tl;dr: school year’s off to a good start!

And just like that, the end of summer ushers in a new school year. I say “end of summer” with the totem-pro-parte enthusiasm of someone who is yearning for the days of rain, blankets, books, tea, and early nights. I know we have another month to go.

The school year calendar is so much more potent in my understanding of time than the Gregorian calendar, because of the impact it has on the life of my partner, a teacher. During the summer break, I work at the office full-time so that she can relax at home. With the start of the school year, I welcome back a new rhythm: Mondays and Fridays from home, Tuesdays-Thursday at the office.

Things feel very different from how they did two weeks ago.

Speaking of rhythm, on Saturday, I danced my very first 5Rhythms wave with teacher Fabiola at the Munganga Theater. Anja has been a practitioner for over a dozen years now, and it was lovely to finally join her. I had attended a few ecstatic dance sessions in the past, but there’s something about this specific practice that makes me feel it is going to stay with me for a very long time to come. What I learned so far: patterns that we have with words, are the patterns we have without them.

After the dance we picked up bagels at Flo’s, where I spotted the owner, casually eating his lunch at the counter, taking a photograph of a female customer’s bare back and proceeding to send it in some group chat. Not all men, but men. We ate our lunch at the Rijksmuseum garden, and I marveled at the fact that I hadn’t visited it before.

At Flevopark, our beloved dog-walking area, the community hub burned to the ground this week. The firefighters let it burn down in a controlled setting because they couldn’t get there on time, and ever since neighbours have lingered around the remaining picnic table, drinking the sodas and beers saved from the rubble, sharing stories, commiserating in the loss of this sweet building. I hope the city will be able to help put back something even better.

We watched The Brutalist in two legs on Saturday and Sunday. Its photography and sound design were beautiful, but overall it seemed like an exercise in cinematic prolongation extended beyond the limits of quality so far that the epilogue was essentially — pardon my absolute French — a ruined orgasm.