a little self-shaming never hurt anyone

It's been a rough week here at the Beeton household. I've been transitioning to a new position at work. Mr. Beeton just got his spring class schedule and found out that he's teaching at exactly the time I am teaching on Tuesdays. We've been scrambling to find childcare for that afternoon. It's just been bleck.

Not to mention this...

What is that, you ask? Well, it's a certified mess. A few weeks ago we decided to transition Baby Beeton into the guest room and move our guest room into Baby Beeton's nursery. We were full of good intentions, but life got in the way. I feel like I need a shot of motivation to get this project going again, but I'm not sure how to do it.

And then I remembered people like Yuka. When I taught a course entitled "The Personal Is Political: Writing About Women's Autobiographies," I did a segment on documentaries. We watched Yuka's Fat Chance - a really delightful and thoughtful chronicle of her struggle to lose weight. At one point, she addresses the fact that it's a little nutty to document what she sees as shameful - her extra body weight. But, she laughs, a little self-shaming never hurt. My post here is in that spirit. Maybe sharing this photo with all of you will kickstart something here on Quackenbos Street.

Of course, right before I sat down to write this post, I went through the mail and found this:

Talk about adding insult to injury?! Now I have to go to the thrift store and look for an old card catalog to refurbish into a toy chest.

Keep sweeping, Martha

Watched Lost in Translation. Watching Dexter: The Final Season. Finished Homeland: Season Two.

in the meantime

I saw a post today on Facebook about poetry. A friend of mine from graduate school had assigned another friend of mine from graduate school the poet Amy Lowell. The idea behind the assignment was that my second friend would then make her own assignments to anyone who liked or commented on her post. Reading these exchanges first and foremost brought back excellent memories of a study abroad trip to London (TOX02, Wagamama, weekend trip to Dublin, creepiness) - both friends were on that trip. But, it also got me thinking about poetry - something I rarely read now but read a lot of while living in the first state.

I posted Deborah Digges's "For Sylvia Plath." I hadn't read much of Digges and didn't know her tragic story, but of course, I'm a sucker for anything Plath. And reading that poem prompted me to re-read the poem that Plath wrote for her son, Nick. It resonated with me as I laid out the rug in Baby Beeton's big boy room and as I sang "Away in the Manger" to him tonight.

Keep sweeping, Martha

PS - I know that I owe a post about our trip to the Sixth City. It's coming. I promise.

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.   
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.  
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,  
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium  
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,  
A piranha  
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.  
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?  
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,  
Your crossed position.  
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.  
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,  
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.  
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric  
Atoms that cripple drip  
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.  
You are the baby in the barn.

Finished watching Girls: Season 2.