Classification of Invariants
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CLASSIFICATION OF INVARIANTS*
I am a Capricorn sun, Libra moon, Libra rising. I am also a scientist, so I feel obligated to tell you that astrology is bogus.
***
Krista Tippet starts almost every On Being interview in the same way. She asks her guest to talk about the kind of spirituality they were exposed to while growing up. She is not the most organized or the most focused interviewer, often seemingly just reacting with her own knowledge and impressions instead of following a composed line of questioning. She does, however, know how to set the tone. As she is also an experienced journalist, this is likely deliberate, making space for being in conversation rather than being interviewed. The guests on On Being are poets, artists, and spiritual leaders. They’re the kind of people that run silent retreats, write about joy or start pop-up churches. Sometimes they are a thinker of some more formal sort, maybe an academic, but Tippet’s opening question still forces them to get a little squishy and a little soft with how they present themselves at the outset. They all play along, and they all have something to say. Later on, Tippet often brings up grand ideas – like capital-L Love – and they continue playing along, arguing their own version of some of these powerful and weighty words with utmost sincerity. In some interviews she simply asks ‘what does it mean to be human in your view?’.
I am fascinated by Tippet’s show, and her overall project, because it often strikes me as something that was engineered just for me to scoff at. I should probably yell ‘I am a scientists and you can’t measure any of this’ at my phone every five minutes. Yet, I am drawn to it. I have found it soothing in some moments of heavy uncertainty, when the lofty words and promises of love and kindness present the opposite vision of the world to the heavy, blank feeling that can forcefully settle behind my eyes. I asked some friends recently about how often they cry and learned I was in the minority; I barely ever do but I seem to get to the edge fairly often. Instead of cathartically letting it all out I guess I listen to mildly spiritual podcasts.
***
Capricorns are stubborn, driven and organized. Capricorns don’t half-ass anything, but they also don’t really let people in.
***
Over the past few years I have become more and more involved with organizing that transcends throwing together a women’s coffee hour in my department or moderating a panel on graduate student life. I have taken an officer role in the graduate employee union that represents teaching and research assistants at my university, and I have been a more or less formal consultant for the Access Network. In my latest role with the latter I worked with a team that is trying to chart out a proposed expansion of the network. We want to fold in mentoring and equity programs in physics and STEM from more institutions, connect them to the programs that already exist within the network and have the National Science Foundation help all that financially. It sounds simple but it’s not in the same way that a conversation about the goals of a union should be, but most certainly are not either.
Working in the organizing and advocacy space has two big components. One is purely logistical and can be boiled down to mundane details that ensure that things can actually keep happening. It’s the annoying but accessible tasks like reserving rooms, maintaining websites, sending emails, printing flyers, filing away reimbursement forms and receipts. The other involves thinking about organizational structures, core values and what I recently heard someone describe as ‘visioning’. Since I have been trained as a theorist, this part of the work appeals to me almost by default as it necessarily requires abstract thinking and trying to assemble some bigger picture of what an organization may be trying to do. But it also terrifies me since, unlike in physics, there is no mathematical skeleton to latch onto and putting ideas into practice involves real people and not just atoms or chunks of metal. Real people are complex, often full of contradictions, and if they are harmed or slighted the intentions that led to that become secondary. The expansion task force I served on recently spent hours debating why we want to expand and why we want to bring in more minority serving institutions. We all agreed from the outset that both of these were very likely the correct thing to do but before designing an application process or planning an advertising campaign we had to do more. We had to examine not only whether we actually agree but also why. Personal self-reflection can be excruciating (we all like to think we are fundamentally good people who act from a fundamentally good place) and institutional or organizational self-reflection is that but exponentiated.
Libra is a people pleaser and wants love and attention. You flirt during Libra season; you make a lot of friends all the time if you are a Libra.
