NOW | 6 May 2024
Think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in a year.
📝 I wish I had more time to write, but since I already write for work, it's hard on my brain to to write even more after or before work, even though it's for myself. Still wrestling about 8 drafts, including: one that's been requested a few times about my zettelkasten practice (now in year 5), and one about how the spirit of Ramadan has changed for me forever in 2024.
🔥 But instead of finishing any of them, this one flew out of me a few days ago because it is just too damn hot right now in Southeast Asia:
Liy Yusof
🎙️ Back in April I said I was learning to record audio on DaVinci Resolve and be more comfortable with using my voice on my own words in this way (compared to how I used my voice in the past mostly for clients and other people's words).
⚡ And I did it! Since my current hosting plan only lets me upload 5MB audio directly to each permalink, I recorded my latest essay on YouTube instead:
✈️ I have a few flights and long trips coming up— in my 20s I cherished travel opportunities like these. But these days, the experience of being in airports and seeing so many people unmasked + the carbon footprint of air travel + Boeing is in shambles... staying at home hits different. My current home environment has done wonders for my physical and mental health. I'm less eager to trade it in for the overstimulating experience of airports and unfamiliar beds.
🦖 Last update, I said that my partner is finally able to meet his mother and siblings for the first time since the pandemic, and that I'll be going with to meet them too. We planned for last Christmas but it's now sometime this year. I haven't been any less anxious since about going to North America for my first time, for *so* many reasons. But my partner revealed a surprise in the itinerary the other day: a roadtrip with his mom to the dinosaur capital of the world! ✨🦕 THE JOY I FEEL! 🦖✨ The kid in the 90s who assembled a glow-in-the-dark T-Rex from their issues of Dinosaurs! magazine with their dinosaur 3D glasses on is going to the dino capital of the world! And the AuDHD adult they are today will get to hang out with fossils for hours all day in between navigating brand new social situations! Y'all, alhamdulillah for my partner, and inshaallah that the Beloved's plans for us align with our plans for ourselves.
Total notes filed: 753
- 327 in reading memory (facts, events, reports)
- 426 in second memory (concepts, claims, ideas)
68 notes added in April 2024, including:
- From October to Christmas 2023, Israel received over 10,000 tons of weapons, including 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells, delivered in 244 cargo planes and 20 ships
- Biderman's Chart of Coercion in 1956 was first used to explain manipulation of American war captives but were declared universal tools of torture and coercion in 1974 by Amnesty International
- Over half of the 80,000 women killed globally in 2017 were killed by someone they knew
- What should surprise us about domestic abuse is not how long it takes to to leave, but that one has the mental fortitude to survive captivity by courtship
- In 2023, the climate emissions of 12 billionaires outpolluted 2.1 million homes
- International solidarity is even more powerful than the political function of genocide as severing a people from human existence
- In June 2023, Southeast Asia experienced a one-in-200-years heatwave, then in April 2024 one even worse
- While conservatives promote more state violence, religious people of different faiths are doing radical liberatory work
- Significant social change is not spontaneous, sudden or miraculous, but the consequence of millions of choices made not to look away
This is a /now page inspired by Al Ibrahim, who was inspired by Derek Sivers, who said to think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in a year.