Fluid Dynamics

A conversation about queerness, identity, and Pride

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.

FLUID DYNAMICS*

June is Pride month and in the last few years I have found that all of my Pride-themed essays end up being about my friends, so this year I decided to double-down on how much queer people in my life mean to me and bring you a conversation about gender, queerness and Pride that I had with my best friend Alex. Alex’s words also end this piece, with a message well-worth scrolling to.

I met Alex through posting pictures of vegan food on Instagram in 2017 and though we still often eat, cook and talk food together, we have come a long way from an occasional DM about zoodles or what makes a good sandwich. When I first moved to New York in 2020, during some of the most isolating parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alex lived in a nearby neighborhood and we would often meet in the park to exchange to-go containers of homemade dishes or walk over the Williamsburg bridge to attend an outdoors food event of some sort. Even with all the constraints of that truly stressful time, they managed to make me feel like I already had my people in this new and scary city and I will always be grateful for that. 

These days I think of Alex as kin more than anything else (accidentally they’re the same age as my baby brother) and we have spent holidays together, helped each other navigate family and work crises, delved deeper into our respective writing projects side-by-side, and talked an awful lot about how to exist in an often hostile world without losing our capacity for kindness. Where I have spent most of my life in the world of science and tend to approach the world through a very specific, sometimes abstract and cold framework, Alex is a much more intuitive person who can both reason extremely logically and toe the line of the esoteric and the woo. 

Though I understand that things like astrology are not a helpful framework for everyone, and probably off-putting for some, even harmful in some contexts, I have at times really appreciated it as a radical counterpart to the sanitized rationality of my scholarly training. Alex and I open this conversation with a bit of astrology (they were recently a guest on Ghost of a Podcast, which is focuses on astrological forecasts and readings), but it is really a discussion of identity, mutability, freedom to explore who you are even under oppressive circumstances, and what the language of being non-binary has meant for either of us. I hope you give it a skim - and I hope you have your own Alex to have these sorts of conversations with.

***

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan: [Laughter] Ok, let me try and do an interview. To start, can you just talk a little bit about what landed you in this podcast, what the question was that you brought to it?

Alex Caruso: Alright, I want to first point out for the record that I'm in my underwear because it's hot out and we're in your living room, that's going to get to like 85 degrees in five minutes. For context, the podcast is Ghost of a Podcast by Jessica Lanyadoo, who does a weekly podcast about astrology, and one episode per week is an astrological forecast, but the other episode answers listener questions. So, I decided to submit a question specifically geared towards the astrology framework, but in the end it turned out to have more to do with my gender and exploration of that through the lens of my astrology. 

I have a lot of Cancer in my astrological birth chart, and I was asking the question of, how do I embody Cancer energy without, like, adhering to the stereotypes that are typically associated with it, such as being a mommy, being nurturing, like anything you would associate with, like the nuclear family, and the mother role. How do I do that as someone who is non binary, transmasculine, maybe, who knows at this point? Jessica reached out to me, and we had a conversation about gender as well as gender expression, and also how that pertained to astrology. 

KPC: I thought this was a super insightful conversation, not because of astrology per se, but because I think you and I have this in common, the sort of wanting to be a caretaker, but a caretaker in a very different manner than, like, a mom. And what I took away from your conversation with Jessica was that a lot of these things actually just open more questions, that you can’t say “this is my sign, therefore, this is who I am,” that you still have to examine what you mean. 

The first thing she asked you was what does it mean to you to be motherly and nurturing, and  to talk about your ideas about caring and that then automatically took you to discussing gender. And what I liked the most was that she sort of gave you permission to not feel like you have to be perfectly set in your interpretation of what it means to be nurturing, or what it means to have named your gender identity. 

AC: I think the biggest takeaway I've had from this podcast is that people around you always seem to have a better idea of themselves than you have of yourself - and that's just a completely biased, self centered interpretation. Essentially nobody has themselves together. Nobody knows who they are exactly. It’s corny, but it really is like a lifelong journey of getting to know yourself. And a lot of feedback I got after this podcast was “oh, I relate to you so much.” What people were relating to is this idea I had, that in order to be truly trans, and to be queer enough, you have to have a concrete idea of your gender and stick with it, with a concrete aesthetic. And once you figure that out, then you're done. When you say that out loud, it sounds completely ridiculous, but I feel like a lot of people get locked into that. 

