Guffaw

It took me a moment (or several) to get why this picture of Karl Marx that Bill Clay titled "The only known picture of Marx and Obama" was so funny to my friends.  It makes me snort.

Clint Eastwood reference here.

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They both start with the letter "R"

I've never paid much attention to the don't-go-out-at-night-by-yourself line. There was always an interesting story as a journo intern or somewhere fun to be or a late night at the library or a necessary grocery run that was too good or important to pass up. I know I'd go bonkers if my kids tried to do the things I've done.

I do take the necessary precautions like all women everywhere. And although there have been a few occasions when I've prickled with fear, I have never spent time worrying about rape. 

So it makes absolutely NO sense that at this particular point in my life, when I'm no longer as gullible or nubile as I once was, to suddenly begin to have fears about rape. True that we're renting in an area that feels a little unsafe. True that I'm sleeping on the first floor for maybe the first time in my life. But it still makes no sense.

Big A wonders if it's because of all the creepy men in women's vagina's lately.

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Before I forget

While I wait for Nu to turn five next month and start Kindergarten this week, I want to write down stuff as she used to say earlier--just this year.

About how she'd get her Rs and Ms tangled and Ms. Rebecca would become the inscrutable "Ms. Mebecca."

How for years, she used T's for all her Ks. And of how we used to tease her by asking her to say "King Kong" so we could giggle when she went "Ting-Tong" like some squishy doorbell.

I'm forgetting things... I want to start doing this vintage postcard calendar journal with the kids.

Here

I'm singing again
thinking savage
songs separating

Tonight's
bright hinge
muttered, relenting

Our own world
a handful of breath
veined and racing

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Possible

the gods of the afternoon

the temple of traffic

the battle of the Buddha 

yielding, coming out alright

the siblings barking in my head

on those long trains headed here

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Voices

Recently, the number of times I've been startled by the sound of a man's voice from the kids' bedrooms upstairs has been legion.

Li'l A, newly 13,  sounds bignormous.

And although he still has my puny wrists and ankles much to his chagrin, the mousey voice he inherited from me is now a grownup boom.

I don't note his mustache--because what south asian, male or female--doesn't have a mustache since they're six months old? (What. Just me? Oops.)

Anyway. If I sound surprised, it's because I was a late bloomer--actually the last to "bloom" in my cohort and expected that my kids would be the same.

Segue to say, I've been trying to get the kids up at 6 a.m. after a summer of late-late mornings. And at that hour the afore-mentioned teen voice sounds positively menacing.

Or cracks with pride as he tells me that his reddit comment got up-voted 238 times today.

Ahem. So when we say some commenter sounds about 13 years old... they very well might be.

Just saying.

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Week Before Work

Frost sharp as
chin settled on shoulder

looking back
at the pelt of summer

book ruffled
beached by libraries

confiscated bliss
the hypnosis of hope

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