This month I survived an earthquake and an eclipse. I went to my first Easter vigil and my first Iftar. I visited the graves of my ancestors, flowers in hand. And I had an epic baby weekend: I met Jaziel (11 months) on Friday, hung out with Charlie (7 months) on Saturday, and attended an anticipation party for a yet-to-be-born baby on Sunday. Last month I met my new niece Catherine (2 months) in California, spent a weekend at my boyfriend’s family’s new house with views of palm trees and snowy mountains, and learned the basics of mahjong. There has been a lot to celebrate, and I’ve celebrated it all.
Still, it is Aries season, which in my personal star chart means that I am feeling extra stubborn and impatient, balking at reality and ready to butt heads. I’m angry about the unspeakable (in both senses) genocide in Gaza; angry that there is a crackdown on dissent and protest on college campuses; angry that some of my CUNY colleagues have been fired for expressing their political views; angry that someone saw a portrait of Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer on my personal instagram and proceeded to try to get me fired too; angry that the US would apparently rather fund and arm an escalating conflict between nuclear powers instead of pushing for a ceasefire and actually getting hostages free; and baffled that I can’t count on many people I know, love, and/or work with to be angry about any of it.
Instead of supporting free speech and the right to protest (things we’re definitely gonna need and/or miss in the dark days ahead), instead of condemning censorship and scholasticide, too many US academics and writers are content to quietly condone the killing and maiming of tens of thousands and the starvation and ethnic cleansing of millions while fretting instead over the traumatizing potential of a political slogan or a Palestinian flag emoji or the incivility of dissent itself. [I refuse to link to Jonathan Chait.]
As when Trump was elected for the first time, I feel like there has been a great unveiling. So many lingering sentimental attachments I’ve had to my political party, to “liberal” media and “leftist” nonprofits, to my own professional guild, are being stripped away yet again. A legendary reading series shuts down rather than include authors who are critical of the assault on Gaza. An organization formed to protect the rights of writers literally drags a protesting writer out of the room. But I’m admiring the many people here and elsewhere who are sacrificing their own ambitions and jobs for the sake of others.
I’m not doing much beyond doomscrolling. But I am trying to do at least a few of the things I will wish to have done. I’m trying to put my wild-eyed, nostrils-flared, pawing-at-the-ground Aries exasperation to good use.
I’m not feeling particularly righteous about any of this. Until October 7, my sole act of solidarity with Palestinians was to buy an Aarke instead of a SodaStream. My vague take was that Israel hadn’t done anything worse (or better) than the US has done, which of course is true. I live in Mass Incarceration Nation, after all. I thought that since the entire world was a mess, I should start at home and focus on boycotting myself, so to speak. But I should have known better than to surrender to the myopia of nation-state borders, living and working as I do in “the World’s Borough™,” descended from 400 years’ worth of settlers and colonizers on this continent and elsewhere. My great-grandfather was in the US military in the Philippines over a century ago—“some estimates for civilian dead reach up to a million”—I shudder to think what he was doing. Now I’m building a life with someone whose country was genocided by mine.
At church once we sang “In Christ there is no East or West” simultaneously in Mandarin and English, a holy Babel. The words are aspirational, utopian, but chilling too— the promise and danger of dissolving boundaries and universalizing religion and the collapsing geography of human kinship. A dream and a threat.
A document is signed in Queens and hundreds of thousands of people are displaced on a distant continent. An old man from Scranton writes a blank check and millions of faraway people starve. Another man shouts at my students “Go live in a Muslim country” but they stay where they are. He doesn’t know it, but the planet under their feet is sacred to us all.
Watching
A few seconds of this SNL monologue went viral, but it’s worth watching the whole eight minutes. It’s perfectly paced and crafted. Funny, exhausted, emotionally true. It does what all the struggling genocide-and-everyday-life poems are trying to do.
I love that Jon Stewart is finally putting quotation marks around “American values.” I was worried that he wouldn’t stick the landing, but he did.
On a lighter (?) but related note— the algorithm kept trying to get me to watch this comedian, and I did, and I thought he was funny and worth sharing. (I am more ignorant than I should be about Sri Lanka, as I am about most things, so take this recommendation with a grain of salt: the last time I posted something by someone from Sri Lanka, it turned out he was famously politically terrible. Wikipedia did not help me much with context on this guy, and due to time constraints, this newsletter has the lax research standards of a Lauren Oyler essay.)
On the lightest note of all— I got to introduce my bf to Some Like It Hot! It remains perfect.
Reading
I got off some Libby waitlists and started a bunch of new books—
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham—
all excellent so far. I’ll try to write about them next month.
Gathering
If you’ve read this far, you’ve more than earned an invitation to my Aries Lanai Party on Sunday the 14th from 4 to 7! If you’re in NYC or its surrounds and want to come, message me and I’ll send you the deets. There will be cake; there might be trifle.
Trifling
I made an easy Easter trifle, pictured up top by the tulips, out of the following ingredients found at the ShopRite on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden on Easter afternoon. (I got to see the resplendent after-church crowd!)
hazelnut Italian roll (I assume that’s what you call a Swiss roll from Italy?)
strawberries and raspberries
Kozy Shack tapioca pudding
whipped cream
pistachios
pink and yellow meringues
Conniptions
If you ever feel that NYT Connections is insultingly easy, have I got the game for you! The bf is crafting categories games that may make you want to tear your hair out, but on the bright side you have infinite guesses.
CONNIPTIONS 1
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Nu-UhgUdiHtKPRREmQA
CONNIPTIONS 2
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Nu-b7wiYNU9Gv7XBYiG
CONNIPTIONS 3
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Ntc05X_Fbg1RNcqWkek
CONNIPTIONS 4
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Ntc4WxQpTYK_zD0tVck
CONNIPTIONS 5
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Ntc5FpOz6b7b9eYS_42
CONNIPTIONS 6
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-NtmLGDM9KFJKp6clVVr
CONNIPTIONS 7
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-NtmQpfL3qPVIY4HG96F
CONNIPTIONS 8
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-NuAVgMyA4m2rDhhqTXb
CONNIPTIONS 9
https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-Nv9VylEisYGP66Vy5Ku
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