Dispatches from the Drey

I don’t really know how to do a year in the life post. Let’s do it anyway. Chronological? Chronological.

You’re gonna have to click through for this one because I want the blog page to be… usable.

January

If I remember right, I touched off the year with a New Year’s celebration on a friend’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons island.

2025 featured the first in-person congress of Marxist Unity Group, my caucus in DSA. We met in Florence, MA, and very nearly got snowed in Sunday.

It was a good time. We had extensive debate on points of our tasks and perspectives, I was asked to run for a second term on DSA’s National Political Committee, and I found weird local pizza.

There’s a place in Florence that just has cheese pizza and if you want toppings they take a slice, put the toppings on, put some more cheese on, and put it through the oven. I love weird local pizza.

The drive from Boston to Northampton is pretty, and I was again reminded that we have a very different concept of distance out here from New England. A hundred miles is nothing to me. Though I ended up needing to move very fast at KBOS on the way back, something that would be a recurring theme until I decided to bite the bullet and get TSA precheck (which is cheaper than it used to be).

February

I attended another caucus’s national convention as an observer, Reform & Revolution. This one was in Portland, which means I got to take the train down. It was good, it’s always fun to learn about debates and things.

I like Portland. It has many things I like that we don’t have in Seattle. But it isn’t Seattle.

March

oh jeez I’m 37

Another in-person meeting! This was an NPC meeting, in New York City this time. It was our last in-person meeting of the term and it was A Lot, as meetings sometimes can be, but this one in particular was A Lot. I will not elaborate. I was introduced to Break Bar, a bar where you go and have a beer and then go in the back and throw the glass or bottle against the wall. It was possibly the most ostentatiously consumptive thing I’ve ever done, very Manhattan. And very cathartic.

I like visiting New York City. Sometime I’ll go back and have time to just… visit, be a tourist. I took like one day for it, but it was the last day of my trip and I was exhausted. Also I had not put two and two together and the St Patrick’s Day parade made it harder to get some places I wanted to visit.

And like, I dunno, I get physically tired more easily than I want to. That’s a me problem, don’t worry about it, but it’s a problem. For me.

I went to the New York Public Library, which has a very cool collection spanning history of the written word.

I did visit the World Trade Center memorial – last time I was in NYC was December 2001 – and I have to say, I don’t like it. I didn’t go in the museum, but I’m told that’s fine. The architectural elements are pleasant enough (I love a waterfall) and victims’ names laser-cut in the railing is a nice touch. But it’s… symbolically empty.

I know it’s meaningful to a lot of people, including some of my family members. If that’s you, you can skip the next section, or take it with a very large grain of salt. But. It’s time for

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Amy’s Hot Take corner

Okay, symbolically empty isn’t right. It symbolizes emptiness. Two big holes in the ground. I might not go so far as to accuse the memorial of manufacturing consent, but it’s difficult to separate the depiction of permanent and irrevocable loss from the Global War On Terror that has killed orders of magnitude more innocents. The memorial says: what is here is loss, something taken from us we can never recover from.

And I mean, it would probably land harder if they didn’t build a fucking mall next to it. Yeah, the Oculus is kind of a quirky building, interesting in the sterile way a lot of 21st century American architecture is. It seems gauche to build a mall on a site you are also marking as a tomb, but I’m sure it’s what the towers would have wanted.

I feel like a better memorial would be to Iwo Jima that one photo of three firefighters raising a flag among the rubble. Were we not all proud of New York’s Bravest in 2001? A symbol of strength through adversity, of tenacity, of a city and nation that – well, it believed itself united. Sort of. Portrayed itself as united? No, not really that either.

…you know, maybe the mausoleum/consent machine is more honest.

Rant over.

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…anyway, I gave an interview to a comrade who was also visiting the city (from Worcester, MA), lost track of time, and got to my gate at JFK as they were calling my name.

side note: JFK AirTrain is $8.50. For an airport people-mover. That’s highway robbery.

April

I think this was the month I decided to give up on trying to keep houseplants again. Some people aren’t cut out for horticulture. It’s me, I’m some people. Honestly, I can probably just blame this one on ADHD.

May

May Day is always fun. Local unions have a big march, and of course DSA is always there.

Oh, light rail opened to Redmond! It’s still not connected to Seattle as of writing, and now if I understand right the contractors that screwed up and caused the delay of the cross-lake link are trying to screw us on the contract. Cool. But I won a Boop the Orca plushie at Sound Transit’s crane game. Going to light rail openings is fun.

