Categories
a better world is possible society

A Caffeine Addiction Is Just An Addiction

Subheading: be less of an asshole!

If you need coffee to feel normal, if you require red bull to make it through another shitty shift, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is: you’re addicted to caffeine. The good news is: that’s morally neutral, because drugs and addiction are older than writing!

The issue, as I see it, with a moralistic or value judgement placed on drugs is that we are creating a two tier system, instead of admitting a fundamental truth: drugs are awesome and they help people deal with sentience. Even other animals get high, for fuck’s sake!

Choosing to view some addictive substances (caffeine, alcohol) as culturally acceptable – well, not in all cultures, shout out to the temperance religions – is that by creating this dichotomy we have created yet another avenue for punishment (and in the US, this almost always leads to / ends with incarceration).

People who smoke crack and functional alcoholics and people who take medicine to inhibit serotonin uptake are all participating in a fundamental part of being alive: to be in control of your experiences and interactions with the world. Drugs are the spice of life! Some people need them to not want to die (please take your meds) and some people just want to use them to lower their inhibitions. Others use drugs to make an intolerable life pleasurable for fleeting moments – and, as long as you realize that even when you consume drugs, you are still responsible for your actions insofar as not hurting others, there is nothing wrong with that.

In addition to the unnecessary judgement and punishment, we also make recovery so much harder for people who want to get sober. Now, again, there’s nothing wrong with not choosing sobriety. But if and when people choose to change a habit, by creating a tier of unacceptable drugs, we impose so much stigma and shame that prevents people from being successful at sobriety. It’s okay to talk about being in a twelve step program (which some employers pay for!!) but it’s not OK to admit it’s been a decade since you’ve shot heroin. And I think that’s bullshit!

Criminalizing drugs also necessitates the relationship between user and dealer, and drug dealers do not fuck around. A better world is possible, and it could start with free drugs on demand. All of them!! Abortion pills. Birth control. Ibuprofen. Opioids. Amphetamines. Alcohol. Caffeine. Allergy medicine. Insulin. Cancer drugs. Think of the hospital bill reductions. Think of the administration costs saved for insurance pReApPrOvAl.

This would end the power imbalanced dealer-user relationship, and WAY LESS people (goal: no one ever) would die from unsafe drugs, because we can make and test them before we give them away to ensure safety!! Oh my god!! DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE A BETTER FUCKING WORLD??

In sum: drugs are good, it’s ok if you do them, don’t be an asshole to other drug users (aka all sentient life), if you want sobriety I want you to succeed, if you don’t want sobriety I fuckin get it – we all deserve free drugs because labor is entitled to all it creates.

Categories
home making

Cleaning Content

I refuse to apologize for being away. Glad we addressed that. Sometimes I don’t feel like being a mouthy bitch online. And sometimes I do, but it’s all on that hell bird app. I don’t want to talk about it. We’re getting back to personal websites, and progress isn’t linear.

Anyway, this post was actually about to be a very long IG caption, and as I was typing on my tiny phone keyboard I had the thought “Why aren’t you putting this on your website?” so thank you technology spirits for that flash of insight.

Today is Valentine’s Day, and we all know that you need candles for romance. Do not @ me, this is not negotiable. For fire safety, I prefer battery operated. For laziness reasons, I prefer remote control. Lucky me I invested in a set of twelve of remote battery candles like two years ago. Unlucky for me, an unnamed person let the battery contacts get all fucked up (it was me).

Have you ever had something battery powered you love get messed up, with that weird battery powder all over the inside? If you are prepared with a few supplies and an excess of executive function, you can safely clean your beloved objects and restore them to working condition!

There are only a few things you need to know. One: don’t touch the battery powder, unless you enjoy your skin getting red and angry at you. Disposable gloves are your friend. If you do get battery stuff on yourself, run lots of cold-ish to lukewarm water over your skin (to dilute), then soap up and scrub like we’re three years into a pandemic. Two: don’t get battery powder shit all over your table – put down a plastic bag from your under-the-sink hoard, or some paper towels. Something you can throw away after you’re done.

Also fun fact: due to advances in battery technology (hello nickle-cadmium, eat shit alkaline batteries) battery powder is less toxic than it’s ever been – it’s still terrible, tho! Also, you shouldn’t throw your batteries away because they start fires at the dump. But do we as Americans have an easy way to get rid of batteries? LOL we don’t even have healthcare, of course we don’t have battery recycling infrastructure.

