Found this creek dam while hiking with David for his birthday last week.

Woof, I know we’ve all said it, but these weeks are crawling/zooming by. I’ll be honest that I’m not reading as much on the internet lately, since so much of it is (understandably) pandemic-related. It just all makes me feel so tired. I’ve been thinking, though, that it could be fun to have friends write guest posts for the Friday 5. Inject the blog with a lil life! Gonna try to convince David to write one, to start, but if anyone else is interested in writing a 5, let me know!

1. My Therapist Says Feelings Aren’t Facts, Medium. “Do you know that feelings aren’t facts?” For a moment, I was more curious than ashamed. I asked what he meant. “Feelings are powerful,” he said. “Feelings give us information, and they can move us to action, but no matter how powerful they are, they’re not facts. You can feel like the worst person in the world. You can feel like taking care of everybody else is the best you can do. You can feel like you’re not worth anything. You can even feel like you’re a human failure, and as powerful as that feeling is, it doesn’t make it true.” And then, I could breathe.”
2. ‘Iso’, ‘boomer remover’ and ‘quarantini’: how coronavirus is changing our language, The Conversation. “In fact, scientists have recently found learning new words can stimulate exactly those same pleasure circuits in our brain as sex, gambling, drugs and eating (the pleasure-associated region called the ventral striatum).” Interesting piece on how language evolves to accommodate crisis. I like “iso” and I fully hate “boomer remover.”
3. Trains Speed Through the Swiss Countryside to Techno Beats, Kottke. Would recommend this Youtube video — I’ve put these train videos on in the background when I’m on the couch, hopelessly scrolling on my phone. Then I look up and see a nice train at a pleasant pace, paired with chill music, and it soothes the senses.
4. Harden Your Zoom Settings to Protect Your Privacy and Avoid Trolls, EFF. I’m only ever a guest on Zoom, but if you’re regularly using it I would recommend skimming these settings and making sure your privacy is at a level you’re comfortable with. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is my jam, they take privacy and digital rights seriously and have thorough resources.
5. “After an illness, walking the dog,” Jane Kenyon. “Soaked and muddy, the dog drops, / panting, and looks up with what amounts / to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him, / nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.” Might have shared this before but I don’t even care! In a group chat of dog lovers, I shared another stanza from a different Jane Kenyon poem, “Having it Out with Melancholy,” which has these excellent lines: The dog searches until he finds me / upstairs, lies down with a clatter / of elbows, puts his head on my foot. // Sometimes the sound of his breathing / saves my life—in and out, in / and out; a pause, a long sigh…” The way Kenyon writes about times with her dog feel very true to me. “A clatter of elbows!”

“She could peel an apple in one long, curly strip…”

Oh, hi again. What’s new? Nothing! I’ve found a new park in the area that is longer than it is wide. It’s basically a long trail between two neighborhoods, with water chuckling down one side and occasionally across the path, ultimately leading up to enormous Sound-of-Music hills and ?? I still haven’t made it to the end of the trail. It certainly doesn’t loop back in a circle, like many trails, and I’ve walked at least 1.5 miles and not reached the end. Because, as far as you walk out into this semi-wild park, you have to walk the same distance back. It’s been meditative and exploratory and I’m not mentioning the name of the park because I don’t want spoilers about the end of the trail. Stay tuned, I guess?

