Spring is here / the lilacs bloomed and died already

I recently had a fun yogurt breakthrough that I’m excited about. I have been making all our yogurt for a year now, and it’s easy and fine. As with all such projects, you know, there is a lot of googling and YouTubing for things like “yogurt runny why” and “how long can I culture yogurt” and “my yogurt smells weird” and such. And over time I cobbled together a method and it’s all great. But then somehow the other day I was googling more because I had a batch turn out really yeasty, and I fell through a hidden pocket of knowledge into a whole other realm of Yogurt Internet I had never known about before: not Mediterranean yogurt internet but INDIAN yogurt internet. It’s a slightly different method, with different accessories! And I had never known about it before because when Indians talk about yogurt in English they don’t call it “yogurt” they call it “curd.” KEYWORD REVELATIONS. So in conclusion I bought a handsome terra cotta curd pot that supposedly will make my yogurt less runny (because of porous terra cotta/evaporation during culturing). I find this very fun. The other yogurt revelation I had is that when people say you can put your yogurt (or your bread dough) in the oven with the light on to keep it warm, I always thought that meant PILOT light, and since I don’t have a gas stove I’ve been culturing my yogurt in a cooler filled with jars of boiling water, which is unwieldy and mildly annoying. Finally realized it literally does mean “oven light,” as in the light bulb that’s in there. I cultured my last batch in there with the light on and was astonished by how warm it stayed in there. You just have to put a post-it on the oven that says DO NOT OPEN OR USE OVEN OR TURN OFF LIGHT.

The first revelation was born of cultural difference, the second of me being stupid! Both are great.

I finished Capital vol. 1 some time ago. It was such a wonderful journey. I feel very very satisfied by the experience. My brain changed a lot and I learned so much. I took 110 pages of notes, which sounds like a lot until you remember the book itself is 940 pages long plus I simultaneously read David Harvey’s companion book, which is like 300 pages I think. I’m sure I have gone on and on before in here about how much I love my notebooks and my note-taking method, but it really came to the fore for me during this process. I felt this was really more of a spiritual journey, like a monk rewriting the Bible 100 times or something (to sell to a King for gold lol).

Capital is just a great book. After the first three chapters it just gets so good. The end is really rip-roaring, he gets into colonialism in America and it’s just devastating. He’s so angry through the whole book and yet is being so incredibly precise and writing with such intense clarity. There’s a joke on Twitter about how Marx considered everything, because it’s basically true and there’s something so funny about that. Like I saw a joke where someone said “Marx failed to consider a giant boat blocking the Suez Canal” and then someone else came along and found some weird passage where indeed Marx is like “let’s say a giant boat blocks the Suez Canal, what would happen then” and then accurately explains indeed what did happen. What a brain! Scribbling away in his horrid London grotto with his little English son calling him “Charley.”

All this being said, I also can’t imagine someone reading Capital without having read like 500 other books across ten years first. When people say Capital radicalized them I just either don’t believe them or else I’m incredibly chagrined by how dumb I am. I just can’t imagine this being your first intro to a critique of capitalism. How could you possibly make sense of it?? If I had read it ten years ago before having read all this other crazy shit I’ve read by now, it would have been like trying to read an Algebra textbook upside-down. I guess we all are truly so different in God’s benevolent gaze. Also I do think my brain is slower than a lot of other people’s, it takes me a long time to really learn stuff. I’m also forgetting stuff at a faster rate than before, which sucks.

