Three Names MEME

You can thank Julia for this "meme."

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
Rebecca
Becky
Mommy-mommy-mommy-mommy

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
RowanEmrys
rpatrascu
RoTN

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
quick wit
comedic timing
ability to learn languages

THREE THINGS YOU HATE ABOUT YOURSELF:
As Julia suggested, "hate" is pretty harsh, but here goes:
My tendency to talk instead of listening
My tendency to speak before thinking
Horrible time management

THREE THINGS YOU WISH YOU HAD RIGHT NOW:
enough money to make a real difference with tsunami relief
more time
a slender figure

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
what I get from my adopted family
what I get from my biological family
what I get from my historical, cultural inheritance

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
the thought that I've so little to show for my life
the idea of my daughters being hurt or scared
that George Bush is our President

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
coffee
food
connecting with my immediate family

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
my wedding ring
the clothes I put on at 5am
contact lenses

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS/ARTISTS AT PRESENT:
Dar Williams
Counting Crows
Dave Matthews

THREE NEW THINGS YOU WANT TO TRY IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS:
another half marathon
sleeping more than 6 hours a night during the workweek
writing DAILY

THREE THINGS YOU NEED IN A RELATIONSHIP:
honesty
respect
love

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE:
I believe in God
It's pouring down rain here as I write this
One of the above statements is a lie

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX (or same) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
intelligent eyes
a warm smile
posture that shows a guy is comfortable with who he is

THREE THINGS YOU JUST CAN'T DO:
bat my eyelashes
chin ups
waltz (but I can polka in a hoop skirt!)

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
jogging
reading
writing

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
take a hot bath
sleep about 15 hours
watch the new Jean Reno movies I just got from amazon.fr

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
poet
data recovery advisor (current occupation)
childbirth educator

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
Wales (as usual)
Antarctica
British Columbia

THREE KIDS NAMES
Myfanwy
Telemachus
Francis

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
see my great-grandchildren
publish an acclaimed (or at least respected) book of poetry
organize my papers

THREE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO TAKE THIS QUIZ (and post the results)... NOW!
Suzanne
Clare
Kate

Extended Stay

Due to the bad weather (flooding, roads being closed, people trying to dodge raindrops while they drive their SUVs), Mom is staying with us another couple of days. I’m glad, too. We’ve had a very pleasant visit. Yesterday while R. did a class project at a classmate’s house, Mom & S & I went out to brunch at a great little place downtown. Then I took her to the Toyota dealership to check out the Prius, since I’m hoping to get one in the next couple of months. They had a model available, but the wrong color & with leather seats, so I didn’t bite.

Then it was a quick trip to the Dr. for mom to get a few more antibiotics for a sinus infection that she’s fighting off. We followed that with a trip to rent a car for her for a couple of days, and finally dinner out at steakhouse (I had chicken) where we filled up on appetizers and hardly had room for any dinner!

Back home only long enough to work on my annual jigsaw puzzle a bit more, then off to the gym to run. Thus ends my week off work. And thus begins my back-to-work, back-to-posting routines.

The Long Christmas

I've had an extended Christmas this year. Mom got into town Thursday, we shopped on the way home from the airport, and then Friday I was out with the rest of the town's procrastinators getting the last few things, as well as groceries. Friday night we went way up north to a wine country town to be treated to a very fancy restaurant dinner by D's mom and stepdad, and then we went back to their place to open presents and have some Buche de Noel. D. and my mom won the bet that it would be a late night.

I stayed up until 2am Christmas eve wrapping & cleaning & prepping a little for the next day's cooking, and then was up at around 7am Christmas morning reminding the girls to be excited about Christmas quietly so that Grandma could sleep in a little.

My sister and her new boyfriend got here not long after 8am. They'd been staying in the city at the home of one of my sister's many friends. We had brunch: popovers, bacon, turkey sausage, fruit, coffee, scrambled eggs (with or without feta), and champagne. D's dad came and then his sister arrived not long after that. D's mom played a common card and called and kept him on the phone for about an hour just as his dad and sister were arriving - and yes, it was because she knew that they would be there. That's just how it is.

Everyone got along famously here, however, and spent the morning catching up or getting to know one another and opening presents and exclaiming over them. I stayed in the kitchen - first making brunch, then cleaning up after it, then making dinner. So I'm a little fuzzy on who gave my kids which fantastic presents. I've already started the motherly interrogation process with them. "And what did Aunt T. give you, honey? Sweetie, who gave you the a-bomb kit? And where did this shark egg come from?" That kind of thing. But fortunately, they're very clear on what's what on this score.

Although we didn't have our Writer's meeting Thursday due to S's cold and my over-committed, non-writing self bowing out, I've felt a growing desire to get back to blogging and finishing stories and doing writerly things. The New Year helps. It may be an artificial starting point - just a date, after all - but it's a convenient time to re-commit to being more who I am , really, and less who I think other people think I should probably be.

It helped to have Suzanne asking where my blogs had gone, and Julia doing the same & also encouraging me to WRITE. And then last night, when we were at Clare's house, having her say that she looks at my blog when she first gets online was also a great motivator. I so appreciate the support.

Today, my brother and his family may again stop by. But I'll have to write about that later, because I've already stolen as much time from the girls and mom as I can get away with. I hear the natives getting very restless in the other room....

Returning from beyond

....climbing...back...up...from the edge of the world. You thought I'd slipped off for good, didn't you?

Well, ha! Fooled you! I'm here. Just after 3 weeks of not blogging - does that mean I've developed the habit of not blogging? I'd rather call it a serious lapse than a change of lifestyle. Sound okay? Okay.

So what have I been doing with myself? What do I have to show for this incommunicado-ness?

Work has been especially demanding, meaning no time for any kind of break or lull to toss off a blog post. So good, but damn busy, on the work front.

The kids had lots of December school and after school stuff. 2 days a week, we take one of R's classmates for the afternoon. Another classmate comes every other Wednesday. Tuesday, R has had "acting camp," a project completely started and managed by another classmate of hers. He'd written a script for a play production of A Series of Unfortunate Events (and this is before the film was released, mind you), and R and other classmates were practicing for 2 hrs every Tuesday. It's that kind of class, I tell you. Thursdays, R. has gymnastics now. S. has gymnastics Fridays, then R. has riding lessons Saturdays which take up from 10:30am to 1pm. (Have I mentioned this before. Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but this is the sort of babbling journaling that I do for my own later reference. Here is where my life is at right now, e.g.)

I have written little. I have jogged about 4 times a week, and when each run takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes, I think this has wiped out what little free time I'd had. I feel like I've been too busy making sure the dishes get washed and the kids' lunches get made and my half-marathon training happens to just sit my butt down and write. Another argument for the writer's group BIC (butt-in-chair) meetings.

Another thing that I think has somehow wiped me out and kept me from writing, ironically, is a new insight that came last week when I went to visit the counselor whom R. had seen 3 times for ADD issues.

This was the first time I'd seen a therapist since I was a post-breakup suicidal twenty year old. And even then, I think I only saw someone three times. I'm just too stingy to spend money talking to someone about myself when I already have the bad habit of doing it far too much for free. If that makes sense. Anyway, that last therapist's last comment to me 18 years ago had been, "You know, someday, you're going to want to talk to someone about your father." I remember at the time, I'd thought something like, "That's weird! I wonder why she thought that? All I ever talked about was me and my ex boyfriend and stuff. I didn't even talk about my dad!"

Uh. Hem. You can see what an insightful twenty year old I was.

Anyway, darned if after my dad's call the other night and his "Actually, I was dead," letter, I didn't find myself thinking, "I want to talk to someone about my father."

Those of you who don't care about digging this deep into my brain and emotions, feel free to stop reading this blog and enjoy something else instead. Like How to Build an Igloo or Hello Kitty Horoscopes or something. And because I know my birth mom and birth dad read this blog (hi guys!), this is the part of the entry where I tell you that I still think you did the RIGHT thing by putting me up for adoption and that I do not want you to feel ANY remorse or concern or whatever. IT'S OH-KAY. Okay? Got it? Really got it? Good. Thanks. No, really.

Anyway, after a chat with this very nice, very competent therapist (let's call her Dr. X), I've learned the following things:

**Warning. Angst-ridden self-absorption follows. Warning.**

1) My father (and by this, I mean my adoptive father, of course) falls neatly into the DSM-IV definition for Antisocial Personality Disorder. As Dr. X gently pointed out, "Your father is a sociopath." I demurred a little, until she read to me from the DSM-IV and I said, "Oh, yeah. That's him."

2) I've survived this remarkably well. She said she was fascinated by how it was that I got out of my childhood so healthy. I told her I suspected genetics had a lot to do with it. The birth relatives I've met are all strong, strong people. Phew. Thank God for that! And I also give God credit for helping me. I may have mixed feelings about who Jesus was right now, but I'm very clear on God.

3) My very handy ability to be detached when it comes to my dad's illness is no reason for me to think that it's not really affecting me at some level. Case in point: I cried in the office. When Dr. X said, "Maybe you've never let yourself cry about this," and I said, "Cry about what? I'm fine. I don't think I really need to cry about it. Much. And besides, even if I did, I wouldn't know how to cry about it. I wouldn't know how to make a catharsis happen." (Besides, I thought, I'm kinda busy...)

