On the third day of puppy...

There was a lot of this

and this

and this

and then antibiotics for bronchitis from the Pet E.R.

(Where embarrassingly for both of us, a student who hadn't turned in her draft of the term paper yet works on the weekends--it felt like weird professor stalkery--Where *is* your paper? *When* will you turn in in?)
_

For Amma

Mother, my diameter
I am yours, your radius.

Gambling into leaf too early
the crocuses are betrayed
frayed on drifts of winter,
sleet, and no daisies
at our feet

All weekend long,

Toronto's lonely songs

their Omni and just me

the same Hindi movies

this time I see alone

Bound to you. Only you.
But found by everyone.

_

Resurrection

With the weather steadying in the 50s, kids seemed to materialize right out of the ground. 

Like zombies except less menacing and so much nicer!

_

Spring Smiles

Two smiles in one frame...

I used to take it for granted, but it's become rarer with teen-and-tween 'tude. 

_

This is how...

I need to put this out there, to counteract Diaz's somewhat simpering performance on The Colbert Report this week, and remember that he's a MacArthur my kind of genius.

(From Diaz's Twitter feed in November 2012

http://twitter.com/JunotDiazDaily/status/268774844273934336)

_

High

The memory of a plane
crawling before flight
the tires tearing grief
a captured sigh of air

the first possibilities
of the night-mare are
gold-tipped at dusk
needy as a pilgrimage

I follow legs of furniture
to the crotches of trees
light bleeding from clouds
coming down, bringing it all down


___

Perhaps it is true. Yesterday, a student blamed his dream--of a gray mold that crawled up his toothbrush--on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez we've been reading in class...

_

So Sari

Unusually for me, I turned up to work in a sari. ( A special sari that my Chelli gave me back in May last year!)

 I took an accidental selfie while I was documenting student PowerPoints, and so I even have proof.

Thanks for the sari, Chells!!

_

Puppy Love

I have Scout the puppy on the brain.

All day, conversations about the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality sounded like "Scout's decision." (Scout is a big advocate of unconditional and unrestrained love.)

Also, I realized today that a few weeks ago I posted a link to an article on Scott Prouty, the Romney 47% videographer (awesome transcript at Shakespeare's Sister), and referred to him as SCOUT Prouty. (I hope Scott won't mind--he shouldn't; Scout doesn't hate anyone, especially people who work hard--you should see how hard he wags his stubby little tail in the video.)

The thing is, we don't even get to meet Scout for two more weeks. (At likes to point out that I have a major case of Internet-fueled love for my surrogate-birthed puppy baby.)

Pictures!

Scout doing his best impression of a potato (at two weeks):

And such a serious fellow today (six weeks):

_

Meanwhile, over on FB...

What can happen when you have one kid on the cusp of high school and the other in kindergarten...
Atul: I need to finish my PowerPoint.
NuNu: I can power point! (pokes him hard)

Like ·  · Promote · Share

• Jake Freeman, Lu J. Rollins, Sarathy Jayakumar and 68 others like this.

If I have to be in the office on a Sunday...

I'm glad I get to giggle at the incongruity of a plant wearing my favorite Horace Mann quote:

Misspeak

Stew
a head
of cabbage garbage
in-certitude
curtained disdain.

Yellow is gold
is lemons
yellow is pages
is journalism
is cold Englishman's lyric

she says
planes, and trains
--not kind to my migraines
it rhymes, write the poem
I say

elastic-electric
forced
forged faked
shudderin' end
ex-tension
_

READ. THIS.

So You're Tired of Hearing About Rape Culture (A Rant)

It starts:

Someone asked me today, “What is ‘rape culture’ anyway? I’m tired of hearing about it.”

Yeah, I hear ya. I’m tired of talking about it. But I’m going to keep talking about it because people like you keep asking that question.

