The last part was my favorite, but I was tired when I got home. Thus endeth (I think!) my spate of late evenings at work this semester.
Pic: Tea at MacCurdy. The Eleanor Roosevelt quote framed on the wall makes it perfect: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.” Memories of other years: Pre-pandemic and Post-pandemic
This is silly. It's a garden, there'll always be dead leaves and dirt and things to do. My new exercise is to enjoy the space without worrying about perfecting things. I lit the candle L gave me (lavender and neroli), breathed in the scent of my hyacinths budding, and marveled at the begonias blooming for the sixth year in a row.
There's gunk on the bird pedestal under the small cachepot... but I'll clean it in the time allotted to cleaning. This is not that time.
Pic: Tablescape with plants, flowers, and candle.
It's only my fourth year of knowing my birthday doubles as "March Forth Day," but I'm carpeing everything I can out of the diem.
It's the Monday after break, so there was tons to do. Plus, I had to send an overdue change of schedule postponing everything to both the publisher and editor. But I owned up and did that like a grown-up. Then I found some time to take myself out for a long walk and a long soak and read for an hour amidst my plants.
Evening was dinner with the fam at Ruckus Ramen, and then back home for presents and cakes (pistachio-raspberry-lemon + a Whole Foods Chantilly cream with fruit as At is allergic to pistachios.)
I am ever so grateful for every minute of this.
Pic: At's friend H took this picture of us (Big A, Nu, me, At). H also drew me a "three-legged cat" for my birthday, which I know I will hang on to for a while because... memories.
Burchfield Park--new to me--was an easy eight-mile loop and scenic all the way through.
Pic: Big A my navigator + water and snack carrier ahead of me.
2) Almost too much love. Just kidding...
3) But actually, I was late getting home because a workplace chat went on and on and then late to book club because Big A kept on prolonging our soak-and-chat and late getting home to dinner because there was pre-birthday cake and jollities at book club and then late for a friend's pooja because the dinner I made (couscous salad with almonds, felafel, and a ton of veggies, + the spicy feta dip a book club friend insisted I take home) was amusingly deemed merely "a side" so Big A got some shawarma wraps to top it off. At that point, I decided it would be best just to send my regrets to the pooja people. And so I did.
4) I also got all the plant care, cleaning, and settling done today so I can take the rest of the weekend off to relax and luxuriate in birthday love and prep for reentry into the work week.
5) Pic: A snapshot of my very whiny FB post. Soc med circles are so weird. I bet if this was on Twitter, someone would have told me to STFU already.
I woke up from a dream in which the kids and I were traveling with bestie KB... but then I got separated from them while lining up for an airport shuttle. I couldn't see them anymore, but I remember shouting over the crowd, "K, do you have my kids?" And she shouted back "yeah!" And then I felt calmer in the dream and as I woke up. I felt even calmer after I texted KB and asked her to check in on my kids if anything should happen to me. And she promised she would but added in characteristic KB fashion: "And FFS, Maya, please don’t die!!!" I'm not planning to!
I did a ton of work all morning from the moment Nu left for school. In the afternoon, I felt like a lady of leisure from a long time ago, or perhaps a lady of leisure in my future retirement.
It was cold but sunshiny today, so I walked over to our local public radio station to help pack reading-literacy kits. It was repetitive assembly-line work and nicely freed up my head from extraneous thoughts--because you had to stay focused to get it right.
Then I walked home again with a nice long detour to finish the album I was listening to.
I stopped by L's for a chat and to pick up the lemons I had asked to borrow from her... and then headed home for dinner with the fam.
Sounds boring, but it was kind of blissful.
Pic: Reading kit assembly station.
I still managed to renew my Driver's License, arrange catering for a campus event next week, and finalize the speaker series for Women's History Month.
I feel sad and helpless, and I told Big A that I was going to take my emergency prescription medication, but I didn't (I'm always "saving" it in case I have I bigger crisis). I drank a lot of tea instead, clung to him like a baby monkey, and then rallied to make up and make an amazing dinner (rice with arugula, five-color veggies + beans braised with miso, sesame oil, and nori).
And then as a reward, I found birthday cards in the mail! They were such a sweet surprise and such a cheery pick-me-up.
Pic: Also immensely cheering, my fuzzy welcome committee. Max and Huck always pop up to say hello as I unlock the back door.
Overwhelmed by the sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell, which I had barely begun to process yesterday.
Heartbroken/Awestruck.
What an empathetic, sincere, radical, and idealistic soul... What a lesson in being true to his conscience and his long history of mutual aid. He had recently been deployed to Israel as a U.S. airman, and I want to question why we're getting involved in the fighting rather than the peacemaking too.
Speaking of which, nearly 100,000 people in Michigan voted "uncommitted" today to challenge U.S. complicity in the Palestinian genocide... the goal had been to get 10K votes. I dislike how the media has painted this as an "Arab-American and Muslim" issue when it's really a humanitarian issue. So yes, Dearborn, which has a large Arab-American population, voted approx. 75% uncommitted, but Washtenaw, which has no significant Arab-American presence, also voted approx. 25% uncommitted. I don't have numbers for Ingham where Big A, At, and I voted. The "Listen to Michigan" campaign was started just about three weeks ago, so this is impressive.
Aaron Bushnell's sacrifice and the uncommitted votes are also a hopeful sign of humanitarian solidarity and moral clarity for me. It is difficult to go on day after day knowing we're actively vetoing ceasefires and sending arms to kill civilians but having to act like everything is normal.
Pic: I was at work today, and wanted to get a closeup of the "touchstone" LK made me--it is actually beautifully planed wood with copper insets that are almost like constellations. But then I got a bit distracted by the sunlight filtering through my office plants. The "toys" are a miniature Freedom Rider bus that KB gave me from her visit to the Legacy Museum and an auto-rickshaw my mom gave me after Nu and I had an adventure in one last year.
It's Amma's 80th birthday today. I spent quite a long time at the temple. My sister made her a mango cake, I made her a kulfi with p...
