Hey, L
Please explain what in the hell happened to my country. It was alive and well - or so I thought - just a few days ago. If it’s true that you reap what you sow, we are in for a hell of a harvest.
Love
Marty

So Marty, first of all, it is awful to be alone (thank goodness for partners and pets). If I were in your shoes I would feel incredibly ( Read more... )

As I say repeatedly... it is a curse to know a lot about all of this. By no means everything, of course. But I think the reason it corrodes my mental health is that being Jewish and following these things provokes a kind of existential anguish that is hard to bear alone. So I am putting all this here and you can read it or not. The fact that nobody ( Read more... )

The compulsion of people to choose sides as though we are watching a football game, and then say things, empty things. Never fails to amaze me.

Adam told us he was scared to be on the Harvard campus. People were yelling at him asking if he was a Jew. The shit people say at moments like this... it burns, and it stays burned in the brain, for a ( Read more... )

This has gutted me to my core.

https://marinakittaka.com/posts/2021-02-26-Good-Ol-Charlie-B

For our 10th anniversary E got me a video game player with Pac-Man and a bunch of other games. It was sent to us in pieces to be assembled because, of course, there is no need for any computing power for these games anymore. Many pegs and Allen screws later, I am playing Pac-Man every night. It was a good present. I think that secretly I have ( Read more... )

I am in an inexplicably good mood. It's some kind of combination of feeling good about gender stuff, reconciled at least about job stuff, and generally, perhaps, a determination to shake off the gloom. There sure is a lot going on.

* E unexpectedly got a gig doing market research interviews in Puerto Vallarta! This was via her friend Jenny, who ( Read more... )

Another week has come and gone and little has changed. They are still working on the goddamn bathroom. It now has tile on the floor and most of the walls. They were supposed to come and replace the fixtures so we could have a working bathroom again, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, no word from the Cheerful Dutchman about the kitchen. Maybe my ( Read more... )

Some very naive part of me, despite everything, despite a lifetime of profound difference between us, hoped something good would come of this. It wasn't until I had my therapy session today that I started crying.

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They shook hands in front of the terminal. Nobody watching would ever have imagined that once upon a time ( Read more... )

My father was God and didn’t know it. He gave me
the ten commandments neither in thunder nor in fury, neither in fire nor in cloud
but in gentleness and in love. He added caresses and added kind words
adding, “I beg you,” and “please.” He sang keep and remember
in a single melody and he pleaded and cried quietly between one commandment and the next:
Don ( Read more... )

I am reading this Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces which is nominally about punk music but actually turns out to be a long explainer of Situationism. Marcus will have many pages about Guy Dubord and the Lettrist International, and then say, "as the Sex Pistols demonstrated..." in the most amazing way. I want to ask Greil Marcus (who is still ( Read more... )