June

Big month. I went on a tour of Eastern Washington, visited DSA’s Spokane and Palouse chapters and the Walla Walla organizing committee.

I just happened to be in Pullman for Pullman Pride. It was nice. Pullman is an interesting place, where I’ve determined there are three broad types of stories: grew up there and got out, went there for college and never left, and a long story full of sighs. I’m sure there are others and it actually seems like a nice small town, but… I have heard those a lot.

There was one person at Pullman Pride, with a cart festooned with No Kings signs, who kept trying to get a chant of “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re harmless” going. No, ma’am. Respect our existence or expect our resistance.

I stopped on the way through Eastern Washington to look at some neat things in between bombing down highways through farmland. Train bridges, Palouse Falls, and the like.

In Walla Walla, well… read my article about it. Prisons aren’t right. We talk a lot of shit about CECOT like our own prisons aren’t entirely designed to dehumanize.

I went by Maryhill Stonehenge and the Maryhill Museum of Art on the way back. I remembered visiting there ages ago as a kid, but I didn’t really appreciate the art at the time. They have a massive Rodin collection. And did I mention the functioning replica of Stonehenge (lines up with solstice and whatnot) down the street? It was built by Sam Hill, a Quaker railroad magnate and paved roads advocate (the early 20th century was a weird time), as a memorial to those “sacrificed on the altar of war” (at the time it was believed Stonehenge was used for human sacrifice) after World War 1.

Oh, if you go to Maryhill Museum of Art – get the potato salad at the cafe downstairs. Just trust me. The person who runs the cafe says she makes it herself at home, and it’s the best potato salad I’ve ever had (no, that is not damning with faint praise, it’s really good).

July

July was neat! I visited comrades in Tacoma, Salem, and Portland. I would have taken the train for the latter, but I don’t think Salem has very good transit.

I was informed a lot of people who work for the state commute from Portland to Salem. There is no transit link between those cities. That sounds like hell. Why isn’t there like… commuter transit? I know living in Seattle I’m spoiled by Sound Transit and member agencies running a world-class commuter bus network, but it seems obvious. Anyway.

I also went to see a production of As You Like It, put on by our local Shakespeare company’s free in-the-park program. (we actually have two Shakespeare-in-the-park companies, but don’t worry about it) It was a riot.

I want to see more Shakespeare – never liked reading his plays, but I’ve enjoyed every production I’ve been to.

And! I got some time in the darkroom for the first time in a few years, which was making a donation for

August

DSA Convention! I flew back this time (I took the train in 2023 and while that was awesome, it cost more than flying and left me even more exhausted). Convention is always fun. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important and frustrating at the same time, but it’s fun. It’s good to see comrades in person that you often don’t. Everyone always being behind a Zoom stream or a social media account is terrible.

I did not see much of Chicago this time, having responsibilities as a DSA member, NPC candidate, and – the morning after (and a few times during) – NPC member. But I did have an Italian beef. Now that is a sandwich.

Later this month, a friend had an extra ticket and took me to the Can Can, which is very cool. Highly recommended.

Then I tripped on an uneven bit of tile at a light rail station and fucked up my knee. Again. It’s fine.

September

Smoke season again. I really don’t have much else to say about September. It was a month.

Oh yeah, I made avgolemono. It’s not that complicated, it turns out – just chicken and rice soup with lemon juice and tempered egg. I’ve been kind of obsessed with it since the first time I tried it, and I still kinda think it’s weird that egg just does that.

October

I went to Cuba.

It’s not super hard to go to Cuba as an American, but it’s not as easy as… most other countries. This is, of course, for stupid reasons – Cuba welcomes tourists and other visitors, but the United States doesn’t want its citizens going there. It doesn’t want money going into the Cuban economy; it specifically prohibits money going to the public sector, plus an ever-expanding list of privately owned hotels the State Department has decided to ban Americans from.

I went with 39 other DSA members on a delegation. We did some touristy stuff – how could you not, and we’re only allowed to buy meals from private enterprises anyway – but primarily we visited institutions. We visited the oldest hospital in Havana (of 36!), Calixto Garcia; a primary school; MINREX, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; ELAM, the Latin American School of Medicine, which serves foreign students (90% on a free ride offered to impoverished areas); and Cenesex, the Center for Sex Education, which also serves as a government-sponsored advocacy group for queer people. Fidel was very serious about correcting the homophobia of early revolutionary Cuba, you see.

