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This letter was inspired by an essay called Critical Poly 100s by Kim Tallbear in Shapes of Native Nonfiction edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. In the essay, Tallbear shares hundred-word long fragments that she had started writing as a part of an online writing group. She traces the form to the University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard in 2009. I found Tallbear’s essay work really well and wanted to give it a try myself, especially since I tend to err on the side of being too wordy. Below are five 100s distilling some of what I have experienced and thought about since my last letter.
CENTIGRADE SCALE*
I do Warrior I and II and, briefly, III. I wobble in Tree. I jump to Chaturanga every time but sometimes my core betrays me. To lift my whole body, I lean forward and push the floor away. I slack-off in Lolasana; class is almost over and my upper body is weak. I lie down in my final pose, looking for stillness. I find you. There’s a pinch at the edges of my eyes. I’m crying ‘cuz I love you. I’m not (yet) but I do (always).
The teacher said, “you’re stronger than you think”, but that was about handstands.
***
I put on my leaving-the-house face. A strong brow: I line beneath the hairs with an angled brush, then above, then crosshatch between. I use at least two eyeshadows. I smear sparkle high on my cheekbones, generously spread that highlight with a fluffy brush. I put a faint gold in the ‘v’ of my lips, cover them in a sticky purple. I blow-dry my hair over a round brush, straighten out any signs of having slept with my head actually touching the bed.
The cashier at the Apple store says, “you’ll be fine”, but that’s about my broken computer.
***
The food is in boxes, the boxes on a library cart, the library cart in my office. I send reminder emails and reminders for those emails. When the bus is late, I run to the other side of the building and find it, the driver bored with waiting. The bus company’s hold music is aggressively classical; the bus driver repeatedly plays American Pie upon pick up a day later. By the third time I think I’m starting to get it, but we get home before I can really tell.
A friend says, “people are reacting the way I hoped”, but that’s about telling them to love themselves.
***
A colleague is back in town for the first time in a while. They stop by my office unannounced to ask about a talk I gave in March. It stuck with them though I secretly hadn’t wanted to give it at all. I can’t remember their face in the room, only the face of a friend I saw that evening. We talk about mismatched periods, curves, windings, chaos. They ask about my job prospects, I counter-ask.
The colleague says, “that’s quite a story”, but that’s just about how I got here.
***
My mom offers to send a dress, some seeds and dried fruits. I ask her for a deck of Italian cards. Later, my dad asks if we ever finalized our plans, in between bocce and soccer updates. I wonder if my brother is overhearing these conversations and playing intermediary, but he only tells me about making pizza. He struggled with stretching the dough and spice levels. I promise myself we’ll be getting pizza together in New York soon, laughing about food feuds.
My boyfriend says, “I guess we have a date now”, but that’s not going to change anything.
*Centigrade scale is another name for the Celsius scale used to measure temperature. In Latin ‘centi’ means hundred and in Celsius the boiling point of water is at hundred degrees (under standard pressure). The centigrade scale is used colloquially all over the world but the SI unit used in science is degree Kelvin which is calibrated so that zero Kelvin is the absolute zero rather than tying the unit to a less universal property such as the boiling point of water.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: After writing this section in my last letter, I zeroed in on two fairly specific questions I wanted to work on answering in the coming weeks. They stayed at the top of my to-do list almost every day since, but I only made shaky progress on one. I also set out to start writing a chapter for my thesis and have, luckily, made more tangible progress on that front.
Partly, I have been slow in my research work due to spending a pretty substantial amount of time co-organizing and then co-facilitating the Retreat for Women and Gender Minorities in Physics and Astronomy (WGMPA) and then another one (mere ten days later) under the umbrella of a mentoring program I help run. These retreats typical involve twenty or thirty people and co-organizing really means everything from reserving a campsite and buying food to putting together workshops on mental health and inclusion and planning fun games such as water balloon dodge ball with a physics theme twist. It’s a lot of fun and a great opportunity to build community, but also just an objectively intimidating amount of work.
While the WGMPA retreat wasn’t solely my brainchild and it has been generously funded by a dedicated grant a faculty member was awarded last year, I am the only organizer who did not graduate since its inaugural run. Since I firmly believe that these events are important and worthwhile, I wanted to make sure that this year’s retreat is even better than the one that seemed to generally receive good reviews last year. Bringing together folks in age groups ranging from college freshman to staff members before classes start, this is one of the best opportunities there are for creating an environment where folks can really connect and build off of each other’s good energy. The organizing group that came together this summer really took that seriously and put together an ambitious schedule. It was a pretty exhausting, but the two days of workshops and activities we managed to execute ultimately left me feeling good and hopeful. Going on the other, longer retreat that included many mentor-mentee pairs from my department and repeating a lot of the tasks I had just checked off my to-do list just a days before, was tiring but slightly less nerve-wracking and the mentoring program leadership team worked together really well.
