fan of many colors

what in the

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it's you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn't say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper's bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

And then we get to the shame that is NYC schools. Fun fact for all of you out there, existing schools in NYC have NO ventilation requirements. 0. Zilch. Literally nothing. So long as the windows are big enough, they are considered "naturally ventilated" meaning that if you want fresh air, just open a window. Ignoring all the energy this wastes, no one does it outside of a few months a year when the weather is nice. And once again, I've seen political will for modernizing school HVAC wilt under the staggering costs of ventilating school. New ventilation requires more heating & cooling which cuts into budgets. Plus the costs for installation can climb sky high. Another fun fact about NYC schools, they're old. And you know what that means! ASBESTOS!!! EVERYWHERE!!! Thankfully this cancerous wonder material is harmless until it's disturbed meaning if it's safely locked away inside the walls, it poses no threat. That is until you try and cut a hole in that wall/ceiling/floor for new pipes and ventilation. Then you not only need to close the school but pay a fortune in remediation, transportation, and disposal of hazardous materials.

Ultimately the problem of solving ventilation in school is not a simple matter of political will, but a potentially trillion dollar problem that would require an investment in our children's health and safety on a scale never before seen. And none of this touches on all the other parts of our built environment from offices to housing to hospitals. Almost all of them need constant investment to maintain a healthy environment.

The good news is WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. None of these problems are particularly hard to solve. Plus this gives us a prime opportunity to reduce our carbon emissions by switching to new, better technology. What we need is to collectively make the decision to accept higher taxes at every level, from the national government down to the local school board, and to invest that money in the health of our people.

And we knew. During lockdown, the legislature tried to allocate over $200M to school HVAC and promptly realized that was a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem. There are over 2000 schools here. Even taking out recent(ish) renovations and new construction, that means roughly 1100 need upgrades. Do that math.

The Chen School of Health at Harvard has a whole section of the website on how ventilation affects health. But finding the money to fix a problem at this scale, especially when there are a thousand other very loud, large problems, well, like prev said.