kī anthony

is this thing on?

I’ve been thinking about the art of a good newsletter lately. I’ve had a couple of conversations at art galleries and bus stops and on my living room floor about it, and it always boils down to this: social media is terrible. I don’t “work for WordPress”, as my mother understood it, any more, but I do still believe what I did when I made my first emo poetry blog as a tween: blogging is one of the good parts of the old Internet that we can bring back. RSS feeds remove the barrier that is being unable to follow your friends from platform to platform; comments sections, moderated by bloggers, create focused spaces for community without easy access for trolls.

I’ve historically been terrible at keeping in touch with friends who don’t happen to be part of whatever small group — a locked Twitter, a small Discord server, an organising group which meets regularly — I’m in. I want to change that, and I want to create a space where I’m able to reflect and share, semi-regularly, with those I love and those who are curious. Monthly updates seemed like something I could hopefully manage! Here goes.

this month

opening a new chapter

At the end of last year, I got home from my last work trip after almost two days in transit to find that many of my colleagues had tested positive for COVID. I did too, days later; I struggled through almost a week of being barely lucid, then dragged myself into Slack to give notice. It was a disconcerting way to leave a job, so unwell even after I had technically recovered that I didn’t get to say goodbye to everyone I wanted to.

I don’t feel like I’ve come completely right. It’s of no particular distress to me — I was already disabled, and my cognitive limitations are more a return to what they were after my traumatic brain injury in 2017 than anything unprecedented. I’m trying to take it easy, but I’ve also stepped into quite a new role in a new kind of workplace, and that’s certainly taxing!

I’ve joined a small company (fully remote, four-day weeks) as their incoming communications coordinator. It’s a role that didn’t exist before, and there is a lot to do! I’m starting to settle into a role without aggressive KPIs, and finding my footing in a place where all the thinking and facilitating and communicating I do is not considered work but recognised as quality work. I still feel like I haven’t done anything, really, and that I’m being trusted with far too much freedom, and it’ll likely take me some time to adjust. The hectic pace and scrutiny of quantity-driven customer support is not something I miss.

what’s on my plate

Half things I’m doing, half Myspace-style media records :)

art: I’ve been working on a comic for an upcoming anthology! It’s a personal essay in comic form, 1.5k words nestled alongside illustrations (hand-drawn in a good old 1E5 book then scanned and processed), so it’s pretty dense. I’m excited to share once it’s out!

writing: This month, bad apple published manual focus, which I’m very proud of.

I also read floodgates, intracranial hypertension, farm to table, and new zealand girls dot com for Performances is at Artspace Aotearoa — apart from floodgates, the other three were first-time performances, and intracranial has never been published! A cheeky little treat in response to an exhibition I really enjoyed getting to see and be a part of. Many thanks to the other poets Joanna Cho and Amber Esau, who are both way out of my league, and to Artspace for hosting us.

music: I’m a The Mountain Goats bitch as always. This month’s song, both for getting stuck in my head and for playing on the travel guitar I got for Christmas, is Store. I’ve been doing a lot of grieving lately.

I’m coming up on a year on testosterone soon, at a variety of low doses, but between said low dosing and the nebulously abnormal behavior of my adrenal glands and natural T production/sensitivity, the changes have been off the normal timeline (in ways I am entirely happy with! I love the way I look and feel). My voice is breaking again at the moment, and while I have a three-octave range that covers most tenor through soprano community choir parts, none of it is consistent or any good. (Not that it matters — I sing because I’m human and it makes me happy, not because I need to sound good. It sure would help if I knew what sound was about to happen or not-happen when I opened my mouth, though!) I’m hoping to line up a couple of vocal coaching sessions just because the new job requires quite a lot of talking in meetings, and my voice fatigues way too easily right now.

books: I’ve got a book review coming out in early Feb for a local novel! Stay tuned for that, it was a great read and quite far from my usual fare. I’m excited to talk about it.

I did also finally read Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant. It’s… fine? It’s a pretty solid and approachable primer for anyone who’s never thought about sex work decriminalization or activism before, structured as chapters which are effectively separate essays. I need to get around to finishing Revolting Prostitutes, which struck me from its first few pages as both more powerfully written and likely more incisive and intimidating for a newcomer!

