Quantum Decoherence
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QUANTUM DECOHERENCE*
There are no memories, just artifacts. And they are all lying.
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
By July, my knees are always in bad shape.
My cousin (actually my second cousin but none of us care for nuance) lives on a small hill at the top of my grandparents’ village. I run down its mild slope paved with oddly dark concrete and slip. There’s sand on the ground, maybe a spillover from inside the bocce ball court, and stepping on it sends me flying, skidding. I’m home in time for a family meal but I’m bleeding. My mom cleans my knees up, sometimes puts me in a nice outfit afterwards so I would feel better despite my body having been damaged. At some point in the future, she will tell my brother we only have one body and have to take care of it, he will be an even more bump-y, scrape-y, crust-y kid than me. Every time I go to the beach, my scabby knees sting. Everyone tells me the salty water will make the scars worse.
The cousin keeps showing up at the porch of my grandparents’ house at 4pm, colorful beach towel in hand or over his shoulder like something out of Ancient Rome. I’m not allowed to go to the beach that early. Usually, we are all still eating at 4pm. I don’t know what this meal is called in English but it’s the big one you’re supposed to share and take seriously. The one you’re supposed to linger at the family table after, observe the adults practicing small talk and gossip. My mom’s father dabs a napkin to the corners of his eyes, then his moustache, then his sweaty chest. He’s putting salt and pepper and finely ground Hungarian chilies he grew and ground himself and it’s all making him sweat. It’s terribly warm and we can’t agree on whether to keep the windows open or closed. After we are done eating, everyone has a cup of thick, sludgy coffee and a glass of homemade wine. My mom doesn’t like coffee so she takes it with lots of milk, she says coffee makes her nauseous. My mom likes wine but says one glass is enough to make her woozy. My uncle makes the coffee and it’s a long, involved process. You boil it, then you rest it, then you pour in such a way that everyone gets a few weak, delicate bubbles the boiling produced. Everyone has an opinion about the wine. It’s the second batch, the one mostly powered by adding sugar to already heavily pressed grapes, but everyone says it’s still so much better than stuff you can buy in a store. I run to the second floor of the house to grab a beach towel (the ones with best prints are always the most flimsy and the least absorbent) then run to the beach.
The beach is also mostly covered in concrete. The county promised to beautify it and bring in some nice sand but instead they poured small grain gravel at the edge of the water. The water is warm and cloudy, the sand at its bottom more mud than the fine golden stuff of promotional holiday brochures. There are Slovenian and German and Hungarian tourists everywhere. They speak their languages and wear socks with sandals and apply too much sunscreen. They have so many parasols and flippers and jelly sandals. We all know they only come here because they can’t afford the coast of Italy or France. We all know they drive down with trunks of their cars full of canned meats and fish and whatever other cost-cutting snacks. We don’t laugh at them, but we feel like we’re entitled to the potentiality of that laughter. We dive off a concrete slab as if it were a diving board, head first, trying to keep our browned bodies rigid as the water engulfs us. For years, I’m terrible at diving: as my head breaks the surface, eyes firmly shut, my legs loose rigidity and bend at the knees. My feet fly up, my knees hit the water and the impact hurts and the salt hurts and when I come up for air my long, curly hair is in my eyes and mouth, but we do it again and again and again, and it’s so much fun.
One summer, it’s my ankle instead of my knees. A boy with the same name as my father pushes me off the concrete slab and as I am falling towards the water my ankle catches the edge of the structure and splits open. It bleeds a lot and when I take a squeamish look at the gash, I see it’s deeper than the scrapes my mom had tried to fix with careful cleaning and nice clothes. The next day, my cousin’s mom tells my mom that the boy had done it because he liked me. My cousin had come home after the incident and she heard him sing in the shower. When she asked about this good mood, he shared that the boy had called me cute before the fatal push. My cousin’s mom gets a good chuckle out of this but I’m embarrassed. The next day, the gash still looks pretty bad, so we go to the doctor. On top of embarrassment, I get three staples in my ankle.