1. Why You Should Wear Inside Clothes During Coronavirus, Refinery29. “It’s understandable that one might associate inside clothes with a kind of ailment or defeatism, a sign that you’ve given up on ever going outside again. An introvert’s badge of honor. Conversely, wearing your street clothes at home feels like a headstart on life, like you’re always up for anything at a moment’s notice. If outside clothes are an opportunity to express your best self, an embodiment of your most optimistic plans, then inside clothes are seen as an admission of your worst inclinations and your dashed desires. There’s probably some truth in that for some, but it’s certainly not true about my inside clothes. I’m more inclined than ever to believe that inside clothes are our one shot at understanding the pleasure that comes from really dressing for yourself. No matter how comfortable you are with your own style, when you’re dressing for the outside world, you’re still adhering to codes and expectations. Not so with inside clothes. In my oven-mitt Korean sweatpants and souvenir T-shirts, I am fully dressed for my own eyes, actions, and plans.”
2. Cereal In My Mouth, Gawker. “It would be extremely easy to blame this chaotic tableau on the lone individual who was in the house during the hours when the crime occurred. It is very tempting to abandon critical thinking and simply assume that—if there is an empty house with only a dog in it, and you leave that house, and everything is clean and in its place, and then you return a few hours later and the kitchen floor is strewn with a hurricane of cereal, and all of the cereal boxes have been opened not by the easy-open flaps on top but instead by being torn and chewed from the side, and there are tooth marks on the boxes, and you’ve seen the dog on multiple occasions push his nose into the crack in the cabinet door and work that door open because he smells the marshmallowy Lucky Charms within, and the dog of the house is hiding in the corner of the living room upon your return, and in the hairy area of the dog’s snout is a good quantity of bluish-white powder consistent with smashed Lucky Charms marshmallows—then the dog of the house is the perpetrator of the crime. Yes, it is quite easy to make this assumption. But where is the proof?” Okay so this is an oldie, that I found in a Twitter round-up of “foundational internet writing,” pieces that define this time period. I’d never seen it before and it is a delight. I like when people write from the perspective of dogs in a way that sounds clever and authentic.
3. Yoga With Adriene is a YouTube sensation, Vox. Ah, I’ve been a fan of Yoga with Adriene since a friend recommended her 5 years ago. She made me feel like I could do yoga, and that even if I’m a little clumsy or not quite getting the poses, a “little goes a long way” to “finding what feels good” in your body and your breath. If you haven’t tried her yoga videos and you’re curious, she has 7 and 10 minute videos, as well as videos marked for beginners. I loved this: “Sequences are plotted out, but dialogue, apart from her go-to opener, is not. It’s breezy, conversational. She can get silly. She breaks out into show tunes and ’70s R&B, makes Zoolander references, and amps up a Texan twang as needed. She laughs at herself. Her blue heeler, Benji, is forever splayed beside her yoga mat, and she’s not afraid to pause the flow to marvel at his deep, contented sigh or real-deal downward dog. The Today show likened her videos to “doing yoga with a really nice neighbor,” and, true enough, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood provided the initial inspiration for the channel.” No wonder I like her vibe so much!
4. A Secret Love, Netflix (trailer). Just watched this last night with my husband and sister-in-law. It’s a story of two women in their 80s, who’ve been a couple since 1947, living together as “cousins” or roommates, and who have recently come out to their family. It turns into a story of aging and weighing independence with care, but as my sister said, “The most powerful thing about this story is knowing it’s true, that they’ve existed all this time.” Plus there’s so much good primary source material — photographs, silent footage of the women on the beach in the 50s, in cocktail dresses at parties, playing baseball (oh, did I not mention that one of the women was Terry Donahue, who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, aka the “league of their own”?). Loved it. It’s so tender and real and Canadian.
5. Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Been working on this book for a few weeks, going slow to absorb it and understand it (and also because nonfiction digests slowly for me compared to ~novels~). She uses metaphors of change and transformation from nature to talk about the best kinds of community movements and individual efforts at changing the world for the better. Dandelions, who use the wind to spread their seeds and influence wide. Ants, who are parts of a whole. Fractals, patterns that repeat from a small scale to a large, like the leaves of a fern or the structure of a snowflake. It’s really good and the more I read the more I would recommend it to you. “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves — how do I learn from this?”

Yoshida Hiroshi

Last week I took the week off. It was an accident, the Friday just flew by me, but I never swung back around and tried to squeeze out a late post (a Saturday 6?). Been doing an okay job keeping my mood afloat, but it’s taking all my attention. Honestly, I played more video games than read anything last week anyway. Oops! Thanks for bearing with me:

1. Pandemic Mental Health Safety Plan, Queering Psychology. This is a SOLID resource. I went through the questions in preparation for this post and ended up taking a break to journal and check in with what my body is needing (the answer? lunch). It’s so helpful to have some questions to prompt me, otherwise I stare at my journal like “Well…I know the feeling is Bad, but beyond that I’m STUMPED.” Highly recommend having this one in your pocket, or just thinking of those check-in questions for yourself from time to time.
2. 30 Non-Boring Virtual Date Activities to Try From Home, Vice. Saved this one to share for you all because of this suggestion: “My favorite iteration of the last suggestion is an after-practice bar tradition I have with my bandmates called “draw a cartoon character from memory” that I picked up from the comics artist and critic Nick Gazin. You can’t look at the character in question before you begin—you have to sketch them wholly recollectively. Start with Bart Simpson, move to Betty Boop, despair at the impossibility of Mario of Super Mario fame. It’s so stupidly funny and makes for beautiful keepsakes. It’s also really impressive, infuriating, and hot when someone is, improbably, good at it.”
3. Baopu #72: Working From Home, Autostraddle. Relatable comic. (I’m feeling Day 40 lately.)
4. “Meditation 17,” John Donne. Written as Donne recovered from a serious illness. There are a lot of familiar lines in it, and power there: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
5. 33 Moments Where Friends, Family, And Total Strangers Had Each Other’s Backs In This Pandemic, Buzzfeed. This is sweet and did make me feel better. Lots of selfish, defiant people getting a lot of national attention right now, and while stories of compassion and community are sometimes quieter, I do still believe they’re more powerful.

Bonus features:

• Smokey Robinson singing about the letter U on Sesame Street
• Sheep handling competition, 8 years and younger class, Twitter video – AHH SO CUTE