#32: Hot stuff

Actual updates

You know, living here has ruined summer for me. Like, yes, everything has gotten worse, living through a global climate disaster is not fun for anyone, and yes I have it easier than many people in the world - but the state of summers here is one that has never been my favorite. Even when I had just moved here, I would compare temperatures with my dad when he would be in Southeast Asia and find that we were having the same weather, which always seemed kind of unreasonable. But now I look at the weather forecast and have small panic attacks when I see sustained 90+ temperatures1; I’m trying to stay positive because summer is halfway over. You know, I used to like summers.

The other week was over 90 for 6 or 7 straight days, mostly with our normal level of humidity, which is to say, swamp. Our house can manage it for a couple of days (well, upstairs can’t fend it off at all, but we have window ACs in our bedroom and Hap’s), but there’s a point when the heat gets in and then it stays in. Worse, I made a grave miscalculation towards the end of the heatwave and left a window open one night to try and get some cool night air in, in the non-air-conditioned rooms, but that was the night that the humidity really skyrocketed, so I just let that in and had to try and work through it the next day. According to our thermostat, it was 56% humidity in the house, and according to the NOAA, anything above 55% is Officially Uncomfortable. I can vouch for that! I feel like I should also be embarrassed to tell you how hot it was in the house as well, so I won’t. But the answer is: too damn hot. Marty hates it, but he is also living up to the orange cat stereotype and being incredibly stupid: he’ll hang out in the hottest rooms of the house (when there are cooler options available!) and then come out later and act like he’s so hard done by. Dude, you are hard doing by yourself! Love yourself and make better choices!

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get Matt’s Permanent Resident paperwork into the hands of Immigrations Canada, and according to everyone’s very good advice, I sent it by a courier service - specifically, FedEx - rather than the mail. It turns out that this was a mistake. The envelope has been sitting at a FedEx warehouse in Quincy for a week or more at this point, because it needs a “commercial invoice.” I hadn’t sent one in, because this isn’t a commercial shipment, and in fact is not goods at all, but just paperwork. Turns out every package going over the border needs one regardless of what it is, so that was on me; however, if I hadn’t been checking the tracking number obsessively, I wouldn’t have known it had run into difficulty and couldn’t proceed - I wasn’t alerted or contacted.

So I phoned their support line and spoke to someone who explained it, and took down the info I needed to provide, and said she was adding it to the package. Great, I thought, all set. Now, this was on a Friday, so when I didn’t see it move over the weekend, I wasn’t too worried - but then it kept not moving on Monday. So I called back again, and talked to someone else who told me that actually the info had to be filled out into a form, by me, and the person I spoke to before was wrong. So he told me where to download the form off the FedEx website and the email address to send it to. But the next day I got a phone call from FedEx, asking if I had done it yet (no! I have a job! give me a minute!) and telling me that the email address I had been given wouldn’t work, and to send it to another address instead. I have now sent it to that address. I haven’t heard anything back and the package hasn’t moved, but again, weekend. Will it move (or will I hear something) on Monday, or will I have to get on the phone again2? We love a mystery!

Okay, quick pivot - as it’s our last summer here, we’re packing in the New Englandy Activities to load up on memories and make sure we don’t wind up having to tell people we lived in Boston for nearly 20 years and never did ____. Of course, Matt has a leg up on this since he grew up in New England, so several of our activities will be ones he spent his youth doing. This past weekend’s was one of those: we went up to Hampton Beach, where he and his family went for summer vacations throughout his childhood.

Let me tell you a little bit about Hampton Beach, NH. It is a broad curve of sandy beach looking out into the open Atlantic; there’s nothing between you and Portugal, unless I guess you bonk into one of the Azores first. The town is literally two blocks wide, occupying a narrow strip of land between the ocean on one side and a (very cool!) marsh on the other. I’m not sure there is one single tree in the whole entire town. Waves yes, shade no. The beach gets absolutely packed with people, and the boardwalk is all food and airbrushed t-shirts. It used to be more stuck-in-the-80s, I guess, but time has moved on even for Hampton Beach. It is a quintessential East Coast beach town, from what I understand, packed with little vacation bungalows and beachfront hotels and souvenir shops, and it’s unapologetically tacky in the best way3. Also, the beach is full of all sorts of people - a wide spectrum of bodies represented in a way that would never happen in Vancouver4 - and I didn’t feel like I stuck out or was stared at in any way. Also, there is skee-ball.

Some links

You know I love JP Brammer, and he wrote this longform piece about speculative biology; it’s fascinating and poetic, and it’s a subject that intrigues me as well. And, not for nothing, the cursor is a massive dinosaur claw. Life on Other Worlds

Anyone who doesn’t think that Foley sound effect work is awesome can leave right now, frankly. The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects

From the mysteries of how to create sound effects to the mystery of whether your show is about to be cancelled or not. “I Don’t Know How My Show is Doing”

Vital. The Women Who Built Grunge

Partly for the title alone, and partly because I had never really thought about woodpeckers and how they work, but lots of people had, and for a long time they had thought about them all wrong. How to Successfully Smash Your Face Against a Tree

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Jim Thorpe, but he was the gold medalist for the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, and then those medals were (retroactively, 6 months later) stripped from him because he had played semi-pro basketball, and at that time, the Olympics observed a strict no-professionals policy. Except it wasn’t really that strict because plenty of college athletes (who competed at the Olympics) played under fake names for pro leagues, and they stripped his medals well after their own 30-day time limit for challenging a medal. Was he singled out for punishment because he was Indigenous? WHO CAN SAY5. Jim Thorpe’s Olympic Record Reinstated

