Ready for climbing into spring

Since it was a high of 38 degrees today, it speaks to either our extreme optimism or market-worthy prescience, that N, L, and I got pedicures. A post birthday celebration of two hours of massages, chatting, (window) shopping, pampering, and--for favors--twinkly toes.

I get massages and facials fairly regularly, but pedicures trigger my latent south asian fear of pollution and disrespect. And although it's been years since I watched a certain SATC episode, it stayed with me.  "The girls" are out for pedicures, and are able to perform that oughties form of consumerist power by way of a bevy of servile and--in the narrative--interchangeable, unspecified, east asian women literally kneeling at the protagonists' feet.

Perhaps things have changed? L's pedicurist had the same name as her and this symmetry illogically made everything seem decent if not downright ethical. The pedicurists we met yesterday were from all over south east asia, predominantly Cambodia and Vietnam (not Korea as was typically the case), N and I even had male pedicurists, which was so unanticipated that it immediately relaxed my political hackles.

Anyway. Onward, purple toes!

_

Little Red Worm

You come
you go

repeat of drum.
Little red shield

and skinny tail
and trailing snout

wending

latchstring.

Fickle as dreams
redeemed in December.

Indistinct as
the faults of spring.

_

B(l)eeping bed

Every night before I go to bed, I pray that no one sends us a fax.

Due to Big A's love for all electronic stuff--no matter how alien and unnecessary it is to our lives-- we are now in proud possession of a fax/scan machine. And because there are no phone jack things in the study, the fax machine sits waiting like an nascent weapon under our bed.

I bet even the President doesn't keep a fax machine that close as he sleeps.

_

Radio

"Live me?"
He asks.

(Or is it
"Leave me"?)

"Army kill me.
Live me, please."

_

Frangipane (Paint)

my eyes sip roses
light lurks lupine

~the contractions
of heart birth~

I throw my furies
to escape me now

~prowl the pretty
places we live~

_

Tired

My leaf self

finds

caterpillar trains.

These gods

tuck 11 maps

to my life

into safe folds

in my brain,

shape it shut

like 

a sand castle
installation.

_

un-koothu

Despite an increasingly adversarial situation in one of my classes that's psychically depleting me, I managed to send off my proposal for a chapter on Mangai this evening. Yay, me.

Mangai expertly uses traditional, low culture forms like koothu to interrogate feminist issues including female infanticide and feticide. Or so I say, and because I was writing about it, I guess my mind had been working hard to process these cruelties and make sense/contain them. And so...

***

Last night, I dreamt that I led my three-year-old daughter  on to a public bus in Tamizh Nadu crowded with standing grownups and gave her instructions on where to sit (in the middle--it's the safest) and where to get off the bus (after two stops).

She said, "ok mama," but bumbled around like the three-year-old she is. The sort of happy, carefree bumbling around that--especially in the mornings when our deadlines are tight as a noose--can make me want to cry and/or laugh helplessly.

The bus conductor was very helpful, promising to help, but as I walked away from the bus, I realized that he was following me around chatting away. And then I realized I'd left my baby on a bus where she didn't know anybody.

Nothing happened. But the possibility of disaster, the sense of menace was huge. I couldn't fall back asleep even after I'd checked that both kids were in their beds. And not on buses.

_