Science Married to a Human Dimension

There are a couple things that the readers of this blog may not know about me.

1.     I add “lethal” amounts of cinnamon to everything. PartnerPenguin recently informed me that not everyone buys full spice bottles of cinnamon every 3 months. We’re not talking about cinnamon challenge or anything, I just add an average of 1.5 Tbsp to 2 cups of oatmeal. I think this is reasonable. This conversation occurred when I commented that store bought porridge was under spiced. ::shrug:: #spicewimps

2.     I am extremely adept at skills that require minute fine motor skill manipulation, like braiding, embroidering, thin section production, and untangling knots of any kind know to humankind.

3.     I do not “crash” in any kind of slowly sloping pattern. I exist in one state, I get cranky, I satisfy whatever need I had and I feel 100%. PartnerPenguin said it best:
“If you are tired, you fall asleep. I swear, we’ve passed into a tunnel [as passengers in a car] and you’ve been asleep by the time we came out. One time you did not get enough socialization for a few days and you described an in depth a conversation you struck up with a dog tied outside a store. A dog, Sara.”

Of these things, #3 has been the most important discovery for working on Self Care. Particularly this week, I have been working with what feels like a totally uphill battle to perform adequate self care.

Overall, I have had a pretty fucking badass week. I wore a super pink makeup pallet to a party on Saturday. I made this delicious, nutritious and spectacularly lovely dish with my beloved and my friend the Lioninegrammer on Sunday:

Oh yeah.

And I got tickets to see Hamilton.

Yes. That one. The one I’ve been writing about for a year.

I took a giant risk and actually waited in line at the theatre in Oroenpaz City where the show will be playing for nearly 8 months. I had gone home and eaten a big food and gotten a big coat, then I walked myself to the theatre and settled in for a nice good wait. The powers whom control positive luck were certainly smiling at me this week because I pulled an improbably good haul by waiting. Despite being 7^th from last person in line, I miraculously managed to get 6 seats next to each other for $100 per ticket. For a show that has been sold out in several cities for nearly a year at this point. 0__o I was literally jumping for joy for 10 minutes solid between when the usher let me into the box office foyer and when I made the purchase.

The majority of the rest of my waking hours this week have been spent at the annual conference for geoscientists. On Tuesday I networked, talked and listened for 12 hours straight. I met with past collaborators, managers, student peers, grad mentors and probably some people who didn’t like me but tolerated talking to me.

I owe this experience to someone who is a “new” character to this blog. I will call her ConventionCousin. We met at a geology convention nearly three years ago when she was thinking about coming to Big American University. She has matured so much in the time since then, I am truly honored to know her. ConventionCousin bought me a guest pass to this conference as a birthday present because she’s awesome like that. In thanks for this gift, I got her addicted to sushi burritos. Seems fair.

While a lot of my friends gathered swag and actually attended the scientific part of the conference, I networked my eyeballs out and my throat sore. I have the following observations about being constrained to the exhibition hall of a conference.

•       I was successful at finding academia adjacent companies, as I had hoped. Publishing houses, instrumentation providers, policy informers, and non-profits.
•        Fancy conferences have enough money to do really weird things that I didn’t know were possible, like brewing beer specifically for the social event and padded plush carpets.
•        Carpet outgassing irritates my eyes and makes me sad.
•        Keynote speakers can be REALLY high profile if your convention is deemed important enough by the right people.
•        At an academic context, people are defined by their work. It is acceptable to be entirely defined by your research and the organization you work for.

The last point really bugs me. People kept asking me “What do you do?” I have been working so much on my personal definition for so many months that this question irked me at a fundamental level. To several people who I could tell had a sense of humor I responded, “I respire.” Another level of this question was “What are you?” to which I would respond “A human, unless my permit has expired and I forgot to renew it. Why, do you know where the nearest permitting office is?”

