kishmish
I love the sound of the word ‘kishmish’ which means sultana in Hindi (or raisin, I don’t think they have separate words for them). It feels like the sound of my brain right now too. I read an article about how big oil has been lying to us about recycling plastic. They just bury it under ground! Last week, I screen-shotted the trending news because it felt especially ridiculous. The stories went something like this: Incredible photos of red skies over San Francisco, Trump on tape advising downplaying of Covid-19, Halloween cancelled, 9/11 remembered.
When NorCal was blanketed by smoke and red skies, I thought of the naive belief I used to have which was “if it’s happening in Silicon Valley, the wealthy tech people will see it and be moved to take action”. I genuinely felt this way. I had this feeling that there were good people in Silicon Valley who cared about climate change and would use their inexcusable wealth for good. This year has been a stark reminder that “The social responsibility of business is to increase profits”.
I’m finding it hard to trust anything at the moment. Every day there seems to be some revelation about how we have been lied to or deceived. This wasn’t helped by watching ‘The Social Dilemma’. My cousin who works at Google messaged me and said he is questioning what he does for work. I watched it, and I get it, I want to delete it all but I wish I knew better how to extricate myself from these platforms: there’s a Mum’s group on Facebook that I do use as a ‘tool’ and has been very beneficial to me, I wonder about staying in touch with people, I wonder about family chat threads, I think about ‘needing’ to be on Twitter for various work-related reasons. This is how they keep you on there, I guess.
The NXIVM doc is also explosive. I am irrationally afraid of Allison Mack. That clip of her first meeting with Keith Raniere was almost unwatchable. We’ve all met an Allison Mack at some point, but obviously L.A. is full of them. Actress with a capital ‘A’.
There’s this tree outside my house that I look at from my desk. It’s sits on the corner of two streets melting off the curb onto the road. It’s sharp and spiky with lush, white flowers that don’t look like they belong on it. I’ve been staring at it, lost in thought, for months. Last week, a water heater company’s truck bumped it and broke off a huge branch. I felt angry at the carelessness of the driver and hoped he wouldn’t just hit & run. He didn’t. He knocked on me neighbor’s door to tell her. The next day, a guy pulled up beside it in a beat-up old car, climbed up the tree and cut off 4 bunches of the white flowers! Again, I was offended by this brazen, pre-meditated attack in broad daylight. Then I thought about how he probably needed those flowers a lot more than the tree did. Like, you know, to sell so that he could feed his family or something. That’s what I told myself anyway. The water heater guy told my neighbor about the accident, the guy who took the flowers was desperate. Not everything is malicious, not everyone is bad. And I should be working anyway.
Here’s my view of the tree:
Here are some tweets I enjoyed this week: