Andy H. anew

Hello, again! It's been the usual three months since I posted last, which on the one hand is wild because it feels like a great deal happened over that time (most of a school term for my spouse and kids, a fairly intense back injury from which I have now mostly recovered, a lovely weeklong visit from my best friend, a bunch of mostly terrible political events at a breathless pace, and more!), but on the other hand is not a span in which I got very much novel-reading done by my own standards: three and three and two makes eight books for the first quarter of this year. Since this was the year-chunk in which Hugo nominations happened, I did also read somewhere around 60 pieces of short fiction in February and (mostly) March in an attempt to be an informed voter -- which, come to think of it, may be why that's the month with only two books in it. Anyway, a list:

January

Hisashi Kashiwai - The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Shelley Jay Shore - Rules for Ghosting
August Clarke - Metal From Heaven

February

Samuel R. Delany - The Atheist in the Attic
Nghi Vo - The City in Glass
Anne de Marcken - It Lasts Forever and then It's Over

March

A. J. Demas - The House of the Red Balconies
Justinian Huang - The Emperor and the Endless Palace

My partner and I have this very sustainable-feeling kitchen-cleaning routine this year where I do dishes and run the dishwasher at night and they unload it and wipe things down in the morning, but the failure mode is that sometimes I don't remember to start cleaning until I feel like it's time for bed and then I get very tired. Today I started earlier, but yesterday I didn't, so I'm still very tired. Also now I'm staying up late after all writing this, so I guess my tiredness is getting more justified still since I wrote that sentence.

I have a lot of idle fantasies about money, having enough to not have to worry about it, enough to give a lot of it away, enough to intervene to make big things better. If one takes the labour theory of value seriously, then every fantasy of being rich should be homologous to a fantasy of collective action, but in practise I know what my brain is trying to do is come up with ways that I could resolve my worries by acting agentically, and imagining the more realistic hopeful scenario in which I have too small a part to see how it succeeds involves giving up a lot of that comfort of imaginary control. No individual vote makes the difference in an election, but the mass of votes that do are made up of individual votes. (Obviously an example that stings at the moment.)

Soon it will be my birthday, and people I love are throwing me a little Jackbox party. I feel an ambivalent need to retreat from people and also to reach out to them, though not the same people; I want to retreat from the mass embrace of cruelty but then also expansively invite people into that retreat with me, people I think of fondly even though years pass somehow every time I think about messaging them, people I haven't met at all or know only glancingly but feel a kinship with and anxiety for. I've been thinking about the birthday parties I used to throw in my early 20s, where I would invite 20+ people, most of whom I didn't usually get to see, and make a space for them to be happy together. Jackbox is limited for that sort of thing because it maxes out at 8 people, audiences notwithstanding, and my house isn't great either because everyone's so far flung and my dog would be very upset, but I keep thinking of people I'd like to spend time with if I could figure out how to do something about it.

Anyway, I guess one way to navigate that paradox or at least express it is to write some words in a quiet, dusty corner of the public internet.

Since cohost is closing down, I need a new venue for longer posts like (chiefly) my every-three-month reports of which novels I've read, so let's try this. (I also considered pillowfort, but it doesn't seem to allow anonymous commenting, and as the internet continues to fragment I'd like friends and other interested parties to be able to engage with my posts if they want to without the barrier of having to have made an account on all the same sites.) I decided to start a new dreamwidth account even though I've had one before; it's not that I intend that one to be a secret or anything, but I posted to it mostly in the late 2000s, and I think if I just picked it up again it would imply a misleading degree of continuity between what I was doing with my internet presence then and whatever it is it turns out I'm doing with it now.