One summer, the knee thing gets my dad too.
He’s playing on the village bocce ball team, as is my uncle and my mom’s cousin and my grandfather and two of my (second) cousins and eventually my very young brother will play also. They play well. It’s a big deal in the village and locals come to watch matches for more than the occasional free beer and a slice of sheep cheese and prosciutto on a really good night. The four starter players wear dark navy polos with a logo for the team stitched below the right shoulder, opposite their hearts. My dad wears chunky white sneakers, often a red baseball cap advertising a favorite brand of beer. He is such a dad. But he has a steady hand, does really well on precision throws, often opens the round and rarely disappoints with those opening. Bocce ball is not thrilling to watch, but when your team is winning you get invested. When your dad is winning you get really invested.
My grandfather plays sometimes but he’s not on the starting team. His knees always hurt; when he lunges to throw, he has to adjust his bent knee with his hands, as if he were handling a prop and not a body part. He’s too slow to be on the team with my dad because the four starters are energetic and fast and loud. They lough a lot. They aggressively high five after every round, even when it’s not going well. Everyone’s drinking. My dad smokes even though he’s quit every year prior and will quit every year after that except that one year when his father died suddenly (he was off the cigarettes for quite a few years before that).
The team makes it past the group round and into the next one and then into quarter finals and all the way to the final match. When they win, they all throw themselves to the sand-covered ground and form some sort of a caterpillar-like conga line on their knees. I think they saw handball players do that; it’s one of those years when the national handball team is winning everything, and clips of players celebrating pepper and season every single news program for weeks. There’s as much celebrating as a county bocce ball league can entice, or maybe even a bit more. Maybe it’s one of those nights when my cousin’s dad brings out his accordion and the German couple renting the top floor of his house, the one on top of the hill right by the court, cannot believe the show they’re getting for free. I can’t really remember but I’m sure singing of some sort does happen.
The next day, my dad admits that he got a bit too excited about the win, threw himself on the ground a bit too hard, and scraped his knees.
(Me as a child, at the water pump in my grandparents' village)
I’m not sure when exactly it is that we go to our cabin in the woods, but it has to be later than June. My mom is a high school teacher, she can’t really take June off even though so many acquaintances tell her how much they envy her job including ‘full three months off’.
When we arrive, my dad’s father is sitting in front of the house, on a bench me and my dad made after someone stole the old one. My grandfather had made the old one and I still don’t understand who would have stolen it or why. The new one is better, I argue to myself, because we sanded down the sharp edges, they don’t burrow into your skin uncomfortably if it’s warm and you’re wearing shorts. When we leave, we lock everything inside the house to prevent more theft but every few years someone breaks a window and steals from us anyway. One year they steal a part of a tent we had pitched in the back of the house on a particularly warm summer, for us kids to hang out in after our tree house, perpetually in the state of ‘almost done’, had to be taken down. I remember finding a very large grasshopper inside the tent and calling him Steven (but in Croatian). I remember talking about that particular summer very fondly only a few years later, after my cousins stopped wanting to come and hang out in the woods with my brother and me. We did not have phones to distract us yet, but they grew up to be city kids faster than we did. It’s funny because me and my brother are the eldest in this generation of our family. My grandfather is by far the oldest in his generation as well. He dislikes thin pasta and rainy weather, he likes it when visitors bring his favorite newspaper and store-bought bread (he’s the only one who does not adore my grandma’s bread), he loves the cabin in the woods; he loves it when we’re all there.
