I lit a candle and sat outside on the cool grass and poured a glass of Carmen Stevens Cabernet Shiraz blend into the dirt. Carmen Stevens is the first black winemaker in South Africa. I figured it was the most appropriate tribute on hand. 
We have so much work to do. 

I had lots of random thoughts today, but I have also been having migraine auras, so can't really look at the screen.

Also, the cat is sick. Nothing is easy.

Everything is fucked and today is a day I can't separate myself from the sorrow and impotence of living at the end of the world. It's not just that the US is over--that's not the world--it's that the climate is over.

I don't have kids, but I love some people who do. And I love some people under the age of 18. We destroyed this world. We let petroleum companies lie to us. We let governments perpetuate their dominance. We let people waste and divert water. We let factory farming create disease and destroy land.

I hate us. I hate myself for failing to make change.

So when I started doing court reform and judicial elections work over 10 years ago, one of the common threads was how much court systems assume that the people access them don't need[fn1] to know anything about the process. Especially if you have an attorney, you're expected to just go along without explanations or answers because the systems don't provide those answers and having those answers does not give you any tool to change timelines or outcomes.

It's this thought: having those answers does not give you any tool to change timelines or outcomes that I keep bumping into this week. Not in court access, but in customer service.

The pandemic has screwed up supply chains. It's screwed up business processes. It's hamstrung employers and a bunch of terrible things, even putting aside the people it's killing. But I'm seeing an interesting divide between business that are handling the disruption with candor and those who stonewall.

In April, I placed two orders: one with HerRoom (which sells mostly bras) and one with Ikea. Both took my money; both discovered problems with their supply chains. HerRoom not only updated me ("Sorry. We know you ordered this, but we still haven't received it to ship to you. We'll let you know more when we do. You can wait or cancel by clicking here.") at regular intervals, they answered my one email with what little they knew in response to my direct, specific question and a sorry, this stinks but it is what it is.

Ikea. Well, Ikea have been complete assholes. The phone tree disconnects you if you select "talk to someone about an existing order"; the webpage only has an option to cancel an order. The Twitter account is a bot that says "sorry. we're experiencing delays." I have a specific direvt question about the bill of lading which they emailed me. A specific question which the bill of lading directs me to talk to them about, at the phone number that hangs up on me.

See, Ikea knows the answer to the question and also what impact my knowing those answers will have. They have decided it is unnecessary to allow me access to that information. That is about as frustrating as not having the information. Even if the information is: we really don't know. This is how we will send you an update--that would 1000x more satisfactory than how they are handling it.

[fn1] oindeed, courts often assume people don't deserve to know anything about the process but that's a digression into the malice or brutal heirarchy of the law and I'm really thinking about the more benign or unthinking motivations or just inconsiderate choices.

Hi, everybody! 
I'm making a public post because I want people to be able to see how cool One Post Wonder is. Here are some things I can do with OPW. 
I can post a photo of my cat stealing my office chair. 

Isn't she a scamp? 

I can also post links to documents. I used bit.ly to make a shortlink to a document in JSTOR. https://bit.ly/3bX3eit

Here's a YouTube video of Mongolian throat singing. 

I hope my friends who can see this will leave lots of comments and sub-comments to show how that works. 

This could be a good thing for people who need an alternative to all the bad platforms that are out on the Internet. I hope more people will benefit from this post and the One Post Wonder community. 

What a horrible terrible evil world we have built here in the US.

I don't feel like talking about either the generalized horrible world we've built, nor the specific terrible evil medical world I had to grind through today.

Suffice to say, I had to drive. And then the parking garage machine refused to read my validated parking ticket. And then I still had to drive home. 

I've got an unexpected (nonCOVID) medical thing going on which is probably nothing but which is impossible right now. The upside is the hospital is right by our offices (which are not yet abandoned), so I can pick up some notes I might need. Unless I take some sick leave, which I might need, regardless of whether or not I turn out to be actually sick or just dealing with hyper-vigilant doctors.

