Originally shared via TinyLetter on 30 August 2020.

I started this letter-blog as a place for some outlet about hope and determination, for a place to write about things that I am working on, and explore some public scholarship that isn’t ready for “official” publication outlets. Then the COVID-blues hit the Millennial-blues right around the time that four months of stay-at-home-if-you-believe-in-covid intersected with my 35th birthday. A week of evening lightning storms further eroded my surge capacity, and I began to focus very hard on consistent eating, sleeping and the handful of projects that I hope will bear fruit into whatever new reality we find ourselves in– as the covid-tsunami recedes and we are left looking at a landscape that needs to be re-imagined. Who will re-imagine it? Who will be able to live with dignity in it?

I graduated directly into the capitalistic-disaster-excitement of 2008 with degrees in anthropology and archaeology, with extra studies in math, ecology and evolutionary biology. Interested in the intersection between the environment, society and emerging diseases, I struggled to find a place that would pay me to think about –and act on– these things. Instead, I took a job filling out forms for orders for supplies for a lab in a hospital. Through that, I found a data job in infectious disease research. I took more science classes, considered a few careers, and eventually– through a concern about the ways that data was being used as a commodity rather than a tool for understanding the world – found my way into the intersection of technology and society: data ethics.

In 2020, we find ourselves in another capitalistic-disaster-scenario that simultaneously wears the costume of a global pandemic, while wind-shears of natural-hazards rip the walls off our houses. And, I find myself re-exploring the studies of my early adulthood, by joining groups of researchers working on disease modeling. A volunteer-apprentice in many ways, I am living my values and my passion. I am harvesting seeds from over a decade ago and re-planting them.

This feels optimistic. The future is mine, right?

Yes, and. Except. My seeds are being planted on precarious ground. I am bartering for water, praying for sun. How many more times will I have to re-invent, re-imagine my own future? Materially, will these seeds provide some of the investment I need to economically survive? To thrive with dignity, instead of living with struggle.

And, I ask this with the heavy knowledge that I can even imagine thriving — that I can still have agency to invest in an unknown future with some confidence — is evidence of my own privilege in a world where new precarity intersects with a gradient of old poverty.

With the intertwined covid-blues and the future-world-imagination that I want to create, I’m trying to give myself the grace and gratitude to struggle and to celebrate, without constraining myself to an optimism I don’t always feel — while also illuminating some exploratory paths that require some determination to follow without knowing the material rewards. The future feels very uncertain, and that is the reality many of us are confronting. We are struggling to unstruggle.

Some of my next pieces will focus more on the covid research & advocacy efforts I am contributing to — for the world, and for myself. I may share some things that I am reading (following the structure of two of my favorite letter-bloggers Simone Letter and Culture Study ).  I’m considering sharing a few things from my experiences exploring and practicing Judaism, and what it means to be a member of community of practice. And there will be more about biking and bikes with throw-backs to my original newsletter about unpredicting life, with a modified focus to account for the very un-routine life we find ourselves in. I want to interact more with y’all — I am only as strong as the community that surrounds me. And we have many more months to live through.

Originally shared via TinyLetter on 14 July 2020, my 35th birthday.

Then.

I was in Spain, in a sushi restaurant, when we heard that a virus in Wuhan was newsworthy enough to break through the political gossip and celebrity highlights. Half a week later, I ate at my first Michelin star restaurant, Street XO, oddly placed on the rooftop of a Corte Ingles. Iñigo and I decided that the next time I was in Spain, this very summer, we would go to DiverXO to celebrate my 35th birthday, or maybe his. We didn’t worry too much about when because how was still possible. Two days later, I visited a cooperative farm to pick vegetables, before jumping on a high-speed train to Barcelona to see old friends, to meet new ones, to attend an ethics conference challenging the technology that has over-watched us all.  The vegetables I picked that Sunday, in the outskirts of Madrid, are the last photo on my Instagram feed before 2020 slowly and then very very rapidly morphed into a global event, foretold only by sci-fi and socio-punk writers and a handful of epidemiologists on Twitter.