4) Saying to Dr. X, "I guess I'll stop in the restroom to blow my nose," doesn't mean that I won't find myself in said restroom choking down sobs and feeling suddenly like I could cry for two hours straight and not be done.

So there you have it.

Plus I've been making Christmas cookies. And, you know, mailing out cards and dragging the kids around shopping. That kind of thing.

(Dr. X suggested I might want to see her one more time. I guess I will.)

Thanksgiving report

Yeah, so I haven't posted in ages. Which is not to say that I haven't been writing, at least.
Much has happened, most significantly the birth of Lillian Monroe!
Congratulations to the family!

Thanksgiving was the tradition two-meal affair for us. Thursday we went to D's dad's new place, about an hour away. D's sister joined us. I brought homemade popovers, broccoli casserole and stuffing, and a store-bought pie. It was a nice afternoon & evening. Before I collapsed into bed that night, I double-checked my ambitious recipes to see what needed to be prepared in advance for the next day's feast. As a result, I was up until about 1:40am making herb maple butter and the beginning of pumpkin soup.

The next day, I got up early and started the cooking/cleaning thing. By 11, the turkey had been in the oven for 2 hours, and I had made half of the dishes for the day. My oldest brother and his wife and two boys (14 & 11 yrs old) came over for the first time in many years. They'd been staying at her brother's place in the Wine Country with his family. Around 1, D's mother and her husband arrived. Around that same time, I was called by my work to give a quote to someone at at a big production studio who had lost about 100GB of data.

Here's what I made for Friday: popovers, broccoli casserole, pumpkin soup, turkey with maple herb butter, stuffing, mashed potatoes with buttermilk, bacon bits & chives, sweet potatoes with brown sugar, almonds and marshmallows, green beans with walnuts and walnut oil, and pecan pie. I did not make the pie crust. If you've ever seen a pie crust made by me, you'd understand why.

Here's what happened with the work quote: we could save their data, but to do it as quickly as they needed would run tens of thousands of dollars, and was outside the budget for this particular project.

It's quite an interesting experience going straight from navigating the four cousins who are wrestling in the hallway, to explaining to an update So. Cal. producer why our service will cost 40K to do ASAP, to chopping yams and offering drinks to the adult guests. If I'd gotten mixed up with what I was doing, it could have been really ugly.

A letter from Dad

I got a letter on Sunday from my father. You don’t normally receive mail on Sundays, unless it’s been mis-addressed and a neighbor has had to bring it to you, as was the case here. Dad says his call to me two weeks ago had been from the ER. He says (and this is where I remind readers that unfortunately you cannot believe anything he says) that he’d had a stroke and his doctor told him he’d flat-lined for four minutes and was dead. Before the call, that is.

Dad’s an atheist, and he made a point to say there were no bright lights, no relatives waiting for him. “Dead is dead,” he writes. Then he says he checked himself out of the hospital and went home. Okay. Right.

When I relayed this story to my mother, she said – uncharacteristically for her - that it was no surprise that no one was waiting to meet him on the other side.

So I’m writing a new short story about my father. I started it before I got the letter. The letter just gives me that much more incentive. I’m inspired by a combination of subject matter I know and find interesting, and the thought that maybe this will be therapeutic for me.

On a different front, a couple of days ago, I had an interesting conversation with my five year old after I picked her up from daycare. It went something like this (with an acknowledgement to Kate, whose dialogs with her son are so nicely recorded in her blog).

“Mom, who did you vote for?”

“For President?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, hon, I voted for Kerry this time.”

“Oh. Well. I just want President Bush to make some castles. Because there are ZERO castles in the world.”

“In America, or in the world?”

“In the world.”

“Hmm. Yeah, I wonder why he hasn’t made any castles.”

“I don’t know, but I need a castle for when I grow up because I’m going to live in a castle, and only poor people can come visit me there. And I’ll give them some of my gold.”

“How much gold will you give them?”

“Well, for one person, I’ll give six gold pieces. And then for another person, I’ll give six gold pieces, and for another person, I’ll give him six gold pieces.”

“So you’ll give everyone six gold pieces?”

“Yeah. Unless if they already have some money, then I’ll only give them one.”

“How many gold pieces will you have?”

“Oh, about five thousand.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“Yeah.”


I think about how we all just want someone to build us a castle to live in. I think about how my dad has been telling me his whole life all about the castle that is being built for him.

A phone call from Dad

My father called me around 10:15 Saturday night. We spoke for about half an hour. It was the longest conversation we’ve had since two years ago, when I went out to visit relatives in Colorado and saw him for about 45 minutes. It was really good to talk to him.

He said he was calling to tell me that he loved me. I waited with some anxiety for the next sentence, but it wasn’t anything about suicide or my grandmother (his mother) dying – the only reasons I could think of for him to call with such a message.

He said that he’d sold the property where he’d had his pawnshop and they were going to tear it down and make a dialysis center there. He said he wanted to call all his kids just to let them know that he loved them and he wasn’t sure what had gone wrong with his life and everything but that he’d sold the property and were going to use it to make a dialysis center. And they’d sold the property. And they were going to tear down the building and make a dialysis center.

Did I mention that he was four sheets to the wind?

After we spoke, I typed furiously on a keyboard at great length about the conversation and about my feelings for my father. The next night, I wrote more about it. In fact, I’m thinking that this is as good a spark as any for me to work on that collection of stories (or even – dare I say it? – a novel) I’d been toying with doing about Dad.

It’s funny that I should get this call now, only a couple of weeks after my birth father had sent me an email checking in to see how I was doing. What a contrast between the two men. My birth father, whom I first met two years ago, is very humble and careful about his relationship with me. He’s never done anything to harm me, and yet he almost acts like he doesn’t deserve to get to close to me. (“Pshaw!” I say to that.)

My father, on the other hand, has done an amazing amount of damage to the health and well being of the people around him, and yet the closest he comes to remorse is a whiny self-pitying litany of drunken excuses.

Hmm. That sounded a little harsh, didn’t it? Yes, it did. And I’m probably the person in my family who was least hurt by him.

I know that alcoholism has a lot to do with Dad’s inability to face reality. In fact, one of the many interesting parts of our conversation Saturday night was when I suggested that he shouldn’t call my sister until he was actually sober, and he said, “You may be right. But I don’t have a problem with alcohol.”

And I said, “Dad, you are the epitome of an alcoholic. I can’t remember the last time I saw you when you hadn’t been drinking.”

Damn, that felt good. He’s been drinking my whole life and that was the first time I’d confronted him about it.

He denied that he drank I pointed out that denial was all part of the disease, too, but I don’t think he heard me.

He said, “I don’t drink. I’m on medication.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” I said.

He said, “Well, I just wanted to call and tell you that I love you."

"I love you too, Dad, " I said. Because of course, in spite of everything else, I do.

"Well, okay," he said. "And I just wanted to let you know that they sold the building you saw when you came out, and they’re going to tear it down and build a dialysis center there.”

“So I hear.” I told him.

It's November

Okay, so it's been November, but I have a time management / denial issue, which is another blog entry unto itself.

November means NaNoWriMo month, when tens of thousands of insane...uh, I mean motivated...people aspire to, and in many cases actually successfully write, a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

As they say on their web site, "It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

For the second year in a row, my neighbor will be participating and I will probablynot be participating.

That's to say that it's one of those things I'd like to do (sort of) and think I should do (sort of) but in all reality, I believe the world is better served by me concentrating on living in the moment and working on things like poetry, short stories, my grandmother's oral history and feeding my family.

Maybe next year.

Or maybe this year.

But probably not until next year. At the soonest.

Could you do this? Would you?

Tomorrow I'll figure out what psychic void I'm trying to fill with Halloween Candy. And I'll talk about the Candy Fairy.

But for now, I have this goal of > 6 hrs of sleep a night, and my pillow calls.

Voted

I voted. Did you?

My 10 year old asked me yesterday whom I was going to vote for. I was reminded of a satirical comment I heard on the radio last week. I think it's actually a bumper sticker, and that it goes something like: "John Kerry: He'll Do."

We talked about how it's important to respect the President, and that he'd been faced with some very difficult circumstances. I told her that I didn't agree with his choices, but that he'd done the best he could.

She said, "The best he could? Are you kidding me?"

As liberal as her school is, only one kid in her 4th grade class admitted that his parent were going to vote for President Bush. Everyone else has had nothing but severe criticism of him - criticism that I'm sure they'd overheard from their parents.

My first political memory was when Nixon resigned. I was a little younger than R. My father made sure I watched the broadcast. Otherwise, my first political memory would have been the Iran hostage crisis, many years later.

I'm amazed that my kids are aware of who the President is, and who's running against him today.

My five year old expresses her political awareness a little more subtly, though.

What exactly was she was trying to convey by making two yellow jelly beans stand up on the table (one in each hand), and saying, "This is Bush." (holding up the right one briefly) and "This is Mrs. Bush" (hold up the left one briefly), and then making them "walk" up to either side of an Applebee's plastic cup, followed by a sly giggle. Hmmmmm....very profound, I'm sure.