***
When I was first starting college, I knew I wanted to be a physicist. When I thought about that physicist, she was just nebulously doing physics and nothing more specific. I learned what condensed matter physics was when I was a junior in college, and then I learned about AMO physics. The person I was dating at the time, and my best friend, worked in AMO labs but did very different things. My ex would talk about Zeeman cooling and Efimov trimers and my friend had all the words about SQUIDs and Josephson junctions. I learned to say Gross-Pitaevskii and Thomas-Fermi and unitary Fermi gas. We had all overnight become a different kind of physicist and started speaking a different language. An acquittance who has somehow still stayed in my orbit years later went from high energy physics experiment to machine learning. Another messaged me on Facebook a few years ago when I was looking to read about Chern-Simons theory; their interest was purely mathematical, and I was trying to say something about vacuum expectation values of Wilson loops. Looking from the outside we all look like we are doing the same thing. From the inside of the academic bubble we are barely able to understand each other. A few days ago, I was apologizing to a first-year graduate student I am mentoring for being able to talk about research but offer very little specific guidance as they study dark matter detection and I have spent years losing sleep over cold atoms. Even as I write the phrase ‘cold atoms’ I can’t help but think about how misleading it is – they are chilled to close to absolute zero, only a specific kind of physicist would describe that by the same word you might use for a well-chilled drink.
Every field, no matter how small has its own language. To be successful in our more and more narrow areas of interest we have to master that language and avoid the pitfalls of assuming that others understand it or use it in the exactly the same way. I saw a gag in some awful sitcom long ago where a will-they-won’t-they couple yells deep dark secrets at each other, and one is “I don’t think I can actually read; I just memorized a lot of words”. Year one of physics research can feel a little bit like that. As I work on my thesis, I am discovering that same is true of year six.
***
Your sun sign is sort of like your Ego; if who you are were distilled into being a job this would be it. Your moon sign captures the more emotional aspects of how you move through the world. The moon reflects your mood when you’re by yourself and most at ease. Your rising sign is about presentation. It governs the first impression you make.
***
In the organizing world, the jargon is almost as thick as in academia but it feels slightly more soft. We talk about making space, about community care, about checking-in, about not yucking yums, safe spaces, consensus decision making and the ouch/oops method. This softness can be deceiving: many of these mechanisms serve to provide an alternative or a remedy to the much darker and heavier backdrop of systemic marginalization, generational trauma and ever-present talk of microaggressions. So, you have to talk the talk and the talk quickly gets very real. Saying that you want to intentional build community means sometimes having to uncomfortably or awkwardly sit in a room with people you don’t know, struggling to keep the conversation going at times, barely getting a word in and feeling left out at other times. Saying you want to foster accountability means sometimes being called-in or called-out on a troublesome statement or action and training yourself to not immediately get defensive, to work past the point of feeling like you have just been called a bad person and that is the end of it all. Saying you want to decolonize your consumption or support workers’ rights abroad means not buying a thing you might like or supporting a business that made life that much more convenient just a week ago.
It is something of a trope for underrepresented people or people with mental health issues or trauma to talk about how much power and understanding they gain from knowing the right words and seeing their experience defined and codified in a way that feels objective and acutely real. The other side of that experience is learning new words and realizing that putting them into practice, making them real and embodied, requires often hard and never-ending work. As a more senior organizer from the Access Network recently reminded me, initiatives that aim to address big picture issues, and do so effectively, have to operate within some sort of an ‘unfinished business paradigm’ because otherwise it is extremely likely that not enough self-education and self-reflection is happening. I have attended a few leadership sessions meant to re-evaluate whether the Network has really been acting in line with its stated values and was stunned by how difficult those conversations can be every time. Not just difficult in the sense of being emotionally charged but also because there are lots of moving parts involved in how a group of people views a goal and what is considered as acting in line with it. Language is crucial here so we have to learn it, agree on it and never lose sight of the notion that acting on it may take a different shape in the future.
I’m a Capricorn sun, Libra moon, Libra rising. Basically, I am doomed to be an introverted extrovert or an extroverted introvert, to want people to love and adore me but also push them away when they try to get me to be vulnerable.
