Week 11: Turn toward, not away

Grooving

So are we all using SFAH (as in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat) as a verb now? As in, I’m having exactly the day I needed to have after that election: I exercised, I’ve only read a few breathless hot takes, I felt feelings but haven’t collapsed in a puddle of tears, and at lunchtime I SFAH’d a veggie and egg fried rice? It felt good to be recipe-less and intuitive. We had a big container of leftover plain white rice from a Thai food order and I also had a little cooked quinoa to use up, which adds textural interest sort of like sesame seeds if you squint, and makes the dish much more filling. I sauteed onion, garlic, ginger and a little salt and pepper first in some olive oil, relying vaguely on my memory of this Smitten Kitchen recipe, and then intuited and tasted my way to a final product that was if not restaurant-worthy, then at least Trader Joe’s freezer bag-worthy.

Stir fry isn’t out of the ordinary for me, but asking “what would Samin do?” felt nice and new. I slid in chopped carrots and celery, some peas, and the one sad scallion in the fridge drawer, plus some sesame oil (MORE FAT!), the grains, some soy sauce (MORE SALT!), a little gochujang and rice wine, and at some point I threw in some of those coconut flakes, not the shredded kind but the chips that look like wider, curved shavings. I cooked that all in a wide skillet and then made space for two eggs and scrambled them up and shoved it all around. I ate with a lot of satisfaction and imagined a drone camera high above me capturing high-def, sweeping b-roll footage, not the shores of Japan or the olive oil groves of Italy, but the cloudy gray damp of Lakeview, most of our trees now bare.

Images from Daily Overview’s Instagram

Moving

My friend Prerna and I have been comparing notes on our respective Zumba classes. We have different instructors, classmates, playlists, and settings, but week after week we’ve both been forced to learn and re-learn: just keep moving. Can’t figure out how that arm swoopy thing goes with that kick-shuffle-kick thing? It doesn’t matter, just move your arm. Move your feet. Just be present. Keep moving and trying.

Rest is really important. So is celebration. So is mourning. There is deep sleep you deserve to sink into, there are big bites of SFAHd foods I hope you slowly savor, and there are long quiet stretches of newsfeed-free stillness I hope you can access soon if you haven’t lately.

But.

Here are two things we can do right now:

First, share your voting woes with someone who will put them to good use.

Dhara, a designer and racial justice organizer I know, is working on a new tool that will help people have an easier time voting, and then help them stay connected to take action on issues they care about after Election Day. She needs some real world examples and insights.

• Was it hard for you to register? Did you, like my cousin in Pittsburgh, realize just three days too late that you’d missed the deadline to get an absentee ballot, and have to rearrange a super long day of work and parenting to make it to the polls?
• Did you arrive at your polling place and find, like my friend in Brooklyn, that your name had been scrubbed from the rolls sometime between the primaries and yesterday?
• Were you told you couldn’t vote when legally you totally could?
• Was the line just so long that you had to leave for work before you could vote?
• Was the wifi unreliable, so you couldn’t pull up the handy online voting guide you’d planned to rely on? Did tools like BallotReady help you to a degree, but you wished for more?
• If you didn’t or couldn’t vote, what were the barriers? Is there something that would make it easier or possible next time?

Anything you can share would be so helpful! It doesn’t have to be a long, perfectly written essay. Email dhara.shah67@gmail.com with any stories that might help her build a better product.

Second, send some money to Georgia.

Today is Diwali. Help good triumph over evil. As a friend said, Brian Kemp doesn’t get to be both player and referee. Stacey Abrams is still fighting, as she should. Donate to help make sure every vote is counted.

To my fellow white folks, especially white women:

Don’t turn away. Take these in:

• From today: We’re Stuck With White People (Damon Jones, VerySmartBrothas)
• From last week: There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground (Tayari Jones in TIME Magazine)
• From February: Gather Your People: White Women Must Hold Each Other Accountable for Racism (Kim Kelly, Bitch Media)

I’m thinking about rivers. Some days flow, some days churn, some days you can barely see the ripples. But we can’t afford to become stagnant. White women voted for Kemp at an even higher rate than white men. We have to keep learning and trying. And moving. And working.

See you next week.

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