mimsy and outgrabe

Inside The Grind When I first learned we were moving our classes fully online, I thought, "no big deal -- so much of my material is already up on Blackboard," but this was a false sense of security and possibly excessive pride, because this has turned out to be very untrue. I mean, yes, my materials are up on Blackboard, but they are not necessarily useful in terms of *teaching* -- discussion boards have to be created, and slide presentations need supplementary voiceover in the form of screencast videos, which are not necessarily difficult to create but *do* require me to have a quiet room to myself for at least 30 minutes per video -- usually more, because sometimes you mess up, even when you create a script. And the creation of the script itself takes time, as in at least another half hour, and creating these scripts when I'm interrupted by other members of my household every 15 minutes makes all of this course prep *while the class is already running* much like nav...

I'm not sure what I should write about anymore. That goes for the blog as much as for my poetry. I've been waking up each morning very early and allowing a small half hour for writing, but little has come of it. A draft revision here. Indulgent, self-pitying ramblings there. Sometimes I just stare at the page, or at the clock.  Vacillating between my children's distance education and teaching my own classes online has been challenging, sure, but I knew it would be. Yesterday was the first day I felt like we had a good rhythm going, like we were on the right track -- I had some optimism. My kids were engaged and doing what they needed to; I borrowed a Chromebook from our school district on Wednesday so that my youngest could do some of her online math and science activities next to me, while I responded to student emails and graded.  I was not fully prepared for answering quite so many emails. I don't know why -- it makes sense -- and yet it means that I haven...

Well this is a shit-show, isn't it? I don't have any eloquence for what has been occurring all over the world for the past month, but it's bizarre how the past two weeks have changed our everyday routines. And by changed I mean upended. Smashed. Eradicated. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself -- the cause is horrific, naturally, but the actual change, up until this point, for me, has been strangely comforting. When there's a terrifying physical threat to humanity at large, I've found solace in sheltering-in-place with my cubs (or perhaps more apt, piglets, because goddamn my poor house is a wreck, and it was a wreck to begin with). We've had our moments of strain, naturally -- you can't have five people in each other's company 24-14 and be happy and shiny for every hour of the quarantine. But we've tried to make the best of it. Up until now, existence has been kind of dreamlike: not idealistic, like a goal you h...

It's been seven months since I last posted to the blog. A lot has happened since then -- some good things, some bad things, but a lot of *life* things that more or less elbowed out the time I might take for reflection in a blog post. To be honest, I'm not quite sure I've gained that time back at this point, but I feel the need to do this kind of writing again. We'll see how it goes -- I don't know if I'll post regularly or on any kind of a schedule. I'm just going to focus on this one post right now. My last post (from July 2019) was about the absolutely wonderful, and successful, Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARiM) that I shared with my friend and colleague M.S. The week after the residency I participated in a project run by ARiM's creator, Lenka Clayton: she asked for mother-artists to submit a record of a single day, July 15, 2019 -- and she said that she would select a number of them and compile them in a book that would be part of the inaugur...