***
Janu Sirsasana B is one of the poses from the primary Ashtanga yoga series that made it into the Rocket yoga sequence I have been trying to learn in the past year. It is a seated pose which makes it somewhat less intimidating than the rest of the sequence, full of inversions and tough binds. It is also a really uncomfortable one as you have to fold over an extended leg while sitting on the heel of the other leg which is bent at the knee. You reach for the foot of the extended leg to stretch that hamstring and open the hips. The bending action is in the pelvis, keeping a mostly long and straight spine and leading with the chest rather than rounding the back. You stare at your toes and try to breathe through the discomfort of the stretch while also not thinking about the awkwardness of the other heel having to be in contact with the edge of your butt. My Rocket instructor will often say ‘If you didn’t know where your pelvic floor is, well, you’re sitting on it’. I have stiff hamstrings so none of the versions of Janu Sirsasana are my favorite, but every time I hear that comment I wonder whether some fellow student just had a revelation.
A colleague who recently started practicing at the same studio told me, after their first week of classes, that if nothing else at least they learned where their sacrum is. I laughed because my experience had been the same and I had, especially from my standpoint as a non-native English speaker, spent the walks home after some of my first practices looking up terms from anatomy textbooks as well as Sanskrit on my phone. This experience is really a bit bizarre, learning to name and identify a body part you’ve always had but just never focused on. It is almost a Cartesian testament to how disembodied our sense of self can be, or how much we can lose touch with our bodies when we are thought to only value the life of the mind. For a while I kept telling any instructor that would listen about how I was a physicist and had written academic papers where gravity pulling down atoms was really important, but never really understood what gravity pulling down atoms really feels like until I tried doing arm balances and inversions.
Just like in my work on superfluid shells, gravity wins every time and I end up on the floor, in a shape different than intended. Turns out embodying words is hard, even when you think you really know what they mean.
***
At a potluck once a fellow union organizer scrunched up their immaculately made up face when I shared this, my usual caveat about being a scientist included, and in all seriousness asked whether being both a Capricorn and a Libra was a hard way to be.
***
Since English is my second language, one that I really had to learn, I have always been very aware of how my vocabulary changes over time and why. I have met other international students who have learned English by watching Friends or Desperate Housewives, and I have met a few who credited reading Harry Potter. Personally, I always claimed I sounded like I had learned to speak based on physics and philosophy textbooks, but I suspect that even in Croatian, my word choice has always been quite technical and my style bordering on overly verbose. Of course, the best way to learn to speak is by actually talking to others that speak the same language. I am guessing that now I sound mostly like people I am with: some Illinois-bred Midwestern sugar-coating mixed with a bit of Brooklyn brashness, NPR political language and colloquialisms tied to certain parts of the Internet. Similarly, being an organizer has changed the way I speak too. And more so than with learning pieces of jargon in my day job as a scientist or my perpetual state of being a podcast over-consumer, embracing this particular bit of language has changed the way I think and relate to others.
It is not at all revolutionary to claim that being able to name things helps us process them, but it can feel more than worthwhile to hold a conversation in which not everyone is just trying to use vague phrases like ‘weird’ and ‘uncomfortable’ to describe shade after shade of feelings and events. Sometimes knowing the right words leaves more space to act or opens up new opportunities to engage in ways that may have otherwise been obscured. Some of my work as an organizer has meant assessing how the work I have engaged with, alongside others, models structures of power and how it may perpetuate the kinds of oppression and supremacy that we see in the world at large. In an academic space, this can sometimes be addressed very concretely. For instance, the Access Network often makes it a rule that in mixed age groups, undergraduates can speak first if they want to – this can give more of a voice to the youngest members of the group, challenging the typical hierarchy where the older and more experienced folks run the show for everyone. In thinking this through, I learned about the ‘four I’s’ of oppression: institutional, internalized, ideological and interpersonal. Engaging with one necessarily makes one think of the rest and so the work spills over together with the language until you can make it more than words.
