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A nice thing: attended my first Journal Club last week to hear Ezra give a talk about credit card points and airline travel (MORE FUN THAN IT SOUNDS). Journal Club launched in 2011 when a group of Cambridge-based grad students wanted a place to come together and discuss their research. They’ve now been running bi-weekly events for 14(!) years and expanded their purview to include talks like:

• The Politics of the Hat
• Inca Bureaucracy
• The Jack-O’-Lantern: History, Culture, Practice
• PCR Tests
• Vexillology and YOU!
• Sea Chanteys: work songs of sailors, dockworkers, and fishers
• Consider the Owl
• Horse Theft
• Using Shadow Puppetry in Environmental Education

And, of course:

• spoooooooooooky nature

Where have these people been all my life?

In the half-hour before Ezra started his talk we had a bit of a meet and greet, and I mentioned something about making books and one of the organizers got excited about having that talk on the roster. I can do a self-publishing talk in my sleep at this point, but I still felt a bit of the old rush. I do love to get up in front of a crowd and wave my hands.

As I listened to Ezra wax rhapsodic about aviation history, however, I started to think of something else.

In 2017 I attended PWL Camp at the Kickstarter offices in Brooklyn. It was an un-conference, which is basically a roll-your-own event where folks propose panels and workshops throughout the weekend and mash together a schedule in real time. I learned about people’s favorite kitchen implements (THE FISH SPATULA), third culture kids (giving me language I’d never had before to discuss my upbringing), and fine press printing, but the talk I’ve never forgotten was “Are you worried about your parents? Me too” by Libby Brittain.

Libby was 25 when she started caring for her mom, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s and was too feisty to stay in a memory care facility. I had never met another person in their 20s who was so open about the experience of caring for a parent. PWL took place a few months before the fateful Thomas Fire Evacuation Debacle, which triggered my dad’s official dementia diagnosis, but I’d already been worrying about him for years.

I accepted my role as a caregiver in fits and starts, but I know that talk was a turning point. The room was packed. It was the first time I’d really grappled with the idea that everyone will face these questions sooner or later. Even if you don’t have biological parents in your life, you’ll have elders. If you don’t have elders, you’ll have your own aging and mortality to contend with. In disability justice the term temporarily able-bodied or TAB encompasses this truth.¹

I remember less about the contents of Libby’s talk than I do the feeling of being in the room. It turns out she went on to run a newsletter during the early pandemic called Our Parents, Ourselves, which I can’t believe I missed at the time.² I’m trying to pace myself going through the archives today, but wow there’s gold in there. (This review of a book on dementia I’d never heard of about erasure and darkness and rewriting the narrative of memory loss as loss of self? GIVE IT TO ME.)

All these threads came to the surface during Ezra’s talk and I realized that what I really want to get into in public these days is care work and grief and coping with a universal human experience that people want to talk about, but often can’t. (I scratched a similar itch talking about money in 2016 and imposter syndrome in 2018. Turns out I’m always trying to illuminate the thing that feels big but unspoken at any given moment in my life.)

This led to a poll on Patreon (you can vote in it! I hope you do!) about what elements of caregiving people might most want to explore. For all my jawboning about the ubiquity of this experience, I’ll admit I was still startled by the number of comments. People are always already doing this work in their own lives—that’s what makes this such an electric thread of curiosity.

Anyway: Journal Club was fun. The next one’s about rockets. And I’m betting sooner or later you’ll see me on the roster getting ready to talk about the ins and outs of care work. As I read this morning in my friend Kat’s newsletter (quoting Douglas Rushkoff, via a tipoff from Rosie Spinks):

When you can’t be an agent of change, aim to be an agent of care.

1. A good elaboration/complication of the phrase via Laurie Toby Edison’s blog. ↩︎
2. For someone writing a newsletter from the current trenches, Roger Mckeever’s is a great choice. ↩︎