My friend sovay's beloved cat Autolycus just died after a long illness. He was one of the world's best little cats, and Sonya and Rob did everything they could for him, at great expense. If you have a few dollars to spare, please consider donating to the fundraiser to cover the vet bills.

https://gofund.me/cf55b268

And hug your kitties, especially the tiny loud voids.

After many years of wanting to go, this year I will finally be at 4th Street Fantasy! Will I see you there?

I'll be easy to spot; look for a badge that says "Asher (rosefox)". I'm Asher everywhere now. (But no worries if you slip up.)

Hello, here is a brief announcement: I'm now going by the name Asher (pronounced ASH-er). It means "happy" and I'm very happy to be making this change!

I've been feeling dissatisfied with my name for a while. Despite many years of stoutly asserting that I don't need a gender-neutral name to be nonbinary, people who see "Rose" are always going to assume I'm a woman. Assuming I'm a man isn't ideal either, but it's less wrong, and in most contexts I'll be giving my full name as Asher Rose Fox, which is a pleasant mixture of signifiers. I also love the expansive initial vowel of "Asher", its Hebrew meaning (which is specifically about being on the right path), and its unambiguous Jewishness.

My pronouns are still they/them. My old email address will still work, but you can drop me a note there if you want the new one.

If you forget or slip up, that's okay. Rose is still going to be my legal name and my middle name, and it won't upset me to hear someone use it by mistake. I'm also holding onto 'rosefox' as a fannish identity, and it will remain my username here and elsewhere, at least for now; it has a lot of history that's meaningful to me. But whenever possible, in contexts where you'd use my actual name, please use Asher for me from now on.

I'm tidying up my DW circle and removing access from accounts that seem to be disused, or from people who don't tend to comment on my posts or I'm otherwise no longer feeling much connection with. It's nothing at all personal, just some housekeeping. If I removed your access and you'd like it restored, drop me a note here. All comments are screened.

I did the anonymous love meme thing! Because we could all use more love.

✨ holiday love meme 2021 ✨
my thread here

Okay, this is a long shot, but if you long ago made me a two-CD mix called "Roserie" that includes songs by Roland Orzabal, Freezepop, Wolfsheim, the Birthday Massacre, Ladytron, and Scissorkiss, please identify yourself. I assumed it was from nonethefewer but they say not. The Scissorkiss track really narrows it down to people who lived in the Boston area in the early '00s. It's a great mix! I just have no idea where I got it.

For some people, it's traditional for one's first act after Yom Kippur break-fast to be hammering a nail into wood, to start building your sukkah or generally to symbolize beginning a year of intentionality and creation.

So I guess it's really convenient that my last day at my job (by mutual agreement, and in a very friendly parting) was last Friday, and I can mark this as the moment of officially relaunching my full-time freelance editing practice:

https://copymancer.com/

Here's to a year of taking big steps to do more of the work I love and build more of the life I want.

Shana tova!

Hiiiiii Readercon is happening online right now and it's very exciting and please join us! $25 gets you access to all of this for six months:

https://www.readercon.org/program

Look at this thing, we made this thing, this thing is now really happening for real and it's amazingly great? I'm getting whiplash from being "at Readercon" for hours and then closing my laptop and suddenly being at home, and also my arms hurt from all the fast typing in Discord and everything. But worth it!

(and in two days it will be over and I will no longer be working an unpaid full-time job on top of my paid full-time job, that's going to be pretty great too)

I cannot possibly convey the extent to which this convention is a hallucination that we dragged kicking and screaming into reality—all cons are, but this one we truly had to invent from scratch, and it's fucking wild to me that a spreadsheet and a document we (mostly the godly chellenator) threw together last year have now been Pygmalioned into actual existence through a great many people putting in immense effort. It's absolutely trippy to me that that's a thing that can happen. I'm not, like, mad with power, but there's no experience that compares to just fucking making up a thing that hundreds of people show up and do for a weekend. I haven't felt it this intensely since Callahanicon 1 in 1997, which I guess is the last time I spun gold out of straw like this, and I've been riding that confidence high for a quarter-century, so let's see how long this one lasts.

Not really coherent rn but this is what's up and what's been up, how are you?

Does anyone want two tickets to see Marc Cohn at City Winery NYC on Tuesday evening? They're requiring proof of vaccination or a negative test at the door. Show and venue details are here.

These tickets were my birthday present to myself last year, and postponed to this year. I was really, really looking forward to this show. But even with City Winery's precautions, I just can't bring myself to go.

Tickets are free to the first person who asks for them, and I hope they bring you joy.

Do any of you know how to get a wrongly disabled Facebook account reinstated? leiacat needs help. Comments off here—please reply over there.

Just in case anyone else is trying to remember what routine medical care looks like, here's the list I made for me, X, J, and Kit of checkups one or more of us might want to schedule now that the adults are vaccinated and dropping covid numbers are making it safer for Kit to go out as well:

General physical + bloodwork (including annual review of meds for interactions and needed changes)
Eyes
Ears/nose/throat
Teeth
Shoulders
Arms/hands
Back
Knees
Feet
Skin
Cardio
Pulmonary
Neuro
Psych
Sleep
Allergy
Endocrine
Gastro
Colorectal
Gyno/urogenital
Chest-o-gram
Medical/assistive device maintenance/replacement

Also regular personal care:

Therapy
PT/personal training/gym
Massage
Mani/pedi
Depilation
Haircut
Dietitian/nutritionist

You might want to schedule one or more of those too! And let me know if I missed anything...

Our Seder was a smashing success. Highlights included Kit asking "Why is this night different?" and then immediately pointing to Hannah's partner and saying "Logan!" (it's true, having him over for dinner does make tonight different!), X and Logan deciding that Elijah is in such a hurry to visit all the houses that he doesn't have time to go to the bathroom, Hannah reminding us all not to lick our pinky fingers after we dipped out wine for the plagues, J carefully putting on an apron to protect his nice shirt while he was cooking and then forgetting to take it off before sitting down to dinner, Kit finding the afikoman at the exact right point in the Seder by pure coincidence (they were wandering around playing with their dolls and spotted it), and me singing "Mi Chamocha" to the tune of "The Wellerman".

X: Do you pee behind bushes like Elijah?
K, scornfully: I pee in the toilet!
R: Invite gentiles to your Seder, they said! It'll be fine, they said!

