Today is many things:

Today is many things. It is my half birthday. It is the day my father died nine years ago. It is a day of lavender mountains at sunset, of queen annes lace in the fields fluttering like cut-out snowflakes, of crickets chirring their endless message: that summer is on the wane.

It is also the day that Cookie S. Fish died. This morning he was still swimming, barely. We don’t know why his brief life was so fleeting.

Maybe he was old from the start, when we carried him home in a plastic container at the beginning of the summer. Maybe the heat wave we just had was too much for him: indoor temperatures were in the low eighties for nearly a week. Or maybe inexplicably, it was simply the right time for this tiny collection of gills and bones and fins to die.

Whatever the reason, when T saw that he was dead, we were eating raspberry sorbet after dinner. The boys had rosy mustaches. Bean paused mid spoonful, and looked at the tank with wide eyes and said,

“Maybe can burry him and write a sign that says Cookie Sandwich Fish so that we know where he is.”

“Ok,” I said, “we can do that.”

“What, what happened?” Sprout asked. “What happened to Cookie Fish?”

He scooted off his stool and climbed up by the tank.

“What happened to Cookie Fish?” He repeated. “Why he not up der?” Why he not up a da top?”

“Because he died,” T told him, tousling his hair.

“Dat make me sad,” he said softly. Still looking at the tank.

How he could even know that it was sad, I’m not sure. It’s the first time anything has died in his small life. His brother was still scooping raspberry sorbet, the reality of what had happened hadn’t yet fully hit him, and T and I were both rather neutral. We didn't say that it was something to feel sad about.

Sprout just gets things like this. I’m not sure why. He been like this from the day he was born. I can’t explain what I mean, except to say he’s always been incredibly tender and loving. He's always been exceptionally dialed into our emotional states. He is soulful, and loving with every cell in his body.

After dinner I carried a small shovel up to the rocky bank at the back of the house and dug a small hole. Bean carried the tiny tank out, and suddenly he was in tears. I helped him pour the tank water and pebbles and the small blue fish into the hole, covering it with more pebbles, and then a smooth flat rock.

Bean began to sob, and if sensing his brother needed some space, Sprout backed off, and quietly occupied himself exploring along the rock wall while I held Bean. T and I both told Bean that he’d been a wonderful fish owner, and that we were proud of him.

“So it wasn’t because of me?” He asked.

“No, no honey. You did everything right.” I assured him. Because it’s true. He was awesome. He changed the tank water, and fed him the requisite number of pellets and not a single extra, and he watched him every day. When the fish was well, it would respond to Bean putting his finger on the tank. It would swim up, following the movement of his hand.

“I want to get that crystal rock there, and put it on his grave,” Bean said.

He’s been through this before. One of the amazing blessings of being in a Waldorf kindergarten for two years is that he’s gotten to work on a working farm every week. There, they celebrate and honor the lives and deaths of the animals. It’s a gift to have those experiences, I think. Because it gives them some tools to later turn to, when grief will find them as adults, and it will.

As he wrote on the crystal rock with a sharpie, sobs still coming, I felt my own hot tears on my cheeks.

We’re never ready to lose the things we love.

After T and Sprout had gone inside to brush teeth, Bean and I stayed on the back stoop.

“How come it took so long for him to die Mama?” he asked me, looking up at the sky above us.

“Because his spirit was taking a while to let go of his little body, I think.” I said.

“People are like that too,” he said. “Our spirits don’t want to let go either.”

“I think your right,” I said.

“But I think for fish and for every animal, and for people too, there is a time that’s the right time to let go and then your spirit knows.“

He looked at my face earnestly.He’d heard me talking about my dad while T and I were making dinner.

“Do you still miss your daddy?” He asked.

“Yes, I still do.” I told him.

But it’s different now. Nine years is a span of time that has transformed me. I wish that I could talk to him now because I see bits of him in who I am becoming. He’d be so fascinated by the program I’m in. We’d have the best conversations about it. And he’d be proud, I think, that I’m finding my voice as a writer + artist. That this is my calling now. That my book and art and stories are coming to fruition.

I carry Bean inside.

His legs are suddenly so long. They wrap around my hips, wiry and muscular.

This is time passing. These boys. This love. These moments.