Where There's Smoke

One brief observation about Japan before bed:

* Many people smoke. I mean, sure, more people smoke there than smoke in my little cul-de-sac of the world, but even compared to the average amount of smokers in, say, Europe, these days (200 million plus), I'd say more people smoke per capita in Japan than outside of it. (And a quick Google search backed me up.)

Some restaurants have little "No Smoking" sections, but since they're not really divided in any way (except by a few feet of distance) from the rest of the nicotine-breathing diners, this really means, "Slightly Less Smoking." Did D. & I care? Not really. We were so happy to be there, on vacation, away from it all and (after the business part of the trip) alone together, I think we could have lost a finger and would have said, "Oh well, who cares?! We're in Japan!"

Except, on second thought, that's not entirely true - as a missing finger is a sign that you're with the Yukuza.

Although there's apparently a way to work around that, too.

What a world we live in.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Blade Runner fans, you know the rest.

We are here: well and safe and sound. The girls are also here, and well and safe and mostly sound. Yesterday, S. had to be taken to the Dr. because of a puffy red eye, which it turns out was slightly scratched somehow - possibly she scratched it in her sleep. We are grateful that eyes heal so quickly. She'll go back for a checkup tomorrow, but today she was the "Pirate Princess" with a patch over the eye.

She was so happy to see me when I picked her up from daycare that she was "almost going to POP!" Daughter number 1 was also thrilled to see me, and gave a running jump into a hug that nearly broke me, followed immediately by her running off to play with a friend. It's all right. I'll get over it.

There is SO MUCH to tell about the trip. I suppose it's best done in installments, and best done after more than the 3 or 4 hours of sleep I've had in the last 2 days. Let's see - it's now 2:30pm in Tokyo Thursday, and we got up to leave around 7:30am in Tokyo Wednesday. I slept about 30 minutes on the plane, about 20 minutes in the airporter, and about 3 hours since I got home. Time for a full night's sleep!

Great to be home. Wonderful to be away, mind you, but great to be home.

Oct. 20, 2004

Dateline Tokyo.
The 23rd typhoon of the season has pretty much passed through the city. The southern parts of Japan, where we will visit next, were hit fairly hard. Here in the city, it just rained on us the whooe time we were sight seeing yesterday, and then while we safely had dinner at the hotel restaurant, the worst of it passed through.

This morning it is raining but not socked in. We'll have a few hours of sight seeing and then I'll be off to another meeting followed by a trade show visit followed by dinner. Tuesday afternoon and evening and even part of the night was business meetings and dinner with the other company's CEO and Manager too. We're learning a lot about how they do business, and more importantly, they're learning a lot about how we run our company. The CEO and Director of Business Developement (our outside sales manager) are really showing me how it's done.

The hotel we are staying at is the one used for the film "Lost in Translations." If you've seen the movie, you know what this place is like. And it's not just a movie star that gets treated royally here. Everyone does.

I want to write more - there's a lot to write! But I have only a little time to see more sights before business, and I don't want to lose that chance. So this is all for now.

Pre-Trip Count Down: 36 hours

I'm 36 hours away from getting on the airporter and going to Japan.

My to-do list is long - but finite. My energy is low but steady - amazing, especially since I've had 5 hrs sleep per night for the last 4 or 5 nights, now. I've lost count. It's a little like having a baby in the house, but instead of losing shut eye for the sake of a crying newborn, I'm up at all hours to appease my own sense of needing to be prepared for a journey.

When we go on long car trips, my husband packs flares and spare gasoline and whatever manly tools he thinks one might need in the event of a problem. I don't think in those concrete terms, but really, I do same thing before a big trip in terms of mental preparation.

One of the symptoms of the difference between us, though, is that he seems unconcerned by what is being left behind. He doesn't worry about letters to teachers, permission slips and paperwork that needs to be put in order, while I can't be bothered to think about how much air is in the tires or what the turbulence might be like over the Pacific.

I've cleaned out most of the drawers and closets in the house. I still need to complete the list of contact names and numbers, the how-to-use the funky dishwasher instructions, to clean out the dog's pen, pay the bills, yadda yadda yadda. There are a few business details still to sort out too: a list the contacts we'll be meeting and their titles (I have their cards from previous trips), a map out their offices and facilities and the trade show we'll be visiting.

The young woman who is watching our kids (with help from her fiance) will have copious lists of instructions and directions. I warned her about this, and she was actually grateful. (Or at least, she said she was.) With her last gig like this, the parents went to Jamaica for a week, and she ended up having to rely on the 4 year old (the oldest of the 3 kids she was watching) to tell her where Mommy kept everything.

Anyway, I'll probably be up until midnight again, but maybe in some twisted way, that's good. I think I'm getting used to the change in the time zone. Right now it's noon in Tokyo.

I will do what I can to post to this blog while traveling. Maybe I'll even figure out a way to post pictures.

But I guess know about as much Japanese as I'm going to know by Sunday.

Some lessons are repeated

Here's what I'd like to do: sit in front of a movie and vegetate for about thirty minutes and then go to bed and get almost full night's sleep.

Here's what I'm going to do: put on a mud face mask, write something for tomorrow's workshop, make the girls' lunches, do the dishes, drink more water, check my Japan trip to-do list, and then maybe fold laundry while watching a few more minutes of Lost in Translation. I've seen it once, but watching it feels like more trip preparation, so I can be entertained and feel like I'm accomplishing something at the same time.

Sick, isn't it?

At least - as my mom pointed out tonight - at least I can laugh at myself about it. "When are you going to learn?" she asked. Apparently not yet.

But please note that I WILL relax on my trip.

Ships and the Sea

We spent the day on the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien today. We left before sunrise to make it to Pier 45 on time. There was a horribly nerve-wracking hour or so, while I tried to figure out if I was supposed to bring tickets and/or whether they would let us onboard without them, and while D's sister broke the speed of sound getting from her home to the ship before it left.

But we made it, we were all onboard when the tugboats started doing their work, and it was a long but enjoyable day. They served good food, there was a big band playing all day, and we saw the Snowbirds do their stuff. I'm still rocking from being on sea from 8 to 4:30, but it could also be that I'm swaying with exhaustion.

We had dinner out (my request) and after the kids got to bed, I went through a drawer of my grandmother's papers to pull out letters from the kids. I've been doing that for hours now.

A funny thing happened, too. Before I got to the drawer of things, I was cleaning up one of the ubiquitous piles of paper on the office floor, and I found an offer to join or contribute to the Nature Conservancy. Well, I do sometimes send checks to various causes and non-profit organizations. But every once in a while, you just have to release yourself of the false sense of obligation brought on by unsolicited mailing. And I said to D., "I'm not going to give to these guys right now," and I threw away the paper. (Ah! Liberation!)

Forty-five minutes later, going through my grandmother's things, I found an envelope from the Nature Conservancy asking her to renew her membership. She'd hung on to the request (for who knows how long), and when she died, it went with all her other paperwork to me.

Yeah, okay. But she died over 8 years ago.

So I threw it out on her behalf.

I think we all feel better. Except maybe the Nature Conservancy. But they'll get over it. Heck, they not only have the domain www.nature.org, but they got a plug in my blog. Twice, if you think about it.

To bed. Tomorrow will be another big day, followed by only big days until we leave for Japan. It's the last big push to get myself and my family ready for our 10 day adventure apart, the last few days during which I can organize my things, clean the house, pack, and find a cure for cancer.

Makes me tired just thinking about it. I've done my duty for the day. I've written. To bed.

Choices

I have made an enlightened decision. I won't be able to complete my grandmother's transcription AND sleep between now and my trip (let alone before the 13th), so I'm going to set it aside and complete it for Christmas.

I'm on page 45, which represents about one and a half of five or six tapes. It takes me about an hour to transcribe about 5 minutes of speaking, because I'm doing it verbatim, and keep pausing and rewinding to get every "but...uh.." and cut off or mumbled sentence she said. So I think there are about 270 minutes more to go. That's nearly 24 hours, realistically. It can't happen as quickly as I'd like.

I can be proud of what I've done so far, and send out a note to my family in time for her birthday, maybe with a picture and excerpt and an announcement that more will come. I have a great shot of her and two friends in front of a little plane they flew in in the 1920's. That should do. I don't want to send just some of the transcript. I'll back up the tapes, back up the file, and put it all in our fire safe.

And then I can focus on other things.

The older I get, the better I can think through things and prioritize, but I'm still fighting this weird idea I have that I can and should do everything I think I can and should do.

Right now I can and should go to bed, but see, now, that's an example of a reasonable goal.

16 tons of concrete

Hello Gentle Readers. I am here, and all is well.

R's 10th birthday party was a quiet affair, with dinner out and a sleepover with two of her friends. She invited the sweetest, most polite girls in her class, which made my job easy. One of the girls is diabetic, and so we had to stay on top of checking her blood and dosing out the insulin after consulting with her mom every few hours. It was educational, because I now understand carbs and blood sugar in a whole new way, but also educational to see that a 9 year old girl can jab herself in the stomach with a needle and just say a quiet, "Ow" when she's done. It's all about attitude; how we handle hardships, how we get through this life.

