Sunday Walk and Brunch

The Rose Garden is pruned back to sticks at this point, but it was still quiet and lovely Sunday. One really attends to the trees and birds and wildflowers when the main show is holding its breath for the big upcoming reveal. It is looking like the art school where I do most of my teaching is getting bought out by some other institution still to be announced and suddenly my employment feels crazily precarious yet again. Adjunct life, if you call that living, puh DUMpum. These last years since my health scare have been inflicting relentlessly serial losses, my cat, my dad, my mom, my Berkeley job, and now this, I feel a bit like Captain Catastrophe sometimes these days forever pushing foreword with my fragile little measure of due diligence and self-care day by day by day while forever thrown onto my back foot by the latest new calamity every few months or so one after another... Who knows what's next? Another health scare? Eviction as our apartment goes condo like everywhere else? Another war? Another wildfire? Irresistibly rising authoritarianism in the background is the furthest thing from reassuring on top of everything else. A day with Eric like yesterday is pretty much the only peacock feather I've got to shake against this thick bleak wall of a world. But the plum trees are star-spangled already with pink blooms. Through all of the despondent slog I've managed to continue teaching well (or well enough, the best I could do), kept my fitness up (I've kept off the 120 lbs. I lost since the health crisis and no longer contend with an aching back with all this yoga), kept my insomnia mostly at bay and have all sorts of tricks to effectively fend off panic attacks and the worst self-recrimination, kept my focus on friends and family (a number I can count on the fingers of a single hand now), and so on. These are difficult times. I don't have much to say that feels to me particularly useful or original on a site like this anymore. Hard as it is to believe, I sometimes strongly suspect I'll look back with incredible fondness at the good things I've seen and done and accomplished during what has seemed in its midst to be mostly a season of distress.