Two Necessary Reminders:

Brilliant advice from Brian Buirge + Jason Bacher

And this:

When we trust ourselves, we become both more humble and more daring. When we trust ourselves, we move surely. There is no unnecessary strain in our grasp as we reach out to meet life. There is no snatching at people and events, trying to force them to give us what we think we want. We become what we are meant to be. It is that simple. We become what we are, and we do it by being who we are, not who we strive to be. ~ From The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron

Maybe this

Walking up from the garden the wild daisies will shout your name. You will pause on a mown path among waist high wild grass, and stare and the small white flowers that reach up and up on slender branching stalks like little stars, and you will wonder how you never noticed them before. You will stand there in the summer heat and wonder how it became summer at all. The heat will lick at your skin, the thermometer registering 96 degrees, the sky hazy and bare save for distant thunderheads that trundle up against the edges of the horizon, white and pale pink with early evening.

It will be past eight. Crickets will be chirring in the grass, and below you in the neighbor’s pond a bullfrog will sing its tuba song. You will stand there looking at the way everything has gone right on living without your attention. The evidence of summer’s fecundity is everywhere: wild grapes are taking over the apple tree, blackberry brambles crowd the path; and each year the wildflower meadow presses more urgently against the deer netting you’ve staked up to claim a small plot of soil as your own for cucumbers and tomatoes.

You’ll stand there looking and looking as though you’re starving for this very thing: these daisies and wild asters, this tangle of grass, these swallows swooping low. And maybe you will realize that you have become homesick for this very thing: for summer, the way summer is, and for you in it.

And though there are things that you must do: screens to sit in front of, dishes to be washed; you’ll pull on a swimsuit instead, take a dark blue towel and walk barefoot down the gravel drive, along the dusty road and up the hill. There will be a fence, but the gate will be open and you’ll slip through onto the neighbor’s land and then down toward the small spring fed pond.

The path will be newly cut. The grass will cling between your toes. The quiet will be full of sound: sheep, frogs, the trilling of evening birds, the hum of mosquitoes.

As you walk you might hear a screen door slam. Lights will glow yellow in the windows of houses, and when you arrive at the pond the water will be black.

You will slip in, hands parting the water.

Maybe you will float on your back and watch the way the inverted world becomes a bowl. You’ll exhale in a way you’ve forgotten, with your whole lungs until your body begins to sink and then you’ll take another deep deep breath.

Maybe you will move as silently as you can from bank to bank, your eyes just above the surface, the sky rippling as you move through it.

Maybe you will float until your body finds its balance. Until you can lie perfectly still, suspended, your back a beautiful curve, arms above your head, feet falling down to where the water’s colder.

Above you the sky will turn to rose and then violet. Bats will cross the heavens. Frogs will call in a sing song back and forth across the pond. And finally without really meaning to, your eyes will find the first star of the evening, right there above you.

Eventually, you’ll climb out, pond water falling from your thighs and hair like tiny gems. The air will still be warm, but your skin will be cool and damp as you walk up the path. Maybe you will be inclined to run, like a child again. Maybe you'll laugh, as your feet twirl, your arms spread wide, your hear lifting off the nape of your neck like dark ribbons.

Maybe fireflies will mark path back home at the edges of the road. Maybe the air will be sweet with the fragrance of honeysuckle as you come up the drive.

{in progress}

The summer's half over, and I'm swimming in a sea of chapters. Held down by river stones, the pages of various drafts flutter on the floor as the fan oscillates. Meanwhile I vacillate back and forth believing this manuscript will be complete by deadline and the book will be good; and that I'll never make the deadline, and it's all a pile of crap. Mostly I try just keep my eye on the page, my heart in my words, and my fingers flying.

a close encounter

It's 85 degree heat with nearly 100% humidity. The heat from the asphalt hit's like hot breath. I watch my heart rate, which is usually in the 140 range when I'm going 20mph, hit 150 and then climb. I'm not thirsty really, but I try to remember to keep drinking. My legs feel strong, and the view is euphoric: fields where hay is being cut; horses standing along a fence in the shade; purple martins swooping into the low eaves of a barn; chamomile and cornflowers blooming thickly at the edge of the road. It's the end of the ride and T is a little ahead.

I tuck down into my drops and start pedaling hard. And then, without warning, my world goes suddenly black.

Just for an instant. No road, no fields, no handlebars. No warning.

