On the surface, everyone is okay. But as we talked, things about relationships, kids, jobs, coworkers, health, hopes, family, holidays, parents, and fears, kept coming up. And laughs. Plenty of laughs.
I felt so rich in poetry after I collated this collection to pass on to the organizers.
I had visions of myself just standing in the hallway shoving poetry under classroom doors, putting them on bulletin boards, and throwing fistfuls of paper into the air so it would rain poetry... like Regina George distributing copies from the "Burn Book" in Mean Girls, but more meaningful.
I hope I do a good job at the event on Monday. And I'm excited for Mosab Abu Toha's event on Tuesday--to which I have online tickets.
I absolutely love the story of the growth of the organization--it started out after a conversation with friends and now influences, advocates, and educates--it was instrumental in repealing our tampon tax last year, for instance. Lysne's book Instigator: Creating Change Without Being the Loudest Voice in the Room comes out later this year, and I can't wait!
Pic: Saying goodbye to Lysne in the parking lot. Of course, the Helping Women Period van is red. Mid-cycle red.
I also spent time today answering questions for an article on the "uncommitted" vote movement for the student newspaper. Students have been wonderful allies, and their idealism and outrage have helped me feel hopeful for the world. I'm convinced the push by our elderly lawmakers to ban TikTok is because that platform bypasses the hangups and hurdles of legacy media and makes it easy for young people to inform and organize amongst themselves.
Pic: Random, ultra-bright, volunteer crocuses that showed up on our driveway this morning.
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.
A beautiful moonrise, blue skies, warmer temps, a long walk, winter break. All day, I felt a sense of freedom and hope.
I learned late in the day of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation with a sinking heart, but also with a sense of awe. What an extremely brave act of solidarity and protest. Culturally, it's a form of protest I'm familiar with--but I keep thinking about this twenty-five-year-old's family, and wonder how they feel... how his mother feels in this moment. In the opening scenes of the news video, he seems completely cognizant and in control of what he's doing, but many outlets are terming it mental illness. Our rhetoric is so messed up--his sacrifice to a just cause is "mental illness," but if he had sacrificed himself for the U.S. military-industrial complex, he'd be a "patriot?"
Pic: Baker Woods with RS.
I love these people so, so much and am so grateful for this life with them.
Pic: A big, squeezy hug at the end of dinner. Nu, Big A, At.
It was so rude of Big A to cheerily text me "one more year" on New Year's day and then explain that in 2025 Nu would be off to college. I swear he has been dreaming about child-free living (precisely what I dread) for a long time now.
But we're on Winter Break at work and Nu had all-day plans with friends, so Big A and I took off by ourselves. We walked to the Breslin Center to watch the MSU women's basketball team post a 93-57 win over Rutgers, detoured to the horticultural gardens to see the orchid show, and then ended up at our favorite Sushi place before walking home to Huck and Max with our leftovers. I have to admit it was pretty nice and I can see us doing some version of this for a few decades after the kids are independent.
Pic: I gave Big A matching Spartan hats at Christmas and promised to go to a game with him (he loves basketball). He got us tickets for a women's game because he knew I'd want to support the women's team.
I've been immersing myself in a ton of fiction lately--anything to take my mind off the news. It has been pretty eclectic. I started the week with a reread of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49--I have a faint memory of reading it for an undergrad American Litt. class. I wonder if I skimmed it, and how many of the references I got back then. It's stuck in my memory as a book with several weird sexual situations.
I've since moved on to what I took to be a romance set in Havana (free on my Kindle). I thought I'd be irritated with its anti-revolutionary stance since the first chapter was about some Batista cronies fleeing, but it actually goes back and forth in time and among various classes quite well.
Next up is going to be Curtis Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy, which I found at the thrift store for a dollar and forty-nine cents when I went looking for old vases. I've always enjoyed Sittenfeld but recently she mentioned someone I know in her acknowledgments and that has cemented her standing in my reading lists forever.
