vital functions

[kaberett]

Celebrating. Five years since we discovered our local bat population!

Reading. None of the Above, Travis Alabanza. I found this frustrating. Partly: Travis is about six years younger than me, which appears to be just enough that they are unaware -- or seemingly unaware -- of at least one huge, fraught, conversation about what words we use about ourselves, and why we use them:

Of course, trans - as far as I understand it - has always been an umbrella term that enables coalition. Its history as a term has always held under it many different types of those transgressing or deviating from assigned genders. Yet it does feel that recently, as a more neoliberal goal is created for tolerance, or acceptance within already harmful systems - rather than liberation from said systems - the categories created within transness fall more directly under medicalisation, and a perception of sitting within the binary (even if that trans person's gender relationship is more complex). Whereas the cisgender spectator was always obsessed with the trans body and what may be done to it, it seems now without our own communities there is a danger we may begin to draw these lines ourselves.

The shift from fighting over using "transgender" versus "transsexual" to draw (medicalised!) intra-community divisions, to using "trans" as an umbrella term that also explicitly includes transvestites, is one that I remember happening and I was there for. I know that Travis knows people who were there for that entire messy protracted discussion, and I know that they'd be willing to provide this context, so I am just -- both baffled, that six years can form such a profound generational gap, and more than a little heartbreak over the ongoing discontinuity and fragmentation of our histories.

And, as I say, frustrated -- frustrated that the messy realities of our communities and our conversations are so easily overwritten.

And I'm sad that Travis, despite absolutely moving in the same circles and the same scene, apparently doesn't know about Le Gateau Chocolat -- here is a Black, gender non-conforming artist who as far as I know regularly works at the National Theatre (as in: I've seen him in two NT shows, one of which was of his own devising) and who Travis never mentions, and this is upsetting not least because Travis talks about how lonely they are to be Black and gender non-conforming and never seeing anyone Like Them in the arts or in the street, and -- LGC! Right there! (And no, LGC isn't the only relevant artist I can name; I know other Black GNC folk have performed at the RVT, where Travis is a regular. LGC is just the highest profile and has the easiest-to-find website.)

So I'm frustrated by the apparent ephemerality of historical context, and the consequent harking back to an imagined, non-existent Golden Age; I'm frustrated by the missing figures; and I'm also frustrated by a lengthy anecdote about "Steve" and "Samantha", which more than anything else helped bring into focus for me the binary that Travis frames most of the book in terms of: that between "cisgender" and "trans". (The anecdote was also heartbreaking because I really do not think the conclusions Travis draws, based on the information they present, are reasonable -- and it's the ways in which I think those conclusions aren't supported that illuminates that binary.)

(My irritation about "non-binary gender" referring to specific genders rather than the system of gender as a whole is a separate terminological fight I'm well aware I'm on the losing side of -- but damn it, if gender isn't binary than "male" and "female" aren't binary genders either.)

I have started, because I got to the front of the library hold queue, skimming through Meera Sodha's Made in India, where my goal is to work out whether I want to get a copy of my own. So far, in a lovely moment of synchronicity, I have decided that rather than going with smitten kitchen's fennel ice cream recipe, which calls for 2 tsp of fennel seeds, I'm going to follow Sodha's lead and up that to 2 tbsp. (I'm also going to use the Ruby Violet base mix, because I know I love the way that turns out.) It is possible that sk's pear crisps with vanilla brown butter are in my proximate future...

Bought Max Gladstone's Dead Country -- the latest in the Craft Sequence -- the day it was released; bemoaned that I would not be awake when he & Amal El-Mohtar were discussing it circa 2 a.m. local; and then bloody was awake and all, in the A&E waiting room at Barnet hospital, and totally forgot it was happening. So I haven't watched that, and I've also not actually managed to even start Dead Country, but it's on my e-reader and I Hope I will manage to get to it... soon.

Watching. The 2023 Migraine World Summit. I am four days in -- the content for Day 5 went live nearly three hours ago, but that's a Tomorrow Problem in this timezone.

Listening. A acquired Pink's latest album Trustfall a couple of weeks ago. We still haven't listened to it because I'm putting it off until I have the CGRP monoclonal antibodies in me, which is perhaps foolish given how long that seems to be taking...

Cooking. THINGS.

• Meera Sodha's beetroot & yoghurt rice, from East. Pleasant! Colours! Once again felt a Lack Of Vegetable. The dessicated coconut didn't actually show up until Tuesday, annoyingly, but I was fond of the coconut-garlic-onion topping.
  