In the next instant I'm pitching over my handlebars into the grassy stubble on the side of the road.

I hear my wheel hit the uneven lip of the asphalt, and I have just enough to reaction to tuck and roll, clipping out of one pedal just in time to avoid twisting my ankle.

I land, chest first, my bike on my back, on soft dirt, narrowly missing the guard rail.

T has seen me as I'm falling, and is looping back, at my side in an instant. I'm already trying to sort myself out: unclipping the other pedal, disentangling myself from my bike. I've got a sweet crank set mark on my jersey: just between my shoulder blades.

My face stings, but I'm barely scratched. Just grass stains on my shirt.

I try to stand, but a rush of nausea and darkness descends again upon me like a hood over my head.

Because he's a diabetic, T's first thought is to give me a glucose tab, and it helps. The grape flavor sugar dissolves in my mouth, and I drink water, and within minutes I've cooled down and feel good enough to get back on my bike and take it easy the last mile to home.

Riding home I keep thinking how it could have happened so differently. I could have swerved in any direction. It's in these moments that I feel like I'm held by something greater than myself. Some filament of grace, some spirit wing between me and what could have been.

+++

Have you ever had a moment like this, a close encounter, a moment of protection, a sudden certainty that your life is right and full of grace? I want to hear your stories.

// Things I want to remember

So busy this week, back to school, back to being in a hundred places at once. Still, it's summer and I'm trying to be in it. At the dinner table watching our boys run out across the grass holding hands to look for sticks for roasting marshmallows, T says: "Oh love, I want this to last forever."

I nod, knowing exactly what he means. Them, as they are with shaggy summer hair, scraped knees, berry stains on their fingers. And us. Our lives full to the brim right now, but in good way.

Things I want to remember:

// Dinner tonight: flatbread baked on a stone on the grill along with summer peaches + a hint of vanilla, chicken with olive oil + thyme, and a salad of summer's brightest: new plump blueberries, arugula from the garden, baby lettuces in a mustard maple balsamic vinaigrette.

// The way morning gallops in, with my boy's on it's back. They're wearing capes and wielding swords. It's before 7am. They are whirring with elbows and energy and laughter.

// The laundry whirring in a quiet house while the babysitter takes the boys on a bug-catching walk. They bring back crickets in a plastic egg box with holes poked in the top. It stays on my counter over night: some wells filled with water, others with grass. In the morning the insects are all alive still, and I make a plea for their release.

// Impending angst about my book deadline. So much to make a book. So many words. Picking the right ones seems feels daunting some days.

// Returning from an afternoon run just as thunder breaks the sky open. Then sitting in a circle of pages, blue post it notes scattered about like the petals of some sacred offering to the writing gods while the thunder rolls about like a bowling ball above me in the sky. Rain falls through the open windows onto the sills bringing the scent of earth and green.

The end of a really good week

We made chocolate chip cookie dough just for eating after dinner tonight; then wandered along the paths T just cut through the meadows. So many flowers. Grass up higher than the boys' heads. Bats swooping low above us. Sundown making everything golden and lavender.

This week was good. It was beyond needed: to have some time with my three boys. To write. To rest. To run. To recalibrate a little.

++

Sprout is suddenly, finally, talking in sentences. "My hands are filfy, Daddy!" he said tonight, holding up flour covered palms after rolling dough out for chapattis with me. Unlike bean who talked in sentences at about 18 months, sweet Sprout has taken his time. But now, in just the last week or two is words are tumbling out nonstop. He makes all of us happy. From the day he was born he's had this buddha presence: he is calm and centered and joy-filled and it rubs off on everyone around him. Bean adores him, even though they fight endlessly over ownership of insignificant objects: long sticks, particular crayons, certain books, matchbox cars.

Bean is all elbows and long legs. He rides a his new bike with gears and hand breaks like a pro, and gets up with aplomb and bravery when he takes a spill on uneven terrain, blood often running down a knee. He's decided wants to grow his hair long. For now we're kind of rolling with it. We lovingly call him mop-head. He wakes up with a tangled shock of semi-curls, and lures Sprout out of bed, and then the two of them come find us. It's still one of my favorite times of day, then, in those first moments of morning when we're all there together, still sleep and warm and trailing dreams.

