> the work you do
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: the work you do, equitable COVID-19 vaccine allocation, digital care package, and the poem begins.
Hello friend,
> How can I tell you how much I love libraries.
> I’m feeling very unecessary right now (the work I’m doing is small and not career-preppy and feels like too-big sneakers). So reading Toni Morrison’s “The Work You Do, The Person You Are” felt like the salve I needed:
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Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
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You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
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Your real life is with us, your family.
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You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
> Indiana hit new records for single-day COVID-19 cases this week. My sister deadpanned, “somebody thinks that records were made to be broken.”
> So we’re all just here until the vaccine gets here, right? I tuned into a workshop on equitable COVID-19 vaccine allocation. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around how there are teams out there trying to make a vaccine quickly but safely, distribute it equitably. How do you do this work? I want to do this kind of work, but I’m still such a newbie.
> Hoping to sift through this digital care package from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center this week (h/t Phoebe).
> From “The Prestige” by Hanif Abdurraqib:
the poem begins not where the knife enters
but where the blade twists.
Some wounds cannot be hushed
no matter the way one writes of blood
& what reflection arrives in its pooling.
The poem begins with pain as a mirror
inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me
before my first funeral & so the poem begins
with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,
a singer born in a place where children watch the sky
for bombs is trying to sell me on love
as something akin to war.
I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.
I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.
I’m past that now.
> Fictitious realities brought to you by Wangechi Mutu.
Cheers,
Tiffany