Hannah > Recent Status Updates

Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being.

No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

[Y]ou cannot let your wounds lead. Doing so will eat you. It blinds you to even the most obvious things, including your own power.

As Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy, says, 'We have become a nation that places a lower priority on teaching its children how to thrive socially, intellectually, even spiritually, than it does on training then to consume. The long-term consequences of this development are ominous.'

As with grief or anger or any emotion, fear, when fully expressed, makes space for calm to follow. This is something for me to pay attention to.

Sometimes the best way through an impassable brick wall blocking your path is to walk away for a while. To stop trying. To allow the unknowing to compost in the darkness within you. I knew something was missing. Something was being asked of me that I couldn't name... Don't you hate that feeling? It's a frustrating inability to understand what is happening that eventually leads to gradual surrender, if you're smart.

"Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe, who had chronicled Putin's takeover of Russia, noted that 'the only people who were fully prepared to cover the Trump presidency properly were people who knew how authoritarian regimes worked. The Washington press corps, which treats politics as something between a baseball game and a Broadway show, was woefully unprepared.'"

"Johnson knew... that the nation's move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power... Johnson explained... to his young aide Bill Moyers: 'If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best [Black] man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.'"

The narrator is truly terrible and this book is way too long. I don't know if I will make it through this interminable listening experience.

The iron molders started a national strike July 5, 1859, and said: 'Wealth is [a] power... too often used to oppress and degrade the daily laborer. Year after year the capital of the country becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, and, in proportion as the wealth of the country becomes centralized, its power increases, and the laboring classes are impoverished.'

Deeply unimpressed so far.

Dear Jennifer Finney Boylan, I love your writing and am totally enthralled by this thrilling novel, but it's incredibly jarring, not to mention very upsetting, when you repeatedly refer to more than one character as "morbidly obese" and even go as far as suggesting that someone with a larger body size is unworthy of love. F*ck off.

And now, "gimpy." BE BETTER, CRAIG JOHNSON.

Sometimes I get mad about how much I enjoy this series when there is much I would change about it. What I encountered on this page is the worst offense so far; Craig Johnson/Walt Longmire ought to know better than to use the term "mongoloid." Good God.

Robert would say, The work will fix you. The work, the habit, the words, will fix you. Nothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then?

... The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.

He continued to study me, and I thought about the damage we all did in life simply by being ourselves and getting up in the morning.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.

He wasn't sure, he added, that he would ever write anything again: his relationship to the world was insufficiently dynamic.

Sometimes, saying what others are afraid or unwilling to say is just being an asshole. We are all free to be assholes, but we are not free to do so without consequence.

... this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.

Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them...[I]t could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more...There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

"For most of our history, whatever the justification, campus life looked pretty much like this: men taught men about the great achievements of men... Women's studies was remedial, designed to remedy previous inequality. So it's a bit ironic that today the men's rights groups are campaigning against their exclusion. 'Where are men's studies?' they ask."