While I mostly celebrated my birthday over the weekend by meeting my mom about an hour and a half away at a nice Ethiopian restaurant — she’d been at an AAUW program in a nearby city that had been scheduled long before this past weekend became a protest weekend — it is, in fact, today. On Saturday’s bus to the train station, I said hello to an acquaintance who was running errands before she was set to arrive fashionably late to a local pro-democracy rally, which was massive based on how the crowd looked as the bus sped by.
No Kings is, of course, a reference to the founding legend of the country, the folklore of America that we are all taught in primary school about the Founding Fathers, and it was cool to see people bonding over that shared American wellspring. There are so many political movements across the landscape of possible viewpoints that have drawn on that founding story, and just as all people drink water, such movements have been inspired by those stories in both constructive and destructive ways in the 250 years since this country’s founding. It’s fitting to have a reset that takes a deep breath and goes back to the root at a time when the country seems to have been split in half by lightning. Some other people I know had preexisting plans on that day as well, which makes the marches even more impressive due to how many people were flexibly free to turn out.
On Saturday, the gluten-free bakery had been cleared out (at least they’re doing well!), and the grocery store seemed to have stopped carrying gluten-free cake, probably because a lot of grocery stores have been cutting back on inventory breadth. We hit every traffic light that weekend. The GPS my mom used, instead of taking her directly to the restaurant from Albany, routed her through winding roads, so she was half an hour late. It was just as bad when we tried going to a plant store on Sunday — its directions were confused, and the GPS seemed not to notice which roads we were actually on.
After my mom left, I planted herbs, chard, and peppers in the back garden plot that my landlady has reserved for tenant use. Then, I crashed. The past fortnight has been a lot — summer session orientations, a conference, hosting. The thing that actually sent me was seeing a YouTube video in my “recommended watches” saying that anyone using em dashes is writing with AI. Em dashes and &c. are my favorite written embellishments. So — I had an anger-time about that which turned into an existential crisis spiral about AI’s impact on my career, the current crisis in American higher education, and some other things.
Yesterday, I had an audiology consultation for hearing aids. My insurance provides a stipend to cover some of the cost every three years. I found out last year, a week before surgery, that the hearing issues that frustrate everyone around me in non-quiet settings were not just me being a bad listener, but I have a late-identified congenital hearing impairment in one ear — reverse-slope, which the OTC market isn’t designed for. They did a six-month follow-up just to confirm that it was a stable deficit. That was about the time that the tariffs were starting up, and stopping, and starting, and stopping. My goal has been to get these before prices go up beyond what my insurance covers. I was also pleasantly surprised yesterday that they thought that my hearing issue could be solved by a single hearing aid and not a relay one (BiCROS). So, I picked a bright blue Oticon, and I’m on track to get it in a few weeks. The audiologist commented that people in my generation and younger tend to get the bright hearing aids because we don’t seem to have the same shame that older generations have. Honestly, if it falls to the floor, it’s also just easier to see?
Once I was done with the appointment, I renewed my library card, and then I went to a new grocery store in the downtown area that I’d passed on the bus over the weekend. In the freezer section, they had a gluten-free cake, so I bought it. On my self-induced long walk home through town, I listened to the new MARINA album, Princess of Power, which some people are calling her “comeback” album because I guess most people prefer it when women sing about love to when they make albums about the human condition (Love + Fear) or explore archetypes of American women in media (Electra Heart), whereas I find love songs tiresome. Even with the topic of MARINA’s new album, the retro 70s vibe of the new album is fun. I sincerely hope that she continues to do as she likes without succumbing to peer pressure, especially since I feel like I navigated all of my young adulthood with her in my playlists. I learned about her from a polytheist blog when I was a junior or senior in college and spent months watching her “I Am Not a Robot” music video on repeat.
When the rain came last night, it was the first time in almost a year that it had been so soft against the leaves. I went to sleep feeling held by its softness, surrounded by the cats and happy about the soon-resolution of the last of the medical things from 2023/2024.
This morning, I did some ideation and life-mapping. This was difficult because so much is changing so rapidly, and the best of what I can do is to give priority to the lifestyle design things that I want to do to reduce cognitive overload and free up more margin/energy.
🪔 May the Gods and my guardian daimon help me navigate these waters. 🪔
KALLISTI 