Chicago, Redux

Had some paperwork to submit in Chicago, so here I am again for the third time in three weeks.  All by myself this time.

And I talked to SO MANY strangers this time. The first time, I was with the fam for Hamilton and barely spoke to anyone else; the second time was for the MLA, so lots of friends, colleagues, etc., and didn't get a chance to speak to street strangers. But my, my, my... I sure am a chatty Patty when I'm by myself.



_

Nerd Words

I love being at every panel I can squeeze in, so a lot of my photos today look like this:



_

Silent Night...

(And then this declaration on the way home: "I'm going to shower before we watch Home Alone--that way I don't have to shower on Christmas. Who wants to spend Christmas showering?")






_

A Plan

I'm traveling--or so
I have been telling
everyone--so now
travel--will unravel

Perhaps periphrastic--
or no--logic underlies
my disguised, feigned
un-annotation of terrain

I prep through these fears--
it helps a little that millions
of years of orbital earth will
still spin in place for me

_

Don't Look Away. Don't YOU DARE LOOK AWAY!

_

A Pattern of Tears

Perhaps we need to bring back rules about permissible dinner conversation again. On Monday, Big A made Nu and me cry with a story from the E.D. of a 10-month-old with a fractured liver (suspected parental abuse).

On Tuesday, I took over, getting people to read Ross Gay's A Small, Needful Fact  and Paul Nelson's An Elegy for Tahlequah's Calf.

We had a couple of days off for Thanksgiving with grandparents... but tonight, At finished the pattern off. As we settled around the table, he called this "the last dinner," horrifying me and reminding Nu that he would leave for college again in the morning.

Despite Thanksgiving, which was lovely, I think we're stuck doing family dinners wrong this week.

_

More Shooting

Feeling some type of way with news of the shooting in the Chicago Mercy Hospital ED on the radio even as Big A kisses me goodbye on his way to his shift at the ED...

Especially when we weirdly begin to chorus: "Back to life/Back to reality."

I really wish the world took D.V. more seriously. In related feels, I am concerned for the safety of people at the local D.V. hotline--I was able to just walk in to drop a book off for SN today.

_

Suddenly L.A.

This was supposed to be a family trip, but we were worried about air quality in L.A. because of the forest fires, and so we left all the kids at home.

And now Big A and I are at this hipster hotel by ourselves.

Whatever will we do?



_

"Not to poor to contour"

Book club friend G just introduced me to the stylings of Sailor J.

Now, I'm crying from the funny and feminism; I'm dying because my stomach hurts.

Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJaaLXZwmsU

_

NWSA-ing

It's a dark and rainy day...

 

But here I am in Atlanta for my fifth NWSA.








_

Meanwhile in real life...

While I was having the dream about losing Nu last night, Big A was at work where he almost lost a teenaged refugee because the dialect her mother spoke was so uncommon that they had to work with someone familiar with a translator from an adjacent language. Her mother gave up on words at one point and just wailed as she rocked her daughter's unconscious body.

There's so much pain in the world, and so much of the time, we're protected from the worst of it. I spent a lot of yesterday finding money to to people--Beto, Abrams, Gillum... while reading about voter disenfranchising and voting machine malfunctions... and then the news of the shooting in the synagogue at Pittsburgh. Today was about the Bolsonaro win in Brazil and a very depressing text exchange with my usually upbeat GOTV champion, At.

Nu and I cobbled some good times despite it all--we went to temple yesterday, UU today, LOLed at Ghostbusters 2016, delivered food to a pregnant friend, made arrangements for kids in Chennai to get Diwali presents and sweets, did tons of laundry, got Nu a new pair of kicks, spent some of Nu's birthday money on (unnecessary) pens and a stuffy, stocked the pantry, did a bunch of baking, and made a couple of comfy dinners.

At some point this weekend we got lost and even that was lovely.



And yet through it all, the knowledge of what lay outside our bubble--inexorable as the real rain, the creeping cold, and our leaky roof.









_

It was just me and Nu last night...

The news is full of bombs, so of course there were bombs in my dream.

Bombs were falling from the sky, and I was digging something out of the car, Nu was terrified of the bombs and said she was going to hide with the others (not family--the other war victims/refugees) in the ditches, so I tell her ok, go--I'll come join you in just a second. Except I didn't notice in which direction she headed off. So I keep calling her name on the outskirts of every crowd of people, but don't hear her call back to me. I keep doing this for hours... may be days. Until finally, a poor woman with many children (aren't we all poor by this point?) tells me that she remembers Nu and that even as she ran away from the car, "a bomb took her." It had happened the minute we'd parted and I hadn't known. The woman is telling me that she tried to reach her but couldn't, that she remembers her "large, wide eyes."

I looked at the expiry dates on everyone's passports when I woke up. The kids need to renew next year.

______________________
school counselor call + Cesar Sayoc + upcoming travel + Yemen + Gaza + refugees from Honduras + Life + work stress + Adnan Kashoggi + mom and sis traveling to Dubai

Just Sayin'

When you go to school in Westeros

         My subtitle to the new Chanel ad.

_

Sunday with Sonia Sotomayor

AAAAAAAAAA. SHE SHOOK THE KIDS' HANDS!! I made them shake mine right after. Haha.

She was here for the one-book-one-community MSU-Lansing event with her My Beloved World. The event was billed as Q&A only, but as she answered questions, she walked around the auditorium connecting with people. She is so awesome, and I kept tearing up with the knowledge that this smart, amiable, down-to-earth person is almost single-handedly keeping us from constitutional ruin.

She said she'd pulled a hamstring as explanation for why she was walking so slowly. I was bit taken aback when she first came in though and had already added her to my list of Supreme Court justices to pray for (#RBGForever).

_

Sweet Hobbitses

We walked to the MSU Arboretum today for a world of gardens (Japanese, English, Michigan).

Also, I love my special little juicy hobbit so much.




_

Keeping up with the Klansmen

Nu and the puppies stayed home, but the other half of of the family, went to various showings of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman. It is a thing of beauty from the way the title is spelled to the tongue-in-cheek super troll move of having Topher Grace play David Duke.

At went with his old H.S. newspaper editor/boss/prom date in the afternoon, and Big A and I headed out later in the day where I had a brief moment of "if someone was going to shoot up a movie theater this weekend, this would be a the one." I did have to take a 15-minute break in the bathroom because it's tough to watch the banality of racism up-close and uninterrupted, but the end was sweetly satisfying.

_

"One whale mom/ did all our crying for us"

Paul E. Nelson: Elegy for Tahlequah's Calf

These are the stories the children of our
children will tell if there are storytellers
in their time. How we slept at the switch
ignored the clear signs of doom, how we
were scholars of war & good tweeters

had nice dinner photographs and saved ourselves
from Muslims, immigrants and every vague
threat the cruel majority could conjure
while the world burned and one whale mom
did all our crying for us.

Paul E Nelson
9:24am – 7.28.2018

_ 

Election Day

At went into the day with a lot of hugs, hopes,

and in his orange "Abolish I.C.E." sweatshirt.

I can see him in Abdul's thank-you video

looking earnest, focussed... grownup.

This is the small satisfaction 

I grab from the day.