Life since Thanksgiving has felt like being on a trampoline. Every plan changes. Every day something has to flex, adjust, be canceled or rescheduled. Every outing is a calculation of risk. Staying home is the safest thing covid-wise but the deadliest mental health-wise.
Our family’s grand plans for a holiday together began falling apart a week before Christmas. Snow loomed in the forecast, all up and down the highway corridor we’d be traveling. Omicron meant our destination was implementing new restrictions on gatherings and updating them daily. One person got sick, then another. We ended up celebrating as we did in 2020, at our separate homes and on Zoom.
It’s a bitter pill in a year when it seems like that’s all we’ve had to dine recently.
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To keep my spirits up, I’m still reading and enjoying media.
Shang Chi was the feature film for Christmas Day. It’s wonderful! Funny and intricately planned and paced, from the way information is released to the knockout action scene on a San Francisco city bus. I need to watch again so I can enjoy the spectacle.
I just finished Casey Plett’s Little Fish, about a trans woman in Canada who finds out her Mennonite grandfather may have been gay or trans. The writing is raw and courageous. Plett mentions Torrey Peters in the afterword and I think this is a perfect companion piece to Detransition, Baby. Both books address pain head on and like massaging a bruise, make it hurt a little extra so that together we come to a greater understanding.
Another gem is Janet Mock’s Surpassing Certainty: What my Twenties Taught Me. This memoir by an acclaimed writer and executive producer for Pose is a window into a trans woman of color’s experience getting jobs, marrying, studying journalism and finding her place in the very white, very male world of publishing.
As we inch closer to 2022 I feel relief--bye bitch--and anxiety. I’m looking forward to writing and books and love and friends and good times and delicious cocktails. Don’t let me down 2022.
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