Flashing Palely in the Margins
Snippets at the end of the year
It has been a long few weeks.
My grandmother passed away a few weeks ago. I wrote a short remembrance of her on my blog last week. Hers is a legacy of love and care that I know every member of the family will cherish and uphold, and while I grieve her loss, I am grateful for all she taught me.
I’m writing this on my phone on a plane that left 2.5 hours late from the airport—we boarded and sat on the tarmac for over an hour—and that is on its way to the west coast. My rear end is numb, but I keep reminding myself of just how much I enjoy spending the holidays with our family out west, and just how invigorated I feel being so close to the ocean. It is the perfect place to close out a long few weeks, to cap off an eventful year—worth a few hours of delays and turbulence.
I’m wearing new glasses that I just picked up a few days ago. My prescription had changed so much that it was time for me to get new ones; I’m still getting used to the change, and this pair keeps feeling like it is falling off my nose. The thing that will take most getting used to, however, is in the lenses: I now wear bifocals. I’m told it’s a rite of passage to finally need bifocals, that it is a natural part of aging for anyone who has lived their whole life with corrective eyewear. These new glasses remind me that youth is fleeting, yes, but mostly they let me read my phone without putting it right up to my face anymore.
A few weeks ago, we had a pretty bad snowstorm: schools were closed for two days and it wasn’t easy to get out and about because of the massive accumulation. We are lucky to have a small sledding hill just down the street from our house; on each day, we put on our snow gear and dragged the sled to the hill. Zoya loved sliding down the hill and then slowly heading back up to sled some more—even more than she did last winter. It was a delightful way to spend a few hours outside on days where the weather had conspired to keep us indoors.
This is most likely the last update I’ll be posting until 2025 — I’ll be spending the rest of the year celebrating with family and friends and thinking fondly about everyone that I love. I’m wishing you joy in the year to come, and rest and solace as we close out the last few days of this one.
A poem
little prayer
Danez Smith
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
Some links
“To understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object.“ It has been interesting to see Zoya start to make sense of the idea of zero, and even more interesting to discover just how limited I am in explaining the concept to her.
I love the idea of a digital mending circle and am sad I couldn’t make it for the last one hosted by Jack Cheng; will have to make it out for the next one. Such a fantastic idea to spend some time tending to our digital lives.
Lots to argue about in this “The 100 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time” list, but mostly it just made me want to go out and watch more musicals. So many of them on this list have made me smile, weep, sing, and dance over the years.
Here’s an interesting piece on cultivating time and space for reading. I used to read prolifically before we had a child; I need to rebuild that muscle again.
You don’t have to love tennis to be in awe of Rafael Nadal — there was something special about the way he played that inspired exultation; he was my favorite tennis player since Agassi, whom I was enamored with when I first discovered tennis. I am lucky to have watched both Agassi and Nadal play live, and credit much of my adoration of the sport to them.
We have entirely too many toys in the house, and somehow more and more keep coming in—and it seems as though this affliction is a shared one in society.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to teach reading in our household, so this article on commercial curricula and how schools make decisions on how they teach reading was eye-opening.
“Plates are capitalism; bowls are socialism. Plates are a backward longing for an imaginary twentieth century; bowls are the dream of a better world.“
Did you ever use Dopplr as a tool to know when your friends were in the same place you are so you can hang out? The new tool Mozi seems to do the same thing, and has a strong commitment to privacy and good internet ethics. If you sign up, let me know and I’ll add you as a contact.
Tuberculosis is one of the diseases that seems to be popping up in my reading and browsing quite a bit recently. I think it all started with this excellent Kurzgesagt video featuring John Green all about “the White Death” and how it’s still deadly and prevalent today.
A couple of things about TB I’ve learned from my reading:
- Over 7.8 billion people received the current TB vaccine (known as the BCG vaccine) between 1980 and 2023, making it the most widely administered vaccination on Earth.
- Antibiotic-resistant TB strains today account for 2.5 percent of cases worldwide.
I find it a bit scary that TB is starting to have some drug resistance, but am heartened to read in this article on the long road to end tuberculosis that there are some new preventatives and therapies in the works, including “a vaccine equipped with adjuvants that efficiently prime the immune system and newer antibiotics against which the bacteria have yet to evolve resistance.”
I have been harping a lot about RSS recently, but I do think that’s it’s the best tool for change in the way we use the web and connect with people. My blog has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if you’re interested, and of course this newsletter has one as well. (Email is just fine too, if you prefer to receive it that way; just thought I’d present some other options.)
This zine on “RSS is (not) dead (yet)” by Audra McNamee from 2023 goes deeper into the way RSS works and some of the reasons why it declined over the past few years (except in podcasting)—and why it’s time for a comeback. And if you’re interested in jumping into it and want a more in-depth breakdown of what RSS does and how you can use it, Jatan Mehta wrote a pretty comprehensive guide to RSS earlier this year.
Happy holidays, my friends. See you in 2025.
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