On the 10th day of gratitude

J & I took a walk just after it rained, and the smell of warm earth was really wonderful. The flowers were so beautiful, all covered in little jewel droplets. And on the way, we picked up iced americanos from Blue State. Win/win: I get coffee, we support small businesses!

Gratitude 2.7, 2.8, 2.9

Brainstorming ways to fit this practice into my daily routine these days, which isn't really a routine at all, it's a toddler-driven frenzy.

May 25, 2020 | 2.7

R & I agreed to try to eat clean this week: no alcohol, no cheese, no bread & carbs. It's miserable but look, I'm closing in on 40, and drastic times call for drastic measures. 

I made it! I'm proud of that. 

I also had a great call with one of my former students, asking for advice about applying for a Fulbright. I am grateful that I can offer him some pointers, and am excited to see where his life takes him!

May 26, 2020 | 2.8

Well I made it through the cleanse eating-wise but I did have a glass of wine this night...

For Tuesday, I'm grateful that I had an hour to work on a new paper, one that is in the very early stages, about connections between the UAE and South Asia. It was an important reminder that this phase of life will pass, like the other awkward ones before it, and break open  into something new...there will be things to enjoy going forward: new things to research, new people to interview, new shows to study, new work to teach, new work to write. 

May 27, 2020 | 2.9 

Today I was outside a lot, and I am so grateful for every second of sunshine. Sometimes I feel like I'm just trying to get back to what I had when I was 30, a little house in southern California with a citrus tree. I miss the sunshine. The sunshine is really good for me, and part of why Dubai felt so much like home, pretty quickly. 

J & I took a walk to Blue State this am for coffee now that they're open again (a second gratitude) and then played in the backyard before his nap. After his nap, we spent about two hours splashing around in the inflatable pool. It was beautiful. 

A third gratitude, I got to Zoom with Moza, Ali & Hadeyeh, and I'm so thankful for the incredible humans I met while conducting field research. 

Gratitude 2.5, 2.6

Wow I'm doing great with the consistency here, whoops.

I'm grateful for the knowledge that this time will pass. I have lived through uncomfortable patches before. They come and go. So do the good times. 

I'm grateful for my training in anthropology, for the years of studying the forest and the trees and learning how to balance seeing them both, for holding difficult and contradictory truths in my mind simultaneously. 

It's not much. 

But I'm trying. 

Gratitude 2.3, 2.4

Thursday May 21 (2.3)

This day got away from me a bit!

Today's appreciation: J also got away from me while I was putting his swimsuit on him, and streaked through the lawn. It was so cute -  his chubby little toddler legs running, hauling his little butt away from me and the paddling pool. 

Friday May 22 (2.4)

I finished Min Jin Lee's Pachinko (after, well, a long time). It's an incredible intergenerational epic about belonging and family, and focuses on a Korean family in Japan - in so doing shedding light on the experiences of Koreans colonized by Japan, and then those naturalized by Japan. 

My favorite passages:

"Yoseb could understand the boy's anger, but he wanted another chance to talk to him, to tell Noa that a man must learn to forgive - to know what is important, that to live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement" (314-315). 

"[Sunja] had loved Hansu, and then she had loved Isak. However, what she felt for her boys, Noa and Mozasu, was more than the love she'd felt for the men: this love for her children felt like life and death" (339). 

I'm grateful for the opportunity to read fiction again, for a few minutes to myself, for this book making my world a little bit bigger.

I'm also grateful for the 30 minutes I spent outside in the yard with a glass of white wine and my laptop, solo, to write.

This day is always an awful day

Day 2

It's the day my grandmother died, in 2017. Three years on and it still stings. There is a hole in my heart.

I try to be grateful that there is a hole, because it means that I can love people that much, that people can be that inspiring, that we have such capacity as humans. 

The Gratitude Project 2.0, Day 1

After *ahem* several years' hiatus, I've decided to start another round of the Gratitude Project. I debated beginning a new blog, to reflect who I am now, and not bring the cringeworthy baggage of my doctoral training, or my prior failed relationships, or just prior failures - to this new endeavor. But the truth is, that's all a part of me. I carry that baggage in real life. So I carry it here too. I ask that you, (few) readers, be kind and forgive these awkward growing pains.

So now we're in a global pandemic, and my country's  leadership has overwhelmingly failed our population. The pandemic has brought our economy crashing down, and revealed all the classist and racialized and gendered fractures in our society. In academe, the field I've chosen, there are dire reports of the collapse of college in America, as well as clear signs that women academics will be farther behind when and if things return to some semblance of normal. There is significant gaslighting about returning to normal, which of course some predicted.

As I write this, there are protestors one block away from me, hair stylists angry that Gov Lamont (CT) has declined to allow them to go back to work. I have become a full-time stay@home mom, which is not a role that suits me. Of course my partner and I have fought a lot during quarantine, because we haven't seen anyone else in 11 weeks (in real life). I am frustrated with my situation: my inability to properly engage and teach my toddler, my inability to communicate with my partner at times, my inability to do meaningful work, my consistent bouts with depression...on a broader level, with the world situation, with everything. I know I am incredibly privileged. That's kind of what makes it worse - that my situation is the ideal situation for lockdown. 

I have been meditating consistently, working out consistently, but these practices have been small goals I've kept to myself. So here is my attempt to focus on cultivating gratitude, again, in a new time, in unforeseen challenges, with some more public accountability. Or at least the idea of it.

Today, on Tuesday May 19, 2020, Day 72 of lockdown, I am grateful for:
- the crinkle in my toddler's nose when he smiles at me, usually up close, usually holding my face in his chubby little hands
-I bought a peony plant and a beautiful pot for it this past weekend. It's quite beautiful, and  I'm looking forward to seeing its blooms here very soon!