me, sitting in the window seat at the coffee shop, alternately typing words and crying tears, reflecting on all of the things.

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I’ve been writing a lot recently, a lot more than I have in a long, long time. And I have just been marveling at how much my writing process has changed. How, although it still feels like hard work, like you really work out a metaphorical sweat, the dark dread singed with a true red pain of sorts is no longer there. (At least not yet, maybe when I get closer to deadline…) 

I’d like to credit therapy for this development. Much of my process right now is writing a bunch of things, stepping back, and noticing that they all seem to talk around the thing I want to say. They describe everything about a thing, but stop short of just saying the thing. And so I pause and ask myself, well, what is it that you actually want to say? And I write that down. And it’s nice, because that’s what I wanted to have written all along. 

Way back when I was writing, before therapy and all this thinking and processing, I don’t think I knew this particular block existed, like an existential writer’s block that, until identified and named, doesn’t go away. 

But now, as they say, you trust the process. You trust that you have things to say and they are important and worth saying in their own little ways, even if they never make it past beyond your own two eyes. You notice when you are writing around things rather than through them. 

I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird lately and find myself picking up her voice, as it tends to happen. Anyway, that’s that for now.

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i’ve been thinking about a boy and it’s not a healthy productive kind of thinking. but i’ve found that putting my energy into creative work and stories have helped a lot to ground me and redirect my attention. just a reminder to myself. observe the thoughts, see them pass by, continue onwards.