_

Daylight Savings

Clocks: imperiously rude
Hands gesturing for attention
Somehow continuously staring
Yet yawning emptily before you're even done

Any sun soaks you in warm syrupy attention
while nudging you towards the door
tells you she is yours real until
bruises become nightfall

Winds open. It's a hoax.
They close like a bridle.


_

That's a Ten (Ten!)

By Kevin Moore over at Mooretown.

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Snatch Dispatches

Big A and I went to see a student production of The Vagina Monologues this weekend. It was an amazing production with student-scripted passages and made even better because we were sitting with  two of my work friends who were seeing it for the first time.

What happened: Big A and friends were talking about how they'd read excerpts of The Vagina Monologues before but hadn't really caught the show.

What I dreamed that night: That Big A was telling my friends that he'd read "snatches"of The Vagina Monologues before.

I nearly peed myself from laughing.

_

Vignette

Invisibility
Stands at the street corner
begging from indifference

Lightness
is her weight bearing
down the breath in my chest

_

Mine to Change (Cha-ching)

Nu likes to belt out Metric's Breathing Underwater,  warbling away, all five years old and angsty, substituting her own words at will--including making "mine to change" into "Cha-Ching." Yes, we think she's enormously cute.

So we're good on finding funny kids, but we're having some difficulty with homes. For some reason, we're having difficulty reconciling ourselves to the loss of our old kitchen (up, above) and assimilating to our new current one (down, below--it gets us so down).

_

The Cure

This backbend is the future
tight wire of dreams
warm like dance
step, tip-toe

*
your toenail could tear it,
from some other room
a cough, a prayer
renounces

*
your breath
goes to my brain
your back is turned.
(But arched closer to me.)

_

A Reminder

Little Red Riding Hood visits the office to say it's the weekend and I should take a break.

(So I played the part of the mother, the grandmother, and the wolf-grandmother.)

Little Red Riding Hood wants to replace her comforter with the fuzzy scrap of red blanket she found while we unpacked. It's too small, I say. Perhaps you could use it under your comforter?

She says: Well, that wouldn't work for me.

Not so little...


_

The team that got me to work yesterday...

(One of them did not want me to leave.)

Scout

In order to further test my sanity, we're considering on a waitlist for a puppy.  S/he will be named "Scout." (More n. than v. That is to say, more To Kill a Mockingbird than scouting.)

We're already playacting all the silly stuff that Scout will do and panting down the phone pretending to be Scout. No prizes for guessing who the silly beings truly are.

Zadie Smith reverberates in my brain:

It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.

_

Tender Obsession

(Tame Impala: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards)
_

Fullness

The day begins
hard, snow-palsied
I contain multitudes
on a to-do list

I get to the office
crank the door
and call my mother
talking to myself

Like the oceans
At 8:30
Regretfulness.
Full of regret.

_

Eulogy

Conscience of the streets
assembled newsheets
stacked against sky

this morning's miracle
blazing tree, burning bush
a touch of frost, a trick of sun.

Before that I stand at the table
some things in my hand
somehow in Chicago

the children call me to them
give me hugs, cheer me up
I apologize to Shirley Chambers

Sorry. So sorry. Sorry.

_

Commit

Like pilgrims
supine, weeping

clothes are planted
like stations

And also like
excuses and bruises

The saddest story
ends again and again

_

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?

_

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.

_

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.) 


_

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. 

_ 

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.

_

New Year

Carry the ashes and ice
that is this body

This token
Beckons? Beacons?

I don't know



Yet here you are

January 1

explosive
all the radiance and charm

of a fat baby



Make me return
to the scrolling of life

from this snow-cast hide
to the Forsythia hinge

to the spiral hymn of sun


_

End of the Year

I sing for dawn:
caught by a single seed
future fluttering

I steal the window:

unstitching golden reflection,

gleaming disaster

I find arithmetic:

the burning sum of days

igniting welcome

_

Decorating Dad

Although he may deserve a medal, all he's getting for now is some Sharpie graffiti.

