This week’s win

I know I’m jinxing it by even saying so, but the fact that our brand-new puppy Zev Bialy Costanza has not had a single accident in the house feels gratifying and exciting. We brought her home on Wednesday from the two darling corgis who gave birth to Lemonade almost three years ago.

I had the pleasure of being the +1 at The Black Archives Bijlmer Book Club, where we read Travis Alabanza’s None of the Above. Meredith and Wally were excellent hosts, and I loved meeting new people with similar interests.

I had strong feelings about Alabanza’s insistence that this work “feels like theory”, in response to it being marketed as a memoir. Calling Get Out a comedy diminishes the value of Black storytelling in horror narratives. But calling it a documentary is just as ineffective. “Feels like theory” very much sits in that spectrum, for me.

I enjoyed the lively conversation my strong feelings sparked about respectability and Black works, and was surprised the lyrical essay appears to be such an unknown genre when I offered it.

The first and last photos were taken by Wouter Pocornie.

They open their roti takeout, unfold their pancake, and start eating. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it. I ask them if it’s okay that I watch them eat before I start, so I can see how in the world I’m supposed to eat sauce without cutlery.

• This week marked the week I got back into the swing of things at work. I tend to find the holiday season quite boring because things slow down quite a bit. Now that people are returning from their winter break, my to do list is filling up again with exciting projects, opportunities for collaboration, and research endeavors. As usual, a conversation with my manager reminded me how much I love my job.
• I finished Angela Davis’ Freedom Is A Constant Struggle (2015) and read a few chapters of Out There Screaming, An Anthology of New Black Horror (2023). I had forgotten how much I love gothic horror. Echoes of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (2017) were in my head as a result all week.
• I also began reading Saving Jesus From the Church (2009) again after first picking it up last Summer. It’s a special book, one I’ll return to again and again I’m sure.
• In 2023, my Wednesdays at the office varied from busy to overwhelming: lots of interactions, many meetings, few moments to myself. By the time Bible study came around at 6:30, I was ready for bed. The Wednesday this week was radically different: I had very few meetings, got to concentrate on my task list, and I attended my first Omek accountability circle event. I found Omek, a community for people from the African diaspora, in the Autumn of 2023, and immediately considered it too good to be true. I found out this week that it isn’t. It’s actually a community of Black people from all over the world, all professionals at various stages in their career, and many of them live in Amsterdam. The accountability circle had me eat a desk lunch. and check off a large portion of what I had been looking to accomplish during the entire week. Awesome.
• Our dear friend AR from Stockholm came to stay at our place because she was attended a weekend-long dance workshop in Amsterdam. Five minutes with her and I remember there’s an entire portion of myself that I don’t tap into enough. Our conversations flow flawlessly, as if the last time we spoke wasn’t three years ago. I appreciate the depth we so easily reach, the air that I feel around myself, my relationships, my choices. We spend three evenings over candlelight, talking about work, family, love, trust, faith, Judaism, the war, and so much more.
• Another great thing about Wednesday was that I had the energy to attend Bible study, which started out small with the usual suspects, and became something different altogether when two other queer people of color showed up. They didn’t even realize there was only one straight person at the table until later. It was a very sweet experience to hear about their journeys. I hope I’ll see them again. We talked about the part in John when Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael and it made me think about feeling seen, wholly.
• On Saturday, I had the good fortune of meeting NB, a person I met at Omek. Over chicken and waffles we got to meet each other and it felt like we were old friends. It’s spectacular to hear about the experiences of a Black person who grew up in a white environment.
• Nice IndieWeb discovery this week: Rachel Smith.

• The first week back at work is fairly quiet, I even found myself on the verge of boredom at one point. Organically, this makes me feel bad, but I remind myself that weeks before and after holidays tend to have this effect on my life. I tell myself I’m just landing.
• No one can convince me the municipality of Amsterdam isn’t using major construction projects to show tourists how crap the city can be. On Sunday, I go for a long bike ride to Amsterdamse Bos and back, and crossing the Berlagebrug I’m struck by how quiet the street is without cars racing by. I like it.
• I finished watching The Righteous Gemstones, and I miss them already.
• Anja’s still off for the summer, and I’m watching her slowly recover from being my personal chauffeur for two weeks
• The Summer makes me not want to cook. It’s no help that I’m using Annelie’s apartment to work while she’s travelling, and that I use the occasion to order poke bowls for lunch. I’m surprised by the quality of Poke Perfect’s teriyaki chicken bowl, extra edamame.
• I’m reading and enjoying Robin Meyer’s Saving Jesus From the Church (2009), a tool to make my interest in orthopraxy more tangible.

Two months of onboarding have rushed by in a blink. The new job is absolutely wonderful: the people are great, the work is complex and important, and the office itself is perhaps the finest I’ve ever worked at. I joined this company because the challenges they have seemed interesting to me. I’m very pleased that, two months in, it’s difficult to think that, at one point in time, these challenges weren’t also mine. I’ve made the right decision.

January flew, flew by, I tell you. We started with “wow, 2023 already, let’s have a chill time this year, hey what’s on Netflix?” and at the time of writing everything is different:

• Things are not chill, because we’re preparing ourselves, our lives, and our house for our first-ever puppy
• Both our work lives are unexpectedly bustling and busy
• We cancelled Netflix

I’ve been saying for years that I’d be willing to pay 100 euros a month for a single, all-encompassing international streaming platform. I suppose it’s never going to happen, but, hey, at least we’ll have that puppy, right?