Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.
Words (not including the ones describing the words I am typing to tell you about the word count):2,235
[009]
Week 9! This is a quickie because I am flying today and the goal is completion over perfection.
***
Check out the first one, or TL;DR: territorial mice, nipple injury, improv, an expensive orifice, dumplings, games, garden poems, friendship lore, and good times; the second one, TL;DR: spite-based newsletter writing, gil scott-heron and nina simone wish you a happy 4th of july, castle rock, bad dating app AI, bone broth, speech disorders, open-toe sandals, harper’s findings; the third one, TL;DR: cute patio situation in Montpellier, FR, facts about cicadas and acoustic defense, my love of tajin, unpublishing, Pope. L, falling in new york, and my new doggie friend; the fourth one, TL;DR: pigeons, citrus, compost, bad birthdays, making music; the fifth one, TL;DR: casablanca, unseasoned fish n’ chips, weird skin, basic pigeons of london, an evacuated center, archives and death; the sixth one, TL;DR: borrowing english, translation, a waxing moon, community ovens, doors and windows, unmatchable hearts, 41st birthday on the atlantic ocean; the seventh one, TL;DR: stranded in paris, playlist, more pigeons, relearning reading, atmospheric reentry, bye casablanca!, OCD, telos, chimerical colors & other sensory illusions, prime numbers; and the eighth one, settling in, body at midnight, task transitions, geographically restricted nutmeg yogurt, survival thriller score composers, slow reading and processing time
Delivering drinks without straws is just annoying. At this point, you have ruined the entire meal. I just want a full refund for the pain and suffering of having to search for a straw in my kitchen or messily sip, which, in most cases, doesn’t work because I am usually ordering at the wits’ end of the day, and I am likely trying to drink in bed because my body is too tired to do anything other than lying supine.
Being a flat-footed baddie really is not for the weak. I love a good Dr. Scholl’s plantar fasciitis hydrogel pain patch. 4% lidocaine and 1% menthol. Slap those babies on the bottom of my feet, elevate, and nap. This summer, I forgot to travel without them, but never again. En route to Detroit, I may get fancy and fly with them. I do not want to leave traces of menthol in the air, but I have smelled far worse things at the airport and on planes; at least this could have some unexpected medicinal value for someone walking by me with a stuffy nose.
I am tired of buying shit. Every place is pay-to-play. Anywhere you go, you have to buy something in order to sit or engage. With the exception of the library, there are few places to just sit and sit. There are, of course, the parks, but I find them so crowded that any sort of serene moment feels impossible. I do have this New York apartment that I pay rent for, so I will just pay-to-play here. One of the things I enjoyed so much about Casablanca was seeing folks lounging everywhere. I want to lounge without being bothered to pay for something. A lot of this is about slowing down to assess what I am even purchasing. I would like to go the rest of the year without buying a dang thing.
And I think this is why I am returning to sewing. I am not a complex dresser, and wearing clothes is like a social requirement for me rather than an opportunity for expression. I do appreciate people who love spending time on their attire, but I mostly care about being neat and clean. I do love a good accessory — a beautiful necklace, a ring, or an interesting bag! Anyway, I digress. I am whipping out my sewing machine and putting my sewing skills back to work. When I was a wee little one, I used to design and sew clothes for my Kenya doll. It will take me a moment to get back into the swing of things, but I am excited.
I have been figuring out what I can plant and grow in my apartment. I grew up in a former farming utopia. Across the street was a partially operating farm and a pump house. There were also greenhouses left behind by the Japanese residents who were sent to the Heart Mountain Detention Center in Wyoming in 1942. My childhood home had a giant barn door as the back door, farmhand quarters, and a giant functioning well. The owners of the home didn’t remove the well; rather, they just built a room around it. It was covered before we moved in back in the early 1990s, and it became a giant tabletop adjacent to a beautiful but unused fireplace.
Michelson, Alan, and Katherine Solomonson. “Remnants of a Failed Utopia: Reconstructing Runnymede’s Agricultural Landscape.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 6 (1997): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3514359. East Palo Alto has a rich radical education history, which was preceded by utopian aspirations of a farmer from Indiana named Charles Weeks. Weeks came to California in 1904. He began in the Los Altos Hills, but there the water supply was lacking. Weeks eventually bought land near the San Francisquito Creek. As an aside, this is the same creek my beloved science teacher, Mr. Barksdale, would take me to for water collection and testing. The first full apartment I got was a short walk from San Francisquito Creek. Anyway, he bought this land and named it “Runnymede” around 1916. There is a lot more to read about this moment. I once read or heard that one reason Black folks migrating from the South settled in East Palo Alto, beyond the Bay Area's entrenched housing discrimination, was the rural landscape, which offered a familiar environment to those who left.