We had about 16 tons of concrete poured in our front yard today. That's right: 33,000+ pounds have gone into the making of a courtyard just outside the front door. D. was very worried thinking about it last night, and I don't blame him. That's a lot of material to deal with if something goes wrong. Which it didn't. We'll have a walkway to the front door cured in another week or so instead of the rebar and dobie obstacle course we'd had. (I tried and tried to find a visual for a dobie but I couldn't!) It feels like things are getting done in a timely manner, but that's probably because I'm not the one doing all the hard work & I'm not as aware as D. is of what must still be done.

I'm working on poems to send to the contest, and I think I have 2 or 3 candidates so far, but they'll need more work. I love the process of working on poetry so much.

Tonight is D's night out. I got the girls to bed before 9pm and am still awake a half hour later - unheard of for a Monday night! I'm trying to talk myself into doing a few more things before bed so I can sleep well all night instead of my usual Monday night routine: collapse into bed, set the alarm for 10pm, hit the snooze button for two hours, get up and work for an hour or two, go back to bed. That's just so wrong in so many ways.

The pet rat is keeping me company. We named her Beatrice. I suppose if I'd had a male too I would have named him Dante, but it somehow seems appropriate that Beatrice is here and Dante is somewhere else, distant from her.

Moolar loss

The rat still doesn't have a name. We're working on it.

The Tooth Fairy, however, goes by the name "Gwen" in our house. This comes from a long series of letters back and forth between R. and said fairy. I may have blogged about this. Maybe it's a good sign that I can't remember if I've written about this in the blog - it means I've written enough that I can't keep track of it and don't really care to search the history to find out. Okay, so maybe it's just a sign that I'm lazy.

R. lost her first "moolar" (as she called it in her note to Gwen) yesterday, and the Tooth Fairy, witty correspondent that she is (Illustrator, French Script font) said she'd add it to her collection. She said other things too. The kind of inane things a fairy says when it's 1:30am and she is sleep deprived and annoyed by the buzz of an iMac. I get so cynical after 10pm. Sorry.

Current pre-trip goals:

* Learn Japanese. My most recently learned phrase is, "Big is the opposite of small." It's oh-so-handy what a CD can teach you!

* Finish the oral history transcription. I worked on it from 2:00am-2:45 am this morning and had to force myself to stop and go to bed and get that extra 2 hours before the alarm went off. But I'm only about a fourth of the way through it and don't have a dictation machine so it's slow slow going.

* Create or polish my best 5 poems ever & submit them to the James Hearst Poetry Prize competition. Deadline: October 31st. Judge: Billy Collins. I can't count on Japan to inspire me to write the perfect submissions, so I should try to finish this before I go.

Meanwhile, I'm very happy. Busy and happy. Thank God for coffee - among all the other real profound blessings in my life.

The Newest Addition

It was another good weekend of getting things done around the house. Saturday morning, I took the dog on a long early walk, got my hair done, took R. to riding lessons, took the girls to a birthday party, and then worked on the yard. I convinced the family that dinner out at a Chinese restaurant would be good, and it was. Sunday I worked on cleaning the house, ran to the store, and came home long enough to grab my things and go (late as usual!) to my writer's group BIC ("butt-in-chair") time at the Apple Box. Had about an hour of writing, got home to do more chores, R. had a friend over & I ended up staying up too late to squeeze every bit of the weekend out of the weekend that I could.

I've started again transcribing my maternal grandmother's oral history. Not sure how I'll finish in 2 weeks, but I'm going to try to mark the centennial of her birth by completing this project & sending the written work (approximately 120 estimated pages!) to my siblings and mother.

And the really big news - especially if you are my children - is that this evening, we added a new pet to our family. My husband has had understandable concerns about not contributing more chaos to our lives and so is adamant that another pet such as a cat or dog would be a bad, bad idea. However, some time ago, he agreed that if I were to get myself a small pet that could be contained in a cage, he would be okay with that.

So here's how it went down.

We were out of dog food.

I think I've mentioned before that a trip to the pet store with children is a dangerous thing. I prepared my kids by saying, "Now, we're going to the pet store, and we can look at the little pets, but we are NOT going to get anything."

We looked at the birds. Very nice. And then either because I was heeding the small quiet cry of Destiny or because I'm an idiot, I said, "Let's look at the rats!" And you know what? Neither of my kids said, "Gee, Mom, maybe we shouldn't. We're not going to get any new pets anyway, and looking at them will just make us want one."

Anyway, there was a little gate barricading us from the room with the rats in it, so either because I am intimately in tune with Fate or because I'm insane, I said to one of the sales clerks, "Could we please look at the rats?"

And the whole time, I'm telling myself, "You're just looking."

This is how people end up driving fully loaded Lincoln Towncars off the lot. I'm sure of it.

The little VOICE OF TEMPTATION AND THE CAPITALIST PIG AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE devil on my shoulder was whispering, "Well, maybe if they have a female and she's young, and not the curly hair variety, and if she looks like she has a good disposition... D. did say you could get a rat. And you haven't had one for about 15 years and you deserve to have a rat if you want to. You're a good human being. You're responsible. You'll take care of it. It can be a Writer's Rat and sit on your shoulder while you compose poems that Billy Collins will read! It will keep you company while you stay up late learning Japanese or transcribing those tapes!"

And at the same time, the VOICE OF REASON, ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND STRENGTH OF WILL was quietly saying, "But you can't anyway because it would be stupid and you told the kids you wouldn't and you shouldn't do anything to make you look like a liar or be inconsistent with them. Besides, it's bad timing to get a pet because you're going out of town so it would be one more thing to have to organize with the babysitter. And what if the dog wants to eat it? It'll cost a lot of money. And didn't you say you'd get a pet from a shelter? How can you get a baby rat from an overpriced pet store while meanwhile perfectly sweet adult rats are being put to sleep at shelters because no one will take them? What kind of message are you giving your daughters? What kind of impulsive person are you? Are you crazy? What if D. only says he doesn't care, but a month from now he moves to Tahiti with a cute little brunette named Bambi and in his parting note to you he says, "I would have stuck it out with you if it weren't for that rat." ?

There was one female in the litter. She was very sweet. She had been handled by people since her eyes opened, and you could tell she'd been handled gently.

We put her back. We bought our dog food. We left the store.

S. was saying, "I want a rat! Please can I have a rat? Please?" and R., bless her heart, said, "Maybe when Mom gets back from her trip, okay?" and then she did a silly pratfall to make S. laugh - even though I knew that R. wanted that rat as much as I did, and that I did as much as S. did. The devil on my shoulder was having the same tantrum S. was having, and the little voice of reason angel was being so damn self-righteous and smug it made me hate myself.

We drove home. The pet store closed in 25 minutes. I knew this because I'd asked what time they closed. I called D. He stayed neutral, but when I said it seemed like a silly expense, he pointed out that we already had containers to house the rat & that money shouldn't be the thing that decided it for me. But he let me decide. I paced, talking to him out of earshot of the kids, who had already let it go. I checked out the acrylic tank we had to put the rat in. I looked at where it might go in the office. Metaphorically speaking, a scuffle broke out on my shoulders between the warring factions. Then, 15 minutes before the store closed, I gagged the angel of reason and said to the girls, "Well, you'd better get your shoes on and get to the car if you want to get that rat!"

They didn't really need their shoes on. Their feet didn't touch the ground between when we left the house and when they went to bed.

Winey post

Brutal, brutal day at work, followed by a couple of hours with the kids and then a party for a coworker who just got married. I'm home and it's not yet 10pm but feels like midnight.

I have a couple of glasses of red wine in me, so I'm relaxed and a little dopey (but not, of course, too dopey to have driven home from the party). I should think of it as the weekend starting early, although I have plenty more on my to-do list to do before Saturday morning really comes. Danged to-do list.

It's probably dangerous to post anything that I think is important at the moment, because it's likely to be highly influenced by the wine.

I'm not a mean drunk. I am a garrulous gluttonous drunk. I have a very low tolerance for alcohol. One glass of wine gets me a little dizzy and unable to move my eyes fast enough to keep up with my head when I turn it. But I talk. And eat. Two glasses of wine makes me downright silly while I talk and eat more. (But I drove home okay. Really.) I don't drink often. Also, if I drink alone, I'm a very paranoid drunk. The world seems a hostile place; alcohol opens doors in the fences in my brain where I keep the demons at bay. I'm not talking about some sort of metaphoric guilty conscience or bad memories. Or wait. Maybe I am. But mostly, I'm talking about drinking wine or a hard cider alone at night and then having the conviction that there are local hooligans or drugged-out neighbors or kitchen knives possessed by the force of evil, and whatever goodness and light I harbor may not be enough to fight them off.

