Hey, lonelyhearts. Here’s a story for you.

OTD in 1995 I’d just been dumped by a bad boyfriend w whom I’d made Thanksgiving plans. I was also weirdly anemic and going through a cancer scare.

Then, yay, a friend invited me to Vermont!

Her brother was chef!

BUT...
Two days before Thanksgiving I spiked a high fever and a hard hot lump appeared on the side of my face in front of my ear. I went to the ER and was diagnosed with...
...a infection in my salivary gland.

Essentially bacterial mumps.

Young arrogant doctor projected annoyance. I didn’t fit the profile.

“Typically we see this in nursing home patients who have become dehydrated from neglect.”

Implication: *So you’re a freak*
I filled the scrip for antibiotics and took a cab back to my tiny Somerville apartment.

Things got worse before they got better.

I spent 24 hours in bed w shaking chills and the lump blew up to a huge swelling and distorted my whole face and neck.
On Thanksgiving morning the fever broke. I felt like myself again. Yay!

Except I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. The left side of my face was swollen out to my shoulder. But I was also now starving after no food for two days and the fridge was empty.
Reader, I walked my wretched self v slowly to the nearest open pharmacy and I found a tin of tuna fish, some Tricuits and a can of mushroom soup on the shelf. And some ibuprofen.

And then, holding all this to my chest, standing in line to check out, a REAL LIFE FUCKING EPIPHANY.
All around me were other human beings also holding cans of soup and tuna. A homeless vet. A young immigrant couple who didn’t know it was a holiday. An old man with no teeth. And me, the girl whose face was out to her shoulder.

I belonged here.
I had fallen alone through a crack in the universe and found my tribe. The people of tuna, crackers, and pain.

Amazing grace.

My heart was pounding out of my chest half bc of anemia and half bc of love.

Love was going to hold me up. I was going to be okay.
Basically the best Thanksgiving I ever had.
If you are going to be alone on Thursday open yourself up to the possibility of epiphany.

Just sayin.

❤️

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More from @ssteingraber1

1 May
I’m done ignoring this tweet.

Re: “our movement” to confront “climate catastrophe.” Yes there is one. I am part of it. It is powerful, intersectional, justice-focused. It is not co-opted.

Michael Moore is not/has not been in that movement or anywhere near the “battlefield.”
New voices are welcome. Filmmakers especially. Critical voices are needed. But you can’t walk in,declaring yourself the speaker of the movement come to save it from corruption while getting the science wrong, misrepresenting the state of political play, and confusing the players.
Did you think you were breaking news by revealing the @SierraClub historical connection with the fracking industry? Those of us in “the movement” were openly fighting with the Club about this 8 yrs ago. orionmagazine.org/2012/03/breaki…
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20 Mar
So I’ve been living a different experience this week from other parents hunkered down with their kids. I haven’t been able to talk about it until today. This is a story that features my daughter Faith, the nation state of Chile, and @Chase Bank. It goes out to @rebecca_altman.
Re: @Chase: I have one credit card—same one since 1989 and I pay off the full balance every month like a Girl Scout. It’s a Chase card, and I’ve been holding onto it until Earth Day when I would replace it and cut it up as part of #stopthemoneypipeline

google.com/amp/s/www.roll…
Re: my daughter: Until yesterday Faith, 21, anthropology major at @smithcollege and fiercely independent, was abroad studying social justice movements in Chile. Like every other college kid she started hearing rumors last week that she would need to come home
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16 Feb
I’ve been ignoring this latest just-sayin’ nonsense from long-standing reactionary bigot Richard Dawkins, who’s been spouting racist tripe since I was in grad school but now feel its my obligation as a biologist to respond. I think we all should.

SHORT THREAD 1/
First of all Dawkins slyly misuses the term eugenics, acting as though it simply refers to the selective breeding of desirable heritable traits—as in livestock or food crops—and of course that principal would in theory be workable for humans.

But that’s not eugenics. 2/
The term eugenics was coined by Charles Darwins’ cousin, Francis Dalton, 24 yrs after Origin of Species (1859) in book called Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

Eugenics exactly refers to the attempt to breed racially superior traits IN HUMANS. 3/
Read 11 tweets
26 Jan
Friends, tomorrow, Jan 27, is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I’ll be taking the day off of Twitter for reflection. So today I’m threading together some thoughts on the things that I’ll be reflecting upon. 1/
I’m not a Jew nor a historian. I’m a biologist who began life as a “surrendered infant” adopted by a German American family, raised as a Methodist. On the day Auschwitz was liberated, my dad was an 18-yo soldier in Italy. Don’t be a Good German, said the man who raised me. 2/
Here are a few things I’m thinking about: 41 percent of US adults surveyed—and two thirds of millennials—say they do not know what Auschwitz was.

At the same time very few survivors remain to tell us their stories. Half have died in the last 5 years. 3/

google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…
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21 Jan
BOMBSHELL: deep dive by investigative reporter ⁦@JustinNobel⁩ into radiation risks from #fracking.

Part of a years’ long research project by one of our finest reporters.

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Earth’s bedrock contains a whole periodic chart of elements, including some radioactive ones. When you blow it up using water as the club (fracking) those elements end up in the briny wastewater that comes up to the surface and requires disposal. Science has documented this...
Read 10 tweets
6 Jan
1/ Everything is awful so I’m tweeting a thread about my kids that has nothing to do with the news.

My daughter, 21, is a literary soul who just wrote a long and complex essay on nationalism and folklore in the Brothers Karamazov.

My son, 18, is a Equally Serious film major.
2/ Last month each of them extracted a promise from me that we would go see Little Women when it opened, which here in Ithaca was Xmas afternoon.

I said yes to both but forget to say that the other one was coming too.
3/ Quelle horreur. Major parent screw up. They were each furious that their sibling was inserting themselves into this momentous occasion.

Faith bc the book was a shared experience between the two of us; we took turns reading LW aloud when she was 9, and it was transformational.
Read 15 tweets

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