Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters, a pleasure like weather, delayed and prepared for, not the pleasure of lessons but the pleasure of errors, of nightmares, of actors in the black box of a theatre, not the pleasure of present but the pleasure of later, the pleasure of letters and weather and terror, asleep by the lake, unable to answer, the pleasure of candles, their wax on the table, not the pleasure of saviors but the pleasure of errors, not the pleasure of marriage but the pleasure of failure, the pleasure of characters like family members, their failures and errors, their laughter and weather, the pleasure of water, terrible rivers, not the pleasure of empire but the pleasure of after, our failure to keep an accurate record, not the pleasure of tethers but the pleasure of strangers, the terrible strangers who will become your lovers, not the pleasure of novels but the pleasure of anger, your failure to answer all of my letters, the pleasure of daughters, the pleasure of daughters writing letters in April, the failure of orchards, the terror of mothers, not the pleasure of planners but the pleasure of errors.

Madeleine Cravens

I bought myself a Quanta R4.16 so I can play pickleball with other parents. I am not good at it, but it gives me a good workout. Many Vietnamese folks are now into this game. They play almost everyday at the park near my house.

I worked from home yesterday and decided to go to the park to skateboard at the court. When I arrived, there were a handful of Vietnamese adults playing pickleball. They asked me to join so I ditched my skateboard and played pickleball.

Yes, I started skateboard on Monday for the first time. On Sunday, one of the parents at Vovinam gave away his kids’ old skateboards and scooters. I picked up a Kryptonis cruiser skateboard. I started to use the skateboard to practice my snowboard carving. I could do heel and toe turns, but I couldn’t connect them together yet. I found this video from Home Daddy to be useful. I will try to follow his instructions.

Wednesday will be the LDVH dad volleyball night. I have been doing quite a bit of sports to keep myself active. I still rollerblade for a bit. I can’t wait to get back to skiing and snowboarding though.

Yesterday, I sold a pair of used skis for $100. I took my family to a Korean restaurant yesterday and spent $200. The food was good though.

Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. In the car window. Shoots.

It is a peaceful country.

We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to pick up the kids from school,
to buy shampoo
and basil.

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement for hours.

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy—

It is a peaceful country.

And it clips our citizens’ bodies
effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.

All of us
still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,
of remembering to make
a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.

This is a time of peace.

I do not hear gunshots,
but watch birds splash over the back yards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky
as the avenue springs on its axis.
How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

Ilya Kaminsky

I must confess. I don’t know jack shit about Taylor Swift. Up until her latest release, I had not listened to any of her albums from start to finish. In fact, I didn’t even know that she used curse words in her songs.

After picking up my nine- and seven-year-old sons from school today, I played The Life of a Showgirl and my nine-year-old was in shock when we listened to “Father Figure.” He asked me, “Daddy, did you hear that?” Of course, I did, but I asked him back, “What did you hear?” He replied, “She said the d-word.” It was not obvious to a nine-year-old that she was using the d-word as a vivid metaphor when she sang over the bouncy beats: “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger.”

Her reference to the male genital piqued my interest and I wanted to know what else she got. “Eldest Daughter” started off with a piano intro then her voice came in, “Everybody’s so punk on the internet / Everyone’s unbothered ’til they’re not.” She continued to sing about the web with “Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments.” She then confessed that she’s “not a bad bitch.” Of course, Taylor Swift is not a bad bitch. She’s a billionaire, bitch.

Again, I didn’t know much about Taylor Swift, but I assumed that most of her songs were about bad relationships and breakups—innocent stuff. In “Actually Romantic,” she sang about sex, “I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kind of making me wet.” I found her sex references kind of weird, especially when she put God into it. “Wood” cracked me the fuck up when she revealed, “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs.” That was just too much for my imagination.

The Life of a Showgirl is my very first review of a Tylor Swift album. Swifties, please don’t come at me. I am just playing with her.