I hope that talking about community care means saying ‘Hi’ to more folks in the hallway, checking in on more familiar faces that seem to have faded from view. I hope that talking about compassion means asking folks what they need when they are in a bad place instead of giving advice and then actually doing that thing. I hope that talking about privilege means being more humble when confronted with someone who has come up in a different situation. I hope that sometimes it means speaking up instead of waiting for those people to put themselves at risk. I hope that talking about scarcity attitudes means resisting competition and comparison. I hope that talking about growth and unfinished business means forgiving a mistake made by someone who is also growing.
I see some of this in me – I catch myself acting on an instinct that feels like something I have cultivated by just wanting to be better and learning how to talk to myself about that process – and I hope I can keep fueling it further.
***
My partner is a Libra sun. Everyone adores him. We almost never fight.
I think I am fascinated with Tippet’s show because she is so adept in speaking a kind of language that seems so absent from my daily life. When she asks her guests about love or spirituality, or even the divine, it is with confidence that those words can be analyzed, defined, re-defined and elaborated upon. She can hold the ‘once we called it a macroscopic wavefunction but it is really more of an order parameter’ conversation about the essence of humanity because her jargon, and the framework that supports it and informs her interaction with the guest, are all set up for it.
One could argue that having these conversations in a meaningful and well-defined way is just a matter of having the appropriate training, of being exposed to enough philosophy and religion in an academic rather than a purely experiential sense. Many of us, however, simply don’t have chances to have that training or engage with those ideas as rigorous disciplines. A college class here or there or Googling around things that stuck out in Sunday school is rarely sufficient, and definitely does not imbue one with confidence necessary to take on these subjects that are simultaneously very large and lofty but also squishy and vague. And being exposed to a culture that spent so long redefining not caring as coolness certainly does not help. Growing up in the early aughts did not prime anyone for being interested in the true meaning of life beyond Douglas Addams jokes.
Anecdotally, millennials are much more interested in astrology than their parents. Less anecdotally, online publications report huge increases in astrology-related traffic and personal astrologers and astrology influencers seem to be thriving across all sorts of Internet-based platforms. I remember reading my horoscope in the back of the newspaper as a child. My mother also once had a student that gave her my natal chart, printed out on an early inkjet printer, now barely legible and severely faded. I never really cared until I started seeing queer kids my age, writers and poets and oddly dressed folks, bantering about their signs on social media. Something about the pseudo-scientific rigor and organization yet complete arbitrariness of how categories are actually assigned seemed to draw people in in the Tumblr days. It’s bigger now, more straight and definitely more heavily monetized, but millennials are still really buying into it.
It is maybe a tired stereotype to talk about millennials and losing hope in economic prosperity or the powers of neoliberalism, but the pop culture of our era seems to indicate that we don’t know how to deal with our feelings without being extremely over the top. Remember the emo era? Or the rise of reality TV where emotions are always theatrical and quite certainly reign supreme? And then there’s the whole practice of being called too sensitive, a snowflake, someone not ready to face the harsh reality of the ‘real world’. In some sense, millennials just have no chill by default, and no time or space carved out for rethinking our place in the universe with depth and calm. Astrology is sort of a shortcut.
Not only does subscribing to this ready-made system of personal characteristics and grander scale causalities carry the glow of something mildly spiritual, but it also gives a whole new immense vocabulary. An indirect vocabulary for expressing things about ourselves that may otherwise feel too intimate or vulnerable. You put a sun and a moon bow on it and suddenly it’s less serious, can be laughed off as a long ironic joke if the conversation goes awry. And we want the conversation, but many of us have been taught to prioritize the mechanical, the technological, the well-defined and quantifiable over waxing poetic about holding space for the universe within us. We were brought up to be near-utilitarians, to trust in smaller and smaller machines and bigger and bigger companies. We were mostly not told to read philosophy or have our own New Age moment as some past generations might have had. Now we’re all looking-up stars on our phones and figuring out whether we can afford therapy.
I’m not sure I’d just straight out tell you how often I feel starved for some good old-fashioned validation, but I am a Capricon Sun, Libra Moon so you may already have guessed it. And maybe I can still save some face and blame it on something like Saturn, something that I’m sure I won’t actually have to confront.