My grandfather always says that in the woods you can do whatever you want, that we don’t force anyone into anything there. He writes everything we chose to do in a succession of journals. They’re large, heavy, hardcover notebooks and he titles some of them ‘ranch’ because he has seen westerns on Italian TV as a kid and the awe never left him. He has his own shorthand for various names and writes down the weather and what we ate for dinner every single day (for lunch we eat canned meats and fish and leftovers). In Croatian, names are gendered so that most classically female names end in ‘a’ and most names typically given to men end in ‘o’. Him and my grandmother have the same name and he codes them as Ba and Bo. Ba picked carrots from the garden and made crepes stuffed with chicken, pickles and sour cream then breaded and fried. Bo painted one of the chairs light green because the previous paint, yellow, had started to chip. Sometimes he calls my dad Tesla because my dad works with electronics in his day job and always knows how to fix the battery powered FM radio we almost never turn off. We strictly listen to one, local radio station. I know all the theme songs for shows and all the ad music by heart. 104.7 MegaHertz-a, Radio Rijeka. Nije radio sve što svira.
There’s probably not a nickname for my mom in the journals, but she embraces the ‘do whatever you want’ philosophy with her whole heart and body. She takes us kids on long walks into such beloved spots as ‘the Dark Forest’ (there’s a fallen wild cherry tree in there and we spend hours monkeying on it) and ‘the Big Meadow’ (you can see the highway from there and you can memorize the view for quick recall when you are in the backseat of the car, on that highway, looking in the other direction). We pick tiny wild strawberries. We sing every song we can think of. We hope to see a deer or a bear but clearly, we are too loud. She talks about it anyway, and years later we will get a dog able to chase deer towards us and we will, briefly, feel very vindicated.
I’m not sure if any of this gets written up in the journals but while my grandfather might bring a lot of stories to the woods, my mom finds all the adventure hiding in there. At night, she sometimes makes donuts in the little wooden shed we call the ‘summer kitchen’. She has to beat the dough by hand over and over and it’s a comedically violent process, her with her curly hair in a high, messy ponytail, wearing clothes from years ago that are only good for the woods now, breaking a sweat over a plastic orange bowl of dough she holds between her thighs and methodically smashes with a wooden spoon. The donuts are always perfect, even when they burn or stay a bit too soft on the inside, almost raw on the edges of the filling. We gobble them up, smothered in sticky apricot jam or filled with Nutella, while we play cards, deep into the night.
(Me as a child, on the way to my grandfather's vineyard and garden)
I take my boyfriend to all the places: the concrete beach, the bocce ball court, the house in the woods.
I make him sit through a bocce game and help cut bread for the after party. The team is not as good as it used to be, but my dad is still playing. He only comes to the village for the games now, wears a different hat and different shoes. He’s manning the grill for the after party though he doesn’t stay very long; he can’t sleep at my grandparents’ house, just down the hill, anymore. To my boyfriend, I explain the rules about the small ball and the bigger balls and which line you can’t step on and how there’s two kinds of players, the ones that deal with precision and the ones that go for explosive, get-this-ball-out-of-the-way, throws. At some point I even have to explain handball because our national team is somehow still playing in a big, televised tournament. He meets my cousin who is actually my second cousin but we still don’t care for that nuance. The cousin has a girlfriend and drives a car and is still working on his bachelor’s degree. We never go to the beach together anymore.
We eat with my mom’s family and my grandfather still sits at the head of the table, still requests the same special fork I remember having to set out for him as a kid, still dabs his sweaty chest with a napkin as the meal goes on. I drink coffee and wine now. I offer to make coffee for everyone but that’s still my uncle’s job. The first time my boyfriend stayed over at my apartment in Illinois, I made us this coffee in the morning, and we spent a long time sipping it, careful of the sludge, and talking about nothing. It didn’t even occur to us that we could, like, watch Netflix. Quickly, he will learn the Croatian method and it will feel like a taste of home every time he hands me a cup. While we’re visiting Croatia, my grandma worries about my caffeine habits.
German tourists are staying in the house next door, the one my grandparents rent out to supplement their pensions. Often, they have dogs and we fawn over the fuzz instead of being bitter about snacks they may have brought with them. Their flippers and parasols and beach towels are set out on the balcony. My grandma really wants to give them some strudel she’d made for dessert. Everyone thinks she’s trying to hard but she does it anyway.