I suppose there are so few contexts where scientists can describe in depth the beauty of their work; this is a somewhat adequate gateway towards meaningful conversation. Personally, I feel like the question “What are you?” makes me feel like I am an object and generates the context that the person asking me this question will view me as a tool. If I am an inefficient tool they will move on to the next person/tool. I understand that there are literally thousands of people at conventions, but I appreciate this as an opportunity to meet people, not tools.

Another question that confused me was “Where are you from?” This question makes a lot more sense in the context that many people travel for the event. However without an official affiliation, replying with my place of residence feels like the wrong answer. Replying with my city of origin feels even more wrong.

I guess I’ve just worked so hard on breaking my personal identity with my student/professional identity I am having trouble code-switching back to that frame of mind. I’m also not sure I want to buy in completely that I have to be defined by my profession and employer affiliation. Sometimes I just want to be a human who respires.

Me, getting ready to go to the conference:

I think the best advice I took with me to this conference was to “take everything with a bucket of salt.” While originally applied to something from Reddit, it is remarkably good advice when people are pedaling their wares at you and you don’t want to buy into what they have to sell. A school tried to encourage me to attend their graduate program because the school had prestige associated with the name. I really wanted to say “Bitch, I don’t care. That’s why I went where I went for undergrad and that was a terrible decision because prestige doesn’t mean shit for personality match.” I didn’t, I just smiled and nodded. I get some things right. I just took it with a bucket of salt.

The event that impacted me personally the most was a keynote speaker. She spoke of the importance of people like me. People who are interested in communicating science to broader communities, who can speak la lingua franca with communities who are “left behind”. The translators who can make complex science digestible to the public. While I felt this call to action was personally very effective, I fear that she politically avoided the issue that you can’t talk sense to crazy. She advocated speaking calm facts to raving talking heads: that might make sense politically, and even in the guarded context of the ivory tower but it is challenging to make a reality. I’m still figuring this out.

To close out the night, I wanted to briefly mention that PartnerPenguin and I attended a benefit concert this week with 2-3 song sets and 16 artists. One hell of a night. From those artists, I wanted to share an artist new to me! So here is Geographer singing “Kites”.

Role Call: Cast List

This past week has been one of crunchy discoveries for me. I decided as a combined birthday/holiday present to myself to invest in a personal coach. Her name is Sparkles and she is a shiny person. She is deeply authentic and the work I’ve done with her up at this point has left me in a state of blissful neutrality. I think this is one of the most profound emotions I have ever experienced: feeling able to handle whatever presents itself next.

One of the crunchy things I would like to work on in writing is my relationship with privacy. A lot of readers who have been receiving this newsletter/blog for over a year are familiar with a lot of my idiosyncratic and neologic naming patterns. A lot of people who are on my weekly list or are my FB friend have possibly noticed that one can “follow” everything I post online and still not actually know what’s going on with me. I plan to critically examine this. I struggle to maintain relationships at a distance, I know people in places all of over the country and world.

I decided to explore some of those relationships here today, and to give a kind of “cast list” to a few people who are in my life right now. This is by no means complete or exhaustive. Just giving spatial relationships to some people I have written about in the past and might want to write about again.

The Big Scrapple (where I grew up)

Mum: The woman who gave birth to me and raised me. First language: French. Good at business and customer service and cooking. Likes to take care of me and Brother, but in our absence has adopted a cat named Muffin. He is a Siamese cat and he talks a lot. She knows me better than I know myself but sometimes it gets lost in translation when we try to communicate about it.

Bubba: She gets her real name here as she died in 2006. Bubba was my third parent growing up and lived with us for much of my childhood. She was Mum’s mom and they spoke French so I couldn’t understand when they were talking about grown up things. Her favorite word was “Merde!” I am truly her granddaughter.

GranolaMom: She was my mother when I ran away from home when I was 17. She and her husband let me live in their basement and deal with my shit as I needed to. We are still really close and talk on the phone when we remember to do so. She introduced me to and enabled my obsession with Margaret Atwood.

PappaHen: I fell in love with his youngest son when I was 16 (it wasn’t requited) but instead of telling me to calm down he kinda rolled with it and let me hang. PappaHen has always been there for me as I moved across country (several times) and has a place for me to stay when I visit. He is the only person in the world who I willingly will do a crossword puzzle with.

