Lisa > Recent Status Updates

All the same, those invisible years raising our children and getting to grips with all those parathas were some of the most formative years of my life. I didn't know it then, but I was becoming the writer I wanted to be. I was going to step into her and she was going to step into me.

No one leaves homes unless home is the mouth of a shark. [...] Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate.

Well, Christ. 20 pages in and this book is also wholly unattributed dialogue. Why is no one talking about The Healing?

Like I mean you forget how you know? I mean like hating all these wise-ass generals and fucked up presidents we get and like these banks and faceless reverend garbage peels and asshole politicians I mean it's just this big drag and like you forget, you know? I mean like really how to hate?

"When we were first introduced to white man's food, everything tasted bad to us... we would smell their cooking and it did not smell good to us." In Iñupiaq, terms for foreign fare were descriptive and disapproving: beans were niliġuaq, a thing that makes you fart; oatmeal was siġri, or dandruff; mustard was baby shit, and the word for bananas, usuuŋnaq, meant "like a penis".

The Oceti Sakowin's struggle for its land is not about getting reparations, apologies, or reconciliation. It is about justice and ending the settler-colonial system. Still, many settlers cannot imagine the return of lands—or, for that matter, future peaceful coexistence of the more than 500 distinct Indigenous nations. While many will agree that colonialism is wrong, they cannot imagine a future without it.

On sanitation, diversity, and public toilets:
Thoroughly scrubbed toilets are first colonised by faecal microbes, launched into the air by flushed water. Those species are eventually out-competed by a diverse range of skin microbes, but once the toilet gets scrubbed again, the communities go back to square one. So, here's the irony: toilets that are cleaned too often are more likely to be covered in faecal bacteria.

Only 150 years late to the party...

Rose, Lillis's dog, was running around. She looked like a white woman's dog. She was a blond mutt and looked like the type of dog that was meant to be roadkill, but rescue missions for stupid dogs interfered with the natural world.

I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, [...] but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids.

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

"This is what hatred did."

When she awoke on her first morning as a widow, she turned over in bed without opening her eyes, searching for a more comfortable position so that she could continue sleeping, and that was the moment when he died for her.

The mime and mute aspect of these movies moved him deeply. Sometimes, after a session of watching several silent movies he would be very quiet for hours and just mime to me anything he wanted or wanted to say and the apartment would be filled with a strange, quiet feeling as if we were underwater.

I warned her to keep her hands away from the blue-white frost and to keep her hands away from her mouth, too. "Death has never been quite so easy to come by," I told her. "All you have to do is touch the ground and then your lips and you're done for."

I really hit the nail on the head with this book choice, didn't I.