For sure, that’s partly a result of capitalism, being like, what's your style, what's your aesthetic, what's your “core.” 

KPC: I think that's a huge part of it, especially being non binary, or visibly gender non conforming. In recent years, we've gotten not necessarily inclusion, but we've gotten a lot of visibility. And the way visibility is conveyed to us is usually through celebrities in photoshoots or companies putting out “gender neutral” clothes. So there is this idea that you can consume enough stuff or buy enough stuff to converge on what gender means to you. Because, again, we're not actually getting inclusion. We're just kind of being incorporated into the machine of capitalism that existed already. And that has that  sense of finiteness - you choose your thing, and now this is what you're buying, it’s almost like brand loyalty. 

AC: That’s what all consumerism promises: if you buy X, then this will make you feel X. And usually what it promises to make you feel is included, worthy, hot, beautiful, desirable. That's the essence of it. And it makes sense that as queerness, and transness especially becomes less taboo – though of course it’s still not exactly mainstream – but as it's becoming more of a marketable demographic you see that changes people's ideas of gender itself.

KPC: I think that makes sense. And there are a lot of critiques from within trans communities about gender identity as purely a sense of aesthetic. There are many trans people for whom their gender has material consequences, like if you choose to medically transition, you then can't just up and move to a state which will not give you your hormones. And if you travel somewhere you have to bring that sort of medication with you. There is a way to be trans that requires a material intervention, and that's very distinct from gender identity being all about aesthetic choice. I think it's very important to think about how transness in particular is affected by the variety of the experience people have. There are people like you and me who feel very strongly about our gender, but have not undertaken any medical intervention, and there are people who feel like medical intervention is the thing that will make them feel more aligned within themselves, which changes their life in very practical ways. We have very different needs and focusing on just the aesthetics, I think, really blurs it all. If your gender is just something that you put on when you get dressed, it can kind of make you forget that for many people, their life is materially impacted.

AC: Right, and the medical industry also really affects the trans and queer community. Right off the bat, I’m not anti medical industry per se, but it does tie us back to how you have to get a diagnosis to get certain treatments. A medical professional first has to deem you worthy enough, essentially, or needing enough to get approved for medical transition. That also impacts people's need to have a sort of permanence with their identity as well, right? 

KPC: Yeah, exactly. I think, when you get approval from authorities and pay for medical transition then there's a sense of finiteness, or an end point that you're chasing. And I'm not convinced that there really is an endpoint for everyone. I think even for people who do feel like medical transition is the right thing for them, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is an end point. 

But to bring it back to the podcast, and I think this is why it resonated so much with me, is that what Jessica had to tell you was very much in the vein of why does there need to be an endpoint? 

And yeah, the capitalist pressure, the medical pressure, is very much to find an endpoint, to find the ‘right answer.’ And maybe that's a distraction from stepping into our power? Maybe our power really is in not finding the endpoint in always leaving room for change and transfiguration, or whatever the right word is.

AC: This does return me to the idea of Cancer in astrology. Cancer is a water sign, it’s connected to the moon, ruled by the moon, and symbolized by the crab. There's a lot of oceanic stuff involved with it, so we talked a lot about how the ocean is changeable. It's never the same, and yet it is constant. There’s all this ebb and flow, which is so cyclical. With the ocean, things are guaranteed to change, and that's okay. That's a lot of what we talked about. 

And I want to say that I'm not against people having a finite answer for their gender. Some people do  just find what's right for them, and that’s great. 

KPC: I’m going to do the science thing that I always do. The difference between a wave and a localized object in science is exactly that the wave is everywhere, that if you're thinking of a wave on the surface of water, it's hard to pin down exactly where it is. And it’s in its nature that it has some variation. That sense of expansiveness, I think, is really worthwhile as a starting point, the image of ebb and flow, of being sort of big and all encompassing and also malleable, because fluids are malleable. That’s a really powerful image to me.

