Honoring Empathy

Responding to the moment with a comic and ice cream

It is not a fun time to be a human with empathy and independent thought right now, while also having to pay bills.

It feels so icky and uncomfortable in my body to mourn the loss of a misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, aggravator and agitator, who was also a father of two young daughters.

Charlie Kirk rebuked empathy as a "new age, made-up term.” Yet I feel empathy for his family who now misses him greatly, and will continue to discover new ways of missing him for years to come. I know this from experience.

Kirk touted deaths from gun violence as a "prudent and necessary cost" of the second amendment. He died from the very thing he argued for, by someone who thought he wasn’t fighting hard enough for conservatives and white people. (What kind of fresh hell is that?)

I don't at all mourn the loss of what Kirk stood for or what he promoted, but my heart feels pain for the little girls who don’t know that their dad was mistaken in his hateful rhetoric. All they know is that he’s no longer there to tuck them in at night.

And so my insides feel shitty. That’s all there is to it.

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These days are a strange dance of trying to stay informed and trying to stay sane. Personally, I have required lots of little treats to even attempt to manage.

Enter…the $10 pint of ice cream. Spending that much on a single pint of ice cream is typically not my idea of a good buy...but I have found an exception in these unprecedented, dumpster-fire times.

There is an awesome little Italian market in Des Moines where I happened upon a pint of Vero Gelato, Bacetto (Chocolate Hazelnut) sitting in the freezer, beckoning. And reader, it was worth every cent.

The best thing to read while enjoying said gelato? Honestly, anything that is not doom-scrolling is A-OK. But I particularly recommend Receipts from the Bookshop by Katie Clapham. Her Friday updates are often highlights of my week.