Welp, back to baseline. Dball threw up all over to wake me up, I stepped in it and went pukesledding before coffee. Slapstick ✅️. I haven't opened my laptop yet, if I am super lucky the meeting about "the future" has been moved online, but either way I will need to bring the party. It seems counterintuitive, I lost the most by far, but that's why - if I can laugh it off, they're allowed some hope. And they realllly need that.

It is AWESOME to get rejected, told in a million ways that you are not valued, that you have served your purpose and can die now (AND Patti ACTUALLY DID), then to be forced to go to mandatory meetings about "the future" - it's like getting very *elaborately* broken up with, again and again. Firing fridays, no real court fridays, god only knows who is making money on all this shite, it's a fucking plague of interpersonal violence everywhere I look. And I, of course, was in charge of shooting bullshit in the face for forever, so broken or not, today HOPE is MY job. And I'ma gonna do it. Cz there is a more important much longer game here than any one era of losses. We are in fact likely to know each other and care about each other until we cannot (die), so if today sucks balls (not in a good way), we hold hands and laugh it off and get to tomorrow somehow. 

I think I'll stop for bakery cookies, try that bakery up the street. 

And tell them some version of what I keep saying every time I have the heart and stomach to do so: We are still here. You and I, we are still here, still standing, nobody can take all we each have become (everything from authors to parents to teachers of the year, but primarily survivors). And I personally think we got better looking too! Look around!! (they will kind of 🤭🫠🤦🏻‍♀️ at my inappropriateness - our senior faculty told us midmeeting to think about being fuckable, jeezus) It'll work. By the time I gotta run, they will have forgotten that all hope abandons and will be talking in wildly unrealistic ways about all the future might hold (fantasizing). And it might! 

Then I am out cz not trusting the "flu", I got blood drawn and was correct. Time for the big hurty needles of B this and D that, my body burning it all faster than it can absorb enough from horse vitamins. That's at 2, meeting at 1, students 10-12, can't really do yoga after shots same day 💫 sooo

welp, let's get to 3 pm then maybe all I'll have left in me is a nap, but thatd be enough 🙏

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Playfulness happens when there is room for it. If a person can be playful, even when the situation is serious, it's because their psyche is expansive, their emotional range as wide as a field. This is who you are today.

just-in-case Mary burned all night 

song tbd

 

I'm sorry 😪

 

Yesterday, I started crying in therapy and never stopped. The word "broken" broke me completely. 

More good shit has to happen here. Laughing, in particular. So I threw a spell candle at it 🤷🏻‍♀️

loverspell - stela cole just the first 15 seconds

grit - Lockwood

Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood. 

"The soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean." 

"To be right is to do what our bodies know how to do anyway, and not ask why."

Lockwood's last book was about an infant's death and I will never hear/see the term "birth defect" the same way ever, she broke my brain of it, and somehow the book was also funny. 

This new book picks up where that one left off, and is about long covid and losing your mind completely to a fever that never ends. And I keep laughing out loud.

To teach humor in a context of life-changing Disease and imminent Death, you gotta find the voices that can do it. 

I felt AFTERNOONY for a brief min. The day shot that right in the face. Glad I got a little reading done first 💔 

survival skill: humor

"To err is human, but to persist in error is diabolical." 

Lockwood's most recent work is challenging. A woman trying to piece her sanity back together REALLY as she performs it AS IF. Why would she do that? Because if you've misplaced your mind (not "lost", it's right there), you know nothing kindly stops for you.

Nothing kindly stops for you, period.

Except maybe Pam.

The premise of the last book, and of the work we did with it for students with the scholar-parent who lost a child the same way, was simple:  Life is worthwhile if you are "just" an object of unconditional love. (Why is life not worthwhile if all you are is an object of unconditional human love? I must protest.) 

I have other material in this category, like Expecting Adam, in which an academic chooses to carry a pregnancy to term with a down syndrome child. So much hate such decisions bring, strangers furious at the imperfection of a human infant. And the academics are the worst. The "smart" people. The folks who are doctors who teach folks who are gonna be doctors and nurses cannot fathom a human life worth anything at all if it will not eventuate primarily in skilled productivity.

The baby will probably never learn math, says the doctor. Lockwood, thinking of Oppenheimer and balling her fist, "say it again, so help me"

Curating this material, it is not difficult to get students to step back from "defective" as a good reason not to exist. They're not nazis, despite everyone calling everyone else that now. And they take another step back when they're reminded that they wouldn't have met me if they had not failed somehow 😀 Step back and back and back, then walk forward again and tell me who does and does not deserve unconditional love (?). 