***
A week before Thanksgiving, a new friend looked at my chart and, in all seriousness, told me that they only now understood how I could have married a Libra
***
At Thanksgiving, a family friend told me how amazed they were with my work. They said they could not understand it because they were not a scientist, but that from their vantage point it looked like what I was doing was ‘applying math to the Infinite’.
Do you know that in mathematics you can actually classify infinities? I learned words for that when I was in college. A physicist only really talks about infinity when it is a problem though.
***
My husband, a social psychologist, says that astrology is just like a weird mashup of attachment styles and the big five personality traits. I wonder whether I can save us some future conversations by claiming that Capricorns have an anxious-preoccupied attachment style.
Best,
Karmela
*In physics, an invariant is a quantity that does not change if the system is transformed in some way. For instance, when physicists talk about conservation of energy and momentum, they really mean that those are invariants. If a system starts with some amount of energy and is then pushed forward in time, its energy will still be that same amount. In condensed matter physics of the last few decades, there has been much discussion about topological invariants. These invariants reflect global symmetries of some material such as being unchanged if time is reversed or all charges ‘flipped’ in the equations that describe the material’s physical behavior. Topological invariants can be classified according to these symmetries and something like a periodic table of topological materials has been constructed as a consequence.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: Since my last letter I applied to many jobs, in academic research and otherwise, and got rejected from a few. I got a little better at writing cover letters, combed through many physicists’ websites, and skimmed even more papers. I did this with a growing sense of panic but here and there excitement about someone’s research still broke through. Physicists are doing amazing things with ultracold atoms and photons and weird things like stackable fidget spinners and solving a lot of really complicated equations. I am happy to always re-learn this about myself – even when I am at my most exasperated the field that I have devoted so much time to can still amaze me. I’ve had a bad feeling about this job search from the beginning, and now that most deadlines have passed and the process will transition into mostly being a waiting game, possibly stretching deep into spring, I am trying to learn how to let that bad feeling go and roll with whatever punches come my way.
When I was not re-writing my research statement and then re-writing it again, I have been juggling different writing projects. Perhaps most importantly, my doctoral dissertation is currently a somewhat incoherent collection of almost 150 pages. Halfway through November I travelled to the East Coast and spent almost a month with my husband, trying to make sense of all that work I had hoarded over the years as we worked side by side in his kitchen, his office, numerous trains and my in-law’s living room. I am hesitant to say anything overly positive, maybe out of superstition, but I seem to be handling this whole endeavor fine. I returned to Illinois to a large envelope of paper copies of Chapters 2 and 7 annotated in pen, pencil and their animated handwriting and there were fewer revisions I had to do in the aftermath than I had expected. It is important for me to produce a document that will be pedagogical and useful for younger members of my research group in addition to summarizing my time in graduate school for my own benefit. It is therefore a relief to see that it does not seem to be a total trainwreck so far. I have also been co-writing two papers that I hope will be finished and submitted for publications before I leave my current university. This type of collaborative science writing often drags on, however, and nothing reveals snags in a project as much as trying to draft a rigorous four- or five-page presentation of it. I’m trying to be diligent about my parts, down to learning a few new numerical tricks to make better figures and double- and triple-check some of my theory with very rudimentary simulations, but I suspect I will be mentioning these two papers in this section in nontrivially many future letters.
Finally, a piece of my non-fiction writing has been published as a part of a storytelling project for scientists called The Xylom. I was overjoyed when the editor contacted me asking whether I’d like to write something for their platform, especially because I really appreciate the notion that we need to highlight that scientists are people too, and all people carry stories. The essay ended up being titled ‘I’m losing count’ and it is about my being international, living in the Midwest and negotiating a foreign language. It has lots of overlap with my writing here and the themes may be familiar to long time Ultracold readers. However, I feel flattered and excited to have the piece out there and really want to pursue more of such writing in the future.
LISTENING: Related to the essay above, I have something of a slate of podcasts that tap into thoughts about organizing, spirituality and friendship or relationships. In addition to On Being, there is Healing Justice, How to Survive the End of the World, Living in this Queer Body, Time Sensitive and Call Your Girlfriend. These shows vary in terms of format and production value or size of teams that make them, and not every episode of every show is life changing but they all get around exploring topics that seem squishy and vague but also absolutely essential. If I were putting together and existential crisis management kit, an episode or two from most of these would probably make it on there.
