I'm looking forward to being emotionally and mentally free for real. My first thoughts are old thoughts and dreams, like clockwork. Behaviors do not seem to make a difference. Perhaps the simple passage of time will, who knows. I seem to be wrapped in all sorts of delusions and memories. The emotional landscape is a combination of hiraeth, anger, annoyance, bewilderment, and sentimentality. The mental exertions of full time teaching, building out two brand new courses, and editing articles for publication means that the sudden silences and hermit time when I am alone feature a vulnerability and rushing in of sadness, anger, frustration, loneliness, and restlessness. Simultaneous with chewing my way through the bollix of nonsense in my mind and heart this morning, I downloaded the new Jucifer album, which is completely different from anything the duo has done before. Listening now, and it's a wild folk tale of Arabic traditional music, and lyrics I am going to have to translate and investigate. My heroine Gazelle Amber Valentine writes of the album: "(nazm) refers to a branch of urdu poetry, from ancient arabic origins. a nazm typically arranges its stanzas around a unifying theme, and is less regimented with regard to form and rhyme than related traditional poetry styles. shifting focus and form and narrators as it unfolds, this نظم tells stories about myself, the centuries-spanning line of women whose lives led to my existence, and about all the women of past, present and future who individually and collectively struggle/d to survive, reform, and reconcile a violent world. viewing our existences as ultimately isolated yet inextricably dependent on one another, نظم is for us all: for how we feel our connection through time and geographic space, and our overpowering longing to maintain it. for how we sing ancestors' spirits to inhabit us, and cherish or dream to step on lands they once knew with our own living feet. for how our hands build. for how our souls insist. for how our hearts break and break again, until our love is as tough and unmistakable as scar tissue. for how we suffer and thrive, how we learn until our wisdom compresses sorrows into diamonds and fury into strength. for how, against all, we continue; and for the chasms we leave once we've gone." I also downloaded the new This is the Kit album, Off Off On. I heard this track on YouTube and loved it: Also, while composing this, the Presidential race was finally called for Biden-Harris. What kind of a weird world is it where I am overjoyed that Joe Biden is President? I'll take it, for sure, for now. But on Monday, I start training to be a police liaison and first aid provider for the local chapter of SURJ. The above basically how I am feeling about...everything. Also the below. I feel like I need major regrouping and re-centering somehow. Maybe I'll find one of the labyrinths in Los Angeles and go walk it.