Month: November 2016

read write run resist, post-Thanksgiving edition

Holly
cherry blossoms on a twig with a yellow autumn leaf
A neighborhood cherry tree is blooming. Photo by sanguinity.

Read: The book that gave me solace during election week was Lucy and Linh, an Australian YA novel by Alice Pung. Lucy wins the inaugural Access Scholarship to an old and cutthroat girls’ school. No one else is the daughter of Chinese parents from Vietnam, or helps out at home sewing piecework. Lucy observes and navigates politics of race, class, and femininity. Whew. Intense but in a way that I love. I highly recommend it if you like the exploration of power dynamics in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. (It did end a little suddenly and neatly. Part of me was okay with that because I needed Lucy to be okay; another part wishes there were another whole book developing the last 40-ish pages.)

Write: I’m taking a half hour a day to write by hand in a spiral notebook. It feels good to have my mind to myself, with no media input and no audience. Not even a project I’m working on, unless I want to. Just me.

Run: 39-mile week achieved! I left the long run (nine miles) until today, and also made up the last three walking miles I needed. It was a push to get this week’s mileage in without my commute to make it feel natural. And early darkness (usually of the cold and rainy variety) kills motivation for an evening walk, frankly. Next: the milestone 40-mile week, half running (10/6/4) and half walking (5×4).

Resist: I sent a “Not Bannon” postcard for Postcard Avalanche, mostly for the mental health benefits of fighting normalization in my own head.

If there’s money left in the checking account at the end of the month Wednesday, it will go to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe to help cover bills for the Water Protectors. The latest developments worry me.

I’m one of the millions who aren’t overtime-eligible after all. I don’t work over 40 hours a week, so for me it’s just whether I fill out a time-sheet starting December 1, or not. But I feel for all those fast food and retail managers who put in 50 or 60 hours a week.

Online Book Fair for Ballou High School

Holly

This is something I almost missed but am glad I didn’t, because it gave my spirits a lift! Guys Lit Wire is in the home stretch of their fifth book fair for a public high school in Washington, DC. I appreciate the decision to stick with the same school and really develop their collection, with librarian Melissa Jackson and the students collaborating to develop the book list.

I got some good intel just looking through the list – Octavia Butler’s Kindred is getting a graphic novel version in January!

If you want to know what I sent this time around, it was  Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed, which was also the first book I read this year. I hope it finds new friends at Ballou.

I believe the fair will continue until 200 books have been sent.

Halloween

Holly

After work on Monday I walked the last three miles home, from about six to seven o’clock. At first the only trick-or-treaters I saw were babes in arms or in strollers. They gradually got older as I got closer to my house and it got darker; by the time I hit my street there were middle-schoolers.

The first time I passed a jack-o-lantern lit with a candle, I had an immediate and immersive memory of that smell, the mix of warmed and scorched pumpkin flesh plus candle-wax. I considered walking up to a jack-o-lantern to smell it, but they were all close to front doors and it was hard to tell what was candle and what was LED. There was no wind.

The Pixy Stix I bought at the dollar store were mad popular in our trick-or-treat bowl! Kids instinctively grabbed them, but didn’t know what they were. I’m proud to have shown the wonder of pixy stix to a new generation.