That photo also marks a moment when a new seed was planted — replanted– in my mind, in my future soul. The cooperative farm I visited is also a community. It’s more than an idea. It’s a place where members contribute to the farm, growing and harvesting vegetables, and they care for each other, with financial, supportive and emotional direct help. They wear costumes and drink chelitas, play, listen to music, dance, and show up to pick vegetables a little hungover sometimes, laughing and groaning and sharing in our all physical limitations and tangible joy. Birthed in many different countries, they are connected by roots they planted together, not the archaic ties of last names and lineage and nation-states.

Now.

Every Friday I drive to a farm and pick up a box of veggies, a loaf of tumerik-sesame bread, peaches and a bottle of salad dressing. Every other Wednesday I drive to an urban greenhouse to pick up micro-greens, mushrooms, flowers and tomatoes. The greenhouse coordinator, who I have never met, sometimes gifts a small jar of honey. The alternate Wednesdays I drive to my cousin’s farm for steak, eggs and garlic.

This has become the rhythm of my Pandemic summer in central Tennessee.

I listen to a local country radio station when I drive, a spare mask hanging from my rear view mirror.

I see horses, cows, bales of hay, trackers, trucks and fields. I don’t see many people.

During these drives, I can’t look at my phone, at Twitter, at the multiple Slack channels pinging me with news articles, the newest baking adventure. I can’t doomscroll with bloodshot eyes.

I ate food, before, and I cook food, now. Calorically, my weekly diet hasn’t changed. Materially, nutritionally, ethically, the food is much better. I think I value it more.


Reflect.

I graduated in 2008 into a (western) world birthing my generation’s (first) unprecedented (economic) disaster. We became lost, then found, then lost – and now we know how to navigate by the light of imagined stars. Are we home, yet? We have become our own guides, creating expanded communities. We plan, expecting disaster. 

In the US – at least -, the federal government has not had the foresight to implement policies to support us during the Pandemic, nor the empathy or coordination to consider the futures of so many people. It has clung to a past that is gone, one that we many of us have outgrown, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.

As I eat my farm-fresh vegetables, it feels weird to think that my previously absent-minded consumption of food flowing along complex supply chains was an economic driver. A hundred thousand stale scones and standardized lattes kept people afloat in an unbalanced, unjust economy. That economy still churns, and unseen workers have been made more visible by their very vulnerability to Covid-19. That economy still violently exists in parallel to the one that I have joined for the moment — this one is more local, imperfectly abundant, not quite just, but closer to ….something. I’m not sure what is possible. I want a different world, but I’m not sure I want a perfectly local one.

Because: I deeply miss the overpriced crap cheese pizza I would eat every time at the Oakland airport before boarding a flight to Spain.

Before.

One night, three days after visiting the cooperative farm, in late January, in Barcelona, I found an Indian hole-in-the-wall, and I asked for actual spicy food. You’re not Spanish, said the Bulgarian bartender. I’m not, I laughed. The Spanish do not tolerate spice, she said. She called over the chef. He was from north-central India, so I recalled a few phrases in Hindi, from my time studying art in Jaipur. He grinned, promised me spicy food, and a Kingfisher. The bartender and I kept talking. Have you heard, she asked. Kobe Bryant died in a plane crash and there is a new virus in China. It’s so unsettling. The news is bad. Who knows what will happen, I agreed. A French women in hipster glasses and a hippie-elegant skirt arrived to pick-up her usual order, and a young Indian couple with vibrant jewelry sat down, chatting in Hindi. My spicy food arrived. I ate, surrounded by familiar faces from all over the world.

Next.

I don’t have a story with an ending, yet. I’ll eat peaches tomorrow. I added blueberries to my farm box for Friday. I’ll talk with friends on four continents, in three languages, and we will dream of what we can create. A healthy garden needs many different flowers, birds, sun, rain and fruit.

I tend to grow vines, climb trees and find rivers to explore. The house I am staying in this summer will not be the house I stay in this fall, but it may be one that I return to.

My dad mailed me 4 o’clock seeds to plant here. He pointed out that they will flower long after I am gone.

Some roots aren’t in the ground. Some flowers take time to grow. Sometimes I feel more like the bird that flies to different places, carrying seeds with the breeze and clouds and the songs.