Moping

This is Scout's favorite "mope" position and today, he kept switching sides back and forth while Nu and I listened to Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings--something I've wanted to do since we fell in love with the radical Grimke sisters when we were reading Rad American Women A-Z five years ago. (Incidentally, while there have been lots of girl-centered hero books since, Rad American Women A-Z remains my favorite because of the way it centers social justice.)

When I'm not actively occupying myself with something productive  (good) or self-flagellating with the news (bad), I find I too am moping in various positions and locations like our Scout. 

Here's to the Chroniclers

Over at the NYT, Teju Cole says true and clever things about chronicling life in this pandemic, and it reminded me of all the bloggers who update frequently, and are giving credence and structure to readers' experiences via their own daily meditations.  I miss my old blogging peers from the time of the Mutiny and people I met there including Cole himself. I remember him saying something faintly nice about a poem of mine here once upon a time, and how it made the rest of my week/month--something like that. Ha.

I've tried to get the kids to keep journals; Nu got as far as decorating the cover of the new notebook I gave them; At scoffed, but he's quite tweety, so there's that. Anyway, these days, I'm starting internet meanderings with: Ana Begins, Grumpy Ramblings, Harry Times, Not of General Interest, Shu Box, Something Remarkable, and Stirrup Queens.  Updating here daily has helped me remember and process these days--yes I've cried every day for the past week, but apparently I've done so for discrete reasons. (Not really; it's mostly been related to living in the pandemic, but at least I have a list of different things that set me off.)

Here's a link to Cole's essay and some pull quotes where he articulates the anxiety of articulation in the right now.

Teju Cole: We Can’t Comprehend This Much Sorrow: History’s first draft is almost always wrong — but we still have to try and write it. 

"This year has been a blur, but I remember one day clearly: Sunday, March 8. It was the last day I ate at a restaurant, the last day I went to a concert (Red Baraat at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass.) and the last day I hugged a friend. It was also the first time I thought that I should begin writing about what was going on.

"That thought was immediately followed by its negation: Why bother? The same incidents, the same references and the same outrages would inevitably be picked over by other writers; for all our social distancing, we’d all be crowding around the same material. I also knew that anything I wrote could soon be — in fact was almost certain to be — contradicted by new developments. But what worried me most was that certain points of emphasis in my writing would later prove to have been misjudged, and that this would somehow reveal that my heart had been in the wrong place all along.

Reimagining

Arundhati Roy being visionary as usual; the full article is in The Financial Times.  

Pandemic, Spring

Across a tawny field that will be green
next week, a stand of maples, waving,
trunks spaced six feet or more apart
as if they’d heard the governor’s order.

As if they, too, were keeping distance,
while in the earth an interplay of fine
roots and tiny fungi relays messages,
shares sustenance, keeps in touch.

From here, their lacy crowns look bare,
spreading as they reach out toward a sky
delicately blue as a robin’s egg. Yet there
a thousand thousand leaf buds hold tight

ready to unfurl in jubilation. Till then
the trees hang on, deep-rooted, keeping
their distance, holding each other close.

Linda Mills Woolsey 3/27/2020

Big Girl

One of our busiest hikes at Harris Nature Center today--my four kids, L&T; B&L, V&C, plus CF and VC and JS and, and...

I've been feeling... sad is the best way to describe it. And as the human kids traveled up and down the hike group chatting away, I brought up the rear with just the puppy kids, giving myself permission to be alone for a while.

Back home, we made a pantry-sourced, vaguely Thai-inspired soup with sweet potatoes, beans, veggies, lemongrass, ginger, basil, and coconut milk, and then settled in to finish watching the Gerwig adaptation of Little Women after dinner with Big A.

Ever since I won a copy of LW in fourth grade, I've steadily read most of Alcott's novels, contributed to the Alcott encyclopedia in grad school, and generally adore her--that I loved this adaptation with its duplex ending so much means something.

The kids had already seen it with the grands in OH when it first came out, and I found it so sweet the way they watched my reaction as they re-watched the movie with me. Also, they think it's hilarious to call it "Big Girls."

Last Christmas

I wanted to give our neighbors's Baby E one of my favorite board books--Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day. I even found a a little snow baby puppet I thought would bring out Baby E's cheeks and smile.

But the very next day, Baby E's parents went to visit grandparents in California for a month (smart of them), and then they moved into their own house sometime last month, and I never got the book to E.

This evening as we were walking home from Big A's Boss Day dinner at Sansu, we saw E's dad T on his way to pick up some things from their old place, and he stopped as he passed us to give us updates and I was able to pass on E's Christmas gift.

I did it! I gave it to someone special. It's not like we don't have snow after all. #GeorgeMichaelLives.

Did not see that coming...

Ellen Barry's  "The Jungle Prince of Delhi" in the NYT 
is the most intriguing, suspenseful true story I've read in a while.

