This weekend, we celebrate.

Zoya is turning six years old, and this Saturday we have planned a small party to celebrate. There will be a few kids, a few grownups, good food, a space-themed cake, space-themed balloons, and some merriment in our backyard pool, if the weather holds up.

This is not an elaborate celebration, but instead an excuse to bring together people we love in a small gathering to commemorate our wonderful daughter turning another year older.

Every photo I have of my birthday celebrations when I was younger is of me holding a piece of fried chicken. I look ecstatic in each one. It didn’t matter what the party looked like or what we did; I was happy because I was with friends and family and because I was eating fried chicken. (I’m easily pleased that way.)

This is what I hope for Zoya: that she looks back at photos from her birthdays and she sees joy. It didn’t matter what the celebration entailed; what mattered is that she was with people who love her and she was surrounded by unending delight.

I love Zoya to the ends of the earth—every moment I have with her is a reason to rejoice—and am excited to see the joy she experiences as we commemorate her turning a year older.

This weekend, we celebrate. What a momentous occasion for celebration it will be.

A poem

Floating Trees
C.D. Wright

a bed is left open to a mirror
a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed

light fingers the house with its own acoustics

one of them writes this down
one has paper

bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils
bed of eyes and leaky pens

much of the night the air touches arms
arms extend themselves to air

their torsos turning toward a roll
of sound: thunder

night of coon scat and vandalized headstones
night of deep kisses and catamenia

his face by this light: saurian
hers: ash like the tissue of a hornets' nest

one scans the aisle of firs
the faint blue line of them
one looks out: sans serif

"Didn't I hear you tell them you were born
on a train"

what begins with a sough and ends with a groan
groan in which the tongue's true color is revealed

the comb's sough and the denim's undeniable rub
the chair's stripped back and muddied rung

color of stone soup and garden gloves
color of meal and treacle and sphagnum

hangers clinging to their coat
a soft white bulb to its string

the footprints inside us
iterate the footprints outside

the scratched words return to their sleeves

the dresses of monday through friday
swallow the long hips of weekends

a face is studied like a key
for the mystery of what it once opened

"I didn't mean to wake you
angel brains"

ink of eyes and veins and phonemes
the ink completes the feeling

a mirror silently facing a door
door with no lock no lock

the room he brings into you
the room befalls you

like the fir trees he trues her
she nears him like the firs

if one vanishes one stays
if one stays the other will or will not vanish

otherwise my beautiful green fly
otherwise not a leaf stirs

Some links

This is all kinds of delightful: a website that tells the story of every color—its provenance, how it is used, how it is produced. Something to new to read every week; every color has a fascinating (and extremely well-written) story.

What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America? This is an impressive interactive visualization of menus throughout time and their place in telling the story of dining over the years.

Craig Newmark seems like a good guy. I wish all tech moguls would think of their duty to make the world better the way he does.

Another gem by Mandy Brown, this time on practicing breaking rules:

We’re trained in obedience and rule-following from a very young age. We need equivalent practice in breaking rules, in recognizing when a rule or law is unjust and needs to be broken, and in acting in accord with that recognition.

Rose Horowitch argues that we are entering a time where we are approaching “the end of reading” (specifically, book and literature reading) mostly due to the other competing communication and entertainment mechanisms in the world. It’s a convincing argument (even I read less than I did before) but also one that has been made many times over the years, so I’m not sure if we’re quite there yet.

Fruit today is getting sweeter than before, driven by consumer tastes and demand, and selective breeding and agricultural technology:

Today's grapefruit are less bitter than the ones your grandparents ate, having had the naringin--the compound that creates bitterness--largely cultivated out of them. Stone fruits are being bred for sweetness too.

In June and July, we like buying our berries — strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, haskaps, more — from the local farms that surround us. We’re lucky to have so many options here. In the winter months though, we rely on Driscoll’s berries from the supermarket; this is an interesting piece on how Driscoll’s has captured the market, and how the market keeps growing.

I’m just going to just quote this article about return-to-work mandates here and not say anything about any employers of mine:

The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism -- the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status -- and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

A beautiful rumination on waiting and living a life full of empty spaces, by Heather Abel.

The year is 2063 and you were never interesting: A prognostication on where you will find yourself in life after having devoted so much of it to the screen, rather than living:

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you - your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Rolling Stone made a list of the 50 best Canadian musicians of all time, and while I would have put CRJ as number one, her position as number 14 on the list isn’t bad at all.

More Canadiana: a set of illustrations of 24 objects that define Canada.

The World Cup was riveting this year, but have you ever wondered who would win if it wasn’t football, but instead demographic indicators like life expectancy and gender equality, that decided the matches?

A brief history of the House of Suntory, Japan’s oldest whisky maker. (I’m a fan!) Love looking at all the old whisky ads in this piece.

Missing that old-school AOL Instant Messenger interface? This fun little tool takes your Bluesky friends and arranges them, AIM-style, into who’s online, and who’s idle.

An excellent opinion piece in CMAJ on the importance of public pools on the health (literal and figurative) of our neighbors and communities. Glad to see this is on the radar of health professionals in this country.

I know I link to his writing a lot, but there’s always something great to read by Michael Monteiro. This time, on how to med a broken heart, or why our hearts should break, too:

If my heart stopped breaking I might become the kind of person who looks for reasons why murdering a baby over the corporate loss of a pack of diapers would be justified, instead of the kind of person who asks why we have money for genocide but not for free diapers. If my heart stopped breaking I might become the kind of person who blames a mother for bringing her baby with her to steal diapers, instead of the kind of person who wonders why we have money for bombing schools and hospitals, but no money for a national daycare program. If my heart stopped breaking I might become the kind of person who jumps on social media to defend the murder of children by the very people who are supposed to be protecting and serving us, instead of the type of person who needs it to stop, prays for it to stop, even though deep down inside I know it will never stop, as long as people, who are not you and are not me and are not that mother and are not that child, keep benefiting from it.

My media diet for May and June: my list of things I learned last quarter.