Black Rain

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LISTENING: to my husband (!!) play balatro
FEELING: cute with my new hair
SEEING: a shirt covered in cat hair

How strange to be alive in this moment.

I sat in a salon earlier, cutting my hair and dying it pink. Meanwhile, toxic black rain has been falling on the heads of women in Tehran.

Last night, I stressed myself out, looking at flight prices, dreaming of my honeymoon. All the while, warplanes were launching air strikes on lovers in Bahrain and Beirut.

My wedding is Saturday, and I've tried my hardest to buy as much as I can secondhand. How silly we all must feel doing our little actions to care for the world. The biggest polluter is the U.S. military, yet those leaders aren't worried about their waste. They don't buy used. I guess you can't find bombs and guns at the thrift store. They're murdering with our taxpayer dollars. We have blood on our hands, too.

I'm tired. Generations to come will feel the fallout of this war. The trauma, of course, but also the cancers and the disease. The orphans of fallen soldiers. The animals — our downed winged friends. They will suffer, too.

Nothing about this is normal, yet I'm at a loss for how to respond at a moment when my personal life is demanding so much of my energy. How do we hold both the joyous moments, like my wedding, and the heartbreaking ones, like this war?

So here I am, doing the only thing I know: writing and grieving in community. 🌀

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Rest in Power

While we can't say for certain that climate change led to these specific weather events (we need attribution studies for that), we do know that the Earth's rising temperatures are already creating more frequent and/or stronger disasters like these.

Heavy rains in Nairobi have caused at least 25 deaths this week.

Tornadoes have rocked the Midwest, killing at least eight people.

Currently Reading

I needed these words from Bill McKibben on Tehran's toxic cloud.

Thinking about all the migrants being forced into more treacherous waters. Hanne Cokelaere writes about the issue for POLITICO.

NPR's Kate Wells and Arthur Allen write about the underground health networks popping up in the wake of ICE's attack on Minneapolis.

Robert Moor for The New Yorker: "In the summer and fall of 2021, I put in seven shifts in the tree house, totalling about a month—though, up there, it felt much longer."

Always, always read Adam Mahoney.

One private company is paying public officers to work for them. Alleen Brown exposes this corruption for Grist.

Really pumped to see Nina Lakhani at Drilled, writing about the 10-year anniversary of Berta Cáceres' death.

Collage

- Yessenia