I routinely complain about the unsustainability of simultaneously being a graduate student and an organizer but knowing this is my last retreat season does feel more sweet than bitter. I came home from the second retreat very tired and immediately ran off to meet a student who couldn’t make the trip so it does not seem that I will run out of things to do on this front until I actually physically leave Illinois. Even then, however, a part of me hopes I will end up at another physics department committed to actively building community and facilitating important conversations amongst its members. When they work well, these efforts are always infectious in the best way possible.
On a related note, I submitted my first postdoctoral job application on September 1st. I spent a day or so in the week before that deadline trying to write a cover letter, something I have literally never done before, and clean up my CV. I agonized over my research statement and was incredibly grateful when a few friends offered to give it a read-through and help with both the structure and the fact that I routinely cannot spell words like ‘strength’. Eventually I just had to click ‘submit’ and hope for the best. I am pretty terrified of hearing back about this particular opportunity (it’s a great one) but also quite antsy about the uncertainty of the wait. As my thesis is due sometime in late January or early February and the fall semester always goes by more quickly than it seems like it should, I am starting to realize this will be an odd few months for me, full of new challenges, new skills and all sorts of transitional business to take care of. I really hope I will learn how to handle it all better both professionally and emotionally.
LISTENING: One of my favorite podcasts has been discussing content related to H. P. Lovecraft all month which led me to revisit The Great Old Ones and their heavily themed death metal. Though I have never cared all that much for reading Lovecraft himself, I very much enjoy this band’s take on his themes and their first two record are close to excellent.
I have also, as may be obvious from above, been listening to Lizzo a whole lot. I don’t really have an overly intellectualized take on Cuz I Love You; it’s a fun, self-loving, at times humorous, record that draws on many pop music references (as Janelle Monae, Lizzo has a connection to Prince and occasionally sounds like something to an heir to at least some eras of his musical output, especially in the middle portion of the deluxe edition of the album) and makes for great listening when you want to run a few extra miles or just perk up a bit while walking to work.
Finally, I checked out two new releases this past week: Hope Drone’s Void Lustre and Entombed AD’s Bowels of Earth. The former is somewhat gloomy, at times very atmospheric post metal that I often fall far while the latter is faster, more aggressive and just overall really solid metal in the more traditional sense of the genre. I liked them both.
On the podcast front, this episode of Radio Diaries titled Vanishing New York details the lives of a few people in professions that will almost certainly disappear soon. One of them is a seltzer delivery man, another a sales assistant at a lingerie store. They all come across as characters more than real people but maybe that is a welcome reminder to all of us that looking from the outside in most lives seem a little contrived and unreal. The simple composition of the pieces made me think this episode would be somewhat complementary to this letter. On a similar note, this interview with a Native American woman in her 80s featured on Home of the Brave also comes across as highly improbable – her life includes taming wild horses, sailing the world and fast cars – and quite fascinating. Given that the format of this letter was inspired by a Native author, it seemed appropriate that I encountered this incredibly rich (and at times incredibly sad) story of a Native life as I was finishing it. Finally, this episode of NPR’s Rough Translation about the very conscious construction of race as a political and economic category in Brazil sort of blew me away. It really made me confront the fact that growing up in a very, very white country definitely meant I could lose sight of the fact that very often the way we act on race has little to do with the shades of our skin and so much to do with what we think race is. (Something similar is explored in this episode of The Stakes from WNYC, examining the changing position and perception of certain European immigrants that have been ‘whitened’ over time purely do the presence of other groups that could be even more marginalized.)
READING: I finished the essay collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction that I mentioned above about two weeks ago, and really enjoyed it. Despite its very long and very academic introduction arguing the contrary, I have to admit that I came to it with something of a colonialist or settler attitude and expected my reading experience to be more of an immersion in an unfamiliar culture than a study of writing forms and techniques. Certainly, many of the essays in this collection, all penned by writers with Native American ancestry, do explore topics specific to Native life and related means of marginalization and oppression. Authors share family and personal histories, discuss tribal traditions and often delve into, sadly, half-forgotten Native languages and dialects. However, there is also lots to learn about ‘shape’ or ‘form’ of non-fiction here. Through the book’s 250-ish pages, one encounters a small wealth of lyrical and personal essays that are as interested in how they are making a point as with what that point is. Though some are better than others and not every piece swept me of my feet, I found reading this collection to be very engaging and as inspiring to me as someone who wants to write essays as it was educational to me as someone who knows very little about Native American history and culture. I hope to carry some of the knowledge on both fronts into future writing projects.