• Meera Sodha's swede laksa, except that I had an insufficiency of swede and a superfluity of parsnip, so it was about one quarter swede and about three quarter parsnips. It was good! I enjoyed it! Turns out that 4 tsp of deggi mirch is Still Too Much Chilli for all of the palates in the house; also A will perfectly happily eat this but is not particularly interested in coconut-based soups in general. I, however, nearly cried about how Excellent Comfort Food this was, and therefore will almost certainly make it or variants on it again.
  
• a leek-and-celeriac-and-parsnip soup, in an attempt to deal with more of the Parsnip Backlog. turned out well! was pleased.
  
• Beetroot sourdough with bonus nigella seeds! Not sure we will bother again but it really is very pink and quite pleasing. Behold:
  
  
• Roasted red cabbage with pears and thyme. Perfectly acceptable? Mildly disappointing. I think I think the cabbage is still too crunchy; I think also I should probably have only used half of our (not-terribly-small) red cabbage instead of all of it, but oh well. It's using up the blue cheese (on my half) and it is Definitely A Vegetables. This is in fact the first recipe I've tried via Foot52 that was not a Resounding Success, which is good for calibration purposes! (I used a couple of cloves of black garlic instead of sensible raw garlic, partly because I thought it would be Interesting and partly because...)
  
• ... we served the cabbage alongside an Ottolenghi aubergine with black garlic. (I had black garlic because I was ordering smoked garlic for the purposes of a Meera Sodha recipe, and it seemed silly to pay more for shipping than for the actual garlic, so I also stuck some cheese and black garlic in my virtual basket.) This is very tasty! The ludicrous quantities of herbs are great! Instead of 5g of fresh dill I used 5g of frozen, leftover from making the dill and caraway oil for my culinary adventure the other week, and also drizzled some of the dill & caraway oil over the whole lot. I think probably I did not put enough lemon juice in the yoghurt dressing, but it's very tasty nonetheless -- it's a "serves 4" recipe in that you probably want to have another vegetable alongside it and maybe a slice of (beetroot) bread, rather than being necessarily A Whole Meal, but: pleasing.

Eating. PIZZA EXPRESS. There is a branch near Barnet hospital (the one actually local to us closed), genuinely on the way, so when we had a couple of hour to kill on Wednesday afternoon between being referred for an ultrasound and the ultrasound department actually managing to fit me in we snuck off the hospital grounds and ate takeaway pizza in the car. (We have now done this twice, which means it is possibly on its way to becoming a tradition, although the two occasions were separated by more A&E trips where we didn't...)

Exploring. More! of! Barnet! hospital! I have now spent about six hours on a ward in the Adult Assessment Unit, a further ten in a private room with en suite (!) in the Willow ward up in gynae, and a much briefer half-hour or so in the sonography dept. (I have previously met the X-ray department and the CT scanner, but ultrasound was a new one on me.)

Growing. Tomatoes are hatching! Aubergines are hatching! Nothing doing on the peppers yet but fingers crossed (and if they don't come up then I will at least have fewer things I need to find space for, and I emptied several seed packets in the name of Not Keeping Things That Won't Germinate Anyway hanging around until next year). Found my Purple Ukraine seeds when my seed box arrived, and got those into some compost in the warm box yesterday; today I dumped the rest of my maybe-Gardener's-Delight seeds, saved Several years ago, in some compost also -- again on the grounds that if they don't come up then there is no point keeping them. (None of the first set hatched.)

Also A very kindly indulged me to the tune of giving me a lift to the allotment, which means I have (1) dropped off the various bits of hose and pipe I liberated from a skip, and (2) moved the blueberry from the patio to the allotment fruit cage, because I am very bored of us getting maybe two blueberries a year off it.

Observing. Banks of blossom in the dark. Sleep ducks and moorhens. And Some More Snow:

Comments

[passingbuzzards]

!!! I did not realize the next Craft Sequence book was out, thank you for mentioning it! Have immediately picked it up (and hope you finally get the chance to read it soon too)!

[shewhostaples]

I saw Le Gateau Chocolat at Ventnor Fringe last year (was my birthday treat, in fact: the show was called something like A Night At The Musicals with Jonny Woo and Le Gateau Chocolat, and it was enormous fun)! What a voice!

[kaberett]

ISN'T it fab. I first saw him in Edinburgh lo these many years ago, and have subsequently been to the NT's Threepenny Opera and his own show Duckie. :)

[ludy]

That is a very pleasingly pink loaf

[hairyears]

Also: thank you for being our Wheelbarrow Handles Messiah.