Resilience in Story and Struggle: Choosing Truth, Care, and Community

In Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor, when Ankara enters Cross River City they hear no signals indicating automation has survived these parts. Only a Hume might be intrigued by such a small, crumbling town. A whole forest of genetically engineered trees and plants makes it untouchable to Ghosts.

Frustrated that no one will listen to their concerns, they decide to shift gears and focus on the problem right in front of them. Cross River City is actually the biggest Hume city in the world. When Anjeli comes, Ankara doesn’t ask her what the Nobodies are doing to prepare for war.

Zelu’s uncle asks her if she was given her “abominable legs” because of her books. Her auntie snaps at him, inplying that he himself wouldn’t stay crippled if mechanical legs was an option. When Zelu starts to tell her auntie that she and the ones defending Zelu get it wrong, she is interrupted by her uncle who speaks over her, saying she looks strange. Staring at her uncle, she tells him, “I’m right here, man.”

Eventually,  Zelu’s space mission is in less than a month and her family has no idea. If Uza was here, she’d record the entire conversation and post it on the family’s WhatsApp. When Uza opens the door, Zelu asks her where her car is, forcing a smile.

In H.R.1, Congress gutted Medicaid to give ICE billions more to terrorize our communities and detain families. Medicaid is critical resource for people, especially children and people with disabilities, across the country. Medicaid is a lynchpin that helps ensure people have the right to live in their own home. Denial of of these supports and care will strip them of their liberty and force them to live in dehumanizing institutions.

As a rabbi and public school parent, plaintiff Rabbi Mara Nathan welcomes the preliminary injunction ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery, who held that Texas Senate Bill 10, due to take effect on September 1, likely violates both the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. He stated, “[T]he displays [of the Ten Commandments in every classroom] are likely to pressure the child-Plaintiffs into religious observance, meditation on, veneration, and adoption of the State’s favored religious scripture, and into suppressing expression of their own religious or nonreligious backgrounds and beliefs while at school.”

Rabbi Mara Nathan added, “Children’s religious beliefs should be instilled by parents and faith communities, not politicians and public schools.”

In Alchemy and a Cup of Tea, by Rebecca Thorne, Kianthe taps a question through their moonstones asking Reyna if she is hurt. She replies with the code that they have only needed once before: kidnapped. Kianthe messages back No shit.

When Reyna steps into an inn’s tavern while visiting a winter-themed city, Nolan directs her to a specific location. Reyna insists that any table is fine. Nolan nods at a figure who had insisted they join his table, who is sitting alone in one of the inn’s turrets.

Coming to terms with the increasing tourism after returning to Tea and Tomes, warm chatter settles over a packed barn like a blanket. Referring to the sign outside which reads, “Grand Tea-Opening,” Kianthe argues for the cleverness of her pun, “Like a reopening, but better!” Reyna has to remind her that they were never technically closed in the first place.

Reyna and Feo do afternoon tea on occassion. Many of the hundreds of applicants for the Academy of Alchemical Arts are Queendom citizens. On one such occasion, one such Queendom alchemist announces visitors to the Alchemicor: Councilmember Serina, and her wife, Diarn Bobbie.

When the Knot for Sail is all ready for a trip up the river, Squirrel happily strolls by the crew scurrying around the deck. Serina stands in the doorway of the mansion and watches Bobbie on the patio for a moment. Giddiness and fear sweep through her.

As they start down the hillside, an urgent message arrives for Serina from Wellia. The council has declared an urgent meeting to discuss Shepara’s contribution to the relief efforts for the tropical storm that plowed into Jallin, Mercon, and Leonal. Bobbie tells Serina that it sounds important.

When Serina tries to claim that they don’t need her, sure that they’ll “enact whatever they need,” Bobbie cuts her off, telling her “not whatever they need. She informs her that she needs to stand up for the western portion of Sheppara, and make sure they don’t offer up too much of their food.

In The Woods All Black, by Lee Mandelo, the last vestiges of Leslie’s metropolitan life slough away. Survival is simpler when he empties his body of contrary desires and replaces them with tasks. As the night encroaches, Leslie asks, “How much further?”

My home looked like it got hit by a tempest, but not the cleaning kind—the other kind. The devastation in its wake was a piled up in the kitchen and the living room, large cardboard boxes, and two large portable ice chests blocking the front door. I just emptied the remaining ice cold drinks in those chests. One had sodas, and the other had bottles of water. My chore list went mostly untouched for a week. Several of the plants are drowsy, and the paradise trees are ecstatically taking over the yard, and threatening my driveway.

Last Thursday, I gave in to the pain in my lower abdominal area that was making it increasingly difficult to walk, and went to urgent care. There, the doctor diagnosed the abscess, and asked if I wanted it to be drained. I interrupted him before he could provide another option, and said unequically yes.