Migeulito: One of my best friends. Wears skirts sometimes and wants to be a nurse. We both love travel and we almost spontaneously went to Guadalajara last year, but didn’t. Good at perspective giving and hugs. Once he visited us in Key Route City and we wound up seeing Bike Porn. It was exactly as weird as it sounds and it was great.

Bashful Sexologist: We’ve known each other since before my brother was born (we were convinced he was actually a watermelon). I have always been envious of the depth her parents respect of body autonomy, their parenting style was so different from my own experience. She is currently getting the first of two masters degrees and plans to develop curricula and conversation around how to better teach sex-ed to students with disabilities. Rad.

Emerald City (I haven’t actually lived here, but I’ve visited a couple times.)

Good Panda: Sister by way of adoption. When we first met people kept mistaking us for twins so we just kinda rolled with it. She is super well versed in music and art, making us a complimentary pair. We share a borderline unhealthy obsession with the show Merlin because nothing is better for the soul than bad writing and sexy men and women completely destroying everything about the Arthurian myths. One time she mailed me blue gummy sharks (my favorite guilty pleasure to eat while doing laundry) and they got lost in the mail for 4 months. I still ate them. They were terrible.

Dr. Bow: A friend from TLoTH, Dr. Bow recently graduated with her PhD in near earth mageneto physics. I went out to the PhD defense and it was truly a unique experience. She has guest starred on this blog before and her blog focuses on how one may pivot out of research academia into the world of start-ups. Brilliant and compassionate, I also appreciate how we can allow each other space in our relationships to be strong leaders.

The Lab on The Hill, TLoTH (also known as the place my self-esteem went to die for a year)

Jr. Ranger: Was sort of my roommate for a bit. We have travelled together to National Parks and Monuments earning Junior Ranger badges together. However she is the Jr. Ranger because she is really good at the little packets and also really good at science in general. We’re both geo nerds. She gave a TEDx talk about puns and how scientists should take themselves less seriously. We get along very well and she reminds me that when I’m exhausted I can’t be a horrible person.

Raptor: German. Engineer. Likes Disney and honesty. Good people.

The Outdoorsy Sage: Peer aged mentor and friend. Taught me how to <ski> and her eyebrows are always on point. Really grateful I gained her perspective while I was at TLoTH because she loves the outdoors but doesn’t hold machismo in high regard so going doing outdoorsy things with her was never terrifying. She is originally from Oroenpaz City so we hung out last time she was in town. I missed the last train because we were in line for a cookie shaped like a dick, then we got drunk off of stolen champagne and I stayed the night. We also share an insatiable lust for dim sum.

Oroenpaz City (nearby)

Dr. Genderqueer: I met Dr. Genderqueer about three years ago yet they have been there for me in such a fierce way I feel like we’ve known each other forever. They have shown me how powerful being true to yourself every single day can look like. Additionally, they have an impressive network of impressive people who intimidate the fuck out of me whenever I meet someone new. They were the ones to introduce me to Sparkles! They live in a loft called the Ecstatic Attic and it makes me happy that I’m not the only one who names the places I live. Dr. Genderqueer is a hub and a lot of the people I know in Oroenpaz city are centered around them in some way.

Shul: Not exactly a person but my synagogue has its own personality and certainly a myriad of actual people it has brought to my life. There are folks like Saba (grandfather, adopted), my Fourth-Cousin-Twice-Removed and the Sniper Ballerina. Moreover there is a dedicated and tight nit community of queer Jews who come together to celebrate, mourn and just be. I have the honor of accepting a position on a committee with the Shul so I will hopefully have more of leadership role within this community.

Key Route City (Where I live now)

PartnerPenguin: My partner. Good people. Likes to travel and is ok with eating bread and cheese with only a spoon for a utensil. Listens to the same song on repeat and thinks Air is good driving music. Adventurous and curious and likes to take things apart. Exhibit A:

Knows me too well, keeps me in line and ponders the wonders of the universe and corporate America with me. We have been together for nearly 9 years and have lived in 3 cities together. We are family.

