Just remember: we're all nightmares to someone.

The trick is learning to love the nightmare you are to yourself.

(Deep-sea chimaera, if curious.)

"When we help others, we help ourselves."

Darned skippy, Margaret Killjoy. 💜

She had a two-parter last week on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that discusses mutual aid response work in North Carolina, from her personal experience visiting Asheville after Helene.

This is a beautiful meditation on how we come together, and how we can find healing for our own wounds in being present for others. Be where you can. Do what you can. Let it be enough.

#CSGN #Podcasts #Helene

https://pca.st/episode/371b7146-79c9-42b0-a47e-b89e5dbb198a

Woo! Sold an SF essay this morning. Not the same as an SF story, but it's a good warm-up to getting more fiction back out in queue - and I do love celebrating histories in this genre.

Still have to finish a book review today, though, and then deal with an unpleasant slice of US history for Rewind Wednesday.

Errands first--and one other person who sent me a series of frantic messages late last night proooobably needs a reply sometime soon. 🤦‍♂️

Hope you and your loved ones are keeping safe. 💛

Yesterday was tense, and I hope everyone was able to reach friends and family who might be struggling amid our current climate disasters (or other issues of note!).

So, a tardy Tough Times focuses on a slightly "lighter" problem: legacy media's buy-in to PR hype about restarting a nuclear plant for Microsoft.

Watch out for such reporting; it creates a sense of inevitability around unchecked consumption, when we cannot afford further investment in waste.

#MediaLiteracy
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/lessons-from-a-weird-hype-cycle-around

@ecksmc, I hope you're having a better day than yesterday (especially with the bullpucky you were combatting).

Pursuant to our last chat, this book just dropped: WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE, a look at how education, nonprofit, and media "thought leaders" leverage the language of equity to further their own careers.

"Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged."

Funny timing! #Books

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232607/we-have-never-been-woke

This piece is going to take until midnight. I keep checking in with folks in crisis.

What even is writing? Why art?
We have so much distress in the world.
So many people who just need you to sit with them while they're in pain.

It often feels so agonizingly selfish to create, even nonfiction meant to inform.

Our world is falling apart (same as it ever was). Is it worth keeping the creative dream alive when there is *so* much quotidian need to address first?

#AmWriting, but also
#AmHumaning

Brief pop-in to share.

Not sure this needs the music, but whew.

Nature should remind us all how small we are, how precious and fleeting our lives are, and how much we need to be present for one another for as long as we can. 🌎

Anything less, and I'd even go so far as to say that we aren't looking at it right.

#Space #Milton
https://youtube.com/shorts/GZORg0fS1bw?si=kfblU1BAU4jRnw6h

There is way too much shaving cream going in the world today.

Offline for a bit, to run errands and finish an editing job. Will try to find a *kinder* approach to Tough Times Tuesday for the newsletter later today, but right now it's all just... a lot.

Watch your hearts.

Adjust your expectations.

Forgive yourselves and those around you for not being at your/their best with so much nervous energy and trauma blasted everywhere.

To be here at all in the struggle is *enough*.

It has to be. 🕊️

Two of my students are, respectively, a forestry engineer and a psychologist. This means that when I pick an article like this for one of our classes, we get to work on vocabulary for them both: first, for the forestry engineer, in using phrases of relevance to his field; then, for the psychologist, as we come up with vocabulary for coping with watching the world fall apart in ever so many ways.

Sucks for the planet (and us)!
But great English class material, thanks! 🙃
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/08/deforestation-destruction-demolition-beef-soy-palm-oil-nickel

My contribution to 🇨🇦 Thanksgiving this year came yesterday, when I wrote out a menu for a family member, along with a shopping list & order of prep tasks.

Did this involve making up three simple dessert recipes? Yes. And teaching her how to make gravy? Yes.

But the hilarious part was that, for all her worries about not having enough options for 20 guests, I learned that she draws the line at *vanilla* ice cream. A road too far, apparently!

🙃 In Colombia you just make a meal and people eat.

No weight training in the park for an hilarious reason: a giant military/police event in the stadium. My equipment was surrounded by men in dress uniform, down to the swords. 😅 Ah well, good business for the tiendas, at least. One had to run an extra pot open-fire style, to keep hot water on site.

I'll restart at home instead. 👌🏻

#Colombia! Where even the rats are packing arepas 🫓. 😋

Back to weight training today? Yes please!

(Me two days from now, after my A and B routines: *shrieking muscles everywhere*)

Morning, 'Nauts! 💪🏻