minutia in a happy life:

1. Serendipitous run-ins and thinkings of each other.
2. The way a space comes alive after a stagnant, too-long, winter.
   
3. The best damned French toast I ever did have with Geoff Odiorne (c/o: Crumbs bread + farm fresh eggs + pure organic vanilla extract + freshly ground cardamon pods + totally rad/totally real maple syrup).
   
4. The Oxford English Dictionary.
5. Walking
6. Bicycles
7. Books
8. oh, oh, music--
   
9. Drives away from here.
10. and drives back home

My prospective reading lists

are getting out of control.

to read academic:

1. Borderlands (La Frontera): The New Mestiza; Gloria Andaldúa
2. Strangers to Ourselves; Julia Kristeva
3. Of Hospitality; Jacques Derrida
4. Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization; ed. Margerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos
5. Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation; ed. Wendy S. Hesford, Wendy Kozol
6. Out Of Egypt: A Memoir; Andre Aicman
7. El fuego y la palabra: una historia del movimiento Zapatista; Gloria Muñoz Ramíre
8. Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity; Ira Livingston
9. A People's History of the United States; Howard Zinn (I've read excerpts, but the entirety deserves my attention)
10. Democracy Matters; Cornel West
11. Race Matters; Cornel West
12. The American Evasion of Philosophy; Cornel West
13. Where We Stand: Class Matters; Bell Hooks
14. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Bell Hooks
15. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology; Slavoj Zizek
16. The History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays; Randolph Bourne
17. War and the Intellectuals, essays 1915-1919; Randolph Bourne
18. The Radical Will; Randolph Bourne (esp. the essay "The Undergraduate")

to read for fun (not that academic isn't fun; I actually put many texts on the academic list myself, for fun; but oh, you know-- this is still a different list)

1. Breath Eyes Memory; Edwidge Danticat
2. Krik? Krak!; Edwidge Danticat
3. Crescent; Diana Abu-Jaber
4. Arabian Jazz; Diana Abu-Jaber (I started but never finished)
5. The Unaccustomed Earth; Jumpa Lahiri (ditto)
   
6. Drown; Junot Díaz
7. Negocios; Junot Díaz
8. Marina; Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Gary- if you're reading; I promise to get it back to you soon!)
   
9. ¡Ya Basta!; Subcomandante Marcos
10. Off The Map
11. The Spell of the Sensuous; David Abram
12. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World; Michael Pollan
13. The Three Sisters; Anton Chekhov
14. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business; Neil Postman
15. An Unnatural Order: The Roots of our Destruction of Nature; Jim Mason
16. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat; Oliver Sacks
17. Awakenings; Oliver Sacks
18. The Mind's Eye; Oliver Sacks
19. The Color Purple; Alice Walker
20. Picture of Dorian Gray; Oscar Wilde
21. War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy
22. Thoughts in Solitude; Thomas Merton
23. The Seven Story Mountain; Thomas Merton
24. Sula; Toni Morrison

-----
(I'd still welcome all your suggestions).

an excerpt.

from Edwidge Danticant's The Farming of Bones.

"I close the door and lock out the tame night breeze that barely reaches my bare body, naked because Sebastian has made me believe that it is like a prayer to lie unclothed alone the way one came out of the womb, but mostly because I am hoping to feel the sweat gather between the cement floor and the hollow in my back, so that when I rise up, there will be a flood of perspiration to roll down over my buttocks, down the front and back and between my thighs, down to my knees, shins, ankles, and toes, so that there will not be a drop of liquid left in me with which to cry."

----
from my (own) last night's vivid-dream head:

I was holding a bird.
It was shedding its down and
my hands became saturated,
until I could not see my palms,
until they had become feathers.