I take my boyfriend to the concrete beach and probably still dive badly, all floppy at the knees. I’m not sure whether I’ve shown him my ankle scar. I think it has faded away
We go to the house in the woods and sit on the bench my dad and I made. We drink rakija from small glasses my grandfather liked and I imagine he would have approved of that. I show him the books and my dad, who has been keeping them after my grandfather’s passing, writes his name in that day’s entry. He writes his full name, first, middle and last, no shorthand. He doesn’t know I sometimes call him by his initials when we text late at night and I don’t mention it. The next year, when we return, my dad has given him a nickname all by himself but it’s unclear whether it’s made it into the books.
I try to teach my boyfriend the card game, explain the number of nights I’ve spent watching the adults play, first under the light of gas lamps, later incandescent bulbs powered by a small generator. Recently, my dad installed energy saving bulbs and LEDs. The inside of the cabin feels so bright but luckily we play cards outside, by the summer kitchen. My boyfriend picks up on cards pretty quickly, learns to count in Croatian up to at least ten. He charms my grandma who does not understand English at all by playing every night. I will ask him to demonstrate his counting for the amusement of our American friends at parties later.
The old radio, an impostor because it is actually fairly new and just looks appropriately low tech, gets put away at night and my dad connects his phone to very large speakers. One year, I learn of the passing of one of my favorite radio show hosts from way back when. The show was called Almanac and he would play songs from the tops of the charts from twenty, thirty and forty years ago. He’d throw in some trivia and my dad always commented on how he was probably a punk or a metalhead (like us) at heart because who else could care about music that much. I’m more sad than I expect.
When the radio is put away, my dad plays slow songs from a very, very long playlist. They’re all hits. He assembled the playlist after the company he worked for folded and he was out of a job. When I was really young, I’d watch him record songs off of Radio Rijeka and onto cassette tapes. When he was unemployed, and I was already gone, he swapped tapes for mp3 files but still burned them on CDs, even printed out paper jackets for them. He’s still such a dad. We all sing along as tear-jerking classics come on in alphabetical order. You can do whatever you want in the woods, my dad reminds me, even play really cheesy music loudly really late at night.
Everyone is double-charmed by my American boyfriend who can play Croatian cards and sing along to cheesy love songs. My dad and his girlfriend smoke cigarettes they hand-rolled earlier in the day; celebrating has become expensive and you gotta go DIY. My grandma dominates every game, but we joke about it and revel in her talent. It’s all very sweet and unreal and I am happy.
There are no donuts because my mom isn’t there.
At some point, we eat donuts in New York. They’re really good, indulgent, flavorful, vegan and all that. As I go on and on about how you can tell what a good yeasted dough is by squishing the donut and watching it spring back, I think of my sweaty mom in the summer kitchen. No-one in Brooklyn seems to be uncool enough to be sweaty.
(Me as a child, on my grandparents' porch)
Whenever people ask, and they ask often, I tell them I never get homesick. (Not once in eleven years.) I also tell them it’s not that hard to be in love with someone who lives miles and miles away. (Not ever in five years.) I’m at home everywhere, I say. I’m at home whenever we are together.
I say these things for myself. I say them to myself.
I’m looking down at my knees. Somehow, I always cut myself while shaving, always at the knees.
