Three Interesting Things

1. Jamelle Bouie talks about how parents' rights seems to only focus on one kind of parents. 

2. Poet Maggie Smith talked about how a viral poem widened the cracks in her marriage.  

3. I caught up to this interview with Randall Park about his latest venture.  

Sometimes You Don't Know

 Content Note: Discussions alluding to  sexual harassment/abuse. 

I wrote a while back about how sometimes the people who seem and often are inappropriate but not harmful to you, can turn out to be inappropriate and harmful to others: http://www.talkapedia.com/2018/03/our-inappropriate-friends.html 

Well, let's talk about the opposite thing. Sometimes people who have always been delightful to and near you, are not that way with everyone. And are in fact being quite harmful to others. 

It can be a huge shock to learn this. It feels like a failure of all your warning systems to discover this about someone. 

You are not a failure if you didn't know. No matter how finely calibrated your systems are, some people are going to get past them. It would be lovely if folks who misused their power all came with flashing neon signs, but they do not. In fact abusers and other varieties of jerks, work hard to be delightful to a good number of people, so that you will say, no, that can't be right. 

Sure, there are people who set off every alarm bell, but most won't. Some folks are going to turn out to be horrible and it will be a shock. It sucks. Obviously it sucks more for the folks they victimized, but it still sucks. 

It is okay to be sad when these discoveries occur. It is okay to feel and to process. It is also important to remember that those directly harmed deserve the most support. Our culture really is steeped in trauma disclosure, and it really likes to ask survivors to describe all the terrible things done in great detail. 

Survivors do not owe us this. They may choose to do this, and that is their prerogative. 

Three Interesting Things

1.  I confess I hadn't properly thought about the environmental destruction side of war, despite having grown up near a WWI munitions dump.  This article about Afghanistan was eye opening.  

2. Some historical Hawaiiana will be returned to Hawai'i.  (For money, but returned nonetheless.)

3. I found this article on prioritizing your creative self, even when your dayjob is financial writing, really interesting.  

Lockdowniversary

So, we have reached the time where a number of folks start marking when we did what in this country we called shutdowns, but mostly meant encouraged people to work and attend school from home. 

As humans, we have lots of rituals to mark the passage of time. Honestly, I am constantly amazed that we divided the calendar into quarters and assigned seasons to each one, leading to endless discussion about why the weather has chosen not to play along with our assigned categories. 

And it is also that time where people say genuinely well meaning things, like what have you accomplished since the pandemic started. And a lot of people have done amazing things. And those should all be celebrated! 

But also, if what you have done since a world changing pandemic, well, changed our world, is survive - then gold star. Because seriously. Pandemic life is harder than pre-pandemic life. Even ignoring the deadly disease, we're watching a lot of systems begin to seriously crack, making so many things we do more difficult and more expensive. 

And so learning how to navigate this world has been a lot. And if you didn't also have time to do all the other things you had hoped, getting yourself to a place where you are still here to do those things, is really a lot. 

Three Interesting Things

1. My fascination with the Iditarod continues, and this year the top three were all from Alaska.  

2. This article in Teen Vogue about kids who are content on their parents' social media is fascinating.  

3. Sheep eating grass!