Sonia Connolly

Akimbo Comics, dark stories and their uses, by b. patrick. Each time I look at this, I see new little details that make it all fit together even better.
via recessional

Also relevant, To Almost 25-year-old Me by Katie Brookins. "Your life is a house and the house is on fire." How narratives help us take action.

Individual skeletons and gender by marina
Very cool detailed post by a current student of forensic anthropology. No you can't identify an individual skeleton's gender by the shape of the pelvis or length of the leg bones. I've been thinking, "Yes, but..." about this, in the context of Tim's comments on my pelvis article. I finally pinned down that yes, an individual person with any pelvis can be any gender, but there are statistical patterns. In the aggregate, men tend to have longer legs and narrower pelvises than women. I care about this because anatomy illustrations almost always show a narrow pelvis without even discussing how pelvises vary, and I don't want to contribute to that erasure.
via tim

Lament of the Twelve Sisters: A Tisha b’Av Story by Rabbi Jill Hammer
I love Jewish stories that focus on women. I had never heard "With each of the sons of Jacob was born a twin sister. —Rashi"

On Tisha b’Av twelve ancestor-sisters gather to weep. On other days it is only the One-who-Mourns who weeps over the sorrows of the world, but on this day, the day the Temple was destroyed, they all gather on the Mount of Olives to remember the razing of Jerusalem and the suffering of exiles all over the world.

The 7 Jobs Capitalism Asks of All of Us by Talia Cooper
This piece makes so much sense to me. It speaks to the ways I don't fit into corporate jobs, and the ways I haven't fit into typical relationships. I like that it has 7 forms of positive resistance as well.

Study: Catholic Hospitals ‘Dump’ Abortion Patients, Often Refuse Referrals by Nicole Knight Shine
I didn't even go looking for this, it just popped up in a Shakesville news post shortly after I posted (locked) about feeling unsafe having health insurance through an overtly Catholic company.

Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, "Building Transformative Justice Responses to Child Sexual Abuse"
This is much cooler than the title sounds.

Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you’ve done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused.

A collection of not-so-light reading I've been doing lately.

Understand your opponent's narrative, even if you will never agree with it. It has always made sense to me that there was no easy resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. They both want the same piece of land, for urgent reasons.
The Original "No": Why the Arabs Rejected Zionism, and Why It Matters by Dr. Natasha Gill.

Relatedly, another Holocaust survivor story. Made me cry, in a warm-fuzzy way.
Champagne in the Cellar by John Temple
via cofax7

A website that is brokering direct requests from Black people and offers from white people making reparations. REPARATIONS by Natasha Marin

Breaking News: Black People Are Ordinary People by Jesse Curtis via

People told me Portland was really white before I moved here. I just didn't have any life experience (or social justice education) to tell me what that meant. I've always lived in racially diverse cities before this. It's been a learning experience!
The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America by Alana Semuels

I didn't know that most opioid addictions are self-limiting!
What Science Says To Do If Your Loved One Has An Opioid Addiction by Maia Szalavitz
Could you elaborate on the 80% of morphine addicts do the drugs less or quit after 5 years bit? by Medic Pixie Dream Girl
via tim

My Complicated Journey to a Child-Free Middle Age by Holly Sinclair
via

For Men* Who Desperately Need Autonomy
and
Tricks Shame and Hope Play on You and How to Catch Them
Just read everything Nora Samaran writes. Wow.
and linked from there
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

Relatedly,
A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983) by Ursula K. Le Guin
via cofax7

Transit App - better transit maps & info than Google. Free. I haven't downloaded this yet, but I don't want to lose the link.

All that because I need to reboot my machine because InDesign won't print to PDF anymore. I am nearly nearly done with a book draft, just need to write some glossary entries and put in some of images.
ETA: Had to Remove my InDesign prefs files to make printing to PDF work again. It's good to reboot occasionally anyway...

... why eggplant is called that?

via recessional

Live-cam: Brooks Falls - Katmai National Park, Alaska. Bears! Catching salmon! Up to their bellies in what I assume is an icy snow-melt river. I don't know if I feel sorrier for the bears standing in that river to catch breakfast, or the salmon swimming upstream through that gauntlet. The bears at least look well able to handle it.

Story: Women Making Bees in Public by Alexandra Erin. Full of delightful sensory details and women supporting each other, less delightful men interrupting women, and an ending that feels warmly right.
Via Sumana Harihareswara.

Art: Rob Gonsalves' magical optical illusion paintings. I love these, especially the ones where it takes me a moment to find the discontinuity. There are places in my life that feel like that, blurring from one interpretation to another as I follow the threads from different directions.

