Werd I/O

As America becomes more diverse, and as a direct consequence more inclusive, it unfortunately makes sense that more people will come out of the woodwork suggesting that people who aren’t white and male be disenfranchised. This is a racist country, after all. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Take this radio host, name redacted. I think this messaging is unthinkably chilling:

I didn’t sign up to be part of a fight for the basics of representative democracy, but I’ve got a growing feeling that’s what we’ll all be drawn into. Christian nationalist rhetoric in particular is escalating quickly, and there’s no middle ground to be found with people who want to deny others’ right to exist with the same rights and terms as them. It would be irresponsible to downplay the risks.

How can we turn this back? And particularly given our context of diminishing resources, rapidly-progressing climate change, and off-the-charts inequality, what will life even look like five or ten years down the road?

The best part of traveling is the food.

You can learn so much from how and what people eat. The way they gather, the smell of the spices, the sizzle of oil in great pans, the delicacies that only come from the sorts of hole-in-the-wall places that locals protect with their lives.

I’ve never been a fussy eater. I explore new places like a toddler: taste buds first, every nerve in my mouth feeling out a new experience. There’s so much joy and humanity to be found in food - and in particular in the kinds of food that are cheap and accessible. Fancy restaurants are all very well (I’m not knocking the skill and artistry involved in a Michelin-starred meal) but the kind of place that can become someone’s regular joint is beguiling. The food is the basis of a relationship that forms over time.

I drove across the US twice last year. Heading east, we went the northern route, through Glacier National Park and the Montana plains. Heading west some months later, we traveled south. Every time we tried one of the headline places to eat - the tourist traps, in other words - the food paled in comparison to the places where locals went. In New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is a fun experience, but the food doesn’t compare to unpretentious spots like Stuph’D.

And just as food is tied deeply into the identity of a place, so is it tied to the identity of a person. We all have the dishes we love, which make up the fabric of us; the ingredients we enjoy, how and when we cook, if we cook at all, the smells we produce in the kitchen and the smells that attract us at the table. Whether our cooking is a whole thing or if it’s something we do regularly, it’s part of our self-image and the image we project. We need food to survive, and our relationship with it reflects us.

When people ask me where I’m from, I sometimes joke and say, “I come from the internet”. In some ways that’s true, but the joke stops here: I’m in no way from the place that produced pink sauce and baked feta pasta. Food, more than anything, links me to the places I came from.

I really learned to cook from my Oma, who brought her Indonesian dishes to California when my dad’s family emigrated in the sixties and adapted them for locally-available ingredients. She loved cooking for her family, but began to lose strength. So she gave me instructions: sayur lodeh and nasi goreng under her direction were my first adventures in mixing spices and building flavors. I grew up with these meals, regular weekday occurrences rather than exotic events, but no less delicious for it; I was pleased to learn how to reproduce them.

We ate a lot of Italian and French food, common to many American families of any origin (despite being in England): lasagna, quiches, homemade pizzas, spaghetti. But my mother’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestry led us to eat piroshki and borscht on special occasions; matzo ball soup; latkes; challah. Our meals were hearty. “Do you eat foreign food every day?!” one school friend memorable said when he came over. It wasn’t foreign to us; it was ours. “Eat, eat,” my great grandfather used to say, “it’s good for you.” Grandpa Dave was PA Joint Board manager of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America; here’s a story about a holiday complex he helped build for union workers.

Despite living in England, at no point did we eat English food, which I was left to discover as an adult. I didn’t have so much as a Sunday roast until I was in my twenties: it just wasn’t part of our culinary milieu. Of course, then I leapt on it, and writing this in California I find myself missing Yorkshire puddings and pork pies.

Locard’s exchange principle dictates that every contact leaves a trace. Although it was developed for forensic investigations, it’s equally applicable to people and migration: the places we’ve been all rub off on us, and we rub off on them. I’m a Ukrainian-Jewish-Indonesian-Swiss-Dutch-American who lived in both England and Scotland for decades. Each of those places left some trace on me, directly or via my family, and my descendants will find that they have rubbed off on them too, even if each of those ingredients has a slightly different potency to mine. They will have their own distinct identities, while also reflecting what and who came before them.

