Binder clips for America
Your February roundup
Hi friends,
I’m in North Carolina at the moment, visiting my mom who, unfortunately, broke her foot a few days before I arrived. I spent all day yesterday cooking for her and helping my stepfather transfer her from a hydraulic recliner to a wheelchair to take her to the bathroom and back.
This lifting and reaching define my days.
In the bathroom, an old, sea-green towel is tacked over the window because my mom thinks people are watching her while she pees. I hung the towel up for her last time I was here with two binder clips.
It’s hard for me to think when so much is wrong—and this feels true of America, too. I can only solve tiny problems for my mother, who is very unwell and who lives far away from me most of the time. I can’t fix her diabetes or her dementia or the broken bones in her foot or the paranoia that eats at her.
But I can help lift her up—physically and emotionally—and I can make her tamales and I can hold her hand in the car while we go to medical appointments. She presses my hand against her cheek like a seed is pressed into the earth and my heart lifts on that current of love.
There’s so much grief and chaos lately I can barely keep up. It’s pinching my bones, this slow-motion car wreck that presses tighter and tighter against our fragile, breakable bodies and we’re searching for a way out, to not be crushed by overwhelm and anxiety. We’re trying to figure out how to make an omelet while the house is on fire and I guess I wish I could binder-clip a towel over the country’s window to keep the fear out.
But last weekend we went to a Two-Spirit powwow and it was so nice to see all the queer, trans, Native people and allies out in the dreary winter rain in their regalia, the bright colors an open defiance against the gloom, against the hatred and vitriol that seeks to deny their existence, to erase them.
The insistence. The joy. The drums pulsing like a second, external, collective heart, repeating again and again a hope that must be ours.
We waited almost two hours for frybread and it was worth it. We clapped and nodded to the music and watched the fancydancers fly without wings and it wasn’t an antidote to anything but I held that feeling against my cheek as if it was my mother’s hand.
Like I try to hold the untold kindnesses of the people working to make the world less ugly—which is most of us. Like the Yaqui elder who told my not-tribally-enrolled mother, “I recognize you. If anyone asks, tell them you’re my daughter.”
I’m saying it’s nice to hold onto such things. I’m saying grief and joy are cousins, like despair and awe, wonder and terror. Lean into grief and you might rub up against the absurd, which might, in turn, make you laugh. No feeling is absolute.
I’m saying keep lifting, I guess. Keep reaching.
Advice
Ask Anna: Dating in a world of bad news: How to manage media overload
Ask Anna: Creative ways to celebrate love when you can’t do Valentine’s Day
Ask Anna: Balancing casual sex and emotional needs: Tips for dating after your first love
Ask Anna: Valentine’s Day compromise – Making it work when one partner hates the holiday
Freebies
Have a very sapphic Valentines
Linkspiration
A formerly homeless NY man and author is trying to raise money to not lose his housing. Buy a book or a hat from him.
Rebecca Solnit—my perennial arbiter of hope—now has a newsletter. Hurrah.
This quote by her, too: “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
has a Kickstarter teaching authors how to write page-turner pacing.Goodgoodgood is a newsletter filled with uplifting stories, like prisons getting turned into shelter for the unhoused, and elementary-school kids inventing wearables for neurodivergent folks, and butterflies coming back from extinction. It helps.
Libraries make everything better: And the research proves it.
A YouTube lecture to help you master travel photography with just an iPhone
37 ways to intentionally celebrate Black history month
The “Uncensored Library” is a large Minecraft map that allows people to access censored news from countries with restricted press freedom
This site analyzes your personality based on your Reddit history
If you’re tempted to fix yourself, fix three broken things instead. (I tried it and did three small things around the house I’d been meaning to do forever, and it did help lift my mood.)
Hot box
Yours,
Anna
P.S. It’s Mew Thong February—thus named when my phone autocorrected New Thing and I liked it better—and Vika and I are learning one new thing a day this month. I asked AI to help and the robots generated a random list of things to learn about:
A bizarre historical event
A word from a language you don’t speak
A new tarot card meaning
A weird animal fact
A famous unsolved mystery
A random philosophy concept
A mythological creature you’ve never heard of
A strange law that still exists somewhere in the world
A deadly poison and how it works
A ghost story from a country you don’t know much about
A literary hoax that fooled people
An ancient curse and its supposed effects
A weird dream interpretation theory
An obscure conspiracy theory
A lost civilization that was rediscovered
A rare psychological phenomenon
A word that doesn’t exist in English but should
An unusual death from history
A real-life pirate who did something unexpected
A banned book and why it was controversial
A folklore tradition that’s still practiced today
A mysterious artifact no one can fully explain
A bizarre medieval medical treatment
A famous escape or prison break
An unsolved cryptid sighting
A strange or forgotten holiday from somewhere in the world
A historical figure with a secret double life
An ancient text or manuscript that still baffles scholars
I have since learned about a war that Australia lost to emus, that tartle is a Scottish Gaelic word for when you forget someone’s name, that octopuses can edit their RNA, and about Nietzsche’s eternal return, which is a thought experiment that asks: If you had to relive your exact life forever, would you embrace it or despair?
It’s a challenge to live with purpose and authenticity, making choices you'd be willing to repeat for eternity.
So, if your life were on an endless loop, would you change anything?
P.P.S. From “Reasons to Live” by Ruth Awad
“…one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,
but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies
in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers
will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only
you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.”
P.P.P.S: If you missed this:
That is a very beautiful, very moving piece. Thank you.