Cara brings the word this week, and it comes from a misread: she thought she saw "awakening" in one of her books and it turned out to be somebody's name in cursive. Kimberly's brain goes straight to her Star Wars sleep shirt, Darth Vader's head over the words "there has been an awakening" (but she was wrong, it was Snoke). Next they jump to: rain returning to the Pacific Northwest, a desert that stops looking like a desert for a brief window after a storm, and Kimberly's question for the week. What is it within us that is waiting for an awakening, and how often are we just waiting?

From there it goes to the body. A woman who spends a day behaving like her friend's 3-year-old and finds her nervous system loves it. The etiquette videos Cara has been seeing that read to her like the old etiquette and fan classes from centuries back: contain yourself, keep your back strong and tall, do not let your hips sway. Kimberly: "Corsets, hello!" So many things have required us to be smaller, and treating smallness as a virtue concerns her, because the people who want that space will happily take it.

Then the gods. Kimberly's problem with Zeus: in nothing she has read were the gods doing any of it for us. Cara maps the Greek pantheon onto neurochemistry ("you're an oxytocin deity") and confesses her current obsession with a local Indigenous deity whose story is told as a warning even though, as she reads it, the deity did the generous thing. Kimberly adds the Giving Tree. Cara closes with an is-it-just-me about making things up and deciding they are real, and Kimberly, of two minds, lands on the version she can fully get behind. How do you know it is a bad idea until you have some data? And a chicken threatens to join.