weekly digest #8
february 16-22, 2026: the place of shells, transgender dysphoria blues, shape shift with me, hand sewing, bedazzled headsets
I’ve had a largely uneventful week. My dad turned fifty-nine. The Olympics ended. I accidentally stabbed myself with a sewing needle about a hundred times.
reading
I finished The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton. In Summer of 2020, an unnamed narrator, a Japanese woman pursuing her PhD in Germany, is visited by Nomiya, a friend who died nine years ago in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The novel is a meditation on memory, reflecting on how trauma warps our sense of time and place. It focuses on twin tragedies: the tsunami and earthquake in the narrator’s past and the covid-19 pandemic in her present. It’s a solid premise, but while her memories of the tsunami and earthquake are specific and painful, the narrator’s descriptions of pandemic life are hazy. She recounts standing in a socially distanced line outside the grocery store, virtual instead of in person communication, a vague sense of fear. But there is no weight to these memories – no clear sense of death or danger, despite the very real presence of both. It feels like there’s an assumption that the reader already knows what it was like to live through the pandemic, since it is recent history (and current reality, though no one wants to talk about that) for all of us right now. The novel was, after all, originally published in Japanese in 2021. (The English translation came out in 2025.) But it’s an assumption that weakens the novel – what was quarantine really like for our narrator? Is it just that the experience wasn’t that difficult? If so, why bother putting it in conversation with the tsunami? Even the most sheltered and fortunate of us experienced some level of terror, I’d think, in March of 2020. It’s hard to convey, I guess, that sense of looming danger, that essentially invisible threat. It’s easier to talk about isolation, distance. But I feel like Ishizawa misses the mark here, and the pandemic feels like a nonevent.
I then started rereading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, which has been on my mind since I first read it in 2024. I finally feel like enough time has passed that some of the details have faded in my memory and a reread will be rewarding.
watching
I mostly watched the Olympics again this week. Should I get into women’s hockey?
listening to
I tried listening to Laura Jane Grace’s Hole in My Head but it wasn’t working for me. As much as I wanted to like it, the lyrics felt kinda corny. Instead I went back and listened to Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues a bunch of times, which I think is Grace’s most interesting work. Black Me Out, the album’s final track, is one of my favorite songs of all time. I then listened to Shape Shift With Me, which for some reason I never listened to during my big Against Me! phase a couple years ago. I missed out back then – it’s a solid album.
I also listened to Papa Was A Rodeo, a melancholy love song by the Magnetic Fields, so many times I lost track. Every year or so I remember this song exists and listen to it on repeat for a few days. The chorus is such great, compact storytelling: “Papa was a rodeo, mama was a rock 'n' roll band / I could play guitar and rope a steer before I learned to stand / Home was anywhere with diesel gas, love was a trucker's hand / Never stuck around long enough for a one night stand”
eating & drinking
For dinner my dad made potato chip crusted haddock, Moroccan vegetable stew, homemade pizza, caramelized beef and peanut noodles, salmon with basil sauce and corn and tomato salad, tacos, and spinach dal. The noodles were kind of boring until I added Laoganma chili crisp and then I was really into them. The salmon dish is really good (it’s a repeat favorite around here) but was too summery to have in the middle of February. No one else agreed with me about this.
My mom is inventing a muffin recipe. They seem like they shouldn’t be good, given that the ingredients include gluten free sourdough discard, protein powder, greek yogurt, and applesauce, but they are extremely delicious.
I’m also back in a hot chocolate phase. I haven’t had it very often since December, when I drank it obsessively. I’ve finally finished the two giant tins of powder that my parents were gifted for Christmas two years ago. Neither of them really drink it, so I have nobly taken the responsibility upon myself.
making
I’ve started construction on my skirt. So far I’ve just cut out the pieces and sewn the side seams. It’s a very slow process, since I’m doing it all by hand and only in short bursts. I like that it’s slow. I don’t need to add a ton to my wardrobe, so if this is a hobby I take up I’d like it to be more about process than product.
I’ve also made a little bit of progress on my scrappy sweater that I started back in November. I’m about two thirds of the way through the back panel. I like the stripes but I don’t love them. I’m trying to trust the process.
shopping
I didn’t buy anything this week. Theoretically I am still looking for a rug.
kitsch corner
I don’t really care about Johnny Weir or Tara Lipinski, but I do respect their commitment to aesthetics. The matching bedazzled headsets are iconic.
See you next week.
xoxo,
Franny 💋☕️