a fever dream, a haze.
a note about what spring feels like | + reading recs, a romcom review, & more <3
Dear ones,
I think I will look back and remember the spring of 2024 like a fever dream. The students were right, there was no business as usual. On the first hot day of the season, I walked through campus in a ribbed tank dress and no bra, something probably inappropriate, by bourgeois norms, for work. But I was barely in the building at all, instead I walked to the commotion from the quad, saw wrinkled tents and books, all a glorious mess of the pristine. The signs read Free Palestine, the banners said this is the people's university now. When we held class outside, my students asked if I had job security, if I was afraid for the administration to see me with the tents and the signs, in the mess. No, I explained, my contract ends next year and it’s to be determined if they can renew it; both security and precarity can act as an excuse not to—or the courage to—be brave.
Then there was leaving town for Appalachia, the way I’ve done for three years now, heading south to a holy place for a weekend retreat where we’re mostly silent. Mostly we don’t talk, so far no one’s even uttered out loud their name. Each year has been a spacious invitation for rest, each year has also been hard, in such distinct ways. The first year I was so heartbroken; just swallowed by the grief of just about six months out of the end of my relationship with L. In love already with P, but still just a shell of myself. “What if the pain and the joy came from the same place?” I remember G asking in the Spirit House. I held that like permission. And the next year, things had been hard, like really hard, but then P had a seizure just a few days before I was here on this land where we are quiet, and I thought, “All that matters now is loving him.” (Dramatic, but the kind of poetry a tumor asks of us.) So here I am now, a new hazy memory being made as I type to you from the front porch of the farm house, where I watch a robin feed newly hatched babies with mouths agape to the sky; where I see a luna moth living as fast as it is dying, beautifully, in its week-long life. Nimbus, a gray cloud of a cat who I’ve grown to love over my years here, rubs against my legs and meows for pets. This year I am thinking of the love and the heartbreak, and of how the pain of a life shows up in a body, and about how the way we spend our days is how we spend our life, and if I am doing right by that. Amidst the most serene landscape, I am also thinking of Earth death and genocide.
In just a few days I will be in the operating room. The sterility of the hospital has become a new normal, but mostly it’s been for P’s body to be poked and prodded. This coming week, I will be the one cut open, I will go to sleep and wake up, likely puking the anesthesia from my guts, like P did almost exactly a year ago. A year of hospital parking garage tickets, a year anniversary marked with new scars. Body horror as a new thing P and I will have in common.
All of this is so strange and so exactly what’s happening right now. A fever dream, a haze.
***
Below, a roundup of reading recs, a brief recap of a romcom that tries to offer us a taste of the 90s, a new album rotation that leaves me reflecting on aging, and more….
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading.
I have to be honest, this has been a week of very minimal reading outside of class and my go-to newsletters. The week before last, as research for the Monday essay, I spent my reading time on Civil War-related articles and revisiting a bunch of classic cultural studies (Hall, Barthes, Brecht, etc.). This week was so dang busy, and a lot of usual reading time was spent on encampment-related group chats and reading student work. Surgery recovery will mean lots of reading time though, so this will be more abundant next week!
Oh, wait, I do remember one article: the “kinky DEI facilitator” advice essay in The Cut. As I posted (what do we call tweeting on substack? I am not going to say ‘stacked’, dear god): I gave an audible heavy sigh and felt like engaging it was both urgently important and entirely dumb. So, we’ll see if I do anything with that.
Teaching: Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love; Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid for my Abolition/Transformative Justice class;
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