To Err is Human. We premiered it in the Kav with overflow rooms for the whole SON. The hardest thing: apologizing. Being wrong ever for some people is agony. 

massaging my iliac crest as I dance and make cool(when I get my hands on you - lyrics bob dylan, vocals marcus mumforddick)whip playlist

empty handed - ariel posen ft city and colour

up all night - james bay ft lumineers & noah kahan

archbishop harold holmes - jack white 

bad dreams - teddy swims 

sushi and coca cola - st paul & the broken bones

"tough love"

VIRGO (August 23-September 22)

Many of you are renowned for your precision, but that’s just half the story. The more complete truth is that when you are most robust, you’re a connoisseur of refinement. Your careful edits can transmute muddles into medicines. Your subtle fixes may catalyze major corrections. Here’s my bold declaration: You are now at the height of your Virgo powers. I hope you wield them with utter flair and finesse. Make everything you touch better than it was before you touched it.

🫴

Breaking down, the life disrupting sickness(es) of it, forces a person to be "decisive afresh about who you are." ~Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood (another title in the running, grit v lifelong recoveries)

Decisive. I imagine looking at pieces of me scattered on the floor. Who is the person picking them up, and feeling forced to decide "not salvageable" about half of the heart? 

"Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business." Thoreau

cowboy dreams - boy golden ft cat clyde for Canada

pretty good at feeling bad - captain lonesome and his hurt feelings  

young Toni Morrison

the devil made me - esme rose  and now he's dead.

"all that matters but not all I want"

lol, yup. (wise and succinct)

5 years with no hospitalizations. 

counting birthdays in relation to illness mectrics and life expectancy stats really underscores the fucked up feeling of counting down to your death once a year with a cake. but she's a bighearted little demon who wants to live relentlessly, enough to walk out into early morning snowdrifts wearing one sock and all kinds of similar hair-raising resistence insistence. and zero repentence as if she has no time for that.

I hope the candles in her never go out.

I hate that, myself.

 

 status: afloat 〰️

 

"starry night blue"

"I tried to kill myself. And the very last thought was seemingly logical: if I'm losing my grip on this real life and slipping into unreality, I would prefer that my children do not have to deal with a mother gone mad." That might make perfect sense to someone who would say he is too selfish to commit suicide. 

"In the water it is now and now and forever now. My life, strange to others, is stranger to myself. But that doesn't really matter. In this strange life, I can still think - think about things and then scrutinize those thoughts; think through things and then start all over, accepting that, short of one's death, all finalities in life are provisional."

WWJD

grit ft underwear for clothes

"Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed." ~ Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li

one a fact, one a problem 
(and an excellent example of how to use a semicolon)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/the-deaths-and-lives-of-two-sons excerpt

I already have a lot of material that I call 'think like a tree'. A tree can survive a wildfire and add it to its rings - a shitty year of hundreds of years. And if it can't survive, it can send its resources to others intentionally. You might think only people can have grit; I am going to not just challenge that assumption, I am gonna suggest maybe we have less of it than any other still-living thing. They will get handed that idea by reading a memoir about the death of two children, so what are they gonna do? Say "fuck that"? No, jesus, they have hearts and minds. So they'll give the ideas courtesy/repect. 

"known better"

Reflection: What does it mean / look like to "tend" something? 

Experiential learning (+ discussion forum for weekly uploads of update photos): a bonsai. Why? "There is no good way to say this: words fall short."

I am sorry (not sorry) for the giant headache it may be for my bosses to order general education bonsai trees for my umpteen failing students. I can hear my supervisor (close friend, we're 🤞), "but they're all going to die!" (he will laugh soon as he says it cz I always say GET TO YOUR POINT, WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE) Yes, probably, almost all the wee trees will die. But each for its own reasons (did not get what it needed but got who knows what instead) that will show the students how they personally "tend" and feel about it and that it is a fact of failure that it can happen despite best efforts. The pot will be a souvenir from the class = a reminder that they could always try again. Folks need solid metaphors. They can feelthink if they do what I ask; I'll reach right into human hearts through bloody chests in my way too. Like magic.

It might be a disappointment to meet the rest of me, many sides of whom can be unsure and proven wrong and all kindsa human. 

"People by behaving predictably and unimaginatively are good only at confirming what I already know, and I think to myself: where you are is where the husks of life gather; where you are is where I won't be. There is little comfort in that knowledge, but still it is a relief that Death has made it easier for me to pay no attention to the husks of life."

I cannot remember not feeling that way. 

Grit rules of thumb:

1. Do not be a husk. 

Quotes for prompts

Premise for Grit 1 and Grad Grit is the same: You are in a back-up plan. Living is a back-up plan, you'll find, when despite all the indignities of both your life choices + being stuck in a body, you didn't die.  So what is your back-up plan for now? (aka now what?)

 "There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now."

"The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meager understanding."

"Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, and alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are friction, until, once confirmed by life, they become facts."

