Plant-based Bae/Womanist/Writer

B R O W N S U G A <3

My current partner has lived on his own for 8 years and the absolute most I have to help him with is maybe sending him $20 so he can make a bill payment on time

After I left, in the first six months I got texts or calls asking me to please tell him:

The online banking password (dude, I left you, you should really change that)

Where I ordered his special-wecial organic underwear

Where the good cutting board was (my dad gave it to us at our wedding, genius, I took it with me along with the rest of the stuff from my family)

What brand butter we bought

What brand of local kielbasa we bought

Who his doctor was

What RMV office had the shortest lines

Where the old tax returns were (in the fucking box labeled tax returns)

The phone number for his best friend

I shit you not.

Then he had a heart attack (mild) and none of his family or friends were around to take him to the hospital. But instead of calling 911, he called me, who by then lived 45 minutes away. He lived 5 minutes from an EMS dispatch location. He called me, despite the fact that he didn’t believe me 8 months prior when I was feeling suicidal and I had to call a cab to go alone to check myself into the hospital for a 72-hour hold. I told him to call 911, hung up on him when he whined about “making a fuss”, called 911, called his siblings and then texted them “your brother is having a heart attack, I called 911 for him, come home,” and washed my hands of it.

—

Mzilikazi wa Afrika‏@IamMzilikazi

As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world.

Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration.

At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.

I had no idea then that this disappearing act had just begun.

Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download statistics about Arctic permafrost thaw or renewable energy in advance of the purge.

‘I’m pretty sure that the majority of my sexual experiences in my teens and 20’s were done out of politeness’ says Maya, 28. ‘You end up in a situation where you’re worried about offending someone if you don’t go ahead – whether you’ve led them on or what they’ll think about themselves if you back out at the last minute. And in relationships, I’ve had sex when i definitely did not want to but just kind of felt bad about not doing it – what if the other person thought that i thought they were crap in bed or didn’t fancy them anymore?’