Getting back into it – three: isopropyl alcohol is the tool for the job. A cotton ball, cotton swab, or even folded up paper towel dipped into iso will dissolve the solid of the battery powder, making it a slurry that is absorbed by the paper product you’re swabbing with. This shit also shouldn’t touch skin or eating surfaces – throw it away. Isopropyl alcohol dries incredibly quickly, meaning that you don’t have to worry about the battery contacts being “wet”; air dries iso faster than your hands and a towel dry a big pot. Trust me, I have a fucking chemistry degree and my first work study job was cleaning test tubes.

Don’t immediately put new batteries into the contacts – wait until the battery opening looks dry, and if you’ve done a good job cleaning, you can test with your fingertip (now that there’s not nasty battery shit everywhere, you can use the power of touch to verify dryness).

If there’s lots of battery powder in the springy part of the contact, a cotton swab is perfect. Dip it into the iso, then insert the swab into the circle of the spring. Turn to the right and left, using just a bit of force to ensure that the isopropyl alcohol on the swab is in contact with the metal of the springs.

A couple of girlfriends a few weeks ago were like, “Lani, how do you KNOW THINGS?” and the answer is “my dad grew up poor and is cheap as hell!” I did a lot of child labor on this type of chore – cleaning fucked up battery contacts, holding funnels as my dad poured various chemicals from one container to another, loosening and tightening screws in narrow places that require tiny hands, being yelled at for letting the flashlight wander because I was both helping with chores and trying my best to read, et cetera.

But it was all worth it in the end for this knowledge. And since I’m planning on keeping this uterus host free, I feel compelled to share the tricks and tips I was forced to learn as a youngling. Now go out there and clean your electronics safely.

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: “The Devourers” by Indra Das

“Shah Jahan’s empire lay sprawled below me like a painted map feathered with dark forest and threaded with road, stretched across the rocky table of the earth. The lamp of the sun was still hidden behind the edge of that table, though its light had begun to creep up the vaulted tent of the heavens, weakening the pinholes of the stars. The cobweb of clouds had torn apart after the rain, and hung threadbare in the dawn.”

if you are looking for a spooky, gory, sexy, queer (i mean gay AND weird), unique story i really recommend “the devourers” by Indra Das. It is not often that I reach the final section of a book and am unsure of its ending with an inability to guess. What a delight, to be lead along a journey without foreseeing the end!

I will give a content / trigger warning about a rape that is a central plot point. It is not graphic, but is one of the suns this story orbits (others include: the nature of love, regret, loneliness, family). This novel breathes rare air as a book that skillfully interrogates our culture of pervasive sexual violence, its causes and effects (on individuals, on the stories we tell), without justifying or glamoring oft covered up grotesque realities. Characters approach the best and worst of humanity from many angles, and with a little help from your local library, you could join them on their journey.

Categories
technology Uncategorized

in the sin bin

My Twitter account has had various features removed (e.g. posting / shit posting) for my belief that racists should be cyber bullied. I would bully them also in real life, but the Internet is more convenient.

This is a test to see how the wordpress integration works. If you see this week during my ~timeout~, well, that’s just another reason to take the blog more seriously and that mIcRoBlOgGiNg pLaTfOrM run by Neo-Nazis less seriously.

Stay safe and take care out there, folks. It’s still a pandemic everywhere. I’ll be at the house.

Categories
home making

Routines

I am a creature that enjoys even a false sense of security. I like to plan, list, schedule. In addition to a work digital calendar and Google calendar, I also use a paper planner (#pashfam for life)! Knowing that different things work for different folks, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been using pre and post COVID to order a senseless world.

Cooking: We cook twice a week. We used to supplement cooking with pretty regular restaurant sojourns 1-3 times per week, but I don’t really want to dine in a restaurant until we have Medicare for All, so I know my cooks, bartenders, and wait staff can actually get medical care if/when they get ill. The pre-pandemic routine was one big cooking project on Sunday, like a soup or stew or braise or casserole, that we’d eat for a few weeknight dinners. Then a weeknight meal, usually cooked on Wednesday, but flexible to account for leftovers. That meal needs to be a recipe that comes together in under an hour. We would usually grocery shop some time on the weekend, so food planning would happen on Friday or Saturday.