Best,
Karmela
* In quantum physics, the notion of decoherence is typically used to describe a loss of ‘quantum-ness’ when the system comes in contact with a classical observer. In classical systems, coherence refers to how correlated or uniform different parts of the system are so one might discuss a coherent light beam which is made up of photons all having the same frequency and wavelength. Loss of that coherence, or decoherence, would then mean that some photons deviate in frequency or wavelength (this could mean the color of the light changing). Quantum decoherence is similar except that what is being lost is the ability of the system to produce quantum effects. In other words, if a quantum system is not isolated enough, over time it will stop giving measurements of all the ‘spooky’ quantum things such as entanglement and start acting in classically predictable ways. There are still interpretational issues related to the idea of decoherence and how it interacts with wavefunction collapse and the measurement problem. It is also of big importance for the field of quantum computation – a quantum computer loses accuracy as it experiences quantum decoherence.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: After the chaos that was May and June and a brief trip to back to the East Coast for the 4th of July holiday weekend, the past ten days or so have been fairly quiet and calm for me. Mostly, I have been working putting in long, solitary days in my office (other members of my group prefer libraries and coffee shops), and racking my brain over the same, or similar, questions that already haunted me throughout the winter and the spring. I tried to remind myself of some basic statistical physics and felt weird about finding material I have learned in college and my own papers cited in the same reference. I spent a fair amount of time fighting with Mathematica and ultimately converged on a piece of code, rooted in a somewhat novel theoretical technique my group has been pursuing for a few years, that seems to reproduce some trends from an experiment next door. At the same time, a collaborator wrote with an exciting idea about a related calculation I had worked on back in March and then got stuck at interpreting. Both of these are welcome developments but, as always, I am cautious to declare any victories. There are two manuscript outlines floating around in my inbox which is a good indicator of these projects wrapping up in the near future. However, I have learned time and again that doing research is like riding a rollercoaster except you get much more than a few minutes of dealing with the jumps between very low lows and very high highs. We’re potentially on the upswing, but I know I have to be ready to keep working if we suddenly plunge back down as well.
My advisor is leaving for a yearlong sabbatical in a few weeks which also means that a lot of planning and group ‘house cleaning’ is taking place at an accelerated pace. A direct consequence of this is that suddenly we are talking about concrete dates for my thesis defense, I might be helping train a new, younger student starting next week, and in a month or so I will start actively looking for a postdoctoral position. I spent a few nights this past week re-reading notes from every career seminar I have ever had to attend and surfing the web for tips on cover letters and research statement, then took the step of actually writing one of these statements myself. If I were not so busy, and my mind so cluttered by all the projects I now know I don’t have all that much time to finish, this would probably feel more poignant. All research statements have a mandatory ‘future work’ section which is supposed to hold a lot of aspirations and ambition, but I have to be honest and admit that I am too tied to the now to be able to imagine myself as any sort of a radically different researcher at any sort of a radically different place. Luckily, I have a little bit of time, and spaces like this, to ruminate on that before I send anything definitive out there into the world. Looking for a job will certainly be a learning experience through and through, and since I would be lying if I said I wasn’t terribly anxious about it, I should also say that I’ll take any piece of knowledge you want to throw my way on the topic, if you are so inclined.
LISTENING: Part of my inspiration for writing this letter came from listening to an episode of Radiotopia’s This is Love called Memory Artist. Here, Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer introduce a man able of painting depictions of his childhood hometown in Italy from memory with perfect detail. They then travel to that town and find it to be truly like the paintings. Nostalgia is such a force in this story that it can amplify someone’s cognitive abilities. At the same time, nostalgia and memory can also be misleading and fallible and shows in which people revisit their past often underscore this, in more or less tender and caring ways. I have recommended both Heavyweight and Family Ghosts along these lines here before, but the latter may be slightly more similar to what I am trying to think through above. There isn’t much about my family that I think of as a haunting mystery, but people featured on Family Ghosts often convey a sense of suddenly realizing how much something from their family’s past influenced them and really wanting to revisit it, and I can certainly empathize with that.
Additionally, I have been listening to a fair amount of Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s show for ‘long-distance besties everywhere’ Call Your Girlfriend and really enjoying it. The episodes I’ve listened to so far deal with body hair, pronouns, women in music and music criticism, adult sex ed and pleasure activism and they have all been well-made and really illuminating in their own way. Working in a male-dominated field is often lonely in a way that’s hard to explain without falling into a trope or a place of near bias, but whatever it is that I miss in my daily interactions with people who are not female is partly answered by shows like this. Major bonus points for avoiding the trap of preaching to the choir or being performatively political.
