When the sun comes out
It's never not true to say "it's been a rough week here in Texas," but in this particular moment, it's too true to utter out loud. No amount of consolation is sufficient in the face of so much pain. Typing this paragraph feels stupid.
And yet what happened here this week, and how the folks who could have prevented it are currently behaving, are but two of the many, many awful things happening everywhere. You don't need me to tell you that. Maybe you need a reprieve from the news. Maybe I do, too. That's probably why I'm typing yet another paragraph about who knows what: to find my way toward relief. That's why we make things in general, isn't it? Try to figure things out, give the ick someplace to go, create something—anything—and remember how things can change from one moment to the next, even if it's just some offering, however small, that didn't exist mere moments ago—didn't even occur to us that it could, until it did.
This week's warm cups of tea:
- I'm not sure what Arlo Parks is up to these days, but hopefully she's happy and free and making new music, if she feels like it. Her particular vibe of velvety vulnerability over mid-tempo beats does something good for my soul, so here's an hour of that in case it does something good for yours, too.
- Did you know there's a protein in our genes named Sonic Hedgehog? True fact. It helps some of our cells talk to one another, apparently, and among its other talents, it's the reason we have fingers. It got its name from the way its mutation can make a fly embryo look like a hedgehog, and from the fact that even some of the world's foremost geneticists are, at the end of the day, silly gooses just like the rest of us. This, turned upside down, means even silly gooses like us (yes I know it's geese but gooses is funner, let me live) can discover fascinating things and change the course of medicine, or culture, or history in general. We can do this just by being curious, asking questions, engaging in critical thinking, developing our skills, and working in community with one another. That's why this odd fact and what it represents brings me some measure of peace: it's just one of so many things we're capable of realizing at any moment, under all kinds of conditions.
- In Utah, there's this lovely person who hosts a popup "Doodle Booth" and the ingenuity, the sweetness, the details are :::chef's kiss:::. (Can AI do that? No. No, it can't. But let's save that rant for another time.)
- Speaking of cool things humans can do, I'm not sure what you call this art form or visual effect (I suppose it's zoetrope or zoetrope-adjacent?) but it makes my brain go "ahhhhhh" every time.
- See also: baking as ballet, as opera, as theatre. Give me a time-lapse compilation of bread, pastries, etc. rising in the oven all slow-like and listen I'm not a smoker but I'm gonna need a cigarette after. You?
- OK, three times is three times too many, so I'm not sending you to the curséd grid app any more today. Come to think of it, I think I'll make a promise here that I won't send you there at all next week. Deal? Deal. I found the next link there, but I'm bypassing it and sending you straight to the full video. In case you haven't caught this "Can I Walk With You" series, it might locate a tiny dent in your heart and smooth it out ever so gently.
- If you want to help folks devastated by the central Texas floods in an impactful way, here's an up-to-date, on-the-ground list of ways to do that. Clothing and food donations have been so plentiful that there's no need for more right now, but there are other things we can do, so let's do them.
Breathe in, breathe out, rest, repeat. See you good souls next week.
"We need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in."
—Desmond Tutu
09 July 2025
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