Someone said this is the real Janine Teagues from Abbott Elementary, and I agree! Ms. Jameka Wilson from Philly! Quinta Brunson, give this woman a guest spot on Abbott Elementary! Someone was acting a fool trying to scare people in a Chucky-style mask, and she kicked him in the chest. “Wilson, a 2023 graduate of the now-closed University of the Arts, said stage-combat training helped in the moment. Although the training is designed to keep scene partners safe, Wilson said its grounding in martial arts and weaponry gave practical knowledge to draw on.” Protect this woman at all costs! Further, and this is my favorite part, she said,
“He just seemed so disoriented about what his goals actually were. I had bags. He wasn’t reaching for those. It didn’t seem like he had a clear goal to actually get in La Colombe to do anything,” Jameka said. “So. I was like, ‘OK, well let’s see if you can fight.’ And he couldn’t.”
I damn near fell over when she said this because this is some mess, I would say. Like the person trying to harm me was not goal-oriented, lol! In fact, this does remind me of a time when I was walking on the Mandela Bridge in Johannesburg, South Africa, and someone tried to rob me. He assumed I spoke Zulu, which I don’t, so he continued his intimidation in a language I could not parse, thereby deferring my fear. Fast-forward, it registers that he will need to rob me in English, but by that point, I assumed he was not about that life because this was the most protracted and conversational robbery I’d experienced. He said, “I have a gun.” And my very dumb 20-year-old self said, “No, you don’t,” and kept walking. Fast-forward again: I am sitting outside the gates of Wits University, waiting for a taxi, when someone walks up to ask for the time. Back in 2006, the game was asking for the time, and when someone pulled out their phone, snatch it. I fell into the trap. This man tried to take my phone. As I looked up, I could have sworn it was the same man from the bridge! I said something like, “You, again?” This guy was not good at robbery. And I hope he is somewhere doing okay.
I have been on the dating app Bumble. Now, before we get excited, let’s remember we are talking about building intimacy and partnership in 2026. When I first got on there, it was because my therapist suggested it as an avenue to broaden my friendship circle. I didn’t realize you needed to be on the friends side of the app, so I was accidentally on the dating side. I feel quite aloof when it comes to attraction. I do not get it. I do understand the dynamics of dating. I find it confusing and counterintuitive. Anyway, my time on this app is admittedly research. This is not to instrumentalize people, but to say that the show Love on the Spectrum is becoming increasingly…resonant. Maybe I am intellectualizing something that should not start in the brain, but I am who I am, and I have two observations:
I do not think people are reading as much as they should, or as much as I’d like them to. Which, in turn, means that people are not taking care with how they send messages. This is frustrating because my brain can’t move past a terribly misspelled word when autocorrect is available. This is not educational elitism; rather, I want people to spend more time and devote more intention to their communication. I miss the days when people wrote letters to one another. A friend and I were lamenting the days of yearning and letter writing. For someone who loves words and will grow interested through intellectual banter, jokes, and playful tension, this is a non-starter. Speaking of which, I am very funny. I’d like you to either be funny or know what good comedy sounds like. And again, not elitism; we cannot all be blessed with the inscrutable desire to face the possibility of being cringey (big advocate!) as we stand on the ledge of repeatedly failed jokes. All of this has taught me that:
I need high-intensity interactions. The key word here is “interaction.” In many encounters, I am driving the momentum of the conversation. I find that people love my high energy, enthusiasm, and banter, but they are engaged as audience members or spectators rather than as participants. I don’t want to be some manic-pixie-dream-girl-adjacent character. And I am aware of how big my energy is, and I think this means I need someone who is assertive and dominant to play well with my “all gas, no brakes” personality.
I do not want to go eat. I can eat at my house. Let’s do something that I cannot do on my own. The purpose of a date, for me, is to learn more about the other person, and I love to do this through a collaborative activity that lets us create generative friction and build kinesthetic memories. I think having a meal can be a great way to end one of these activities. My favorite collaborative activities are team bowling, escape rooms, and scavenger hunts. I also love a good builder moment — somewhere we go to make something or break something. Do I sound like an 8-year-old? Maybe, but I am honest with myself about what I like. While social media is not a reflection of reality, I remain fascinated by the projection of particular gendered expectations in this landscape.
Anyway, this was not a dating ad even though it now sounds like one. Do with this information what you will. I am not angered by any of these observations. If anything, I am excited to spend time better understanding what I need across all the relationships in my life.
I don’t watch the final episodes of my favorite shows. That way, I pretend the show never ended, and I stay happy (and surprised). Something like delayed gratification.
As much as I love publishing, I have never tabled at a book fair. This year, I am going to try. I want to sell paper-based word games. If I made game kits, would you buy them? I’d like to say I will make a book, but honestly, my favorite kind of book is a book as a program, a book as software, so I want to make something that necessitates activation and manipulation.
I have been rewatching Buffy because someone messaged me about book curses, which reminded me of a specific episode. Then someone else commented on last week’s newsletter about a Buffy episode that seemed to be an inspiration for that film, Obsession. Anyway, I forgot how much I love Willow. I remember watching bits of this show when I was younger, and Willow was so familiar to me. Seldom do I identify with a character on a TV show, but Willow, that’s my girl.
See you next week for another list!
Thanks for being a pal!
All the best, always,
Kameelah 👽
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL