A million and a half people on the verge of starving and I wonder how is being on the verge of starvation different from starving itself?

Last night I made pasta. Defrosted sausages and heated them in a pot of jarred red sauce. A husband-away meal. Plated it up. Ate only a few bites, leaving enough to save for today. Too much to give the dog in other words, the dog who I guess is better fed than a million or more people in Gaza.

My husband would’ve eaten the pasta and sausage with gusto and I suddenly wonder if his healthy appetite and omnivorous palate have given me an inflated sense of myself as a cook.

Tortellini, the name, was inspired by the belly button of Venus, did you know? So said one clue in one Sunday puzzle or other.

Many friends recently cancelled their subscriptions to the NYTimes to protest ongoing failures in reporting — the relentless old Joe coverage based on a shitty poll that the Times themselves conducted being the final straw.

That’s why I did my Wordle and Connections this morning in a fugue of guilt. Why let principles interfere with enjoyable, habitual puzzle-solving though? I have so little else I tell myself when really I have so much. A full enough stomach to turn my nose up at a perfectly respectable bowl of pasta, for starters. A dog who loves me. Closets full of warm clothing which I still need but look forward to not needing in a matter of weeks.

I have enough long-sleeve shirts to give four or five away because I don’t like the necklines or the color, one a dusty blue that I never want to put on. I can order gum arabic without a second thought and plan to devote two solid morning to making ink out of wasp galls discovered out back, ink that I don’t even know what I’ll do with.

I can use expensive sake to make risotto because there’s no Chardonnay in the house and I live in a house where these usually is Chardonnay somewhere — in the fridge upstairs, or the fridge downstairs, or resting in the mini-wine rack. You heard that, didn’t you? The part about having two fridges?

I hope there are a succession of weeks where I can wear a long-sleeve shirt, one with a neck-line I like of course, and a light cardigan, weeks when I can leave the windows gaping open with maybe a fan or two running, before the stultifying heat arrives.

The stultifying heat used to limit itself to a string of days in late July or mid-August. You could certainly get by without AC. But now some years the heat arrives before I’ve even gotten all the storm windows raised, dropping like a wet blanket on the landscape, making gardening or walking a chore and forcing us to close our windows. All of them.

I am so tired these days. I try not to say that even to myself but there I am mid-afternoon frequently of late saying not out loud but emphatically to myself, I’m exhausted.

How many years have we been doing this, a fellow traveler asks. It’s creeping up on a decade. The frothy ribbons of fear, the grunge of despair, the hyper vigilance have long since taken up residence and gotten to know each other. They don’t care if the windows are open or closed as long as the internet and cable are functioning.

Yesterday I brought that sake-infused risotto to a friend — she is grieving a sister who died and died suddenly due to medical neglect and/or outright error — and I forgot my phone, the phone with the credit card wallet. It felt weird. Like having sex without protection or entering a party where you can’t remember the name of the host.

I’d intended to stop and get flowers and a sweet bite, but I could only scrounge up nine dollars — eight from the eyeglass drop down compartment in the car and one from the treat pocket in my hobo bag. So I only bought flowers.

Counting out those bills felt so strange, almost awkward and to realize that was to realize how in between I am, for I also find it strange to call up my square code and scan it — where? where do I scan it? — to get my Prime benefit, generally something like $1.89 off the total.

Amazon owning WholeFoods, Facebook catering ads to conversations (not even KEYSTROKES), Facebook owning Instagram, the hideous helmsmanship of a racist, immigrant billionaire over on Twitter or X, formerly known as Twitter (— imagine being such a dick that you force people all over the world to utter or print those extra words over and over — X, formerly known as Twitter), what a conflagration!

Such hideous monopolies and intrusions make it hard to offer more than a shrug at TikTok and the idea of an adversarial superpower harvesting data from our people. I mean it’s not like Amazon or Facebook are exactly on our sides, are they?

I know my kids are smart enough to not to input phone numbers, addresses, birth dates — I hope.

On TikTok, I have yet to get past the Chinese hip hop dancers and the comical wombats at feeding hour, so it astonished me to learn yesterday that some huge number of people rely on the platform for their news. All of their news.

I started with starving Palestinians and so perhaps I ought to come back to them. Good gracious, I want to say, fuck the pier Joe, just cut Netanyahu off!

Can you imagine if Biden lost to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who needs to return to power to avoid going to jail because he couldn’t say no to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who has to hold onto power to avoid going to jail? No wonder I’m tired.

My old habits of outrage will not get going these days. I hardly recognize myself sheathed in a passive silence. But to support one feels like condemnation of the other — a regular funhouse mirror tunnel of allegiances. And to protest the killing, the genocide, too much is to risk everything here. I am committed — committed — to re-electing the guy with a brain and a moral compass.

It was so easy to stick a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn. Give to the good causes. Take history on. Our history. American history.

But it was so complicated to take down, after a horrid and violently brutal few weeks of IDF retaliation, my I STAND WITH ISRAEL sign.

And then, a small defeated part of me wonders if perhaps in fact I know as little about the fight for racial justice as I do about the Middle East. Is that possible?

And, what cost my silence?