This is where I say that:
A) I'm part of that generation of 30-something who saw Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and Amyteville Horror and The Omen at way, way too impressionable an age. It would have been better if I hadn't seen such things until I was older - somewhere around two or three years after NEVER.

and

B) Here are 10 things I would rather think about (and perhaps therefore give power to) than the above bad stuff:

1) finding what's been lost (two 8mm video tapes D. & I had torn up the house looking for, which showed up among my grandmother's oral history tapes, safe & sound)

2) my 10 year old wanting to wear a special hand-made frock from the Czech Republic tomorrow for a field trip to the local "Ag Day" because that's short for "Agricultural Day" and the dress if from another culture. (This after I've tried to trick her into wearing it for 3 family holidays to no avail). I'm glad she'll wear it. She'll probably get cow dung on the Eastern European cross stitch, but she'll be wearing it.

3) my 5 year old's conversations with all her toys in the bathtub

4) the lavender I planted in the front yard

5) red wine :)

6) mnemonics. Here are some of the many I've developed for learning Japanese:
-the word for "not yet" sounds like murder ("mada"), as in "I hope that murder is something that I will always be able to say I have not yet done."
-the word for "good night" ("Oyasumi nasai") starts with "Oh yeah!" as in "oh yeah, that's how it starts. Silly, but it works.
-one of the words for seven is "nana" and my Nana has passed away and is therefore somwhere that rhymes with seven
-"to leave behind" is "nokoshimasu" and when we go to Japan we will leave the kids behind. Kids in Japanese is "kodomo" (I just remember that one), and so I think "no" they're not with us "ko" short for "kodomo" and "shi" which is pronounced like the English "she." Our kids are girls ("she" not "he") so to leave behind is no-ko-shi with the usual "-masu" ending. Long and involved, but it works.

7) good poetry

8) good chemistry

9) Autumn will come every year whether I'm here to see it or not

10) I'm currently here to see it.

Sept. 18, 2004

My goal to write daily has been met so far. Thursday was the blog, of course. Friday I took the day off work in part to go to a workshop led by Ellen Bass. It was a inspiring workshop, and she is a good poet and a good person - gentle and thoughtful, but also with a sharp wit and keen ability as a teacher. She teaches creative writing in Santa Cruz, and apparently has done so since 1974. She spoke about "The Poem of the Moment," and she gave us some examples. She also had each of us try to start such a poem our own, at the end of the workshop. There were so many people in the room, about a dozen of us were sitting on the floor. I had a corner of a table to kneel at while I wrote.

I wrote a poem about telling R. about menstruation (the event itself is recorded in my 7/21/04 blog entry). And I was one of a few people who read their poems to the group. People laughed loudly at the right spots, which was gratifying. And Ellen said "Good work," among other nice things. But better than everyone's reaction was the fact that I wrote something new, and with some more work, I can add it to my collection of poems that are about life in general. (The other poems are about, or inspired by, role-playing games). And Ellen provided me with another look at what happens if you write poetry and send it out into the world and try to improve. I wouldn't mind having the awards and grants and recognition and publications under my belt that she has under hers. I have about twenty years to get there, I figure. "Lord willing and the creeks don't rise."

I also finished reading my neighbor's novel and wrote up a critique and got it all back to her (500+ pages of her double-space manuscript and 4 single-spaced pages of my comments and observations and suggestions). Phew! Glad to have fulfilled that obligation.

And I got a good start on cleaning out the house one corner at a time. Worked on our closet tonight. Threw out such things as the empty jacket for Heart's Little Queen LP and a slew of old AAA travel magazines. If we want to go somewhere, we'll look it up online.

I had thought I would go to bed but got a second wind. This after a day of running errands, horse-back riding lessons for R., a party for 3 hours and digging in the adobe for another 2 hours. I just feel energized. Or maybe the word I'm looking for is "manic."

(But at any rate, Clare, you'll be happy to know that I'm living more and more outside of my mind and in the present, where it's oh-so-nice to be.)

Here's a link to an Ellen Bass poem about praying in everything you do. K & B, please note the reference to riding the bus. You see how riding the bus really is very important in the whole scheme of things. It is not necessary to make fun of certain role-playing characters for liking to take public transportation. Public transportation is cool.

End of random thoughts for the day. I also worked on the new poem, earlier, and updated my "fitness" blog, so I met my goal again today.

Sept. 16, 2004

D's 40th birthday. We went out to dinner - sushi, of course. I just spent the last hour working on a poem. D. is playing Parasite Eve and having a birthday hot chocolate.

I believe 9pm - 10pm will have to be my set writing time, although again (working on the poem) I fell asleep with my fingers on the keyboard. Repeatedly.

Time for some zzzzz's. But here's the poem - rewritten for the 5th time, originally composed around June 1998, and maybe still not quite there!



McClure's Beach

We walked the length of it
until rocks checked our progress, and wind
had crusted our hair with salty grit.
Then we turned and trudged back,
once more past kelp that had been coughed up
in cold tangles by the waves.

Our daughter was tired but too tired to know it.
She kicked when I carried her, went limp
in the sand when I put her down to walk.
I thought the steep hill to the gravel lot
was all we had left to conquer.
But at a stream flowing thinly into the sea,
my husband stopped, announced:
"I've got to do it."

No sticks at hand, he used his boots
to crumble and crush the shallow banks
and smudge lines it had taken gravity and tide
uncounted hours to make. He found rocks,
lay them in the water to displace the hapless stream.
Our child whined and tugged at me;
both of us dismayed
by his need to redefine the land's borders
to change courses to the sea.

Slide

There’s been nothing huge in my life that has kept me from blogging. I just stopped making it a priority for a week. And look what happened. Slide, slide, slide. I’m not beating myself up. I’m making an observation. Writing is long-term important to me, and I don’t want to drop it for other things that are important for the moment. The damn laundry can wait another half hour. The kids’ dinner can’t, but the laundry can. For example.

About two years ago, I went to a sales training seminar through work. It was a frightening experience. It could have been worse, I suppose. But it was bad enough. There was much talk about MOTIVATION!! and SETTING GOALS!! and GETTING THE CUSTOMER TO SAY YES!! - that sort of thing.

What I took away from it – besides a renewed conviction that I’m not a sales person at heart – is the understanding that I could fake it if I have to, and the realization that what I learned could be applied to different areas in my life. So I have set goals and have seen them attained. Being a published poet. Running a marathon (I’ve run 2 half marathons – does that count?). Getting a new car. All have happened since I went to that seminar. I have also become closer to my family – another goal I set at the time.

So I’m going to make a new goal that I feel I can keep. The goal is this:

WRITE EVERY DAY.

Wow! What a unique idea! However, self-mockery aside, 9/15/2004 is as good a day as any to start. In fact, if every day I said, “I’m going to write every day!” and every day I did it, that would work, wouldn’t it? It works for recovering alcoholics to take it one day at a time.

Maybe my daily writing won't be a blog entry, but certainly it will be fiction or poetry or journaling in earnest. Not “today had tea with the Smiths” diary entries. Real journals, like the blog is able to be. I think I’ll add long and well-written letters (not email) to the list of qualifying writing, too.

I’m beating Julia to it and daring myself. And anyone reading this is my witness.

What this means, of course, is that I must honestly MAKE TIME to write. Ideally the same time every day, but I won’t worry too much about that right now.

I bought a beautiful little journal to write in when I’m in Japan next month. I can’t wait to fill it up.

Sept. 7th, 2004

A good, long weekend. The girls and I went to a "soup party" Friday night at a friend's house. She put on a pot of soup and the guests provided bread and wine. All the kids there played like sweaty rabid animals. At one point, another mom and I were watching the pack of them race around screaming, and she said with calm consideration, "You know, it's really like Lord of the Flies." And I nodded and said, "Yes. That's what it reminds me of."

Saturday R. had a riding lesson and then a slumber party and S. and D. and I did some shopping at a Macy's - a real department store - something I haven't done in years. I'm so used to going the cheaper route. But fortunately, no one was playing a piano by the escalator. I have a REAL problem with grand pianos in department stores. They make me laugh uncontrollably. Even though I'm sure it offends the pianist, I can't stop myself. It's just somehow so wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Am I the only one who feels this way?

I'll try to put into words what's wrong about this. Certainly, part of it is the seriousness with which the businesses take themselves. But beyond that, it's like Nordstroms (or whoever) is saying, "Here. Please spend lots of money at our store. We'll entertain you with classy live music so you can feel like it's a privilege or some kind of culturally enlightening experience to part with your paycheck for clothes that you don't need made for pennies by third-world workers under horrible conditions. You can listen to a little Chopin while you propagate inequality. And by the way, that color looks great on you."

Okay. I'm off that soapbox. Thanks for listening. As I was saying: we made it out of Macy's with the purchases we needed. I had a moderate case of consumerism. But I got better.

Sunday I went for a long run with the dog - well, as long as he could handle it - after 3 miles, the poor thing had to feign a lame back right leg to get me to just walk, for heaven's sake. I guess a fur coat in 120 degree temperature is a little bit of a challenge, even if you're part sled dog.

I got R. from the slumber party, stopped at the grocery store, and got home with just enough time to turn around again and get the babysitter so D. & I could go to a swanky wedding in the Rotunda at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It was pretty magical: we were early. We found free parking. We were dressed appropriately. We found the reception just fine (at the Golden Gate Club at the Presidio) and the parking was also free there. The bride and groom were as happy as could be. The food was wonderful, the company was pleasant, and the weather was perfect. Scary.

