> how to wind a watch
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: pumpkin bread, research projects, voting plans, and winding watches.
Hello friend,
> If you need a voting plan, message me. I voted early and got caught in a lovely conversation with another woman waiting in line. I keep driving by this street in town, and this week the line of cars parked along it for early voting seemed to stretch forever. It's sort of reassuring to see so many people voting. Now more than ever, we have to vote.
> Lots of cooking this week. Dumplings, ravaiya, shepherd's pie, pumpkin bread. I bought a lot of whole spices recently and it's been so satisfying to pound them in my parents' mortar and pestle that I've been thinking about getting my own.
> Since cooking is my preferred form of deferring other work, I haven't done much else this week. Thinking about whether I can leave in January, wanting to collect my poems in a little book—I'm trying to procrastinate all of these things, but I'm also trying not to worry too much about them. I thought I would be bored without having school/clubs/research, but it's been nice, actually, to have the space. I don't really want to call it "self-care" since that evokes something commercial and overdone for me, but I do feel more grounded.
> Oh! Some good news—the epidemiology research I did in undergrad got published recently. If you're interested, one project was on racism and class discrimination, and the other was on public care. I'm thankful for finding projects I care about and for mentors that care about me. I still have hesitations about the state of academic publishing, and now I feel like the research I did was an oversimplification of social determinants of health, but it feels cathartic to have some sense of closure on these projects. I'll probably do more research in the future, and I'm glad to know more about the system, the writing, the process.
> Return prompt: send me some good news from your life.
> A few reads: "How Legend of Korra Gave a Big Black Girl Permission to Be Broken," "Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia," and "Milk, a Symbol of Neo-Nazi Hate."
> Taking time away from the grind has made me think about how I move through time. I'm trying to detach myself from ideas of "spending" time or "filling" time or "wasting" time. I no longer find it useful to foreground efficiency or productivity. But I still want to move through time in a way that means something, and that's what this next poem means to me.
> "Instructions on How to Wind a Watch" by Julio Cortázar (and in Spanish):
What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly. strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant.
> Beyond the veil brought to you by by Shirin Neshat.
Cheers,
Tiffany