David Jonathan Ross launched a lovely microsite for Megazoid, a stunning display typeface. Jason Santa Maria has done an excellent job of showcasing what Megazoid can do. Furthermore, he gives the webpage a soul, which is missing in today’s web design. We need more unique designs and less templated systems that kill the beauty of the web.

By the way, I had the opportunity to provide David feedback on Vietnamese diacritics for Megazoid.

My friend and I had a cat we called Mother.
I took the couch; my friend got the one bedroom
because he often had sex and needed
that private darkness. I had not yet had sex
of my own volition. No one knew
I had been raped. I was so unknowing
I barely knew it myself, how lost I was
to myself. I was maybe twenty. We loved that cat
that had wandered into our lives, rubbing our legs,
needing love and milk and a safe place
to sleep like any creature arriving on this earth
from God knows where and God knows why.
One hot August day I was sitting outside
when Mother joined me and sat on my lap,
a thing she had never done before.
And that was where she died. I called Jeff,
who had gone to a motel somewhere
with his girl of the moment. “Mother died,”
I said. There was a long silence, then
he whispered quietly, “Oh, no,”
as if he wanted to keep his sorrow to himself.
Many years later I told my actual mother
about the rape. She cried a little and was angry
on my behalf. I was calm. Relieved.
Then life went on, as it does,
without much of a pause. I was not healed
by telling her, I am sorry to say.
I am still not, at seventy-nine. The beautiful gray sky
of a rainy May day, and the lindens
coming into flower. That smell!
You and I both love it. (Did you know
all along I was writing this poem to you?)
Often at night we walk to the river
and stare down into the black current
which has reached flood stage
and carries everything before it.

Jim Moore

I woke up early this morning this morning to do some work. Kids didn’t have school this morning, but they had dentist checkup appointments at 11:00 am. After they finished, I took them to lunch. They wanted soul food; therefore, we went to Milk & Honey. After lunch, we went to the park until around 3:30 pm.

I decided to go back home so I could replace the flush and fill valves in the master bedroom, which I had been putting off for a few weeks. The entire job took about half an hour. Then I also changed the shower head. Even though the tasks were trivial, they made me feel good. For someone who is not that great at doing handyman work, I had accomplished something.

I don’t want to ask people to help me all the time. I am sure handymen wouldn’t do these kinds of job; therefore; I try to do as many as I can on my own.

The nice thing about this blog is that I can document these kinds of trivial things that no one else cared but me. Whenever I needed to know what I had done in the past, I just have to refer back to this blog. This is why I love blogging all these years. OK, enough rambling.

It was the way summer hunted me:
a sequence of instructions
in the folds of a flower.
How do I explain the hatred of the sun,
the terrible wonder of being alive?
Fuck the fucking birds. I looked
to the sky to join the storms. I couldn’t
have imagined you, swift as the lightning
I traced with my finger, a song scratched
into a back. I ached with the not-knowing.
On Mother’s Day I knelt and begged
for something to help me. Is that God?
I played “Here Comes the Sun”
in the psych ward and everyone
watched as I shook. This
is not true, I said. The sun
is already here. Hope was slight
as an eyelash. How clean the sky—
a cloud that posed as a spine.
There was no container
for my despair. In your face I saw
a sequence of instructions.
When you touched me, I named
the future: Be here. Stay living.
I was running once. Did I tell you
how I wept like that? I saw a fox—
my life bound into tricks. The past
is the past is the past. An idea grown
in the name of the obvious. How
a beloved becomes a stranger
and a stranger becomes a beloved.
I can hate what is true, the thick beauty
of it. I am always in the school of the dead:
a bracket, an aside, a reordering.
I tell you language is always a failure,
a string waiting to be plucked. A song
you love and cannot resolve.
What’s the difference between
rupture and rapture? Not even salt.

Erika L. Sánchez

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

Ocean Vương

In the last couple of days, I spent some times revising the look and feel for the Law Library’s LibGuides. I put in custom CSS rules to override Springshare’s default styles so that the page has a bit of our brand elements. I also made sure the colors passed accessibility test. It was a nice, little project.