We gotta be starting something...

Part Two of Li'l A's birthday weekend, dinner with the grandparents. And as the kids chose to ride with the grandparents, Big A and I had a few minutes to angst.

It's recurring guilt about our lifestyle. Big A had a very sick patient and it made him feel weird about practicing medicine for money. We're not thinking of unpaid medical school debt, incomplete kids' college funds. We just want to get a smaller house. Live more ethically. Quite apropos for today--May Day.

But will it happen? Or will we go ahead and get new wood floors and furniture for the rec room as we'd planned to? 

Four Parties

Can Maya do it?

Party #1: 5:00 p.m. for my favorite two-year-old twins. Bring presents. Get in my fill of baby smells and nom nom on a few. Check.

Party #2: 6:30 p.m. get Li'l A's Birthday-sleepover started. Pizza, I-phone cupcakes, buckets of juice boxes, snacks, candy. Party games lined up. Check.

Party #3: 7:30 p.m. Bestie L's birthday. Bring prezzies. Slice cheese, serve Sangria. Say Hi's all around. Hugs goodbye. Check.

Party #4: 8:00 p.m. Get on the "party bus" for dinner and pub hopping in the Oregon district. Nope. Duh. (Have to chaperone Li'l A's sleepover as Big A leaves for work in an hour.)

Three out of four is considered good in most circles. And a warm, sunny day--a nice way to say goodbye to the rainiest April in my memory.

_

Yoga

Breath
thrown outside
bequeathed to us
peace.


swarm music
rest sharp
in the flush
of stillness

_

The Grammar of End Times

[ANOTHER SAD, CRAP DRAFT. It's very frustrating that I can't write about this without sounding like a catechism.]

Worlds are separate
suspended, discrete.
Take count, make them
account--they seldom
cohere, cannot agree.

One world expects children
making laughter, worries,
afternoon weed bouquets.
Love. Loveliness.
Sports car (import).
University tags. Online shopping.
Flowers, phone calls, food.
Need new wood floors.
Another bathroom.
Home sweet
home improvement.

In another world, a child (more ribs than years)
and a buzzard guards her, waits for her to die.
(What else to say--for this part,
lacking everything,
also lacks words.)

Sages, madmen who care,
decide that worlds do not share:
the same sentence--or any other space
the sages have died alone, and madmen
too, many by their own bourgie hands

And that young self who
starved, carved wrists--
she mutely floats in my veins--
rude. But just as any other chained
and stubborn corpse would.

_

Small

It's a small world town. Straight from work to the FedEx office to ship my green card renewal forms. The clerk glances at my address and says--Yellow Springs? She grew up in Yellow Springs. She graduated high school three years behind Big A, and yeah--she knows him. She was best friends with his baby sister.

We used to bug him a lot and make him mad, she said.

He's reformed now, I said.

Poor Li'l A, who bugged his dad by eating dinner for over an hour and heard his wrath for a solid ten minutes yesterday, would probably disagree.

_

Stop me if you've seen this before: Microaggressions

The format is a speaker's somewhat blithe, privileged comment followed by a description of how the listener interpreted it.

I particularly like the way Microaggressions--a new-ish Tumblr--acknowledges that minorities may exercise small, even unintentional, aggressions upon each others' consciousnesses--as below:

Man, outscored by a black guy.”

• Quote - Permalink

Vietnamese American male upon finding out I got a higher score than him on the Chinese I midterm. 

Having the House to Myself

Is delicious. The silence is heavenly. The kids are at school. Big A is at work. The university is still on Easter break. I'm getting work done. I'm eating chocolate. I'm eating a lot of chocolate. I microwaved some Annie Chun's for lunch.

I miss the kids. And memories--of their tiny hands, their silly requests, their crazy antics--are debilitating. Their crazy requests. Their silly antics. Their tiny requests.

When I'm not with them I worry about them. I'm with them; I worry. Somedays they're crawling all over me and I feel like I'm sitting cross-legged on a train-track holding them tight, wondering if something horrible is careening around the corner towards us.

Other days, of course, feel like I should save the world from my kids.

_