Updates from inside an unending tornado
Hello everyone!
In this email:
Buy art, fund aid with Gaza Grocer
Various life updates!
First off, welcome to everyone receiving this newsletter for the first time— apparently a number of you signed up via my website last year, but somehow didn’t get transferred over to the mailing list (I am tempted to blame Squarespace, but as anyone who writes code can tell you, the error is almost always located between the computer and the chair… meaning it’s probably just my fault).
NEW: Gaza Grocer!
Before the personal updates, a new initiative where you can simultaneously buy art and fight hunger: Gaza Grocer! Gaza Grocer features prints and shirts of original artworks (by me, duh) of food items— prints are scaled to reflect the scale of inflation for these items in Gaza, shirts are offered at a flat rate. Proceeds currently benefit The Sameer Project, who have been working hard to distribute whatever food, water, and other material supplies they can access. You get the idea: buy something and money supports desperately needed aid.
As most of you know, it has been over two months since aid of any kind was allowed to enter Gaza— as I write this, the first few aid trucks are being allowed to enter, but the famine is dire and this is a mere drop in the ocean of need. If you were unfamiliar with conditions in Palestine and specifically Gaza before the current genocide, you might be tempted to think that the hunger in Gaza is new— but it’s not. Throughout its occupation, but especially over the last 20 years or so, Israel has made a constant practice of blocking certain foods or supplies from entering Gaza, and most Gazans were already living on a razor’s edge to access enough food and water to survive. Given the precarity that already characterized people in Gaza’s access to basic needs, the genocide and subsequent blockade of not only food but medicine, building supplies, and other needs has toppled people into extreme crisis.
Despite the dwindling supplies, there are numerous efforts within Gaza to distribute food and other supplies. The Sameer Project (this month’s Gaza Grocer beneficiary) is one such effort— and if your walls are full and you want to skip the middleman, you can also donate to them directly!
Life updates
I don’t know about everyone else, but the past several months have felt like I’m rolling down a hill in a truck tire. It is somehow May, almost June, and yet I feel like I have almost no idea what happened in the past six months. Partly that feeling is because I got very ill at the end of December, and then the inauguration happened, and like everyone else in the US (who isn’t on the wrong side of history) I’ve been trying to weather the intentional chaos of the new administration. Something that is particularly galling for me— which I have been intending to write about at greater length, but will just mention here— is watching the One I Warned You All About (aka Elon Musk) dismantling the load-bearing walls of the country. Obviously the gutting would be upsetting no matter what, but the fact that an incompetent loser came into power via his association with space leaves a pretty bitter taste in my mouth. More on that when I assemble my thoughts properly.
The other major event of these past few months is that my mother died. We had been long estranged, but as it happens one can do a tremendous amount of processing and healing from an abuser, and then when that person dies, it turns out that there’s a whole lot more to do. I have been sifting through the dregs of my experiences with her and their attendant feelings since she passed in March, and it’s starting to feel a bit more settled.
However, I was recently reminded that those experiences leave a legacy that can really never be removed entirely from the present, after I fainted while riding the train in Tokyo. I was there visiting Frank (after two long years of not having the capacity to visit!) and overall it was a joyous and wonderful time. On my second to last day, I ventured out to do my souvenir shopping, and decided to listen to a new book, Careless People, which is about the unbelievable mess Facebook and its leadership have wrought in the world. What I wasn’t expecting was that the first chapter of the book recounts the story of the author being attacked by a shark— and as part of that story, she discusses how her parents dismissed the severity of her injuries and neglected to come to her aid in the aftermath of the attack.
I’ve never been bitten by a shark, but I have numerous memories of begging for medical attention and my mom refusing to take me to get care (which is ironic, because at other times she also exaggerated or fully invented my health issues when it suited her). So, as I rode the train listening to the beginning of this book I was so excited to read, I first started to feel queasy at the gory description— then came the author’s parents’ dismissal, and I suddenly felt the familiar ignition of a panic attack. I tried to remove my headphones and pull up a deescalation tool, but a few minutes later I woke up slumped over with a train full of people staring at me, and the contents of my tote bag scattered all over the train floor. I managed to get out to sit on a bench on the platform in Shibuya station and Frank came to my rescue, as I sat there thinking about how some pieces of the people who impact us— for both better and worse— live inside us for good.
FWIW, I’m pleased to report that you can entirely skip the first chapter of Careless People without any compromise to the rest of the story. And you should definitely read it!
Last but not least, I just finished teaching my most recent iteration of Search for Life in the Universe, the course I have been teaching at School of the Art Institute (SAIC) here in Chicago for the past couple years. I absolutely love teaching this class and adore my students! We cover all aspects of the search for life, including not only the astronomy side, but also the social science and pop culture impacts. I really think it’s a fun way to not only teach about astrobiology and SETI, but also broader lessons about the scientific process, how social forces influence funding for science, the nature of evidence and belief, mis/disinformation, etc. The course culminates in a research project where the students write a paper and produce an artwork inspired by their research, and I love to see what they make. This semester I introduced a much longer iteration process for them to figure out their research topics, and it really paid off with thoughtful, well-sourced papers on everything from what extremophiles could live on Europa to how the dynamics of the Cold War have influenced the search for life beyond Earth.
OK, that’s all for now! I have a few other projects brewing in the background that I hope to tell you about soon. If it’s not too late for a new year resolution, I’m hoping to write these far more often, so… talk to you soon.
LW