Teen Vogue: Fashion, Beauty, Entertainment... and the Resistance

I knew she was brilliant, I had no idea she'd be just so dang nice! I told her what seeing her so Indian name on the masthead at feministing.com more than 15 years ago meant to me, what it means to see her leading Teen Vogue into the resistance... and she wove that into her keynote that evening.
Also: she hadn't had breakfast when I picked her up, and she told me she had texted her mom later to say--Indian Lady picked me up; I got food inside of twenty minutes.
Yup, I have superpowers too.

#SamhitaMukhopadhyay



_

Sun's Light

...passes through me--
it makes me strange
flashing like sighs
signing rainbows

melting extravagantly
becoming sweet, sweaty
celebrating, stumbling
determined this is love

In an epilogue, we may seem
imprisoned, undermined--
But here, we are optimistic,
glittering in our sisterhood, one.





_

Plans Are Getting Better

To think that I couldn't wait to start using my 2019 planner, and here I am almost a quarter of the way in, having barely used it. Worse: nearly all of my sabbatical term is over, and I haven't done any of the important stuff I meant to do.

I re-started the planner with all five colors of ink today--I feel so much more intentional and focused when I can confirm at a glance that the various modalities of life are in (chromatic) balance. And I reconfigured the to-do list to make it more realistic given how little time remains between now and getting stuff ready for the spring term.

It may be that it is the prep work that drags the most. And that's where I spent most of my time today--I enjoy being poetry editor--and today was about prepping the selected poems for Dropbox and publication; I love being the advisor to the feminist house--and I spent hours making sure the application materials for next year reached the relevant channels and vetting and worrying about applications; I love teaching in the classroom--and so much of today was re-reading materials and organizing the e-reader (okay this last thing was fun).

Also fun: The Spotify playlist I curated for our class.

_

“HARRY POTTER” & THE DEATHLY STATUS QUO

At is in New York for the Model U.N. competition, but his article from last month seemed really pertinent. Some weird typos and things, but I love his take. This is the article he wrote while I was on the Greece trip, mining Nu's help for HP lore.

"Consider, instead, that the wizard world of Harry Potter isn’t a status quo worth returning to. The “magical and perfect” wizard world is based on class, racism and segregation. In a society where magic can magically fix and duplicate things, somehow there are still wizard families living in poverty. "

And because I posted it proud-mama style on FB, there were some sweet reminiscences about his playwriting at seven, and him asking me a question at the SALA D.C. conference in 2004, when he was five.

So far, the only bright spots in a day where both Jordan Peele's Us and and Bobby Mueller's magnum opus disappointed.

_

Saturdates

A full "dayspend" with J that we made happen when she walked into my office two weeks ago and insisted that I pull out my calendar to schedule it. We went to the temple, and lunch, and ended up with cups of tea at home.

Then it was Nu's sleepover with neighbor E after we walked over to Sansu for Big A's Boss Day dinner where I ate too much sushi. It felt so nice to have two kids at dinner with us again. Although when I said that, A said that the adoption thing seems less possible for him with each passing week.

Nu helped me design a Bitmoji so I can at least have tiny ones that way:

_

Friday Night with Bottle Shock

Apparently, people who swear make better pals...

I'm making good ones then:





_

Spelling Bee Champion(s)

 

This is DB's picture of the three finalists, and the random seating R to L is also how we ended up in the rankings. As he put it: "Of the around 100 people at the spelling bee last night - it all came down to these three favorite people of mine! Congrats to Maya, Jill, and Pete on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place finishes!"  (I'm the odd one out here, Jill and Pete are DB's much loved family, after all :)

We weren't really going at it Spellbound-style. The event was for Child Advocacy and we'd been in groups up until the final round, and I'd been lucky to have bestie K as well as my CASA director and coordinator on my team. But yes, this did help me cross one more thing of my mental list of things I meant to get to after I moved to America.

* Nu and Big A were going to come to cheer me on, but kids weren't allowed, so they stayed home.

_