À la carte (February 11, 2025)

A respite, a cookbook, a show, and vacation reading.

I’ve been sick for a week and a half, which explains my absence from your inboxes. Despite testing negative for strep, Covid, and flu, to the surprise of the providers at Northwestern Immediate Care, I had a fever and chills for four days, and a sore throat for over ten.

It’s strange to take time “off” as a self-employed person, to be both one’s boss and employee. Harder than asking myself for the time off was granting myself permission to … just be. As grateful as I was to be able to remain horizontal on a heating pad for a full week—something that simply is not done in the American workplace in 2024, even if you have the flu—I couldn’t help but loathe myself for letting a full week go by without any creative output. I even felt guilty that I wasn’t reading more during my “free” week. But I had no appetite for anything, and I floated through the week on a diet of popsicles, applesauce, and Single’s Inferno, the Korean reality dating show I wrote about last month¹. In the background, Elon Musk appeared to be disassembling our 250-year-old democracy before our very eyes. With each snippet of bad news, I would feel my outrage start to rise and then have to let it go, as I remembered I couldn’t breathe through my nose or swallow.

Some wise words

It was in this space of utter exhaustion that I encountered Anne Lamott’s opinion piece in the Washington Post, The Resistance Will Not Be Rushed.² I’ve been thinking a lot about the usefulness of outrage in this political environment. I’m worried that outrage without an outlet is a recipe for burn-out, and it seems like most of us are starting 2025 feeling already burned-out. And so I appreciate Lamott’s permission to rest, to gather ourselves, and to trust that “this stark desert [of harshness] is dotted with growing things.”

In 2017, our collective outrage fueled the Women’s March. Our anger tore through the world like wildfire. Eight years later, my individual fire is smoldering, but it is still alight. And for now, before I can do anything else, I think my job is to tend my own flame of rage, to make sure it doesn’t go out and that I have fire to contribute to the fight when it is clearer to me what the fight is.

If outrage is the opposite of resignation, I believe it is important to keep naming what is illegal, abhorrent, fascist, and not normal. Even in the absence of any other acts of protest, I think this naming remains important—groaning in solidarity with the Trader Joe’s check-out person, muttering “Fuck these guys” while listening to NPR, and retaining such profound disdain for Jeffrey Bezos that I will drive to the hardware store for more rubber dishwashing gloves instead of giving one more techbroligarch another $4.99.

I don’t have to scroll very long on Instagram to encounter someone reminding me that rest is radical or that, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Taking time off from work when sick is, unfortunately in the context of late capitalism, an act of protest. Finding joy, tending our flames and our gardens, are acts of resistance. We are gearing up. This is the eerie calm before the storm.