A little overwhelmed — came home from the trip to a cold, and Kev and Anand were recovering from the same (only Kavi seems to have escaped). So moving slow and sluggish, and there is so much piled up to do, the house has descended into chaos, and I simultaneously want to clean it all, and want to curl up in bed and just read and read and read. None of which gets classes prepped, by the way. Okay, plan for today:
– next: send readings to students
– at 8:30, go to Walgreens, pick up meds, drive to Burr Ridge for mammogram — further than usual, about 30 minutes, but my oncologist is switching to some fancier kind of mammogram for me, so have to go a little further away; it’s hard to argue with her taking extra care (4.5 years since diagnosis…the time slips away)
– come home, grind some roasted spices so I can take a little curry powder with me to Ragdale, where I’m planning to meet Nayomi Munaweera for lunch; maybe cook a little too, depending on timing (Nayomi, do you like mackerel? or chicken? lentils?), since she’s been at a residency program for weeks, and I know I’d be longing for Sri Lankan food by that point, even though the chef at Ragdale is excellent
– what I really want to do is read her book, _Island of a Thousand Mirrors_, which I started last night, and am about halfway through, and it’s a little embarrassing that I haven’t read her work before — I’ve been meaning to for years and years, but somehow, something else always intervened. Better late than never, and it’s my own fault that now I’m having trouble putting it down to do the work that needs to get done — maybe I can read in the hospital waiting room:
*****
“Arteries, streams, and then rivers of Tamils flow out of the city. Behind them they leave: looted, soot-blackened houses, the unburied or unburned bodies of loved ones, ancestral wealth, lost children, Belonging and Nationalism. It is a list that stays bitter on the tongue, giving birth to fantasies of Retribution, Partition, Secession…”
*****
– after that, meeting with trainer (it’s been a few weeks, what with end of summer closing of gym and travel, so this may be a little painful), and then we’re trying something new, youth personal training — six sessions for both kids, to see if we can inculcate some less couch-like habits
– and then dinner, and then writing workshop, and somewhere in there, I need to read the stories for workshop…
I’m starting to feel the itch to write again; it was drained entirely by finishing the novel, but it’s coming back, an inexorable tide (oh, look, Nayomi, the water metaphors are impossible to resist, aren’t they?). Tomorrow is busy too, with teaching and e-mail and SLF stuff, and Friday morning, I have another medical procedure, sigh.
But the rest of Friday is pretty clear, so writing then? We’ll see. I have stories to revise.
#blog