She's not gonna fix it up too easy

Input, output, electricity

These are hard times. Such hard times. I just submitted an article for publication that is guaranteed to lose me a few friends but anyone who can stand by while Jews are murdered is not my friend. Was that clear?

I do what I can. I wake up in the night urgently trying to send love to the parents of children taken hostage. I write. I don’t know what else to do. What has the world come to when my Jewish friends thank me for simply reposting an article that calls on all non-Jews to speak out against the antisemitism that is taking over our world, again?

I have been physically sick since the attacks of October 7. It doesn’t help that I only have health insurance for a few days a month since I am on the COBRA from my last job. Most of you probably don’t know how that works, but I was an expert as a union organizer, always on the verge of a strike. You have a 45 day period in which you can be late with a COBRA payment, and during that time you don’t lose the insurance permanently, but you can’t use it. So I can’t use my insurance most of the time because I can’t afford the $723 in COBRA payments. At the end of the month I pull together the money to make it and then I get all my medical care at once. I am probably going back to substitute teaching a bit and it costs a lot to get the clearances and I had to go see my primary care doctor for a pre-employment physical, so I got together the money and I’m feeling terrible after a booster of everything.

“But now I’m not about to dress up in some other woman’s shoes

I’ve got nothing to lose.” — Carly Simon

My friends’ children are feeling antisemitism for the first time. My friends are afraid. I am afraid. And now I’m going to speak up.

I have no career to cancel, I gave it all up so long ago… and in the search for meaning that keeps us alive I realize that if I hadn’t, I might have so much to lose. But then again, in the activity that we used to call “retro-hacking,” if things had gone differently, I would have Jewish children.

I am pretty sure my cat is agnostic. No, that’s not true. She is the priestess of the cat goddess, the one we pray to when we pray for the cats I love at the cat shelter to find loving homes. We pray intensely. She is a good prayer partner. She purrs.

I promise I will write something lighthearted soon. These times have brought so much sorrow, nightmares, I can’t sleep. And yet they have brought me closer to the most important people in my life.