#38: Call me Spuzzum because I'm beyond Hope

Actual updates

Well, there’s been some movement. We got an email saying, among other things, “The process is almost complete,” which, I don’t know what almost means to Immigrations Canada1, but to me it means “time to start hoping again, you little idiot.” I’m getting big dreams about leaving sometime this summer. I might be stupid.

It’s so hard for me not to take progress personally. It’s so hard for me not to hear one tiny and unclear piece of good news and start planning out where the furniture is going to go in the new place. We’re going to hang up our art this time, I promise. We’ll take this with us, but we won’t take that. Look what a short walk it is to school! Will we go to the grocery store a few blocks north or a few more blocks south?2 Will I ever be able to find clothes that fit there, outside of grandma stores? Will I be a different person there, and if so, different how? Will everything be too different and make us (“us”) unhappy? What are we going to do for work? Will we be able to make friends? Will the friends we already have come and see us? Will my parents be annoying?3

You can see how it goes.

I also got another email from them which gave me a brief heart attack. It began, “we have received your request; however, the information provided does not match what is in our files,” and continued by asking me to fill out a certain form and send in copies of everything I had sent in with the original request. I was in a panic. That original request took me over a year! Could I manage it again, quickly? Surely I could just print out the filled forms again, and I’d just have to make sure I had all my other documents handy to copy and send. Maybe I could do this! Time to gird my loins! But then I read further.

Back in November, Matt had gotten a request to submit biometrics within 30 days, and these needed to be collected at a specific place, which was open on weekdays only. This was right at the beginning of the busiest season for his work, and he couldn’t take time off. So I sent in a request to have an extension.

He wound up managing to do the thing on the day after Thanksgiving, when his work was open but still slow, and the other place was open too, and I thought no more of my little request, which I had heard an automated “we’ve received your message” reply on but nothing else.

This was in relation to that request. For those keeping track at home, I received this message in mid-January, about an extension on a 30-day deadline that occurred back in November/December. Obviously, since it is now moot and the info they requested has been sent in and received, I heaved a big sigh of relief and disregarded it, but I’m pretty sure I lost a year off my life in that first moment or two!

Speaking of losing years off my life, I’ve been really going through it, mentally, in the last few weeks; I anticipate spending a certain amount of time around Christmas curled up into a ball and sobbing (as quietly as I can), but it’s stuck around longer than usual, and, okay, this is not a groundbreaking statement, but: it makes everything so much harder. Hey, wouldn’t I feel better if I just did this or that thing? Sure would! It is like clawing my way out from under a rockslide to do it, though! I’m not saying this for sympathy - I know most of the people who read this have their own problems and I’m not trying to position mine as being worse in some way - just for understanding. With luck, it’ll fade eventually, and go back to its normal background level4, and I am not In Danger, so don’t freak out. I’m just feeling like garbage, making nonstop mistakes, it’s a struggle it’s a war5, etc. It’s shitty but normal.

Speaking of shitty and perhaps newly normal, I’ve been having trouble with my right wrist for the past couple of days, and I can’t recall doing anything to it that would have caused this. Wrapping it tightly helps (bonus: if you have an Ace bandage wrapped around your wrist, it helps keep you warm!), but it’s worse when I’m tired or I’ve been typing all day. But more to the point, I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m at the stage of life where sleeping wrong, or something like that, can jack up my wrist for multiple days. Just call me grandmama, I guess.

What am I reading

I am apparently in the stage of writing where I’m reading books for research (or “research”). So, upon the recommendation of my wildly talented friend Scherezade - whose newsletter you can and should read here - I’ve been reading Writers and Lovers, by Lily King. Actually, I just finished it on the train to work today, but the next book on the pile is a comic and I don’t know how much I’ll have to say about it, so I’m leaving everything I wrote here and not deleting it in favor of talking about the book I’ll be reading by the time I send this6.

I gotta say, if I hadn’t gone in with a recommendation, I would not have picked this book up. The title does nothing for me, and the cover (of the edition I have, anyway) is honestly kind of dreadful7, so it's a good thing we don't judge books by those!

But the story is something else. It follows Casey, who is writing a book while toiling at a fancy Harvard Square restaurant and trying to cope with her mother’s sudden death. She’s depressed, she’s anxious, she’s having panic attacks in the middle of the street, she’s sabotaging things when they start to go well because she can’t envision them working out - in short, she’s extremely relatable when working on a novel, and also in general if you are a disaster person, which I am. She can’t bring herself to read back over the book? Neither can I! She has a horror of her friend reading it because what if she doesn’t like it (but also desperately needs to know what the friend thinks of it)? Me too! Maybe this is everyone, writing? Maybe everyone is torn between fervently hoping it’s good and knowing in your bones that it’s instantly-forgettable trash? Maybe.

But the funny thing is that I didn’t read it for reassurance on the universality of the horrors of the writing process, or for ideas on how to actually finish the fucking thing. I read it for the sex.

See, here I am writing a book about adults, and sometimes when two adults love each other very much… but the thing is, I always feel like I’m either overdoing it or underdoing it, when it comes to writing about doing it. So I asked for some recommendations of books that do a good job with it, so that I could gauge what I was doing against a variety of quality examples8. But I think what this book does better than actual sex scenes are scenes about thinking about sex. Also yearning! Some top-quality yearns in here. Also falling apart emotionally and financially, but that’s somewhat less sexy.

Okay! I’ve written the word “sex” about 10 times more than the total previous usage in the entire 3+ year run of this newsletter9, so it's time to move on to...

