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Gradually, then suddenly

12/9/2021

In This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz writes, "As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end."

I can't help but think about how it all started. Seeing the position. Applying, interviewing. Picturing myself walking with purpose (and a perfect silk press, purr) through hallowed halls. A seat at the table just for me. Creating opportunities for others. Doing well, while doing good.

My dream came true. I was doing the work! People wiser than me warned me not to get too wrapped up in any job or title, that politics devours normal people. I took the advice to heart. Still, I never tired of saying, "Hi! I'm Risikat Adesaogun, Press Secretary and Deputy Communications Director for Minnesota Secretary of State, Steve Simon." It was a mouthful. A perfect, clout-laden mouthful. I called, people answered. Ideas became action. I couldn't wait to wake up and do meaningful work. As this chapter comes to a close, my world feels quiet.

How can I begin to make sense of these chaotic, rewarding, grueling years? I'm certain my thoughts will materialize into something more coherent later on. All I have now is gratitude.

Next for me is heading up the Communications department at the City of Brooklyn Park, which happens to be my hometown. My mind is somewhere in the space between excitement and terror. The same mix of emotions I had almost exactly two years ago. I want to do well. I want to do good.

One of my ballet teachers recently described an elegant way of spurring us dancers to action before going on stage. The chant we whisper-scream, an urgent prayer for excellence: Don't fuck up! Don't fuck up! Don't fuck up!

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Risikat reads and reads and reads

4/17/2021

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The pandemic rages on, the country feels upside down, and I am antsier than ever for things to be different. What's the remedy to this nervous energy? Books, of course! Here are some of my recent faves:

The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo

The three words that came to mind as I read this book: Symbolic, nascent, lyrical. It reminded me of Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat's work, but with a youthful spin.

"I have no more poems. My mind blanks. A roar tears from my mouth. 'Burn it! Burn it. This is where the poems are,' I say, thumping a fist against my chest. 'Will you burn me? Will you burn me, too? You would burn me, wouldn't you, if you could?'"

Slapstick or Lonesome No More! by Kurt Vonnegut

This was one of my favorite books as a teenager and boy, does it still hold up! Read this if you enjoy sardonic sci-fi with a hefty dose of philosophical inquiry.

"The blacksmith was told that 'Sooners' were human beings, too, no better or worse than 'Hoosiers', who were people from Indiana. And the old man who had moved that I be allowed to speak later on got up and said this: "Young man, you're no better than the Albania Influenza or The Green Death, if you can kill for joy'.

I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to. Bully for them!"

Bonjour, Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

This little book was seen as provocative and maybe even a little obscene when it came out in the 50's. I have to agree. It's a tart little masterpiece!

"I felt proud of myself: I had sized up Elsa, found her weak spot, and carefully aimed my words. For the first time in my life I had known the intense pleasure of analyzing another person, manipulating that person toward my own ends. It was a new experience; in the past I had always been too impulsive, and whenever I had come close to understanding someone, it had been pure accident. Now I had caught a sudden glimpse of the marvelous mechanism of human reflexes, and the power that lies in the spoken word. I felt sorry that I had come to it through lies."

Becoming, by Michelle Obama

I listened to this on Audiobook while baking endless loaves of bread. Hearing Michelle Obama's story in her own words (and voice!) made things come alive in the best way.

"Together, the three of them (dubbed by my larger team "The Trifecta") gave me the confidence I needed to step out in public each day, all of us knowing that a slipup would lead to a flurry of ridicule and nasty comments. I never expected to be someone who hired others to maintain my image, and at first the idea was discomfiting. But I quickly found out a truth that no one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life - politicians, celebrities, you name it - has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It's all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard."

Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi

This book is superb! It should be made into a movie. The action, world-building, and suspense were mesmerizing.

"Afraid. I am always afraid. It's a truth I locked away years ago, a fact I fought hard to overcome. Because when it hits, I'm paralyzed. I can't breathe. I can't talk. All at once, I crumple to the ground, clasping my palm over my mouth to stifle the sobs. It doesn't matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields. They will always hate me in this world. I will always be afraid."

