Some Books

MIL's book (illustrations by her, words by SIL when she was six) is out in print. I love it and we ordered a bunch to give to friends with kids. LMK, if you'd like a copy!











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

A Big Day for the Babies

Nu had the Math M-Step to make up today since she postponed hers because of the trip. AND I mean SHE postponed it. We got back Thursday and the test was on Friday--she walked up to the counsellor's office and requested a postponement. "Were you upset?" I asked. "No, I just thought it would be better." I love that she is advocating for herself.

At had to be dropped off at the courthouse at 7 am, since he received a summons for jury duty. A big fan of Twelve Angry Men, he is super excited. He thinks it might be the big case about another sex abuse scandal at MSU. All the details check out. He spent the rest of his time there reading about how Twelve Angry Men is a good movie but bad jury behavior. Nerd.

I managed to juggle both important morning drop-offs. L had offered to take one of them when she and T came to dinner last night. I can do it, I said. And I did. I even jumpstarted the car myself to do so.

Big Whoop

Stonehenge 5/15/2019

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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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Good Morels

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Pillow Fort?

Princely Birthday Present

Of course K would get me something Prince-themed. Of course.

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The woods were lovely, though not dark and deep...

#SaturdayHiking Club
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Friends in Yellow

Daffodils















Dandelions












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Happy Tax Day

For JW who's seen us through ups and downs 

and loops and loopholes of all kinds.

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New Beginnings

Need a fresh start in the middle of April?

Don't fear! Tamil New Year is here!

The little sibs at Hawk Island. #SaturdayHikingClub

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Saturday Morning American Gothic

Compulsory Heterosexuality

More than one student has told me how Adrienne Rich's Reflections on "Compulsory Heterosexuality" changed their lives. I was thinking of that today when I was looking for a card to celebrate our newlywed colleague T and her wife whom K and I were taking out to dinner. Even bunnies and birds were pretty gendered, and it took me longer than usual to find a nice card. Between that and having to read a whole Elle article on my phone before I could pick a nice champagne in our budget, I spent way too much time at the store. Ha.

Presto Change-o

I was trying to take a picture of early morning bougainvillea and jasmine, when I noticed... SNOW????!!! WTH, Michigan?

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Sunshine (underrated)

Twitter student evals.


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That girl lovvvvvvvvves her dada

Not this adorable girl in the foreground whose new Amelie-style haircut we were trying to document... (She loves her dada, but reserves her lovvvvvvvvvve for mama.) Talking about the other adorable girl--in the background--looking up at her dada all heart-eyes-emoji style.









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Lift

You said to sing with you:
I start off like a boat

dropped into the water
turning round and round

worrying and wondering
at the same movement

until I catch the uplift
and the current leads us and

we're at the top of the next note
floating, the size of an insect

which then washes over, catching
us in the clear curl of the wave

* I don't know where this came from, but I will say Nu and I have perfected the howl part of Lady Gaga's shalalalalalalow, and sing it every time we're on our way to school.
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Wordless

I am the child with a knife--
for all my years now,
and in monosyllables

I have been digging in the
softness, the door
to some other worlds

Moon is eyeball today
side-eye tomorrow
I stay here, I witness.

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Today at UU

Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich

[The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (New York: Norton, 1984) ]

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

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Every mention of death in the sermon today seemed like a special message just for me. And I would start thinking about how my children are too young for me to disappear. And I would imagine that Scout and Huckie would be bewildered; that Nu would be devastated,  become hard; that At would rally, becoming more vulnerable as he goes. That they'll all keep looking for me everywhere. Ugh.

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We're Having Lovely Weather

And Saturday Hiking Club is Back!
(Nu's "2018--Let's Do This" tee is hilarious.)

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Shower Thoughts

It's likely that I'm in a state of denial, which is why this still makes me chuckle.

I've had a kind of on-again-off again dull pain in my left breast for a while, and while in the shower this morning, I decided to figure out if it had definite origins. (Big A and I had been talking about the politics of breast cancer detection guidelines earlier this week--so that was on my mind.)

What I could feel in my 'underboob' area--possibly why it had been undetected for so long--felt like a couple of smooth Lego blocks. My first thought was that weight training had resulted in some amazing muscle formation. Alas, it's only on one side, so no way, but I chuckle every time I tell this story.

I was kind of hoping that Big A would say I was imagining things, but he said it was a definite "mass" and that I should call my doctor on Monday. So I had to take a some time to compose myself before I could return to our guests at 'Fun Friday Film Fest' and Your Name (B's suggestion, and cute for several age ranges).

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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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Why we're going to hell

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Loves her Dada

The Rapids of a Great River

An uninspiring photo I took when out hiking with L and Nu this morning, which got the phrase "the rapids of a great river" stuck in my head. After that, the only thing to do was to pay too much for a copy of a book I've always wanted...

#MSU #RedCedarRiver








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Watch out, sticks!

The picture is its own happy story.

     Alternate story: It's the kind of day where you need a woolen hat when you set out and need to switch it out for sunglasses by the time you get there.
     Nu and I set off with Mason jars of chicken soup for At who wasn't feeling well.
     We found out when we got to Alma that he'd been running a fever for five days--so it was off to Urgent Care, where we found out that he'd lost even more weight and that he had Strep. Pharmacy next (Amoxy is free!) then back to the MUN House to put him to bed. Refrigerating the soup, I found four other trays of food that he'd stashed without eating them.
       Back home, Big A set to throwing away the food and putting the dishes in the dishwasher while I cried my heart out. And that resulted in... a very firmly-worded text to At from Big A. And so we go on.

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Even better!

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It's still brown and sticky outside

but our nights have been summery jasmine madness.








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“Dad, bring us some snacks...and a few more pillows.”

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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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Sun's Light

...passes through me--
it makes me strange
flashing like sighs
signing rainbows

melting extravagantly
becoming sweet, sweaty
celebrating, stumbling
determined this is love

In an epilogue, we may seem
imprisoned, undermined--
But here, we are optimistic,
glittering in our sisterhood, one.





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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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Saturdates

A full "dayspend" with J that we made happen when she walked into my office two weeks ago and insisted that I pull out my calendar to schedule it. We went to the temple, and lunch, and ended up with cups of tea at home.

Then it was Nu's sleepover with neighbor E after we walked over to Sansu for Big A's Boss Day dinner where I ate too much sushi. It felt so nice to have two kids at dinner with us again. Although when I said that, A said that the adoption thing seems less possible for him with each passing week.

Nu helped me design a Bitmoji so I can at least have tiny ones that way:

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Friday Night with Bottle Shock

Apparently, people who swear make better pals...

I'm making good ones then:





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Spelling Bee Champion(s)

 

This is DB's picture of the three finalists, and the random seating R to L is also how we ended up in the rankings. As he put it: "Of the around 100 people at the spelling bee last night - it all came down to these three favorite people of mine! Congrats to Maya, Jill, and Pete on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishes!"  (I'm the odd one out here, Jill and Pete are DB's much loved family, after all :)

We weren't really going at it Spellbound-style. The event was for Child Advocacy and we'd been in groups up until the final round, and I'd been lucky to have bestie K as well as my CASA director and coordinator on my team. But yes, this did help me cross one more thing of my mental list of things I meant to get to after I moved to America.

* Nu and Big A were going to come to cheer me on, but kids weren't allowed, so they stayed home.

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Blooming

My Christmas amaryllis!









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Gifts From Afar

So the flowers we sent my parents  were delivered, and they're just as lovely as they looked in the catalogue...





The cake? We're all still giggling at the writing on this:



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Golden Wedding Anniversary

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A Picture of Ice and Sun

On our hike today, L pointed out that while the river was finally thawed and flowing, you could still see how high the snow had been from the rings of ice around the tree trunks.

#RedCedar






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#BalanceForBetter2019

International Women's Day tea @ MacCurdy House

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Happy Birthday to me!

We went all the way out to Ann Arbor for brunch...  it was delicious, decadent, and worth it.

This was yesterday, actually. I have a difficult work meeting today--more on that tomorrow, and At said he couldn't miss his evening class to do a birthday dinner tonight. L says I should be proud of him for not wanting to miss class (I'm trying!!).




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And... the first flowers arrive

I love birthdays!
















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Jabbermouth

At was taking pictures of us at dinner in our home away from home (Sansu!!).

But apparently I can't keep quiet for even two seconds when I'm telling some all important story I can't remember now.

It's not even 10 am...

and 3/4 are already taking a nap in the study.













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I've come a long way...

in the last two weeks.

Pics and tidbits tomorrow.









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Now you too

May wonder (like Scout back there)

WTF?

(Nu claims this is acceptable bass clarinet practice.)











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Found this picture of a baby Scout

and it's just been all awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww









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