Yesterday was my final TGIF of the semester. What an absurd semester! Teaching online–something I imagine Marx genuinely did fail to consider, although I am open to being corrected on this point–is extremely not fun. The experience of sitting here at my desk for four months straight is totally bizarre. I mean my lifestyle is always very desk-oriented, but at least during normal times I get up and drive to work and walk around campus and stuff. Instead now I’m just….here. Every moment of every day. Sometimes I’m here in my house when I’m sitting here; other times I’m in a classroom when I’m sitting here; other times I’m in an organizing meeting or a mutual aid meeting when I’m sitting here; sometimes I’m talking to a crying grad student in New Hampshire when I’m sitting here. Yesterday I was scrolling through Twitter in the 10 minutes before I had to teach, which is my way of managing last-minute teaching anxiety, and Gary came in and did the passive aggressive thing we do to each other when one of us is annoyed the other one is on their phone (asking “what’s on your phone?” in a bright, interested voice that is just dripping with scorn) and I yelled FUCK OFF, I AM AT WORK, HOW DARE YOU. He said he forgot I had to teach. Which is fair, as I’m just puttering around in my office at home! Sometimes I vacuum or something in between classes. It’s so weird. Also bizarre is the experience of teaching my big nighttime class, because during it I am also hearing the banging of pots and pans that signifies Gary in the kitchen making lasagna. Simultaneous spaces and temporalities! Teaching some crazy lecture about propaganda to 80 students and then just closing the laptop and instantly you are home and dinner is on the table. No thank you. Never thought I would miss a commute but I do; I miss the decompression time, the farm fields rolling by in the gloaming, the moving from here to there.

A few weeks ago I was teaching a seminar about music during the Third Reich, when a gigantic hawk SLAMMED against my office window right in front of my face, feathers flying as it speared a mourning dove in its talons. It flew away low over the yard, carrying the dove. I screamed and ran off camera and watched it fly up onto a tree branch and start tearing into the other bird.

Another time a thunderstorm rolled in while I was teaching, so while I was maintaining normal composure talking about some boring-ass shit and gesturing with one hand, with the other hand I was trying to comfort my gently sobbing dog who was pressed trembling against my legs.

Another time a grad student was attending class while driving and had to screech to the side of the road because he wanted to make a point about Nietzsche.

Anyway it’s over and now we wait to see what the Fall will hold. What fresh horrors await? Like most of us, I assume, I no longer really speculate about the future. One day at a time, baby

I am getting a haircut on Friday. It is my first haircut in FIFTEEN MONTHS. I might get bangs. I am also getting a tattoo. The really cool 21 year old anarchist I co-coordinate a food distro team with does super avant-garde freehand tattoos for a living and I feel like there will never be a better time, reason, or situation than this, for me. They recently asked me how long Gary and I have been together and when I said “eighteen years” they just stared at me wordlessly, so to fill the space I said “we met on the K Records message board” and THEY KNEW WHAT THAT WAS. Cross-generational, cross-country connections, thanks to punk culture. Surreal to picture the fact that when Gary and I were falling in love on the K Board via weird long jokes about our shared orthodontia history, this person was three years old. Alas! “Every old man dies a foreigner in his own land”–Chateaubriand

We are starting to move into public outreach phase of our budget project. It’s exciting and unnerving. One of us received an anonymous letter in the mail the other day detailing all this corruption in our local government. It’s all incredibly small potatoes stuff but still. Deep Throat!

Gary’s anti-profit bookstore is going really well. He’s now hosting the wishlist for Noname’s book club! Selling the books at cost, zero mark-up. “It’s literally so stupid” he said happily. Making zero income and spending 40 hours a week in the basement with 800 browser tabs open is honestly the happiest I have ever seen him. All he does is make spreadsheets, research shipping costs, have long phone conversations with local weirdos he’s doing various projects with, and then on Tuesdays he drives around delivering books for free to locals. This has been such a cool and fun aspect of our network-building this year. If you want a cheap-ass book without using Amazon, check it out! We make no money off this (all profits are rigorously dispersed elsewhere, primarily to mutual aid projects in our area, and always will be) so I don’t feel weird about promoting it. It’s Gary’s contribution to the struggle. He will eventually have to get a job but I think it’ll be okay. I have given him one haircut over the past year and he looks like a beast. He is currently using our food dehydrator to dry a bunch of stinging nettles he made me get from the farm co-op.

We are nearing the end of our biggest movie project yet. Over the past year we have undertaken lots of projects where we, like, watch all of Ruben Östlund’s movies in chronological order; watch both versions of Brewster’s Millions and discuss how they reflect changing historical circumstances; watch all of Miami Vice (we made it through I think 4 episodes and couldn’t deal although we did paint our bathroom Miami Vice colors if you’ll remember); we went through a long period where we picked our nightly movie based on a weird “game” where I would describe a vibe and Gary would research and find movies that fit that vibe. Like “British thriller from the 70s” or “period drama but NOT Jane Austen” or “courtroom drama” or “non-American rom-com.” He finds such good movies! We went through a period of re-watching movies that made huge impressions on us as kids (Hot Shots Part Deux; Double Jeopardy; the Brady Bunch movie; Gremlins (“Billy from Gremlins is the worst character in the history of Western fiction”)).