Post-pandemic, much is the same. Still a Sunday/Wednesday cooking schedule but with a less flexible Saturday grocery shopping trip. We get takeout/delivery on Fridays, because one day a week I like to think about food but not do any labor for it. I’m glad we had figured out what works for us pre-pandemic because otherwise I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through a lot of last year.

The other thing I’ve worked on a routine for is cleaning. Without a cleaning routine, I always think “oh, I should clean” as a running worry. Tasks, ideas, chores, pretty much everything needs a container, and that’s wisdom straight from people who know a lot more than I do. I grew up with a chore schedule (three kids, three sections of the house on rotation, kitchen cleaning was always the worst – read, most work), so I figured we ought to try out a cleaning schedule for our current living situation.

We currently have a one week cleaning, one week nothing setup. We call the cleaning weekend “chore weekend”, and it’s often a time that I feel motivated enough to do another project – for example making a large Costco run, cleaning out a closet, puttering around outside to sweep up leaves and the like. The non-cleaning weekend is lovingly referred to as “degenerate” or “degen” weekend, nomenclature courtesy of the hilarious show Letterkenny. This is our pre and post pandemic setup.

The weeks we clean, we always hit the most heavily used portions of the house: the kitchen and both bathrooms. Anywhere that collects food or hair draws my eye and needs as much love as I can stand to give. We have a cadence to clean those heavy hitters + something else. In rotation, the something else is “the upstairs”, “the downstairs” and “everything”. The everything weekend is “deep clean weekend”, which happens about every six weeks.

Since we’ve been at this spot for a while, I know that on normal cleaning weekends, the chore takes about two and a half hours of my partner and me working together. The deep clean is a four to four and a half hour project (dusting is so much damn work). It feels good to know the weeks that we’re cleaning, I can block out a bit of time on Saturday mornings to absolutely blast music (this last weekend: Ari Lennox) and give my living space the attention it needs to feel safe and homey.

There are other micro routines I have (e.g. how I use my calendars, how I wind down at night, how I schedule calling my various family members) but this post has gotten long enough. I can share in the future if there’s interest! But I’m curious: what routines do you have? How have they changed with the pandemic? How do you evaluate if something is working for you or needs to be tweaked or tossed?

Categories
Uncategorized

Real Estate is a Scam

I am utterly consumed with trying to find a house to live in where I cut a check to a bank instead of some creep who doesn’t sell their labor. And my partner & I are white technology workers who make decent money, so we’re self-aware of where we push the needle in the gentrifying forces of a city.

I am so salty about the idea of an “assessor” – like, are you kidding me, you’re just going to walk through a property and say “yeah, since this was seemingly owned by white people it’s gonna be worth an extra $50k” like that’s a feature?! We don’t wash our legs! This is common knowledge!

As salty as I am about assessments, I’m also salty about how Zillow now has “homes listed by Zillow” like that’s not a massive conflict of interest. I’m flabbergasted that we don’t just FUND ALL SCHOOLS EQUALLY because that would actually make the “I need to live in the ~best~ school district for my children” problem go away! I hate that people think their house is/should/can be their retirement strategy – this is unsustainable and unwise. I’m angry that house prices have increased but wages haven’t. I’m mad that we have enough empty houses to have everyone living inside, and we would do it if we weren’t a broken society. This whole process has really shown me that we have commodified property in the most dangerous, wasteful, inaccessible, absurd way possible. It’s all so broken!

I was telling a friend we were trying to buy a house, and he roasted me extremely well:

A text bubble says "Also I thought you were against participating in oppressive systems like property ownership" and I respond "I just wanna pay a bank to store my dishes instead of a landlord!"

But also, points were made. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll have a house. Then it’s time to think about the garden and a dog 🙂

Categories
art

How do you find new music?

What’s on the title, then.

Me: Michael recommends new artists (linked my new favorite below), I remember music from my past and listen to the artists’ full discographies, features from known artists, other friends. Divine timing?

new fav: Masego

been listening to a LOT of Loose Thoughts and Lady Lady. will need to get into Studying Abroad.

Categories
Uncategorized

Gravatars are Still a Thing?

I’m just shocked when I see an endangered internet species. It’s like someone giving you a mixed CD of MP3s. As if a person gave you their email address and it ended with “at AOL dot com.” As time moves faster, you start to realize that a lot of relics are just detritus.

I missed out on the heyday of RSS feeds, which I think would have really fit into my internet usage vibe. Let me sign up for content I’m actually interested in, instead of paying a bushel of tippy tappy boys a lot of money to build features I won’t be interacting with – looking at you, Reels and Fleets.

