~32-Year-Old Lady~
This past weekend saw both a partial solar eclipse at sunrise, creating a horn-shaped sun rising over the horizon. It also saw a New Moon. A Black Moon if you like that kind of thing, which I do. What this means is that it was the second New Moon in the same calendar month. It was also my birthday month! I have decided to spend my thirty-second year catching up on the experiences that I missed out on in my twenties. No worries because I am a worker bee and I shall have many careers. My career this year is to enjoy the year.
Personally, I am struggling with the subject that I alluded to in my last post. I originally meant to write about how I look around and only see what can be improved. Anne Helen Petersen said it much better than I ever could in her newsletter, Culture Study, in her post titled “Are People Bad At Their Jobs…. or are the Jobs Just Bad?”.
I have felt this way often, griping and groaning about the ridiculous sludge that is the crumbling infrastructure around us. Living in Wisconsin in 2025 is like living in Colorado in 2007, and I wish I was exaggerating. But it’s the shifting climate, the piling up of pollutants, and the population size that makes me reminisce about long drives with my family, looking out the window and knowing nothing of politics. (To be fair, I was only 14…..) Jump to ACTUAL Wisconsin in 2025, and luckily, today, this day after the special election, Wisconsin has shown their flexibility in these changing times. Adaptation is a special human power and I have faith in humanity.
Though my last reading list is about reconciling the past, and that’s what much of my reading diet has been the last several years since college, at this time, my reading is going to be centered on something…. a little different.
In my year as a ***32-year-old ladyyyyyyyyyy*** (if you know, you know), I am going to be entertaining myself. Yes, I’m a nerd, therefore my forms of entertainment are educational. This year, that means that I want to nerd out on books on the present moment. Things have changed SO FAST since I graduated college in 2017. Crispr was a brand new technology, only earning one slide at the end of my last year of college evolutionary biology classes. That’s four classes that the experts in evolutionary biology weren’t discussing Crispr beyond “Wow, this is new, keep your eye on this.”
For some more context on the world at that time, my very last classes were in the summertime after graduation: Conservation Biology, and Statistics. A book that was recommended in my Conservation Biology class was “Spillover,” a book on zoonotic diseases. A few years later, after I did not get beyond the first chapter of said book, a spillover event slammed the human population into a global pandemic, and the author was doing rounds of interviews to help people understand epidemiology, and conservation ecology…. And I still haven’t finished the book! Now is the time.
Here we are, and we have a vaccine not only for Covid, but for Sickle Cell Anemia.
To continue this train of thought, I reread some books I did complete in college. Some sci-fi by the OG Robert A. Heinlein which was his idea of forecasting the future, in his own way. A man who was born in 1907 envisioned a future where women were still nurses but not doctors; secretaries who transcribed for their bosses by memory alone, rather than writing for themselves; and activists who wear blackface and earn money as surrogate mothers for tiny Chinese babies, a fun double-entendre demonstration of the term transracial; manipulative wives of and astrologers for the male Secretary of Defense; abused wives of cops; and tatted up nuns and polygamous strippers. He also envisioned living grass mats for apartments, similar to today’s grounding mats. He also envisioned AI and penile colony rebellion. And ecological disaster from over-extracted resources, resulting in cannibalism before starvation. I enjoyed reading these books, which were very interesting to read with my ***32-year-old ladyyyy*** mind, rather than my twenty-year-old mind. What a time. We have done things that he could never have imagined. But my favorite part is his imagining of resource usage, and Colorado at the center of history. Headlines reading “Fraser, Colorado breaks record low temperatures today.”
And here I am in Wisconsin. Living in the present. Following a storm of books that happened to center around the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, next is to read the books that are pouring out of the actual experts, the actual sci-fi unimaginables that have been authorities on science in our country since I graduated college.
Here’s a list of what I’m currently reading to catch up to the present:
Nexxus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI-Yuval Noah Harari
Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine…. And Fighting It-Mark Klein
Cobalt Red-Siddharth Kara
Spillover-David Quammer
Twilight of the Elites-Chris Hayes
Invisible Hands-Kim Phillips-Fein
The Covenant of Water-Abraham Verghese
Orbital-Samantha Harvey
Everything is Tuberculosis-John Green
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-Susanna Clarke
Bowling Alone-Robert D. Putnam
The Island of Sea Women-Lisa See
A Thousand Splendid Suns-Khaled Hosseini
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us-Hanif Abdurraqib
Ancillary Justice-Ann Leckie
The Sirens’ Call-Chris Hayes
Unreliable Narrator-Aparna Nancherla
Manufacturing Consent-Edward S. Herman
What If We Get It Right?-Aya Elizabeth Johnson