Kit was really good for the whole evening, delighted to have extra people to play with and reasonably engaged by the pictures in the haggadah even when they didn't much care about the story we were telling. They ignored most of what was on the symbol plate, though they did suck all the salt water off the parsley leaf before rejecting the parsley itself, but they went to town on the matzo ball soup—a far cry from last year.

Our cooking plan went perfectly, and of course we made far too much food. The symbol plates were generously laden, and we went through the service so fast that we hadn't had time to get really hungry, so we had matzo ball* soup with my homemade stock—so damn good, never doing it any other way ever again—and GF matzo balls and meticulously slivered celery and carrots, and then had no room for actual dinner. We decided to take a break and do a round of clean-up to buy ourselves some digestion time. My grandparents had a tradition of Elijah bringing gifts of knowledge, a.k.a. books, to all the kids, and of course I'm happy to continue that tradition, so Kit was well entertained by a collection of Daniel Tiger bedtime stories while the rest of us bustled around.

* Why do I want to spell it "matzah" when I'm talking about the flat cracker form but "matzo ball" for the soup form? Transliteration habits are so weird.

Once the table was cleared and reset, each of us managed a small bowl of lamb or chicken stew and a couple of pieces of chocolate and a nibble of afikoman, and then we called it quits. Kit skipped the stew and just had chocolate; apparently the going exchange rate is 1 afikoman = 1 piece of chocolate-dipped marzipan. We'd meant to steam asparagus, but there was no time and we couldn't have eaten a bite of it anyway. It'll keep for tomorrow, or whenever we're able to think about food again.

For the last few weeks I've been shifting to lower-carb eating and smaller portions, so I'm super extra stuffed and feel no guilt whatsoever. It was a most excellent feast.

Kit often finds it hard to listen to people singing, but when I put them to bed, they let me very quietly sing "Eliyahu HaNavi" while rocking them and listening to the rain, just like in their delightful More Than Enough picture book (from which this post's subject line is taken). It was a very good end to the evening.

As for the omer count, I'm thinking of folding a little origami flower every night, and stringing them into a garland when I'm done. My room needs more decoration and it feels like a nice way to celebrate the growing season.

My mom and her husband managed to catch a three-week cold a few weeks ago—that's definitely what it is, just an ordinary rhinovirus, and their pulmonologist is mystified as to how it's hung on this long—and they're on the mend but haven't had a chance to do any Pesach prep. I was very chuffed to make and deliver Seder plates for them, including lamb shank slices that are frankly large enough to be the main course. (We braised them in wine and spices, because my family tradition is to give each person a symbol plate and to eat everything on it, and roasted bones are very symbolic but not very edible.) I thought I'd miss having a Seder to go to tonight, but it felt appropriately holidayish to do this mitzvah instead—and to get to really hug my mom for the first time in a year.

Kit saw me packing things up, said "Gramma's not feeling well, I need to cook", and put on their apron; they were a little disappointed to learn that all the cooking was done, but they carefully helped me put the care package together. They're such a sweet kid.

Tomorrow we'll have a "second" Seder that's actually our first, in person, with our governess and her fiancé. They'll get here mid-afternoon so we can cook together, and then we'll see whether we can get Kit to actually sit through a Seder. We have the PJ Library haggadah, which is pretty accessible (though I don't like its English translations of the blessings at all and will substitute my own), and we've been practicing finding the afikoman by hiding some of Kit's toy matzah. They're capable of saying "Why is this night different from all other nights?" but not of doing it on command, so we may try all reciting it together, or doing repeat-after-me. The youngest person is supposed to ask the four questions, but nothing requires them to do it alone.

And a month from now, we'll do a Pesach Sheni with my mother and brother and stepfather and stepsister, in person, because by then I should have been able to get at least one dose of some vaccine or other, and it will be as safe as it can be to dine outdoors together in what I hope is beautiful late-April weather. It feels very appropriate for it to be a Pesach Sheni; I want to write off the whole past year as tamei from being in close contact with death, and it will feel like a make-up not just for this year's Pesach but last year's too.

Chag sameach to everyone celebrating, and chag kasher v'sameach to those for whom it's meaningful!

( Our cooking plan )

If I count my DW's lineage back to LJ, which I think is reasonable to do, it is twenty years old as of today. (Almost to the hour, in fact—first post was at 2:43 a.m.) Userpic is approximately how I looked at the time.

My second post, because of course I immediately started posting multiple times a day, is timestamped 4:32 a.m. and concludes thusly:

And now I'm going to bed. Really.

No, really, I mean it!

Why are you looking at me like that?

I am extremely amused to be posting this at 1:05 a.m. when I really ought to be on my way to bed. Age 2 or 22 or 42, some things don't change...

It's the Equinox, and the Omer count starts in just eight days. I wonder how I should approach it this year. I do like R' Yael Levy's book of Omer meditations, which has that knack I associate with good horoscopes and Tarot readings of feeling startlingly personally relevant. But I also like DIY... Maybe I'll try to take a daily photo of something growing or seasonal produce and really immerse myself in the seasonal aspects of the Omer, from the first shoots of spring to the first fruits of summer. That's easy to do this year, with everything so early* and Pesach coming while the trees are barely budding, and it'll also get me outside every day, which is a mitzvah in its own right.

While poking around at resources, I found this gorgeous setting of the prayer of intention before counting. I'm putting it here so I don't lose it. I could easily listen to it every night for seven weeks.

I'd love to introduce Kit to the Omer count, but they can only count to three. Maybe I can still do a seven-by-seven sticker chart with them or something. Or a spiral "map" like this.

If you do Omer counting, how do you do it? A quick blessing and count and done? Thematic meditations or activities? Other thoughts?

* Shavuot is in mid-May! I think of it as happening near my birthday! (But of course it does on the Hebrew calendar—it's only out of sync with my Gregorian birthday this year.**) And that probably means another virtual Shavuot, which breaks my heart. Maybe I'll be vaccinated by then and able to get together with at least a few friends or something.

** I had not previously contemplated what it would be like to observe my Hebrew birthday, and the thought of my birthday coming weeks earlier or later every year is weirding me out. I have very specific seasonal associations with my birthday, particularly the pungent scent of ailanthus trees and the proximity of the summer solstice. Global warming is messing with the ailanthus blooming season and that's already disorienting; I would find it very challenging to deal with my birthday being weeks off from the solstice on top of that. But associations can be made as well as broken, so I will tentatively try thinking of my Hebrew birthday as coming eight days after Shavuot and see whether that's enough to help me feel anchored from year to year.

I finally woke up early for 9 a.m. Torah study! The student rabbi sent out such cool texts for Parashat Vayikra and I was excited!