On the music side of things, I want to recommend an ex-Yugoslavian (Bosnian to be precise) band that held me captive for a few days this last week as I was apparently entering some dad rock phase that culminated with a day or two of having ACDC’s Highway to Hell album on repeat and watching Bon Scott videos. They’re called Bijelo Dugme (White Button) and their gimmick back in the day was naming their genre something like ‘shepherd rock’. Gimmick’s aside, though there is some folk influence on their early (and very late) music, this is a band that was clearly just listening to whatever rock and blues records one could get in communist Yugoslavia and took away some great stuff from that listening. They dipped their toes in the new wave scene which was huge in Yugoslavia and aged almost as badly as any other classic rock band, but their early catalog remains pretty stellar and really fun. This compilation is probably a good place to start and this 1977 recording of them performing on Polish TV is pure gold (don’t be intimidate by the folk-dance ensemble they open with).
On a completely different note, some death metal albums I’ve enjoyed lately: Tomb Mold’s Planetary Clairvoyance, Gatecreeper’s Sonoran Deprivation and Bestial Hymns of Perversion by Of Feather and Bone.
Also, go listen to this Springsteen cover by Soccer Mommy, it gave me chills, on repeat.
WATCHING: I watched some TV while hanging out with my boyfriend at the beginning of July but a lot of it came down to MasterChef. This is truly the equivalent of ordering fries at a bar at 1am because you know you can, you know that you’ll feel bad about it tomorrow, you know they’ll be kind of terrible, and you know your friends will have some too. What I’m saying is, I still think the show is terrible and I dislike how much I get caught in it, but my boyfriend’s whole family got invested in a girl with frizzy hair cutting up salmon and an angry poker player making risotto in a pressure cooker, and then we all hated the person who won and I think you might be getting the picture without me dissolving into outrage over a contestant trying to make a fusion bibimbap ratatouille.
When we weren’t watching MasterChef, we did manage to find time to check out the second season of FX’s Legion, and I have continued to watch bits and pieces of it over lunches and dinners after coming back to Illinois. Legion is a Marvel show and it is an X-Men-related show, but in either season that is almost unimportant. Having never been a huge Marvel fan (though I do remember really enjoying an X-Men cartoon as child), there are likely Easter eggs and references going over my head but the big selling point of Legion is that it is compelling enough even without that context that missing a Professor Xavier reference here and there does not diminish the watching experience. The first season of Legion was pretty trippy, full of oddball 60s aesthetics, a few dance and song numbers, all sorts of psychedelic and psychedelic-adjacent themes, and even though it did suffer from a few slightly under-developed side-characters, it was a blast to watch. Season two picks up on all of that and only increases the trippiness and the weirdness, quite consciously incorporating even more psychology and meta-commentary than it did before. The story continues roughly where it left off and sticks with the cast of characters established in season one with only one or two additions, and it is now fairly regularly interrupted by a narrator providing some framing for what may be happening on screen, PSA-like vignettes included. There are explanations of mass hysteria, of delusions and paranoia and even some nods to ‘fake news’ and Plato’s cave. There is a lot of potential for this sort of thing to be annoying, but Legion pulls it off, in no small part because it is already so odd and so committed to the aesthetic of its oddness. The plotline itself, and I have made it through roughly three quarters of it so far, is at times discombobulated and occasionally paced poorly. Some of the characters I found lacking previously (the Cary/Kerry thing just doesn’t work for me) have been given more to do and more to say, Syd Barret especially, and the show does seem more conscious of gender dynamics it may have handled poorly in its early episodes. However, there is more of a messy feeling to this season and at times I found myself thinking about it as something of a counterpart to the latest Twin Peaks just more digestible. I still really like it, and still really want to see where it goes, but I do also hope the storytelling gets a tad bit tighter.
