29 // texas vs. mars

Feb 19, 2021

Next Sober from Bullshit 💘 Recovery Club is Wednesday, March 3, at 7pm PST. Wednesday club meetings highlight a community member’s story, a most moving experience - register here if you haven’t already.

Mars is an average of 128.41 million miles away from Earth. It took Perseverance seven months to travel there. Noodling around the internet, reading these stats, I had a little cry, and not because I was bowled over by this feat of human curiosity and ingenuity—which I was—but because 128.41 million miles feels like the exact length of distance between so many of us here in the U.S.

My brain broke yesterday, watching the celebration in the control room the moment Perseverance touched down, juxtaposed with images on Twitter of our friends in Texas dealing with freezing temperatures and the reality of coping with an emergency inside of a failed infrastructure. It’s difficult to hold both things in my mind - that we can send robots to Mars, while at the exact same time, an apocalyptic scene plays out here at home.

In a different world, Perseverance might have been something that brought us together: a collective sharing of wonder and amazement, a moment to let our imaginations to run wild, our young people to dream big (and to sort of kind of start to see more of themselves represented?), to be proud and inspired.

But now all I can do is wonder what life would look like if we spent as much money and resources on taking care of the life on this planet as we do searching for signs of life on Mars.

Pulling from this week’s essay, I was going to ask you about something positive, however humble that thing may be, that’s emerged for you in Pandemia.

But then Texas froze over and well, that’s simply more front of mind, isn’t it?

So really I’m wondering:

Texas friends - how are you?

I’m imagining a government that loves us. I’m thinking about this gap in care. The distance feels too big. And yet, we persevere, don’t we?

I love y’all, for real. Take good care of each other. I’m here if you need anything, at all, truly.

xxoo
tuya,
dani

⛓ ‘s, boo boos:

💦 It’s not sparkling water, it’s mineral water. Thanks to SMS community member Christine for sharing this video with me after last week’s recovery club after I shared that <gasp> I don’t actually like LaCroix (!)

🌳 A rad new park project at San Francisco’s Presidio is led by an all woman team. I love how explicitly they’re designing the shared public space to be more inclusive.

📈 Study identifies 'post-traumatic growth' emerging from COVID-19 lockdown. This is the study I referenced in Tuesday’s post. As humans, part of coping with this time we’re living through is to create meaning out of it.

"Of course, the pandemic has affected all our lives in significant ways, most obviously the understandable and substantial negative impact it has placed on our mental health which we know has been acute for very many.
"But that is not the full story.’

✍🏽 My boyfriend happens to give some pretty decent writing advice, and also, it was literally all I could do to not make a very naughty comment about this headline.

📇 More from the nerdy literati (but make it sexy): R.O. Kwon and Alexander Chee
on How Kink Can Liberate Us. “Exploration of kink, to my mind, is about exploration of the self in relationship to things that are connected to desire and pleasure that might not technically be codified as sex, per se, but that can reshape you, or your relationships, or your sense of where you fit into the larger world.” As you can imagine, the Kink anthology they’re discussing is widely sold out.

🤬 Curmudgeon stories are some of my favorite stories: 90! Year! Old! North Hollywood Senior Drops $10K On Newspaper Ad To Complain About Internet Speed. The video is hella cute “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term, buffering.”

☎️ My Call Center Job’s No-Uniform Policy Was a Dream, But for Who? An interesting essay of workplace exploitation hidden inside a supposedly “progressive” workplace:

“Then it dawned on me: This wasn’t one of those tech startups that lure in yuppies with promises of kombucha bars and ping pong tournaments, but a business that used their no-uniform policy to attract people who had difficulty finding work elsewhere, in particular trans and gender nonconforming folk.”

👩🏽‍💻 This dude wrote about the mess the internet has us in back in 1997! “The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention.” Attention is a limited resource! Take care with what you give yours to…(i’m a social media curmudgeon!)

🕺🏽 As a person who dates men, and loves men, I am fascinated by this stuff (also it was written by a trans man which was unexpected and rad): Among the Spiritual Bros - How much genuine change can shirtless drumming circles, ancestral rituals and father archetypes really bring about?

I couldn’t deny what I’d seen and heard: Men attempting to heal from patriarchy, however messily and problematically. I also couldn’t deny my own impulse to call out all the things they could do to more aggressively combat the social ills they’re fighting on a much broader scale. But that would misrepresent what they are absolutely doing, even in rap sessions laced with words like “bro” and “man”: Calling other men in.

✋🏽 I wish I could wrap this one in a tortilla and eat it: What makes an effective boundary: “The most effective boundaries that I’ve been able to enact in my life have all been: measurable, accountable, negotiable and communicable.” This was so very helpful for me and I know it will be for you, too. Why can’t they teach this in school?

🚶🏽‍♂️ “A 37-year-old Tokyo man who says he rents himself out to other people ‘to do nothing’ has been inundated with gratitude from Twitter users, indicating people are happy with his new form of support.” The power of simply being with another person. Also humans are so gorgeously weird, aren’t we?

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