The Catch Up!

Hey friends! It’s a polarizing time of year, September! Is September your new year, new start, or do you adhere to a New Years, middle of winter is where the year rolls over? Also are you a pumpkin spice girlie or do you throw down for apple cider season?-At this point I would throw down for either drink if the weather cooperated. There’s something unsettling about drinking (chugging) fall drinks when the air temperature outside feels like I am wading in butternut squash soup. I should be drinking hot drinks to warm up, not drinking hot drinks to force my body to sweat.

So. A lot has since the last Catch Up. I had to reinstall windows and wipe my computer because it kept crashing so badly. Apparently it didn’t just eat one copy of the Catch Up but it also ate all of my course work from my seminar (final paper RIP). That has been a technological kick in the face. I do have most of my documents, for the most part however I am missing some newer parts.

Also, my partner has been hospitalized for the better part of two weeks, which has been less than good. Cue back to school season. I trust you can read between the lines for why there’s been some radio silence. As an unexpected punch in the face, the city also hit me with an unfathomable property tax bill (and threat), which is paid off but still.

It feels like I am living in a post 9/11 country song, and I want to escape it.
I get it universe. I am humbled. Please stop the kicking. My morale has significantly improved. Welcome to September, mes amis, I am glad to have you.

What I've Been Watching

I will spare you all what I've actually been watching with a curated list because I need to maintain some air of mystery.

Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit

I caved and began playing Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit on my phone. I remembered some of the game mechanics from the first Cozy Grove and depending on how you look at it, might have broken some parts of how it’s supposed to be played. Which is fine. I’m early on in the game, and I would kill (maybe trade a bunch of quartz or rare shells)to get a spirit deer. I love the humour of the game, and the bears are always neat.

Misfits And Magic Season 2 Trailer

Aabria Iyengar is running a second season of Misfits and Magic over at Dimension 20. I’m excited. I am so excited to see the players characters again and also the tablet looks fucking terrifying.

Alex Melton

Alex Melton has been one of my favourite cover artists on YouTube for awhile. I really like how he plays with songs and yeah. This is a pretty cool re-imagining of The Cranberries Linger. (He also has a pop punk fall song called Autumnal).

What I've Been Reading

I’ve been reading physical books more in my recent life. I picked up volume 1 of Covenant by LySandra Vuong, which was pretty neat and maybe I’ll write about one day. I read Premee Mohamed’s We Speak Through The Mountain, the follow up novella to The Annual Migration of Clouds. I do plan on writing about them and posting them next week, if the universe is willing. I also found myself invited to a book club and this month’s book is Becoming A Matriarch by Helen Knott. She’s amazing, I read one of her smaller creative non fiction pieces for a class last year (Seeing Myself in My Mother's Addiction) and I like her voice.
I have read some neat online stories too!

Love is torture. That’s indisputable. When an Aldarish team extricated the tiny chip from a cracked Byrnyan skull and accessed its data, I had no doubt about what I was seeing. Once in a subject’s head, the chip forced them to produce all the same hormones that we associate with love. They could even channel this love toward someone else, to an object, or even a government.

Over at Clarkesworld Renan Bernado’s A Theory of Missing Affections is a complicated short story about families, obligations, and an evolution of a scholarly theory. I love how well Bernado wrote the complicated dance between faith and proof (maybe not proof but evidence), the different selves someone can wear, and the slow change in belief.

Like most kids growing up, I was confused about the world and my place in it. I teeter-tottered between my Palestinian roots and a White label and struggled to make sense of it all. As I grew older, I didn’t see many other brown girls swimming and that pushed me further into a confusing spiral.

I read this after the Olympics and kept thinking about it when I thought about different events. At Hazlitt Sophia Shalabi’s My Body in Water is a delight. I like how she crafts sentences, how there’s a humour that’s needed to unpack (and trouble) the notions of girlhood, Otherness, and the gift of parents who want to you to have more opportunities than they did.

Most customers were looking for something way out of Edwina’s price range. She tried to be nice to everyone, because this was a decent on-site job with health insurance and a 401K plan. There were limits, though. She wasn’t going to do free brand repping like Daisy, the staff clinician. Daisy’s self-care videos blew up pretty regularly, and they were full of artfully deployed Skin Seraph products. That’s why Daisy got bonuses while Edwina never would.

Finally over at Reactor I really enjoyed this magical realism novelette (what a concept) #Selfcare by Annalee Newitz. This is some wild body horror (content warning: skinless character, vomit, blood, shit), fae, and gig economy narrative that did not go where I thought it might. Also, you know what?-This is kinda the dream to be honest, how it ends.

Small Mammal Update

The small mammals have been naughty. No treats anymore. Not until they (Delphine) stops eating all of my plants, especially the slow growing string of hearts.

In other news, I will keep you posted on operation Hanging Inside Garden (no you cannot stand on things to eat my plants, you tiny asshole) and how it will be providing enrichment to at least one of the mammals in the house.

What I've Been Working On

So it’s either the last quarter of the year, or new year depending on how you view September. Before the Great and Terrible blue screens of death, I would have been making a list for stuff I absolutely want to complete by the end of 2024. Which I guess is noble and some would argue completely doable.

However, now that I am hunting for the most up to date versions of things I swore I did and in a limbo for my final paper (sad kazoo noises), my list is slightly more disjointed and odd.

In theory-

• 16 more Catch Ups until the end of 2024. That feels wild. It’s on the list.
• 2 posts about books I read and had feelings about
• A Working Skeleton variant of Bergamot and Bygones
• One Felix short story

This is all doable. This feels like a shorter than usual Catch Up, as always thanks for reading and sticking it out with me.