Week 3 Famous Last Words: Too. Much. Stress.

I was feeling pretty stressed and exhausted at the end of this week, and I have so much paperwork to take care of (there is finally a death certificate for my dad; it took over three weeks for that to get processed; long story)... but I decided to take today, Saturday, and just do some stuff for this class, and it was so soothing... I wrote about Valmiki for Indian Epics, and I did a Sufi microfiction for Myth-Folklore. I've never tried to do both classes at once before, but I think it's going to work fine, and I wrote up a plan for how I can do two projects and make that work also. I'll get to start on those projects next weekend, and that will feel really good too.

I hope that students in these classes will get that same sense of relief. For me, when I am feeling stressed and frustrated (which is pretty much all the time right now), being able to create something, to write a new story or create a new graphic, even just something small, makes me feel so much better. It's like when there are so many forces trying to crush the human spirit and even destroy human life, one way we can fight back is by using our powers of imagination and creativity to assert ourselves in the world, to say WE ARE HERE. This is our world, and you cannot take it away from us.

I also registered for my absentee ballot. That felt good too.

And probably my best feel-good moment of the week was this: at Twitter, I learned that someone used the Tiny Tales of India book in a podcast: Vidhi's Bollywood Jukebox. That was so amazing! She had heard about the book via Joel Veena, a musician (Indian slide guitar! wow!) whom I learned about from his collaboration with Maati Baani, and I learned about Maati Baani years ago from an online friend in Europe. So there it is: the beautiful power of the Internet to connect people together so that we can share and enjoy each other's creations across distances of time and space. Here's the podcast; I listened to the first half yesterday, and now I am going to just relax and enjoy the second half. Yay stories! Yay music!

Hey @OnlineMythIndia, check out the link to my latest radio show in which I read out stories from your book. https://t.co/JyJVr5QWW3
Thank you for writing these tiny tales ❤️ and thank you for recommending them @Joel_Veena

— Vidhi (@vidhiism) September 4, 2020