Jeannette

"Live. Hold out. Survive."

(from Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler)

Currently...

📚 Reading: Zinn's A People's History of the United States / Butler's Parable of the Sower (both have been on my tbr list too long!)

🎧 Listening to: Moon Walker (discovered them today)

📺 Watching: Somebody Somewhere (heard it had a great ending which is rare so had to check it out)

"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

"That which inspires us to our greatest good is also the cause of our greatest evil."

Arcane, season 2

it's like a lot of people watched Children of Men and instead of seeing the film as an indictment of capitalist realism they thought, "oh, low birth rates, national decline, very scary, gotta do something."

Less Than Human (Smith) 

Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (Rapp)

Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (McAfee)

The Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patiarchy (Levings) 

The Message (Coates) 

On Tyranny (Snyder) 

All are highly recommended.

My history with nonfiction goes like this. Religious texts and parenting books till mid-30s. Works by philosophers, humanists, atheists till mid-40s (I deconverted). Then almost nothing but fiction for a decade and a half (I'm old) until this year. I've read six so far. They are...

#booksky

Grey cat

Here's our baby. She has opinions.

If I didn't think our cat would runway right up that tail then I'd definitely want one in our living room!

Also hello, new follower here 👋

This is how you become a writer: just pick one of the things that is deeply wrong with you. Make it a character. Now send it on a self-help journey or try to kill it. Now call it a book.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Then I had to get this ornament because it matched the little tinsel tree, and Amy has named it Freddie the Yeti.

And yes we're decorating early because depression.

Tinsel tree with colorful yarn pom poms.

Trying to find bits of joy where we can. My daughter Amy found this odd, little tinsel tree with colorful yarn pom poms and we love it.

"The best hiding place was love." Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison has me thinking of "love covers a multitude of sins" in a completely different way.