#candles🙏

"If I focus my mind on the happy moments, the framework for living seems sturdy enough. And yet it is not an indestructable shelter from catastrophes."

#shocking#painful#defining

"No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of 'I love yous' we can say to them. That, too, is a fact."

(funny story, I texted all the kids "I love you" when I read that - one said I LOVE YOU TOO, the others gave me total side-eye 👀 hahahaha)

"I did not yet know how our life would be lived, but there was one thing I did know: do things that work."

what works for you? how? to what end? be specific

"Get thee to a nuttery...Isn't the world the most inclusive nuttery?"

"We all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our tears."

discuss: everyone deserves our tears (?)

"Life, in an absolute sense is worth living just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn't always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person once endowed with that capacity can retain it."

do you possess the capacity for living? (are you doing so currently?, have you ever? explain, be specific)

"People by behaving predictably and unimaginatively are good only at confirming what I already know, and I think to myself: where you are is where the husks of life gather; where you are is where I won't be. There is little comfort in that knowledge, but still it is a relief that Death has made it easier for me to pay no attention to the husks of life."

what rule of thumb would you add to my list?

"Clichés are not merely flabby words used to express unimaginative thoughts; rather, clichés corrode the mind. Flabby language begetting flabby thinking seems a more alarming prospect than the opposite, flabby thinking finding refuge in flabby language. My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow....My students are often dumbfounded: They are still young, but it is my job to tell them that sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks. It’s their good fortune that they haven’t learned that sometimes people don’t have the luxury to wallow in clichés." word search the text for key words, including "gardening" for the bonsai thing

"To philosophize is lonely, but to philosophize is also to learn to walk past some emotions, including that momentary loneliness, and say: these are but pebbles that should not and will not stop me." not touching this, job for my PHI guy 

"I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering and inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists....I am sorry for whatever losses you have suffered or whatever deficiencies you were born with that make you, unavoidably, who you are and what you are."

"question: Is this life, which may be worth living, worth suffering for? If life is worth suffering for, should there be a limit, or should one have to suffer unquestioningly, all in the name of living? Is life worth living? ... A few years ago, when I met a psychiatrist .. and I said, a little shyly, that everything, in the end, came to that central question—is life livable? And my answer, after months of struggling, had been no. The psychiatrist nodded and then told me an old story from Norse mythology. In the wild darkness there is a long hall, brightly lit, warm, with windows open at both ends. A bird flies in from the window at one end and in a moment dashes out of the window at the other end. That hall, the doctor said, is life, and we’re all birds coming out of the cold darkness for a moment and then returning to the cold darkness the next moment. 'My advice,” he said, 'is that you never ask that question again. Is life livable? We don’t really have the time to form a thorough and thoughtful answer.'"

"Life is a comedy for those who think."

maybe this is what an answer to prayer feels like, a sudden freedom from needing to pray. POW (new nickname) is unchained, status "all is well".

Wolves appear to be howling at the moon, but what they are really doing is howling to one another. They howl to greet, to celebrate, to warn and most often simply to find one another. Under the first supermoon of the new year, who is it you would like to reach? Send your signal to the moon and it just might land in the heart of another.

I just want to howl. And howl and howl and howl. Nobody needs me to do otherwise, or wants anything from me, or has anything for me. I could howl out a sonic boom with no intention at all except to let it fly from this throat. 

full wolf supermoon (forgot, but felt) - view from front yard 

Wolf Moon, the first supermoon of 2026, overnight into tomorrow. The emotional tug echoes a truth about intimacy: Those closest to us evoke the deepest reactions. Their friction, their barbs, even their resistance can be, on some level, the tender proof that we matter to one another.

dickbutter 26.1

if I needed you - white horse guitar club if so how, if not why, if I can't
why can't I 

"for to ease your pain"
butterydickbutter

my fave card, means ENOUGH ("house clean, bills paid, man close, kids dogs oldsters all well cared for") #lucky pull for a new year

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Your fresh start is a seed of faith. What you plant will grow — believe it and be patient. Seeds don't sprout on demand; they sprout because the conditions are right. Create those conditions and let your inevitable future unfold. Lucky charm: jade.

Jade. I own nothing made of it, I don't even have anything that color. 

As for seeds, that tracks. Sunshine and I discussed my bright idea overnight, a garden including a seed library (like those book things people have in their yards). I bower as a kind of gift of my ability(s). I could build next a garden to hold a magical handfasting, bursting with abundance, butterflies alighting, songbirds bathing and nesting, children playing, water flowing, all arrayed around a place to still be standing - and then I could give it away. Sunshine could marry fairies. 

I made no wishes (gave them away). Thank you 🙏for my still waking up. That's all. 

coffee at dawn, still standing

Sunshine pulled me a ruin