What I have learned from this is that waking up early sucks, trying to interact with people and be emotionally and intellectually present after waking up early sucks even more, Zoom is the worst possible way to do Torah study, and I should not attempt this again.

Oh well.

I've taken our Airtable meal plan to the next level with an inventory table. I did a full inventory and reorg of our upright freezer (long overdue). I'd love to do the same with our fridge and pantry, but it's hard to find the time, so I'm settling for adding things as we put them away or as I notice them. When I make the meal plan on Sunday night, I put "leftovers or ordering in" instead of a specific food, and list some inventory options. When I make the associated cooking plan, I note which inventory ingredients go into whatever we're cooking and build a shopping list for whatever we don't have in inventory. Then even less thought is required during the week.

Of course, this only works if the inventory is up to date, but I'm doing all right on that front so far. And if I go a week or two without updating it, it's still pretty easy to catch up.

Knowing what we have makes me much more eager to use it, especially now that I'm adding perishables. This week we need to use up the meat from a rotisserie chicken, so for Tuesday lunch I'll put it on a frozen pizza crust—bonus, I'll use up the open jar of tomato sauce before it goes fuzzy—and Tuesday dinner can be pasta with the rest of the chicken and whatever's in the open container of pesto. Iron Chef My Fridge is fun!

We probably won't do any bulk cooking next weekend because X and J will be recovering from their second vaccine shots, so the following week we'll be very glad to be well stocked and well organized. After their first shots we did a whole week of not cooking and mostly eating from the fridge and freezer, and by the end of it we gave up and ordered in just to taste something freshly made; it was very satisfying to clear out so many things, though.

My other food-related project is slowly moving all of our recipes into Whisk, which will build a grocery list for a given meal plan and also do nutritional assessments. I'm still happy with Airtable for the nitty-gritty of meal planning, but Whisk is aces for recipe organization.

On a meta level, it feels really good to have the mental wherewithal for this. Even a couple of months ago, there's no way I could have managed it.

HELLO SPRING I MISSED YOU

Yesterday I went out on a neighborhood stroll and saw snowdrops and one perfect golden crocus. Today Kit and I took a walk in t-shirts, and tonight J and I went out for an outdoor dinner and walked for a couple of miles in light jackets, and it's SPRING.

We left the bag of salt downstairs because there could well be another freeze before winter fully gives up and slinks away—I see a low of 29F predicted for Sunday—but whatever. The trees are budding and the daffodil shoots are shooting and spring spring spring.

Kit and I revised the bedtime book again today, since it had been a while and they've explained more to me about how they feel at night. It turns out they're more lonely than scared, so we've been working on specific techniques to address that, like talking to their stuffed animals or to the sound that woke them up ("Silly heat pipes! You're so noisy! We'll call a plumber for you!"), and I wanted to update the book to reflect that.

When I asked whether they wanted to work on our book together, they immediately ran to get some paper from the printer and a pen. They propped the paper on the couch, took pen in left hand (they're firmly a lefty, as we always suspected they would be), and began to "write": long looping scribble-waves, drawn fluidly from right to left, that look like a cartoon of writing. As they "wrote", they narrated what each page said.

I was floored, honestly. I've never seen them do anything like that. They went on for pages! I photocopied the two that were most densely written on and added them to the printout of the book. (Then I had to stop Kit from poking buttons on the printer, as they hadn't seen me use it as a copier before and were very intrigued.) Kit wrote them as part of the book and I felt they should be included verbatim. I didn't catch much of their narration, but one thing that was clear was "my grownups come back to me", so I made sure to add that to the book's text as well.

Later I showed the pages to J. "What does this say?" he asked Kit. " 'I love you,' " they answered. We melted.

Today they also traced a very credible straight line on one of their write-and-wipe drawing pages. And they pointed to Daniel Tiger's 5-Minute Stories and said "I want a 5 story, please". They got very shy when I asked them to confirm that they recognized the big "5" on the cover, but that's fine, we've been through their shyness with speech and I know they'll keep practicing until they feel confident. It feels like real reading and writing are suddenly just around the corner. So exciting!

My 20th self-wedding anniversary was on Tuesday. I wish I'd had a chance to write about it then, but we had an unexpected two days without childcare, and between that and the sleep training, my brain is very fried.

So... 20 years. That is a good long time. I mean, it's not like I could divorce myself, but it's pretty awesome to still be actively engaging in self-marriage: taking my ring off at night because I can, putting it on in the morning because I choose to, and doing my best to cherish and support and care for myself and be my own best advocate.

All these things I will be to myself:
Kind
Respectful
Courteous
Honest
Gentle
Patient
Loving
Generous

When I think about habits I've taught myself, I don't usually include those, but I should. My wedding vows were certainly aspirational in 2001. Now they're second nature.

2001 was a very big year for me in a number of ways—9/11 being the most obvious—and this is the first of those 20-year anniversaries. In March it'll be 20 years since I started my LiveJournal. April, 20 years since I had a wrenching mental breakdown. June, 20 years since I moved to San Francisco and met J in person. And then the September–December stretch of endings and beginnings. I'm glad that litany starts with my pledge to be good to myself. I needed it desperately then, and it will see me through the memories as well as it saw me through the happenings.

I usually take myself out for dinner for my anniversary; obviously that's not an option this year, and I'm not sure what to do to replace it. I hardly do anything out in the world by myself these days. I can't even go for walks at the moment because I think my PT would leap through the screen and throttle me if I risked my back by taking a walk in the ice and snow. So that will have to wait.

My other tradition for big anniversaries is buying myself jewelry. It often features the fourfold knot that's in my original wedding ring (see userpic), though for my 10th anniversary I bought myself a plain band to honor my masculine side, so that's not a hard and fast rule. I went looking for the entry about that ring and was amused to see this:

As we were walking down St. Mark's, I reenacted my wedding ring purchase: walked over to a jewelry stall, glanced at the rings, picked one up, put it on, it fit perfectly, I asked how much it was, the guy said "$10", I gave him $10. Now I have a tenth anniversary ring that's very different from my wedding ring. I've been vaguely thinking I should get a more masculine ring to wear when I'm crossdressed, and this one is perfect. It's a plain band of brushed white metal (I'd be very surprised if it were silver; it looks almost like steel but is probably nickel or something), broad and hefty without weighing down my hand. It is comfortably androgynous. I might start wearing it a lot. I still love my other ring, of course, but this one is very apropos to who I am right now. Maybe I'll get another one in ten years to suit who I am then.

