round-up: 12/16
reading recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading and watching
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Some things for you:
Housekeeping:
If you still need to do some last-minute holiday shopping, I made a tiny gift list:
What I’m reading:
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib1
15 U.S. Cities and Towns That Look Like They Could Belong in Europe
The block button is the ultimate source of dopamine. Use it.2
A 'renaissance of gay literature' marks a turning point for publishing
Photos of Everyday Activities Reveal the Humor of Perspective and Serendipitous Alignments
What I’m watching:
Shock Treatment3
Quotations:
So often in these older man/younger woman relationships, the older man leverages the younger woman’s naïveté to make her feel like she alone is special, like she alone “gets him,” when in reality he can’t relate to women his age because there’s something wrong with him.
When my hair was first fully grey, it was also the peak of my youth, actually. I would spend hours with friends doing our makeup before drag shows and hormone parties (first shots of estrogen should be treated like birthday parties) and tattoos in our living rooms and roof top blow-up pool parties. We didn’t have very much materially, we were living 4-8 people in labyrinthian apartments in Bushwick and Ridgewood, but we were beautiful and made beauty into an adventure. Most queer people, we knew, and especially trans folks (most of my community), were never going to make it to old age. It felt appropriate to be grey when mortality was so close to the skin that it was in the air we breathed. We never walked alone back home, even if the parties were only a few blocks away. Queer love is walking each other home, or at the very least texting when you get there. We keep each other safe, we are each other’s family.
I remember seeing bottles of henna dye in the bathroom cupboard at home as a child and my mother mysteriously appearing with ink black hair occasionally, even as her age spots slowly stretched bigger over time, freckles to dime sized spots to the width of a thumbprint (I measured, in her sleep). She always treats age like a secret war that we’re losing - I think it’s a generational thing. I get it, even if I’m not on the same page.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Big picture: most writers spend years—years—toiling at 4am or 12pm in feral states on material that very well might never see the light of day. We don’t necessarily know how to talk to other people about what we are working on, the work isn’t earning us money—it’s like a mental illness, creative writing, sapping our sanity and time. And then, overnight, we’re supposed to be ready to speak on podcasts and the radio and navigate weird interviews and shrug off hurtful comments about our work and publish like an industry veteran? How? How? Who is teaching writers that?
I saw gender in terms of, first off, the binary. Man and woman. Two-dimensional thinking. And in order to say, "I'm neither," I had to get into a third dimension because that said there was something else that wasn't represented by a binary.
So, OK, there are three dimensions and that meant there was a limitless number of identities. Saying nonbinary and watching so many people say they're nonbinary has helped me get into a fourth dimension of looking at gender, if you will, and that's adding the dimension of time.
It's the idea that — you know it, I know it, we all know it, but hate to admit it — gender is continually changing. We are changing our notion of gender. What we depend on to define ourselves as a gender continually changes, moment by moment. So now, rather than saying just "not man, not woman", I'm saying that my gender is a continuum. And currently, a continuum of 73 years.
The sneaky thing about the word nonbinary is it doesn't say what you are, it says what you're not. And that's what I was saying. "Not man, not woman" because I had no idea what I was. Some people seem to think that nonbinary is an "is" and it isn't. It's a "not is."
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.
-Lorraine Hansberry
A blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I, like so many of you, spent 2016 trying to hold on to what joy I could. I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one. And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I don’t fear what the future holds as much as I fear not being alive long enough to see it.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive. It is something you experience, and if you’re lucky enough, time slows down.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
There are times when the night pushes against the clock and time slows down: when you lock eyes across the room with someone who you think you could love.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
And, look, I am saying that I have wanted to forget the day and run into whatever allowed me to do so at night. I’m saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I lock eyes with someone for what was mere seconds but feels like an entire small lifetime, and I wonder what it must be like to trust a stranger with your undoing […]. What it must be like to feel briefly full without considering if any emptiness might follow.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
I think about how much of myself I’ve left behind for people to gradually find, heartbroken.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
How can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
It does no good to point at a neighborhood of burning houses while also standing in a house on fire.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
There is something powerful in someone who looks like you actually seeing you.
-Hanif Abdurraqib
She just fit me. She fit right into my arms and right into my heart. She made me feel calm in a way I'd never experienced. Safe in a way I'd never known. Secure and powerful and wholly adored. I was watching her get ready for bed recently and she quirked her eyebrow and asked what she'd done because I was making my "mush-face" at her, soft smile and a universe of starry devotion in my eyeballs. But she knows and I know I've been doing mush-face in her direction, non-stop, since practically the day we met. I wanted to combine our books because I wanted to combine our worlds. I wanted to build a life with her. A whole life.
I go in. I say, You are the worst thing I know I can’t breathe around you the world is more than this I am more than you put on your black coat we’re going out.
We ride and yell and ride and yell and that’s the best of us anymore, that’s all we can get to anymore.
Tweets:
Here is a very long list of good tweets from this year.
The Memes That Carried Us Through 2023
Well.
Mood.
Yeah.
Welp.
Me.
That’s all I have for you today—
-Despy Boutris
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This has been on my list for years! Glad to finally be reading it.
I block people for everything. Mindly annoying? Bad take? Anything, really. We’re not politicians and don’t have obligations to be accessible to constituents. I love cutting off people’s access to me without a second thought.
Free on YouTube; an absolute fever dream.