Monday I slept late and spent some writing time downtown with the writer's group, then D. went off to game and the girls and I spent the rest of the afternoon into the night moving S. back to the room that used to be hers and had become the playroom. This meant moving large pieces of furniture in the 120 degree heat, and a thorough re-examination and R&D testing by the girls of every rediscovered toy under said furniture. I finished everything except the dishes, read half of my neighbor's novel copy, and slept.

Must now look at what I'll bring to our writer's group meeting tomorrow. Another very positive bit of news - just got an email from the editor of the American Poetry Journal asking if he could include another one of my poems in the next issue. Golly. This is a good thing. I said yes. I'm more pleased with this one than the last one he published, but I'm really tickled pink that the last one wasn't just a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Hooray!

Sept. 3, 2004

So I missed a couple of days of blogging and reading blogs. I'm still trying to shake strep, and have followed my traditional pattern of doing too much too soon and suffering the consequences. Plus, apparently the penicillin didn't do diddly against the tough little bacteria I'm hosting. Yesterday, I was put on another antibiotic. Should see results soonish. I hope! I look forward to the day when I can swallow without wincing or even noticing I'm swallowing. Once again, I'm in awe of people who go through life with chronic illnesses and maintain a positive attitude.

Please note that I have added a link to Clare's blog. I highly recommend a visit there. Clare is a deep thinker and a great friend – and she manages to write while mothering twin one-year-olds and 5 year old. True, she’s not home-schooling seven children but it’s close. (Thanks to Julia – another blogger you should read – for the link).

August 31, 2004

While I did not complete and send out my chapbook manuscript, I did compile the poems I'd like to put into that first chapbook. And I put together and sent out 5 poems to a reputable national poetry journal. I dropped them off in the post office slot at 9:50pm. Phew.

In the meantime, I see my work as so doggone juvenile, limited and/or self-indulgent. This is not me fishing. This is me saying I need to read more, broaden my vocabulary and subject matter, extend my voice and lengthen but tighten my poems. I don't think I'll get too obscure and academic and intentionally inaccessible, but I do need to move closer to something that can hold its own among the well-known poets in the country today. And dang, there are a LOT of those!

I realize this sounds awfully egotistical, the thought that I could reach that level. But if I don't believe my poetry will ever afford me a reputation and respect among peers, what are the chances that it will all on its own, without me thinking it could happen?

Tired, now. Still suffering from strep (can feel it at night), and last night I didn't really sleep. I played the "I'll set the alarm for an hour from now and get up and write" game from 11pm-2am. After D. got home, I told myself I'd get up at 4:30am and write. Then it was 5. Then I barely made it to work on time after all. So tonight, I'll try for a full (or almost full) 6 hours of sleep.

August 29, 2004

I turned 38 yesterday. The first thing I did was sleep past 7:30am. Then I roused myself and went out to get a latte and a haircut. I came back from the haircut to learn that the hospital had called to say that I have strep throat. So mid-day, I ran up to the hospital pharmacy and got antibiotics.

Later, I picked up a babysitter and D. and I went out to dinner. We tried a new sushi joint. Very nice. Afterwards, we walked downtown and browsed in the local bookstore together. We haven't just wandered and browsed like that in a long time. Wandering and browsing is what cows and horses and the gatherer contingent of the hunter/gatherer tribes do. We are usually more the racing and collapsing types. Or I am, anyway. D. actually has a great gift for relaxing. I could learn from him. If I stopped in one place long enough.

But the birthday was peaceful. I hung out, I napped. I did little. It was good.

And today was good, too. Slept even later. Did very little until I met the writer's group for coffee and butt-in-chair writing time. Still working on the poems. Deciding which to send out in a chapbook, and to whom, and when.

Something will go out by the end of the month - Tuesday! - anyway.

Birthday Eve

I didn't post last night because I couldn't swallow without the kind of pain that made me long for the good old days of childbirth. I'm better this morning, but since I've had this sore throat off and on for a couple of weeks with really no other cold-like symptoms and no fever, I guess I'll call the doctor and have them stick a giant q-tip down my gullet to see what's going on. The no-fever symptom doesn't really count for much in my book because I usually run below normal.

(Unlike my husband, who always runs a temp. slightly above normal, and for a while was able to trick school nurses into calling his mom and sending him home.)

I'm at work, and must catch up - so no greater note than this for now. It's my last day as a 37 year old. Puts me in mind of this Bill Collins poem:


On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

-- Billy Collins

Welcome Clare

I'm happy to see that Clare has JOINED US and is now blogging. Mwah-ha-ha! There's no stopping The Blog now. It will encompass the whole world -- or The Whole Entire World as Julia's heroic character would say (as in, "I have to save the whole entire world!")

Thank God as much as my job may demand of me - even on my "vacation days" (when I had 4-7 pages or calls a day), at least I don't have to save the world. As Sarah Connor put it, "Do I look like the mother of the future? I mean, am I tough, organized? I can't even balance my checkbook!"

The girls survived their first day of school. And I'm happy to report that so did their teachers. R's class of 18 has 11 BOYS. I want you to imagine instructing a drunk baker's shy-by-one dozen boys between the ages of 9 and 11. Okay, now stop. You should see your face.

And it's not like the girls in the class are sweet quiet demure little things. They can hold their own. They are tough, healthy girls. The kind that are pretty but dangerous. Yeah. That kind.

S.'s Kindergarten consists of playing, singing, hearing a story, playing, taking a walk, and playing. Except that it's a survivalist kind of playing. They have as toys things like metal shovels and a water pump. They will be carding wool tomorrow to sew into a pillow. I asked S. what they did today and she said with great excitement, "I got to wash my own dishes!"

I think the school will be good for me...er, for her.

August 24, 2004

Today was a wholly domestic day. I am tired but feel pretty good about what I accomplished, especially considering I didn't get dressed until after 10am.

By then I'd already taken 2 calls from work and had done a number of chores including getting the girls fed & ready to face a day of shopping for school and other school-starts-tomorrow type activities.

Did I mention that school starts tomorrow?

Both children will be in the same school, only a mile from our house. S. will be in Kindergarten. R. will be in 4th grade. I know I'm more excited about it than they are. Even as tired as I am.

I stayed up late sewing a little apron for S., according to the teacher's cryptic written instructions to all Kindergarten parents. (I pity anyone who attempted it who hasn't sewed much before. ) One side will be worn facing out during cooking, and the other during art. This is a Waldorf-inspired school, after all. With two years of kindergarten and no reading this first year. Although we're working on that at home anyway.

The girls have new lunch boxes, new shoes and some new clothes. They worked together to make their lunches this afternoon, after we got back from a massive Costco trip that it will take me a month to pay off. Good think I bought a month's worth of groceries. Or thereabouts.

Tomorrow I am taking the day off again, and there's the potential (if I get fewer work calls than I did today) that I'll have about 2 hours to work on my poetry.

My current goal: entering a chapbook competition. The postmark deadline is the end of the month. I have the poems - enough, I think. But I need to decide which to use and put them all together. And post some of my newer ones to the lists I belong to for critiques.

On another note, I started to learn Hiragana today. We leave for Japan in 8 and a half weeks. I'm starting to dream about having incomprehensible conversations with Japanese people. In my dreams, I don't understand what I'm saying to them.
And neither do they.

Singing Suzanne's Praises

Suzanne, who is in my writer's group, is tall and graceful, with beautiful long red hair.

She is witty. She is compassionate.

She is smart and kind. She is generous.

She writes things that are clever and insightful.

She once wrote a great essay about the pain of being labeled "average."

She is NOT average.

August 22, 2004

Tomorrow my daughters and I will leave at 6am and I'll drive us north, and home. The plan is to get back home in time to prepare for a Writer's Group meeting.

Okay. So I can't create a 25th hour in the day. And I am still not much good for anything after 10pm. But I can try to write. Even with the friggin' Olympics on in the same room. Right? Yeah, right. I mean "write."

August 21, 2004

I am back in Hemet. I have just had my first professional massage. It's a wonder I can type. My sister, who is the Southern representative of the "Let's drag Rebecca into the world of self-indulgence for her own good" Committee, lined up a day of massages for myself and 3 other friends.

My sister has had hundreds of massages, but this masseur apparently has spoiled her for anyone else. The technique he used with me is Hawaiian.

I found this quote about Hawaiian massage: "There is a sublime awareness that every cell of the body and aspect of consciousness suddenly becomes totally and completely filled with the presence of life force Intelligence, in an ever-vibrant stream of love, beauty, delight and goodness. Intelligence offers conclusive knowing that “I Am This Life” and “I Am One Being, Complete and Whole.” The contrivances and facades of self-image become transparent and unimportant. In its place, a wonderful and triumphant remembrance of true Self-identity emerges and fills one’s entire universe."

Uh.

That wasn't the exact method he was using.

