Commit

Like pilgrims
supine, weeping

clothes are planted
like stations

And also like
excuses and bruises

The saddest story
ends again and again

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Get This (Don't Get That)

It bugs me when people claim that vaccines are controversial or a conspiracy--so it was particularly pleasant to listen to Garrison Keillor sonorously intone Adam Possner's poem as I was taking the kids to school. My favorite moment was when I was trying to explain what Possner meant by the "non-stick headstone" to the 13-year-old, and he was all, "It's Ok, mom--I get it." I gave him a noogie instead of the kiss I wanted to give him.

Myth Dispelled

by Adam Possner

The flu vaccine cannot
give you the flu, I tell him.
It's dead virus, there's
nothing alive about it.
It can't make you sick.
That's a myth.
But if we bury it in
the grassy knoll
of your shoulder,
an inch under the stratum
corneum, as sanctioned by
your signature
in a white-coated ceremony
presided over by
my medical assistant
and then mark the grave
with a temporary
non-stick headstone,
the trivalent spirit
of that vaccine
has a 70 to 90 percent
chance of warding off
the Evil One,
and that's the God's
honest truth.

Power

Squirmy Nu and her dad jockeying for position on the couch:



A: Stay still. You have to listen to me, don't you know I'm the boss?

Nu: YOU stay still. Don't you know that I'm the princess?

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So... This is Embarrassing

A isn't supposed to drive because of his shattered wrist, and he's out of work while we figure out if he'll recover, but he had to sit in on med student admission interviews nevertheless, so I was driving him to Saginaw. We almost made it to the hospital (after being pulled over once for speeding--but no ticket) when he noticed that I was trying hard to catch my breath but wasn't able to and I noticed that I was getting light headed, nauseous, and headachy in the process.

So A hopped into the driver's seat and we got to the hospital where the interviews were--except A and the kids ended up accompanying me to the E.R. Where it was discovered (just as I had insisted all along), that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. I got handed an official diagnosis of acute anxiety and prescription for Xanax--making me the most embarrassingly 1950's cliche of a doctor's wife ever.

Yet--it was scary. And comes at a time when we can least afford additional medical bills. And once I started crying--progressing quite rapidly to sobbing and then wailing--it was impossible to stop even as I was ashamed of myself and trying to stop so the kids needn't see me so completely lose control.

It's been a tough six months or so--two new jobs, all four of us at new schools, and moving to a different state where the skies are frequently grey, not to mention all the other doofus antics we've been up to. But more than the every day stressors, I can't explain how consumed I've been by the Newtown shootings and the New Delhi rape. Every time the kids aren't around, this is what I end up talking to A or friends about. And I took this international by calling my sister at work and my mom first thing in the morning to worry even about things as quotidian as taking my kids to school. And I know it's unhealthy--in the sense that it isn't good for me. But not being able to stop thinking about eleven bullets in a five-year-old's body or wondering how someone can be raped so violently that it requires that their small intestines be surgically removed is probably mentally unhygienic as well.

And that's just where I am.

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The Book Kids of Mumbai

This made me nostalgic although it is about Mumbai and not Chennai, and although it is about pirated books and not books on resale, and although it is about children on the street rather than quite literate adults. It reminded me of my friends and fellow English grad students Kamal and Christine with whom I spent many hours competitively buying second-hand books from the pavement book sellers of Pycroft Street. And I'm thinking also of the many street sellers (I wonder if the guy at Luz corner still sells) who would take a pescribed book list and rattle off all the titles they did or didn't have.

As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai, the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?”.... (Don’t tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.) 


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Bright Futures

I love how brightly dressed the women members of the 113th U.S. Congress are! 

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

And the unprecedented, we-the-people diversity is simply lovely.

From the NYT: As the 113th Congress opens, the Senate and the House are starting to look a little bit more like the people they represent.  The new Congress includes a record number of women (101 across both chambers, counting three nonvoting members), as well as various firsts for the numbers of Latinos and Asians as well as Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. 

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I'm Lost

Today the kids went back to school; it was hard.

It started out being hard because they'd gotten used to 10 a.m. starts and hour-long breakfasts and today was about waking up at 6:30 and getting out of the door by 7:30.

And then I walked Nu to her kindergarten locker and kept saying goodbye and not leaving. I started getting shaky and teary and then it dawned on me that this was their first day back at school since the Newtown massacre. I'd kept the kids from school for three days after that Friday, and then it was Winter break. It "helped" that A had just shattered his wrist and we were ferrying him to assorted surgeries.

Intellectually I knew that this was exceedingly maudlin and irrational and that my kids enjoy (and need!) school. And it was extremely embarrassing. But I'd look around at the crowd of goofy kindergartners milling about at waist-level and the harried, smiling teachers trying to appreciate the kids running up to them en masse to tell her all about their new sweater/hat/toy/lunchbox and kind of lose my sense of proportion.

Finally I ended up calling A who talked me down--first gently, then mockingly--and got me home.


****
In other news, we just started watching Lost. We're only about a decade or so late to that party.

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