Is the lesson that I bragged to soon? Bragged at all? Will Nu be able to get past this? Will I? UGH. I feel so helpless watching this child squander so many chances.
Pic is to remind myself of a less complicated, cuddlier time...
Is the lesson that I bragged to soon? Bragged at all? Will Nu be able to get past this? Will I? UGH. I feel so helpless watching this child squander so many chances.
Pic is to remind myself of a less complicated, cuddlier time...
Lots of catching up on work with the new issue of Jaggery, Canvas, grading and class prep. Also, Feminist Bookclub meeting today--we read Ijeoma Uluo's Mediocre. I didn't make it into the Zoom, but EM and MW went on my rec and judging from their texts post-meeting seem to have loved it--so I feel like I did my best to keep ole LFB going.
Big A has put himself in charge of groceries since he has had the vaccine and we did some meal-planning this morning. This--meal-planning--is new for us, because I like to cook extempore based on what veggies have been delivered to us and what I feel like. But he's doing multiple weekday dinners because I get home from teaching kinda late TTR, so I've given up my primary-chef privilege. Groceries (to be delivered to At too) and meal-prep notwithstanding, dinner was Acapulco to celebrate Nu who has caught up with their schoolwork! They've really clawed their way back, got such a kind and celebratory email from their homeroom teacher (teachers have been AMAZING in the pandemic!), and I'm proud of this kid for working hard and learning some life lessons on the way.
Today is the deadline to pick in-person or virtual school for Nu for the March-June period. Big A pointed out that kids rarely get hospitalized even if they do catch Covid and that Nu might do better with some in-person instruction. Nu noted that the kids who plan to go to in-person school are frequently the ones with very conservative backgrounds and that that might put them in danger from more than just the pandemic. That decides it--virtual school it is!
Met Nu's new therapist 💕; fielded pandemic tech suggestions from my mom 💕; handled paperwork and planner work.
A loooooooong walk by myself (Wonch Park) was the best part of today. Reread favorite bits of Piranesi, started The Lost Girls, took a loooooooong bath, and fell asleep for a bit with Scout (and Nu and Huck) while watching Korra... There's an absolutely brilliant moon out now, and I'm glad what's looming is the weekend.
Everyone seems to need me today.
Must go!
I can weigh the difference of a day
I doubt most resurrections--yet
the rhizomatic tenderness of your banks
are prayer: lilting, tidal, endlessly
old / done / enduring--but
even in the porous ecstasy of freeze, I know
the delirium of loss, know you won't
take me any place to call home
SO much sunshine today, everything seemed automatically brighter and easier. Clear skies all day... and stars and moon right now.
Temps were in the teens, but it didn't seem to matter--two long hikes--one with LB and another with BS; chats all day (fam, KB, EM, JL); and quality time with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, which is a trippy trancey delight and I'm sad to be near the end.
I took today for myself and loved it; back to work tomorrow.
while I keep walking
everywhere.
Silence sings here, shame too--
like a mosquito hymn
in my ear.
Perhaps I'm a savant of fracture
on an enraptured
exiled page--
perhaps I've siphoned my love
into stories just a little
or too late.
A teeny-tiny life hack for me: It was also the day I seem to have realized that my lonely desk-picnic lunches needn't happen on breakroom napkins. My contract doesn't preclude me from bringing bright things to keep me company as I scarf my lunch down between classes. Ha. And actually, not so lonely today as there was a KCP virtual lunch.
I didn't get to watch the inauguration in real time, but took in a few texts here and there and then a Zoom to toast the new admin so "things feel more real."
I really missed my WGS folks who have helped me keep my sanity in the last four years, mostly by making ad hoc traditions of marches and protests, and linners.
I so wish we could be together in solidarity and community again.
I'll rearrange for my fingers to speak
to the clouds
unfolding like a migraine confession
I mean, I mean
You've cried so much, your eyes
drop like pebbles
and wait to show you a way home
I try, to free
the mistakes I made as a parent
then I draw you,
my love, as a silent self-portrait
***********************
A detail from a mural in the Children's Garden (early morning walking date with L!).
Talked to At on Twitter and chat today; and gosh--I miss him fiercely. Spent some time settling things in his room and ended up clearing out a decade's worth of video games, Popular Science, and Make Magazine. We've been in this house only four years and only four years in the Alma house before that, so this stash somehow made it through three moves. Yikes.
Also yikes, as I leaned to get another piece of mail from behind At's bookcase, I twisted something in my knee and it has felt progressively weird. It feels... feeble now, although it didn't when it actually happened.
Finalizing all the syllabuses and diagnostics for first week today. And I'm laughing at myself because the smallest things get me excited sometimes. My latest tweak is so superficial--I changed all the font to Garamond--and I'm so inordinately chuffed about it.
Big A was mostly experienced as a napper in various settings around the house (he's coming off a spate of nightshifts).
This "Beam-Me-Up" action in the sky is from a long walk with Nu and B.S. and it made us chuckle. Lots of talk, sharing, support, and a huge, delicious loaf of BS's banana bread that Nu and I loved (i.e. have almost finished) this afternoon.
Rumpus Room sleepover tonight with Nu, Scout, and Huck, because At left for college this morning and this is how we cope.
Most years we're already back at school before Pongal comes around and the usual celebration is something hurried when the sun is no longer high in the sky.
This year, we got to celebrate in the sunshine and make our offering at a reasonable daytime hour, with fragrant narcissus and paperwhites rounding out the pongal rice and jaggery laddu on the offering tray. To the millenary vedic sun salutation sloka*, which I was translating for the kids as I went, I added a prayer for enough Vit. D to help us through the pandemic.
Cousin P had sent the cousin groupchat a set of truly lovely pics of their traditional celebration replete with sugarcane, outdoor hearth, and silk-clad kids. So I sent this pic back to balance things out.
Not pictured: The very un-Pongal looking kids, one in the Phoebe Bridgers limited edition Punisher sweater they got from their older sib and the other human kid in the pink Mean Girls/Karl Marx mashup tee I gave them.
Tamorim Sarva Paapagnam Pranathosmi Divakaram
[You radiant as the Japa flower, heir of Kashyapa, the creator of days
destroy my darkness and all corruption I pray to you, O Sun.]
is better than none; I am human,
I love as a reversible history.
You already know
If you call me "sunshine," I will answer
also: "they who love sunshine," try--
I've called prayers into every reverie.
Oh my little girl
All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm
In my head, the "little girl" became a reference to Nu who had just told their first lie and had been reprimanded, and was now sad.
Anyway--I was reminded of this because Tommy Raskin's life (yes, I haven't moved on) reminds me not of my own weltschmerzen, but of my children's and students' joy, their yearning for justice, for full lives, how the pandemic is the chief thief of joy RN, and their frustrations with the world... and it terrifies me.
(Pic from walk this afternoon with LB; Red Cedar River--the mallards followed me around!)
"pour the saliva" they say chorus my saliva's spectacle how random, how to unbait sighs
I once described a snake exist/lament/impact/about the junction of having breath back
'pouring' itself down a hole the scratching exhaustion having my back, trusting offspring
the kids were so freaked out of dying on tv every day to try to sidestep the cracks
More meetings today, including two terribly fraught ones... including one in the boardroom where 99% of the portraits on the wall are of old...