AC: This also reminds me of the topic, the buzzword of like, detransition, and how people typically blow it way out of proportion, usually conservatives trying to say “see, this wasn't worth it.” But anytime I read a “detransition story”, it's often about someone who's just living life on a spectrum and then exploring other parts of themselves, or evolving as time passes and it's like, wow, how dare they do that. This feels worth mentioning to me, because I think if people weren't so pressured to have medical proof of their gender, and could exist and explore their bodies in the way that they wanted to, without all this sense of finiteness and permanence, then there would be more freedom to allow yourself to change over time.

KPC: Right, and if you try to look at research about people detransitioning, a lot of people detransition, or they stop their transition, because they find that it's too hard because they're not in a supportive community. I think there are people who detransition because they realize something about themselves, but a lot of the statistics are just about people being like “it's really hard to go to work, it's really hard to make money, it's really hard to be around or cut off by family.” So the right wing weaponizing these instances is really nefarious, because what would probably help people the most with deciding how, when and how much to transition would be to let them be and make everything free. In general, that approach solves a lot of problems. 

[Laughter]

You were on this podcast a month ago now, so how many lessons, so to speak, have you taken with you? I think it can be easy to talk about generalities and how living under capitalism has made it harder to think about gender, which is true. But like, when you really zoom in, has your experience actually changed after someone put this idea in your head, the idea to stop looking for the one answer?

AC:  I think the thing that has most changed me is people sharing their similar experiences. It’s the classic experience of talking about what you're going through, and then realizing that you're putting too much pressure on yourself for literally no reason, and that other people are going through the same thing, and that it's going to be fine. There is all this societal pressure we were talking about, but also at the end of the day, it's practical things like me living my life in my home, choosing what outfit to put on, and being so mad at myself for not being able to choose one. Of course, I'm absorbing all the societal messages unconsciously and consciously as we do, but ultimately it's easier to be easy on myself. If I can, I try to remove some of the pressure that I put on myself. 

KPC: I think it's worth acknowledging our positionality in this. We are in a good environment to have this conversation because we're both white people with stable jobs who can afford to live in New York City, for now. And we can, and have done this, find community, and have access to people who do not impose things on you. So, how much of it comes down to yourself? 

I think for me personally there is a desire to claim that I am different than other people because I have it worse, to sort of be like “I know everyone else is probably also thinking what I'm thinking, but I'm thinking the hardest because I'm important,” right? This makes me think that you have to be humble before you can be truly good to yourself. There's no virtue in suffering.

I saw someone recently on Instagram saying something like “I'm in my normal era, I transitioned, and now I don't have to be in photoshoots or have weird hobbies, I can just be a normal person and be boring.” And I think in some sense, maybe that's the greatest privilege - to be able to sometimes be boring. I'm not advocating for buying into mainstream culture in any way, but not feeling like you have to prove something about yourself all the time does require some amount of inner peace. I find this very aspirational, not having that need to be more important than other people, or to suffer more than other people, or to have edgier expression than other people, or whatever. I think some of the greatest privilege in life, both in the sense of political privilege, but also just the in life, can be found when you can finally relax into the mundane details and just be literally enjoying your life. I think that's partly what you're speaking to. 

AC: I know what you mean. And I think that this is something I've been trying to look for in my older age. I'm not that old, but Karmela is secretly 75 years old. [laughter] 

KPC: I think part of it for me is that it feels like I've come to a lot of things late in life. I wish that I had had more awareness around gender and how to carry myself as a queer person in the world in college. I think I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, and treated myself less unkindly. And now that I've come closer to some sort of inner truth, there’s some pressure to go out and be visibly happy with myself and push my life in a way that could make up for all the lost time, to do everything I did not feel like I could do in my 20s. At some point that also becomes a burden, right? 

It’s also a distraction from the minor magic of just making yourself breakfast at home, and having friends who talk to you about absolutely uninteresting, everyday things. There's a lot of joy in the normal that I think you have to be at peace with yourself a little bit to get to. And the world that we live in doesn't want you to be at ease within yourself. Because if you're at peace with yourself, you're not buying things and you're not voting out of grievance and so on.

