Week 16: Make the call

First

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has said he’s considering offering clemency to Cyntoia Brown before his term expires next month. Here are some steps you can take:

• Make a quick phone call to the governor’s office using this script from BLM Nashville. (I just did this and it took less than one minute to leave a voice mail.)
• Read this.
• Find more options — like writing Cyntoia Brown a letter and watching a documentary about her — in this piece.

Links from this week

• Jazmine Headley was released from Rikers. Click that link, listen to the 29 seconds, listen to her voice. And then read this piece at The Cut by Stacia Brown. Jazmine Headley and her baby — who is a month older than mine — now have lives divided into the before and after of this trauma. Here’s a fund to at least help her get back to her life and routine.
• Take a few minutes to play The Warden Game (via Mariame Kaba)
• Oh, Amazon. You employ three of my wonderful friends. You make sure I stay stocked with diapers and wipes, and you bring me quality entertainment on gadgets that will die in the not-so-distant future, and you simplify holiday shopping. And I can’t stand this bad relationship we’re all in.
• This Longest Shortest Time episode is a sweet one, if you need a romcom for your ears next time you’re cooking or commuting or errand-ing
• Gifts for the ears and eyes of Samin Nosrat/Salt Fat Acid Heat fans
• If you pay someone to clean your home, definitely check this out: the National Domestic Workers Alliance — aka my org crush — has launched Alia, an app which allows employers like you and me to pay into a collective fund for each worker that will enable them to access benefits like time off work and life insurance.
• Look at this child’s face. Read what his parents have endured. Stay outraged.

Getting It Together

We met with a lawyer this week for a free consult to learn about wills and trusts and legal guardians. Making the appointment felt dreadful. Getting dressed and traveling uptown and climbing the office staircase felt dreadful. The fact that we still have to act on all this useful new information is, in some ways, dreadful. BUT. The meeting itself felt manageable and strangely empowering, in the way that gaining knowledge and actionable next steps is better than just sitting around feeling dreadful despair. Even if you can’t handle the idea of a lawyer (and whether you have a partner or not, kids or not), if you don’t have this stuff taken care of, check out the website GYST, “an online service to help get your shit together one step at a time, starting with your will, living will/advance directive and life insurance.”

20 days ‘til 2019

Make ‘em count. / Take good care of you.

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