annie's microblog

Kids are back to school today: M is 2 hours away starting college. R is a senior in high school. Z is a sophomore. And L is in 7th grade. TIME IT DOES SURE FLY.

Also while I love love love the additional time we have together in summer, I’m so ready for uninterrupted work time again.​

Nick Cave, quoted here:

“Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position — it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like — such as reading to your little boy, showing him something you love, singing him a song, or putting on his shoes — keeps the devil down in the hole.
It says the world and its inhabitants have value, and are worth defending.
It says the world is worth believing in.
In time, we come to find that this is so.”

how’s everybody in IT doing today? 😬 hanging in there?

community, community, community. So many questions keep leading me back to this same answer.

well, that was awful

am i really listening to the potential leaders of usa insult each other over their golf capabilities and that’s what we’re doing? okay that’s what we’re doing

watching the presidential debate of the united states of america and a key point is about ‘having sex with a porn star’ and so that’s where we are as a country

biden needs a nap, donald needs a straitjacket

trump just called biden “a very bad palestinian” so okay

OH MY GOD CAN WE PLEASE PUT A WOMAN IN CHARGE ALREADY. IT IS 2024

dying throes of a colonizing empire sure are ugly

after birth? wtf is he talking about

donald is so dumb, biden is so old, i am so depressed

Books I read through the divorce process. The progression is 🤣

How small that is, with which we wrestle,
what wrestles with us, how immense;
were we to let ourselves, the way things do,
be conquered thus by the great storm,—
we would become far-reaching and nameless.

What we triumph over is the Small,
and the success itself makes us petty.
The Eternal and Unexampled
will not be bent by us.

…growth is: to be the deeply defeated
by ever greater things.

Rilke, The Man Watching

Finished reading: A Life of Meaning by James Hollis, Ph.D. 📚

We swim in the mystery, and we have to track the movement of Divinity through the tangible world, to try to track the role of the unconscious powers—which by definition is something we don’t know—to see them as they manifest in our dreams, our bodies, our patterns; and to realize we are carriers, humble carriers of the life force that has little interest in our comfort or certainties.

Mandy Brown, Gather your gossips:

Capitalism needed to disparage women’s talk in order to bring itself about because women’s talk—that is, talk that is liberatory, reciprocal, and mutual—is a powerful antidote to the violence, oppression, and theft that capitalism ushered in. That same disparaging force is at work today, in the forces toiling feverishly to restrict reproductive rights and to reinforce the gender binary—because the gender binary is a load-bearing pillar of capitalism. But as the edict to prohibit “babble” attests, only by isolating women, by preventing them from talking, from sharing their experiences with one another, from acting in concert, can that pillar be defended.
This represents an opportunity: if capitalism needs women to be quiet, then women talking is one key to ending capitalism.