ANYWAY our biggest project yet: watching all of Star Trek: the Next Generation, from the beginning. 7 seasons of like 20 episodes each; remember what TV used to be like?? It was really soothing at first to get back into that older paradigm of episodic television. Like one episode is just the most devastating meditation on humanity and you are weeping; the next episode is Deanna Troi’s mom is too horny and it’s “hilarious!” People are constantly adopting children and swearing never to leave them, or falling in love, but then you never see the children or the love interest ever again. Worf has at least two kids at this point. A character will have the most shattering experience you could possibly imagine and then at the end of the episode it’s like “Well number one I’m certainly glad everything is back to normal” and you never hear mention of the shattering experience again. It’s also so interesting to watch this exploration of the liberal mentality. It’s the perfect liberal utopia, in all its legitimate joys and wretched sorrows. The unexamined centering of certain values and perspectives as universal; the 90s style multiculturalism where all types of aliens are welcome to participate in the Enterprise so long as they give up all but the most superficial markers of their own cultures in order to be appropriately productive as a member of the crew; the show even explores how wrenching this is, i.e. when Worf is screaming about how he had to give up sex in order to be a Federation officer. The insistence that human society has moved past war and yet Starfleet is clearly a military and they are constantly blowing shit up. The insistence that society is egalitarian and yet somehow they are also rigorously hierarchical. The absolute acceptance of meritocratic top-down hierarchy, but it’s okay because the boss is the best person who has ever lived, so you are in good safe hands, you don’t have to worry about anything. As Claire put it: “the central thesis of TNG is: ‘what if daddy was good?'” It’s such a window into how a certain type of bourgeois liberal humanist sees themselves. Caring deeply about equality–the way they instantly free those giant jellyfish in season 1 even though they know it will cause a diplomatic incident, simply because Troi is like “THEY ARE SUFFERING IN BONDAGE.” How devastated they are when they accidentally commit genocide because they didn’t know the sand on that mining colony was sentient or whatever. “WE ARE SORRY. WE DID NOT UNDERSTAND.” The one where they encounter a totally unknown life form swimming through space and they are all just astounded by the joy and beauty of that encounter but then accidentally immediately kill it!!! And are so ashamed. The weird displacement of self-loathing onto the Ferrengi, who represent the dark side of the bourgeois ethos, and thus are viscerally loathed by every single other species in the universe to a degree that is just straight-up rude and racist. Methinks the Federation doth protest too much! Also, of course, Data, the greatest character in Western fiction. Is he a person or not?????????? They are constantly worrying over this point, even though he is clearly a person. It’s Frankenstein, but again, it’s Frankenstein if Daddy was good instead of a piece of shit like Victor was. How I wish there were a scene in Frankenstein where the Creature tries to learn how to small-talk by observing a boor at a cocktail party. Or where he learns to tap dance! OMG the Creature does tap dance, in “Young Frankenstein!” Whoa

And it’s also just a very fun and silly show with a lot of truly weird moments. So many parts have made us laugh for days. “MY NAME IS, BLEEP BLOP!!!!” “You’ll always be Jean-Luc to me”

I genuinely think Brent Spiner is the greatest actor of our lifetime

But anyway my point is that we are almost done with season 6 and we are getting tired of it. We watch two episodes every night no matter what, and I always fall asleep during the second one and Gary has to recap it to me in bed and it’s confusing. They are all blurring together in a really psychedelic way. I’m tired of the opening credits, which we DO NOT skip. We are also getting so overwhelmed by the repetitive plot paradigm that it’s like we stop paying attention to plot and get really fixated on details, like a really weird piece of blocking where Picard gets up and walks thoughtfully across behind someone to the wall and back, and if you actually think about it it would be the most psychotically weird thing for someone to actually do during a conversation. Or like there’s one moment we saw recently where Geordi is walking toward the camera just PAWING at his little iPad thingy, like the most half-assed fuck-you fake computer acting you could imagine, and we were dying, we were imagining it was like take number 20 and LeVar Burton has HAD IT. Or there’ll always be a scene where somebody is talking intensely in close-up and then behind them is a totally random extra in the most outrageous face prosthetic imaginable, playing some fuckin’ alien, and after awhile it becomes really surreal and hilarious.