AC: There's a lot of privilege in being in the middle of things, being able to just exist instead of constantly being in survival mode. I was just listening to Jessica's recent episode, and it was about someone who's an activist, a Black person, which matters because she talks about how she fought so hard to build her life and to be a leader in her community with her husband, and now she just wants to create art, and she feels like she wants to stop talking about her pain so much and just enjoy her life with her kids and play with herbs and make art. The whole conversation is about how a lot of people in that position would be inclined to feel guilt over releasing themselves from service to their community. This podcast guest, she talks about just allowing yourself to finally rest, because that's what she said her ancestors fought for her to do, for her ability to rest and enjoy being creative and slow down, and letting the body slow down and treating yourself right, and enjoying having joy, you know? 

I think this is in the ancestry of all people who are marginalized in some way. I don't think people who fought for liberation all those years ago were fighting for much more than that - a sense of just not having to try so hard all the time. 

KPC: When you spoke to Jessica she had this idea about slowing down and taking time to digest. She said that you have to sit with your feelings and let them break down and transform. And like that's in some way, the hardest part, and also the work that really needs to be done if you're gonna come out on the other side with any semblance of peace.

You and I are both food people, which is maybe why I keep talking about this. Because this is something that you learn about cooking, like with making bread. There is some amount of chemistry that just takes time, and you have to budget in that time. So, we have to find that patience when we want to make something. 

AC: Don’t even get me started on instant gratification. [laughter] The expectation now culturally, I think, in the United States among a lot of people is things like getting all your clothes now. Like, get it all now, don't build your wardrobe over time. There's a lot of expectation now with technology, with convenience companies for things to be immediate. And it’s cliche but I think a lot of young people, historically, have felt impatient to, you know, grow up or to be like people they admire. To think: “isn’t this is when I figure it all out?” That plus this technological instantaneousness with everything is a really powerful influence.

KPC: I remember years ago listening to a podcast about how there's a company that will sell you everything you need for your bar to look like an Irish pub. And I feel like you can kind of do that now with your identity. Especially if you exist online, where you can, for relatively little money, buy like 10 outfits and all the accessories, and then the internet will tell you which artists to listen to, and you can curate your social media grids to reflect who you think you are. And then, of course it's so much harder to change your mind and move on from that, because you've bought so much into building up this person, or persona, immediately. 

But change is a huge part of growing up and aging. Someone asked me this recently: “when you think of yourself as a kid, when you look at pictures of yourself as a kid, what is the gender of that kid? Was that kid the same gender that you are now?” And that really trips me up because I remember times in my life when I was a very sort of a third wave feminist and very committed to the idea of womanhood even if it never worked for me. I had always felt like I was cosplaying being a woman, but I also had the need to be like, well, feminism teaches us that there are so many different ways to be a woman, so I must have just not found the type of woman that I need to be. And I really believed that, that I was a real woman who just hadn't found her flavor of womanhood. That was genuine and I don't want to deny that past version of me. On the other hand, there's also grief there. Why did no one tell me there were other options, you know? If I go even deeper backwards, there were times in my childhood when I was a huge tomboy, and my parents basically intervened and were like “You need to shave your legs and be a girl.” I ended up wearing dresses and all my best sandals and big occasion outfits to school because I didn't understand that to be a girl is something more than just putting on an outfit. All these things now have me grappling with the sense of change and the question of how to stitch them all into a coherent sense of self. 

The answer is, of course, that you don't have to. But we are so conditioned to think that you should have a character arc, that you should have a coherent story. That you should be able to put yourself in a box, or even better, buy a box from someone, and then slide yourself in. And I think it’s a real emotional project to reach a place of being fine with having been all of these different people. And to think that it’s also fine if I'm going to be someone else tomorrow. Part of the goal is maybe to not get too attached to where you are now. I think you have to have the kindness in your heart to let yourself be like, yeah, maybe I will change. Even if the aesthetic is pinned down already and every transmasc in Brooklyn goes to the same three barbers. [laughter]

AC: And there’s something to be said about when you change and find that you’ve become more like other people too. A lot has been written about unpacking the obsessive need for individuality and for being different, that is ingrained in a lot of American people. But you can find some comfort in a sort of sameness. Of course, no one is exactly the same, but instead of rejecting other people or yourself because you're conforming to an aesthetic, you can find actual community in some sameness and a collective experience of joy. It can be kind of beautiful that everyone landed on the same page. 