Poem: Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye. Someone reminded me about this recently.

Relatedly, Taming the steamroller: how to communicate compassionately with non-native English speakers by Molly Clare Wilson. "Dear fellow native English speaker: you’re a very lucky person."

On impulse, while walking through Powell's, I bought an adult "stress-free" semi-abstract coloring book, and a set of 10 markers.

Then I let them sit for a couple of weeks. Maybe I should give it to someone else. Maybe I should return them.

This morning I realized that my bedroom feels like a more playful place than the downstairs office with the computer. While the bedroom is often too hot or too cold, it was a lovely temperature today, so I brought the coloring book and pens upstairs.

My mental image was of lying on the floor like a young kid, but the armchair looked more comfortable, so I settled there. Flipped through, chose a page full of vines and flowers, and started.

The first thing I realized is that it has to be like a labyrinth walk - the experience is whatever it is, not what I think it should be. I have stomped around labyrinths angrily, and today I colored anxiously.

Not just the expected worries about coloring outside the lines (yay finepoint pens!) and choosing adjacent colors that look good together (boo, no purple pen!), but a surprising worry about using up the pens. Not just the worry about wasting time, but also about wasting a page in the book that maybe someone else could color better.

The design had a lot of repeating elements, and even as I debated internally, I decisively colored matching elements alike. Something about making order.

I noticed this sense of needing to be useful, productive, and underneath that, a sense of not really deserving to use resources.

I'm also noticing that while my daily morning meditation isn't "productive" time, it has not been subject to debate because it so clearly feels better than not doing it. It will be interesting to see how coloring settles out.

I can see why so many people are taking up knitting and crocheting. It's colorful, soothing, repetitive, and you come out with something useful at the end. I used to crochet afghans and scarves. I don't seem to have the same amount of open time, though. There's always something else I could be doing.

Like now, I'm going to go dig out the three rogue bay trees that took root last year. I've been wondering why so much of my garden is overrun with one invasive plant or another, and I realized it's because I was completely overwhelmed last summer and didn't spend much time in the garden. There's always something ready to take over here.

I've had this one open since before the mass murder in Orlando. Presented without further comment (except I thought it would be about how I as a cis person could help, not putting all the responsibility on trans people). 8 Ways to Fight Anti-Trans Bias on the Job

Songs when you need them: Ysaye Barnwell and the music of community, resistance, and power by Kimberly French. Kumbaya does not mean what you think it means.

In the middle of slogging through Stephen Porges' book on Polyvagal Theory, I saw (elsewhere) this lucid article about a different aspect of the brain. This makes so much sense, and yet is brand new research. A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved.

Descendants of Holocaust refugees tend not to have family heirlooms. I was touched by this story about the one thing a family held onto. Tea, Pride, Mystery: For One Family That Fled The Nazis, A Tin Canister Held It All by Camila Domonoske

This is scary around climate change, but also somehow delightful. Very old tree exists! And is flexible! 5,000-Year-Old Tree in Scotland is Changing From Male to Female.

Speaking of climate change, a couple of world population links.
Watch world population growth, 2050 years in 6 minutes. Spoiler: most of it is right at the end. Also, watch for some of the dots disappearing from the Black Death.
Population graph by year. Hover over your birth year to see the population then. Population has doubled since I was born!

Passing along a great set of links from firecat.

Girls' and women's experience of anger, a link collection. The comments have another good link and interesting discussion.

We all deserve to have our distress heard and heeded.
The Betrayal of Not Being Heard

New book responses at Curious, Healing. Have you read these? Comments welcome!

• "Voices" by Ursula K. Le Guin
  
• "I Love You But I Don't Trust You" by Mira Kirshenbaum
  
• "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk
  
• "Your Body Knows the Answer" by David I. Rome
  

Curious, Healing is a blog, and you're welcome to comment there or here about the books. The articles don't have a comment section. You're welcome to comment here or send me email with any thoughts.

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I'm thinking about how to fold wellspringofcompassion.com into my main site, and I tested the link to the book's Amazon page. Wow, people have said the nicest things! Totally made my evening.

Unlike looking at my business's Yelp page a little while back, where I found someone who had rudely interrupted a dance evening at my house (nothing do to with my business), left a 1-star review because I didn't drop everything to help her... I don't even know, leave a note at my neighbor's house or something. Back in 2014. So I went through Yelp's process to contest a review, and to my surprise they did take it down. So that ended well, too.

Anyway, finding surprise positive reviews, yay!