At the end of last year, I had just polished off all of the Hercule Poirot books. They definitely get a little less good toward the end, though the final book (written quite a bit earlier — Christie absolutely did not intend to write the poor man for so long) is a return to form and a satisfying close. I’ll have to see if I move on to Miss Marple next for my easy-reads between more novel (pun intended) tomes, or if I try something else! Of course, let me know if you have thoughts.

watching: I’m making my way through season two of Fantasy High at the moment! I’m very late to the actual play scene, but I’ve been enjoying Dropout as a whole. I’m fairly staunch about not paying for streaming services (I prefer to outright buy music, for example), and Dropout is one that’s very, very worth the money. I’ve been thinking about revisiting Elementary.

gaming: Into the Breach is still just as good as ever — I own it twice, because the PC version got me through university (short enough strategy game to be ADHD-playable, as much as I love XCOM), and the Switch version is a perfect winding-down/portable game. I’m hoping to start the fan translation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 soon!

crafting: Nothing complete yet this year. I’m maybe 20% of the way into a Haruni in Malabrigo Lace, my first laceweight project; I’ve got a pair of squishy broken rib socks working up in Waikiwi Prints which some of you would have seen me casting on in Munich last November.

I’ve also splurged on A0 printing for a couple of patterns ($5 a sheet is so worth not having to trim and tape sixteen pieces of paper together, especially if I can work out tracing directly onto fabric with a lightbox or something similar) and bought some clearance cotton voile and silk georgette which is much nicer than anything I have stashed, and comparatively cheap. I’m hoping to get some summer pajamas made before it cools down too much to wear them! We’ll see if they feature in next month’s update :)

joyful things: Yoga with Adriene’s yearly challenge, which my wife and I have been doing together, and how much more stable my bad shoulder and wrist feel these days.

The kilogram of strawberries, fresh from a farm out west where my sibling bought six kg, which I processed into syrup then had with matcha and almond milk for weeks.

Trading 2kg of Perendale yarn (too coarse for my planned purposes) which had been sitting in my stash for years for 2kg of paneer, which I’ve been working my way through as mattar paneer. Bartering with friends, when you both have or can make something the other wants, is just such a joy.

Watching my zoomer friends get into Star Trek: TOS. Letting one of them introduce me properly to Phantom of the Opera. Editing fanfiction for loved ones. Trotting across Aotea Square at a Palestine rally that’s thousands-strong despite the blistering heat, because I recognised friends on the other side. Building new spaces for my friends, new friendships, and recommitting to the old.

poem of the month

I’ve done a lot of writing this month, largely emotionally gruelling — settling into the new job, for sure, but I left therapy at the end of last year with some very intimidating letters to write over the summer. I’m still not there yet, and it’s coloured all the other things I’ve been working on. There’s background processes using up all my RAM, as there often is with PTSD during the hard parts of recovery.

So here’s a quick poem, written at 1am while putting this newsletter together! Straight from brain to post, just what’s been on my mind this month, which is a nice change from tweaking things for print.

BUT THEN IT HAS BEEN FOR A WHILE / i tell you stories in the dark when it’s too hot to sleep / of lead in water and bullets and the mythical pencils the soviets used in space / aren’t you scared of leaving your windows open? i’m not. anything they do to me i will have deserved / oyster mushrooms spring from our rotting guts / the endless mould the sagging frames the saltwater tunnels the teeth you see when you finally pass out and wake up in the jaws of empire / NOW UNTIL IT ENDS / sunblock clots under my nails / i show up when my body lets me and your carcass isn’t hanging around my neck / you never do / UNTIL IT ENDS / how long until our fingernails fracture? until our fingerprints are scoured into lymph and loam? / STAND AT THE PRECIPICE / you throw your arm over me and i throw the rest of me into you / body bags infinitely nested / FALLING / like cancelled buses and the local facebook groups that rubberneck at crime / UNTIL IT ENDS

I do believe that Palestine will be free in my lifetime. What we’re seeing is liberal democracies — New Zealand, the US, the Commonwealth more generally — increasingly showing their true faces as governments who only pay lip service to the illusory concept of international law when it allows them to justify interventions to protect capital. But the mask is off, and people will remember that. If we do not succumb to despair, these mouldering, near-extinct states will fall before we do.

None of us are free until all of us are free. This informs my work as a prison abolitionist, and it informs my fundamental, unshakeable conviction and hope for our future.

I’ll see you there! And I’ll see you here, next month, and the month after, until it ends.

Comments are turned on! Let me know what you think, or stay in touch.