Since I last wrote,

(please repeat this phrase before each bullet below)

• I made a fig cake and brought it to my Workplace and fed it to my stellar colleagues whom I’ve grown to love. We are all Teachers, and I don’t think there’s a better profession in the world. Sometimes I feel like the most fortunate 58 year old in the universe.

• I’ve been reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (the graphic version), Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, Snow Falling On Cedars by David Guterson, and an abridged version of Moby Dick by Herman Melville (all again) with my students. I don’t think I’ve read Beloved in at least thirty years, and it’s as astounding as ever, maybe even more so. I think that from now on, when someone asks me what my favorite novel is, I’m going to say To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

• I read Goldenrod by Maggie Smith, her new collection of poetry, On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose, Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft by Samantha Silva and just started Matrix by Lauren Groff.

• I spent some anxiety-filled days waiting for Sophie to have some kind of reaction from her first Moderna vaccine, but it did not happen. In fact, she had no seizures for nearly a week after the vaccination. My tiny little mother mind™ had anticipated that in a kind of magical thinking based in part on the peculiar tendency of Sophie’s seizures to abate during significant fever. The magical thinking was that her immune system would be weirdly provoked into controlling her seizures and that we’d say, Can you believe it was the Covid vaccine that finally stopped her seizures? The not having seizures during a high fever is a phenomenon that is barely mentioned in the literature of epilepsy, but I’ve noted it forever in Sophie. Now, the Covid vaccine did not cause any fever, but I imagine her immune system was fired up, and perhaps there’s something in the firing up that quells seizures. I’ve written about this before. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon to the various Neurologists we’ve seen over the last quarter century: Wacky First Neurologist, Buster Brown Neurologist, Unhygienic But Heroic Neurologist, Dr. Knife Neurologist, Dr. Pharmaceutical Neurologist, Girl’s Prep School Neurologist, I Can’t Support Your Use of CBD Neurologist, I Will Actively Fight Your Using CBD Even as I Am Paid by Pharmaceutical Company in England to Develop CBD Neurologist, and Nice Neurologist. None have been interested. Anyhoo. After not having any discernible seizures for a week or so, Sophie began experiencing them again as per baseline, and I filed some more information into my tiny little mother mind,™ where it joins the rest of the refuse and discard of an adult life spent observing the intricacies of a brain gone awry without the real support or input of any authority. Oh, who will take the challenge?

• Sophie is relatively stable so we’re going on our merry way. I will keep my anxiety at the usual low simmer before the second dose of Moderna next week, when it (my anxiety)

  will be stoked to a

  pitch

  that I’ll manage like the

  witch

  that I am.