I don't feel like resting

I don't feel like resting | cut paper on canvas panel | 5" x 7" | 2025

"We are resting," They've said. And I get it. There is psychological exhaustion, trauma, fatigue. Recovery takes as long as it takes. It was presumptuous and cruel of anyone to demand Black activism without acknowledging the devastation of the election and asserting the right to rest was essential.

But then, "we are resting" became the standard response to anyone Black who wanted to protest. Where there had once been an understanding that some might sit out because they were tired while those of us who still wanted to be part of various actions would do so, now "we are resting" became an order. And then, "we are resting" became a refrain of shame directed at any Black person on social media who opposed their monolithic thinking.  But I never asked to be included in the "we" who was resting. Why should I rest when I'm not tired?

When I was growing up, there was a gospel song the choir at my church would sing that had a repetitive chorus of "I'm not tired yet," and it often came to mind when I was being told to take naps when I wasn't sleepy. I've been thinking about that song and have re-experienced that same long-ago frustration many times over the past few months. 

The rest advocates never seem to consider how cathartic protesting can be. To take justified hatred of injustice and oppression and direct righteous indignation like a laser, to be surrounded by other people who feel the same way, to take a stand in public—all of these things are so much better than having to hide anger, misdirecting it, or turning it inwards.

The alternatives to protesting almost always seem to require extra time or money that I don't have at my disposal right now, as well as spending extended periods of time in crowded indoor spaces with volunteers whose idealism never seems to include wearing masks and providing air purifiers. Protests have become the only place where masking is still fairly common. 

Anyway, if you are resting, I respect that. It's not my job to tell anyone what to do or how to feel. Go ahead and keep resting, but stop trying to force me to rest when I don't feel like it.

100 Days of Hell

Things are so terrible, and it didn't have to be this way. Since January 20th, every day has been a relentless barrage of bad news. This second reign of terror has been forced upon me and is happening against my will. The only difference for me from the first time around is that ashwagandha and magnesium help me sleep at night. I've been trying to distract myself when I can with art shows, but at the same time, I can't ignore the constant chaos. Everything feels ominous. I feel like I'm living on borrowed time. Even if this nightmare ends in 4 years, that's the year I will turn 50.

I am disgusted but not surprised or afraid. Because I have always assumed the worst of everyone in the administration, nothing they do shocks me. I wouldn’t put anything past them. Nothing is too senselessly depraved for them to try. It's been 100 days of villainy. 100 days of threats and intimidation. The regime has no respect for the humanities or humanity. The tyrant and his supporters are pathetic, small-minded fools who have nothing to offer the world but their bigotry. 

I keep imagining the long-term consequences and ripple effects of  the irredeemable, intentional cruelty of the regime and all its henchmen. I won't even attempt to list all their crimes here, but between DOGE defunding important research and firing government employees, the attacks on the arts, the ill-informed crusade of our pathogenic Health and Human Services secretary, the torment of immigrants, and the rage-fueled opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, I often feel like what little progress we had in America is now irrevocably ruined. Who will even want to come here to vacation, study, work, or do business ever again? These heartless buffoons are blocking our blessings and cutting us off from the rest of the world. All they do is create abusive and isolating policies that seem designed to ensure a friendless existence. 

Lawsuits have seemed to be the only nonviolent thing that might slow them down. It's like being in a custody battle for our rights. At first, what little opposition there was came in the form of strongly-worded letters, useless pleas to the hard heart of a bully, troll, and menace possessed by an all-encompassing desire to overpower everyone. What good are these pleas to a monster who is unencumbered by anything vaguely resembling a conscience?

Being on social media has been a reminder of the persistent, ignorant posts and replies I saw last fall, that Americans deserved to suffer if we didn’t vote for third party candidates, or that we were already living under the oppression of Project 2025, or that there was no point in voting at all, or that the country should collapse (with us in it?). Now, many have become curiously silent. How peculiar. I thought they would be rejoicing now that the country is a sinkhole and everything is falling into it. The few that remain are now telling everyone to buy guns, invest in gold, grow our own vegetables, boycott everything, and/or move to other countries. Thanks a lot.

A significant portion of the rest of the discourse has been a cycle of insipid replies, shaming, consent-manufacturing, psychological warfare, mind games, and manipulation, distraction from what really matters thanks to bots and algorithms, and people who don’t know how to spell martial law telling everyone not to protest. Meanwhile, people in other countries yell at us to do something, but whatever opposition they see is never enough. According to the social media hive mind, the few things that have given me hope were performative and pointless. Am I wrong for believing that not every protest needs to be a day of rage or an act of self-immolation? I thought the point was to make dissent visible, not the intentional provocation of law enforcement officers. And sorry if I don't want to just sit on the roof while the world burns. I hate having all this anger with no place for it to go. I would still be protesting under Harris, but the difference is that I would be protesting about a few things and not everything. 

