loose change

i’m starting this piece on sunday night! because i do know what’s good for me, although i’ve been keeping that a secret these days. i have a lot on my mind for a multitude of reasons. i’m excited to parse it on this page.

for mother’s day we returned to a classic repertoire: brunch, mimosas (veuve+fresh squeezed oj from our tree), scrabble, and an episode of our favorite podcast, the moth. in the morning i got up a bit earlier than mom. i took myself out into the fog and began to cut flowers for bouquets, one for my mom and one for katie’s mom to be dropped off later. it was lovely.

i forget how much i love arranging flowers, or arranging arrangements in general. i love doing it by myself when there are no guidelines. i picked a bunch of fleabane, erigeron is the scientific name; they look like micro-daisies with the daintiest petals and the skinniest stem. once the bouquet was full, i slid a couple in. they were hardly noticeable unless you really looked. i’d saved them for last so that they didn’t drown in the callalily and roses and gerberas.

the bouquet provided the centerpiece for our table. mom beat me 278-262, or something like that. not our highest scores, but a fun game anyway. during her turns, i sat quietly and tried to figure out whether losing bothered me. i’ve beaten her a handful of times, and it doesn’t feel great to lose, but it didn’t really have an impact this time.

i continue asking questions to which i already know the answers. some days the questions come out in statements: i’m having a hard time finding the motivation to put my laundry in. i don’t know why i’m so exhausted at the end of every teaching day. i wish i didn’t feel so disconnected from my body right now. i need to figure out a time to take all my stuff to the thrift store.

lately i’m doing a better job managing these statements. i catch them before i utter them, and i try to walk them back. some days i am mean. you’re not struggling to find motivation, you’re just being lazy. other days i am practical. you’re exhausted because working with kids takes up a lot of mental energy. you’re out of touch with your body because you’ve not been running or swimming. lots of days i am avoidant. you’ll find time this weekend to do it. that avoidance is the bone i am constantly picking with myself.

henry miller talks about living from moment to moment: think only about what’s right there. do only what’s right under your nose. you shouldn’t be five steps ahead. i am very much five steps ahead. i am constantly willing time to speed up and then running around in circles in chaos and distress when it does. the time is passing regardless of how i spend it!

here on the coast we are fully in the swing of may gray, and the gloom is dense. i have not been seeking out beauty within it. it’s so monotone that it blends into the background–weather is off the table this month in terms of checkout-line small talk! i do wonder if the grayness is getting to my head.

the end of the school year is like an energy vacuum. the kids are one-by-one starting to finish their seatwork books entirely, and i’ve got no other books to assign them. our class play is this thursday. we have four weeks of school left. the teachers are letting recess get longer, almost a minute every day. sometimes we lose track of time. most times we just want one more minute of breathing room.

raf showed up to school first today, as he normally does. it’s such a funny 5-10 minute period of the two of us hanging out before someone else arrives. i went in early today. i woke up at six fifteen this morning in my dream state. i snoozed my alarm every nine minutes until 7:08 just so i could remain in it. for a week or more i’ve been remembering all of my morning dreams. i’ve not been writing them down so bits and pieces surely slip away from me, but it’s been fascinating. i want to keep dreaming. i like trying to solve them. i didn’t come to terms with this morning’s dream until i was in the car on my way to school. my eyebrows raised for just a second when i realized it. it was bizarre. it must have come from somewhere beneath my conscious stream of thought.

it’s teacher appreciation week! i forgot until about five minutes ago. i feel very lucky. the first grade parents go above and beyond mere appreciation–amy showed up this morning with a beautiful gift basket full of salves & snacks & socks & an immaculate sticker. it feels pretty good to be on the receiving end of such a basket that is so fine-tuned to these things i love! there are a lot of teachers out there who might deserve this more than i do. privilege is not lost on me!

it’s about 4p now on monday and i’m finishing this up from my dad’s office. we’re going to yoga at 4:30. i’m stoked–it’s the same restore class we did a few weeks ago, but this week i’m able to put more weight on my hand.