But it was good anyway - even in spite of the fact that I was completely naked except for the hand towel / tucked in sheet that covered only what a small bikini would cover. I'm still modest to the point of prudishness, so to be so exposed (even to a professional) and try at the same time to completely relax was a challenge to say the least.

The method he did use, Lomi Lomi, is Hawaiian for "Make the client think you have 8 hands." Apparently, the idea is to reconnect all the disjointed parts of the body by rubbing them all at once in sweeping waves with the forearms and elbows and all 8 hands. This is unlike other methods of massage that compartmentalize the body into pieces as though they had nothing to do with one another.

I am now one happy intact body, with olive oil in my hair.

And all is well with the world. Everything is good. Anything that is not good is still good. It will all work out just fine.

Thanks, too, to the supportive comments to yesterday's post. They help just as much as the massage. And I didn't have to drink gallons of water after them.

August 20, 2004

I’ve spent the last two days fighting this feeling of being defeated.
Defeated about all sorts of things, but one of the biggies is not having (not MAKING) the time to sit down and write.

In a draft for this post, I whined and complained about how hard my life is. Now I’m much better and I can say only that something has to change. D. and I stayed up very late talking about all sorts of things (which was really important for us to do), including the fact that I HAVE to figure out a set time/day for myself. Alone. Without the kids. By myself. Alone.

You moms out there reading this understand what I’m saying. And I should count my work time as alone time, but really, all day at work I’m at the beck and call of 2-10 people at any given time – needy coworkers (anyone reading this is excluded from that comment) and needy customers.

I like to be needed. I like to help. I like to do my work well. It’s just not relaxing, quiet time, though – is it?

Oops. I thought I’d gotten all the self-pity out of my system. Nope. Guess not.

I’m better now.
Thanks for the read.

August 17, 2004

I have officially broken my blogging streak, but I'm not going to let that stop me from getting back on the write-everyday horse.

The flight home Sunday night was delayed by three and a half hours, so I didn't get home until 1am. Knowing I had to be at work at 6am, I just couldn't blog. I am weak. And then last night I chose sleeping over writing. Again.

The delay at the airport was a good thing, though. I love hanging out at airports and watching the people. I think about why they're traveling, where they're going, who's waiting for them at the other end. Or who isn't. And why not. I love the power of the planes taking off and landing, the over-priced gift shops, the food joints with people reading or working on laptops while they eat. There are people with tattoos, dressed in crumpled ill-fitting clothes, and people wearing the best suits. Some dress for comfort, some still dress especially well for travel.

I even enjoy studying how people respond to the new security measures. The men who protest about taking off their shoes, the mothers trying to juggle four children and all the little bits and pieces that go with them: blankets, dolls, gameboys, books, pillows, snacks, drinks.

I’m much more alert at airports than I used to be. I evaluate people more for hidden motives. I decide who is an undercover Federal Air Marshall (or who is IS, Kate). I try to avoid racism, but it’s hard not to give an extra glance to a young middle-eastern man traveling alone who looks nervous. Then I think, “I’d look nervous too if everyone in the airport were scrutinizing me.”

On a completely different note, today my older brother is 44 years old. My oldest brother turned 45 at the end of July, and my sister turned 36 a week ago. I'm next in the line-up. I used to joke that by the time they got to me, my parents were out of money for birthday presents.

August 14, 2004

I'm at my mother's house in Hemet, California. I've called this town the mobile home capital of the West, but I may have to change my opinion of it. Last night, my mother & sister gave me a tour of the newly opened Club House and facilities at the housing development where my mom lives. It's downright palatal. It's like a Palm Springs resort, only a tad cooler.

There's a marble-tiled high-ceilinged lounge with an enormous fireplace, a bistro area, a massive ballroom, a billiards room, a library, a gym with top-of-the-line equipment, and a game room. I think the idea for the last room is poker or chess, but the way I think, I see "Game Room" and I picture four or five wrinkled, stooped octogenarian sitting around with cranberry juice and goldfish crackers at midnight croaking things to one another like, "Okay, so you see this manor house guarded by three Orcs. What do you do, Violet?" "I pull out my broadsword and charge the place, Vernon!"

My favorite perk here is the Theater. It's a private movie theater with a big screen and a DVD player. Every seat is an extremely comfortable stuffed chair with a cup holder built into the right armrest. They show a different movie every week (this week it's "I am Sam"), but if no one is using the room, you can bring your own DVD and have a private screening. Between this theater and the incredible palm-tree surrounded courtyard, state-of-the-art BBQs and huge swimming pool, I'm thinking this is the place to be if you're 55 or older and don't mind living in Hemet. The hot tub is nice too. I estimate you can fit about thirty-two well-sized senior citizens in it easily. Some people's built-in backyard pools are smaller.

Today we slept late, had home-made eggs Florentine and coffee for breakfast (after I did a short jog), and then I payed my bills and we swam. For lunch, we had Chinese food. It had a very soporific effect. My sister and I napped. My mother played solitaire on her computer, and my daughter read all of Espiranza Rising.

I think the three of them are watching the Olympics now. Television, which does not exist as a medium in our house, has already cast its evil spell on R. Maybe I'll blog about WHY I HATE TV (by a former addict) soon.

On a lighter note, Spellcheck has once again brightened my day with its highly-evolved sense of humor. I just quickly checked this post, and I knew I'd said "yes" to fixing something I didn't mean to fix, so I reviewed once again.

I'm glad I did. I wouldn't want word to get out that the Four Seasons at Hemet has "a bigotry area" instead of a Bistro.

August 13, 2004

This weekend R. and I are flying to visit my mom and sister in Southern California. I'll leave R. there for a week with Grandma then will drive down next weekend with S. to spend a few more days and head north again before they start school. The summer is almost over. S. will have one more week of preschool and then we will have reached the milestone of having both kids in elementary school. At the same school. Dropped off at the same place, at the same time M-F.

Kindergarten is half-day. We have no idea where S. will go for after-school care. I might even have to line up baby-sitters at first. This may seem amazingly irresponsible of me - not having this figured out yet - but it is dependent in part on the other Kindergarten parents at our Charter School who are trying to organize a co-op or hire someone to do on-site afterschool care. This is one responsibility I'm not stepping up to take hold of. Yet.

The charter school, although good in many ways, is notorious for its poor communication skills. I could tell lots of stories to illustrate this, but it wouldn't be charitable. And I have other, better stories to work on anyway...

August 12, 2004

This year marks the centennial of my maternal grandmother's birth.

Allison Dorsey Hale Fadeley was born October 13, 1904 and died July 14, 1996. She was my mother's mother, the relative with whom I was closest. We shared a love of books, of education and English comedy, of coffee, and sour dough toast with red current jelly. I still miss her terribly.

The last few years she was alive, her sight was very poor due to macular degeneration. I would come to her house about once a week and help her with her bills and writing checks for charity (she was quite a philanthropist). We would talk about religion and politics and biographies and the day-to-day annoyances that came with growing older.

After her vision failed, Nana’s hunger for books had to be satisfied by books on tape and by me reading to her. She had me read the entire Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson. She also had me tape myself reading it so she could listen to it while I was gone. So I have something like 30 tapes of me reading books to my grandmother. The tapes also captured her coughing, the long-dead dog’s tags clinking together while he scratched himself, and us laughing at the story and making random comments to one another. It’s a strange thing.

I also have her last driver’s license and her tax returns from the 1930’s, and pictures of her in front of a little plane she flew in sometime around 1920. I have cards and letters from the many close friends she had all over the country, and tapes from an oral history she and I worked on.

I’m transcribing the tapes. I hope to put them on paper and print it out for my mother and brothers and sister in time for the 100 year anniversary of her birth. Maybe later a fuller biography will come, but for now, setting down what she had to say about her life is enough.

August 10, 2004

Is there some reason that we can't all wear sari's and salwar kameez if we want to?

The day I gather my courage and buy such an outfit and wear it, I will be declaring independence from the opinions of others. Some of you may already not give a fig about what other people say, but I am not so thick-skinned or self-confident.

Indian clothes are beautiful, and practical and comfortable. (I think.)

And I know I should be able to wear what I want without caring, but I'm just not quite there yet.

I'm working on it.

When you see me in a sari, you'll know I've arrived.

August 9, 2004

I'm trying to feel no pressure to be brilliant, witty and insightful just because the people I care most about in the world (and whose opinion I value most highly) are reading this blog. This should help get the pressure out of my system: blah blah blah. There.

(I'm really writing this Tuesday mid-morning from work, in between telling people we can save their RAID arrays but that it will cost them over $20,000. And I must quit and post.)

August 8, 2004

All the extra sleep I got last night is now wasted and I'm going to start the week in a deficit again, but it was fun to stay up and watch Wasabi one more time. Without subtitles, so I had to work hard on both my French and Japanese.

We finished the gravel for the courtyard today. Or at least, everything we could without figuring out the fountain and a few other details.

D.'s mom came up for a while and told some very interesting stories about growing up in France and why her mother and older sister stopped speaking to one another. Family history. You gotta love it.

Who just tried to call me 15 minutes ago, though? Hmmm.....
You can try again, but I am going to bed now. Really.