Related Links:

Trump’s 100 Days in 100 Seconds

Under the Blacklight - Beyond the First 100 Days: Centering Racial Justice and Black History

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker speaking to New Hampshire Democrats 4/28/25

Fascism Isn’t Coming — It’s Here. Now What?

Mistakes Were Made. And Made. And Made Again.

Trump, echoing Project 2025, using 'flood the zone' strategy to push agenda: Experts

An Unsustainable Presidency

Trump Enters First 100 Days In Office By Lining White House Lawn With Mugshots Of Alleged Arrested Immigrants

Trump's Visual Legacy at 100 Days: Not Normal Pictures for Not Normal Times

Tariffs, funding cuts and migrant raids — how Trump hit Chicago and Illinois in his first 100 days in office

We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US

220 lawsuits in 100 days: Trump administration faces unprecedented legal blitz

How Donald Trump Broke Our Economy in 100 Days

My 5 Year Pandemic Anniversary

Art by Volker Maunz

Today is my birthday. I have only celebrated it twice since 2020. Prior to the pandemic, my greatest frustration this time of year as an introvert living in Chicago was finding a restaurant where I could meet a few close friends and family members for a meal without too many rowdy, drunk St. Patrick's Day revelers interrupting. Now, because of the risk of indoor dining, I have decided to just wait until it's warm enough to eat on a patio. (Not expecting the unseasonably warm weather we're having.)

Sharing meals to celebrate is such a simple thing we all took for granted. So many gatherings have food as the focal point. I keep missing out of them, postponing them, taking a plate home instead, not getting to eat my food when it's hot and freshly made. I can't share a birthday cake with my friends or have them over for a dinner party. I can't serve snacks at my open studios like I used to. No workplace happy hours or ice cream socials for me. I'm eating my lunch outside in the cold, the snow, the rain. Its the price I pay for safety.

A moderator in one of the online groups I'm part of asked us for our personal definitions of what it means to still be taking precautions. It was an earnest question that anticipated a straightforward response. But in my mind, my answer was loneliness, isolation, and alienation. I try to avoid crowded indoor spaces as much as I can, quite a feat when you live in a big city and rely on public transportation because parking is so expensive. I tried requiring masks at my open studios and only showing my work in spaces where masks were required, but I didn't make as much money as I hoped to as a result.

I feel burdened with the knowledge of what could go wrong. Sometimes I almost wish I didn't know what I know. Sometimes I wish I could be blissfully unaware and live in denial. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier. But if people suffering from long COVID can take the time to share their hard-earned knowledge from their sickbeds, the least I can do is heed their warnings.

Still, as a lone masker is many of the places I go, every day feels like a protest. Still, there is no end to this disaster in sight. Last fall, prior to the election, I saw a scientist's estimation that perhaps in 2027 we could finally have a vaccine that would give everyone sterilizing immunity, meaning that we wouldn't have to worry about breakthrough infections and long COVID anymore. Now that the country is being run by misanthropic sociopaths and a pathogenic Health and Human Services secretary, who knows? The research that was being done for numerous diseases has come to a standstill for lack of funding, and Captain Brainworms hates vaccines. I am mentally preparing myself for the possibility of traveling to another country to get their version of the better vaccine, provided they will even let me in.

I'm glad that there's so much awareness about the political crisis that we're in, but frustrated that because of it, the lingering crisis of the ongoing pandemic continues to be ignored. There is discourse online about sacrifice, about giving things up, about boycotting one of the stores I had come to rely on because they bring my orders to my car for no extra charge, as well as the one where I get my KF94 masks. (Do the people calling for these boycotts even wear them?)

We have already lost so much because of COVID, and every day we lose something else to DOGE. I don't want any more austerity, avoidance, or abstinence in my life. I have given up so much. I have sacrificed so much. Don't ask me to cancel, delete, or boycott another thing. I am already boycotting the air.