KPC: Yeah, that sense of rugged individuality that's hard-coded into American culture has always been there in part to divide people. Everyone wants to talk about community and chosen family and whatnot, but a huge part of that is letting go of the idea that you have to be individual and realize that finding commonalities with people is more joyous than anything else. 

AC: Even if you look like other people, underneath it, of course, you're a different person. No one is actually being denied unique personhood, that’s largely self imposed. 

(Editor’s note: unfortunately, many queer and trans people are being denied personhood and living conditions that could make it possible to invest in their personhood in the United States and around the world today, through legislative and economic efforts alike. Alex is speaking to a more narrow idea, one that applies to those of us who are privileged enough to live in relative safety and grapple with beyond-survival issues like toxic individualism.)

Again it comes back to why am I being so hard on myself? It’s just things like me wearing outfits. A lot of this concern about finding your aesthetic and being an individual, I think, is also coming from some place of worrying that you're not good enough for one reason or another. 

KPC: I always think about how when I used to live in the Midwest, I felt like people were looking at me all the time. I stood out. And there is this meme about how everyone in New York is intimidatingly hot, and native New Yorkers do have this base level of calmness that is really intimidating to me, but in some sense, that is not a bad thing. There's a lot of good to be found in being like, here I'm just not that unusual.

AC: Isn't it quite interesting that when we want to, we always find a way to hate ourselves? This realization of being different is bad, but being the same is also bad.

KPC: I think both things feel bad because at some level you just want to hate yourself, and you want to hate yourself to make yourself feel important. And you don't actually have to be important. You have to be, just like … good, right? 

AC: The through line, the commonality is, well, obviously societal oppression. But aside from that it's all just self hatred and self-imposed. The way we rebel against society so often then becomes another thing that you have to rebel against.

KPC: Right. I think about how I've given away a lot of my more feminine clothes, but I will still, like, three times a year wear a dress, and it’s such a big internally emotional thing. It's such a wild experience, because I realized some ways of dressing don't feel good, so I rejected them. But then immediately I have to ask, have I gone too far in rejecting them? Gender is not just what you wear, so even if I am not a woman, shouldn't I try and wear a dress sometimes?

AC: But then people are like, yas queen, you look amazing. [laughter]

KPC: Right! And then it starts to feel like experimenting was a mistake, and now I have to go back to the other thing, hard, just to not be misunderstood. There's just sort of no winning, because you're boxing yourself in at every step and like, the answer is, like, tantalizingly in between the things. It's always in between the things in that delocalized wave that's everywhere at the same time. 

AC: I think for me it’s when you get no compliments, like when you’re wearing a very genuine outfit, that's when you know it's really hitting. I feel like anytime I've dressed just for myself, zero people have been like, ‘“wow, you look so good.”

KPC: I have a really skewed concept of what it means to dress for yourself. I have a uniform that I wear to work, right? And in recent years, whenever people have tried to get me to go out to the bars or to go to a party or something, I am stumped. What do I wear when I'm not working, when I'm not in my uniform? Do I wear makeup when I'm not in my uniform? Do I wear a dress when I'm not in my uniform? And part of it is: who is the me that’s dressing for me actually dressing for. 

AC: I think you need to take a year to just feel sad, and then I think you'll know what to wear. [laughter] But okay, this may be something that I need to unpack, but I feel the most confident when I take direct inspiration from someone else, when I'm trying to copy someone else and seeing how that feels. I find the most joy when I find some similarity between myself and someone that inspired me. When I am dressing for myself, it's a combination of clothing that feels unique and then stuff that adheres to an idea of someone I look up to in terms of aesthetics, and then sometimes it's something that makes me feel connected to my location, my sense of place. It's very complicated. 