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A day in the life: Pandemic edition

12/21/2020

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My perfect first year as a Press Secretary was waylaid by that raggedy, no-good COVID-19. Instead of traipsing through the hallways of the Capitol like I was in one of Shonda Rhimes' TV masterpieces, I spent the better part of the year padding softly around my house in leggings and pug slippers. It isn't what I expected, but things have been interesting all the same.

Picture this: You're sleeping the blissful, deep sleep known only to single child-free pug owners. Maya is lightly snoring in bed near your feet. Your satin bonnet is firmly in place protecting your tresses, and you enjoy dreams of kneading dough for the perfect brioche buns. All is right with the world until...

*buzz buzz*

You answer the phone with your best not-sleepy voice: "Hi, this is Risikat!" Bleary-eyed, you sit up. You're on the record and a reporter is peppering you with a stream of questions. Thinking on your feet, you scroll through Twitter to see what's happened in the past six hours, promising to get back to the reporter as soon as you can.

With that, your day has begun.

7:45 a.m. Now that you're fully awake, you run through your morning routine: First, you check your Google Alerts for any sign of you, your boss, or the Office being mentioned in the media. Next, you skim the front pages of several print and digital news outlets. Finally, you turn your attention to social media, scrolling through your social listening tools to see what the ~hot goss~ is. Or something. On ambitious mornings, you turn on the local TV news stations and stream political talk radio. But mostly you enjoy the quiet.

8:30 a.m. Ahh! The reporters are ramping up. Your phone buzzes with calls and texts, and you even spot a message or two on your Twitter account. You quickly triage them. Who needs an answer right this moment? Who can wait? Has anyone yelled at you yet?

9:00 a.m. Time for the morning check-in call with your Communications Director! You discuss the news of the day and the dilemma of the hour, ensuring you're both on the same page. Something Big may be happening this week but we don't know what, so we need to be ready.

9:30 a.m. Draft messaging for your boss, outlining three possible scenarios. If X, consider saying this. If Y, consider saying that. If Z, say this, then that, then another thing to drive the point home.

10:00 a.m. Oh, shoot! Forgot to eat breakfast. Need food. Practice delivering talking points for the different scenarios while your oatmeal cooks. First, in your normal voice. Then, in what you imagine your boss' voice might sound like, complete with the deliberate crisp pauses and hand gestures that only seasoned lawyers seem to employ. Then, because you're crazy, you practice rap lyrics in your boss' voice, too. You laugh hysterically, scaring your pug. Ope! Oatmeal's done!

10:30 a.m. You shop the key messaging draft around to your colleagues. You lay out the scenarios, frantically taking notes as senior staff members duke it out. "I think we should tone down this part," says one person. "I actually think we need to punch it up!" says another. "Hmm, I think we need to be prepared to amp things up in case of Scenario 1, but dial back in case of Scenario 2", says another. Your notes are a mess of diagrams, keywords, and if/then musings. You send IMs to your team's subject matter experts to make sure you have the facts straight.

11:30 a.m. While you were talking with your team, you missed several more calls from reporters - two of whom work for national outlets. You still have to get back to a few people from earlier. You DM the Gen Z reporter on Twitter, text the millennial reporters, call the boomers, and forget to return calls from the Gen X journos until the end of the day. (Kidding!)

1:00 p.m. It is now much later. How?! Some New Big Thing has happened and Twitter is exploding. Your boss' Executive Aide rallies the team and everyone is in problem-solving mode. "Oh no, hungry again!" You mute your line while you make a sandwich, trying to make sense of the conversation happening on speakerphone. Mid-bite, you hear your name. Rushing to unmute, you chirp, "Yes, I'm here!" A press release must go out. You have 15 minutes.

1:01 p.m. Your friends' group chat has been heating up - your phone pings every few seconds as your seven besties swap memes in rapid succession. You can't think! Disoriented, you feel the urge to scream. You take a deep breath, silence your phone, and begin typing. Five minutes later, you call your Communications Director. "How does this sound?" You both make tweaks to the messaging before running it to the next layer of people. More edits. And more, still. Finally, a stamp of approval from your boss. "Nice work, Risikat!" Win!

1:30 p.m. You send out the press release. Like clockwork, a reporter screenshots the release and tweets it out 10 seconds later. You field press calls while simultaneously updating the website and consulting with your boss about the ongoing Twitter discourse. All the while, your sandwich is staring you down, daring you to take another bite.