++

The manuscript is now a complete draft. There are some rough chapters, but everything is there now, in place, in sequence, and my mind can hold it all at once. That's been so hard: I can't really explain it. There is something about the linear medium of the computer that makes it really challenging for me to see all the parts as a part of the whole. I went to UPS today and printed the whole thing at 1.5 spacing with wide margins for marking up. It's about an inch thick, and made things feel real in a way that they haven't until now:I'm writing a book. Really. Truly.

Now, if only I can stay in the groove when I get back into the swing of things at school + work.

+++

PS: I'm craving some new summer tunes. Do you have any suggestions?

Wednesday + Thursday { only this }

Last night gail force winds + ground lightening took our power out right at dinnertime. We went to my in-laws, made pizza and put the boys to bed there, then came home late to a still-dark house. Above us, stars, and in the woods so many owls. We followed a single flashlight up the stairs, and then we found our way to each other in the dark.

Tuesday {in pictures}

Hello friends.

I'm finding this so restful: to notice the small things of daily life and to share them here with you.

We've been keeping a jar of markers and fresh paper at hand for quiet times, and today had many moments where the boys just sat and colored. I love the way Sprout is learning to draw: circles first.

I made some fresh peach preserves yesterday with some not-so-great peaches. Just a little sugar + water + a hint of vanilla and they cooked down into something lovely to have on biscuits this morning.

Today was all dappled with sun and shade. I love the way the field grasses blow in the wind.

While I was writing Bean and T made a sign for our nightly visitors. Bean has since observed that perhaps he needs to add a checklist to clarify exactly what makes a skunk a bad one. We have several this year. We always do. T has twice encountered them in the coop, though they've yet to spray anyone. Still. Bad skunks take note.

Manuscript progress today for sure. It is wild to be working on something this big. It terrifies and thrills me in turns. I've decided to focus on just finishing the manuscript. Once it's in, all my backers will be rewarded (with a little extra surprise in addition to what they signed up for) for their patience. Until then, I imagine I'll be pretty quiet on that front: creating beautiful chapters.

What are you up to this week?

Monday {July 4th in pictures}

A few glimpses from our 4th. Sun all day. Fireflies. Sparklers. And after everyone when home T and I went up to the hill past the fire pit and watched the horizon twinkle and burst with fireworks from faraway towns.

Sunday in pictures

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A few glimpses at our Sunday. How was yours?

Documenting the week in pictures

Starting tomorrow I have a week off from classes. I have high hopes for these seven days: uninterrupted writing time to get somewhere significant with the book manuscript; writing in the mornings; then making illustrations in the afternoons, the fan on low, interspersed with strawberry picking and swimming lessons and celebrating the Fourth.

I'll be taking a break from writing here, but I'll be posting some photos every day instead. I'm looking forward to the challenge of bringing my camera with me more and documenting our daily life. Care to join me?

Surviving Summer: An In-Progress List Of Little-Boy Awesomeness

In the process of perfecting the art of moon walking, I'm also becoming increasingly adept at wrangling and loving and wrestling little boys. I'm starting to understand that this is a part of my art. This almost-balance, this in-motion gesture of my life towards and away from them in the very same instant. This push-pull, this glorious mess and abundance of giggles, this makes my creative work what it is. Here it is, friends, an in-progress list of little boy awesomeness: +++

* Mud is meant to be played in. Let them. Let the laundry pile up. No one will remember clean laundry; mud monsters on the other hand: totally epic.

* Sink play: faucet on low; funnels, teapots, turkey basters, measuring cups. Science happens here: sink and float, cause and effect. Also, dinner can get pulled together around them. Just remember put towels down first.

* Extra bubbles in the bathtub. So what if their hair doesn’t ever get perfectly clean? There’s always next time.

* Make soup. Give them sharp implements and let them help chop. A 2 yr. old can do a number on zucchini with a butter knife. Also: they’re more careful than you’d think, and growing boys who turn into men who can cook = awesome.

* New couches are overrated. Keep the one you have. Buy throw pillows. Let them build forts. Cardboard boxes are also amazing.

* Chocolate ice cream cones. Yes, let it melt everywhere. If you think ahead, bring wipes. If not, extra napkins + a little water works wonders.

* Let them climb trees. The rules: don’t climb up where you can’t get down yourself; only hold onto branches bigger than your wrist; use both hands.

