I just got back from a week in Boston, where I hung out with Kevin's family and learned how to knit. I miss the trees already.

My brain is too fried from this week back at work to write something pretty and thoughtful. So here is some random stuff:

+ Found Magazine is having a tour (go to the page and click on "events") and they are coming to the bookstore around the corner from my house. Yay!

+ On one extremely busy day this week, I overheard my co-worker pick up a line that had been on hold and say, "Thanks for helping, how may I hold you?"

+ I like things in threes.

I saw it six months ago, glowing cranberry and cute from the pages of the catalog, like something I would have made but 10 times more expensive. (The catalog, which I am trying not to look at because it only makes me want and want, with its shiny perfect clothes and carefully arranged carelessness.)

So I bought it. Because then it was on sale, 50% off! Because then I had an excuse to buy it -- I had been looking for one, an excuse, since the day I saw it -- because why not? I deserve it I haven't bought anything for myself in like a month I have a new job I can afford it.

And now I have it. Now it glows cranberry and cute from my closet, sometimes my hips. The first time I unwrapped it, I saw with dismay that it was made in the Philippines. I imagined rows and rows of women in a sweaty gray-metal room, hunched over woolen maroon piles of skirts. It was on sale, I said feebly to myself, so at least I am not giving as much money to the company that exploits these women. Feeble.

The skirt binds. It's the right size, it fits, but I can't move my legs as much as I'd like. I can't walk as fast as I usually do; the skirt holds me in. It still hangs in my closet, it's still cute. But there is something about it that is not quite right, something inauthentic. The compliments it receives do not feel like mine, leave me slightly embarrassed. Not like the clothes I buy at thrift stores, which are more mine, even though they were once someone else's. To find them, I battled racks of smelly polyester, burrowed through piles of limp t-shirts, risked fungus, scabies, lice. I can claim them because I worked for them, because it took more than a phone call and a credit card, because I am not ashamed they are mine.

My new skirt. It's not mine yet. And I'm not sure if I want it to be.

I haven't been writing at all lately because I've been kind of sad and in my head, but I discovered yesterday that nothing gets you out of your head better than hearing a room full of second and third graders yell out, "HI ANJALI!" in unison.

I spent the afternoon volunteering with my creative writing teacher, doing a writing workshop with second through fifth graders at The Accelerated School, an elementary school near USC. It was amazing. Their assignment was to write a story about an animal that finds a human object and uses it in a way that people do not. Some highlights:

The lion who finds the CD and asks all the animals what it is. No one knows. Then she asks her mom "and her mom new what it was." The end.

The ever-popular lion who eats the rap group that enters the jungle, then finds their microphone and is confused by it. It doesn't move, but it makes his roar louder. When he figures it out, he spends the rest of his days rapping and singing songs in the jungle.

The bird who marries the eraser.

When the pretty sorority girl Melissa, another volunteer, introduced herself to the kids, I heard one little voice say, "'Sup Melissa," as cool as anything and I looked up to see the little boy in front of me giving her the eye.

And the tiny girl named Mixtly who smiled at me and touched my hair like I was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. The adoration of a seven-year-old is maybe the purest thing there is.

So, you see, how can I still be sad?

When you are going through heartwrenching times,
there is nothing more bizarre than coming home each day
to a living room slowly filling with Razor scooters.
(Not just the normal kind or that one with the little seat --
tiny motorcycles, go-carts and electric big wheels, too.)
It's like a pair of scooters has nested in the eaves and
they are producing a new little hatchling each day.
The house reeks of rubber
and everything feels as crowded and metallic and foreign
as my mixed up insides.