the slow and unyielding march of time | episode 15
I've been watching Star Trek: Voyager, a show I've wanted to watch since I saw a talk where Anita Sarkeesian
named Captain Janeway as the best example of a truly strong female lead.. (IE, she leads with qualities like diplomacy which are associated with femininity rather than masculinity.) Last night, I finally started to get to know Seven of Nine, a human who was assimilated into the Borg, a fascist, imperialist collective hive-mind that destroys and assimilates all societies it comes across. Resistance is futile.
Spoiler alert!!! Seven's link with the hive-mind is severed, and she begins the task of figuring out how to be human again. She was a child when she was assimilated so she has more experience being Borg than human. Janeway teaches her about art; Neelix teaches her how to eat. It's ... a challenging task. "Beauty is irrelevant," she tells Janeway. She deems pleasure imagination, idleness, all irrelevant. Things that are not irrelevant, like eating and talking, are inefficient.
I just finished reading Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a book that the Borg would hate. The nothing that Odell is encouraging is not the absence of action but the absence of action that has been declared to be productive by capitalism. That means, to Odell, withdrawing attention from addictive technology and re-engaging in the physical world. It's funny to me that we can easily identify the Borg as the bad guys, but not our own society, where we have largely reconstructed actions like reading fiction, watching a sunset, going on a quiet walk, as things that are irrelevant or at least unproductive. I don't know if this is resonant for everyone, but I often get down on myself when I am doing things just for me -- it feels like I could be optimizing my time better, being more productive, paying more attention to what's happening in the world.
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of going to a little mountain preserve. There are hiking trails, a lake, a little swimming beach. I checked out a paddle-board and paddled to one side of the lake, sat down, and just stared at the rocks for awhile as the tide pushed me this way and that. I love rocks; I love touching their craggy surfaces, finding handholds and footholds and climbing them, balancing myself and scrambling over them. Just looking at them expands my universe; looking at the layers and colors reveals their age, their journey. It was so pleasurable to just exist, to bob up and down on the water, looking at something so much older and fixed than myself. To pay attention to the world, rather than the world's happenings. I wonder if Seven will learn to sculpt.
Debris:
My cat is sick. I'm very sad and scared about it. A couple of very bad days made it very hard to withdraw my attention from technology because I craved connection and because I was too anxious to do anything else. But doom scrolling is not connection. Sometimes I wish I had the strength to throw my phone in the toilet. Plucky is getting a biopsy on Tuesday; I'll know more after that.
The vague title of my paper is "A Reading of Silences in Crisis."
I still have a couple of weeks until I start work. I have really enjoyed my time of unemployment; I wish it could be longer.
I finished my quarantine video game! I started Assassin's Creed: Odyssey in March, and I finally beat it. I got the "happiest" outcome without trying. Nailed that dialogue tree. But now what??
What I'm Reading
Finished:
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell:
Sahar lent me this book because she thought it would be a meditative read in this time between jobs, and she was right. I think this book has pushed me even further in my anti-capitalist beliefs. Please see above for more!
Warcross, by Marie Lu:
I couldn't get enough of this book! (As soon as I read it I immediately but the sequel, Wildcard, on hold.) It's a fast-paced, often kind of goofy sci-fi YA novel set in a future where someone has solved that pesky virtual reality nausea problem, and now everyone has cheap glasses to access the Neurolink, where they can explore VR and augment their current reality. Every pair of glasses comes loaded with Warcross, a game that has become the world's most popular form of entertainment. Emika Chen has been struggling to survive since her dad; he left her with a mountain of medical bills and gambling debt and also, even though she's an accomplished hacker, she legally cannot touch computers, since she has a police record from doxxing a bunch of assholes in her high-school who had leaked naked pics of a friend of hers. She tries to exploit a bug in Warcross during the opening match of the Championships and accidentally glitches herself into the game. Capturing the attention of millions, Hideo Tanaka, the mysterious, hot inventor of the Neurolink, hires her to hunt down Zero, the only other individual who has ever managed to breach Warcross' security. I. Love. It.
Number One Chinese Restaurant, by Lilian Li:
This book was ... fine. I read it fairly quickly so I could be done with it, not because I was enthralled by it. It centers two brothers, Jimmy and Johnny, who have an uneasy partnership around the Duck House, their family's restaurant established by their late father. Johnny is the older, more steadfast brother who joined the Duck House later in life; Jimmy is the younger, wilder brother who dreams of emerging from under their father's shadow. Both were jerks to their staff and their families and each other in different ways! The whole thing was kind of messy and stressful but not in a good way. (For me.) I liked their mom, although she was also really mean to both of them. It was an interesting glimpse into an immigrant world, which I appreciated, but it felt a bit flat. I also think I don't enjoy stories of families being really mean to each other? Yes, family is obviously very complicated, and I get that there are many, many circumstances that lead to that kind of dynamic, but ... I don't have to enjoy reading about it.
Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid:
Damn, this book fucked me up. Emira is a 25 year old Black woman who ekes out a living, working one job as a transcriptionist and another as a baby-sitter to a wealthy family. She's feeling a bit lost -- all her girlfriends have more secure employment, and seemingly more passion for what they're doing -- but she seems fully capable of figuring it out on her own. But her employer and her boyfriend, both of whom are nice, White liberals (and coincidentally have a history in which both imagined bad acting on each other) believe that she needs them to solve her life. It's a really masterful work portraying the ways in which everyone interprets events based on the information we have available, and how nice Whites impose their experience onto others who don't need it. It felt very real and layered and uncomfortable; highly recommended.
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir:
This is hard to summarize because it was such a unique and complex world. The Emperor summons the heirs of all the houses and their warrior companions to participate in a competition of magic and fighting and puzzles to ultimately become an immortal servant. Gideon is *not* her house's heir's companion -- in fact she and Harrow hate each other --but she gets tricked into coming along anyways because she's the best swords-person of the Ninth house. What follows is fun and entertaining and hard to describe! I liked it quite a bit, although I found it to be overly descriptive at times. I've noticed that sometimes authors will take too many pains to describe exactly what they see in their heads, to the point where it becomes semantically meaningless to me. But nailing descriptions is hard; I just get to the point sometimes where my eyes gloss over. But it was good! I'm gonna read the sequel.
Cinderella Is Dead, by Kaylan Bayron:
I'm very sad to report that this book was Not Good, which is a true bummer because I love fairy tale retellings and this one had such an interesting premise! Cinderella is not just a story -- she did exist, and she did marry Prince Charming, 200 years earlier. Since then, her story has become not just a model for living but the actual law. Women and girls in this world have very few rights; as teens, they are forced to attend the King's ball, dressed in their nicest finery, where the men of the kingdom get to choose their wives. If you aren't chosen, then you uhhh have to go work in the salt mines. (Also men can just ... beat up their wives? Women are property? Just like in the Cinderella story! ...) Sophia, however, does not want to play by the rules, which strike her as very unfair (I'm with you there, Sophia!) especially in light of the fact that she wants to marry her best friend Erin. The night of the ball, Sophia fights against the literal patriarchy, and has to flee for her life and begins a journey to try to undo the wrongs. Man, this sounds good, doesn't it? I'm so sorry to report that it's not; the big "twist" is pretty obvious and telegraphed so strongly that Sophia seems like a real dingdong for not picking up on it, and also the villains of the story make a bunch of really stupid choices basically designed to bring us to the climax of the novel. UGH.
Currently:
Wildcard, by Marie Lu:
This is the sequel to Warcross. (See above.) I am pretty sure a buggy algorithm is the villain, which rules. A thing I like about this author is that she manages to take really boring internet stuff (like ... typing in a password) and interpreting it as a physical place or gesture. The Dark Web is a real physical place in these books, and the Silk Road and the Pirate's Den are describe places. There's one point where, as a security precaution, Emika has to remember a step pattern, and perform it in complete darkness in order to enter a secure location. It's just a neat world.
Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory:
Olivia, a gorgeous, funny lawyer who's just moved to LA to start her own law firm with a friend, meets Max, a hot, funny guy in her hotel bar. They hit it off, but go their separate ways at the end of the night without exchanging information. Their paths cross again, and Max learns her full name; he then sends her a cake and his phone number. They start dating and there are wacky hijinks but I bet they'll end up together and in love. Man, I love love so much. Guillory is such a fun writer! Highly recommended for some low-stakes breezy love in these trying times.
I'm so sorry to all my friends who can't go outside right now because of smoke and fires. I know you're all doing the best they can. Let me know if I can support you in any way. I love you so much.
davida