_

Home

Our space is braided
by the warm vibrato of your chest
the small companions of our
great journey

Then too I am summoned
by the gravity of afterlife
the clouds razored by mortal moons
defibrillating

I can trace spans of sky
knowing sun and moon recognize
everything in an embarrassment
of ambition

Except that I burrow and spelunk
in tides and pools of anger
in a cave where I keep letting
strangers in


_

Amanat

The anonymous young woman was nicknamed Amanat (Treasure) by the press; her savage gang-rape  set off unprecedented protest marches and riots around India. She died today.

The story--all of it I can't even--is at the link. A few of the heart-wrenching, scream-inducing prompts are below:

On December 16, the student watched The Life of Pi at a South Delhi mall with a male friend who offered to escort her home. They boarded a private bus - the sort used so often by commuters in a city where public transport is inadequate and unreliable.

The six drunk men on board began harassing the student. They beat her friend with an iron rod. When she tried to stop them, they turned on her, hitting her with the rod before taking turns to rape her. The bus kept circling a 31-kilometre stretch in South Delhi, for hours as it rolled unstopped through a series of police checkpoints.

In messages that she scribbled for her family while on life support systems, Amanat reportedly asked if the six men who had damaged her so badly that her intestines had to be removed had been caught and punished.

The 23-year-old had persuaded her parents to sell their small piece of land in Uttar Pradesh so she could move to Delhi to study medicine. Since then, they said recently, their meals are very often rotis with namak (bread with salt).

There are so many tragedies here. One of the most frustrating may be that there are so many enlightened people in this story--the young woman living her life, her caring male friend, her parents who went through financial hardship and sacrifice to give her an education. It hurts that some completely unrelated goons can insert themselves into this narrative--precisely at the point successful change--and turn it into one of unimaginable suffering and tragedy.

_

Woes and Lows 2012

Family:

• At breaking his collar bone. Breaking my heart by being such a sweetheart about it.
• Big A breaking his wrist in about ten different places and needing multiple surgeries. Blowing my mind by trying to do every single thing himself.
• Me catching my hands in a slammed door--it hurts to make a fist or curl my hand around stuff like the steering wheel.
• Nu wanting to be in the "dumb, doofus dog club" by breaking a bone too. P.S. : WTH?!

Home:

• Coming home to discover that someone had taken a BB gun to our dining room windows.
• Waking up to discover that the basement drain had flooded an assortment of decay into the house.
• Waking every morning to intense gratitude and surprise that we weren't assaulted while we slept.
• Wanting to leave nightmare rental central, but having our extremely reasonable offer on a house dissed, basically.

World:

• The gun shootings in Aurora.
• The gun shootings in Wisconsin.
• The gun shootings in Newtown. 
• Not being able to go to movies anymore. 
• Not having been able to send kids to the last three days of school before Christmas break.

_

What

He's 13; she's 5. 

Sometimes I can still manage to find matching gifts that delight them.

_

A Child

I've always loved the solid Anglican certainty of T.S.Eliot's The Journey of the Magi at Christmastime. The ministrations of belief, the miracle of birth, the ardor of every pilgrimage...

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down 
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

_

Andal

(After Andal)


The small, breeze-colored day

the design and dance of water

thoughts are jasmine 

and mint

In the pounce of moonlight

what to think 

Yearning summons 

from a distance of days 

The ways of the evening

settle and fly like birds

Krishna, Krishna

Where are you?