The Bears: MommaBear, DaddaBear and Little Bear. Introduced to us by a mutual friend about 5 years ago, right when PartnerPenguin and I desparately needed storage space during a move and they had a garage to offer. I became their nanny for 10ish months and the Little Bear calls us “Auntie” and PartnerPenguin “Uncle.” More specifically, Little Bear has made sure we know that we’re part of her “team,” as she calls her extended family. MommaBear is one of the wisest people I know and I admire how her wisdom drives her humor. She has taught me so much about how to frame situations in a way that is both accurate but assigns responsibility appropriately. It’s ok to mess up, but own it. DaddaBear is a fancy editor and I don’t have as close of a connection with him but he is supportive of PartnerPenguin and I when he can be.

The GrootGamemaster: Kind of like a real life Steven Universe, TGG is one of the most compassionate and empathetic men I have met. He is also one of the best hosts I have ever seen. He hosts a weekly game night and is the hub for a whole set of other friends. I learn a lot about catalyzing and situation reading from him. He's strong in the real way.

KT: We met on an airplane and have (mostly) maintained a true friendship. He is unusually good at communicating boundaries and expectations. Our friend groups recently converged and there was a fancy party that involved guests dressing in fancy gowns and literal tuxedoes. There were multiple cheeses on a cheese plate. I brought Oreos. It’s difficult to tell whether new(ish) crowds are being ironic when they say “fancy.” KT brews really really good beer so I had some of his porter and felt a lot less self-conscious. Being self-conscious all the time is exhausting. I’m grateful I don’t have to feel that way around my friends.

KinkyKabuki: Formerly SamG on my blog, KinkyKabuki finally left a toxic (to him) PhD program and is doing much better in his life. He is applying for community college professorships so hopefully he will soon be Professor KinkyKabuki! He and I have one of the most emotionally honest relationships I have ever had in my life. I am happy to have our mutually supportive relationship. Sometimes the people who you are closest with are a complete surprise to everyone involved. KinkyKabuki and I met on a couch on a balcony at a Math party and talked about dildoes. Pretty much sums up our current relationship too.

Thanks for joining me on this little expose. It’s made me feel a lot more solid on relationships. Still working out privacy feelings but I feel like this post helped.

Here is a cat being a cat.

Music today “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers

And “Taro” by Alt J

Also, I went through and compiled all of the music I have posted on this blog since 2015 so if you are interested in checking it out, it can be found here.

We are WE, we are US

Last we spoke it was just before everyone entered their annual tryptophan induced coma and things were dandy. Our Friendsgiving went absurdly well, thank you for asking. I shit you not the friend who hosted us literally said “Gosh darn it” on possibly more than one occasion. It was so wholesome. And then the Cards Against Humanity came out and re-confirmed that everyone is terrible and I cackled a lot. Also having a car makes traveling long distances a lot easier, who’da thunk.

Resolution(?) to illness

The one big issue to come out of an otherwise lovely day of gaiety was that I remained sick. I was beginning to have an awful hacking cough that knocked the wind out of me and I immediately thought it was definitely pneumonia. Fortunately I have levelheaded people in my life who remind me that I am not a medical professional and therefore should not diagnose myself. Also people who point out that one usually gets bronchitis before pneumonia and there are phases to these things.

Cool. So I went through the proper bureaucratic to get a doctor’s appointment for the Saturday after Thanksgiving and astonishingly I got in. Most of the time I change people’s names and give clever nicknames but I have to tell you about my nurse at Urgent Care. The name on her badge was “Nurselyn.” Her profession was nurse. I wasn’t actually sure that part was reality so I feel more comfortable sharing it with y’all.