Related Links:

Death Panel Podcast, "COVID Year Five"

Why Are People Wearing Masks in 2025? A Mental Health Professional’s Perspective

Study: COVID pandemic stole nearly 17 million years of life from adults in 18 European countries

The Long COVID unicorn: How I lost faith in my leftist political party

Julia’s Story – Fallout: Living with Long COVID

Study finds erectile dysfunction for 1 in 5 men even years after Covid infection

How Covid Sickened the National Psyche

Trump takes advantage of our collective COVID amnesia

Why Masks-Required Concerts Still Sell Out in the Bay Area 

When Covid hit Black Americans hard, too many white Americans shrugged

From the Community | Stanford must end its complicity in COVID harms

America Is Sleeping on a Powerful Defense Against Airborne Disease

Doing it out of spite

 They hate diverse books.

They hate multiculturalism. 

They hate abstract art. 

They hate sustainability.

They hate masking.

They hate unmarried women.

And I hate everything they stand for. 

So I will keep doing what I do out of spite.

My presence on this platform is not an endorsement of its CEO

Twitter users in 2021:

"If you're still on Meta platforms, you're a terrible person." Threads users in 2023: "If you're still on Twitter, you're a terrible person." Bluesky users in 2025: "If you're still on Meta platforms, you're a terrible person."It never ends. 😒—Me today, here, here, and here
If the character limits in my online profiles would allow it, I would add this disclaimer to my bio:"My presence on this platform is not an endorsement of its CEO."
I wasn't expecting to have to rant about something on here so early in the year, but as usual, I am disgusted, but not surprised. Mark Zuckerberg is clearly complying with the wishes of the Trump regime, despite his great wealth and power. And now a new migration is underway, away from Threads, Instagram, and Facebook. While I understand and respect the sentiment, I'm not interested in deleting my accounts as a form of protest. I would prefer not to spend my time in a state of digital exodus from one platform to another. I also don't want to put all my digital eggs in one basket. I wouldn't even be on all these platforms if Google Reader was still around and if Flickr still dominated image searches.But that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where it seems like everything is at risk of being bought out by a terrible billionaire or a greedy private equity firm. Bluesky, they tell me, is somehow an exception to this, and though I would like to believe them, at this point, I doubt it. And even if that is true, for now, I don't feel like it's the right place for me to promote my work. Bluesky is so dogmatic about alt text that I feel like it's just a matter of time before I get reprimanded for not including detailed descriptions of my abstract art for people who are never going to buy it. I know it's going to take time for the right audience to find me. Starting over can be exhausting. I don't enjoy doing it.I also don't enjoy being judged for the actions of the owner of a platform I happen to be using. I didn't create any of my accounts to support the people who built the websites and apps they're on. I created them to support myself. Without an agent or a gallery representing me, being on social media has helped me promote my work. And frankly, as a Black woman living in a society that is openly racist and sexist, I often have no choice but to make the most of environments that were not set up for me to thrive in. Standing my ground in inhospitable places could be good practice for surviving our coming broligarch dystopia.I feel like nobody on other platforms believes me when I tell them there are still good people on Twitter, but even now I still see them because I have blocked so many bad actors over the years. I don't care if I have to block a million accounts. I'll do what I need to do to make sure I have a decent experience online in spite of everything. But if you're no longer on social media, you can still find me here, because out of all the platforms I post on, my favorite one to use is still my blog.

a tragedy told in screenshots

We have 45 days of freedom left before America descends into Hell on a golden escalator. This is not the future I want. This is not the kind of world I want to live in. Social media is an inadequate medium for expressing complicated thoughts, but that hasn't stopped us from trying. The months leading up to the election were full of misdirected anger, masochistic defeatism, and hyperbolic language and for the past month, I have seen a lot of misplaced schadenfreude.

My political opinions are too complicated to be expressed concisely for social media. I prefer to blog about them. I needed a month to figure out what I wanted to say because I am so angry and disgusted. Hot takes aren't my thing. I think I still need more time. Perhaps I will save my final analysis of this time for my next art book. In the meantime, for your consideration and for the historical record, here are some screenshots that I have saved from this cursed election season. They help to tell the story of how we got here and where we might be headed. They answer important questions like, "Why are we in this mess?" and "How did we get here?" Some may lead you to ask questions like, "What is wrong with people?"

This is a tragedy told in screenshots. I didn't redact any names because these were public posts and if the people who posted them feel ashamed of themselves now, that's not my problem. I have not edited out any profanity or slurs, so be forewarned.

Apparently some very online leftists are fine with collective punishment as long as it happens to American civilians. According to them, we all deserve to suffer. This time the election wasn't stolen, but purchased by the richest man in the world.  To me, the real tragedy is not that Harris lost, but that Trump won.