Some links

Now offering some competition to my ex-band’s ex-song, “1919,” about the Boston Molasses Flood, this article proposes a new contender for “that’s gotta be the worst”: The Worst Year Ever to Be Alive in History

I feel like the ultimate answer to this mystery was not that much of a surprise? Anyway, I feel bad for the bears, but at least the reason has been figured out and the newspaper guys were able to write this headline, so it all ended okay. Bears Were Mysteriously Missing Toes. These Scientists Cracked the Case

I had no idea about this when it happened! Also, the headline makes them sound like they’re international career criminals or something, and not two guys who scammed a marathon. The Not-Quite-Redemption of South Africa’s Infamous Ultra-Marathon Cheats

This is a great essay about working as a backup for a bot, and how it leads to bot-ification of the worker in turn. Since the bot in question works for a leasing company, it’s also a window into the grim, inhumane world of apartment rental companies. HUMAN_FALLBACK

This is especially relevant today: in this article, the author explores the rare case where an enslaver was actually punished in a court of law for murdering a person he was holding in slavery, and it shows how the system maintains itself by holding up the most extreme examples and saying “see, even we agree that this is bad!” That lets the regular, everyday brutalities go by as if they are fine. The parallels to police behavior are blindingly obvious. Searching for Mira: The Enduring Legacy of Slavery and Brutality in the South

Hey, ever disappointed your dad? This guy has! I’m being flippant but it’s really a rather lovely study of trying to balance between a dad and a stepdad, trying to be the son either of them wanted, and also DIY tree maintenance. Fighting the Tree

We studied the Scopes Monkey Trial in school, or at least we touched on it; is it taught in schools in the US? Anyway, this gives you much more background on the people involved, the way the public saw them, and so much more than “creationists took a schoolteacher to court for teaching evolution and won! Look at those backward Americans!” which was sort of how it was presented to us at the time. The Curious Case of Nebraska Man

I have never read a James Patterson book and am in no hurry to, but it’s fascinating to see the process of an author this prolific. Here’s How Author James Patterson Writes 31 Books at the Same Time

I might be a bit of a hater but I read this with some skepticism. It’s interesting; it shows exactly which kind of life choices and tools make it easy to consume less or no electricity, but he came at this with a lot of advantages. He can use his university’s electricity when he’s at work during the day, and his job is cool with this experiment and how it impacts his ability to work - or not work - at home. He can take the stairs and isn’t limited in his mobility. He knows how to rig up a simple solar panel! So, in terms of takeaways, there are some that many people can do and reduce their dependency on the energy grid, but getting all the way off it in a major city is not all that realistic, even if he thinks this proves that it is. I Disconnected from the Electric Grid for 8 Months - in Manhattan

Surprise!! A Microsoft data center didn’t follow any regulations about preserving human remains in land they wanted to build on, and nobody held them to account! Who would have guessed! Developers Found Graves in the Virginia Woods. Authorities Then Helped Erase the Historic Black Cemetery

I had no idea this had happened at all. Although I am kind of sent for a loop by the fact that a man who personally removed nuclear warhead parts from an accident that could have blown up a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard would then go to work for a weapons manufacturer. An Obituary for the Man who Saved North Carolina from Nuclear Disaster

These covers are so familiar to me even though I don’t think I owned a single one of these books - did you? The Artist Whose Book Covers Distilled the Nineteen-Eighties

It’s lightly tragic to me that maybe one or two people reading this, max, would get the reference if I said she was the worst and most misunderstood Roman Empress. But anyway, I liked this for its insistence on correcting the “Dark Ages” myth and reminding us that alleged “barbarians” of the era were often just as civilized, and being unfairly maligned due to being nomadic (or even just not being Roman!). The Misunderstood Roman Empress Who Willed Her Way to the Top

Crucial science: Can You Stop Beans from Making You Fart? We Put 17 Methods to the Test

This is the one, this month: the one that if you read nothing else, I think you should read this one. It pairs an exploration of a hundreds-of-millions-of-years-long lacuna in the Earth’s sedimentary history (nothing! there’s literally nothing laid down in the geological record for, in some places, a billion years! get your head around that!) with the story of the author’s brother’s brain injury. It’s heartwrenching and scientifically fascinating at the same time. The Great Forgetting

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

The catchiest song about being drenched in blood you’ll ever hear!

I listened to this one a bunch this month because a new configuration of the band (is it truly the same band anymore with the loss of one member and the addition of another? Probably not, but we haven’t had an identity discussion yet) - anyway the band was going to start practicing again and we were going to play this song. I felt like if I was ever going to play a Hip cover, it has to be here, right, it has to be now, before we move back. It’s not something you could really do there without looking like a weenie or a punter and treading extremely well-trodden ground, and not even treading it as well as those who came before. But then band practice got cancelled anyway. That’s fine; you’re not a real band if you aren’t routinely cancelling practice. I do hope we get a chance, though.

“Bend to work, and work gets done” - oh, like writing this newsletter? Is that what you mean, song? Mind your own business! Fun fact: I wrote those words and then immediately fell asleep.

This month’s top 5: Vibes I was trying to curate on the book playlist

Because I don’t have enough other things I should be doing, I started making a playlist to go along with the book10 - some of it is character “theme songs,” some is extremely obvious and heavy-handed title or lyric references, and some is just the mood. So here are some of the moods and vibes and whatnot that I was trying to aim for. Successfully? Well, I would say "you be the judge," but I'm not letting anyone be the judge just yet.

1. The desert, but not in a yeehaw way

2. Being, or at least feeling, doomed

3. Being in one’s hoe phase

4. Drugs

5. hey guys he found us and he brought his guitar with him

It’s Arctic freeze temperatures around here right now and I’m sitting upstairs here watching the big tree out the window blow around in the gale force winds11 and hoping a branch doesn’t crack off and spear right through the window and into my brain. Then again, that would solve a lot of my problems, so…