On a less anxious note, I also listened to all of Scattered which is narrated by the comedian Chris Garcia and tells the story of his father and their family history in Cuba. It’s a really funny but also really devastating story about immigration and family and I really enjoyed it.
To round-off my podcast recommendations, and I am sort of ashamed to admit this, I have also sort of gotten into listening to the Sean Caroll’s Mindscapes in which the theoretical physicist Sean Caroll interviews other scientists and thinkers on big themes in science, philosophy and technology and also sometimes just talks about things like quantum gravity an awful lot. I am always reluctant to spend even more time in the physics bubble than my profession forces me to but Caroll’s guests are interesting, they don’t shy away from big ideas and the physics of it all is not as ever-present as I feared it would be.
On the music front, I got around two really solid metal albums, one by Blood Incantation who’s music I’ve always liked a lot and one by Toxic Holocaust. The first is a death metal kind of affair with a darkly futuristic band and very much in my wheelhouse. The second is similarly interested in something like an ever closer dystopia but expressed through more of a speed metal approach. Toxic Holocaust feels pretty old-school, album art and somewhat problematic name included, and they pull it off very well.
Beyond metal, I spent a few weeks listening to The Comet is Coming a lot and really enjoying their futuristic jazzy sound, a type of music I honestly don’t know the jargon for, but that resonated with me and felt mildly mind-expanding. Their record Trust In the Lifeforce Of the Deep Mystery also introduced me to the poet Kate Tempest. Her album The Book of Traps and Lessons is not really music but also not really a poetry reading so the correct words escape me here as well but again I was pretty moved by it. The cadence of her voice is quite powerful and her words somewhat devastating.
Finally, one of my brothers-in-law turned me onto a whole lot of Zamrock after a few tracks showed up in a playlist Spotify was trying to push onto me and honestly this stuff is so good. It is a genre of rock from 70s Zambia, influenced by classic rock, psychedelia and funk and really channeling the best of those genres. Ngozi Family is great as is Musi-O-Tunya and WITCH. A lot of these artists are collected in two anthologies simply called Welcome to Zamrock! And I would very much recommend giving these a spin.
WATCHING: In the ever-expanding streaming landscape where every show feels like it’s trying to out-prestige the next and deliver not only gut-wrenchingly real feelings but also an artsy take on them, I am finding that I am too tired to be giving that much energy and emotional focus to TV shows. Left to my own devices, I’ve developed a bit of a TV fear of commitment and have been watching shows that are not necessarily super auteur-ish but feel digestible and familiar. I haven’t quite made it to the level of Blue Bloods or Law and Order but I have been watching the kind of series that I think my dad or my father-in-law enjoy. In this category, I watched all of Ozark and a season of The Sinner. Both are fine, the first more amusing than the second, and both sucked me in without getting too existential. I could recognize a lot of the beats and call a lot of twists, sorta tell myself I could see what the show was trying to do every once in a while, but I think that was what I was looking for. In other words, these shows are two fairly different kinds of solid crime TV but nothing revolutionary.
Similarly, I also started watching the oddly grim and soap-like adaptation of Archie comics, Riverdale. Maybe the only thing I need to say about this show is that it stars a mix of Twin Peaks, Disney Channel and Beverly Hills, 90210 almunae and that is exactly the mood of the series as well. The writing is extremely self-aware and characters often call-out the tropes they are embodying but then still over-act, over-dramatized and deliver a product that seems so artificial it might as well come wrapped in cellophane with a shiny ribbon on top. None of these people are real, they mostly have nothing to do with Archie, and this is certainly not quality content. I keep watching it though, partly because it is such an oddity, partly because taking joy in bad TV is one of the best postmodern joys there is.