I'm going to drive, instead of bike, because I am trying to clean all of my things out of my office and there are still things there too big for my bike.

In other news, a friend said "congrats! better done than perfect!" to me and I almost wept from validation and love.

I read this today and I relate to it:

And I am well aware of the difference in behavior, attitude, self-awareness, empathy, and compassion between adults who were treated with compassion and respect when they were children and those who were not. 

I should talk to my mom about it because I feel like we were and I'm not sure how my parents came to that model.

My sister in law's house is surrounded by smoldering woods. She and her daughters are fine and if the winds hold, so should their house be, but it's nerve-wracking.

Rebecca Nagle's podcast This Land is good. There was a lot I did not know and it's a perspective you don't often hear or hear amplified in the U.S. But also it's an interesting story.

One thing that I've been coming back to was her discussion of the "blood quantuum" which is a US government conceit and incompatible specifically with Cherokee notions of identity which was matrilineal and never included things like "half-blood". She talks about taxes and how the blood quantum was designed to harm indigenous folks. She also talks about how, for tribal citizens, tribal identity was primarily a political or community identity (more like, you know, your basic European national identity) than some measure of ancestry. But the blood quantum mechanic was something I never thought of before as an externally imposed standard.

The episode also gets into racist notions about not only indigenous people but freed slaves, including the racist notions of the tribes against the slaves. And this informs the conflict between tribal identity as political and social and that of the blood quantum.

I don't have any sophisticated or well-informed opinions about it, but I had never thought about how the criteria of belonging was constructed by the occupying government, how it may or may not have conflicted with the identity of the people it was claiming to define. She touches very briefly on the dualing racisms of defining people by how much of whose blood runs through their veins (as if that's even a thing).

[As an aside, Nagle is a citizen of the Cherokee nation, but the case at the center of the story involves a Muskogee (Creek) citizen. I gather she has written rather more about the general questions of identity and indigenous citizenship, but I am mostly familiar with her through Pink Loves Consent and FORCE]

I sit in a sphere of US society where no-one questions "what" I say I am. Where I can be Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, even though I'm nothing but a White U.S. born woman, whose parents were White U.S born people, who know which countries and towns their grandparents left to come here instead.

Nagle talks about the oppression of defining people with metrics not part of their own sense of identity as she moves through the general story. I think about all the people I have known in my life, across the American southwest and in the Plains who have mocked those definitions, the people within them, not knowing (and likely not caring) they were invented to steal land and resources, as well as destroy political structures.

I need to listen to This Land again--it's been months since I listened to it and I am probably misremembering most of it.

But that's the bit of information which was glaringly new to me and probably should have been obvious all along.

QotD: I said this earlier and want to repeat it: we had a tremendous opportunity this year to show compassion, in so many ways, and it’s such a continuing disappointment to realize how many people opted not to.

Oops. Forgot to hit post, so this is Saturday AND Sunday AND Monday.

We made some progress on cleaning out our storage unit. Ate hot dogs. Cleaned some more. Ate tacos. Cleaned some more. 

Spouse is getting all the money in line to leave the country. Unlike several friends, we can't do the Irish citizenship, so he'e getting things together to demonstrate we can support ourseives without working or welfare.

I don't know how I feel about leaving my parents or my sister. I don't know how I feel about being a refugee. I don't know that I want to leave everyone.

During the hours of last night when I was awake, I thought about what I'd take and what I'd abandon if we left quickly. Not that it would come to that--even if we go, it would require time and planning. Everything is digital now: pictures, money, contacts. But I'd want the Cursed Family Ring. Mom's paintings. 

As hard as it is to think about the picking and choosing, if we leave the country calmly, normally, like moving to another state, I cannot imagine how we'd leave suddenly, in an emergency. 

I don't know. I'd like to feel safe. It does not feel safe here at all.