It will be so weird to finally finish and then go back to watching movies. It will feel like shooting into the future! Although, the first movie I want to watch after this is “Speed,” so who knows.

Today is the first day of vacation (not counting grading) and I tried to read a book about history but couldn’t concentrate because I kept thinking about all the other books I want to read this summer:
– Robinson, Black Marxism
– Jackson, Blood in my Eye
– Brown/Gordon/Pensky, Authoritarianism
– Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism
– Robinson, Hungry Listening
– couple books about time
– finish this book about primitive accumulation and Renaissance pedagogy I started 2 years ago
– political theory book I can’t remember title of
– Lewis, a Power Stronger than Itself
– Rosa Luxemburg
– Kropotkin, mutual aid and conquest of bread
– Dialectic of Enlightenment! I’M GOING THERE
– want to finish the Marx bio I started last year, it’s really good
– Nietzsche, not sure what. What should I read? Zarathustra?
– other things I think I am forgetting
– It is also time to re-read Infinite Jest again, I do so every few years
– I also am going to re-read Lonesome Dove in honor of my childhood and Larry McMurtry’s passing

Will I read them all, in truth? I have no idea.

I fell out of fiction reading over the past year somehow. During all the times I’d normally read fiction I instead played video games. I did read all the LeGuin short stories collected in that cool box set.

I have a videogame group chat where we discuss the games we are playing; we like to find out about a new game then all start it at the same time and talk about it. One of us is an incredible gamer genius so she always is like “I finished the game, it was pretty good” while the rest of us are still in learner mode being like “how do I walk forward.” This group is really a support group, born of the intense yearning for the Breath of the Wild sequel that feels like it will never come; we are always looking for games that somehow approach BOTW even though that of course is not possible.

Videogames:
– Windbound (fun at first but very not fully realized)
– Long Dark (amazing, not at all like botw but an incredible hypnotic game made by weird Canadians)
– Stardew Valley (so great)
– just started Yonder!

My joy-con broke and I had to ship it back to Nintendo for repairing and my husband mocked me til his throat was sore

What else has happened? So much, yet so little. Some say maybe/others aren’t so sure. Time has passed in blur and also stretched on forever. I have aged 10 years and yet am a child again. The world explodes over and over and yet each day you still have to do the dishes and feed the dog. The apple tree is blossoming; asparagus are in season at last; a cat has been shitting in my raised bed. An oriole visited us again, same as this time last year, a fun little orange bright spot kicking up a ruckus in the bird bath while Gary takes 700 pictures of it. Snoopy is an old bumpy man who now groans continuously and farts more than usual, just like a real grandfather. At his senior wellness check the vet said he is beautiful and perfect. “Greatest dog in town” she said, “best dog I’ve seen in my career” she said, “this dog should be president of the United States” she said. He will catch a cookie in his mouth if you toss it over your shoulder; it’s the only trick he knows. He disrupted MANY of my classes this semester, as he is actually the worst.

Our friend Luke now lives in a house with a pool, and so it is going to be a decadent summer. We also just learned that you can rent the entire historic movie theater in Brattleboro for $50 and they’ll open the popcorn stand and let you watch a DVD you bring from home. NO BIG DEAL!!!!!!!!!!

One big summer project I might undertake is renting out an industrial kitchen and trying to can like 1,000 jars of tomatoes and salsa, to give out during distro next winter. Winter distro has been super depressing and how amazing would it be to have canned local produce?! This might be too ambitious an undertaking, I don’t know. I did find a cheap kitchen you can rent but I now need like a team of dedicated canners and a bunch of equipment and anyway I might be too scared. I also formed a gleaning team and we got hooked up with a local rabbi who operates a vast gleaning network, so we will be gleaning local farm fields and orchards on Sunday mornings sometimes! All this food work and yet I still haven’t learned to garden. Maybe I just never will.

My other summer goal is to become fluent in Spanish, which I know won’t happen.

Oh we also finally learned how to smoke weed!!!!! Turns out it’s great