When I mentioned I was going to Cuba, one coworker asked if it would be safe for me because, you know, I’m trans. I was like… buddy. I’ll be safer in Cuba than I will be during the layover in Miami, where I had to break the law to piss. (come at me, Rick)

I’ll have a lot more to write on this in the future (after checking with a comrade in one case) but… there was one thing we heard time and time again. What we can do as Americans is fight el bloqueo – the interlocking set of sanctions and embargoes that the United States has in place to try to destroy Cuba. The medical system has to autoclave and reuse disposable items and suffers shortages of basics like antibiotics despite an impressive domestic biomedical industry because they cannot purchase feedstocks. Ships full of food or fuel sit at anchor, unable to dock and unload because Cuba cannot make payment for the contents (the US controls the global financial system and the State Sponsor of Terror designation – which is factually nonsensical – means it is nearly impossible for Cuba to make payments).

I don’t really know what to say about this. It is a bipartisan effort, despite being vastly unpopular outside of like… Miami. We need to find a way to end this.

November

November was a busy month.

First was a trip to Denver. I had never been to Denver before, just through – I visited Colorado Springs for a weekend in 2018. It’s a neat city, there’s a theme park downtown! This visit was for an in-person NPC meeting.

I love the high desert. I know it’s like four major biomes, but the region from Denver to Albuquerque and beyond is all high desert to me.

Somewhere in November I found a video of Switch Angel livecoding on Strudel and decided to get into livecoding. Livecoding used to require a stack of software (well, I guess SonicPi was easy, but I never liked its language) but now it’s just a web browser, which has some… interesting advantages. Also the uzulang model (tidalcycles, strudel, etc) just clicks for me.

Through this I discovered pastagang which is I guess a livecoding collective of sorts? It’s built around a collaborative livecoding environment called nudel (which is based on flok, which…) and you can usually just go there and find an interesting jam. It’s also really strongly rooted in algorave philosophy – impermanence, imperfection, that sort of thing. nudel has “mantras” that randomly scroll at the top – my favorite is (…was, now?) “persist in your folly” which to me is the opposite of fake it ‘til you make it. If you’re doing it you’ve made it – don’t stop.

I’ll have more to write about livecoding later.

It seems like every year some media or other grabs hold of me and I don’t come up for air for… close to a week. In 2023 it was Tears of the Kingdom, in 2024 it was Death Stranding.

In 2025, I’d been lamenting that I wanted to read more, and the monkey’s paw curled. In November I crammed Sisters of Dorley in the space of… five days? Don’t do that. Read it, but don’t do that. It’s over a million words now. That’s not good for you. Get some sleep.

It’s… good. It’s very trans, it’s got a reputation for let’s say transdiegetic egg-cracking, it’s uh… also brutal. It’s sort of a… I’d say deconstruction, but more of a reconstruction of the forced feminization genre? Realization? Doesn’t gloss over things to stay in the fantasy realm.

This, too, I’ll have more to say about later.

Since then I’ve also read most of the author’s other works.

More recently something reminded me of Alex Zandra’s work and I decided to read some of that as sort of a palate-cleanser and got emotionally bodied by a friend’s cameo I’d forgotten about. (there are some… sorta similar themes to Greaves’s work, is why I mention it here, except it’s magical and cozy rather than gritty and traumatic)

Reading fiction that gets me in the feels seems to be a theme of my late 2025.

December

Another light rail opening, this time Federal Way, where they had this nifty ice sculpture of a Link car

And an excuse to ride the monorail (I love Winterfest)

I guess it was a quiet month, which is a nice change. That brings us here.

Miscellany and stuff for the future

I’ve glossed over and excluded some things here because good lord this is long enough already, but I want to mention them anyway.

I have a new relationship. Also kind of rekindled a relationship with a play partner I hadn’t seen in a few years, and I have been trying to spend more time with another partner. Not very good at it.

I guess you could call it a new year’s resolution, I’m trying to lose weight again. We’ll see if I stick with it this time, but I’m trying to take care of myself like I care, which is sort of a new thing. Also not very good at that.

I keep thinking about adopting a cat and not doing anything about that. I expect that to continue.

I’ve had literally just a cold twice this year. First time it felt almost insulting to get the common cold in 2025. Then it was like, okay, nature is healing, I guess?

One thing I haven’t mentioned (much) in this post is politics, which is unlike me. Friends, I don’t need to tell you it’s been bad. I’m incredibly fortunate to be white, an adult, and in a state that protects my rights.

People on the internet tell me you’re supposed to have a call to action. Politics is shit right now. More than usual, or at least more than the previous few years. If you want to do something about it – if you’ve thought about it – if you’re on the fence – if you just want to support us – if you’re in the US, this is your call to join DSA.