A Different View

Back to urban hiking with L, and here's another portrait of the Red Cedar River.

Also, when Big A and I were on our way home yesterday, the kids asked if they could go out for dinner before we got home. Since we're not paying a sitter anymore, the deal was that they would eat out and just put it on the credit card...  I was so charmed that they went out to a fancy Sushi restaurant by themselves.

#Red Cedar #MSU #Sansu



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We are the world!

At the UNA's garden party. My babies are lovely, and At is wearing his "Abolish I.C.E." sweatshirt ahead of this weekend's planned raids.















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world changers

#At@ElizabethWarrenLansing



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Current Mood

Read. 

Overflowing

This doesn't even look like Michigan! I even thought that the the little log in the shadows looked like an alligator. All the rain has given the Red Cedar quite the overflow.

I'm having a tough time of it emotionally as well. At and I started watching When They See Us and my feelings are getting to a point where I feel very overwhelmed most of the day.

At DD's birthday lunch today, this came up (at the end after we properly celebrated) and she thought I might benefit from a coach rather than a therapist, because I have to get through this by figuring out what is within my control and learning strategies to cope with what I cannot control.

Anyway... onward, I guess.

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“HARRY POTTER” & THE DEATHLY STATUS QUO

At is in New York for the Model U.N. competition, but his article from last month seemed really pertinent. Some weird typos and things, but I love his take. This is the article he wrote while I was on the Greece trip, mining Nu's help for HP lore.

"Consider, instead, that the wizard world of Harry Potter isn’t a status quo worth returning to. The “magical and perfect” wizard world is based on class, racism and segregation. In a society where magic can magically fix and duplicate things, somehow there are still wizard families living in poverty. "

And because I posted it proud-mama style on FB, there were some sweet reminiscences about his playwriting at seven, and him asking me a question at the SALA D.C. conference in 2004, when he was five.

So far, the only bright spots in a day where both Jordan Peele's Us and and Bobby Mueller's magnum opus disappointed.

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I've come a long way...

in the last two weeks.

Pics and tidbits tomorrow.









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:/

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.



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Nerd Words

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



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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?")






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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

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

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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.

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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.

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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?



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"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

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NWSA-ing

It's a dark and rainy day...

 

But here I am in Atlanta for my fifth NWSA.








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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.









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