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As members of her buddhist prayer group lead us in a soul-releasing meditation, I turned off my camera and let out a sob. I remembered the smiley faces on her signatures, how great it felt to have her, at one time, believe in me. 

Earlier today I heard about an archives elder who passed, and I’m feeling all kinds of feelings. I fundamentally disagreed with the dude on many points, but he was always jolly and decent to be around. He had taught and inspired and engaged with generations of library and archives professionals, myself included.

When I learned my advisor went emeritus and then retired, I was mostly shocked to learn that she would not be teaching cataloging for another decade or two. Teaching cataloging was her art and her craft, and she elevated the practice of cataloging for so many. 

Somehow I took having LIS elders for granted. Even though I walked away, I think I always assumed that it would still all be there - it all did feel so stagnant. I didn’t anticipate how losing them would mean the end of an era, and a realization of that slow burn of teaching and learning and careers.

The universities that our elders came up in no longer exist, and that in part feels like a relief. Several of the junior faculty members I know speak openly about their six-figure student debt. Those are the tough ones who have stayed in the game and made significant victories. 

As someone with a long family history of asthma (and a mostly mild experience with it), I keep thinking of all the things that I find helpful (or just comforting) during flareups in addition to my good old albuterol inhaler. (NB: If you are experiencing asthma symptoms for the first time and/or don’t have an inhaler, please seek medical care before doing any of these things.)

- Drinking lots and lots of water

- Coffee! (yes, I am Cuban-American but tons of peer-reviewed studies show it’s an effective bronchodilator)

- Mint in pretty much any form - suck on an Altoid, drink some mint tea, chew on mint leaves. 

- Honey! Mint tea with honey always feels good and soothes your throat.

- Showers and Baths. I’m fond of a hot and cold shower (or just a 30 second cold blast at the end of a hot shower)

- Keeping the air moist and moving. Boil a pot of water on the stove, run a vaporizer or humidifier if you’ve got one. 

- Smelly medicine. Every culture seems to have their own kind of smelly medicine - Tiger Balm, Vick’s, et cetera. This is what is called ancestral wisdom! Rub in on your chest, and like my bisabuela always did, a little on the soles of your feet. Today I sprinkled 10 or so drops of Olba’s Oil in the shower before I got in and it was wonderful.

- Loose, comfy clothes. Look, I know everyone has been in sports bras and sweatpants since march, but this is really the time for loungewear. Yesterday I purposefully did not change out of my (cute) pajamas just to remind myself to take it easy.  

- Self-massage. When I have tightness in my chest it makes my whole body tense up. If you have a golf, tennis, lacrosse, any other small ball, or a foam roller at home, roll it under your hands and feet, neck, back and shoulders, stopping when you feel tightness and leaning into it. There are lots of how-to YouTube videos but it’s not that complicated. 

- Weed. I know there is very little academic science around this, but I find that it helps. That said, I’m not smoking or vaping anything right now, my lungs have too much on their plate. I have some nice 2:1 CBD/THC tincture from Homegrown Apothecary, and edibles are a great option. 

- Watching something silly and engrossing. Sometimes I just need an external reason to sit down and chill for hours on end. Telenovelas from Mexico are excellent for this, but I’ve gotten into K-Dramas lately too, currently watching “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay”

- A weighted blanket if you’ve got one, or just a heavy blanket

- Something to do with your hands - knitting and puzzles are good

- From the naturopaths at Kwan Yin:

Increase detoxifying vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables are great at increasing glutathione production leading to improved detoxification. Cruciferous vegetables: Kale, Spinach, Collard greens, Broccoli, Arugula, Bok choy, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Cauliflower.

Certain supplements can help boost glutathione production and help prevent smoke exposure from causing harm:

NAC (helps boost glutathione production and breaks up thick and sticky mucous.)

 B complex (B6, B9, B12, biotin)

B vitamins, especially the methylated versions, provide methyl groups to really push liver detoxification.

Selenium is a potent antioxidant and is used to make glutathione.

Get it from food: 2-3 brazil nuts per day!

Vitamin C + E

 Together, these 2 vitamins help you recycle and reuse your glutathione over and over again.

Get it from diet- oranges, red peppers, kale, almonds, spinach and sunflower seeds

Y’all feel free to tell me what I’m missing here. And to my fellow asthmatics, I see you and you are not alone. 

First class meeting of third grade.

Emma-Lee Moss, “Parenting here means checking the ingredients of teargas”

I’ve thought a lot about this essay over the past year, and especially over the past few weeks.

If you had told me two years ago that I would take a turn towards full-blown anarchism in 2020, I would have laughed and told you to go read “the tyranny of structurelessness”. I’m still giggling about a secondhand story I heard a few years ago about someone’s husband declaring that his relationships were “non-hierarchal” and therefore he was going to skip the family vacation with their three kids to hang out with his other girlfriend.

Sure, I have been subject to inane women’s leadership prosperity gospel as long as I can remember and find it completely hollow, but what else was there? I had gotten so used to feeling a generalized “we’re all fucked” malaise and a vague hope that today’s youth activism could be bold and strategic in ways that had been impossible when I was younger.

And yet, things change! Watching the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement from a distance and witnessing the Black Lives Matter protests on the ground in Portland has completely changed my mind, and I now have a real sort of heartbroken faith in the future of autonomous and decentralized movements. I have a newfound hope for abolition, and I think defunding the Portland Police Bureau is an achievable goal.  

Look, I don’t think you need to explain the appeal of decentralised direct action to middle-aged ladies right now, especially parents and caregivers who have been chugging along without school or most kinds of childcare for the past 5 months and face this reality for the foreseeable future. We’re on the frontlines at work and at home, and even those of us “lucky enough” to have shifted to remote work are being pushed out of the workforce, even in prestige workplaces, pink-collar jobs, or the so-called “Nonprofit Industrial Complex”. What we had been working for, what we had been holding together, has collapsed. The world as we knew it is already over, and there’s no one else coming to fix it. The old strategies of the institutionalized left are definitively not going to pay off. I for one find this thrilling! 

Yesterday, Lilith Sinclair, one of the most visible Portland BLM protesters, posted a thread on Twitter with names and @ signs, pointing out white leadership in the local DSA chapter and other activist orgs who had perpetuated anti-blackness and created what I can only assume are those bad old-fashioned fucked-up liberal activist leadership dynamics. Even thinking of it now makes me so disappointed and angry, because it’s an old song that’s so familiar.

The beautiful thing in autonomous movements is seeing your peers facing challenges and recognising their strength and growth, and all the different things that can mean! I’ve been moved and challenged by Black protest leaders, including Demetria Hester and Mac Smiff, and countless folks on the ground participating, feeding everyone, and documenting it all as it unfolded. I’m awed that my polite (ex-Mormon!) neighbor got herself an ANSI-spec respirator and went down to the protests at the Federal Courthouse, giving me a neighborly invitation to join her. I’m grateful, days later, that one of the moms in the group text (who happens to also be the school principal), confessed that she too is losing her shit about online school and working from home.

Be like water! I tell myself, and it seems corny at first but feels right when everything else feels wrong. As Octavia Butler wrote (and Adrienne Maree Brown reminded me) , “All that you touch You Change/ All that you Change Changes you./ The only lasting truth Is Change./ God Is Change.” None of us know what the next few months or years are going to look like, but we can show up how we can to change it for the better. I also keep going back to a line from this Dissent essay by Wilfred Chan: “After weathering decades of disappointment, Hong Kongers understand at last that there is no tomorrow waiting; that the future is not guaranteed, but must be won.”