Next Sober from Bullshit š Recovery Club is Wednesday, March 3, at 7pm PST. Wednesday club meetings highlight a community memberās story, a most moving experience - register here if you havenāt already.
Mars is an average of 128.41Ā millionmiles 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 ingenuityāwhich I wasābut because 128.41Ā millionmiles 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. Itās 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 weekās essay, I was going to ask you about something positive, however humble that thing may be, thatās emerged for you in Pandemia.
But then Texas froze over and well, thatās simply more front of mind, isnāt it?
So really Iām wondering:
Texas friends - how are you?
Iām imagining a government that loves us. Iām thinking about this gap in care. The distance feels too big. And yet, we persevere, donāt we?
I love yāall, for real. Take good care of each other. Iām here if you need anything, at all, truly.
xxoo tuya, dani
ā ās, boo boos:
š¦ Itās not sparkling water, itās mineral water. Thanks to SMS community member Christine for sharing this video with me after last weekās recovery club after I shared that <gasp> I donāt actually like LaCroix (!)
š³ A rad new park project at San Franciscoās Presidio is led by an all woman team. I love how explicitly theyāre designing the shared public space to be more inclusive.
"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.ā
āš½ 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.
š More from the nerdy literati (but make it sexy): R.O. Kwon and Alexander Chee on HowĀ KinkĀ Can Liberate Us. āExploration 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.ā As you can imagine, the Kink anthology theyāre discussing is widely sold out.
āThen it dawned on me: This wasnāt 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.ā
I couldnāt deny what Iād seen and heard: Men attempting to heal from patriarchy, however messily and problematically. I also couldnāt deny my own impulse to call out all the things they could do to more aggressively combat the social ills theyāre fighting on a much broader scale. But that would misrepresent what they are absolutely doing, even in rap sessions laced with words like ābroā and āmanā: Calling other men in.
āš½ I wish I could wrap this one in a tortilla and eat it: What makes an effective boundary: āThe most effective boundaries that Iāve been able to enact in my life have all been: measurable, accountable, negotiable and communicable.ā This was so very helpful for me and I know it will be for you, too. Why canāt they teach this in school?
š¶š½āāļø āA 37-year-old Tokyo man who says he rents himself out to other people āto do nothingā has been inundated with gratitude from Twitter users, indicating people are happy with his new form of support.ā The power of simply being with another person. Also humans are so gorgeously weird, arenāt we?
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I like the way you think, Dani. Imagining that world is the first step.
thanks Ted.
who knew we had the same boyfriend?!
it's an open relationship ;)