Further in sports: 34 Days, 2400 Miles, and One Cramped Boat: How 4 Women Set a Record Rowing Across the Pacific

Further in boats: Suspected Fabergé Egg Found on Yacht Seized from Russian Oligarch

This is also quite a headline, but did you know that the rules that govern who is legally dead vary widely, even from state to state? The article (twice, actually) refers to being alive in one state and dead in another - and this debate is not just in the Weird and Interesting category! It’s also in the Religious Zealots Imposing Their Worldview category: they’re already setting the tone on who counts as alive at the beginning of their life, and next up is taking a position on who counts as alive at the end. Inside the Heated Scientific Debate to Redefine Who is Dead

And, finally: Why Is a Chicken Wearing Trousers?

What am I reading

So I’m being strict with myself here: no fudging it and talking about what I just finished, or what’s coming up next, even if it’s more interesting to me than what I am currently reading. I am in that situation now: I’ve just finished Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola, which is a romance (I do not read many of those!) AND which I happened to be reading on public transit the very day I got to a sexy part, BUT it is not the book I’m reading right this second so I will leave that there6.

But what I’m reading now is a Hellboy omnibus, and I’ve never really been into Hellboy as a character, despite having allegedly seen at least one of the movies (sidebar: David Harbour?7 as Hellboy??). But I’m liking the comic! It isn’t too self-serious, it doesn’t go over the same mythology 150 times, and the art is really fantastic (especially the colors! lots of greys and muted greens and mauves to contrast off Hellboy’s redness). I’ve rolled my eyes exactly once so far and it’s when a character whose name ends in -escu is described as no one knowing what his nationality is.

So am I a Hellboy Guy now? Not really? I don’t know? Maybe! See, comics really can change a life.

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

It’s Tapes Time in my life! It turns out all my high school friends had (and presumably continue to have) excellent taste. I took it for granted before! I mean listen to this. It’s a cover of a cover of a Brian Eno song and it’s weird and great. Now, this version isn’t on Spotify, so sadly it won’t appear on the year-end playlist, but the cover x1 is, so that’ll be there.

Another banger off a tape from high school times. I actually took a picture of the track list for this tape to share it with friends in order to brag about how good it was. I don’t think the architect of that tape reads this newsletter (Hi Julia, if you’re reading! Your taste was great in the 90s and is doubtless still great now!). I know the guy who made the tape the previous song was on does not read this; he is a ghost in the internet and I often wonder how he’s doing.

Also just been listening to a lot of Mudhoney this month for whatever reason. Fun fact: I asked in the music channel at work what people thought was their best song, and got absolute crickets. Should’ve expected.

This month’s top 5: Movies that did not make me gay but should have

Alright, hear me out: I grew up in an age of movies that were responsible for Awakening Some Things in many of my peers, but none of them worked on me; I got here on my own, so to speak (or rather, I considered that it would be unreasonable for me not to be queer, this being a big world with many people in it, and found that hypothesis validated when I got hit with a big crush on a girl in one of my first-year seminars in college8). But I watched all these movies, and honestly at least ONE of them should have kickstarted the process. Maybe one did, in an under-the-radar way that I still haven’t unpacked? But I didn’t Feel any Feelings at the time! Anyway, I love “x made me gay!” conversations even if I don’t have anything to add to them.

1. I saw Fried Green Tomatoes when I was 10 or something (it came out when I was 9, but I watched it on video at my friend Sara’s house, so I feel like it had to be later) and, look, that is a gay story about two women who are in love, but with enough Straight Camouflage tacked on by the studios that I could watch it and have no idea.

2. I watched Run Lola Run approximately one million times in high school. I feel like I should have at least developed a noticeable crush on Franka Potente. What was I doing? At least I did dye my hair the same shade of red a couple years later and looked, honestly, awesome, and that counts for something.

3. A League of Their Own is a gay movie! Do not argue with me on this. Also at least one of the actual women who played in the real team the story was based on was a lesbian and just came out earlier this year at the age of 95! And yet I watched it and didn’t think twice.

4. Okay, Ghost World I have some doubts about. I identified so strongly with Enid - she even almost kind of looked like me, at least in body, which I never saw onscreen without being the butt of a joke, but she was also in a really intense friendship with a girl who had much more social capital, and the friendship got strained over whether we were changing as people or not. The whole “I want to stay weird my whole life” vs “Now you’re getting too weird” dichotomy hit really close to home. Maybe I just needed to investigate why I felt so close to this movie a bit more; then again, it came out in 2001, by which point I already knew the deal with myself. Also, I know this isn’t canonically a queer movie, but also, yes it is.

5. Finally, The Matrix came out when I was 17. Truly what was I thinking if that movie, the official movie of Getting Bisexualized (that and The Mummy; 1999 was a big year for bi antennae moments) did not knock me over the head with a revelation. Two insanely attractive leads leaping around in black leather? What was it that didn’t work for me here?9

Please clap: I got this newsletter out on time and not a week late.

Also, please clap for my extremely appropriate music choice to be playing as I send this (which sadly can’t be added to the tunes of the month since I’m listening to it now, in August: Old Hat’s “Whitewash NH”