Winter from now on

It’s Monday evening, and the mayor of Boston has just declared a snow emergency.

Our third nor’easter in as many weeks is said to be bringing almost two feet of snow on Tuesday. No snow has fallen yet, but the storm will be in full swing by the time you read this. 

These nor’easters bring with them a severe shift in the air pressure. The sudden change causes liquid soaps to bubble unbidden from their dispensers, and cheap plastic bottles to dent in on themselves like origami. But it’s not just my household goods; the pressure change, quite unexpectedly, seems to do a number on me. 

These storms flatten me with a fatigue that rivals the flu, a bone-deep weakness that seems utterly disconnected from any need for sleep or explicable physical exhaustion. I’m lightheaded. I’m dizzy. In other words: my blood pressure responds to incoming nor’easters by dropping through the floor like a cartoon anvil, leaving me confined to my bed, bewildered and impatient and tired.

Friends, I’m so tired.

I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to think my way out of this feeling, but what can I do? It’s just low blood pressure, stupidly low, and I’m learning just how heavy a hitter it can be.

Meanwhile, my partner—whose complicated body responds to the same air pressure changes by setting fire to his joints—has decided to try and fit in a few rounds at the boxing gym before the storm rolls in. 

Well, then. Everyone manages as best they can.

Please be safe out there.

Because I’ve been so tired, I don’t have the concise, polished narrative of a personal essay that I had hoped to have for you today. Instead, I want to share other people’s writing, which should prove doubly useful in this storm. Get snowed in. Do some reading.

• I wrote up some thoughts (a nice way of saying I funneled my incandescent rage into a coherent argument) about how damaging it is when people in the tech industry ask conference speakers to “keep politics out [their] talks.” In short: it’s a gag order on underrepresented voices in our industry, and it makes me furious. Everyone: speak up. Let’s get political. 
   

• Lili Loofbourow on “The Male Glance” is one of the best essays I've read in a while on any topic: “If we were less busy celebrating our perfect vision, we might notice that under the mask we spotted there may lurk a rather interesting and even intentional subjectivity which—in addition to the usual universal human things we all share—has been trained from birth to constantly consider and craft its own performance from a third-person perspective. In other words, women […] are walking around with the usual amount of self-awareness and a few meta layers to boot. There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos.”
   

• Teju Cole has written a stellar essay—“On the Blackness of the Panther”—that stitches together superheroes, the African diaspora, Rilke, Lagos, zoos, Switzerland, and Hollywood: “And there it is, the black rainbow. I learned black and I learned diversity in blackness. Turns out black is multifarious and generative. It is capacious and dissenting. […] But, against the high gloss white of anti-black America, blackness visible is a relief and a riot. That is something you learn when you learn black. Marvel? Disney? Please. I won’t belabor the obvious. But black visibility, black enthusiasm (in a time of death), black spectatorship, and black skepticism: where we meet is where we meet.”
   

• I’ve been pointing to information literacy and critical thinking skills as crucial design tools for a few years now. But in “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?”, Danah Boyd offers a phenomenally thoughtful look at what that discussion is missing (and the mistakes we might be making): “Developing media making skills doesn’t guarantee that someone will use them for good. […] [We need to] recognize [our] own fault lines, not the fault lines of the media landscape around [us]. I can imagine that this too could be called media literacy and if you want to bend your definition that way, I’ll accept it. But the key is to realize the humanity in ourselves and in others. We cannot and should not assert authority over epistemology, but we can [become] more aware of how interpretation is socially constructed.”
   

• The poet Lucie Brock-Broido passed away last week, and Stephanie Burt has written a gorgeous take on her impact: “You could see how much power her deliberately elaborate styles could hold and how much she could give away, how much she knew and how much she figured out about style and need and growth and fear and appetite and promises, and also about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wyatt and Sumeria and Scottish ghost stories and the catastrophes of American carceral capitalism and the compromises that power involves.” 

Lucie Brock-Broido was a poet and a teacher, and I was—am—a devotee of her work. Though I never met her (and both of us Cambridge residents), I’m heartbroken at her passing.

I picked up one of her books, Trouble in Mind, during my MFA program fifteen years ago; it immediately became one of the most beloved in my library, a lever in my own poetic development.

About a year after I found Trouble in Mind, my cousin was killed in a tragic accident, and that book was as close to a balm as I could find. “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements” is one of the few poems I’ve memorized, and one of the few pieces of writing I pass along to others without hesitation. As a result, I’ve always associated Lucie with grief and loss. And healing. 

She continues, but my point is: a stranger wrote that. She did not know me, yet she was able to render my inconsolable experiences into something legible. Something that connected.

Thank you, Lucie.

Finally, because grief is a constant: it’s been over three weeks since the Parkland shooting. I hope we carry on the momentum that the student survivors have built (on the foundation laid by Black Lives Matter activists, domestic violence survivors, and the survivors of too many instances of gun violence to count). 

Fuck the NRA. Melt the guns. And, short of that, consider donating to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence or the March for Our Lives (happening on March 24).

Friends. I’m so tired.