I did actually get another ring late last year, sort of: I gained some pandemic pounds and my old rings no longer fit, so I borrowed a similarly plain ring from X. But it's time to properly choose and buy one for myself. So instead of St. Mark's, I went to Etsy and bought a silver and eilat stone ring. I've been coveting eilat jewelry for months, and that design is just perfect. I'm considering getting a second one in a more masculine or gender-neutral style (maybe this or this?), but my wife remains my wife, no matter what gender shifts I go through, so it seems appropriate to go with a more feminine ring first.

I do wish I could go to St. Mark's and stop at the first jewelry stall I see and buy the first ring that fits. Maybe I'll also do that when it gets above freezing next week and the ice melts a bit. In the meantime, I'm very happy with this, and looking forward to the next 20 years and beyond with my amazing, supportive, fabulous wife.

Once again unto the Kit sleep-training breach. Or solitude training, rather, because—as the child sleep specialist told us—Kit doesn't have a sleep problem, Kit has a being-alone problem. I've often said that the biggest downside of a 3:1 parent:child ratio is that there's always someone right there, and we have to consciously make space for Kit to be alone, which they often don't want to be. Add in the need for a bit more supervision and assistance because of their mobility challenges, plus a year of pandemic isolation, and you get some very close attachment. We've spent the last couple of months encouraging solitary playtime and getting Kit used to the idea that we might say no when they ask for time with us, and now it's time for the next step.

( Four nights with various challenges )

Live music meme via sfred! How nice to see a proper old-fashioned meme cross my screen.

First Gig - Undoubtedly many children's productions of Peter and the Wolf and the like, but the first proper concert I remember is seeing Debbie Gibson at Madison Square Garden for a friend's birthday in (I think) 1988.

Last Gig - TMBG at the Bowery Ballroom with J and Lorelei and a friend of hers, 2/8/20. In retrospect, being in that room full of people all yelling together was riskier than it seemed at the time! Mostly I remember how ecstatic Lorelei was to hear "The Communists Have the Music" and how loudly the crowd sang along with "Your Racist Friend".

Worst Gig - I hated the Garbage concert I went to in 2015, which made me very sad because I love their music. But it was just noise and noise and more noise and super-heavy bass that made me feel ill and I couldn't wait to escape.

Best Gig - Whenever I get a "best" or "favorite" question like this, my only response is rapid blinking. Insufficient parameters! How do I compare Dream Theater and Iron Maiden at Madison Square Garden* with David Ostwald's Gully Low Jazz Band at Birdland, or the Chieftans at Carnegie Hall with Savatage in a San Francisco waterfront dive, or Alice in Chains in a suburban Oregon high school's shoddy basketball stadium with Sooj and Vixy singing directly into my ears in a darkened train car? How do I rate the most technically outstanding TMBG show I've been to (Bowery Ballroom, 8/1/07) vs. the one that was most emotionally meaningful (the Fillmore, 7/17/02)? Impossible. I'll just say I've been blessed to enjoy a great many wonderful live shows in my time, in an enormous variety of genres and venues.

* I was quite distressed when I couldn't find the entry I was certain I'd written about this show. I thought maybe I'd deleted it by accident, so I searched my hard drive for a key phrase... and found it in my Twitter archive! At least I wasn't wrong about having written it.

Loudest Gig - See above re: Garbage. Flogging Molly was also pretty loud, but a lot more fun. I generally like loud bands as long as I have earplugs, so I don't notice their loudness, and I also tend to see them at fairly large venues. Like, I assume Iron Maiden was loud, but they were playing at MSG and it's hard even for a very loud band to sound loud in that giant cavernous space.

Seen The Most - TMBW says I've been to 22 TMBG shows. No one else comes close.

Most Surprising - TMBG had a while of picking really dreadful opening acts, so when I saw Noe Venable open for them in San Francisco, I wasn't expecting much. She was incredible. I grabbed her album from the merch table and still listen to it now and then. I also have to mention the inimitable S.J. Tucker; I did not expect to encounter a world-class musician at Lunacon.

Next Gig - I had tickets to see Marc Cohn on my birthday last June. They've been rescheduled and re-rescheduled to this July; they might be re-re-rescheduled depending on how the spring goes. But one way or another, it will happen and I will be there! I also have tickets for two TMBG shows that have been re-re-rescheduled, so one of those might happen first.

Bucket Gig - Beyoncé. I'm not enough of a die-hard fan to be happy with the seats I could afford, but she's such a magnificent performer and I'd love to be able to see her up close just once.

Would Have Loved to See - Too many to list, going back people who performed well before I was born. But one show I was invited to and regret declining is Moxy Früvous back when all my friends were into them and we didn't yet know what a shit Jian is. I think I would have enjoyed that.

Yesterday I clicked a Resistbot thing.

Today I set up a small monthly donation to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. I got Kit The Big Day by Terry Lee Caruthers and Robert Casilla, a picture book about the first Black woman to cast a vote in Tennessee, and it really moved me, so I wanted to support an organization that's helping Black women vote today. The Committee is one of the foremost groups working to restore and protect voting rights across the country. I've been a fan of theirs for a long time and was very pleased to see that Biden tapped Kristen Clarke, their president and executive director, to lead the DOJ's civil rights division. They seemed like a good choice.

Maybe this weekend Kit and I will write postcards.

Kit just negotiated for what they want. I think this is a first!

Usually when they ask for something and don't get it, they just get upset or beg. But they wanted me to get down the pump that we use to reinflate their sports balls (they just like pumping it as an upper body workout), and I said no. They went to X, and X also said no. And instead of crumpling, they earnestly looked at me and said, "Pumper, in my room only! Please?"

I was so impressed that I said yes. They smiled hesitantly like they couldn't believe it had worked. We shook hands to seal the deal. I got the pump down and brought it into their room with Kit bouncing alongside me chanting "Only only only!", and they happily settled into pumping it up and down in front of their mirror.

They later brought it out briefly and I said, "In your room only, remember? We shook on it!" They immediately took it back in their room and shut the door, possibly to remind themself not to bring it out.

I feel like this should go in the baby milestone tracker or something. I'm so proud.

I can hear all of you more experienced parents saying "You may regret this in a few years" but trust me, I am not concerned. My brother, a proto-lawyer from birth, once responded to our mother's request that he clear the dinner table by batting his eyelashes and saying, "You made the mess. You clean it up." She was shocked, then belly-laughed and said, "You get away with that... once." So I'm fully prepared to live with a relentless negotiator, and I also have a good role model for encouraging it within limits.

