i have a final stanza! a final stanza has been written by me! (passive voice feels important there, since i've been hanging around like a chump waiting for something to occur to me and only managed to toothpaste something out in utter desperation at a library shift this week because i had absolutely nothing else to do instead.) i think it's pretty good; maybe a little treacly, but this is a book for young children and the editor asked for something explicit, and joe says it feels like an ending, and so. i think my sister has been waiting for me to get this out to make her own final push with our illustrations, and i'm hoping i can focus this lovely having-written energy on infusing her with confidence even though we could easily go back and forth even more with the editor, in theory, it feels like something is coming to a head here. surely she too wants to see if something tangible can come out of all of this time and talk–even at the glacial pace that that these things happen, as i've come to understand, who wants to take zoom meetings for a year with someone who won't make them any money?
as if something had actually shaken loose, i then immediately heard back with a yes from a new-to-me print magazine i'd been hoping but not expecting to write for this spring. i haven't pitched a passion project in a really long time, one half-baked idea to a local newspaper notwithstanding, and knowing i'll be part of this weird ambitious collective, a bit like the one for which i've been writing cat and mushroom and bird stories for the last couple of years, feels wonderful. now i have to line up interviews with some old friends and unfamiliar cemeteries before pauline and i head down to puerto rico next month. did i mention this? we have lodging, a car, and a ferry to vieques and back booked, but otherwise–oh, and an evening on a bioluminescent bay, which is my big activity priority for the whole trip, other than figuring out how pauline and i can save the world–we're just going to walk the earth and deepen our respective relationships with bad bunny? consume at least one beverage apiece (one has to pay to bring things on the ferry, and i got round-trip fares for our totes but one-way tickets for drinks)? i was hoping for some inside dope from my therapist, who revealed in our second-to-last call that she lived there for two years, but in our call this week she mostly went on about how misogynistic puerto rican men are. it sounds like she got a pretty extreme experience of that, as she lived there with her husband who was researching schistosomiasis on the naval base during the vietnam war and, in addition to teaching history classes, she spent a lot of time horseback riding in the mountains by herself, but i concede that there's a part of me that's been expecting some kind of weirdness re: two women traveling together. i could draw a little pocket knife in one of my owl tattoo's talons? i wondered if we should look into something like a casual guide for exploring the rain forest, as i have a dreadful sense of direction and utilities on the island are notoriously inconsistent, so leaning on my phone will likely not be a thing, but pauline feels pretty good about catching as catch can, it seems, and if our three-decade friendship culminated in being mugged and eaten by a golden mongoose, that feels pretty good to me.
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