Books
💬📚 “Those who mother are the sanitation workers of bodies— handling the refuse, the filth and putrescence, living in the stink.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
For Garbes, mothering is a type of care work not reserved exclusively for parents.
Want to read: Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin 📚
Thanks for the rec, @agilelisa!
🔖📚 Read As a Queer Author, I Thought I Had to Come Out Before My Books Did.
Excellent piece about the dangers of outing anyone before they’re ready. Nods to Becky Albertalli & Kit Connor, who both experienced this. 💔
📚💬 “Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity. True allyship lives in relationships, true solidarity requires giving up some comfort, material resources, and power—and sharing it with others.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “The perspective mothers bring to their jobs—whether it’s law making, coalition building, project management—is that family and care work are essential to life, not an inconvenience.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “We are entrusting that which we say is most precious—our children, our future— to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? What does that say about our priorities as a society? Our priorities as individuals?” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “Childcare professionals, many of them mothers, are three times as likely to live in poverty as workers in other professions.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “Weekends aren’t time off for parents; they are two long days of caregiving.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “Early on in quarantine, I found myself thinking, ‘What is the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time?’ The answer clearly wasn’t writing an article or making a podcast, but rather, keeping my family, and my community, safe and healthy.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
🔖📚 Read The Art of Reading While Feeding (with a Newborn).
I love articles about how other people enjoy things that aren’t necessarily parenting-related as they parent. Good stuff here.
📚🍳Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies from I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To)
Cooking is really hard with chronic illness, because both pain and fatigue reduce your options for homemade food that won’t eat up all your energy for the day.
When Suzanne Scott mentioned the cookbook I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) at the Fan Cultures/Food Cultures session at FSN North America, citing the ease of prepping its recipes when you’re exhausted, I immediately put it on hold at the library.
I picked it up over the weekend. Today I made my first recipe in it: Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies. TL; DR: It’s tasty and I still had energy left after making it.
Right away the book delighted me by including all prep work in the written instructions rather than ingredients. Author Ali Slagle doesn’t say “Fresh shallot, finely chopped” in the ingredients list. Instead, it’s the first step in the recipe. Slagle also encourages substitutions.
I modified the recipe a bit to make it even friendlier for my chronically-ill self. Here are some photos with explanations.
The first change is that I subbed garlic powder in for chopped shallot. Target didn’t have shallots and I didn’t want to go to another store. Plus, I already had garlic powder on hand.
The second change is that I used canned diced green chiles instead of chopped fresh chile. I’m a spice wimp and once again Target had limited selection.
I then followed the recipe as written, using canned black beans, salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.
Slagle suggests chopping and adding veggies right before serving but I wanted to do that in advance, so I sliced celery and cucumber and stored them in a Mason jar to keep them crisp until serving time. They’ll only keep in the fridge for 3 or 4 days, but so will the beans.
When it was time for lunch, I spooned a quarter of the beans into a bowl, then pulled some celery and cucumber out of the jar and stirred it all together. It was a lovely, easy lunch.
(The real star of this photo is my beautiful new kitchen counter.)
Finished reading: Snowbound with the CEO by Shannon Stacey 📚
Sweet, short. Stacey wastes no time in making things steamy, but leaves plenty to the imagination.
📚 Went to the library to pick up my hold on I Dream of Dinner (so You Don’t Have To): Low-Effort, High-Reward Recipes and Nona the Ninth was waiting for me on the shelf beside it. 😍
📚 Finished reading An Introduction to Media Fan Studies by Lori Morimoto.
A super accessible introduction with helpful paraphrases of jargon-filled pre-fan studies cultural studies scholarship and many new directions for future reads. Highly recommend.
💬📚 “‘Pure,’ ideologically unadulterated consumption/fandom may be a possibility, but it’s not what most media fans experience or enact.” Lori Morimoto, An Introduction to Media Fan Studies
What’s that? Oh, just a quick pamphlet bind of Lori Morimoto’s An Introduction to Media Fan Studies 📚
💬📚 “The acafan… is one who is able to occupy the spaces of both fandom and academia and speak authoritatively on both.” A Fan Studies Primer, “Introduction,” edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams
Finished reading: Smith of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚
Reading my way through Wyngraf’s Appendix C (for cozy!).
💬📚 “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
📚💬📝 “…the work of critical thinking and theorizing is itself an expression of political praxis that constructs a foundation wherein individual action can be united with collective struggle.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “Critical writing counts for very little when critics speak about ending domination… in our work without changing individual habits of being…” bell hooks, remenbered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “The point is not to render ideas less complex—the point is to make the complex clear.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “I write with the intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
📚💬📝 “All academics write but not all see themselves as writers.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work