Besides, as another parent of a speech-delayed kid once told me, nothing is sweeter than the first time you wish your formerly silent child would please just stop talking. Kit used to whisper one word at a time. I'll take argument and bargaining over that any day.

Addendum: Kit was so empowered by this that they became the boss of bedtime. When their ocean sound night light turned on, I heard them say, "Ut! I tell my parents," and then they came out and yelled, "IT TIME BED." (Prepositions are hard, so Kit mostly doesn't use them.) When I took off their pants, they asked to keep their shirt on to sleep in. They tolerated toothbrushing and then announced, "I read a story my bed." They brought their chosen book in and we sat down on the bed to read it; halfway through, they abruptly told me, "Put house 'way!" (Their playhouse is where they have school, and we put it away at night and on the weekend.) After asking them to ask a little more nicely, I took the playhouse down, and we finished the story. They asked for a Daniel Tiger story and I read that one too, and then I tucked them in and turned out the light.

At this point Kit realized their efficiency had a downside: they were in bed with lights out a full 20 minutes before this usually happens. So they tried to get up, and I said no. They said they needed to sit in the rocking chair with me, and I said no. They said, "Where my socks? My feet cold." Kit never gets cold, even with bare feet on the bare floor in winter, and they were under three blankets, so I was certain this was not true. But they do often feel very strongly about having socks on and we tend to go with it, so I got them some socks and tucked their feet back under the covers. Running out of excuses, they ventured, "It bacteria on my teeth." I was quite impressed that they would rather brush their teeth again than go to bed, but I held firm. Eventually, for lack of any other option, they went to sleep.

I can't emphasize enough that I love every minute of this. Every single minute. And I fully expect to keep loving it through all the challenging questions and assertions I'm going to field from my kid for the rest of my life. I truly wouldn't have it any other way.

Two weeks! Today I did a "proper" political action: sent an email through the White House contact form saying that means testing for pandemic relief payments is bullshit and especially bullshit when it's based on 2019 earnings. 2019 was a million years ago. Just give people money!

I haven't forgotten these; I just haven't been logging them. I read Let the Children March with Kit and had some good discussions with them about racism. (They pointed to an angry white policeman and said "He looks sad," so we talked about how sometimes when you share what you have, you have less, and that can make you sad or angry even when you know it's the right thing to do.) On Monday there was a blizzard, so instead of ordering takeout, like we usually do on Mondays, J cooked and we donated the cost of a takeout dinner to the Ali Forney Center, which gives unhoused queer kids a place to go in a blizzard. And tonight I'm writing a piece for my shul's haggadah about "Dayenu" and reminding people that they can be enough. (Which will take more than five minutes, but not much more—it's short, and I've been thinking about it for a while.)

I also put in three hours of Readercon work on Sunday, but that never feels like activism even though it is in a way—at least, I try to bring an activist sensibility to that work, and I think the con is better for it.

I'm looking for a meal planning app/site that:

* Works on a Mac (browser-based is fine)
* Lets me put in my own recipes
* Doesn't count calories/calculate nutrition, or lets me turn off that "feature"
* Calculates portions consumed and remaining
* Ideally doesn't suggest other recipes (I don't know why I'm shocked that most meal planning apps are in fact meal plan apps that tell you what to make, but that is not what I want)
* Ideally makes shopping lists
* Realizes that at a single mealtime, different people may be eating different things

That last one seems to be the sticking point, and I don't understand why! Surely the need to pack children's school lunches or accommodate a picky eater is not unusual. But all the screenshots I see have a single recipe for every meal of the day, as though everyone in the house is going to eat Easy Strawberry Parfait with Granola for breakfast like it's a sitcom. This isn't the same functionality as being able to add side dishes to the menu; dishes need to be specifically assigned per person per meal. Otherwise Monday breakfast will say "Omelette, smoothie" and I won't have any idea how many omelettes and how many smoothies we'll be making.

Regarding portions consumed and remaining, I want to be able to start the week with, say, 16 servings of chili, and allocate them throughout the week—but only to me and J, because X doesn't eat chili, and on some days I might have chili for lunch while he has chili for dinner—and know how much will be left to freeze at the end of the week. If we plan to make six servings of pasta on Tuesday, I want to be able to allocate four of them for dinner Tuesday night and two more for lunch the next day. I can use Airtable for most aspects of meal planning, but not for this one.

Am I going to end up writing my own app or doing this in Excel or something? Why is this so hard?!

EDIT: I figured out how to do it in Airtable. Grarh.

This stage of habit-building, where I've been doing it long enough to feel like I want a break but not long enough for the harder parts to get easier, is always the most challenging. But I press onward.

I dropped donations into a couple of fundraisers. I can't do that every day, but I'm glad to do it when I can.

Kit picked up several of the library books I'd put holds on—they were so happy to be able to go to the library again, even just for a quick lobby pickup—and yesterday and today they read Hair Love and Something Happened in Our Town and Let the Children March. (They showed off their books to their teacher, who said, "Wow, what great choices for Black History Month!" I... had forgotten that February is Black History Month. We just got those books because they looked cool!) We also read some pro-social books, When I Miss You and When I Feel Scared, that I think of as activist, in the sense that it's still pretty radical to treat kids' feelings as important and worth paying attention to. Books like that are also part of raising a kid who acknowledges other people's feelings as important, which I view as a foundational tenet of both progressivism and being a decent human.

Speaking of which, a thread on Ask a Manager about professional boundaries with nannies led me to explicitly say to Kit that caring for them and teaching them is Hannah's job—a job she loves, as she was quick to say, but still a job—and that's why she gets to go home every evening and stay home on the weekends, just like we stop our work at night and don't work on the weekends. I'm not actually sure they knew that she works for us. We frequently tell them to respect her hour-long lunch break, which she tends to spend reading on the couch because there isn't really a private place in our house where she can go while she's on break, but I think they see that as equivalent to not knocking on our doors when we're resting or on the phone, not as something she's owed as a person who's working hard all day.

(For that matter, I'm not sure how clearly Kit understands "job" and "work" and related concepts, including money. They're still not great at answering abstract questions like "What do you think money is?" so I'll probably just sit them down for a lesson at some point. My inclination is less to say "Money is what you trade to someone who does something for you or gives you something" and more to say "Money is a great big imaginary thing that we all imagine together". But I should probably start with goods and services and supply and demand.)