I have also been making slow progress on Asja Bakić’s short story collection titled Mars. I picked this book up in the library on a whim because the author’s name sounded like they were from my part of the world and the book was blurb-ed quite positively by Jeff VanderMeer. In some sense it is perverse for me to say anything about the style of the stories in this collection as I am reading it in English translation instead of the original text which I could certainly understand – Bakić lives in Zagreb and writes in Croatian. However, that bit of dissonance aside, she is certainly doing something interesting, often presenting stories with unclear punchlines plot-wise but a definitive feeling of it all being a ‘zinger’ so clever you can’t always tell what exactly it’s about. I’m enjoying this punchiness but also the somewhat cold, mater-of-fact-ness with which the reader is briefly thrown into worlds that are often given only the most minimal backstory. There’s almost no embellishing here but the texts still feel rich. I guess I’ll eventually have to track this book down in my mother tongue because I’m quite intrigued by it so far.
WATCHING: I finished season one of Marvel’s The Punisher on Netflix and moved on to season two. When I last wrote about The Punisher I was fairly conflicted about even watching it and that unease certainly stuck with me all the way through the end of the show’s first season. Though Frank’s friendship with Micro became warmer and the story of how they were both betrayed became more enraging, the sheer amount of violence the last few episodes displayed almost pushed me to abandon this story all together. Jon Bernthal spends so much time covered in blood and letting out nothing but grunts and bloody guttural noises that it is easy to forget how much life he can actually bring to the Castle role when the script is not just a gorefest. It all felt exploitative and slightly unnecessary though there is a strong argument for this sense of discomfort with violence being exactly the point of focusing the show on a story about something like futility of revenge. Frank Castle is not a cool guy, The Punisher is not an aspirational vigilante and it’s all just ugly and off-putting, not the kind of thing anyone should consider laudable or normal. However, this is an argument that I could buy even without watching twenty-minute torture scenes in numerous consecutive episodes.
At the same time, season one of The Punisher does end on a somewhat hopeful note. As a viewer I finally felt like I could maybe allow myself to acknowledge some of Bernthal’s charm and like Frank a little by the time the last episode ended. This is where season two picks up and it was slightly devastating to know that just the existence of season two means he will soon return to being a bloodbath machine. This hit hurts even more after Castle is allowed a brief affair with a gorgeous bartender named Beth in the opening of the season, and their one night together is shown in a surprisingly wholesome way (this show is for some reason really good at depicting sex and intimacy), even if their morning after scenario does lean very heavily into a number of tough-but-good-guy-gets-the-girl-with-baggage-and-they-sorta-manage tropes. But then all hell breaks loose, and Frank is just a grunting, bloody mess again, this time on the road sort of protecting a lying teenager from a religiously inclined evil mastermind. And an old villain makes a comeback in a very comic book-y fashion, loss of memory and an affair with his psychiatrist included.
Throughout season two, I was never fully sure what Frank’s motivation for more mayhem (habit?) really was now that he seemed to have made peace with avenging his family. This made the new storyline harder to follow and overall less compelling. The plot started off slow and the few new characters began and remained underdeveloped and without much emotional depth. Frank was given some warm parenting moments with Micro’s children in season one, and though some were cliché and pretty ham-fisted, Bernthal brought very believable emotion to, making them some of season one’s best. In light of that, it makes sense for a follow-up season to try and pair him with a younger side-kick pursuing her own revenge. Amy, the teenager, is at times a great balance to Frank and does ask all the right questions in some episodes but because the show insists on two villains and two storylines, she is simply not on screen enough to feel as real as some of the characters from season one. Her connection with Frank is touching but even at the very end of the show, I could not quite put together much about her backstory. What happened to her to make her susceptible to this psychopathic father figure? The show just takes it on faith that hinting at her vague emotional baggage and tragic upbringing is enough to settle this question.
My problem with Amy was in part indicative of my larger problem of why the story had to turn Frank into a ruthless killer again. Part of me did often wish for a world in which Frank Castle is a slightly problematic New York dad (accent and all) rather than the Punisher for the sake of every character in the world he actually got. The uncomfortable truth though is that to a large extent this season of The Punisher tried to deal with people who are still traumatized due to the mechanics of Frank’s tying up of his own story. This has always been a show about trauma and revenge and it is somewhat compelling to argue that if season one was all about Frank dealing with his, then there has to be a follow up centering all the people that have to deal with the fallout of that, extremely violent, process. Trauma propagates and the show just reports on how far it has reached. This is clearly true of agent Madani and Billy Russo. The latter is haunted by not being able to fully remember his trauma which is an interesting juxtaposition to Frank who is constantly reliving his and clinging onto that memory more than anything else. As one of the villains of the season Russo is quite successful though his accomplice and lover psychiatrist is poorly written and just hits on way too many empty clichés. In the end, neither Frank nor Russo really get a second chance though for a brief episode or two it seems like they both might, though in slightly unconventional ways.
