Finished reading: even this page is white by Vivek Shraya 📚
Watched: Black Christmas 🍿
omg, super dark. Great flick. And I thought I’d seen it all. Wow
My poetry well seemed to have dried up for a while, but last night and most of today it seems to be producing again. Whew. Pleased with one and very pleased with another (that I’m still hacking away at right now … even though I just took a break to post to Micro.blog 🤣)
iPhone apps & layout
I am a crazy person. I like minimalism and have tried to implement that through my home screen on my iPhone. I posted before about my home screen.
I always seem to be tinkering with it. My latest was to get down to one page of apps and some widgets on the Today view page. That lasted about 4 days. I just have too many apps that I like to open and I hate folders. I hate the extra clicking and for the apps I use, I actually like their icons. And, I absolutely hate seeing a notification on a folder for one of the apps (e.g. I use Overcast for podcast listening and I have the number of unplayed episodes on the app icon). Some apps I don’t use often, but I tell you, as soon as I moved them to the App Library only, I needed them multiple times a day! 🤣
So, I’m back to 2 pages of apps, and widgets on the Today View. In case you’re wondering, I’m using the double-wide Calendar widget (I love how it shows multiple days in a nice format), a double-wide Battery widget (to see watch, phone and AirPods). Then I have small widgets for Activity and Sleep Score.
Importance of knowing your community
I loved something I heard on a podcast this morning during my walk. It’s a great podcast (sadly it finished its run a few years ago) on trans writers, and the creator/interviewer themselves are trans. I’ve read so many of these folks that it’s wonderful to get to here their physical voices and listen to an interview. The podcast is called t4t, created by Hazel Jane Plante. By the way, Plante’s own works are amazing. Check out Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) and Any Other City. They’re worth it.
Anyway, back to the quote. The interviewee was Morgan M Page, a Canadian writer, artist, historian and activist. She was commenting on a conversation she had with trans youths in Toronto and how they knew who they were in the present but didn’t know that they had a history and could be artists, writers, etc. themselves since others had blazed a trail before them. She explained a lot of this history and their eyes widened.
Page said, “Once you reconnect someone to their lineage, they no longer feel like they are adrift and alone in an empty sea. And it just has such a powerful impact on people’s lives and what they think their lives could be.”
This. This is how I felt when I started reading trans writers and watching films written and directed by trans people. I saw this whole community unfurl before my eyes. I knew I wasn’t alone before I read/viewed these works, but still, to see it physically before me, I was blown away. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, the warmth of a home after coming in from the snow, the embrace of a true love after a hard day.
This is also why I get so angry and fight so hard to keep books in libraries and in front of kids and adults. As I’ve said in my “About” page, never underestimate the power of seeing yourself positively portrayed in popular culture.
Embodied Exegesis, Ann LeBlanc, ed.
Finished reading: Embodied Exegesis by Ann LeBlanc 📚
A good collection. There were three stories and one poem that really stood up and spoke to me.
- Lillian Boyd’s “The Repossession of Kevin’s Perfect Hair” was dark and awesome.
- Elly Bangs “Bespoke” started slow but I really enjoyed how it progressed and concluded.
- Ryka Aoki’s poem “The Woman of Water Dreams” was concise, powerful and so good. I’ve read other pieces of her work. I love her style.
- I loved Izzy Wasserstein‘s “Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition.”
It’s been an amazing week. I really need to get a longer post out but I need to find some time to do it justice. Leave it to say that I have some amazing friends who while I never doubted their support, receiving it has so deeply touched me and energized me.
Sometimes you need an album of funny nature pictures. Something to make you smile and just be a happy human being for a few moments. This set of photos from the Guardian is perfect!