2:00 p.m. Your boss' Executive Aide calls you. The five interviews you'd lined up all need to shift by 15 minutes. Why?! You immediately begin texting producers, negotiating time. The TV stations are chill, the live radio producers are stressed, and the print reporters fall somewhere in the middle.

2:10 p.m. You consult with your boss, reviewing the brief you've drafted and offering up facts and figures to help contextualize the talking points.

3:00 p.m. You've sat in on most of the interviews, noting the questions that came up and promising to provide additional information requested by reporters. "In the next 30 minutes? Sure thing!" You check Twitter again before beginning to track down information. Upon hearing a yes or no question, your favorite colleague takes you through the past 150 years of the democratic process. You're intrigued but in a hurry. Delicately, you pull out the nuggets you need.

4:00 p.m. Somehow you've missed even more reporter calls. Thankfully, most have asked variations of the same question so you make quick work of developing one robust response and getting it to everyone.

4:30 p.m. The first of the digital stories has hit the internet. Oh no! There's an error. Anxious, you call the reporter. They have to connect with their editor to approve the necessary adjustments, then the web team has to execute. You peek at the story's comment section and worry that readers are already forming incorrect conclusions. It's tense. Thankfully, Maya is snoring loudly enough that the reporter can hear her through the phone. You both laugh and you feel your heart rate return to normal.

5:00 p.m. Damn - do people really need to eat this frequently?! Hungry again! You dump some veggies on a plate and take a quick walk around the block with your pug. She's been a trooper, napping next to you all day. More e-mails - this time, from internal folks on the team. "How should we answer this constituent question?" You draft a quick plain-language explanation for their use.

6:00 p.m. Twitter finally seems to be dying down - just in time for the evening news! You tune in, listening to the interviews of the day. You e-mail producers asking for links to share. Graciously, they oblige. You text your boss a link to the best interview - "This would be great to tweet out!" You turn your attention back to the original Big Thing you were preparing for earlier in the day. Maybe it'll happen tomorrow or the next day. Depends on the news cycle. You type.

7:00 p.m. You have approximately 30 browser tabs open - bookmarked statutes, random web content, news stories, a picture of a pug in a burrito costume. You then look to your desktop - a mess! Several open Word docs with meeting notes, a half-finished PowerPoint, and spreadsheets dying to be updated. Grimacing, you look to your Real desktop. Bon Sang! Post-it notes as far as the eye can see! You stack them up for later review. Whew. All clean. Sort of.

7:30 p.m. Another reporter is calling. Instinctively, you reach for the phone, but fall short. You watch it as it buzzes. That's a call for tomorrow. You praise your ironclad boundaries.

7:35 p.m. Right before you shut down your laptop, an e-mail comes through. "We need to check in on that long-term project you've been working on - is tomorrow morning good for you?" You reply: "That works just fine!" You open the spreadsheets and get typing.

11:30 p.m. You've eaten, exercised, showered, spent quality time with your pug, video chatted with friends, started a list of puns you'd like to incorporate into a future speech, and checked Twitter one last time before drifting to sleep, eager for tomorrow's call buzzing you into action once more.

It is grueling, frenetic, extraordinary.
And you love it.

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Risikat's top reads: 2020

12/15/2020

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Reading for pleasure during a high-stakes election year is nearly impossible! However, despite work weeks that sometimes claimed nearly 100 percent of my waking hours, I happily worked my way through 18 books. Here are my top 8 picks for the year:

The Terrible, by Yrsa Daley-Ward
This memoir is best devoured in one sitting. It's familiar, halting, and a perfect read for when you want to feel something.

"You love that boy, do you? Do you? Granddad was shouting. "Hear me, and hear me well. Don't you ever. In this life. Push yourself up on a boy. Don't you ever write a note like that again...to anyone! You hear me?" Grandma was softer, but only a little. "If a boy sees you and likes you, he will tell you. Don't you ever. In this life. Approach men. It is not nice, it is not good, and they will not thank you for it. A man gets to see what he likes and asks for it. That's the way it goes."

The Night Diary, by Veera Hiranandani
Read this if, like me, India's Partition wasn't covered in your education and you want a starting point to make sense of things. It is deliberate, velvety storytelling.

