Hiii,

I returned to NYC on Jan 1st. And it’s been an adjustment but I’m so glad to be back.

Dog sitting in LA was honestly amazing. I loved having a canine companion, being warm, having head space & physical space, and watching season 1 of Sex and The City. I did a bunch of coding, meditating, running, and I setup a new linux laptop.

There was only one moment of drama where I was being told to evacuate due to the atmospheric river. Nobody in the area did and everything was fine. But it was a moment of oh my goodness for sure.

I’m back now. It’s great. I have been taking care of all the things I’ve not had the chance or money to take care of. I found a used and amazing Parka at Beacon’s Closet <3, I have a new gym membership and something called “packing cubes” which I will need to write a blog post about at some point. I’m able to organize my gym stuff, my work stuff, and even stuff for having fun after work all in my bag. I am living the dream. Almost.

I’m wrapping some name change stuff with banks, and finally closing down my consulting business RIP.

Things at work have been going well. I got my quarterly review. I cried while writing my self-reflection, but apparently they’re very happy with what I’ve been doing. Yay validation from my superiors.

At the end of the month I’m flying to Belgium to give a talk on the education track at FOSDEM. How fun. It’ll be a quick trip but I’ve never been to Belgium, and a friend from Recurse Center is now attending so they can see me. How fun!

Many of you probably don’t code much but we are making a lot of big progress on libprocessing which is the cool Rust language project that I’ve evangelized and started development on. I’m literally so excited for what we will be demoing for the 25th Anniversary of Processing.

What else. I don’t know. I wake up at 5:30am, brush my teeth and head straight to the gym. I run a 5k, shower, and then head to my workspace. I do this every day. And I’m trying to work days at the sauna into my month.

Romance Report

I decided to stop dating the person I was dating. Now looking for another person to date. A friend said that I have to put the same energy that I put into work, into finding a relationship. Which is annoying because I thought being hot and hating myself for being transgender was enough. Oops, wrong approach.

ANYHOO

Big year ahead.

READING:

• The Dispossessed - IT’S SO GOOD. An invitation to dream. Within the context of my community it feels like something more fundamental. But I did love how the story was constructed, the two planets, and also how both planets demonstrated a way that power could consolidate, and the dysfunction that emerged from that consolidation. That was what felt different between the two, and I think that is a cool way to highlight why anarchy is great

• “The Revolution Eclipses Whatever The World Has To Offer” - Idris Robinson gave a talk recently as this book was being released. I couldn’t make it sadly, but I ordered it immediately and it was waiting for me when I got back. I highly recommend this book if you have capacity to digest radical discourse about working towards liberation. I’m still reading it, but I’m drinking it down. Some of the analysis is just chef’s kiss. I’m finding the book to be a breath of fresh air, and grounding myself for what is ahead. Something that really stood out to me immediately in the book which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about was the mention of intersectionality and privilege being something that serves the police in counterinsurgency. So for the liberation movements we will have to drop that from the dialogue in order to get to the other side.

  The author was not saying outright that intersectionality and privilege theory is bullshit. Which I had to go back a few pages to confirm. I do think those concepts, especially around privilege do play out, but in the day to day.

  It feels really good to be challenged around my views there. I’m not sure where I’ve landed entirely, but the book has an amazing bibliography so far

• “The Joy of Abstraction” - Eugenia Chang has written a book on Category theory, a math subject that usually isn’t taught until you’ve finished all of your upper division math classes (Abstract Algebra, Real/Complex Analysis, Set theory, etc…). It’s something that offers a sense of tying everything together. But this book is special in the sense that it’s written by a math researcher who also has an arts background and teaches artists. I think she does an amazing job of making this branch of mathematics available to folks without a math degree. Sometimes I would just prefer she get to the point, but honestly, I do benefit from the verbosity here. It’s a great book, and she has some amazing examples that involve things like white male privilege, and there is a whole arrow diagram in there. It’s amazing and I think it will help me exercise my ability to structure my thinking a bit more. Yay.

In conclusion: I’m doing hot girl shit. I’m crushing it. The healthy choices I make for myself inspire my friends and loved ones to be better versions of themselves. Let’s go to a rave already.

Peace.