* Keep cardboard boxes, toilet paper tubes, etc. Supply scissors, duct tape, markers. Instant rocket ship, submarine, motor boat, race car.

* Take a walk with big sticks. Poke things. Draw in the dirt. They wont poke their eyes out. Sword fighting may occur. The only rule: no running.

* Say yes. Keep a marble jar. Point out the positives. Move on.

+++ Now I want to hear your favorite life with kids discoveries. What are your standbys for keeping small people happy while achieving a busy life. Ready, set, go!

I AM IN LOVE WITH THESE BOYS

I am so utterly in love with these boys of mine who tussle over the banana bread muffin batter, giggling, shoving, offering sticky cheeks to be kissed. And I am in love with this man of mine who makes me flatbread with caramelized onions + creme freche + flat iron steak, and a salad of micro greens when I come back from a forever long day.

Yes, yes I am.

His smile is a raft that buoys me up. His love is bedrock.

Some days we spend the whole day gone, sending texts back and forth, missing bedtimes, missing dinner. We encounter each other in the dark among the sheets. I wrap my arms around his back, and listen to the wooden shades clattering in the summer wind.

On the weekends we play french music and sing along. We fry bacon like it's going out of style. We have two double shots of espresso each, mine over milk. We make pancakes made with cornmeal and buttermilk in a cast iron skillet, and Sprout helps pour the batter while Bean sets the butcher block kitchen island with plates and carelessly folded napkins. Forks get strewn like pick-up-sticks. Syrup is amply doled out.

We're all about relishing the sweetness of these mornings, and after we're full we almost always go for a walk.

It always takes longer than we expect. Sometimes we get impatient. Usually I bring my camera. More likely than not there are either puddles or sticks, or some combination of both. The blackberries are hard green buttons on the brambles along the road, and the peonies along the edge of our neighbor's yard fill the air with the most lovely scent in the world. Sheep bleat. The boys chase each other and climb fences. We hold hands.

These moments happen in spite of the pace of things, or perhaps because of it. We make time. We always make the time for us.

And so I am learning to moon walk

The sky is grey and yellow and thunder moves about like a restless god above us. Rain falls then stops, and the gutters drip. In the yellow dark after the storm the birds sing twilight songs. The trees become silhouettes. The sky turns to taupe, then lavender, then black. Curled inside with my feet tucked under me like a cat, I can feel the way my breath catches in my ribs. The way I have to consciously remember to breath out. The way this week I’m always close to tears.

This summer I feel like I’ve landed on the moon: my third semester in graduate school, full time, in an immersive program that is, by it’s very definition a moving target: emergent media.

And so I am learning to moon walk, which is a lot like learning to fly except for the inevitable part when gravity always catches up in the end.

It’s work that requires leaping again and again toward the very center of what I love: telling stories with words, with images, with media that moves through time, with interaction. And inevitably: coming down hard again and again, as I fall short, underestimating what I think that I can do, imagining a project too big and wide for the scope of my limitations. Most of the time my limitations are about time. Ironic, isn’t it? Because of course, I’ve dared to write about this thing called the present tense. Of course I’ve leaped into the very thick of this glorious mess. Wanting all of it, hungrily, the way the humming birds come again and again for simple syrup we fill the feeders with. I keep coming back, even when every the nanoparticles of every minute are filled to the brim.

Some days being a mama and a partner while doing school and writing a book in a genre that blurs (personal essay + mixed media illustrations) makes my breath catch in my ribs like I’ve swallowed the pit of some magical tree that will burst forth from my ribs in full bloom.

Other days it feels more like standing in front of a fire hose. To move at the speed of emergent media means to be endlessly and simultaneously processing, considering, noticing, reading, questioning, answering, creating, making asking, and doing, all day, every day. But to write a book, means to dwell, linger, revise, consider.

It’s a brutal, brilliant, overwhelming combination. And time dissolves like sugar.

Maybe it's no wonder I've been feeling exceptionally thin skinned lately: as though the barrier between me and the world is as slight now as the screen that separates me from the night that arrives softly, filled with the trilling of tree frogs and bull frogs and the sounds of moths fluttering with their incessant, fragile wings.

+++

I’m so grateful for your comments in my last post. You have no idea how much courage and joy they gave me.

elsewhere + back

Hi friends. Missing this space, but feeling too overwhelmed to be able to share more than a few images from my week with a conference in the middle of it in NYC and two huge deadlines met.

