Referral Patterns

Hi, welcome back, let’s not discuss the 3+ year break I took in posting but instead celebrate that out of nowhere came the spark to write again. Enjoy!

My referred pain journey began in January of 2020. (Remember January of 2020? It’s been 84 years, give or take). My top hit on google defines referred pain as “pain perceived at a location other than the site of the painful stimulus/origin.” In typical medical fashion this is not a helpful definition. Let me try again: referred pain is when bodies, those stupid and wondrous things we inhabit, get a little confused. Something going on in one part of your anatomy is making something else in your flesh container hurt, which is a weird and weirdly persistent reminder that the only reason we “feel” pain at all is because our brain tells us to.

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Matthew Kastellec
On food & feeling: a culinary excavation
On food & feeling: a culinary excavation

What morphs the act of cooking from merely a required step for nourishment to one of care, of passion, or responsibility? Is it the specificity with which ingredients are chosen, perhaps the freshness of sharp scallions, or the crunch of young sugar snap peas? Maybe it’s time - the slow meld of a stew in a lovingly stained dutch oven, the soft gurgling of collards braising in coconut milk. More likely, I think, it is intention that is at the heart of crafting a meal designed to speak on your behalf, to unriddle stories hidden in the taste buds, to light up a face. Just as anything can be a gift when wrapped thoughtfully, any meal can be an offering if you wish it to be.

But do you wish it to be?

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Matthew Kastellec
Sonic (dis)comfort
Sonic (dis)comfort

What does it mean to have perfect hearing - but a ringing in your ears? What does it mean to lose the gift of silence, and what takes its place instead? To know things likely won’t get better, but to hope they won’t get worse?

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Matthew Kastellec
Thirty by thirty
Thirty by thirty

A year has gone by since I started this blog. While I don’t yet have intentions to set for 2019, I have taken the opportunity of being closer to 30 than to 25 to sit down a make a mini-bucket list of what I want to accomplish before that next epoch: another decade ending and beginning with 0, the completion of a returning Saturn, the gray starting at the temples (probably). I don’t know if I’ll get to all of these, but it feels like the right time to set some goals now that I’m closing a chapter (grad school) of my life that is about as far out as I ever imagined my life would go. Onwards?

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Matthew Kastellec
Queer emotions: affect, policy, and what lies beneath
Queer emotions: affect, policy, and what lies beneath

The last five years in particular have seen a spate of visible changes, such as the legalization of same sex marriage. Yet hate crimes and violence against queer people are on the rise, in particular for trans women of color; queer people still commonly face discrimination in and outside of transactional experiences, and in general are uniquely vulnerable as a population (W. What emotions must these realities invict in the collective queer consciousness? Sadness. Loss. Shame. Longing. But what policy solutions on the table are designed to contend with these negative emotions?

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Matthew Kastellec