After she checks my vitals (slightly above average pulse, everything else normal), she calls in the doctor. In walks Dr. TooAttractiveToExistinReality (Tater). I did a literal double take and immediately felt like the mum in Angus, Thongs and Full-FrontalSnogging (then gave myself a moment of pause and sadness that I was identifying with the mum instead of the main character). In this book series the mum routinely goes into the doctor, or convinces the daughter to go into the doctor because he is Dreamy. All of a sudden I could see her point.

Best of all, he concluded that it wasn’t pneumonia! And he did all of the proper doctor-y things that gave me the impression he was keenly excellent at his job. I have seen a lot of doctors in my tenure of being alive. They are not often keenly excellent at their jobs.

He concluded that it’s something called Reactive Airways Disease which is a fancy way to say “You never really grow out of childhood asthma, it just hits you with wonton cruelty at random points of your adult life.”

Dr. Tater escorted me towards the exit and gave me some papers to read up on the medication he was assigning me.  Then he proceeded to do something I have never seen a doctor do. He went over to Nurselyn and said “Hey, I see you’re really busy over here. Can I go grab your next patient and take their vitals so you have some time to catch up?” 0__o Dr. Tater, ftw.

So now I have fancy inhalers and I’m taking a bunch of otc medications so I can avoid further issues. I feel like a 80’s stereotype of a “nerd” kid. It feels weird but I can also breathe again so fuck the haters, I got my spirit back!

A Local Institution, Its Trials and Tribulations

There is a park down the street from our house in Key Route City that I love very dearly. It is the park I took the Little Bear to when I was her nanny. It is the park I walk through when I go to the grocery store. The recreational center was where I had my going-away party before I left for TLoTH (The Lab on The Hill, if you’re new to this blog). The same rec center is my polling place, with three precincts jammed inside and literally hundreds of people exercising their civic muscles.

On election day I gave out Free Hugs at the rec center. I stood next to the folks who work for the center selling buttons and coffee. It was very chill environment (with lots of hugs from voters who appreciated the support) and we all got to talking. The director of the rec center encouraged me to come to a planning meeting the next week because the park had some extra funds and they wanted community input on how to use them. Cool! Civic participation leads to more civic participation. So of course I suggested it to PartnerPenguin for our next Date Night.

We went to the planning meeting and it was…attended. There were 15 people, 5 of whom either worked for Key Route City or the park. The funds available for the park were designated for ADA accessibility but they were flexible so the floor was open. I should also mention that there is an old Victorian house on the lot. Let’s call it the Lichen House. It is really pretty but totally dilapidated and no one goes inside because the floors probably don’t support weight.

There is one guy in particular who is super-all-for getting the Lichen House repaired. He thinks that all funds should be diverted to fixing it so the City of Key Route can get revenue from the Lichen House as a venue. I chime in that one way of seeking additional funds would be that the city could ask a large new tech company, Potato Inc., moving into town to help out. (There is a complex relationship between what cities can ask of companies around making privately owned public spaces.)

Other suggestions included creating edible forestry/foliage and also putting in a giant sign with the time, date and temperature because a lot of people can’t find the park or know whether they’re in the park.

We left because the gym area was echo-y and there is only so much civic juiciness one can reasonably handle in an evening.

Cool cool. Fast-forward to Sunday. PartnerPenguin is browsing Twitter (as he does) and he comes across a post by the Mayor of Key Route City. The picture is of the rec center, in ashes! 0_____0 We are so numb to helicopters lately that we hadn’t noticed there was a two alarm fire going on 5 blocks from our house. 60-70% of the rec center is gone, but the Lichen House was saved.

PartnerPenguin and I immediately decide which Scooby Doo characters we are (I’m Velma because she’s the sexy smart one and he’s a mash of Scooby and Shaggy) and we get to work. We very vaguely, and without any actual intent of legitimately accusing, decided it was the angry man who wanted to divert all funds to the Lichen House. Definitely arson. Not the very realistic possibility that the electrical wiring was 70 years old and in dire need of replacement.

Tune in next week to see how the crime unfolds…

Lunch is a Vague Time Frame

I’d like to round out today by telling you about the excellent lunch company I had today. While a lot of my friends say they would travel from the ends of the Earth to see me, few actually have.

