on dogs, babies, worms, and other delights.

NOTE: i am moving from substack to the newsletter platform buttondown soon! there are plenty of political reasons to leave substack (e.g. the founders’ refusal to stop monetizing nazis, their introduction of ??prediction markets??) which i empathize with but i’m gonna be real with y’all, this transition is coming for other reasons.

i like buttondown better. it’s simpler, it’s prettier, it makes me happy to use and look at. i prefer it’s e-mail-first user experience and its barebones home page, as opposed to the substack ~ecosystem~ of notes and shortform and all the other stuff they’ve been introducing. (will i be sharing posts from my buttondown on my substack notes for a time after this transition? yes lol)

buttondown lets me import my subscriber list, which is what i plan to do! so do not be alarmed when that happens in a post or two (you will start receiving these from the sender “mia” via buttondown instead of “mia” via substack). this should be a seamless transition requiring no action from you! but if you’d like to double-ensure that you continue to get these missives, i’ll share a subscribe link soon (once i get the transition all spiffy).

thank you for your continued commitment to reading my words!!! it means the world :,) <3

dear friend—

recently, i’ve been thinking a lot about odes: love letters, adorations, praise poetry, etc. whenever i feel dubious about what to write or how to start writing when the world feels like a lot, i return to what i love. back when i was a poet, i loved writing odes. i performed an ode for a virtual graduation ceremony. i spent a summer writing odes to people and sheepishly sharing them with those people.

here is one that i still think is a banger:

i love to read the newsletter One Thing, which does exactly what it says on the tin, with entries that are brief and thoughtful and personal and centered on just one thing. not everything they put out is an ode, but they often veer into ode territory. (this installment from Celine Nguyen on stalogy, my favorite notebook brand of all time, sticks in my mind. if notebooks were religions, the stalogy 365 day would be my Good News.)

when i started reading one thing, it was like diving into cool water on a hot day. kind of revelatory. i’ve always written expansive essays--trying to over a topic from so many angles, hitting so many beats, digging into the nooks+crannies.

but like, what if i just zeroed in??

hence: recomMONDAYtions (originally just a framing to write casually about things i like and am thinking about, posted on mondays) are being replaced with ODES.1

to begin: airports.

this is not very #environmentalist of me, but some of my favorite places to be in the world are airports.

this month my job flew me out to detroit, michigan for a conference, and i was overjoyed. i love almost everything about airports (overpriced food nonwithstanding).

i love wandering the shops (especially the book stores, which were great in detroit and newark), walking up and down the concourse to stretch my legs before the flight, riding the trams that take you from terminal to terminal. i love the zooooom sound a roller-board suitcase makes on a moving sidewalk and the click-click-click it makes on tile.

i love people watching and seeing how folks pass the time and what they wear and the bags they carry. the elderly Black gentleman who sat next to me on my flight home wore a trilby and a cream plaid suit and carried nothing but a shoe-box sized box with a panera logo, and he spent our ascent and descent reading what i believed were passages from the Quran on his phone (REAL! i too appeal to a higher power at these times).

i even love going through security.2 there’s something about the shared ritual of it, of doing the same thing as the person before you and the person after you, that scratches an itch in my brain.

the top three things i Bore Witness to during my airport visits were:

1. the most well-behaved off-leash dog i’ve ever seen in the whole wide world. a wiry-coated terrier-looking cutie, with floppy ears that bounced as they followed their owner quite leisurely into the ladies’ room, as if they were in their home and not a massive buzzing bustling international airport. personally, i am a big advocate of leashes on dogs in crowded public spaces, as anyone around you could be allergic to or terrified of dogs. but i cannot help but admire an impeccably tempered and trained pup when i see one.

2. a man BOOKING IT full speed down the concourse, double-fisting a wheelie luggage in one hand and a stroller carrying a small child in the other—and then i saw him run in the opposite direction just a few seconds later. godspeed to that man.

3. the express tram at the detroit metro airport mcnamara terminal.this candy apple red worm zooms up and down the concourse on a raised platform. i didn’t know it existed until i arrived, so when i saw it zooming past, it felt kind of like being visited by a benevolent fairy carriage of the future. like a princess in a space suit would poke her head out and wave to the peons below. alas, i didn’t have time to ride it, though i did get the chance to do a circuit on the detroit people mover with my sister.

what’s your favorite part of traveling?? (could be air, could be bus, could be car, could be walking on your own two feet :D)

thanks for reading, take care,
—mia xx

1 this ode to messy zines from my pal phoebe is a banger!

2 my feelings about airport security reflect a lot of privilege. for so many people, going through TSA is a ritual in humiliation and injustice—xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and all sorts of prejudices rear their heads.

at the conference i traveled to, design researcher Sasha Costanza-Chock gave a keynote speech that opened with their experience of TSA security, particularly going through the millimeter wave scanner (the massive grey tube whose glass whirls around you). for trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people, this contraption is frequently a source of othering and extreme discomfort.

as they read from the introduction of their book (you can read the whole book for free here):

You see, when I entered the scanner, the TSA operator on the other side was prompted by the UI to select Male or Female; the button for Male is blue, the button for Female is pink. Since my gender presentation is nonbinary femme, usually the operator selects Female. However, the three-dimensional contours of my body, at millimeter resolution, differ from the statistical norm of female bodies as understood by the data set and risk algorithm… This sociotechnical system is sure to mark me as “risky,” and that will trigger an escalation to the next level in the TSA security protocol.

Costanza-Chock goes on to describe what happens next during one TSA experience, as they’re flagged as “risky” and patted down by agents who offer them little in the way of grace and humanity. Then, they write,

The point of this story is to provide a small but concrete example from my own daily lived experience of how larger systems—including norms, values, and assumptions—are encoded in and reproduced through the design of sociotechnical systems, or in political theorist Langdon Winner’s famous words, how “artifacts have politics.”

ultimately, Costanza-Chock explained, they are not interested in making a millimeter wave scanner or the protocols around it more inclusive and kinder to trans folks. they are interested in ending border militarism and in making this technology obsolete. a bug fix or a design change to make a technology more “inclusive” often fails to address the inherently unjust system or norms that the technology reinforces.

they also shared several books besides their own that i added to my tbr, linked below if you’re interested!!

• Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Brown

• As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance,by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

• Undoing Border Imperialism, by Harsha Walia

• AI Commons: nourishing alternatives to Big Tech monoculture, by Costanza-Chock et al. (free download link)