It's Dilovely

This weekend is a big one for me. On Saturday, I’ll be thirty-five years old. (Holy smokes.) And of course, Sunday is Mother’s Day. Over the past week or so, something has been making me feel slightly odd and touched in the head. There’s been a phantom baby inside me. Not that I have actual [...]

I just don’t understand. What point could you possibly be trying to make? You got something against long-distance runners? Did you try to do the Boston Marathon once and not finish? Or do you have something against mobility in general? Thanks to you, dozens of people have lost limbs. Boom. Just like that. Perhaps you’re [...]

So I finally got to see the new Les Mis movie in mid-February, when it had been in theatres for a month and a half. This is rather a travesty. I’m a musical geek. I could sing you most of the soundtracks for about a dozen different musicals.* I was also a French major; I [...]

I have one living grandparent, my dad’s mother. She is a treasure of a person. I remember a particular conversation we had when I was seven or eight, while she was visiting from Texas. We were out in my backyard together, talking about boys as I swung on the swingset. I asked her earnestly, “Wina, [...]

Today is the birthday of my elder sister Emily, a.k.a. Auntie Em. It is also the day she officially completed and bade adieu to her Major Research Project, finishing her Masters in Language, Culture, and Teaching. Emi is a special gal. She is full of love and complicated thoughts and stress and nostalgia and joy [...]

My husband has a love-hate relationship with Facebook. He has created and deleted his account countless times. He knows that, for now, no other social media site does what Facebook does – that’s why he always ends up returning. The part he dislikes – apart from their sneaky privacy policies – is how it encourages [...]

Seven years ago, in my second year of teaching, I taught at a Catholic elementary school. I’m not Catholic, but French teachers are often in short supply, and I was in no position to be picky about jobs. Sometimes I was a bit uncomfortable being a Quaker inside the Catholic bubble with all the unfamiliar [...]

Sean asked me yesterday if I blog to try to “make sense of the world.” Yes. Absolutely. That has never been more true than now. I also blog because, as I know from keeping a diary for so long, it helps a lot in painful moments. It’s a way for me to remove a piece [...]

Images dropping before my mind’s eye like slides: lockdown drills suddenly in sharp focus, children huddling with their backs against the wall, invisible to an intruder, teachers shushing them and hoping they’d manage in a real emergency. Now there are real pictures. Children who will now always feel sick at the sound of a loud [...]

Dear colleagues, I know I haven’t written about what you’re going through in a long time, not since the post that unexpectedly deflowered my blog three months ago. I want you to know that it’s not because I’m ignoring what’s going on; I think about it every day. (Well – and I did have that [...]