While I was spending time with my husband, we caught up on two shows we’ve watched together in the past: Netflix’s German time travel extravaganza Dark and the very reliable hard sci-fi affair The Expanse on Amazon Prime. I was disappointed by Dark and pleasantly reminded how good The Expanse can be. The appeal of the first season of Dark was that it was moody and mysterious and leaned into its characters more than convoluted time travel schemes. In season two, character development and moodiness are minimal, and time travel is maximal. So many characters meet their past and future selves that it becomes hard to keep track and the mechanics of time travel are fully demystified with some sort of Higgs physics argument. I am not disappointed by the bad physics in this season, but I was bothered by how much of an overkill it was to try and bring it in through both dialogue and chunky special effects. The originally intriguing idea of time cycles and not being able to break chains of events has been fully overshadowed by unnecessary layers of conspiracy and near-didactic explanations for the most certainly confused viewer. Season three seems set up to be even more convoluted and show us even more versions of characters we got to know in season one, and I will probably not have patience for it. The Expanse is the exact opposite in that it is just a good old-fashioned space opera with spaceship battles, space walks, political intrigue and a stock character here and there. It does get complicated at times but mostly the show is not trying to be more than it is. It’s critiques of politics and social issues that one might recognize as similar to the real world do not overreach and are not necessarily the sole focus of the plot that, as this is all based on a series of books, just has to keep going. We’re still not fully caught up on The Expanse and I’m looking forward to watching more of it when I fly back East for the holidays.
Finally, as I am sure many people did, we used up some of our post-Thanksgiving laziness to spend over three hours of our lives watching Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman on Netflix. I feel quite unqualified to critique this movie and I feel even more like it was really not made for me. I enjoyed it but was not convinced that it is a masterpiece nor did it exactly live up to so much of the buzz around it. It is not bad, far from it, but there is little to it that is unexpected or truly new (except maybe some of the technology) and too many of the ‘he’s still got it’ famous actors seem to be wearing a character rather than embodying it. On some level, I understood the aspiration to tell a long story about a long life so that the final stages would be truly poignant. It is a compelling idea but the execution, for all the presumed old white male excellence surrounding it, just didn’t really click with me.
READING: Because it has been shamefully long since my last letter, I managed to finish reading a few books since then and mostly they have been really great. First, I finished the series of essays from the Atavist magazine collected in a book called Love and Ruin and, as I have mentioned before, I really enjoyed reading them for both quality of craft and really fascinating content. This is not a book that changed my life or made me cry at every page, but it armed me with some incredible fun facts while also being a tour de force in storytelling. Another book that I had been reading for quite a while and finally completed is Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. This is a collection of short stories that straddle the divide between horror and weird fiction with a feminist and queer bend. Machado is inventive and plays with the format often, and her prose is rich and full of life. I liked the voices of her first-person narrators and how embodied a lot of the prose seemed to be. And Machado’s approach to the politics of gendered bodies is complex – she is not all that interested in telling the reader how to feel as much as she just exposes them to a monstrous amount of raw emotion. For most of Her Body and Other Parties, this works really well.
I also started and finished another book of poetry (rediscovering poetry is still a strong theme for my reading habits this year) and picked up a book on politics, organizing and pleasure by an author I was first introduced to on one of the podcasts I have mentioned above. The poetry book was Fariha Roisin’s How to Cure a Ghost and it really blew me away. Roisin writes about being a young woman, about being a person of color and a daughter of immigrants, about being a Muslim, and about being mad. There is so much lived experience that we do not have in common, but her re-commitment to herself after years of self-denial and her finding beauty in a hometown or a home-cooked meal felt viscerally familiar. This book reminded me of Tommy Pico and Durga Chew-Bose in its contemporariness and being so of the millennial moment but also just so lush with pop culture and food but also raw pain just on the edge of being healed. I basically inhaled it. The other book is called Pleasure Activism and it is written and collected by adrienne maree brown who is an organizer, a facilitator, a healer, a scholar and a writer and co-hosts the How to Survive the End of the World podcast. I haven’t made it very far in this book but just getting through the introductory chapters seemed worthwhile, and like maree brown’s work may be a good philosophy to carry with me into the next year and the next decade. Here are some sentences from the opening of the volume:
“Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists”
and
“Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this plant.”
