Sweet as Summer Vacation

back soon, babes

It’s time for a little break! I’ll be back in your inbox on August 28th, after a little seaside vacation and some down time. In the mean time, I’ve collected a few of my favorite pieces since I started this project in March 2022. I hope you’ll take a chance to read the ones you haven’t read before and share any that resonate with you. When you’re not taking your own break, that is. And I’ll see you soon.

On Queer Books and Old Journals (April 2022)

I read too much as a kid, built too many dreams out of two dimensions, slipped into too many other skins. I spent a lot of time searching for the feelings I read about in books, trying to recreate that certainty. We were best friends once, but I was too insecure to believe in it and too reckless to stop poking the bruise, too self-righteous to stop demanding that you account for the sin of not loving me like the books said you would. 

We Can Dream Bigger (July 2022)

But we have to be willing to do it. We have to remember and act on the essential human dignity that we claim to believe in. We have to stop assuming an “us” who are responsible and hardworking and a “they” who are taking advantage of the system and therefore of us. We have to remember that there is nothing a person can do that makes them undeserving of food, clean clothes, and a safe place to sleep. We have to remember, in the words of Mayor Carter, that there is no them, no us - “there’s just one big ole we.”

It’s the Calculus that Kills You (October 2022)

Of course we are outraged. These Republican politics are designed for maximum cruelty with minimum productivity. They do not want to solve problems, they want to exploit them and the people most impacted for their own politician gain. But if politics is the project of caring for each other, then perhaps political savviness is not to be cynically unmoved, but to be pushed further, from outrage into activism, not to ignore the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers but to remind our fellow Americans and our fellow voters that behind every issue are people that deserve dignity and opportunity.

Mansfield Park, Marriage, and Me (March 2023)

But Fanny did not want to marry him. A romantic notion, given the eminently practical approach to marriage imbued throughout Austen’s work. And an acknowledgment that, at its heart, spending your life with someone, taking their presence and needs and desires as your responsibility is much more than a political or financial or social transaction. True freedom, true independence is the ability to live your life as you choose whether you are married or not; to be able to marry whom you wish regardless of others religious or moral (in)sensibilities; and to know that the choice is yours and your partners and no one else’s.

Planning for the Future in the Age of Aquarius (April 2023)

It’s not just me. In the last week, in every political Q&A, discord, or slack community I am a part of, someone asked if this is hopeless. Will we ever be able to do anything about guns, if dead children aren’t motivation enough? How do you make policy with people who would rather ban health care for trans kids than the guns that murder them; who want more police and harsher penalties for every crime except the ones they themselves commit? If every election is the most important election of our lifetime, when do we sleep?