Others: “so, How ~southern~ Are You?”

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

I am on my way to being the best auntie ever or the worst sister-in-law that ever lived. Possibly both.

I am making my 2-year-old niece a plushy for her birthday. She is very hands-on baby and wants to help with everything and be involved in the center of attention. A few weeks after her birthday everyone is going dipnetting. She is two and can not help with dip netting or do anything but watch.

So I am making her a toy salmon. And I am making it so she can filet it. It has guts. It has bones. It is all one piece and child friendly, and I am debating using embedded magnets or velcro to hold the filets on.

She has a kitchen set with a little wooden knife at her grandparents house, who have already heard about this and think its a great idea. We are gonna teach this kid to clean and process fish. She already knows where meat comes from and she will want to get in and do what everyone else is doing which she can not do because the fish are only slightly smaller than she is.

So, salmon plushy

Vivaldi played by the South African elementary school Goede Hoop Marimba Band

Turn ON the sound

I read Stone Butch Blues when it was first published. I was 18, just barely out, and a sophomore at a liberal arts women's college 45 minutes from my parents' house. That would've been... 1993? Yup. 1993.

The book fundamentally changed my understanding of... pretty much everything.

My great-grandparents were all working class. On my dad's side (his parents were cousins), they were farmers. On my mom's maternal side, they were European immigrants and union bricklayers. On her paternal side, Jewish immigrants. Her dad and his sister were raised by their mom, who was not, I believe, religious, and didn't raise them in the faith. She was a shopkeeper.

My grandparents' generation were college-educated (possibly except for my dad's mom). My dad's father was a math teacher and my mom's father, educated at Caltech, was a civil engineer. My mom's mother ran my grandfather's business, including a real estate office for a while.

Both my parents graduated from Stanford and taught English (my dad, who had a Ph.D., eventually went into corporate management to make more money).

So... I grew up surrounded by both the privileged world of aspirational academia and the, much more resonant for me, family stories about immigrant lives, trade unions, and beautiful craftsmanship.

I can do the academic thing, and do it well, but I have always preferred making things to studying them. I have always felt a bit out-of-sync with my family’s "evolution" towards increasingly academic pursuits. I like using my brain, but I like to keep my hands dirty while I do it.

Leslie Feinberg's writing became, for me, the first place where my own queerness and my identification with my family’s immigrant and working-class roots, made sense to me as parts of a single whole.

The summer after my junior year, I went through a directory I'd gotten my hands on of lesbians working in the arts, and sent out letters to those who seemed interesting, compatible, and far enough away from my childhood in California to let me try my hand at becoming something more than my parents' daughter. I asked for an apprenticeship.

As such things do, the end result wound up being... very different from what I'd imagined. I got a gig in New Hampshire helping a musician and her trans partner, who made their living busking on hammered dulcimer. I was meant to go live in a tent on their land, help with the straw bale house they were building, help babysit their 3 year old daughter, and join the busking on my harp. As it turns out, I have absolutely NO musical improvisation ability and had no clue what to do when there wasn't sheet music. The harp spent the summer in its case. Also turns out that my social anxiety made not having my own, completely private, space to retreat to unbearable. I wound up renting a tiny apartment in a nearby college town. And then... well, it turned out that the weather wasn't great for house building, and my girlfriend, spending the summer outside DC with her parents, was miserable, and so she came to join me, and...

Well. Before my girlfriend arrived, I did a lot of hiking and lake swimming, went to Boston Pride and cheered on my busking "bosses," joined them and their friends for a summer solstice ritual at which I was introduced to the concept of herbed butter and the back-breaking problems of invasive blackberry, and rode in their decomposing old subaru wagon (it's fascinating to warch the road go by through clusters of tiny, rusted out, salt-holes in the footwell) all the way to New York, specifically to hear Leslie Feinberg speak.

I was the most awestruck, hero-worshipping baby dyke imaginable, the youngest person in the room by at least a decade, and I still remember the sensation of blushing for *three hours.* Because. I was. In. The. Same. Room. As. Leslie. Feinberg.

That summer broke me wide open. It was the first time I ever felt like I, as an individual being, might hold power, make something that changed things, in the world.

That feeling, of urgent, hopeful agency, swells and recedes in my life, but I never experience it without thinking of Stone Butch Blues and of Leslie Feinberg. And yes, I still blush. Every damn time.

Happy (early) Nov 15th! Remember that Stone Butch Blues is free now and always to read here

Leslie was a communist, a butch lesbian, a nonbinary and transgender activist, and the person who made me who I am today. Consider checking out Stone Butch Blues if you haven’t already 😘 Do it for Leslie, and for hir surviving partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt 💕

Yule Goat is here to greet you and wish you a merry solstice, may your winter festivities be joyous and safe ✨

[prints available here]

people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.

saw someone say "an 11-year-old isn't even supposed to know what sex is and if you do something horrible must be happening to you and you need to get out of there" like can we be for real for a moment. have some people honest to god never heard 11-year-olds making sex jokes in their life

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This pandemic is really proving that government has the means to solve all problems they just choose not to