there’s such a peculiar poignancy to saying “I miss [this fictional character]” or “I miss [this work of fiction/media]”

because you could always just pick up the book / rewatch the movie/TV show / re-consume the media again but it’s not quite the same. it’s not just “I miss discovering everything new about them” but also “I miss who I was when they filled my waking hours.” yes we joke about a character/book/movie/TV show living in our head rent-free but when they move out, you feel their absence. they haunt you, or perhaps, you haunt yourself with the memory of what it had been like, because there’s the bittersweet knowledge that you have also changed since you came into contact with this text or this character, that they have changed you with the revelation of some experience or identification or emotional truth, and you now carry them with you wherever you go but you will never be able to fall in love with them again for the first time

some loves are long-enduring but others fade to embers, and there is something particularly heartbreaking about wishing that you could love something again as much as you used to

I was going to ask if y’all were okay and then remembered that I’d wistfulposted on yearning dot com

I was thinking about all the stories of exploited workers explaining that they can’t leave work even if they’re sick, prompted by coronavirus concerns & I was thinking about when I was a *part time* librarian at a community college and was made responsible for making ALL college IDs for students and staff and how once I called in sick for 2 days (unpaid because no benefits but I took the pay cut to stay home) and when I got back I had panicked emails from my boss who had gotten panicked emails from their boss who had gotten a swarm of panicked calls from people who hadn’t received IDs cause no one took any photos or processed or printed them for a week (cause I was only scheduled like 3 days a week to begin with) & therefore people couldn’t register for classes or in some cases even get in the building, and an emergency meeting was called where I had to explain how I got so far behind. Because they had no one else who knew how to perform this vital function to the college except a part time, unbenefitted person working in the campus library, and just relied on the assumption that I would never call in.

I’m sure none of the students realized how absolutely dysfunctional their college was. They probably thought the delay was some sort of disorganized bureaucratic nightmare, which would have been a valid theory. But no, it was 1 worker who was sick for 2 days and it brought the whole functioning of the college down.

People really don’t understand how precarious literally everything is. So much relies on the sacrifice of exploited labor, and the precarity only reveals itself when someone in that position refuses to provide that sacrifice

Stevie the shit-stirrer.

Michelle Yeoh for the Hollywood Reporter photographed by Jingna Zhang (March 2022)