Beka > Recent Status Updates

"The MomBomb conference is sorority rush meets Harvard business school; you have never met another ambitious crowd of women who are so meticulous about their beachy waves and personal branding."

"Our carrier is a secondhand Baby Bjorn from my mom group that has been through maybe 7 babies. It has stains from bodily fluids that will...never come out.

Her baby carrier looks spun from the rawest of silks, is unstained, and fits her like a couture gown as she sweeps the porch, hangs the sheets on the line in the fields, bakes everything from scratch... it costs an otherworldly amount, too."

Ope. First thriller in ages. It includes bougie motherhood influencers, so why not.

"Migration is the most natural thing people do; the root of how civilizations, nation states + countries were established.

The difference, however, is that when white people move -- then + now -- it's seen as Courageous + Necessary, celebrated in history books. Yet when people of color move, legally or illegally, the migration itself is subjected to question of legality: Is it a crime? Will they assimilate?"

"There are no writers in my family; none on my mother's side, none on my father's side. In the Philippines we're a family of farmers, nurses, cooks, accountants, construction workers, U.S. Navy veterans. I got into journalism because of a high school teacher.

Writing was a form of existing. Writing was a way of belonging, of contributing to society."

Delectable, I tell you. McQuiston did some AMAZING work with this Europe tour of food and drink and...humans.

Gahhhh this book is GOOD.

"After after the war, the military, which became marked as queer space during the war, was "cleansed" of its queerness, + gay space moved further underground.

In the 1950s, driven by fear not just of social violence + ostracism but if police violence, gay bars became even mire important sites for building queer community."

Queer Spaces in America
"To call a space 'queer' is a way to communicate who has power and who does not, who belongs and who does not, and who feels the need for one's own space and who does not."

This novel is so.... delectable (France! Italy! Spain! Food!)
And also very veryyy cheeky

"We change our attitudes, our careers, our relationships. Even our age changes minute by minute. We change our politics, our moods, + our sexual preferences. We change our outlook, we change our minds, we change our sympathies.

Yet when someone changes their gender, we put them on some television talk show.

I think that we ALL change our gender, + subtly shift the kind of man or woman we're being at the moment."

"I have gained an even deeper understanding of the mutable soul. (My intimate partner's) flexible consciousness has encouraged me to be generous in my thinking and less rigid about the way others self-define, or in fact, when they choose not to."

"Young adults were exhorted to marry young, bear several polite children, buy a house in the newly constructed suburbs, + partake in the amazing new wonders of home appliances."

"When the war ended, the scrutiny of sexual orientation + increased policing of gender roles returned with a vengeance.

The rise of heterosexual domesticity emerged as a symbol of postwar prosperity."

This book so far is charming, jaunty, and full of androgynous flirtation + sensory wisps of smell, taste + feel.

"The 1940s + 1950s showed how quickly war + peace could change the social climate in terms of gender + sexuality. With the U.S. entrance to WW2, queer women + men flocked to major cities + found one another, breaking down distinctions between rural + urban, + solidified metropolitan dominance in building vibrant queer communities."

"By wearing pants, smoking in public, or learning to drive, lesbians suffered overt discrimination + moral censure for rejecting the constraints + limitations of femininity.

But a complex range of gender presentations existed within queer communities that were also shaped by race + class as much as sexual identity."

There's something about spending mid-August as a human living in the Midwest, surrounded by greenery and heat, reading books on the history of Earth as scientists have discovered and posited it to be through the evidence theyve found...while also reading books on queer youth having spats and lovey-dovey days.
Humanity and our sweet and bitter lives is so brief! Nature is always.

"...longing to return to the natural world, where flesh becomes soil..."

I figured I'd try out the audiobook in my libby while folding laundry (I adoredddddd the book Red White and Royal Blue by McQuiston) and I'm pretty charmed and engaged already🥲

"We link the words democracy and freedom, and rightly so -- freedom is the value of values, and the case for democracy must begin with it.
Democracy is the system toward which the forms of freedom lead.

We The People will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives."

"If efficiency is the only measure, then values evaporate and solidarity is impossible."