Bread and Bread

This morning I woke up with the thought: If not for Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn’t be living the great life I’m living. I wouldn’t be able to move through the world easily with my Mexican-American esposa, hoping/planning to adopt a kid, having checked the “any/all ethnicities” box on our adoption preferences. This was followed immediately by the thought: And if not for white privilege, we probably wouldn’t have been able to finance any of it. Welcome to the smoothie of gratitude and guilt that is my brain. It’s okay, I’ve come to find it endearing. We spent the weekend in Oakland*, site of historic and recent civil rights activism. With Pedro and Stephen, we walked the quiet Sunday streets downtown, looking for a place to have a late lunch amid shops with boarded up windows. On the sidewalk, in front of Gold Rush-era storefronts selling artisanal canvas bags or perfectly curated vintage Southwest sweaters, was the repeated stencil: Black lives matter. Downtown O

Having two full weeks off—twelve days of which were after Christmas—was head-clearing and house-clearing. Every day that I slept in felt luxurious, and I got a jump start on my New Year’s resolutions, which are really one resolution with a few branches: Be more mindful. Because gentleness seems to walk hand in hand with mindfulness, I’m choosing not to get mad at myself for the fact that I’ve already fallen off the mindfulness wagon at least a half dozen times. The point, I think, is that mindfulness is not a wagon . The inside of my head is almost as tidy. The house-clearing part came when AK and I lugged somewhere between ten and twenty bags of stuff from our office to Goodwill/recycling/trash. The office—a.k.a. our storage room (since my real office is Starbucks), a.k.a. the room OC gets shut in when he forgets to use his inside meow—has been hanging over my head for four years. It will hopefully be our baby’s room, but fixing it up preemptively seemed audacious. Not fixing