READING: As happens periodically, I have yet again resolved to read more so when I took the White Album back to the local public library (I’m really starting to love the place) I ambitiously picked up three more books. Since I was already reading one other book that I had bought during a trip this past winter, I now have four books in rotation and have made some progress in all but one.
The book I have read most of is Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. Genre-wise, these stories fall somewhere between weird fiction and horror and they all seem to be rooted in a strong sense of what it means to be female, to have a body, and to have a body marked as female. Machado’s style is direct and beautiful without being too ornamental, she is clearly grounded in a tradition adjacent to fairy tales and she really does not pull punches. There is sex in almost every story, and there is something terrible happening to a body in almost every story. In these stories, desiring is monstrous as is being desired or wanting to be desired. But Machado is also witty and does not take herself too seriously which makes some of the more unsettling subtext of her work easier to handle. One of the stories describes an apocalypse through a list of past lovers of the main character, from the somewhat predictable first experiences to one last fuck before the world ends. Halfway through the book, there is a story made up of 50 pages worth of imaginary Law and Order SVU episode summaries, 271 of them to be precise. There is a story couched in them, about hauntings and deaths, and love and lust, and the Earth breathing under our feet. There is also a bit of mockery towards SVU and a few very believable descriptions of just how ridiculous the show gets. It is really clever to turn such a pop culture reference into a format, especially given how formulaic this show is about often gratuitous sexual violence. This is the most recent story in the collection that I read so its impression is heaviest on my mind, but I am looking forward to reading more and seeing what other moments of genius Machado has to offer.
Two other books I started reading this week: Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments which is a short volume of ‘arguments’ which are more like quips or idiosyncratic truisms presented in what sometimes feels like a barrage of opinions and sometimes a slow drip of nuanced insight, and Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark which I heard about on On the Media a long time ago and am reading out of the same impulse that lead me to Brooke Gladstone’s latest book: in this political climate I probably need constructive hope or whatever it is that is the opposite of (liberal) despair. I’ve only made it a few chapters into Hope in the Dark but the tone of it is gentle and encouraging in the same way being told by a beloved teacher that you can do better is and it is also full of historical examples that ground the more didactic elements. Solnit wrote it after George W. Bush had been re-elected but its eerie how on point some of her observations of liberal politics still are, and how much she references the environment.
The book I have not gotten around cracking yet is the collection of longform journalism edited by Evan Ratliff of the Atavist magazine and the Longform podcast called Love and Ruin. I listen to Longform fairly regularly, in part because I like to imagine that, in another life, I could have been a more serious writer, so it seemed appropriate to get around reading some of the pieces written by reporters thoroughly interviewed on the show. Maybe I’ll make it a project to read an essay or two every weekend, the same way I have been trying to attack my other books by factoring in some reading time into my lunch breaks at work.
EATING: I am still eating a fairly restrictive diet in order to appease my troubled stomach, but I think I’m getting better at working within those restrictions. Avoiding all beans, onions and garlic on a vegan diet is certainly suboptimal, but I have been enjoying a fair amount of roasted vegetables, tofu scrambles, herby quinoa salads, noodles dressed with peanut sauce and this incredible Chinese five spice braised tofu. (As a clarifying note, tofu, tempeh and quinoa are pretty much the only protein sources I am allowed to eat for the time being.) A lot of these meals have been somewhat improvised, abandoning all recipes and just being grateful for the local farmer’s market that allowed me to stock my fridge with fresh produce pretty cheaply and just keep throwing bowls and plates together as I go along. Other than recommending this previously mentioned tofu from the From My Bowl blog (the same technique will work with other spices or spice blends if you don’t have access to a store that sells Chinese five spice), I don’t have a specific recipe to share other than highly endorsing chia pudding (2 tablespoon chia seeds mixed with 5 tablespoons to 1/3 cup milk of choice and let sit overnight, add a teaspoon or two of maple syrup or a tablespoon of cocoa powder for extra flavor if you’d like), coconut yogurt, strawberry and peanut butter bowls as a perfect summer breakfast.