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Don’t freak out, but I left the house and I’m sitting in the sun at a café irresponsibly drinking coffee that’ll keep me awake tonight, rubbin’ on my new calm strips. I absolutely did not expect these things to work, but I keep finding myself rubbing on them instead of doing my other little fidgety habits, and it feels niiiiiiice. (I got the smoother & the rougher ones to try and everyone in the fam had a different preference.) Accommodations ftw.
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SHADER PROTOTYPING. Patricio’s teaching a live 2 hour class on his professional shader prototyping workflow. Class is $44, all the info is here. Behind the scenes, we’re trying out ways of working together that take into account our realistic capacities, and this Notion sales page → Gumroad class launch has been 💯. I learned it from watching Marlee Grace and Michelle Pellizzon. Accommodations ftw.
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I’ve been keeping a close eye on Long Covid from the beginning, as a community herbalist and also person with a body that tends to have complicated immune responses. In the early months of the pandemic, I watched a panel of herbalists who were actively working with covid clients, and they were some of the first folks I saw saying: If you get covid, lie the hell down for 10-14 days, no matter how fine you feel. That’s remained incredibly useful advice, although let’s be honest it’s nearly impossible under capitalism 🤷♀️.
This week Imani Barbarin tweeted a 2 part video message advising people with long covid to look to each other and to the ME/CFS community for support. She also recommended a mindset shift from the individual “I & me” to the collective “us & we,” and finding a support system that understands what you’re going through. This got me thinking about my own experiences and work with herbal clients, and how much more content chronically ill and disabled people are who are seeking accommodations & support rather than A Solution from a medical professional. My health went a little sideways at 16 after a few intense viruses in a row, and my advice to my past self would absolutely be: sure, see docs to rule out the bad stuff (ie cancer), but otherwise stop focusing on docs finding A Solution; turn your energy towards support & accommodations, and REST. I don’t know about your families, but in my family the idea that a person should rest when they were sick was laughable; I truly didn’t know that rest was necessary until I was ~35, and even then I didn’t like it. I’m better about prioritizing rest now, but only because my body demanded it.
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I’m an absolute Kiese Laymon stan since reading his essay How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America maybe 10 years ago?, and that MacArthur announcement this week brought me real joy. I keep thinking about this conversation between him & Tressie McMillan Cottom on revision in your work & revision in your awareness — when your understanding of the world changes and you have to stop listening to a favorite jam. In Heavy, Laymon’s high school friend uses “meager” over & over to describe the white culture they’re embedded in, and that description has become absolute canon to me: it’s the exact right word and I use it regularly.
Related: Questlove’s use of “the sullen dominant” in his 2014 When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America.
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HALF-ASS IT. DO IT POORLY.
Accommodations ftw.
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1/2 our kid’s preschool has RSV! So do we! Good luck out there. Get that flu shot. Join us in being one of the ~12 people in the US getting that bivalent vaxx for yourselves and your young kids. Plz mask. Wishing you some moments of rest, wherever you can find them.
Jen
Email: jen@jenlowe.net or reply to this email
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