KPC: That’s actually really helpful. As someone who came to queerness sort of late in life and in a safe space of a steady relationship and being pretty independent of my parents, something I think about often is who are my queer ancestors and what's the historical lineage that I belong to as a queer adult, but wasn't really always consciously queer as kid. I’ve thought of myself as bisexual since I was 15 or 16, but it took me a long time to really step into it. And now part of moving forward is thinking about my lineage and my influences, just like with you saying that you dress for yourself in part by emulating people who you look up to.

We're having this conversation at the beginning of Pride month, it’s June 1st, and Pride can be such a strenuous thing where all the very capitalist influences are all in all the time, and there's so much pressure to go to things that are labeled as being for you and to do things for your community and perform your queerness for the allies, so what's the energy that you want to bring into Pride? How has having all these new insights about gender changed Pride for you?

AC: I think the energy for this year is being a menace and being a freak. The second June hits, I’m going to be out and I'm going to be unapologetically freaky. It’ll be like a B12 shot [laughter]. What about you?

KPC: I think my goal is to be more spontaneous and not be so beholden to my schedule. Like, if there is something fun happening, I want to be able to do things like skip the gym to go. People who know me in real life know that this is big for me, if I’ve canceled a workout class or had to skip the gym to do a thing, it's like a tectonic event. [laughter] I want to let go of that and give myself more chances to just do things, and be out more, and be silly with people. 

I'm realizing that I've met a lot of new people in the last couple of years, just  by virtue of living in a big city, and so many people only know me as dry and serious. I'm their science friend, or I'm their friend with a deadpan sense of humor, but I'm not their warm friend. I'm not their friend who's down for an adventure, because I don't put that energy out there, because I'm sort of scared of the world. [laughter] I would like to embrace a little bit of that fear and just be a little silly. And if that means that I have to skip the gym, or sleep in, or say something sort of nonsensical in front of someone who doesn't know me, that's actually probably fine. I can take chances that are actually not dangerous at all, but for very idiosyncratic reasons feel dangerous to me, you know? So maybe I also want to be a major freak or whatever. [laughter]

***

Alex here. 

Let the record show that it is still 85 degrees and I am still in my underwear in a living room. We’re nearing the end of June and I can say that Karmela has had a hell of a pride month thus far–though they have not managed to skip the gym to be gay even once, I see them online, outside, at the beach, at home with everyone they love. I, on the other hand, have done one single Pride-related activity in this entire month of June. The most menacing I’ve gotten is allowing my hairy ankle to reveal itself to the old Glendale, Queens veterans on the Q55. It’s unrealistic to expect someone to change their entire demeanor just to celebrate their nature for a month, and I think it’s okay if you only manage to be a menace and a freak 20% of the time. It’s on brand for me, a Virgo, and Karmela, a Capricorn to impose goals on ourselves for bettering ourselves during the month that is supposed to celebrate who we already are. 

Though there is always room to improve for anyone, I think it’s okay to have the kind of Pride Month where you do find the joy in the mundane and not try too hard to be something you’re not. This is what we spoke to, isn’t it – the privilege of being in the middle of things, the privilege of allowing yourself to relax, and not constantly rally for your own existence or self-improvement. 

While we are deep into the decades, if not centuries-long fight for collective liberation, constantly hearing about new legislature that is challenging trans and queer peoples’ right to existence (including not just direct anti-trans laws, but also laws and bills that impact disability, racial, workers’, climate and bodily autonomy justice), older established protections being stripped, multiple genocides occurring around the world, and the real time effects of climate change (a June “heat dome”? Okay…), we are being asked to celebrate, be carefree, be queer, be here. I am not the first to point this out, and this “take” has, in my opinion, become rather played out. 

The question and contrast of, “are we allowed to have joy in times of horror and apocalypse?” has been written and talked about ad nauseam by people with more credentials and years of activism than myself. I am nothing more than a white queer in a big city with a stable job and self-made comforts that allow me to withstand the horrors one day at a time. I am not going to prescribe you joy, relaxation, or self-improvement. I will forever stress, though, that the goal is to keep you all alive. 

You have to stay alive. We need you here, amidst it all, because of it all. 

