I am sitting at Theo’s soccer game when I hear a mother’s voice. It says: “There’s no such thing as girl toys or boy toys. You just like what you like.” She was talking to her young daughter, a spirited little girl with blonde hair. Her name is Ruby. Ruby’s mother’s words have stayed with me.
Over the last few years, space travel movies have become an unexpected favorite of mine. Ad Astra. Gravity. Interstellar, especially. I just heard that there are plans to send Tom Cruise up there, literally, to film the first movie in outer space.
I once bought a large, cheap print of a yellow elephant and her baby. This was when I lived in Vancouver, a time and a place that holds a painful, beautiful time in my mind and my heart. It is not anything particularly stunning, but I liked the whimsical simplicity of it. Since then, the picture has taken on new meaning.
Educated is one of my favorite books. I first read it shortly after its release date in 2018, but it has taken me three years to write about it. I suppose that’s because I’m still thinking about it, and figuring out what it means to me, and why.
It is a devastating story, but written beautifully. It hit a nerve for me in two main ways: first, in its portrayal of women and girls existing within religious communities; and secondly, the use of gaslighting and the author’s experience with truth, reality, and powerful men who lie.
It’s been 9 days since the world went insane. I don’t even remember what I was thinking about before. I know I was aware of coronavirus, and was tracking it’s spread in China, but it hadn’t yet stopped life everywhere else. So it seemed like a distant non-possibility. it feels weird. like it was normal normal normal and then bam. everything changed. overnight.
How do we know what we think we know? Do you remember being born? What an odd experience that would be, to know that you are coming out of your mother’s body and into your own.
So, are we awake yet? There have been and will continue to be many, many words written about the events of January 6, 2021. I have already seen it written that it will be a day remembered in the history books and seared into our national collective memory akin to 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. I have no doubt about that. Similarly, I remember sitting at our kitchen table eating out of a box of Cheese-Its as President Clinton was impeached in ‘98. I was 12 years old and I remember not understanding why my mom looked so grave. I don’t remember any of the coverage, just that image of my mother as his impeachment was announced.
60 years ago today 6 year old Ruby Bridges walked to elementary school in New Orleans, escorted by US Marshals for her protection, while white parents and students screamed at her and refused to participate because of her presence. All but one teacher refused to teach her. She was one of only six students that had passed a test given to Black students in order to provide a metric of who to allow in to the all white schools, the test was administered in the hopes that it would continue to keep Black students out (the same tactics that were used to keep Black people from voting.)
These are strange, strange times. I feel the urge, more than ever, to document and write what I’m seeing and what I’m feeling and, more simply, what is happening for the sake of posterity. And yet, I’m not. Not nearly as much as I want to, or should be. Part of that is old fashioned self sabotage—it seems that even a global pandemic can’t shake one’s ability to self loathe—and part of that is practical.
On Saturday, the Daily (a New York Times podcast that I love) played a special episode titled: A Bit of Relief. It was needed after the week that had just concluded. It included a reading from “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (also love her and her writing), another reading by Wesley Morris from a cookbook about how to stock your fridge (funny and light and his voice is nice and reassuring to listen to), and then this reading from C.S. Lewis’ “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
