8 February 2021

Dear Everyone:

I hope you’re able to join the celebration of queer love and live on Friday!  Big thanks to Madeleine Barnes and Olivia Wood for hosting this upcoming Friday Forum!

It is also a rather perfect way of welcoming the year of the ox!  Friday is the Lunar New Year! As you may know, the ox represents groundings and earthiness and gentleness – in contrast to the rat, the year of which we’re in right now, which connotes unpredictability and change…really, sometimes the symbolic is too spot on!  I hope that remains true – that the year of the ox unfolds to displace precarity and overweening uncertainty with stability…

…and/but a stability combined with the desirous, joyful, demanding, nonaligned, willful, expansive, world-making, revivifying sensibilities that give meaning to the idea of queer valentines, perhaps!  My new years/valentine’s wish for you/us all.

Friday is in fact an official holiday – as is the following Monday – for CUNY. Though we’ll be conducting some program business nonetheless, I hope you’ll feel something of a different cadence for the long weekend. For many people around the planet, Lunar New Year prompts reflection on, gratitude for, and celebration of ancestors. I am endlessly grateful for their company –

And for yours!

All well wishes, as ever,

Kandice

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