Weeknotes 54
- Met up with my dad for a nice motorcycle ride on Monday. He found some really fun twisty roads about an hour outside of Richmond. After ripping around a bit, we stopped and got some Mexican food before parting ways.
- Have been upping my running mileage in preparation for the Cap Trail 10M run. Ran 8.5 miles on Thursday and got the ol’ runners high feeling for the first time in a long time.
- Began another motorcycle ride with Jess and dad yesterday, but it started downpouring on us as soon as we got to the fun roads. So just aborted mission, and headed home.
- All my Chinese vocabulary words from my level 1 textbook have at least been reviewed once in Anki. I’m about 2/3 of the way through reading the actual material / doing the exercises in the workbooks, so started the order process for books 2 through 5. Unclear how the always-changing tariff nonsense will impact things this time.
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Good read of the week was Mike Monteiro’s How to eat with others. Some choice snippets:
While I appreciate having friends with different points-of-view, or even different politics […] I will not be friends with people who want my daughter dead. I will not be friends with people who want, or even tolerate, my neighbors being kidnapped. I will not be friends with people who believe some of us are somehow entitled to more rights than others. And I will not be friends with people who believe if we keep our heads down, as others around us suffer, we’ll save ourselves.
Personally, if I’m having a gathering in my home I want my friends to feel welcome. Not just by me, but by everyone else there. And I need my friends to know that me, my guests, and my house are a safe place. Not just for this particular event, but always.
Think of it this way: if you invite someone from a marginalized community into your home and they ask if there’s going to be someone there that wants them dead, or doesn’t feel like they’re entitled to full personhood, and you tell them that you’re having a separate party for those folks the next night, how do you think that person would feel? You can’t claim to care about someone while also caring for the people who would bring them harm. You really don’t care about your friend in that situation. You’ve made a decision that speaks more to your standing in the social order than their safety. And that’s fucked up.
A timely reminder for Thanksgiving. I’m thankful I don’t have to deal with much of this mess with what remains of my own family.