I'm also watching shows I used to watch in the 90s (Frasier, Felicity); they're kind of calming and help me fall asleep.
Pic: I was looking forward to taking pictures of the moon this evening, but it's suddenly quite cloudy.
Here's a picture of a squirrel looking straight at me instead.
BOL's cat who saw them through undergrad and grad school died and I want to be there to support them the way they supported me when Scout was dying... But also, it brought me back to that month of slowly losing Scout... the dread of every day. I'm surprised that it will be a whole year without my darling in just about two months.
Pic: E.D. Wilson's poem "My Phone is Full of Cute Cats and Dead Children."
Our grandmothers were first cousins, so Sunil was a distant cousin--although that doesn't matter much in the Indian context (something that's unclear in the poem, and I should work on it). Our grandmothers were as close as sisters--closer, as they had no sisters and lived in a big joint-family mansion where they had private tutors--so they were together all the time. They were really close--they always talked about how they breastfed each other's babies so their babies would feel like siblings and think of them (their aunts) as mothers too.
It didn't work out exactly like that. My mother would go to her aunt when she fought with her mom, but later there was some family drama (our grandmothers fell out in their sixties) and mystery (things people won't talk about). Stuff that came out as what Nicole rightly called "mixed things." Nance found the ending surprising--something else I'm working on. I was trying to express how it felt to have someone in my peer group die... like the beginning of the end. As I mentioned in a comment to StephLove, Sunil died of a heart attack, so that feels as though our bodies are going.
Pic: It's the puppies' Boss Day! Huck and Max got new lick pads and love them.
(It's not their actual Boss Day, but it was too bewildering for Scout and Huck when we celebrated them individually, so we picked the 18th of the month to celebrate a puppy Boss Day. Max's "smile" cracks me up.)
Pic: An icy, windy day--but oh, such brilliantly blue, sunshiny skies. A long walk with Big A to the MSU Baseball stadium.
Pic: Max and Nu in yesterday's surprise snow.
I tried to recreate a little bit of that olde magic in class yesterday with a "Pal-entine's Day" celebration--there was candy and stickers people could share with each other. I expected to merely be the facilitator but some people made little notes for me too. I love the one that said, "Thank you for creating an inclusive classroom for all and expanding my love of literature." I love my students.
I already gave the fam their V-Day treasures and treats, and it was just Nu, Huck, Max, and me at home today (Big A is in Milwaukee). I felt Nu might need some extra love so I picked up a few treats (ice-cream, Krispy Kremes, Kit-Kats) when I gassed up the car on my way home and made some heart-shaped caramel and chocolate cookies. Nu's delight was everything. I love Nu so much.
And my gal-pals took care of me. Lovely LD sent me a Galentine's Day care package via mail that had some serious Sephora goodies and a powdered drink mix I can't wait to try on the weekend. JG said I was her favorite Galentine and sent me a picture from Costa Rica of a howler monkey (!), and I nearly lost it when KB said she was loving me "from afar" (I MISS KB!!!!). I love my women friends.
Pic: A jumble of V-Day stuff on the counter today. Also: the Spring planting catalog arrived in the mail like a present from the universe.
I remember being triggered by sirens two weeks later, but that seems to have faded now. What a difference a year makes. And it's amazing all the rubbish my human brain can grow used to and normalize.
Pic: MSU students working on a commemorative message at the 'spirit rock' on Sunday.
Oh, I feel this so much. But also, things really are going to slow down after this week. I listed a long list of 'have to-be-dones' for myself last month and the deadlines on most of them have come and gone and I've done my best on each of them. The last of the colleague letters and student award letters went out today, our last campus visit was today, and one of our two speakers is presenting this week--which means my list has been significantly whittled down and the future looks so much more manageable.
Technically, that means I should be able to work on my projects for a bit. No more excuses.
Pic: From yesterday. Max and Big A in my tea garden where I'd gone to escape everyone. (Not successfully, evidently.)