The other villain of The Punisher’s second season, John Pilgrim, fell really flat for me. Though there were interesting aesthetic choices here and there and he was certainly not spared any violence, in part to mimic some of Frank’s own experiences, this character just came off us a dull and predictable. There is a conspiracy angle to Pilgrim’s plotline and maybe some weak commentary on politics and money and power and whatnot, but the show was much better when it was couching those concerns within military and intelligence agencies than when trying to build up and introduce a whole other group. Pilgrim is a man with a dark past, a man who kills for hire, a man with a strong moral code nonetheless, and a man willing to sacrifice everything for his family so clearly, he is meant to incentivize the viewer to rethink all of those qualities in Frank. I wish this had been implemented better because the ending of the season, and the show’s Netflix iteration, seems to do away with all and any nuance contrasting Frank and Pilgrim may have engendered. When the final credits rolled I felt like I should have been relieved for Pilgrim not having lost everything and having managed to make a turn in his, at that point pretty gnarly, trajectory but really I was just disappointed to watch the final few shots and see Frank lean-in into the conviction that he was always meant to be an avenging murder. In one final misstep, his last rampage is made to look cartoonishly cool – a regrettable choice for closing a season that was probably pretty unnecessary to begin with.
I really meant to watch the second season of Mindhunter after finishing The Punisher but fully knowing I will only have time to watch it in bits and pieces I lazily fell into another super hero show and promised myself I’d give David Fincher’s work the consideration it deserves over some break or impromptu vacation. The show I settled on was CW’s Black Lighting which is based on a DC comic. I haven’t made it very far into the show so I cannot say much other than that the comic book and super hero tropes are familiar and comforting and that the political implication of having a mostly black cast are handled better than I expected (the show very much tries to bring in contemporary politics such as police brutality or confederate monument debates into its world). I am not wildly intrigued by Black Lighting’s conundrums about choosing between vigilantism and the safety of his family or deciding when murder is a step too far with bad guys because TV has hit a point of superhero saturation where these issues are fairly standardly addressed on the small screen, but they are also not lazy enough to put me off from watching. Maybe the most interesting thing about the setup here is that the viewer is confronted with his comeback story rather than his origin story which does leave a bit more room for creativity and unexpected twists. And, hey, there are some decently written female characters (some even do science) and someone openly identified as a bisexual without the show making it a big deal, so how much can I complain about my mindless dinnertime entertainment anyway.
EATING: I saw a new doctor recently and all that got me is another month or so of restrictive eating and a few pretty intimidating tests looming in my future. In other words, this has not been the most exciting time in my kitchen. I’ve mostly been roasting squash and eggplant, sautéing greens and throwing tofu or quinoa alongside everything. Or I defaulted to noodles and oatmeal, all staples in my kitchen. Things got a bit more involved while I was attending retreats (I’ve been in charge of all the cooking for the past few years) and, with the irony of having to cook meat for a cabin’s worth of people while being the only vegan in the group not being lost on me, I put together a few fairly nice meals, a taco spread, a carb-y pasta lunch and a middle-eastern themed dinner (featuring my favorite tahini and lemon dressing) included.
I was also fortunate enough to be invited to a friend’s home for a home-cooked meal that I contributed some chocolate and fruit rolls to, and an impromptu lunch with some colleagues at my favorite local vegan restaurant (I’ve missed my weekly visits). Both of these meals made my stomach feel not great but the otherwise good feelings I get from sharing a meal with someone mostly outweighed that. I grew up almost never eating alone, in a family where having dinner together was a must and almost everything was made in the home, so eating dinner by myself while watching snippets of violent Marvel shows often feels melancholy and suboptimal. Once this semester settles into a routine and I hopefully get a bit more medical help, I really want to cook with friends more and host more dinners in order to scratch this particular emotional itch.
The recipe I am sharing below is a fairly simple one, especially if you buy your roasted red peppers jarred and already have some seeds on hand (they help add creaminess and protein), but also pretty versatile. It’s a slightly thick cream full of umami flavor and it can work as a dressing, a spread in a sandwich or even in tacos or wraps if you’re feeling un-traditional. Next time I make it, I really want to use it as a sauce for some mix of rice noodles and spiralized zucchini as well since it would make for a great noodle-heavy dish that can be eaten cold and straight out of the fridge.
For about 4 servings, you will need
2 roasted red peppers
1.5 tablespoon peanut butter (preferably natural, almond butter works as well)
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
2-3 teaspoons soy sauce or tamari
Juice of ½ to ¾ of a lime
2 tablespoons pepitas (or sunflower seeds)
1 tablespoon hemp hearts (or almonds, more sunflower seeds or pine nuts)
Pinch of salt and cayenne, to taste
Put all the ingredients in a blender or a food processor and blend until smooth and creamy, thinning with a bit of warm water if needed
Taste and adjust salt and spiciness levels
No tips - adjust this to fit your taste and pantry then pour it on everything