Dear friends,

As we enter the 700th (!) day of Covid Standard Time, it's sometimes hard to feel like 2022 is actually a new year. So many people I know, especially my friends who are parents of young children, have felt like a yo-yo this month, pulled and pushed from one extreme to the next at the mercy of someone else's hands.

In early January, I sat back in the fully reclined driver's seat of my car in a downtown Palo Alto parking lot as one of my dearest friends, a medical professional, felt around my left armpit/lymph nodes, where I had been experiencing an unfamiliar pain that week. As the daughter of somebody who has had breast cancer, I admittedly am a bit more sensitive to any changes in that area, so I wanted another opinion. We laughed behind our N95s as I invited her to basically feel me up and make sure everything felt...okay...under the thin, tie-dyed cotton of the cut-off Class of 2009 shirt I had on beneath the two sweaters and coat now strewn on my passenger seat.

We determined, to my relief, it was most likely something muscular, and she made me promise to monitor it and get my scans later this winter. I had already postponed my first routine mammogram because of the booster shot lymph node inflation in November and had postponed it again for February in light of the Omicron numbers and not wanting to expose my 72 year old mother, who I am with regularly, to anything I might pick up in a medical environment

After she left, I ended up sitting in my car for an hour waiting for AAA because it turns out my car battery was needing-to-be-replaced dead. Which gave me some time to think.

How in the hell did we got this absurd point, where I am getting examined in a parking lot by a friend because it feels too risky to go into a health care facility?

Like many of you, I'm constantly trying to wrap my head around the choices individuals have made that got us to the parking-lot moments that we're all experiencing in different ways. Which means I'm also trying to grapple with the structures at play that got us to this point. And trying very hard to muster empathy for folks whose views frustrate (/anger/sadden) me.

In an effort to work through that waning empathy, I decided it was time to re-read Eula Biss's On Immunity: An Inoculation, a nonfiction gem that I had loved in 2014 when it was released. Written in the wake of the H1N1 pandemic, Biss begins the project when she becomes a mother for the first time and starts meeting parents who are opposed to vaccination.

"Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as [professor of psychology Paul] Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves."

In the next 200 pages, Biss weaves together research, metaphor, history, philosophy, etymology, and personal experience into an exceptional social critique that explores topics as big as capitalism and the medical establishment and as specific as Dracula and DDT.

“The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both."

"Vaccines govern the immune system, in the sense that they impose a particular order on it. [...] We resist vaccination in part because we want to rule ourselves."

Without judging, demonizing, or patronizing any view, Biss probes at all sides of the vaccine landscape and offers an eerily prescient reflection on how interdependent we are, how shared our immunity truly is, and how much is at stake if we fail to live in community.

"However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space--a garden we tend together."

It was the book I needed to read this month, and I cannot reccomended it enough. Regardless of how far apart we may be in geography and in ideology, we are so connected and dependent on one another, and we cannot lose sight of that, even when we are at our wit's end.

Thank you for doing your part to tend to your shared gardens, wherever you are, and for nourishing mine.

Warmly,

Natalie

{Watch}

TV: If we've talked recently, you've probably heard me enthusiastically recommend that you watch the newest season of Queer Eye on Netflix. Which some of you responded to with incredulity. Fair enough. Except for one episode at a friend's house a few years ago, I hadn't seen this show since its first iteration in 2003, when I was in high school and had a much bigger appetite for the novelty of reality TV. But after a few close friends heartily recommended the newest season, which was taped in Austin--where Enrique used to live and is forever endeared to--we figured we'd give it a whirl.

Amidst everything going on right now, Queer Eye is a visual dopamine pill and a true celebration of the fact that we are all worthy of love and care. Leave your cynicism at the door, grab some tissues (even the usually stoic Enrique shed some tears), and enjoy witnessing some truly beautiful personal transformations.

I cannot say enough about Station Eleven, the mini-series based off the 2014 book by Emily St. John Mandel. Read the first two paragraphs of this review--and if you're ready to give it a go, watch the first two episodes together so you aren't left feeling utterly bleak from the opening.

And yes, we did finish the first half of the final season of Ozark in two nights. Intense r' us like Succession, but exponentially more violent and nerve wracking, this show is full of despicable characters (Laura Linney as Wendy Byrde, ooof), and I constantly found myself wondering why I'm still watching it. I'm on the fence about recommending it if you haven't already been roped in. But Julia Garner as the brassy, fearless Ruth Langmore almost makes all the handwringing worth it.

I forgot to mention this in December's newsletter, but if you're ready for your blood to boil, Dopesick is an incredible miniseries about the unfolding of the opioid crisis, with a pitch-perfect cast including Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, and Rosario Dawson... and Michael Stuhlbarg as the ultra creepy Richard Sackler.

{Read}

Fiction: Memorial by Bryan Washington was the first novel I read this year; it took me a bit to warm up to it and then I became completely captivated by the subtle and yet deeply affecting story about the intricacies and intertwinings of the love and duty we have for our partners and our families.

Full disclosure: I have ignored most of the books on my stack and read a grand total of 9 romantic fiction novels on my Kindle this month because that's what my brain was asking for at the end of a long day. If you want to talk about that genre or exchange recommendations, write to me! Think less grocery check-out line paperback with glistening cleavage and torsos and more the fictional equivalent of a formulaic Lifetime movie...for millennials. I was talking to my dear friend Killeen about why many of us feel guilt around reading this kind of book, and we were discussing this comment I saw online that I fully agree with: "Can’t stop thinking about how women are ridiculed for enjoying romance novels and movies (where actual good things happen to women) and are told that they should enjoy other genres (where women are often not mentioned or killed to serve as a plot device for the male lead.” So I will stop describing this as a guilty pleasure.

Nonfiction: On Immunity by Eula Biss (in case you skipped my ramble above). Another fantastic 2021 memoir I forgot to mention in my wrap-up newsletter last month: Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford

The Internet:

Instead of opening up my email or reading the news when I first look at my phone in the morning, I now Wordle along with all the other annoying acolytes sharing their daily grid on social media and let me tell you, it's actually a much better way to start the day.

Your Local Epidemiologist remains one of the most informative and measured newsletters for understanding the times we're in from a scientific POV thanks to Dr. Katelyn Jetelina.

{Listen}

Cat Power's cover of Nico's "These Days" from her new Covers album has been the soundtrack to my January. I have a long fascination with the translational power of (non-shitty) covers, of the way they make me listen to the lyrics in new ways or completely change the mood of the original and become an entity unto themselves. I know covers can be polarizing, but if you dig them (or want to tease me about how awful they are), here's my playlist, Get Under These Covers, that I've been plopping songs in over the past few years. Feel free to send your favorites my way.