Today, a friend visited me from Chile. Yeah. The country not the pepper. And he was only in town for a total of three days. Friend. Win. Of. The. Century.

I’m going to call this friend The AndeanLawyer and his wife BilingualMomma. These were some of our first friends we made when we moved into the area. At the time their eldest son was 10 months old and they worked some kind of magic so that we never heard him fuss or cry. Like, I’m sure it had to have happened. But we almost never heard it. ¡Los vecinos fantasticos en todo del mundo!

The Andean Lawyer and I dined in the cafeteria we both used to take our lunch in while we were students (he was getting his JD while I got my BA). It was oddly nostalgic, but also really nice to see the folks I used to see every day and greet them fondly.

We talked about my mother and her new kitty roommate Muffin, and my brother who is now living in The Great North. We talked about his kids going to bilingual school and how important that will  an asset for them. We talked about PartnerPenguin’s work and how he and I have been discovering some of the challenges and benefits to my being an ENJF and him being an INTP and how that works in “off” time. We touched a little about how frustrating it can be to have culture shock when you’re back in a place you once considered home.

We talked a lot about the political climate and actions of democracy that America has been up to lately. He asked me how The Clown was elected. I told him what I suspected but honestly that I just don’t totally know. I told him how I waver between being scared and being ready for action. I would like to be able to do more, but I don’t quite know how. He didn’t have any good answers there.

I introduce him to a term I have invented and I definitely think everyone should use.

Agreeument (əgree-you-ment) 1) A conversation where all parties emphatically agree with each other in a manner that, to a casual observer, seems like an argument. 2) Reinstatement of the original point with additional observational evidence from all parties involved. 3) A circle jerk.

One of the things I miss from the city I grew up in (The Big Scrapple) was the ease with which I could find a person with a different worldview than my own. The way I was taught to interact with people who have different opinions to yours is that you listen to them. They listen to you. You do not speak for the purpose of convincing the other side to agree with you. You speak so that your position is fully understood and that further disagreements may be made with informed positions. You agree to disagree if you come to a point of impasse. But importantly, you can discover A LOT MORE nuanced points of view than if you never listen to an oppositionary opinion.

As a takeaway from this very serious conversation, The Andean Lawyer reminded me of something very important. When you have important and intimate relationships in your life, hold on to them. “We are WE,” he said. “ We are US.” Don’t let go of the important people in your life because of challenging situations or difficult times. The folks who matter, they matter. And that’s what’s important.

Music

Today I’d like to close out with Gaelynn Lea’s “Someday We’ll Linger In the Sun”. I loved her Tiny Desk Concert so I started following her on social media. This past week she posted about something really cool called Bedstock which is an entire music festival where artists record music in their homes for kids (and adults) who aren’t able to leave their beds.

Gratitude-Tastes Like Health

Content warning: Recent events involving hate speech

Thanks giving

I am feeling very conflicted by thanksgiving this year. As I've discussed before, I feel like holidays centered around forgetting/rearranging the truth of what Europeans have done to American Indigenous people are awkward at best. The American continent was won, in part, by genocide and brute force against the Native peoples of this land. This is a constant, recurring battle and it continues at the Standing Rock encampment today. For my part, I have made a modest donation to Standing Rock.

PartnerPenguin brought to my attention a science fiction retelling of Thanksgiving that I really like. Hope you do too.

Conversely, I also am in love with the idea of setting aside a day to be grateful. I have a personal (albeit lazy at times) practice of writing out three things I am grateful for each day. For my birthday this year, I asked everyone who posted on my Facebook timeline to tell me one thing they were grateful for in the past year. Really amazing things have happened in my friends lives, from just being in a better place than where they were before to having babies and excelling in their careers. I think setting aside a day for people to come together for the express purpose of sharing what they are grateful and thankful for is an amazing practice. If you're comfortable, I would love to hear one thing you're grateful for this year.


I just wish it wasn't so interwoven into the death and sorrows of other humans.