"Empty Hearts"

 

That's it, that's the update.

I made it out in this, so I'm calling today a success.

(A book club meeting for Juli Zeh's Empty Hearts--

I liked it, but I have SO MANY questions!!)

First!

I got to bookclub first, with my signed copy of Rainbow Rowell's sweet debut Eleanor and Park for the book exchange. (Reusing book, bag, and tissue paper here. Hola!)

Half-an hour later, the place was all raucous exuberance, with discussions hilariously veering off course. The book was Tayari Jones's An American Marriage and the loudest, longest discussion SOMEHOW became: which famous prisoner would you write to?

Generous Thinking

Dinner with the author at the President's house this evening, and KB and I kept falling into these patterns where we were flanking--first the fireplace, then the speaker at the dinner table. 

Anyway, it gave me time to quietly thank Fitzpatrick for her solidarity with minorities, and her point that civility does not mean having to argue with people for your humanity.

November surprise

Snow was predicted for today, but it seems to have caught everyone by surprise after all. It was so perfect and powdery and pristine out. Also surprising: Me being out in it.

And later today, from At's article in the school paper about carrying his passport card on him: "The real reason I hold on to the card is because of my immigrant mom, who is worried about her son being stopped by the police and detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (I.C.E.). She herself carries numerous documents in order to prove her legal residence and her parental relationship to my sibling and me." 💖 

It's cruel

When your child can drag so many of your cultural heroes at the same time and loves it so much that they send you this pic on Twitter and family chat...

#JustinInBlackFace #OldSchoolKanye










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Strange Beauty

Today, I heard Paul Winter's Missa Gaia (1981) for the very first time at UU--almost otherworldly in its beauty, it made me happy and it made me cry. (Once I got past the JarJar Binks title and realized that it's simply Mass [of/for] Earth [In Latin and Greek] and that whales and wolves would be acknowledged as composers too.)






And late yesterday, I shared how I fell in love with 11-year-old Nu's little waif with the anxious shoulders.



And then it was a sleepover night in the rumpus room with the puppies, laughing at some of the creepy creatures in Nu's sketchbook, and falling asleep to the strange symphonic sounds of Sigur Ros.

Summer Blessings

 Book Club yesterday








Hike #HarrisNatureCenter









Farmers' Market today







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When the Eng. Lit. Prof. gets the joke:

It's a Nice Day to... Start Again

I should have grades done soon, and that will be goodbye to a satisfying four weeks of Spring Term.  My first assay at a travel term, The Empire Writes Back: Cosmopolitan England threw a bunch of non-majors into cultural theory and they took to it in a most satisfying way: looking at The British Museum critically; hypothesizing about Britain's Roman connections; seeing empire in Victorian fiction, reciting poetry at all the landmarks; talking to Sunny Singh and Robert JC Young... I love all those moments and I love all those kids.

It was terrifying too--in all the ways that being responsible for 15 young people can be. But we're all safely back. My secret weapon was taking Nu with me, so that was a little piece of home always with me.

And now... it is summer and time to work on all the projects that didn't get done over the sabbatical.

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Honors Day

I woke up this morning excited for Honors Day.

At was nominated for the Kapp Prize 

as were two of my students, 

and chances were that I'd be

celebrating at the end of the day. 

(And not just because it was my Boss Day.)

Sure enough: At's presentation was 

AHHHMAZING 

and my dear student MW won the Kapp. 

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Teen Vogue: Fashion, Beauty, Entertainment... and the Resistance

I knew she was brilliant, I had no idea she'd be just so dang nice! I told her what seeing her so Indian name on the masthead at feministing.com more than 15 years ago meant to me, what it means to see her leading Teen Vogue into the resistance... and she wove that into her keynote that evening.
Also: she hadn't had breakfast when I picked her up, and she told me she had texted her mom later to say--Indian Lady picked me up; I got food inside of twenty minutes.
Yup, I have superpowers too.

#SamhitaMukhopadhyay



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Plans Are Getting Better

To think that I couldn't wait to start using my 2019 planner, and here I am almost a quarter of the way in, having barely used it. Worse: nearly all of my sabbatical term is over, and I haven't done any of the important stuff I meant to do.

I re-started the planner with all five colors of ink today--I feel so much more intentional and focused when I can confirm at a glance that the various modalities of life are in (chromatic) balance. And I reconfigured the to-do list to make it more realistic given how little time remains between now and getting stuff ready for the spring term.

It may be that it is the prep work that drags the most. And that's where I spent most of my time today--I enjoy being poetry editor--and today was about prepping the selected poems for Dropbox and publication; I love being the advisor to the feminist house--and I spent hours making sure the application materials for next year reached the relevant channels and vetting and worrying about applications; I love teaching in the classroom--and so much of today was re-reading materials and organizing the e-reader (okay this last thing was fun).

Also fun: The Spotify playlist I curated for our class.

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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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