The world needs your freak-ass self here, and that means you need to find a way to keep up the fight long term. If that means putting down the phone, setting boundaries with social media, going out of your comfort zone, burrowing into your comfort zone, investing in relationships, getting a silly little treat, not getting silly little treats, taking responsibility, becoming accountable, accepting you need help, overbooking yourself this month, denouncing Pride altogether – do it. 

The point is for you to be here in July, in August, September, and for many months and years to follow. The point is to not become an embittered elder or bright star that burns out too early. The point is that you, my beautiful queer and trans friends, you, promising to be here tomorrow and in love, is what’ll make life worth living in our own personal apocalypses. 

Love you, Alex 

***

You can read Alex’s writing over on their fantastic newsletter Homage to Lyric 9-1245.

*Fluid dynamics is a branch of physics that deals with how fluids flow, pack energy, transfer momentum, change temperature and every other thing that can happen to them. This is one of the oldest disciplines within physics, and among the most notorious for mathematical difficulty. 

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ABOUT ME LATELY

Karmela and Alex earlier in the summer, attending a Big Apple Softball League game

WRITING

My favorite piece of reporting since my last letter has been this story I wrote about the nature of time in quantum physics, and possibly all physics everywhere. There is a part of me that is dismissive of blanket statements such as “time doesn’t exist” because we clearly experience psychological time without any reprieve, but it is also never not endlessly fascinating to delve into the question of whether time could be something more objective, and less personalized, than that. For this article, I spoke to a researcher who thinks he and his collaborators have traced the origin of time down to a quantum effect, and therefore have a leg to stand on for arguing that physical time is emergent rather than a fundamental ingredient of our physical reality. The argument would certainly be stronger if there were more empirical elements to it, but I still found rehashing it with various folks, be they fellow reporters or other physics experts, to be very intriguing and compelling.

READING

For someone who is not always the most disciplined and up-to-date reader, I have been really lucky with books recently and am currently reading another piece of nonfiction that is blowing me away. The book is called Magical/Realism and its author, Vanessa Angelica Villareal, does a masterful job braiding her personal history, the historical story of immigration from Mexico to America, various strands of 90s music and popular culture, gendered dynamics and marital strife, literary criticism, and even high fantasy video games, into one incredibly compelling collection of essays that melt into each other nearly seamlessly. There is a lot of grief and trauma and vulnerability packed into this book, but it reads as a sharp journey of discovery and a project of healing sense-making a lot more than a bid for pity or a cry for recognition of the author’s humanity (she knows she’s worth more). And Villareal is clearly writing it from a place of scholarship and leveraging that scholarship in a way that is so generative and supportive, rather than as a way to assert authority, that I am finding myself really inspired for how I am bringing my own past scholarship into my book-in-progress.

LISTENING

As part of the effort to take myself less seriously this summer, I feel like I am falling for every piece of music that is meant for my demographic and embracing the mainstream-ness and basic-ness of that instead of fighting it. By this I, of course, mean that I have been listening to Charli xcx’s Brat an awful lot ever since it came out. This is a record meant for party girls and everyone else who likes to be high at the club, and though my capacity for either being high or at the club is about zero, and I am mostly bopping to this at the gym, there’s some raw tenderness behind all the harsh beats and catchy hooks that still got to me. Like I wrote last summer, a big benefit of embracing myself as a nonbinary person has been that I can engage with “girly things” with less emotional baggage and less of a need to be cool about it, and this album definitely falls into that category.

The other piece of music I have been obsessed with recently is Pulsar by the french nu-disco act L’Imperatrice. This is such an easy-going record with a really soft and indulgent feeling that you could probably still dance to, but it would also be really perfect for just staring at the stars on a warm summer night and thinking about a dreamy bell-bottomed vacation with someone you love. I must have listened to the Maggie Rogers track a thousand times by now.

EATING

Incredibly well-crafted dinners on a pair of vegan chefs’ patio in Brooklyn. Bitter greens paired with soft, custardy tofu and briny yet sweet golden beets from our CSA. My first ever rhubarb and strawberry pie with the freshest farmer’s market produce and a good kick of cardamom and ginger. Endless pasta salads, sometimes on the beach. Homemade cake, whenever I feel like it and one special blueberry funfetti production for the birthday market at my favorite coffee shop.