This long haul flight
Nostalgia is made up of "nostos" (return home) and "algos" (pain).
Kat Schneider, Crying During Covid. ID: Two panels of illustration in the colour schemes of orange, blue, and off-white. The first panel shows a woman crying, hear tears visibly falling off her cheeks. In the second panel, she is crying still, but she is wearing a surgical mask, covering her mouth and her tears.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when there still seemed to be hope, I often asked my friends what they wanted to do when the whole thing is over, such naivety. A lot of answers revolved around hugs, around having meals with friends, a number of them answered wide-eyed about the idea of lingering in the book stores and touching the book spines and being OK with not even buying them, and one very specifically said they wanted to lick some random poles by the streets. The first thing I wanted to do, the nerd that I am, was just to pack some books to go read at the cafe, with an iced latte on the table and perhaps some pastry. Almost a year in, we still see no end in sights. Numbers soar, people lost their jobs, we worry about the safety of our loved ones, we miss brunches with our friends, and gone (maybe temporarily) are the ideas of lingering outside as we go to the supermarket armed with a list of groceries and the readiness to sneak into the nearby aisle without getting a mini heart attack when a fellow shopper almost gets too close in proximity.
Last week, the magazine The Cut asked their readers how the past year has left them feeling. Some answers are too real:
It definitely summed up how I have felt— for at least the past two weeks—that it felt like a neverending long haul flight where the lights are off indefinitely and even when the plane crosses two timezones, it was still dark. Someone asked me if there were babies crying or some random passenger snoring loudly in my imagination, I said, weirdly there was not. I was just staring listlessly into the dark.
In Ling Ma’s Severance, a virus called Shen Fever took over the world. Those who were infected turned into zombies. They, however, did not turn vicious and eat other people’s brain, but otherwise their brains were devoured in some other kind—they turned nostalgic. They resumed to do the activities they did while there was no virus of any kind—they read books, set up tables, return to their childhood home—before they slowly rot away. The book was one the titles—aside from Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—that enjoyed some acclaim during the first few months of our (?) pandemic, all before it hits too real.
I understand this is definitely part of the desire to return to the status quo, after all not everybody could afford long brunches or cafe visits or lingering for many reasons. But to know that all of this has been especially exacerbated by bad leadership felt like we have all been deliberately shoved into the long haul flight we never signed up for—confined and breathing the same circulated questionably healthy air over and over again—while occasionally hearing a ‘ding’ atop our heads telling us to securely fasten the seatbelts to prepare for the bad weather, but never a landing.
Reading in my tabs:
As people are mass migrating to Signal, their employees are sounding an alarm about its lack of policy to deal with abuse and misinformation. Now that does sound familiar…
“Teaching students the basics of digital literacy is just the first step to successful remote learning.” Remote learning lessons from a refugee camp.
“All I know is that the web today is not made for us. It’s no longer made for people to send charming bits of texts to strangers. Instead, I see the web as this public good that’s been hijacked by companies trying to sell us mostly heartless junk. The web today is built for apps – and I think we need to take it back.”
“[…] user-centred design ends up being a mirror for both individualism and capitalism. It posits the consumer at the center, catering to their needs and privileging their purchasing power. And it obscures the labor and systems that are necessary to create that “delightful user experience” for them.” Beyond the lens of user-centred design, and 5 strategies to do better.
“[…] choosing what books to read becomes itself a moralistic enterprise, a form of atonement. One must read postcolonial literatures to pay the guilt tax. It is a reading toll that the student of the White Literature syllabus is not asked to pay.” When books by authors from under-published communities are promoted to readers as a way of becoming a "better person," it exacerbates problems of representation.
My biggest pet peeve is when people texted me one-liner “hi”, “hello” and the worst, just “Zana” and waited for me to answer before they asked me something, so most of the times I just sent them to nohello.com, or nohello.net. Text me a whole essay, it’s fine! — so I will know how I can better accommodate your requests.
Resources: A working resource of community-led design wiki; Am I Part Of The Problem?, a game that will walk you through what you did, how and when to apologise, and most importantly, how to make amends; and good films around the globe, FOR FREE!
"May that officer be visited every night of his life by an enormity collapsing in front of him, into an incomprehensible bloom, and the voice that howls out of it.”
STATUS BOARD
Reading: Asim Qureshi’s A Virtue of Disobedience, and Marta Orriols’ Learning to Talk to Plants.
Listening: The sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin in St. Paulde-Vence, left behind after his death in 1987.
Watching: Lupin! Also I returned to watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt every night before bed.
Food & Drink: I did not have anything much in the pantry today but!!! I have some peanut butter and pasta so I made these peanut butter noodles and they are delish.