i spent this weekend on a beach day with friends and a day of running around working on first steps toward getting the house back in order since ex-to-be moved out Friday, so not so much writing or media-ing.
read
i finished reading Etaf Rum’s A Woman Is No Man and wow. it’s unabashedly looking at how cultural norms are transmitted across generations and ultimately manages to be both empathetic and damning toward those who are complicit in abusive, misogynistic ones. all without losing track of some of the root causes in systemic violence and the trauma of uprootedness. again, i’m looking forward to seeing what my book club has to say.
new audiobook of the week: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. i’m not sure how, but pronouncing “patriarchy” as “patriarchyugh” has consistently managed to make me chuckle even though it’s used enough to be potentially really annoying. the whole book seems to be an uptempo, feminist take on the best we know about how to process stress AND an exploration of the underlying causes for women having an extra-big dose. the chapter i just finished was a giant rant against the “bikini industrial complex” and its actual health effects… immediately followed by the author (Emily, who’s mostly a sex educator) admitting that she spent three hours writing about it and went upstairs to weigh herself because she knows she’ll be taken more seriously professionally if she comes closer to conforming. and framing that as part of the mess to accept — that the feelings and actions while fighting the patriarchy WILL be contradictory sometimes. anyway, ultimately charmed even if it’s in many cases information and research that i’d heard about before, and i won’t be surprised if i wind up gifting it to a few people. (i mentioned it to my therapist, and she had not read it yet… but was given a copy for xmas by her boss. i let her in on the fact that they have a tldr at the end of each section, since we have already laughed over reading habits and ADHD and how much less fun the self-help section is when you’re a professional helper. side note: i love how much laughter there is in my therapy sessions.)
seen
i’ve been carrying the camera that i bought as mourning-the-DSLR-passing-from-the-household/anticipation-of-travel-someday-soon. a lot. vowing to learn how to use it before i can actually travel. i discovered that zoo membership is not nearly as expensive as i always assumed. i live about a mile from the zoo. i’m trying to post a photo a day on my personal instagram and a photo a day on the one that i set up for this blog, but there are still some extras that make me happy.