I hope to spend more time with this book in the coming weeks and use it as motivation to be less stiff and worried myself, at least not while the holiday season throws all sorts of cheer and goodness my way.
EATING: I did a whole lot of cooking for Thanksgiving and in the weeks leading up to it. I veganized a traditional walnut roll both of my grandma’s regularly make for a dinner party we had at my husband’s home. I made an extensive vegan dim sum spread with one of my brothers-in-law and his partner. And I made maple roasted brussels sprouts, whole baked cauliflower, candied yams and a vegan chocolate custard and cranberry pie for Thanksgiving. All of these were really successful, and I was really happy to cook for someone that is not me. I also met a friend at a vegan pop-up where there was some incredible cashew cheese and vegan Jamaican oxtails stew that ranked extremely high on my list of faux meat dishes. Having returned to Illinois, I’m taking some time to cook out of Amy Chaplin’s incredibly simple Whole Food Cooking Every Day and dream up everything I want to try and make for various Christmas parties that are coming up.
I’m not sharing a recipe in this letter, but since I was recently asked by a friend to round up some easy vegan snacks, I am including the savory part of that list below. I hope you’ll find it helpful in case you may be considering a flirtation with veganism in 2020 or just need ideas for how to consume less animal foods in general. If you have favorites along these lines, please let me know because I definitely love to snack.
Savory snack ideas:
1. Mix 1 tablespoon peanut or almond butter with a teaspoon of soy sauce, squeeze of lime juice or splash of rice vinegar, 1 teaspoon of maple syrup or a pinch of brown sugar, a bit of sriracha or red pepper flakes then add a bit of water to thin to however runny you’d like. Eat as a dip with crunchy vegetables like cucumbers, red bell peppers or carrots.
Extra tip: double the quantities and make the peanut butter mixture a bit more runny, then toss it all with rice noodles and some edamame for a cold noodle salad (add avocado and steamed kale to make this noodle bowl a whole meal)
2. Hummus with crunchy veggies or hummus on toast topped with roasted red peppers or avocado. For any variety of avocado toast, I’d recommend finishing with something acidic like lime or lemon juice and a good pinch of salt (add pepper and nutritional tastes or some toasted seeds like sesame or pepitas to taste)
3. Half a baked sweet potato topped with hummus or a tahini sauce (mix 1 tablespoon of tahini with juice of quarter of a lemon, 1 teaspoon mustard, a pinch of salt and some curry powder or turmeric to taste). You can also just mash half an avocado with some lemon juice and salt and spread that over the sweet potato. I like to bake my sweet potatoes whole in the oven. I put them on a parchment lined cookie sheet and bake for 40 minutes at 400F, then cut them in half an sear them in a pan or run under the broiler to get some caramelization and crisp.
Sweet potato with lots of toppings can also easily be a whole meal: serve it on a bed of greens and just add some protein like marinated beans or baked tofu.
4. Cucumber slices dressed with 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of sesame oil, good squeeze of lime or 1 teaspoon of rice vinegar then topped with sesame seeds and crushed seaweed. You can also upgrade this to a whole meal’s worth of salad also by adding some steamed vegetables and edamame or 1/2 cup of cooked rice or quinoa. Double the dressing in this case.
5. Savory oatmeal: 1/2 cup rolled or old fashioned oats cooked in 1 cup vegetable broth, topped with steamed broccoli (I often buy it frozen) some tahini or hot sauce and avocado slices. Depending on how many things you add this can be a whole meal, just don’t forget some protein like chickpeas or white beans or cooked tofu or tempeh.
6. Cubed roasted winter squash like butternut or acorn (toss with salt and olive oil and bake for 20 min at 400F on a cookie sheet then shake and continue baking for 15-20 min more) with a drizzle of tahini and a pinch of salt. You could also eat it tossed with some spinach and a bit of oil and vinegar. Add a handful of dried cranberries, toasted almonds and 1/2 cup of cooked chickpeas to make the latter a full meal.