Like a lot of Americans, I wasn't explicitly taught how to grapple with the ethics and emotions of hiring domestic labor. My personal approach is to treat it exactly like hiring someone for any other kind of work, which is to respect them as a professional, pay them fairly, and not behave any less formally around them than I would in the office or with a client. We've made a point of talking to Kit about how important it is to stay out of our house cleaner's way while she's working and to respect her and her excellent work, but we haven't done quite the same with our babysitters, and I want to do better on that front. Kit thinks of Hannah as a bonus parent, more or less—she's in the category of "my grown-ups" along with us and Kit's grandmothers and favorite teachers—and I'd certainly rather they err in that direction than in the direction of bossing her around like she's a servant. But there's a middle ground that I think it would be good to be in. Something to keep working on.

Yesterday I felt pretty unwell, so I think all I managed was to click on a petition or two. I was hoping to take the FreshDirect bags to the food pantry, but that didn't happen. I'll do it next week.

Today I made a small donation and filled out another couple of petitions.

I've also been doing a running Twitter thread of pro-social, anti-racist, pro-queer etc. picture books and board books. And I reserved a few more library books based on other people's replies to it. And I chatted with Kit about the kinds of things one might write on a postcard to the president, which they're very interested in doing. The blank postcards arrived and I hope we can make and send some this weekend.

Every bit counts, right? That's the point of this whole thing. Even if all I did was send a few dollars or click a few links or do a little more to raise my child, that's more than nothing.

Today I spoke out when I could have stayed silent, and backed up someone who'd stuck their neck out in a challenging situation. I can't really say more about it than that, but I'm proud of doing it.

Scrolling through openletterbot to find a letter to sign worked so well yesterday that I did it again. Maybe I'll make a daily practice of that as my minimum action, and then try to do something in addition on days when I can.

I'd hoped to send postcards with Kit today, but I seem to have either run out of blank postcards or stashed them somewhere extremely safe, so I ordered more. I already have a roll of postcard stamps. I'll pre-print some card fronts with images from http://tinyurl.com/angrypostcards (where I just updated the postcard back template to say "President Biden" and "Leader Schumer", yay!) and leave others blank for Kit to make art on. Making it a thing we do together will help me to do it; that roll of postcard stamps dates to 2017, when I clearly had good intentions but never quite got off my ass.

And I reserved a bunch of anti-racist picture books at the library, because our local library branch is finally open for book takeout! It's been closed for most of a year because pandemic and we've missed it so much. So on some future day, my action will be reading and discussing Let the Children March or Something Happened in Our Town or Where Are You From? with Kit. I'm setting myself up for success!

I'm exhausted today and everything is hard, but that's the sort of day resistbot is for, so I scrolled through the openletterbot feed until I found one I agreed with (didn't take long!) and clicked the "sign this too" link. More of a one-minute action, but I did it and didn't let myself off the hook. And now Schumer knows that one more constituent wants him to stay strong against McConnell and get rid of the filibuster.

Today I taped up the box I've been filling with clothes as Kit outgrows them or we konmari them. Then I weighed the box, ordered the shipping label, scheduled the pickup, and printed and taped on the label. Now it's downstairs waiting to be picked up on Monday.

The box is addressed to the P---- family. They're refugees from El Salvador now living in New York. I don't know anything else about them except that they have three kids, one of whom is a bit younger and smaller than Kit and appears to really love the clothes we send. I was matched with them through the New Neighbors Partnership. If you're in New York and have a child, you can sign up to be matched with a family and send them your child's hand-me-downs. If you're anywhere, you can make a donation to NNP, or buy handmade goods from this Etsy shop run by one of the neighbors. Or you can look for ways to help refugees where you are.

(I'm going to try to include "and here's how you can do the same or similar things" links in every post, in case that helps anyone else with their activism practice.)

Incidentally, here's a great reason to shop at Primary: they accidentally sent us a duplicate order of the mittens and skirt we'd bought for Kit, and when I wrote to inform them, their customer service immediately gave me their blessing to donate the spares. I was very happy to add them to the box. I figure that a kid who's been wearing a lot of hand-me-downs might like to get a sparkly skirt that's just hers and has never been anyone else's. Also, Kit LOVES those mittens, and we love them too—they're really cozy and easy to put on—so I'm glad to share the joy.

To some extent, sending this box is a thing I would have done anyway, so I wasn't sure I should count it toward this effort toward daily actions; I was just waiting to hear back from Primary so I could put in the mittens and skirt and declare it full. But on the other hand, actually declaring the box complete and going through the process of shipping it off is something I always need a jumpstart on, and "What will my five-minute action be today?" was what jumpstarted me. Without that, it might have sat in my room for another week or two. Now, because I pushed myself a little to act and not delay, those mittens might even reach young Miss P---- before next week's snow. That feels important enough to count.

Via melennen: I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture on your page. A picture that you took. Just a pic. No description (but yes alt text!). The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on your page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.

Going to try to track my activist efforts here, to help myself get and stay in the habit of taking a small action every day.

Today I used resistbot to urge my reps to close ICE's internment camps. You can too: text "SIGN PLTDJP" or "RESIST" to 50409, or DM "RESIST" to Resistbot.

Things I hope to remember about Biden and Harris's inauguration:

- The look of absolute delighted and focused readiness as Harris stood to take her oath.

- Kit exclaiming "She's SO HAPPY!" at Lady Gaga, who channeled everything we were feeling, all the victory and grief and relief, into the words "that our flag was still there".

- The way I immediately felt hungry, in a purely physical sense, as though a space had opened up inside my body that four years of tension had constricted and walled off. Twelve hours later, I still feel that emptiness, that openness. I have more space in my mind too—staying focused on conversations is easier, getting things done is easier, I feel like maybe someday soon I could read a book or participate in a deeply intellectual conversation or make art—but feeling it in my body is extraordinary.

Kit is excited that the president went to speech therapy, "just like me!" They weren't interested in knowing that he has trouble speaking, but they loved knowing that he worked on learning to speak better, a distinction that I hadn't previously made and that I'll be thinking about for a while. In the meantime, I'm just so happy to have a president that I don't mind my child identifying with.

Biden's not perfect, but he's got moon rocks in the Oval Office, and a huge portrait of FDR on the wall across from his desk that he'll see every time he looks up from his work. The State Department is processing passport applications again. The Muslim ban was revoked. There's a national face mask mandate for federal workers. Lives are being saved from the get-go. After four years of the party of death, that's so refreshing.