Empathy Experiments

Perhaps to no one's surprise giving out free hugs landed me with a free illness. w00t. It is this weird chest-cold thing unlike any I've had in the past. So far I've been mildly out-of-it sick for 8 days. I think I'm finally on the mend today, but if it gets worse again I'll go to Urgent Care this weekend.

Due to this illness I have limited my interactions with folks, particularly at my synagogue because there are people in that group who have compromised immune systems. It is really really challenging to not be able to receive hugs when I really really want hugs.

It seems every week since the election has brought some fresh trauma. This week's been no exception with CNN's headline fuckup. That clip really rattled me. It rattled me, in part because I spent much of the day looking at news websites; trying to compare and contrast their content. Turns out, it doesn't matter how you slant it, traumatizing words are still traumatizing.

With Facebook's recent words on fake news, and their emotional manipulation experiment, I've been far more critical about my news consumption. I find NPR to have good coverage, and to be pretty reasonable on their reporting. Recently I've been exploring CBS and ABC. What is your approach?

I feel that part of the problem is the normalization of hate-speech in mainstream media. I feel like I vaguely knew that people hate Jews but I have been shielded, very intentionally, my whole life from such people. I really need to credit both my parents for that. I have been a lot more aware of hate speech and actions against LGBTQ+ folks. Yet until this week it has not been personal. I am a straight passing bisexual Jewish woman who does not come across as anything but generic white woman. I am intentional about not affiliating myself to the wide world as being Jewish or queer. But all of a sudden, I feel so exposed. So vulnerable. And so scared.

As a form of protest that I feel comfortable with, I have been preparing my house to be a respite for my marginalized friends. I have gotten rid of tons of clutter, that made my home feel more full than necessary, and made me feel like my house was 'unpresentable', a feeling I've struggled with since childhood. Cleaning, especially cleaning areas that have not seen the light of day in some time, feels very productive.

I am grateful to myself for expending my energy in this manner as we have already hosted the first friend in need. Several of my friends are beginning to experience attacks against them for being their true, authentic selves. I hope that my house can continue to be a haven for them, even if it just a place to read quietly. Maybe this is not as grandiose a gesture as going around giving out free hugs, but for right now it's what I can manage while sick.

Recipe: Soup That Tastes Like Health

As part of my healing process, PartnerPenguin and I invented a new kind of soup. Here is one VERY me recipe so maybe you can make it for yourself or your loved ones when they get sick. A helpful note is that we get produce that is often irregularly shaped so I will give size measurements based on my hands. I have small hands.

Ingredients: 
1 large onion (fills both my hands when held), diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 small or 1 large carrot, diced
3 branches of celery, diced
Olive Oil to cover the bottom of a pan (2-3 Tbsp)
Pinch salt
Fresh ginger root, 2 knuckles in length
4 cups broth (we use 1 Tbsp Better Than Bullion Chicken with 4 c. boiling water)
5-6 pestels of saffron (don't ask, we just had it lying around)
pinch of coriander
1 sweet potato, two fists wide, 1/2-1 in pcs
1/2 a handful of fresh parsley, chopped
1 yellow zucchini, whatever shape/size you want
1 green zucchini, same
1 freakishly large radish (fist size) or small batch of normal sized radishes
Green onion stalks, cut up for garnish

Preparation:

Add oil to the pan and warm so water dances when shpritzed. Add onion, garlic, carrot and celery. (We were experimenting with how lazy we could be and still have a good product.) Add pinch salt and turn over constantly, sweating the onions. Add pinch coriander and the saffron. Continue turning over ingredients regularly. Should develop a nice golden hue.

With the ginger: peel as best you can and cut in half. Cut into the pieces without breaking them apart so there is lots of surface area but only 2 pieces to fish out. You will thank me for this. Any other way of putting ginger in soup and you wind up with a mouthful of ginger.

Add the ginger to the pot.
Add the broth/bullion.
Add the sweet potato. Probably add some more water because 4 cups isn't enough to cover the whole thing.

