Month of Joy: Signal Boost by Jen Zink
I know I’m beating a dead horse when I say this, but 2017 was a really tough year. There definitely were some amazing moments which brought me joy, including when the court granted my son his official name change and when he started his transition, when I got to share my daughter’s incredible artwork on the cover of the Robogoblin Gazette, and when my husband brought me home a beautiful flower he made for me out of molten metal. But I talk about those moments on twitter whenever they happen, so today I want to focus on Skiffy and Fanty.
Month of Joy: La Alegría del Lenguaje by Cassandra Rose Clarke
A year ago, I decided to embark on a not-exactly-new endeavor: teaching myself Spanish. I say not-exactly-new because I had attempted it before with a dubiously-acquired copy of Rosetta Stone, which I used for about a month in 2013 before giving up. My failures with Rosetta Stone hadn’t killed my desire to learn Spanish, though. Spanish is a language I grew up around without ever actually learning—I’m from South Texas and now live in Houston, so it’s been a part of the sonic and cultural landscape my entire life. However, I went a Classics route with my formal language learning in high school and college (Latin and Ancient Greek, respectively) and so Spanish was firmly lodged in a strange space of being both familiar and unknown. This frustrated me. How could I see and hear a language almost every day and not understand it?
