Whelmed.

Well, this has been fun, hasn’t it? I won’t torture you by recounting all of the utter bonkers that the late summer has brought on or intensified. The thing I went into this year fearing the most turned out to be a nonissue, and my imagination has failed completely to predict any of the surprise nightmares we’ve been navigating.

The thing is, until just recently, my personal life has been healthier and happier than average. I’m sleeping. I’m mostly out of my reading slump. I’m eating (sometimes) food that I’ve grown myself and that’s super rewarding. The garden itself has been awash with wonders for the last few months, making all of those weeks with my knees in the mud totally worth the current bounty. Given my past expertise in killing almost every plant placed into my care, the sheer abundance of thriving plants out there is both shocking and delightful. I’ve been keeping my body and mind in the game by taking odd jobs here and there, including a fair amount of chicken-sitting. By which I mean farm-sitting, but mostly I’m there for the birds. (I like to pet them. They are so shy.) I’ve found my happy dosage for the current moment on everything, enabling me to stop looping and break through the panic that was behind the wheel of the first three months of the lockdown. As my therapist had predicted early on, post-calamity hindsight has given me both objectivity and a lot of compassion for the person I was in mid-March, wandering aimless through Oxford as it slowly closed down and sprinting through (so many) airports to get home. I had good survival instincts, and I’m proud of that. (Also that I managed to hang onto all of my books in the midst of my sprinting.) But I was so afraid.

I can honestly say I’m not afraid any more. Sure, there are some unpleasant moments when the year takes yet another bite out of the (now much shorter) list of things I love. (I still can’t talk about RBG. She was a powerhouse of effective and practical hope.) But I have so much choice, now––again––in how I respond to the latest and greatest headlines and personal challenges. I don’t automatically leap for potato crisps every time I hit the grocery store. My life feels capacious and roomy and ready for positive change once more.

It also doesn’t hurt that my parents were able to visit briefly a bit ago. It’s hard for me to go an entire year without joking around with my dad in person, let alone go a year without a hug from my mum. There’s no substitute for being in the room with people who have stuck with me through everything. Maybe even despite everything. My parents and I are really and truly working hard to navigate the fractures in our relationships that formed when I came out as nonbinary and started looking inward to confront some of my previously unquestioned biases and assumptions about the world. I cringe sometimes whenever I rediscover my old blog entries from back in the Xanga age and realize just how blissfully ignorant I was, how complicit in so many systems of oppression I was. The twin challenges of overcoming my privilege and simultaneously building bridges with my folks are likely to be a lifelong project.

Also? Sputnik has been an absolute snugglebutton these last few months. Especially when the temperature started dropping at night. I’m trying not to analyze her motives but simply accept her lil nose boops and that weird half-flip thing cats do so that you can scratch their lil chins and so that they can attack you with claws at the same time.

If you have some thoughts to spare, spare a thought for my mother in the months to come. She has a Health Thing™ on top of her usual bundle of health things to deal with, and she’s not quite to the stage where everybody can move forward with treatment. (And yes, thankfully, it is something treatable.) Things always look more terrifying when you’re looking forward along the long arc of time than when you’re in the middle of them or have tidied up after. (I’ve always found this to be true with syllabi, as well. One reason I’m extremely grateful for my middle and high school experience abroad is that the schools there had really mastered the syllabus as an empowerment tool and didn’t treat it as a list of problems to be managed or overcome or simply committed to memory. Thanks, Mrs. Nunn.) You could always spare a thought of two, too, for my friend and former coworker Heather. Her life and health has been completely shattered by a family crisis and some difficulties at work as well. She’s shown up for me countless times before when I needed encouragement, so I’m grateful to be around now to encourage her––but I know that all of my best thoughts and efforts aren’t really capable of doing the trick when both life at home and at work are what they are for her.

My friend (and fellow podcast co-host) Tony had a bit of a 2020-inflected summer as well, having wrapped up his PhD in Geography (I need to memorize the specifics) with a killer presentation on his research, which involved tracking the comfort levels and presence of LGBTQ+ students in the biosciences as a geographic distribution, essentially. Mad brilliant, but unfortunately his Doctoral investiture comes exactly when the world is melting down and the job market is what it is right now. He’s taken on some teaching for the University of Arizona, which is sweet, and he and his partner recently added built-in bookshelves to their new house. So it’s not all and entirely bad, but we share some solidarity in the “look at this fabulous/”oh no, I haven’t done this in forever” search for our next jobs. We’re keeping very busy with both our own and our shared projects, weighing in on each others writings (well, mostly his, since I’m tackling one block at a time) and dreaming up our seemingly endless list of authors and artists and creators we want and get to talk to on the Imaginaries. Alix Harrow? Seanan McGuire? Sarah Gailey? Kim Stanley Robinson? Jess Owen? Rosaria Munda? A.J. Hackwith? Caitlin Starling? Kali Wallace? Mary Robinette Kowal? Steve Brusatti?! *pauses to catch breath* I can barely believe that I/we have gotten to talk to all of these incredible folks––and more!––and more to come! Four years have seen a lot of change in the world, and an absolute explosion of intersectional, diverse science, science fiction, fantasy, and queer community building. And we’ve gotten to talk to so many of the voices that have helped us feel like we queer readers belong. That we have a home in these worlds.

I’m whelmed by the joy of talking to so many delightful human beings.

Positions are opening up again in libraries north of the border, so I’m working hard to refine my focus and strike a balance between owning up to my finer qualities and marketing them hard––and hitting just the right tone for the ideal candidate for my dream job in the world of academic libraries. (I mean, where else can I combine my passion for information access and student advocacy with my nerdy skills as both an amateur scientist and creator? You’d have to look pretty hard to expand my list of one. The research, librarian, educator, scientist, and visionary moments of my life all seem to fit together … in the academic library.

I get such intense pleasure out of organizing and reorganizing things, especially when it’s for other people. (I might have to put up something more specific about my bookshelving obsessions.) So in the interest of helping a friend organize a thing, I’m going to run off––and because I’m a gigantic child––