Add the zucs, parsley and radishes. Make sure most of the ingredients are covered with water.
Bring to a boil, then lower to simmer.

Simmer for about 2 episodes of Steven Universe (25 minutes).

Soup is done when sweet potato is soft. Garnish with green onions and a pinch of salt if you prefer. Tastes like health!!

Music

And to close out, here is a performance that always makes me smile. Watch some, watch all, and dance. ^___^ Plus, everything is better with a glockenspiel!!

Free Hugs

::hugs::

::deep breath::

I am going to start this blog again. I have been in hiding for some time, trying to heal and trying to figure myself out. But I feel like things have gotten to a point where I need to be seen again, heard again and connected again.

My struggle over the past 9 months of unemployment has been one of identity and self discovery. Coming away from TLoTH, I felt like I didn't belong. To be honest, I'm still don’t understand where I can find work that treats me with assumed competence, respect as an equal and where I know they will acknowledge my contributions.

Since the election I have gone back to doing something I haven’t done in a very long time: holding a sign that says “Free Hugs” and giving people hugs. It started on election day and since then I’ve been mostly standing in front of the City Hall of Key Route City. This act of resistance and protest contrasts many other folks very legitimate decision to march en mass. Don’t get me wrong, I am angry. I am hurt. I am afraid. But I also know that I have the capacity for empathy and compassion.

Part of what inspired me to write today was a conversation I had last night with some friends. We touched on the idea that certain sections of liberals are having difficulty communicating with people in opposition to themselves.

This is a similar issue I have noticed with academic scientists. There is a distance from beginner’s mind, a distance from legitimizing the other people’s perspective that exists among many scientists. In science, there are hierarchies of who is entitled to an opinion. A professor or a senior scientist has more publications on a topic and therefore their opinion on the subject matters more than a novice. This creates a community where individuals are inherently unequal and to become “equal” one must sacrifice their life for a few years to obtain a PhD to hold a legitimate opinion. There is also a competitiveness built into the nature of (limited) scientific funding where there are “winners” and people with “better” ideas.

Scientific knowledge, and subsequently expertise (as the knowledge required to gain expertise is limitedly distributed) are quantifiable, known entities. Everything is count-able. As Brene Brown refers to in her Huston TEDx talk, “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.”

And I use Dr. Brown specifically because what I have been thinking and acting and talking about the most recently has been empathy. (She has a great video differentiating between sympathy and empathy.) Empathy is less quantifiable than what people studying hard science tend to be willing to accept. It is not quantifiable, so therefore much of the scientific community pretends it doesn’t exist.

The big sticking point is that there are no "winners" or "better" with empathy or compassion. People outside the scientific community hold opinions and do not understand/get upset when they are dismissed by academics. People within the scientific community tend to just assume ignorance and discount what those outside academia say. It is fine to discredit an idea on the basis of merit within academia, because everyone in the community agrees upon what "merit" means and agrees that certain proof is required for an idea to hold merit. Outside of this community, however, many others feel like their opinions are equally valid and just dismissed by the elite because they're haughty and full of themselves.

In my view, empathy is the only way. Compassion for people who are scared for their lives, for the lives of their families, for the future of their children is what is currently needed. There is also compassion needed for those celebrating. The people who wholeheartedly supported the President-Elect into office need to be embraced as well. Reminding everyone that those around them are human is important. When we all know those around us are human, we will be better equipped to stand up if/when violence or hate-actions occur.

In order to hold this view, I have need to acknowledge my own privilege. PartnerPenguin has a job that ensures we stay afloat. My basic needs are met every day. I am working solidly at the third rung in Maslow’s triangle. I feel shame in my comfort but also power in being able to give out hugs on a regular basis. (Also to note: I am kind but not stupid. I have steel toed boots when I go out in case anything goes awry.) My decision to act non-violently and in my own time is somewhat part of my upbringing and somewhat due to my current position of privilege.

So that’s how I’ve been this past week. What have you been up to?

And, as usual, a song. Today it’s Of Montreal’s “It’s Different for Girls”