Wrote about the bewildering mix of excitement and hesitancy as we start to make plans (plans!) again for the not-so-far future — and making room for all the unexpected ways grief is going to come for us in the months to come:
How do I articulate unspeakable excitement to gather again *and* having no idea how my mind and body is going to react to a social life? The closest I can get = being so so so excited for the first day of school but we pull up to the front door & I can't get out of the car
Someone just commented that they feel ready to lick their friends, which is a perfect encapsulation of how weird we're all going to be for, like, at LEAST six months
The number of people who have directed me to this illustrative tweet to accompany this piece:
This is all my way of saying I know what it's like to try not to grieve and just throw yourself back into your life — and it's come back to kick my ass in so many unanticipated ways. I hope we can find space, personal and societal, for all this loss:
Also this post is ostensibly about your own social life but bosses and HR departments: the great grief is still coming and it would be very smart to expand your leave policies liberally to accommodate it
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Knowledge workers have embraced our own deskilling, and the subsequent de-valuing of our labor, and rebranded it as personal productivity. We have downloaded so many fucking apps and read so many life hacks, all in service of our continued debasement:
Off Twitter all day but I heard the North Idaho siren and must answer the call: there are many parts of North Idaho that are not what my family would call "in the toolies" but this company is IN THE TOOLIES
Look at this website. The copyright was last updated in 2008. The design is straight out of.....2002? They are the people you call when you live in the woods and no other company will get you internet. Based in Priest River, serving Priest Lake.
I used to go to church camp in this area and it's the sort of place where you'd be out hiking and find an RV in the middle of nowhere and shut the fuck up v quickly and back away. It's prime American Redoubt real estate.
I hope you'll spend some time with these stories — filled with joy, deep loneliness, epiphany and mourning — of people navigating the pandemic while living alone:
"I didn't take advantages of opportunities to enjoy life in the past, and after a year locked in my house thinking about the people I loved who died — well, I've stared into that abyss enough."
I thought the @benyt profile of Heather Cox Richardson was quite good; I think her success (and prominence of many academics on Twitter) evidences a twinned liberal skepticism of journalistic process / embrace of academic authority
@benyt Like Ben, I rarely open the newsletter, but I also recognize that I'm not the audience. When I talked to Ben about it he described it as "PBS Newshour, but online" and that feels right. Descriptive, authoritative, historically rooted, and most importantly, once a fucking day
The audience reminds me of some older liberals I've encountered recently: not MSNBC boomers; they've reached their limit. They want something very clear and then the comments section that is not their toxic Facebook account