Men cannot be trusted and I know women too, but I believed you

It feels longer than two days since the election. Possibly this is because of the fourteen-hour migraine that started to hit me shortly after midnight on election night (I cannot claim it was the shifting barometric pressure of American bigotry; it turns out I'm allergic to Febreze) and rolled over into yesterday afternoon, during which time I did not sleep. More likely it's because there's been so much going on in the last forty-eight hours, mentally, emotionally, conversationally, because the changes in the world feel too huge and vast and all-swallowing to have happened so recently. But it's only Thursday. It's not yet Armistice Day. I still have a poppy on my coat.

We have a new stove. All four burners light without matches and it's safe to turn the oven on. We broiled chorizo verde in it for dinner and I re-baked some apples for dessert. My cousins came over with their son, the three-and-a-half-week-old Fox whose sparse, soft baby hair right now is as red as his internet namesake. Hestia stayed in the bedroom even after Rob got up from his nap, having dived under the bed the moment she heard the doorbell, but Autolycus came out and made spooked curious forays in the direction of the very small human and allowed himself to be petted by gaudior and rushthatspeaks and intermittently ran back into the kitchen. I found out that a person I had considered a friend on the internet for years killed herself because of the election results and what she feared they meant for her continued health and safety. I finished listening to a Yiddish cover of "Hallelujah" and Rob told me that Leonard Cohen has died.

People who are living, make art. Make protests, phone calls, donations, petitions, invitations, acts of kindness and defiance and protection, but also art.