I needed this so much!
Pic: Early morning hike with L and T in Baker Woods. Lots of trees have come down in the last couple of days--it has been very windy.
1. Happy Lunar New Year! At a New Year celebration lunch this afternoon, EM told me we're supposed to rest today and do a minimal amount of work tomorrow. I can do that!
2. The kids got little red envelopes of cash. I'm so touched when work friends and family friends treat my nearly grown-ass kids like their own niblings.
3. I got a nice ramble with L in Baker Woods today. It has been weeks since I hiked with L--She said she missed me, and I asked if it was my silliness she missed. "I missed all of it, Maya." She said diplomatically (and lovingly!).
4. I got a long walk with Big A--it was grey and windy, but we did a "Super Sparty" and it felt nice to be able to stretch my legs after sitting at my desk all week.
5. At came to dinner tonight so I gave the kids their Valentine's Day presents a bit early. When will they be too old to get V-Day presents from me? I hope never.
6. In a first for us--we're now mooching off At. They subscribed to the Criterion Channel and logged us in on the big TV so we can watch it too. I like all of it.
7. Pic: The Red Cedar is kinda plain today. But the mallards are enjoying it and so are we.
Pic: Finally, I get to take a picture from the bank of the Maple River.
Reunited with my human kids, puppy kids, and plants!
I demolished a large bag of Culver's fries on the way home and demolished all my remaining grading after I got home.
Big A's doc gave us a hopeful update and now we wait for the actual results. Oh, the things I take for granted when I make plans and resolutions...
Pic: (anti-clockwise) Max, Huckie, At, and Nu. I missed these sweet loves and my zillion plants in the tea garden.
We made it back to Michigan! Haven't seen the kids yet as I'm currently in the hospital waiting room while Big A has his exploratory procedures. I hope to see Big A's doc in a couple of hours for some answers/counsel.
Big A was asked not eat anything for 36 hours, so I've been fasting alongside him in solidarity. We're totally going to demolish a brunch on our way back home.
Pic: From yesterday--we're kind of wearing matching shirts! Out on the balcony of our hotel room with the brilliant azure sea and the El Arco rocks in the background. (I'm wearing my heavy winter jacket in the hospital's waiting room today.)
Back home (in Michigan) I have two bougainvillea plants I got at the specialty nursery, and one manages to put out a few blooms in the summer and the other one is dormant (or dead :/).
So it always surprises me when I'm in tropical climes and they seem to be growing untended the way they did in my childhood. (Especially if it's in the U.S.--they do that in California, Hawaii, and Florida AFAIK.)
In Cabo, they seemed to be using bougainvillea as hedges and cropping them pretty closely, but nothing could keep these plants from showing off a little bit.
Pic: A Bougainvillea hedge. I took this as a reminder that we're on the cusp of Spring, and soon we'll be awash in scent and color. I took a long Boss Day walk by myself this morning to say goodbye.
#LaterPost
In large part this is because the kids have been so awesome about taking care of each other and texting us regular updates about their meals, plans for the day, school projects, and so on.(It also helps to know that EM and LB jumped in to be our emergency contacts in case they need rides or advice.)
All the human kids want--they said--was for Big A to learn how to make towel sculptures and redo all the towels every day.
The kids are kidding, of course.
Pic: The hotel's towel "bunny" that prompted this exchange.
#LaterPost
Our wristbands are an open sesame to restaurants, bars, pools, clubs, spas, and tons of activities.
All we've been doing is taking long walks together, carrying margaritas back to our room, napping, and figuring out our next restaurant every couple of hours.
And then when Big A is resting, I'm grading, monitoring my online class, liaising with colleagues, and answering emails.
I guess I can do this! (For another couple of days!)
Pic: We have funny elongated shadows!
#LaterPost
I spent Friday night in the E.R. with Nu (so thankful they're ok now), and there was another fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis. My brai...
