Today was—and I think this is the technical term here—“bad.” I had an upsetting meeting at work and cried about it; I saw an upsetting ticket rating from someone I’d genuinely tried to help and cried about it; I took a nap after work and cried (not about, but) during it. It was a weepy sort of day that I haven’t had many of since going on antidepressants.

The world feels very hopeless right now. The sun keeps rising in a truly weird red orb that my phone camera won’t photograph quite right; my friends in Portland are scared they’ll have to evacuate and everyone in San Francisco is viewing a horrible orange sky. The prison labor we use to fight the fires is running low because of the pandemic. The software that my company uses to manage contract signatures is currently being held hostage by the Belorussian government. It does not feel like a great time to be.

Not everything is the worst, of course. I got a weird orthopedic pillow and my shoulder hurts less now. I got to read through the 180 comments in the world’s stupidest facebook group on a post about decolonizing reiki. I bought cornchips that I really like. I got to email a friend for work purposes today.

And whatever’s in the air has at least meant the temperature hasn’t hit 110 again.

Shit to read

Part of what makes the present moment so frustrating is the realization that recovering from the pandemic is quite possible, except that the people who run our country are too fucking stupid to be able to do two (2) things at one time.
A great and sad piece about Black childhood and burnout.
A friend sent me a link to this great piece about blands, which is what they call all the D2C B-Corp startups that look exactly like each other, and it is tremendous.
Earthworms are canceled!
One of the engineers posted this at work and I laughed very hard before sighing a long, sad sigh.
Portland: intentionally racist and not just in the historical way.

Shit to eat

Get bone-weary, “am-I-somehow-iron-deficient” exhausted.
Fight through that to chop up an onion. The recipe calls for half of one but the recipe is for cowards.
Chop up a few garlic cloves and half a bell pepper.
Turn on your rice cooker, dump in oil, and wait until it’s hot. In retrospect, you should have done this to start. Oh well. If you don’t have a rice cooker make this on the stove, but it’ll be a less hands-off process.
Once it’s hot, toss the vegetables and some salt and a tablespoon of curry in there. Wait five-ish minutes.
Poke them around to make sure they’re soft enough.
Top with 6oz of whatever sort of tomatoes you have around, chopped up and undrained.
If you freeze all of your stock like I do, break off some hunks and toss them in with the tomatoes. Close everything until the stock is melted or five-ish minutes have passed.
Stir everything up.
Dump in a cup and a half of rice or two cut-open bags of brown minute rice from when your former coworker and you swapped houses literally a year ago; you do not eat a ton of rice.
Stir it all up. If the stock isn’t enough to cover the rice up to your first knuckle, add water until it seems covered. It’s a rice cooker, it’s probably fine. If you are using unsalted stock, add more salt.
Cover it and leave it to do its thing.
When it beeps, leave it be and use the time to cook some sort of protein. Your friend has told you that leaving rice in on the warming mode for an extra 20 minutes is the key to get good-quality rice cooker rice out of a bargain-bin rice cooker and you have no evidence she’s wrong.
I made chicken. You don’t have to. (Recipe: heat up a pan with oil. Cover chicken thighs with za’atar. Cook on each side until done.)
Scoop some of the rice and some of the protein into a bowl, and eat, curled up on your couch and watching HGTV. Put the rice cooker bucket directly into the fridge.

Shit to watch

My delightful friend did digital Dragon*Con and this video made me laugh.

Shit to buy

My friends do amazing direct service work giving food and supplies to unhoused Angelinos and you can buy things for them to give to people at this wishlist. It feels good and helps people undergoing just shitty conditions during a shitty time.

Emchap's Shit from the Internet 09/9/20 🍠

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