The slow and unyielding march of time, episode 41
Hi friends,
It's been a pretty intense few weeks! As a federal worker, I’ve been experiencing a lot of ... stuff, and am struggling to process it, especially since I have to compartmentalize quite a bit. And also, of course, I can’t talk about all of it.
But hey, let's process the stuff I can talk about 2getha.
serious shit:
personal stuff:
baby’s first doxxing!
Last week a Daily Wire article dropped, naming me (along with a few colleagues) as a radical lefty fed. Okay, technically not wrong! But in this particular case, I was singled out because I use she/they pronouns.
Sidebar: I don’t think I’ve really talked about it in this newsletter, but may as well come out to anyone who doesn’t know — I’m agender, which just means that I don’t identify with a gender. Inside my brain, I have no understanding of a binary, and my gender feels performative. So sometimes I code more feminine, and sometimes more masculine, and it doesn’t matter to me one bit how people interpret my gender expression. I’m thankful to my trans friends who do have very strong feelings about their gender identity, who have helped me realize this about myself!
Thankfully, a couple years ago I spent some tedious time working through this workbook to remove myself as much as possible from the internet. While it’s still possible to find me, my personal information is relatively obscured. I’m sure there are a horde of trolls out there calling me ugly on twitter, but I stopped using twitter a long time ago.
fuck ICE
Meanwhile, when I went to volunteering this week, they handed me a little information slip about what to do if ICE shows up at the door. (Apparently punching the officer is not in the playbook, but! I am willing to improvise.)
Professional stuff:
trump wants me to retire
Yes, I got the stupid fork in the road email. And a follow-up every day telling me to take this sweet deal before time runs out.
It’s incredibly insulting to send a generic email to every single federal employee and say, “It doesn’t matter your expertise or your experience, you’re doing a low productivity job and we’d like you to resign.” We’ve also gotten a lot of messaging from our new political appointees about how we need to “recommit ourselves to the mission” after getting distracted by ideology. Guys!!!! (All the new leadership is guys.) We don’t have to recommit ourselves. We never stopped doing the job.
children are gumming up the works
We also have had a gaggle of boys showing up at various meetings acting like we don’t know what we’re doing, and we all had to do individual interviews with one or more of them. The purpose of the interviews are unclear, although it sounds likely that they might try to pull some of us into “high priority projects.” I’m not too worried about that since I’m feminine presenting, and these are the kinds of boys who think women can’t do math or whatever.
I'm not currently quitting
However: it is an honor and a privilege to serve the public, even though the public is full of huge dumbasses. And there is a lot of work to do! So I’m not resigning (at least not yet), and would like them to stop insulting me to my face. Or at least get a little more clever about it!
Existential stuff:
I get it if you haven’t been paying attention to the news. It’s hard. We all knew that Trump 2.0 was going to be bad! Some of it is highly predictable (all the anti-trans and anti-immigration executive orders) and some of it is not (Elon Musk and a band of stupid little boys staging an administrative coup).
two good articles
If you wanna catch up without sacrificing too much of your sanity, I loved this Defector article Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government. There’s also this article by Anil Dash about DOGE as a procurement capture play, which has always felt likely (to me anyways) to be Musk’s goal. (Although I am sure as a detached sociopath, he’s also reveling in the chaos and destruction he is creating along the way.)
wake up, sleepy dems
We didn’t know that our elected Democratic leaders were going to be such a group of babies. I’m honestly never going to forgive them for not reading Project 2025 in great detail and coming up with runbooks about what to do when they happen — as Tim Walz said, when someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it. I hope that all of these complacent, aging ding dongs step aside so that some younger members of the party can meet the moment with energy and ideas. Maybe also a right hook.
media capture is bad for democracy
Also! How embarrassing all our major media sources have become. They are absolutely foaming at the mouth to call Trump audacious, or bold, or whatever. Paul wrote more about this over on his newsletter. In case you’re wondering about my media consumption, I just subscribed to Wired because their reporting has been excellent for the past couple weeks, and I also subscribe to 404 Media and The City.
I don't want to minimize how bad things are. People are going to die, children will go hungry, things will get materially worse for most if not all of us. Whew!
and yet let's have joy
But remember that we don’t need to be mad and miserable all the time. As Rusty from Today in Tabs said, this is not a marathon, it’s the rest of our lives, and it’s important for us to be joyful and happy and be with other people and dance and fall in love and create art and learn or whatever else makes us happy.
to that end, some Good News:
a good kid
There’s a kid that I love at volunteering who is Very Naughty. He loves to be defiant and say no and focus on the thing he wants to do (drawing anime monsters), rather than the writing assignment that he’s supposed to be doing.
