This past week was crazy, again, and packed full of work, chores, errands, and duties which left little down-time. As I type this, I am sitting on my porch on Saturday afternoon, enjoying the smell of lilac, the chirping of birds, and a distant radio playing music which sounds something like Bauhaus. Appropriate for a day which feels like the first spring day, which is not the same thing as the first day of spring.

I suspect this will be the last quiet day until the third week of June, when I will start a three-week break from work, which will be my first down’time since I hit the ground running at work on January 5. Six months with no meaningful down-time. I missed the entire transition from winter to spring, except for the tiny sliver I could see from my office window.

It’s my own fault for not being old or wealthy enough to retire.

Reading

I just finished Arthur Sze’s wonderful little book Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry. Highly recommended if you appreciate poetry and the art of translation. Which I do.

Writing

Since the poetry critique group last week, my head has been a little more in That Space, and every other day or so I have managed a verse or a short poem in my journal. Past experience suggests it will be several years before I get around to transcribing them into a workbook. So it goes.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Undead, Kaiju
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Western

Interesting Links

• “No One Told Men the Floor Was Made of Women” (Soraya Chemaly, Unmanned) – A superb, important read. This seems like a good idea to point out, once again, that never in the history of Western civilization have men been oppressed, repressed, or marginalized for being men. Not in any time period, not at any scale, not in any society.