I'm ordering these "Saying No To Things Punch Cards" for friends. The idea is that you reward yourself for saying no to things by treating yourself to an ice cream after ten "noes." There's a version with cocktail reward as well, and they're available here.
Anyway, I would have earned that icecream/cocktail today. I evaluated everything against back pain and let most things go. A missing submission could wait, family could make their own dinner, someone else should give Scout his meds, Big A thinks we should go for a walk? I think not. My planner looks bereft. I researched elaborate menus for upcoming parties, read for hours, soaked forever, spent time with the fam, and fed myself what I wanted.*
*What I wanted ranged across continents and was delicious: an English muffin with hummus, jalapenos + sliced avocado, sprinkled liberally with furikake.
In the midst of the slowdown and the disruption, a few insights:
My general humor is greatly impacted by pain. I have so much less patience and do so much less for people. I wonder who I would be if I had had a history of chronic physical pain.
I'm more likely to take medication for the pain if I remind myself that it'll help reduce the inflammation--apparently, I don't think I deserve to take it just for the pain alone.
Nu and Big A are really good at waiting on me hand and foot and I should ask them more often.
I should try to get my treadmill desk up again so I can move as I work tomorrow--sitting and getting up from sitting are the worst.
Pic: Daffodil Hill (we think at its peak) with L this morning.
Apropos of all this, I love the title of the book JL gave me--Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship. It seems to be a sociologist's happy validation of female friendships from besties and cliques to squads and posses.
For a while now, I've expected my elderly years to be lived in the communal company of women. Whether that's from watching too much Golden Girls (or more recently Grace and Frankie), growing up in all-girls "convent" schools, or radical feminist envisioning, I don't know... yet.
And this is not at all unusual--I've been averaging between 3-6 hours of sleep for years now... and put like that, I'm worried there's going to be some spectacular comeuppance for this.
In some ways I'm a perfect candidate for fractured sleep because I have family from other continents and time zones--so no matter what the time, I have people on hand to have heart-to-hearts and to text links to hilarious songs like Rowdy Baby (no babies were harmed in the making of this video).
But also Big A works nights, so we're usually texting and chatting about stuff and keeping in touch and being silly as well. And if he's home, his sleep schedule is messed up by working nights, so I'm hanging out with him then too. And tonight At seems to be up and feeling chatty and is sending me Langston Hughes poems about Lenin and I sent him that clip of Paul Robeson singing to Scottish miners (cross cultural solidarity is my favorite and my boy knows me).
Anyway, this will all work itself out, or won't. If I'm going to be up all night anyway, I feel like there ought to be a cuddly baby to keep me company at least 😁.
Pic: The Red Cedar was flooding its banks on our walk yesterday.
"For young people experiencing grief, he suggests Bridge to Terabithia, a novel about two children who create a magical land that allows them to escape a personal tragedy. For people dealing with indecision, he recommends “Eveline,” a short story by James Joyce about a young woman who plans to leave Dublin with her lover and is forced to decide whether to abandon her family. Cheu prompts clients by asking them, “If you were Eveline, what would you do?” Turning the question on the reader, he says, uses the story to ease them into sharing more about themselves. “That is how you allow the discussion to move away from a very personal direct confrontation to an imaginary alternative,” he says, “which allows them to imagine a different life for themselves.” Literature essentially helps clients be seen without being exposed."
Pic: Scout giving us high-fives for the week that was. (I think Big A and I may have taught our baby a new trick!)
But an unscripted funny moment was when Pinsky was describing how hair sprouts on the human body, using his fingers to mime sprouting at his head, then his armpits, and then the whole auditorium kind of held their breath wondering if he would go further. (He didn't).
It was bittersweet saying goodbye to advisees and students who graduated today. I went in early to finish writing congratulation cards in my office and was touched to find cards students had crammed into the doorjamb or slid under the door. I thought I knew whom they might be from as I collected them, but I was wrong. None were from advisees or people I had done big, important things with/for. For the most part, these cards referenced small conversations and interactions. I kind of sat with that for a while. The idea that small things had been so important in someone's life made me feel... TBH... a bit anxious, actually. It's easier to do a finite number of big things than it would be to be open and supportive all the time.
Pic: A screengrab of me doing the faculty marshal thing with the staff/mace and all. I kind of like the extra shoulder width and overall height academic regalia gives me.
And I couldn't help remembering that this happened at last year's graduation.
Already unthinkably wild things have been done and said (by my mom, natch) and wilder things have been said in support (by Big A who is her ...