And so many firsts! A trans woman will be assistant secretary of HHS. A Native American woman will run the Department of the Interior. Vice President Harris's first official act, after breaking three different glass ceilings, was to preside over the Senate confirmations of California's first Latino senator and Georgia's first Black and first Jewish senators. That's a whole lot of kids who can now say "just like me". And if you're asking how we could just be achieving some of these things in the year 2021, then you know how much work has gone into bringing us here, and how much work is still ahead.

Someone asked on Twitter how we could still believe in democracy after the past four years. I believe in it because it survived the past four years—battered and bruised but not broken—and because it let us save ourselves from another four years of hellish misery. We bought ourselves four years in which we push leftward against a gentle breeze rather than walking into a hurricane. It's been made abundantly clear that democracy only exists as long as enough people clap for it like Tinkerbell. But we did, and she lived, and that matters.

I'll try to sit down with Kit every weekend to write postcards to Biden and Harris. Some cards will say "thank you" and some will say "please". It's nice to know that either way, someone in the White House might actually listen and care.

It's amazing how blocking Twitter on my phone and personal laptop leads to going to sleep two to three hours earlier. Apparently microdosing dopamine really wires me up. I thought I'd find something else to do with the "freed-up" time, but nope, I just become more aware of how incredibly tired I am, and then I'm too tired to do anything that isn't Twitter and I can't do Twitter, so I go to bed.

I might need a "no Twitter after 3 p.m." rule like people have with caffeine. Or something like it. Until I figure that out, blocking it entirely seems best.

I was stressed out over the weekend because I've had a cold (just a cold!) for a week (everyone else in the household sneezed for a day and was fine, so I guess I'm special) and that meant a lot more time off over the holidays than I was expecting, and I wanted to hit the ground running today. So last night, I cleared out my work inbox and rejiggered my open task list to have clearly designated tasks for each day this week, making sure to leave room for any additional tasks that come in as the week goes on.

Today I was able to start work right away after the morning round of meetings, did all my designated tasks, and completed the last one 15 minutes before the end of my work day. I even had time for breakfast, lunch, and "tea" (usually actual socializing over hot beverages, but there's construction happening in our main room at the moment, so I went into J's room and ate a bit of chocolate and called it good enough). And I did good work without rushing, because I knew what I had to do and knew everything else could wait.

I feel sort of irritated that this worked, because it's exactly the sort of thing that well-meaning people advise one to do if one is struggling with one's workload—divide big tasks into small pieces, do one thing at a time, work smarter not harder, etc.—and I hate well-meaning advice from well-meaning people because it's so often totally wrong for my actual brain and situation. But uh. This time it wasn't. Huh.

(And then I also feel irritated with myself for not trying this sooner.)

As soon as I started planning the next day's tasks so I could hit the ground running, I realized I was doing "spend five minutes outlining the next scene" from Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k method, so I decided to see how I could apply her other two pieces of advice by evaluating when and how I work and looking for ways to boost my enthusiasm. I actually did the evaluation last month and realized that I do my best work in the afternoons, using my laptop in bed, with minimal interruption, so I blocked out two hours every afternoon for head-down intensive work time and immediately started doing more and better editing—my boss actually PM'd me to ask "What clicked? This is a huge improvement". I also do more and better work when I get enough sleep, so I continue to refine my bedtime protocols. As for enthusiasm, I'm driven by relationships and encouraged by success, so I remind myself of nice things other people have said about me and my work, sign into meetings a little early to chat with coworkers, and save small quick tasks to do when I need the boost of checking something off. I hit a slowdown after lunch today, and doing a bit of data entry got me back in the groove.

Work isn't writing. But I'm the same person when I'm working that I am when I'm writing, and I know a lot about my writing process, so it's interesting to see how transferable that process is. If I get backed up on tasks, I remind myself that I get to edit my outline. If I need a jumpstart, I set a 25-minute timer and ask coworkers to do work sprints with me. It's working better than I expected.

We did it.

X and J and Kit and I went down to Grand Army Plaza and joined the party there. We cheered and danced and waved our queer pride flags and Kit's glittery rainbow pinwheel and had a very good time. We came home and were very tired. I was the only one who stayed up for the speeches, and I'm glad I did but now I'm absolutely wiped—and an hour late for bedtime again. I think everyone's feeling that tiredness. Even our neighbors up the block, who will take any excuse for a party and were ebullient at the news, called it quits by 11. But worth it, all worth it, what a good way to be worn out instead of the usual exhaustion of pushing back despair.

X and I separately and spontaneously put all our political pins back on. I know New York is the same place it was a week ago, with the same people in it, but it still feels safer now. And it certainly felt good to pile into the town square and be surrounded by people who felt the same.


J with glittery pinwheel, X with trans flag, me with bi flag, Kit with rainbow flag and rainbow mask.
(Subject line is from Dream Theater's "Take the Time", which helpfully popped up on shuffle today. Thanks, psychic randomizer.)

I genuinely love being back on Twitter for the collective wait for the election results to be incontrovertible and complete and done, but also I woke up at 9 a.m. and didn't get out of bed until after noon. I'm glad I got out of the house at 3, while there was still sunlight. I was jittery and bouncy enough to walk four miles without really thinking about it. (Working at a standing desk is clearly improving my leg strength and stamina. That walk would have been more taxing even a couple of months ago, and J and I are taking fewer evening walks than we used to because he's going to bed earlier, so standing gets all the credit.)

I liked Biden's little chat tonight, though waiting three hours for it was hard, but I want to hear the real speech, the one that ends with balloons and confetti. I want Kit to see Kamala Harris give her first speech as VP-elect. I have mixed feelings about both Biden and Harris, but they act like reasonable human beings and that counts for a lot these days. I hope we get four years of the lovely gender role reversal of Biden being warm and caring and inclusive while Harris cleans house. The criminal justice system in this country sucks, but it's what we have at the moment, and we didn't just vote out a crook, we voted in a prosecutor.

I really wanted Stacey Abrams to be the VP pick, but I sure am glad she was doing what she was doing in Georgia. Not being able to phonebank more was frustrating, but I did one round of 30 calls to Georgia on Election Day, and the one voter I managed to speak with was so fervent and hopeful. I hope she's having a good week.

Tonight was supposed to be my first night of going to bed at 11:30 and getting up at 8 ("going to bed" means "being in my room ready for bed", which is easier to time and track than when I actually lie down and turn out the light), and now it's 12:30 and I'm still out on the couch. The challenge I always face when trying to go to bed is wanting there to be some sort of neat and tidy ending to the evening. Now here it is Friday night and we haven't even had an end to Tuesday yet. It's a wonder I've gotten any sleep this week at all.

