November 10, 2021
Gleanings
- Baked in a disposable foil cake pan for easy door dropping and classic Deep n’ Delicious aesthetic, with frosting piped on with a star tip to complete the effect, I’ve baked this several times and it has been devoured each time – it’s wonderful, vegan or not.
- And then it gets weird. The Hong Kong avian flu introduced H5N1 to the world, a new and dangerous virus, transmitted from birds to people, causing fears of a worldwide influenza pandemic. The European Union experienced major floods, while a massive tornado stormed through Texas killing 27 people. Meanwhile, world leaders from 150 countries met in Kyoto to sign an agreement to address climate change.
- I am about halfway through You Look Good for Your Age: An Anthology, edited by Rona Altrows, and so the theme of aging—body and mind and soul—is clearly on my mind.
- A deliberate act of stopping, noticing, looking up, breathing deep, all in stillness – a necessity I am becoming more comfortable with, in this hunt for awe, whose closest companion, may just be gratefulness.
- I’ve got a lot of houseplants, dude. Each time a mood strikes me, I find myself holding a potted plant.
- Books have been a comfort to me since early childhood as I learned to navigate life in a world that expected much more from me socially than I would ever be able to give.
- I’ve had less flattering juxtapositions of “Taylor Swift” against other aspects of my identity, most noticeably in university when a Black friend pondered why a Black man would be listening to a “basic white woman”. The false description aside, my reason is simple: her themes embody the kind of writing I seek to create—emotive and universal, yet highly specific.
- I suppose what gets to me is this belief that we need to take classes to learn, to become perfect at something. What happened to just plain practicing? Why not sing, dance, paint, or write for the pure joy of it, rather than feeling like we need to be experts?
- It feels like the epitome of late fall to me, the kind of thing I can never resist on a lunch menu because isn’t it wonderful when someone else has already gone through the trouble of roasting squash?
- The power went out at 5:30 this morning, the small lights we are accustomed to at night–the shell nightlight in the bathroom, the glow of the modem in John’s study beyond our bedroom– extinguished
- What is a character without place? Even if it’s a place as small as a room or a country where the character does not feel she belongs.
- I’m miserable when I’m not writing in some form — so if I don’t write for too long, something starts to feel deeply off and so I keep coming back to this complex relationship.
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