Anyway, I need to get back to my day job, but I was playing around in WordPress and saw Gravatars and felt compelled to comment. Soon this website should actually have my domain properly configured – ah, waiting on a DNS record sync, reminds me of my professional life. Just curious – what’s our rollback plan? :p

Categories
Uncategorized

Lani + Caffeine, A Love Story

When I was in high school, I ran on an absurd work ethic, the love and support of my community of fellow nerds, and diet mountain dew. Many thousands of dollars of dental work later (not all caused by soda, a solid half is genetic, sarcastic “thanks parents”, but also a real thank you for paying for the dental work), I realized that maybe I needed to switch to something less acidic. I moved to coke zero, which sustained me through college and for most of my professional career.

Last year, when the world broke, I still had a costco purchased flat of coke zero in my work cabinet (I would put two to three at a time in the kitchen fridge, I’m not trying to hog all the space). When we immediately transitioned to remote work, I started to realize I didn’t want to buy soda in bulk to get it home from the grocery store, which I walk to and from. The costco pallets of soda didn’t fit in our kitchen, and I knew that it was bad for my teeth (also that phenylalanine has been linked to various health issues). So I figured I would become a True Grown Up and switch from soda to coffee.

What I started to realize about coffee is that I’m never going to be a person who cares about the aromas and the flavor profile, but I do enjoy the ritual. I like to spend a few minutes reading my book or doing a puzzle while the water boils and the grounds steep. I’ve even expanded my ritual to include a bi monthly walk to a local coffee shop to buy beans, which feels both like a COVID approved activity and a great way to explore my community. There’s something to be said for making space for rituals in your life – not habits that make you as productive as possible, but rituals that actually enrich your life.

[This story doesn’t have an ending, which I’m beginning to realize will be a common theme in these posts.]

Categories
technology

Inbox Zero: Technological Compulsions

I would like to elaborate on my email philosophy.

A bit of necessary exposition: I am a technology professional who is responsible for email administration (SPF records and various alphabet soups), and I want to say, ask any person responsible for email traffic and they’ll tell you the breakdown is 95% automated garbage to and from robots, 4% scams (don’t click links, I beg) and 1% your boss telling you that they are waiting on a Very Important Email that you need to find Right Now.

Sidebar: Why are we conducting business via email? From a deliverability standpoint, email ranks only slightly higher than carrier pigeon. That being said, we’re all stuck with it, and thus our coping mechanisms develop.

In addition to my work inbox, I have three (3) personal addresses from various phases of my life that I still use regularly. At the end of my daily screen time – hopefully before 9pm – all of those inboxes are empty, unless there is an outstanding issue that will be dealt with promptly in the morning. Why?

Firstly, for me, inbox zero is about using technology to keep up to date. Emptying my email every day is like opening my mail – yeah, I might not respond to something immediately, but I am abreast of what’s going on. You can’t be surprised if you stay caught up! I consume more information via Twitter than any of my inboxes, so information overload isn’t really a concern from the email vector.

Secondly, having an empty inbox signals to me that there’s nothing urgent that requires my attention. Different inboxes have different sorting mechanisms (labels, folders) and the search function in any inbox is so robust I never worry about “losing” an email. If there’s something I need later, the search can find it much more efficiently than I can. Removing mail that’s awaiting responses from others frees up my thoughts for other things, rather than “I wonder when they’ll respond?”

Thirdly, archiving, labeling, or responding to email and ending the day with none means that the next day, when I dive back in, everything is in chronological order, which is how my brain works.

Lastly, I thrive off measurable and achievable goals, and since I have a handle on my inboxes, this really is something I can do most of the time. Of course there are days I don’t look at my computer at all – but those are more the exception than the rule. Getting to zero, and that sweet endorphin rush when crossing “email” off my daily to-do list, is a powerful ambrosia.

My partner’s email regularly sits in the quadruple digits. I begrudge no one their strategies for dealing with the absurd overhead of being alive in the “digital age”. If you’re reading along and agreeing, but despair at ever attempting inbox zero yourself: here is your permission to delete/archive/trash everything in your inbox right now. Start aggressively unsubscribing – why are you receiving email you don’t want to read anyway? If you choose to go on a new journey, I wish you the best of luck. You can choose to restart today. It’s allowed.