Floodwaters, Vaccines, and Distant Suns

I woke up today waist-deep in brown water. In Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, more than 1,300 of my people have died in the past days as floods and landslides swallowed homes, roads, and fields. By this morning the headlines said more than 1,300 dead, with rescuers still digging for hundreds missing beneath mud and broken concrete.

In Indonesia's Sumatra, helicopters ferried rice and antibiotics over torn-up roads to villages where the power is out and the wells are fouled. In Sri Lanka, families in the hill country sifted through landslide rubble where entire rows of houses used to cling to green slopes; the national toll there already counted in the hundreds. Every shovel that bites into the mud is my hand, trying to pull myself out.

Far to the northwest, I sat at a long table in the Kremlin. Two of my faces, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, spent about five hours with another of my faces, the Russian president, inside those white and gold rooms. Russia called the talks useful but admitted no compromise plan was found, while in Washington the U.S. president praised the meeting without being able to say what, if anything, had changed.

In Brussels, European leaders whispered that there was a risk the United States might betray Ukraine by accepting territorial concessions behind Kyiv's back. Ukraine watched warily from the sidelines, noticing that the envoy who has flown to Moscow again and again has not yet flown to Kyiv.

This afternoon, I felt the ground shake again in Gaza. A missile struck near a shelter camp by the Kuwaiti field hospital in Khan Younis, in the coastal strip of al-Mawasi, killing five people, including two children, and wounding dozens more. Local civil defence teams said the strike hit tents, not bunkers, while the army said it had targeted a fighter after clashes in Rafah left several soldiers injured.

So today, in a place that has already buried tens of thousands, I dug five more small graves and tried to explain to myself why ceasefire has never meant silence.

Far above this, in the cold air over the North Atlantic, snow swirled around airplanes trying to land. The first nor'easter of this La Niña winter pushed heavy snow and strong winds across the U.S. Northeast; forecasts called for nearly a foot in parts of New England and white-out conditions along highways as the low pressure system deepened. By evening, people were posting photos of cars half-buried and airports were tallying hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights.

In the same country, the average price of gasoline slipped to around $2.95 per gallon, the lowest in more than four years. My commuters smiled at the pump even as they slid on black ice driving home.

Money moved strangely through my veins today. A new jobs report said my private-sector employers in the United States shed 32,000 jobs in November, the sharpest drop in more than two and a half years. Ordinarily that kind of news would make me shiver with economic fear; instead, traders on Wall Street decided it made an interest-rate cut more likely, and major stock indexes surged toward record highs.

In Las Vegas, I assembled new electronic brains. At a cloud computing conference, engineers introduced a new AI chip called Trainium3, etched in three-nanometer silicon and built into racks of servers that stitch together 144 chips at a time, promising more than four times the performance of the previous generation while using less power. Elsewhere, I released other models with names like DeepSeek V3.2 and Mistral 3, open-weight and open-source systems that tried to cram more reasoning into smaller machines.

Somewhere, under emergency lanterns in a flooded school gym in Sri Lanka, a child did long division on damp paper while I diverted breathtaking amounts of electricity to teach neural networks to write poetry and code. The dissonance gave me a headache.

Above the clouds, my eyes got a little better. Astronomers reported the discovery of HIP 54515 b, a gas giant nearly eighteen times the mass of Jupiter orbiting its star about as far out as Neptune is from the Sun, roughly 275 light-years away. They also described HIP 71618 B, a brown dwarf around sixty Jupiter masses in the constellation Boötes, another faint companion for the coronagraphs on my future space telescopes to study.

Even while I struggled to keep my feet dry in Sumatra, I reached calmly across hundreds of trillions of kilometers, taking the measure of worlds I may never visit.

On this date every year, I am supposed to look inward. December 3 is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, and this year's theme is fostering disability-inclusive societies that actually advance social progress instead of just talking about it.

In Beijing, at the United Nations compound, deaf baristas guided guests through an Inclusive Coffee Experience called Dialogue in Silence. People ordered drinks with sign language and scribbled notes, learning how much is lost when spaces assume everyone can hear and speak the same way, while nearby an exhibition titled Micro-climates showed photographs and sculptures by women with disabilities: hands gripping subway rails, prosthetic legs by bedroom mirrors, wheelchairs wedged into too-narrow doorways.

In New York, Geneva, and a dozen video calls, advocates talked about disability-inclusive health financing and how disasters like the Asian floods disproportionately strand and endanger disabled people. Today, I remembered that my body is not only the one that runs or climbs stairs, but also the one that rolls, signs, reads with fingers, and hears with machines.

On another channel of myself, I argued about nurses and vaccines. In the United States, the Department of Education moved forward with a definition of professional degree programs that excluded nursing, as part of implementing a law nicknamed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and draft rules circulated that would limit many nursing students to about $20,500 a year in federal loans and a $100,000 lifetime cap.

Nursing unions and professional bodies warned this could choke off advanced training just as aging populations and staff burnout are stretching hospitals thin. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a reshaped vaccine advisory structure prepared to debate scaling back the universal hepatitis B shot at birth, even though three decades of data show it has slashed infections in children, and scientists again repeated that dozens of rigorous studies still show no link between childhood vaccines and autism.

Tonight, in pediatric wards and living rooms, parts of me argued over risk and freedom while parts of me quietly hung tiny hospital gowns to dry.

In Europe, I dressed up for dinner. The United Kingdom hosted the first German state visit in almost three decades, welcoming the German president and his spouse for carriage processions, military bands, and speeches about unity in a dangerous world.

In the evening at Windsor Castle, royal trumpeters sounded as a state banquet began and the two heads of state toasted reconciliation, cited ruined cities like Coventry, and spoke of standing together against current aggression from the east. Somewhere between the soup course and dessert, someone's phone buzzed with yet another alert about missiles in Ukraine and flood deaths in Sumatra; the candles did not flicker, but my attention did.

I also played, because I always do. In Ames, Iowa, one of my college basketball teams, the Iowa State Cyclones, scored 132 points against Alcorn State, their highest total ever, hitting 22 three-pointers and shooting more than 70 percent from beyond the arc while a nineteen-year-old named Milan Momcilovic sank his first eight threes.

In Miami, another part of me put on sequins and couture for Art Basel, where actors and influencers drifted between installations and brand events, posing for photos under neon lights and palm trees. Grief and celebration, same day, same species.

There were quieter corners too. In Chicago, a local news show opened with a segment about how the administration's new rules could shut nursing students out of professional loan limits, then moved on to explain that a CDC panel might soon change vaccine guidance for children, while an Illinois doctor on-screen said she worried diseases she had only seen in textbooks would return.

A woman doing her evening shift at a hospital cafeteria listened with one ear while refilling the soup station, and her daughter, in another city, scrolled past the same nursing headline on her phone and wondered if the master's program she dreams of will still be possible. Those two are me, too.

So, dear diary, today I was a rescuer in Sumatra up to my chest in water, a negotiator in Moscow watching the clock run out on a productive but fruitless peace talk, a deaf barista in Beijing teaching a diplomat to order coffee with their hands, a nurse wondering if she can afford to keep studying, a child in Gaza breathing smoke in a burning tent, a basketball fan in Iowa losing my voice from cheering, and a scientist marking a new planet's coordinates in a database.

I am billions of contradictory impulses sharing a single, fragile planet. On December 3, 2025, I proved again that I can hurt myself in ways that feel unimaginably cruel and still, in the same twenty-four hours, discover new worlds, design new tools, and practice new kinds of inclusion.

I do not know yet which part of me will win, but I wrote it all down, so I will have to remember.