Flashing Palely in the Margins
Driving on the left
Some people love getting behind the wheel of a car, revving up the engine and just going wherever their whims will take them.
I am not one of those people.
I approach driving with hesitation and a bit of dread. Even though I do it every day, it’s still something I’m not totally comfortable doing, and often look for reasons to avoid it if possible. There is nothing freeing about being behind the wheel; instead, it feels stressful, constraining, imbued with too much pressure.
This feeling overwhelms me when I drive here, at home. I try my best not to drive in unfamiliar places as the discomfort increases when I don’t know where I am or where I’m going.
Earlier this month, I did something I never thought I would do: I drove on the left side of the road.
We were visiting England, and as part of our itinerary, it was necessary to rent a car to bop around to places in the Cotswolds and in Dorset. I had never driven on the left before, and was downright terrified of how it would go and how I would cope.
After the first day of driving, I was ready to give up. I complained, loudly, and felt like I couldn’t relax, even after getting out of the car and sitting down for a while. It was not my finest hour.
The second day took me through small, winding roads that were only large enough for one car to drive despite there being two-way traffic. The speed limit was 60 miles per hour; I was lucky if I was driving at 20mph on those roads. But: we got to where we needed to go, and I survived the first real test of my driving acuity.
Once the third day rolled around, I had gotten somewhat used to driving on the left, to navigating narrow roads, and to finding my way around roundabouts. Things got easier, and while I maintained my discomfort with driving on the whole, I didn’t feel out of my depth anymore.
The rest of the trip was better: I didn’t complain as much, and I didn’t feel as agitated as I did towards the start. I still didn’t enjoy driving, but I didn’t feel terrified anymore. (Thankfully, I got a few days off from being behind the wheel when we visited friends for a few days and they ferried us around.) On the last day, as we took the series of motorways from Bournemouth to Heathrow, I almost felt a slight sense of ease. When I returned the car, the woman at the rental agency told me I didn’t look as shell-shocked as some of the other foreign drivers are upon their return.
I still don’t enjoy driving, anywhere, but I did learn that what seemed daunting, almost impossible at first, could become easier with time. That it only takes a little practice, a lot of immersion, and a willingness to try something new to make things better. I don’t plan on driving on the left again anytime soon, but at least now I know that I can do it, and that I can navigate any fork in the road the path of life may throw at me.
A poem
Thermal Imaging
DeeSoul Carson
The beautiful British nature documentary narrates that their cameras
are military grade, meaning that before this technology was used
to peer into the areolas of ants about their business, or to stalk
the thermal signature of a tiger with such clarity and precision
one might think the beast observed by a shadow, a military
–likely ours, likely unwarranted–traced the path of a group
of boys, likely pubescent and unaware of their tracing, for miles
before ordering a strike someone will call surgical, as if to excise
a tumor and not to condemn to death a child someone will mourn
despite the camera trained on their figure, the aperture analyzing
even the twitch of their eyes as they flick towards a God we have long
ignored or abused, trained so close and so clear on their tears that,
in a different context, we might think it a river, its gentle arc,
its ceaseless flowing
(From the Latest Issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review)
Some links
My family is East African Indian Shia Muslim — like Zohran Mamdani’s — and this thread is an EXCELLENT explainer on our history and our identification as both African and Indian. (Also, just a really great way to learn about my family’s history.) Definitely worth reading all the way through.
I read a lot on the internet (as you may be able to tell from the links I share—a small sampling of everything I do read) but sometimes I feel like I could do more, that I used to be a more voracious reader and these days things sit in my Instapaper queue for ages and I never get around to them. Anne Helen Petersen’s obituary for reading the internet captures that feeling perfectly:
I periodically beat myself up about how bad I’ve become at reading the internet — how fragmented my attention has become, how easily I skim and scroll, how much more interested I am at looking at all of the things, even if that’s just the titles of posts in my newsletter feed, than instead of reading them.
Twenty-seven notes on growing older—I’ve been feeling a lot of this as I crest into my mid-forties and grapple with the trajectory of life and what’s to come:
Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.
Mike Monteiro, as he always does in his newsletter, shares some excellent wisdom, this time about meeting people and being in community:
The lack of a sidewalk is a threat.
The lack of a sidewalk implies that no one in the neighborhood needs the sidewalk to get between things. Therefore anyone walking through the neighborhood doesn’t belong. You are doing it wrong. You are not following the rules. You are not one of us. You don’t below here. In places without sidewalks, people get in their car, drive out to another place, do their business, and retreat back into their home. And while I’m sure they make some form of human connection where they might drive to, there’s a loss in being hermitically sealed in your vehicle during the trip. When I use the sidewalk to go to the record store and come back home carrying a very identifiable yellow Amoeba bag, I can count on at least one person asking me “What’d you get?” during my walk home.
Loneliness is an architectural problem.
When a restaurant includes a postcard with the bill, I will always bring it home and mail it to a friend. The words I write often have nothing to do with the restaurant, but it is a reminder that I was thinking of them as I enjoyed myself over a meal. This look at the evolution of the restaurant postcard was fascinating:
Before artfully designed tote bags and graphic tees marked a boom in restaurant swag, there were postcards. Starting in the early 20th century, postcard culture swept across America, and restaurants in bigger cities saw an opportunity to capitalize on the tourists and business travelers passing through with a free postcard advertising their business.
I’ve been intrigued by digital sovereignty ever since I heard my friend Vass talking about it, and appreciated this piece on the steps we need to take in Canada to achieve digital sovereignty:
Dependence on digital infrastructure owned and operated by American companies now seems to put Canadian sovereignty at risk, prompting the need to reduce reliance on the United States for digital services.
An interesting take on why it’s good to self-censor and why we shouldn’t want everyone to just say whatever comes into their head:
There’s real societal value to self censorship. Watching your words and how they might affect people around you is a pro-social exercise that should be encouraged in every facet of modern life. Instead of flooding the home or the workplace or your social gatherings with toxicity, you should monitor your inner dialogue and filter out the parts that will hurt people based entirely on their immutable traits. You should be nice. You should not be an asshole. It’s not a big ask.
I’ve shared a lot about mangoes and mango season in the past, but not much about the industry that has popped up to meet the demand of mangoes imported from India and Pakistan. Turns out, it’s a cutthroat market out there.
I didn’t know observatories had artists-in-residence, but I’m very glad that some of them do, especially when it means we get beautiful reflections on what it means to view the universe and our place in it, from the artist-in-residence of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Another set of stamps I’m coveting: a pane of 20 stamps by cartoonist Chris Ware following a mail carrier on her rounds through four seasons of the year.
Emily and Ben Dreyfuss, the children of Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss, talk about the movie—quite hilariously and not so flatteringly—on its 39th anniversary.
I’m an (over)user of the em-dash, so it has been strange to see people saying that its presence in writing is a tell that something was written by AI. I laughed, and nodded, at this “response” by the em-dash to the AI allegations.
How muppets go outside: a great video explaining all the amazing in-camera tricks and techniques they used to make the muppets really come alive.
I don’t often share podcasts in these links, but this episode of Popcast is too good to ignore: Pusha T and Malice talking about hip hop and the industry. (And there’s a new Clipse album out!)
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