And of course, the same is true of everyone. Each of those chefs in the hole-in-the-wall joints serving food to their regulars has their own combination of ingredients that led to them. We’re all constantly leaving traces on each other, part of a tremendous, delicious mix. The more we mix and ebb and flow, the greater the tastes we may experience. To be fussy and reject new tastes, or to demand it be anglicized or made pristine, is to reject new people and other ways of life.

Taste is part of life. It’s one of the best parts of living. We are, literally and metaphorically, what we eat.

Photo by Miquel Parera on Unsplash

Well, we sold the house. A new family gets to enjoy the space, and the incredible surrounds. It’s the start of a new chapter for us, too.

I was there over the weekend, and the memories were overwhelming: the four walls of my parents’ former bedroom held newly-staged furniture for show, but I could hear the laughter, remember talking to my mother at the end of the day, could hear her feeding tube apparatus rolling across the floor. So much happened there. It’s sad to see it go, but the memories stay with us. All we’re really leaving behind is wood, stone, and plaster.

Throughout the sale, our agent Florence Sheffer was wonderful. She held our hands through the whole process, and was as fun to work with as she was knowledgable and connected. She consistently went above and beyond to help us. I’d recommend her to anyone who wants to buy or sell a home in Santa Rosa and the surrounding area.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with the indieweb website that I made for the house. Probably I’ll just let the domain expire. Here it is, archived for posterity on the Internet Archive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about redesigning my website, or even moving platforms. That’s a bit of an emotional decision, because my website runs on Known, a codebase I mostly wrote myself, and started while I was taking care of my mother post-lung-transplant. It’s the reason I’m connected to the indieweb community, and the Matter community, and a lot of people I care deeply about. All those things are separable from this codebase now, but it got me there, and I’m hugely grateful for that.

The design is looking a little long in the tooth: I can make tweaks, and would commit them upstream into the open source project for other people to use, but I think there’s something to be said for starting again completely, knowing what I know now.

If I had unlimited time and energy - which, sadly isn’t my situation; time and energy are both in very short supply right now - I’d rebuild Known in something like Node, with a cleaner codebase. For now, I think I’ll live with it, and clean what I can.

Incidentally, I also cleaned up my public Obsidian site at werd.cloud. I intend to do more with non-linear, unbloggy writing there.

What is a man?

The only answer I really care about is “whatever you want it to be”. Like all men, I’ve spent my life in a context of weirdly reductive, gender essentialist expectations - a man is physically strong, competitive, aggressive, stoic - that I couldn’t live up to because, generally speaking, that’s not what I am. Am I less of a man because I’m not aggressive, and because I prefer collaboration to competition? I don’t think so, but there are certainly plenty of people who do.

The reason this matters for me now is not my own experience. I’ve found my way to a kind of self-acceptance, although my teenage years and most of my twenties were pretty rough: a mix of hating my body and receiving hate for not being what people expected me to be. I definitely have some pretty strong character flaws (non-confrontation and people-pleasing among them), which I’m trying to work on. But I feel some degree of pride about who I am, what I’ve managed to do, and the effect I have on the communities I’m a part of. Honestly? I’m glad I don’t adhere to the gender stereotype, even if it’s also true that I couldn’t if I wanted to.

But now I’m going to have a son (or at least, a baby who will be assigned male at birth), who will be subject to all of the same pressures and expectations, even in his first few years. There will be people who will be upset if he plays with dolls; there will be people who want to direct his interests to sports and trucks and whatever-else boys are supposed to like. There’s a fine line to walk here, because if he comes to those interests naturally, there’s nothing wrong with them! And those interests shouldn’t be gendered in the first place! I don’t want to dissuade any of his interests. But I worry about him getting there through external pressure, both explicitly and implicitly. The pressure to conform to someone else’s standard can only lead to anxiety and unhappiness; not to mention the impact it has on perpetuating gender inequality, and how he shows up for other people later in life.

To be clear, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not an expert in gender, or parenting, or really anything else. But I want to show up well as a parent, and I want him to show up well in the world (which are two expressions of the same thing). I just want him to be whoever he is, without regard for who other people expect him to be. That goes for every aspect of his (or her! or their!) identity. And I want the experience of that self-expression to be better than mine was, and better than so many people’s are, without fear or friction or conflict.

I guess what I’m really saying is, I don’t care what a man is, or what a boy is. I care who my child is. And that’s all that matters.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash