october: in the bag
Here's my second monthly round-up. This was fun to do. I will continue my monthly roundups until they are no longer fun :)
watching:
- Apothecary Diaries is back and we love our Mary Sue who can Solve Any Problem. She's overpowered and we love her for it.
- We just saw You Can See Everything yesterday and now we get to dive into the discourse. It was good! Long! Lots to think about!
links
- I've become obsessed with French holy wells, similar to the ones in Ireland. I found some neat websites (in French, sorry!) here and here to explore. Love finding guestbooks on more "normie" parts of the web.
- I originally followed Keenan for the excellent podcast he co-hosted but I thoroughly enjoy his writing. This blog is about the loneliness of language in a new place, and really made me think about my second-language students and families a little differently.
reading:
- Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. It was a good read, but soft on the Protestant paramilitaries from what I can tell as someone hoping to learn about the Troubles for the first time.
- Are you Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson. I picked this up after losing sleep for a full week over a student's parent kind of willfully misunderstanding every communication to her, and it really screwed up my nervous system in a way that made no sense at the time. This book has already helped me realize why a childhood with a very unstable parent makes me need people to be happy with me to feel safe. Still early on, will report back later when I'm done.|
irl
A buddy and I went to Doors Open Baltimore, a day where a bunch of historic buildings are open to the public!
the Bromo Seltzer Tower is this huge Italian-style tower to promote an old medication brand that has been turned into artist studios. It has a massive clock up at the top with four huge faces and you can tour inside of it! We climbed up all 15 flights instead of using the elevator. It has a mini-museum of glass bottles as well from Maryland Glass Works you can see if you click on the link above - very cool website navigation with the tower on the right!
the Clifton Mansion was Johns Hopkins summer home that I hadn't been inside, and it's been (very expensively!!) restored recently.
And elsewhere in my IRL life:
- Halloween was successful! We committed to being on our porch handing out candy in a world where people congregate to 2-3 neighborhoods out of Baltimore's 240+. And we got about 30 trick-or-treaters and sweet parents. We dressed like witches and had a little firepit in the front yard and neighbors came over to chit chat. Building and being in community means being available to your neighbors in some way.
Plants are inside for winter! All fighting over this one south-facing window. My next step is to trim the mulberry tree outside to maximize light. The staghorn (top left) will have to be removed and hosed down in the shower from time to time.
No pictures yet, but I am sewing a hooded version of this quilted chore coat. I am deep in HST-land, for all my fellow quilters. Mostly thrifted fabric once again because that's the budget! Maybe I'll finish it before summer?
55 gallon is set up and ready to rumble!! As in, will be ready for fish in another month. But the substrate, root tabs, plants, etc are all there for the nitrogen cycle to start. Some of these plants came in looking ruffff after shipping so I am waiting for them to show signs of growth before I even test the water for fish.
We voted! We live in a new state so making sure things went well was important to us. There was a first time voter in front of us and the whole place lit up for him. 80-year-old poll workers were hollering and sending him shine. One of my favorite things about living in a Black-majority city is the emphasis on celebrating things and making them the big deal they really are. And he wasn't too embarrassed lol.
thinking
I am working on a post about this, but here's a short fedi thread with current thoughts. I'm not interested in debating about why people need to be disposed of when they are largely in alignment about the harms of web 2.0 and growing right-wing authoritarianism. We need to work on normalizing disclosure of AI tools in a way that doesn't purity test. This is a time for coalition-building.
This election season is coming at a time when I am probably the most in alignment with my own values. I do not feel like I have anything to prove (well, most days). My days over the last four years have been spent working with people in extreme poverty, and it's made me so much less judgemental. I'm not on social media. I'm encouraging my coworkers to vote and talking about ballot amendments and non-culture-war local election issues.
I believe that the future I want to see will benefit the normies more than they realize, so I focus on making the future I want to see appealing to people who just get their news from Facebook or wherever. I do that by listening to them and not being condescending when I hear a conspiracy or two, but just asking where I can look up sources in a gentle way. I know I've changed some views on school board candidates from my moderate coworkers, and I bet I made more of an impact than I did when I lectured from Instagram stories about how dumb people are.
I'm still a little election-traumatized. I'm not looking at polls, but I'm still making sure people are voting and understanding what they're voting for.