I just want it done.

Well, I sure picked a good week to get back on Twitter and start waking up at 9 a.m.

How are you all holding up?

After 13.5 amazing years, I'm leaving Publishers Weekly. My last day is November 3.

(Let's hope it's someone else's last day on the job as well.)

It's been a really good run. I'll miss my colleagues and reviewers so much; there have been a lot of tearful emails and phone calls over the last week. But it's time.

I'm beyond thrilled to announce that I'm joining the PCMag team as a managing editor. I'm especially happy to be working with Wendy Sheehan Donnell, a superb editor, and with my high school buddy Sascha Segan. Tech has always been just as much a part of my life as books, and I'm looking forward to diving back into that world.

For the first time since 2002, I get to just read books and have my own opinions about them. How fucking wild is that?

The ad for my job at PW is posted here. If you're interested, please email me at [email protected] for more details.

It's a pretty weird time to be sharing good news, especially such BIG good news. But I'm so happy to have something good in my life, and I think it's important to talk about good things in hard times. If there's goodness in your life, large or small—even just something you ate that was tasty or something you saw that was pretty—please share in the comments. I'd love to hear about it.

And here we are.

( My takeaways from week six )

( Week Seven: Malchut and Shechina - Immanence, Manifestation, Divine Presence, Inspiration, Awe )

At the end of seven weeks, you have done whatever you could do in seven weeks. It both was and was not enough.

The 50th day is the festival. Jewish holidays tend to be a mix of the somber and the uplifting, and Election Day will undoubtedly be both those things. Vote, if you can and you haven't already; help others vote; and as the polls close and the results trickle in, take care of yourself and your loved ones. Remember that on any day, whenever you need to, you can start counting again, building your own pattern and your own habit and your own way of getting from where you are to where you will be.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. It's been genuinely therapeutic and invigorating for me, and I hope for you as well. <3

I'm very sorry for the lateness of this post; there's been some good but very urgent and intense stuff happening here and I had no brain at all for it. I'm still not sure I have brain for it tonight, but I know a few people have been counting along and I didn't want to leave you hanging any longer.

( My takeaways from week five )

( Week Six: Yesod - Foundation, Motivation, History, Vitality, Creation )

At the end of this week, you have taken six concrete actions for social change. You've worked on letting go of the urge to change the past and taken responsibility for repairing past wrongs. You've actively created some good things in the present. And you've taken time to look back over the past six weeks of thinking and planning and acting and appreciate what you've done. Even if you only made a single donation or sent a single postcard, that's a tangible accomplishment that could do some real good.

The seventh and final week is malchut/Shechina, the divine made real.

I've completed the post for hod, just in time. I'm glad I took the time to do it right. I think the entries for tonight and tomorrow night are really powerful and useful. I hope they are for all of you too.

( My takeaways from week four )

( Week Five: Hod - Presence, the Moment, Ritual, Thought, Acceptance )

This post currently ends on day 33 rather than going through to day 35, because one of the actions I'm taking to manifest a healthier future is trying to go to bed earlier even when it means leaving something undone. I'll come back to complete it tomorrow. Complete!

At the end of this week, you have taken three concrete actions for social change, and one action to sustain and preserve what's already good in the world. You've loved yourself as you are and made a plan for being who you want to be. You've supported yourself through anxiety, and hopefully out the other side. You've built some rituals and habits, extending now into the future. And you've expanded your idea of what taking positive action looks like. I hope this grounding in the present is helping with all that stress about the future.

Next week is yesod: foundation, motivation, history, and vitality.

( My personal stumbling block and anchor from week three )

As previously mentioned, netzach begins a new three-week group that deals with the past, present, and future—except in the reverse order, with the future coming first.

( Week Four: Netzach - Endurance, Tenacity, Vision, Victory, Eternity )

At the end of this week, you have taken three concrete actions for social change. You've crafted a vision of the future, and refined it. You've crafted a vision of your own future self and found ways to work toward that future self's sense of accomplishment. You've set up a schedule of actions so you can build a habit of acting. And you've gotten some large-scale perspective to pull you out of navel-gazing and remind you of wonder.

Next week we turn to hod, presence and the present.

( My personal budget and motivations from week two )

The discipline of gevurah has channeled the intense light of chesed, and that brings us to the week of tiferet.

( Week Three: Tiferet - Balance, Harmony, Truth, Focus )

At the end of this week, you have taken three concrete actions for social change. You've renewed your commitment, given yourself an anchor for when you feel adrift, and made a plan for moving a stumbling block out of your path. You've acknowledged truths about yourself and about the past and present. And you've built or renewed a relationship that supports your action or is itself an action, a tiny way that you've made the world better than it was.

Next week begins another three-week group: netzach, looking up and out at the future; hod, centering ourselves in the present; and yesod, grounding ourselves in the past. The first of these is netzach, the week of eternity, vision, endurance, and the long term.

Thanks for all the supportive comments on my last post. I'm glad to have such good company on this journey.

I realized that I didn't include a blessing for counting each night. Here's the one I'm using, in English because I don't know enough Hebrew to translate it: "Here I am, ready and prepared to take action toward building a nation governed by just and righteous laws. I undertake this journey to Election Day in homage to the ancient journey from liberation to revelation, and with the intention to manifest both liberation and revelation in this time. Blessed are You, Holy One, who show Your love for Your people Yisrael through the gifts of Torah, mitzvot, discipline, and law. Today is the [] day of mishpatim, making [] weeks and [] days of mishpatim." (Or you can reverse the order of days and count: "Today is [] days until Election Day, making [] weeks and [] days until Election Day.")

( My personal causes, roles, and actions from week one ) I feel like I'm already starting to see how these choices and self-understandings can interact, which makes me feel very empowered.

When I'm feeling all revved up and excited, I often overextend myself. Fortunately, the characteristic of week two is gevurah.

( Week Two: Gevurah - Strength, Judgment, Discipline, Discernment, Boundaries )

At the end of this week, you have taken three concrete actions for social change. You've also examined your capabilities and limitations, refined your sense of what's possible, budgeted your resources, and nudged yourself toward doing something challenging. And you've given yourself space to be who you are, a compassionate understanding of your motivations, and a vision of a better future.

Next week is tiferet, the week of balance, beauty, mercy, and truth, which channels the abundance of chesed through the judicious constraints of gevurah to create a steady, sustainable flow of energy.