It amazes me how relieved I feel after Biden's inauguration.

The past four years I have devoted so much work to dissociating my own sense of wellness from the craziness going on in my country's national politics. In fact, I think this has been one piece of the larger work of dissociating my wellness from external signals in general. It's part of ( Read more... )

From
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Writing to Sustain HopeHappy New Year! After a jam-packed fall term, it’s been a relief to have a slower winter break and a little time to reflect. While I’m still enthusiastic about Workable Utopias, which launched this newsletter, I’ve moving toward a focus on the rhetoric of "hope." The word “utopia” carries complicated and negative connotations ( Read more... )

Happy new year, all ( Read more... )

Just before the record heat struck, my family and I spent a few days in Paris so that I could attend and present at a lovely conference on the Legacy of Ursula Le Guin in the Anthropocene. The conference was wonderful! A diverse group of fascinating folks with a range of insights and experience with Le Guin’s work. I may write about it more, but ( Read more... )

My sci-fi short The Eater is done. It's up on YouTube as a full film and as four webisodes. I fulfilled my (tentative) New Year's resolution to complete it. All in all, it took about five years. It's definitely microbudget and, yes, in at least one spot the boom is in. But I'm reasonably happy with it ( Read more... )

I don't know if I've ever been so pleased with the voting of my fellow Oregonians in the 16-ish years I've lived here. They pretty much came through with sanity across the board ( Read more... )

At my request, our tenant checked on our old tree, Senex. This photo is a little hard to interpret, even if you know the tree, but the trunk, which was largely old and rotten burned out completely.


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I was just reading
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"Platonic Bonding" as "Relationship Orientation"

I told skinintheway that I would write a post about how I bond with people, which-for want of a word-I've been calling "platonic bonding." For clarity, the kind of bonding I'm talking about here is serious interpersonal love (or in love) bonding of the kind we'd generally associate with wanting someone for a ( Read more... )