"At the end. the character always dies. We try to make the death worse every time. The worse the death, the funnier we find the story. We try to laugh quietly, which makes it even funnier. We would have never made up stories like this before. And we would've never found them funny. Amil says it's because nothing's real right now. I know what he means."

The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, by Andrew McCabe
This memoir dives deep into what happened immediately before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. McCabe's insider perspective is at once upsetting and motivating. The stories alone are worth the price of admission.

"All the way to sentencing. In 1997, he refused to admit any guilt for anything. "I am not in a church," he told the judge. I have no need to make a confession."

That Mad Ache, by François Sagan
If the French had reality television in the 1960's, the characters in this book would become fast favorites. This indulgent, opulent - and perhaps even a bit shameless piece of art is why I keep returning to Sagan.

"All day long he kept on thinking. "This is crazy. Sooner or later, every woman goes through this - they all have babies, they all have money problems - that's just life. She's got to understand this. All it is is selfishness on her part. But then each time he looked at her again, saw that bright face, carefree and unreflective, he suddenly started feeling that all of this wasn't some shameful defect in her character but actually a deep and hidden animal power in her which deflected her from engagement with life's most natural flow. And he couldn't keep himself from feeling a curious kind of respect for the very thing that, only ten minutes earlier, he had found contemptible."

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi
I'm still not sure how I feel about contemporary gothic literature, but these short stories are intriguing. They were playful and mystical, if a bit unsettling.

"MURDER? IMPOSSIBLE. Not Safiye. Lucy walked backward until she found a wall to stand behind her. She rested until she was able to walk to the train station, where she bought train tickets and a newspaper of which she read a single page as she waited for the train to come. She would go where the map in her purse told her to go, she would find Safiye, Safiye would explain and they would laugh. They'd have to leave the continent, of course. They might even have to earn their livings honestly like Safiye wanted, but please, please please please."

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden
I was in seventh grade the first time I heard about concentration camps in North Korea. Years later, the books and articles and podcast episodes about the atrocities are plentiful. How is it that we all know about these places and have for years, but a global intervention seems out of reach? I listened to this on audiobook and immediately wished I hadn't. Sobering, meticulous, and brief.

"He had been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he was beaten, he deserved it - because of the treasonous blood he had inherited from his parents. The girl was no different. Shin thought her punishment was just and fair, and he never became angry with his teacher for killing her. He believed his classmates felt the same way."

Trenton Makes, by Tadzio Koelb
This is the first book I've read with a transgender protagonist. Set in 1946, it is gritty, startling, and excellent.

"Art felt his family well up within him, wanting desperately to be spoken. Jacks was the only person he had seen since the argument who knew his father, who knew what it meant to be cowed by him and yet for some reason hopeful of the mystical and unknown blessing that was his approval. In that way, it occurred to him now, they were more like brothers, and for a moment he felt almost desperate to talk about the thing they shared, especially when Jacks said suddenly with an attempt at indifference that was as close as he ever came to guile, "So how's your pop? Is he bald like me yet?"

Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I read these striking short stories in a bewildered haze. The writing is so good I couldn't read it all at once. This is a book that demands your full commitment.

"When I realized I was faster and stronger, at first I didn't know what to do. I thought that maybe I was supposed to be on top now. I thought I was getting rewarded. And so I did what I wanted. Before the Flash, Carl was not nice to me. He liked to call me "nappy-headed bitch" or "dumb-ass cunt." He liked to make me cry back when we still had school. Then, when my mother left us, when I saw him, he said, "Guess your mother didn't want to be alive, knowing she made you." That, well, I know he regrets saying that. Because after the Flash, once I realized what I could do, I hunted him. He was the first person I ever killed. He was the first person I'd kill every day. The hurt I've pulled out of that boy could fill the universe twice over."

Which books topped your reading list in 2020?

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Top reads in 2022

Gradually, then suddenly

Risikat reads and reads and reads

A day in the life: Pandemic edition

Risikat's top reads: 2020

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Top reads in 2022

Gradually, then suddenly

Risikat reads and reads and reads

A day in the life: Pandemic edition

Risikat's top reads: 2020

​RISIKAT'S THOUGHTS

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Categories

RISIKAT'S THOUGHTS