the day at school ended up being really great, especially for a monday–we got all of our lessons done and the kids all got along well and play practice went about as smoothly as possible. when i left, i chatted with some of the kids’ parents and thanked them for the gifts they dropped off today–a couple of parents even stuck around to wash all the teachers’ cars(!)–and they told me that today was only the tip of the iceberg. it’ll be really hard to have a bad week!

yesterday i almost Lost It at about 6 pm. i’d put in this big load of sheets and towels (i’d been avoiding it for a week or two) and was feeling great about it. i kept on tidying things up(slowly though, like through molasses)until it hit me, the slow, sinking realization that i’d forgotten to put in detergent. tiny error. i wanted to slam my head into a wall. i’m attributing all of the subsequent Large and Scary Thoughts to my menstrual cycle.

i know i’ve written about it before. there’s no exact science to it. five or six days before i’m projected to get my period, i just go a little bit crazy. i lose my stability. the worst part is that i can feel it happening, i can feel myself being irrational, and the natural followup thought is usually dismissive: you’re being crazy. which doesn’t help anything at all!

the thoughts are very vast and expansive, too. somehow they are all-encompassing in a real doomsday manner. this is where meditation should help. sam’s mantra, being the rock while the river rushes over and around you. i was too deep in it yesterday to get there.

i am home now. i’m in my room trying to wrap this piece up while stella shoves her ass in my face and steps all over my keyboard and keeps coming dangerously close to putting her tiny black paw in my hummus plate.

yoga was good. i wasn’t very much at peace, but i tried to observe my body. it is fucking TIGHT in there. we stayed exclusively focused on shoulders and hips today. the ole ball and sockets. i cannot believe how accessible stretching is, how good it makes me feel, and how rarely i take advantage of it. woof! i’m so happy to be able to do things like that with my dad.

time is flying. theres’s always a lot going on, even if you aren’t intentionally paying attention. julia fox is celibate. donald trump will be found guilty in court. it’s tornado season. american universities will do anything but divest. the news is sometimes written by people who are bad at writing. i want to be good at writing.

the good news is that i started reading the lightning thief to my class today, and they sat and listened for thirteen whole minutes. it’s a little above their age range, but they love mythology, and i loved this book as a kid. the good news is that claire ran the perimeter of manhattan, 31 miles, all in a day’s work. the good news is that lucy’s friend Ava wrote a killer song that she released with her band in richmond, virginia, bucko. the song is called vines will thrive. the good news is that teaching math to the kids is teaching me too. the good news is that lucy and i are seeing the counting crows this summer, in the maine summer air, the place in which we belong together. the good news is that summer is just barely out of reach, and eking closer by the day.

i’ve been revisiting old books. today i looked at now we are six by a.a. milne, surely one of the first poetry collections i was ever introduced to. i wanted to transcribe a little poem, a dainty one, a sweet one in the right context, called buttercup days:

Where is Anne?

Head above the buttercups,

Walking by the stream,

Down among the buttercups.

Where is Anne?

Walking with her man,

Lost in a dream,

Lost among the buttercups.

What has she got in that little brown head?

Wonderful thoughts which can never be said.

What has she got in that firm little first of hers?

Somebody’s thumb, and it feels like Christopher’s.

Where is Anne?

Close to her man.

Brown head, gold head,

In and out the buttercups.

not much cohesion or order to this piece i imagine! but that isn’t why i write em so i’m not gonna go back and review. one of these days i’ll start to edit. not today.

i met with a journalist for the washington post this past week, an old friend of my dad’s. i wanted to know more about writing. he instilled a lot of confidence, a lot of what we both hope isn’t false hope. he said a writer’s job begins with curiosity. i asked him if he ever felt his worldview to be different, if he ever noticed things that other people may not. he chewed on it. there is no clean way to phrase the question.

absolutely, he said. i’ve never thought of it that way, but absolutely.

sometimes i feel that writing is just the mere act of caring enough about your observations to make them permanent. sometimes it’s to understand them better. you can’t write if you aren’t interested, scott said. and on interest, he said: if it’s interesting to you, it’s interesting enough.

on february fifth i quoted annie ernaux on writing–i’ll leave an excerpt again here:

it is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.

thank you for reading my interesting-enough thoughts–see you next week! (which will be here in roughly 15 minutes given the way weeks have been panning out)

xxo r