The four shots of lidocaine to numb up the area delivered incrediby sharp pain each. Just about the time my endorphins finally woke up and started kicking in, the area began to numb. Once it was it numbed, the doctor did a quick incision to drain the pus, install a wick, and then rapidly leaving the room while the assistant covered up the wound. When he returned, he told me that he had to change his shirt, because their was a lot more blood and pus than he expected. He then put in a prescription for sulfa-based antibiotics.

The abscess and the antibiotics continued to drain me for the next day, my body needed a large amount of sleep to contine. As the anesthetic wore off, I felt a pin prick pain returning where the incision was. Thich Nat Hanh teaches that suffering is greater when we attempt to ignore it, whether it is physical or mental. Fighting pain only intensifies the suffering. So I opened my mind to fully embrace the remnant, and as I did so the needle feeling would resolve to nothing. A continued to use this practice throught the next few day.

I was resolved to deliver the drinks for Dem Bones on Sunday, the annual potluck by the Utah Stonewall Dems. I caculated that I needed four dozen 12-oz cans of soft drinks, and the same number of bottles of water. I ordered large portable igloo ice chests delivered the same day on Saturday, and on Sunday stopped by the store to get the sodas, water, and ice to fill the two ice chests, making them incredibly heavy.

The event went off pretty well. I was struggling with the side effects of the antibiotics, which had caused my skin to flush in a kind of hot flash, and felt my capacity for energy storage was less than usual, exhausting easily and frequently. The good news is that it was also the first day of three days of rain, helping to cool the ambient temperature.

As we ate and communed, I introduced our sponsors, candidates, and elected officials to speak. We endorsed Chris Wharton for Salt Lake City Council, and Dustin Gettel for Midvale Mayor, two openly gay elected officials in the state of Utah. Both gentlemen work hard to make sure our LGBTQ+ community is heard and served. In addition, as we were wrapping up, I discovered that we had a significant number of book donations, which I am looking forward to donating to the VOA Homeless Youth Resource Center.

As I write this, I have finished the last of my antibiotics, and am feeling a lot better. A friend has invited me to a Carpenters concert tonight, and that brought back memories of the shocking news of Karen Carpenter passing away so suddenly. I love the Carpenters' music, and I also think of The Captain and Tenille, and miss those days. Thankfully, I have Alexa to play the music for me.

My work in leveraging generative AI continues at my company. I found an interesting sort of vibe coding and am amazed at how retrospective interactions can work with the agents, now that they longer term sessions. When it generated wrong advice, I can get it to help me help it.

As an example, I opened up a conversation with one of our agents that had responded that "Concealed Damage" was not a valid claim type for Central Transport. So I went into analysis mode.

I first asked the agent what the valid types were. It said they could be just about anything. Intrigued, I asked it to give specific examples. Interestingly enough, it didn't provide any. Then I told it the scenario that happened, to which it replied that I needed to use "Damage" and then provided the link to our knowledge base. When I told it that there were no instructions to validate the content of the fields, only their presence, it spun for a while and apologized saying I was right, and that it needed to only verify that they existed. I finally asked it, "What can do to make you don't do this again?", the agent churned again for awhile and provided specific changes that I should make to the agent instruction prompt.

This is the first time I have asked an agent to provide a fix for itself. Usually, I have been going to another agent technology, like Github Copilot backed by ChatGPT 4, providing the prompt text, and explaining the problem to make the fix. The results have usually been pretty successful. Considering I am refactoring the validation agent to use a python lambda function instead of an LLM for field-level vaildation, I saved the change, but did not implement it.

Anticipating what would probably happen, I asked Alexa, "What is the appropriate velocity to approach a terminal?" She happily responded with an explanation of terminal velocity, which is the maximum speed a falling object can descend through the Earth's atmosphere, which for a well-trained sky diver is close to 400 mph, a bit fast to approach a terminal.

Alexa got this wrong because it relies on semantics based on positional context. LLMs train on straight text without a syntactical parsing. So it doesn't recognized terminal as a noun instead of as an adjective when placed near the term velocity. This just proves that generative AI is not quite ready for autonomous vehicles, when a slight turn of the phrase can have devastating effects.

What shines through in all of this is resilience—the human (and sometimes not-so-human) capacity to endure, adapt, and keep creating meaning even in the midst of struggle, uncertainty, and pain. Whether it’s Zelu standing firm against voices that try to diminish her, Serina being called to stand up for her people, or the quiet lesson of accepting pain instead of fighting it, we’re reminded that strength often shows up in the smallest choices. Just as stories weave futures where resistance and care reshape entire worlds, our own choices—showing up for community, protecting each other’s dignity, and speaking truth even when ignored—can do the same. The call is simple yet profound: don’t wait for the world to be ready. Live your truth, defend your people, and help create the future where all of us can thrive.