This week, we were working on “empowerment songs,” where they were supposed to be writing about themselves and something they love about themselves. He didn’t want to do it, and eventually we negotiated a deal (this kid loves to bargain) — he would write two lines, then draw for two minutes.
After the first cycle, he started writing and then, friends — he would not stop writing. He filled up the whole paper. The instructor told everyone to start cleaning up because class was over. He did not stop writing. “Jose,” I told him, “I think it’s time to go.” This child, who spends the entirety of class telling me that he wants to go home, looked up at me and said, “I don’t want to stop writing.”
a work success
I don’t work for 18F anymore, one of the organizations that has gotten some media attention for being Extremely Liberal (for the wild belief that government is for everyone, and that equity is important). But when I was there, I worked on a project with the Office of Head Start (OHS), a program that supports early learning, health, and family-well being for children.
I won’t go into all the details, partially because explaining this kind of stuff can be pretty boring, but part of my job was to help build technical capacity among the staff so that they would be able to better evaluate and oversee their technical contracts. I learned this week that, partially due to my work there, they have developed a better, more collaborative relationship with a vendor who understands modern technology development.
I know that this doesn’t sound flashy. It took a long time, and a lot of energy. But building this kind of capacity and ensuring that the contractors working on our government’s infrastructure are competent and effective — honestly, this is the work!
walking directly into the sea
I was on vacation this weekend, in the Caribbean. The ocean is an overwhelming, violent force. We have no control over its tides, its moods. It can be gentle and placid, or whipped up into such a rage by a boat motoring by that it tosses you around and dumps you unceremoniously onto the beach.
It felt so good to just leave my phone in the hotel room and walk outside, directly into the ocean, and just try to ride it out. When the tides pulled me too far away, I’d pick myself, despite rubbery legs, and haul my ass back up the beach. When it tried to pound me against the sand, I’d swim against the wave to inoculate myself. I swam with a loved one to keep myself from getting sucked in too deep.
Okay I get it, this is an extremely on the nose metaphor. But accepting that I don’t have any control — and holding onto the power that I have — made me feel alive, and joyful.
what I’ve been reading
Okay I don’t REALLY feel like writing about a lot of books today, although I have read quite a few lately (I was on vacation after all!) But here's a few that I've enjoyed:
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly
I loved this book so much!!!! Greta and Valdin are Maori-Slavic 20-something queer siblings living together in Auckland, trying to figure out what they want in life. It's slow-paced and surprising, and extremely funny in ways that are hard to articulate. Reilly does this interesting thing structurally where she does not rush -- she often lets plot points emerge subtly and then, rather than fully explicating them, takes time for them to breathe on their own. As for Greta and Valdin themselves, they are a bit twee, but they're also so complex and multifaceted, it was a true joy to spend time with their internal musings and mistakes. Also, I love a book that dives really deep into the ways that we support and hurt the people that we love best.
A Short Walk Through a Wide World: A Novel by Douglas Westerbeke
How would you withstand the loneliness of never being able to share your life because you were destined to explore forever? Westerbeke explores those questions through Aubry Tourvel, a woman who is inflicted with a mysteries illness that presents itself whenever she stays in one place for longer than three days. The disease would kill her -- but it disappears as soon as she travels away. Sort of like the Speed bus, but it's her whole life. I think Short Walk went on a little bit long, but as someone who has done a lot of solo traveling, I was really caught up in some of the ideas around how sad it can be to have beautiful, unshareable moments. It was quite good!
Dietland by Sarai Walker
Plum's smart, and funny, but she's narrowed her life considerably because she's fat, and the world is incredibly cruel to her. This is partially a coming of age novel -- Plum finds community with other women, many of whom have been deemed "unfuckable" by society, and gets embroiled in an anti-patriarchy plot that changes her life. There's some pretty violent revenge stuff, but it felt cathartic to read it this past week.
Okay, my friends! It's been a tough week, and next week will be a tough week, and it's good to feel in community with all of you. I get and read and respond to replies, so please feel free to write back, I would love to hear from you.
And remember: each of us has power. Exercise it, whether that means saying no to something, writing your elected officials, showing up to a protest, doing something kind to a stranger or a friend, running for office, etc, etc, etc.
much love, davi