I am exhaling into the memory of a different skyline: everything manmade, geometric, gorgeous, crowded, teaming with people and their endless urgent need to produce and create.

And I am breathing into the moments today of kissing my boys and making Mexican tortilla soup and eating apple chips and holding hands, and trying to be patient with my need for rest and with all the things that are uncertain and that must be accomplished.

Also: I'm feeling a little shaky of late in my niche here. I'm so different now than when I began blogging six years ago as a new mamam. I'm wondering how to make this space change to fit the work and life I'm growing towards, and I'm wondering: Why do you visit? What do you like about this little space? What do you want me to share more of, or differently?

Always this

On the gravel drive, a sleek-skinned slug moving slowly, antennae swiveling about. A bumble bee, flying along side me as I run its wings moving a thousand times faster than my feet. Horses in the pasture, does at the edge of the woods, a new fawn, thrushes, blackbirds on the wire and buttercups by the armful strewn across the fields. This is my prayer, my alter here, to move among this tall clover, to run one foot after the next, and to take note of this always and again blooming glorious day

A full heart

Feeling an immense sadness tonight at the fact that my mother has zero interest in being in my life on any terms but her own strange, bitter, peculiar ones. Letting that relationship go for now.

Aching nonetheless.

+++

Feeling immensely grateful for my incredible friends who have become my family over the years, and for my in-laws who are like solid rocks in a turbulent sea. They make so much possible.

+++

In love with my wondrous sweet boys. All three of them. Bean sent me a love letter in the mail from his Nonna's house today. Melt.

+++

Grateful for you + this space and the inspiration and joy and community you share with me here.

In all honesty

I feel like I'm in the spin cycle and I can't get my feet under me. It keeps raining every single weekend. It's freezing. I have a space heater on in my studio for effs sake.

This week both our washing machine and our vacuum broke. It's impossible to feel like you have your shit together when everything is strewn about: dirty socks everywhere. Sand under foot.

Two projects for school are eating me alive. One keeps taking my team back to the drawing board. That bites. Big time.

I'm also accumulating a sleep deficit that I can't make up. Even though I hit my pillow at 8p.m. on Thursday night and didn't wake up until Friday.

I miss my kids. We have a rockstar babysitter two days a week now, and the boys love her. But I want that time: those giggles, those tears, that laughter, those fistfuls of wildflowers. I miss my husband. He's been flat out for work two this week, and our relationship basically consists of a series of night time collisions and daytime texts.

But I also want every single thing I am doing. These projects. This love. This work. This book. I want all of it.

Now what?

Talk to me.

Learning to be productive at super capacity: full-on focus, full-on giggling, full-on being in this moment right now.

Now is a time of full velocity everything: love, little boys, projects, deadlines, dreams, and to survive it, I'm exploring my tendency to want to overfill each moment.

I let my attention get messy.

When I'm writing, I keep open too many tabs. I bookmark a dozen articles, skimming too many without letting them sink in. Who am I kidding? When will I have time to go back and read them again? And if I do, will they still be as current or relevant as right now?

I try to answer emails or read assignments for school while I'm also attempting to orchestrate dinner.

I can hear myself: nagging, repeating things, becoming irritated. The boys whine, argue, drive over my feet with their plasma cars. They can tell I’m not really present, even as I toss salad or put soup on the stove.

I know I'm most successful when I am able to in the moment, absolutely, whatever that moment is, and then make a clean break when it's time to move on. And it's when I let my myself be distracted from where I'm at with what I think I should be doing, or what I will be doing next that things fall apart.

I’m committed to exploring what I have to do now, in the context of this super capacity life I seem to be living this summer, to live into the moment as fully as I can, and then move on.

I’ve been exploring what happens when I do less multi tasking and more ultra-focused mono-tasking. When I put all my attention into a supercharged, super focused sprint to complete a single thing, instead of skipping between things.

Full-on running, full-on writing, full-on racing matchbox cars on the floor. I’ve been using this timer (especially for writing goals.) Pretty cool. Very productive. This week I’m specifically committing to actually reading with full attention each article, blog post, poem, or link I click to, instead of saving it for “later.” Full on focus. Move on. Enough said.

What about you?