I miss... I wish 

to hear your words again 

to feel the kiss of the flute

warmed by your breath


-

Mourning

The dead begin 

to forget us 

call, answer

don't let go

stay under sky's 

umbrella

beat entreaty

speak like echoes

in the new 

and unknown

the strange pucker 

and kiss of stars

_

Sorry

1. Charlotte Bacon, 6 
2. Daniel Barden, 7 
3. Olivia Engel, 6 
4. Josephine Gay, 7 
5. Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6 
6. Dylan Hockley, 6 
7. Madeleine F. Hsu, 6
8. Catherine V. Hubbard, 6 
9. Chase Kowalski, 7 
10. Jesse Lewis, 6 
11. James Mattioli, 6 
12. Grace McDonnell, 7 
13. Emilie Parker, 6 
14. Jack Pinto, 6 
15. Noah Pozner, 6 
16. Caroline Previdi, 6 
17. Jessica Rekos, 6 
18. Avielle Richman, 6 
19. Benjamin Wheeler, 6 
20. Allison N. Wyatt, 6
21. Rachel Davino, 29
22. Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal 
23. Anne Marie Murphy, 52, special education teacher 
24. Lauren Rousseau, 30, teacher
25. Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist 
26. Victoria Soto, 27, first grade teacher

Together...

I love this.

Happy Diwali Light!


__

Meanwhile, over at ye olde claw machine...

The "pick me" line is inevitable. But mostly,  I'm finding the rendering of the Prez strange and problematic...

_

39 Candles

Happy Birthday, Big Dog!

_

Happy Hero

Both kids have been fairly spidey obsessed. This is is the five-year-old Nu's SECOND Spiderhero-themed birthday. (At had FIVE; oy, yes.)

Nu and her superhero friend.

That silly Spidey--he crashed into the bottom of the cake again!

_

All Right

So this is kindergarten humor:

Mama!

(Holding heirloom tomato aloft)

I'm putting out a tomato-warning. 

A TOMATO  warning! 

(giggles)

Doesn't it sound like tornado-warning? 

Mama?

 __

Taking a Fall (for science)

While I was over at a visa interview in Grand Rapids, At was "the nucleus" in his science period skit. His science teacher wanted to show how At the nucleus moved, so he pushed him off the demonstration table... and...

At ended up with a broken collar bone. True story. No, we're not suing anyone.

He's in a lot of pain, but he's such a sweetheart and tries to mask it. 

(Related: This kid is ridiculously cute.)

_

Old Things (2)

I picked up from my old house the black corduroy trench I’d left behind. S didn’t have to save it for me, since the house papers are long signed and it has no real monetary value. But I'm glad it was saved. That I have it. It’s always made me feel sophisticated. Miss Selfridges. Ten years ago it cost me less than 20 GBP. I know because I never spent more than that on one piece of clothing.

And although it still quite warm now, it reminded me of wearing it back to my rooms on my way back from the Žižek talk the evening the snow started unexpectedly flower-like and light.

And how you called me on my new cell phone. I must have given you the number because refusal would have been ruder than necessary. Because you asked although you shouldn’t have.

You said—“Are you out in that thin black coat of yours.”

And I tried to act as though it were ok for you to call me on a cell phone. And you acted as though there were nothing unusual in telling me that you were worried about me calling me to check on me on my walk home in the snow.

You said—“How was your talk?”

And I pick from Žižek’s talk the one thing I thought you needed to hear. “Žižek says that if you tell someone you love them then the dominant emotion implicit in that statement is selfishness because you want to hear it back.”

You make fun of Žižek. I bristle. You imply that Rushdie is a philanderer. I am non committal.

We ring off.

_

Old Things (1)

Today I found the song you played me on repeat from across the aisle while trying to make eye contact. You may have played it a hundred times? Played it louder than necessary. Played it back to back with another song I don’t remember at all. Something with Salman Khan in it? Some other song extolling the virtues of romantic love and taking a chance.

Anyway, I found “Mannil” on an old CD copied for me by a dear friend who’d billed it as “SPB Marina Beach Song” because even seven years ago I’d forgotten how the song was sung, but only remembered only that it was filmed on the beach. But although I’d forgotten the song itself, something about the frisson of seeming desirable to you must have stayed with me.

And today, listening to that song from another lifetime, I enjoyed it as I never have before. Remember you, footnote, person whose name I never knew. I’d look you up on facebook if I knew your name.

_