birds of a feather

I was walking with Youngest the other morning when he reminded me that he thought I'd like a display at his school.
He was correct.




I was in a hurry to get to the office and didn't research why his classmates had made bird costumes (this should not surprise you) but I loved them.




There was this little penguin too.

It's warmed up here, a little bit, and everyone's showing off their ink.




Or being pushed to school.




Last night after drinks with a friend, I saw the same mohawk-french-braided lady that I saw last week.



She looked amazing.
Again.
And I took off my headphones (I don't travel without the headphones) and told her so.
Her face lit up and she thanked me. She had amazing earrings too.

It's National Poetry Month and there are poems all over my office but the most moving one is installed in my pal D's office. She's left the company.



And here's the poem on the desk:

SELF HELP
The eye is the lamp of the body so I tried
to make a world where all I ate was light. Butterflies
complete a similar labor in the summer
garden, beating their wings slowly like a healthy
person, the kind of person who runs for fun, could
run from an attacker, eats greens in the same
quantity as the salty meats the storytelling part
of us appears to favor. I couldn’t decide
whether I wanted to stay alive or wanted to go
faster, they appeared to contradict each other, I tried
in all I did to eat light. I left the argument
about the difference between a slave and a servant
on the table though I think what I think is that
consent to servitude is as much a fiction as a butterfly
having a nervous breakdown because of the beauty
of the lavender. The longer your hunger takes
to find a shape the longer you can hold it. Consider the butterfly,
only at rest in the middle of consumption, but even
then practicing for departure, for disappearance,
closing in the middle of the landscape.
Trying to manage a world in which all you eat
is light is difficult. Labor, and the lungs should be like wings
of the butterfly beating, closing, slowly, the moonlight
tensing the edge of each, almost lifting the edge of each
towards the middle distance. So all that I consume
can make me healthy, illuminate my throat
and the interstate of my digestive tract
with what a butterfly’s been swimming in.
—KATIE PETERSON