August 7, 2004

Today after R. had her riding lessons and I picked up S. from a playdate, we went next door and met our neighbor's friends from Montreal and swam and chatted. They are nice people, kind people who are bright and friendly and have a good sense of humor. To see a couple who obviously love one another and their children, and to see them play with their children (two girls, 11 and 13) is very refreshing. It reminded me again of what I want with my family.

Tonight the local gym hosted a Parent's Night Out. For $25, we were able to take the kids to play in a fun safe environment from 6:50-10:20pm while we had a chance to be alone together. (With the added benefit that I didn't have to clean the house for a babysitter.)

Dan and I were able to talk about what's working and what's not working in our lives, and we had a good sushi dinner to boot. The girls came home exhausted.

August 6, 2004

Here's how you'll know I'm cheating: the time of this post is 11:59pm 8/6/04, which means I really am posting early morning 8/7/04.

What would I do without the Writer's Group? So nice to have accountability and an ear and two other sets of eyes, and so nice to hear other writers' work develop.

J. - good luck with the book treatment!
S. - good luck with contacting the PD!
(Go ladies, go!)

I, in the meantime (who am strung out on decaf mochas and on too much talking about myself) will research the market, work on short stories, work on poems - chapbook competition, deadline the end of this month - and in general try to stay focused (focus, Julia) on my work.

I have a drawer of rejection letters, but they're old. At the very least, I should update my collection of no-thank-you's from editors. Things don't get published if they sit in a drawer, and certainly they don't get published if they are never brought to fruition by busily typing fingers.

August 5, 2004

Can't post. Busy writing. Falling asleep too, but still trying at any rate to work. Perhaps I could wake myself up by writing about whale cheese, but it's hard to say, so for now, I'm sticking to the story I'm working on.

But I'm asleep. The nonsense words are starting to come. For example, if you skip past continents to Icleland-ica, the grease on the tire iron will shadow the pyramid under your breeze. See? I'm friggin' asleep, I tell you. The above was not some witty example of how I might sound while asleep. It's the real scary thing.

Maybe I can get up at 4 and write.....?

And the cry went up: "Whale Cheese!"

August 4, 2004

It's late again. The night sneaks up on me, daily catches me out.

I honestly think I need two days. One for work and family, and one for me. For writing and walking or running or just cleaning out my wallet. I mean, how many receipts can one keep?

Here's another neurosis I'll expose: I used to keep my Safeway grocery receipts so I could make a log of money spent on groceries per month. I long ago stopped that practice, but now I keep the receipts in my purse so I can take them home and recycle them. Because they're paper. And because I don't want to believe Penn & Teller's Bullsh**t episode about how recycling really does the planet no good. However, since the Safeway receipts also have my name on them, before I put them in my recycle pile, I rip out the part of the receipt that has my name. And that part goes into our little garbage bin of paper to be shredded.

I think of the "to be shredded" bin (really a nice wooden box D. made years ago) as a temporary pile, but in reality, I rarely take care of it, so it's the place any savvy identity thief should go directly to for easy criminal convenience since it contains a ton of personal information like account numbers on receipts and our signatures.

So another thing I could do in my second daily day would be shred that stuff.

HOWEVER

Since I do not have the luxury of two days per day, and since (as I've already pointed out), I don't like to spend too much time window shopping when I can't buy the item in question, less whining is called for.

And, as I'm just starting to see (thanks to Clare for the book that points this out), less thinking is what's really required.

I have a very very noisy brain. And an interesting personal relationship with the snooze alarm, too. I am the only one this happens to? Because the snooze alarm goes off (more than once) while I'm in a some almost waking state, my brain creates all sorts of wildly interesting explanations for what the alarm really represents. For example, I distinctly recall once understanding with brilliantly clear insight that if I hit the alarm button just right, I could get a few more ounces of sleep per minute, and as long as I didn't abuse the privilege, the time would not be too great for me to sleep another pound or so.

This morning I reminded myself that the snooze button's name was really Lolly, and that we'd been friends for a long time, so I could hit her once every seven minutes and she wouldn't mind. After the 3rd time, I remembered that her last name was Gagging.

This makes sense because every time I hit her, she shut up.

Please don't bother to post to say that I'm sleep deprived, because I know all of you who post are probably getting less sleep than I am.

August 3, 2004

Amazing. Somehow, I'm posting again. That three weeks to form a habit concept seems right on. Today makes three weeks since Julia challenged me to blog daily, and even though five minutes ago, I was sure I couldn't do it, I'm now writing. Again.

Kate has also presented something of a challenge by suggesting I submit something to Strange Horizons or Ideomancer.

Let's see what I have to offer in the way of old stuff [putting on my marketing hat, now]:

Hearth - the story of a childless couple who inherit an off-the-grid house that has a life of its own. Speculative fiction, maybe.

Rista's story - about a young women sentenced to exile after avenging a relative's death. She comes from a bi-racial, bi-cultural planet and is dropped, along with other criminals, on an "unpopulated" planet in the middle of nowhere. I don't even have a title for this one yet and I wrote it years and years ago. Science fiction/alien story - light on the science. Too long to publish as a short story, though. More like a novela unless I can tighten it even more.

What's Carried on the Wind (needs new title) - the story of a woman who can literally smell death, but only at specific times in her life, and how she learns to cope with that particular "talent." Speculative fiction.

Something from Quest (aka the Rowan story, aka Senior Thesis)? Apart from the fact that the main character must (thank you Anne McCaffery) be renamed - I think she is Mara now - is there anything I can pull from this? In this world, there are empaths and technocrats, badger-like emotional bloodhounds, wise women and refugees in hiding in the heart of the city. (Do you remember it, Clare?) This would be sort of like fantasy, but not in any high fantasy tradition. I'll leave the real stuff for Julia.

Maggie's story - near-future tale about a girl who works as a sorter at a thrift store and who finds an experimental gadget that acts to motivate its wearer to do whatever they might not otherwise be motivated to do. For better or worse. Seems like a good idea that is too "nice" and watered down, in retrospect. Could be so much darker & edgier. Could be really disturbing fiction if I let it.

Newer stuff:

Rock Garden - a woman going through a divorce takes her son to a mobile home park in the California desert. The son becomes convinced that the entire park is populated by aliens and the mother must try to strengthen his grasp of reality even while her own is faltering.

Trained as I was - could-be creepy Halloween story about a father who, on the way home from trick-or-treating, leaves his two young daughters standing on the side of the road so he can go investigate a mysterious circle of chanting people in a nearby field. (Thanks Dad.) I've been reworking this and other "family" stories.

Not yet written:

Whale cheese for Julia.

The story of the couple who bring their baby home from the hospital only to find that he has no belly button.

On that note, I think I'm going to go to sleep now.

August 2, 2004

It's Monday night. Every Monday night, D. goes to his friend's house & games until around 2am. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's his chance to get out and blow off steam and he's a happier person for it, and it's certainly better than having him go watch a football game and drink great quantities of beer like some men do. Also it means that I can (and do) get a night of my choice out whenever I might need one.

On the other hand, it means that he's trashed every Tuesday and (I think) gets sick more often because he gets so little sleep once a week. I also feel that it makes him an enabler to his best friend's pathological reality-evasion. And I'm bitter that his friend never comes here. And I'm often suspicious about that, too. Why don't they game here? In our garage? Even once in a while? Blech. Blech. Blech. Excuse the ugly emotions boiling beneath the surface, please.

More of a problem than the others, his Monday night gaming session means that I single parent every Monday night & if anything comes up I might want or need to do, I pay a babysitter so I can go out. Tonight, for example, I went to an ADHD Overview at Kaiser so I could learn more about R.'s attention challenges and what they might be and what we can do about them. D. also cares about what might be going on with R., but it's Monday, so tonight I represented both of us.
It was a very interesting overview, taught by an obviously highly experienced, compassionate, bright doctor. It's pretty clear that R fits most of the categories and behavior patterns associated with attention issues. But there are other things going on, too, and D. and I are so intent on addressing everything WITHOUT medication, well..I know there's lots more to learn about how we'll do that.

On a completely different note, I think I'm going to get a new car. Soon. I just can't wait to own a hybrid any longer, and I've found I do not need the mini-SUV like I thought I did. I had started to make this decision anyway, and then I got a call out of the blue from my sister-in-law saying she had a friend who is looking to buy a slightly-used mini-SUV.

I think only an idiot ignores synchronicity.

August 1, 2004

I'm cheating. I'm posting early morning 08/02 but am backdating to call this 8/1/04's post, because I'll post again tonight.

The party went well. I know this because when I asked D., "How do you think they party went?" He said, "It was great!" And then he gave R. his fake psychopath google-eyed glare and said, "How do you think it went?" until she stammered, "Fantastic!"

D. knows that even if the guests arrive before I unload the groceries and while there is still a stack of dirty dishes on the counter and we have not disinfected the stinky dog pen (all of which was true in this case), of even if children melt down left and right and parents fight and things get broken (none of which happened, fortunately) - he knows that no matter how dismal a failure a party we host is, if he says the party went well, I'll believe him.

There were 8 children between 4 and 10 (including our two), and 11 adults (including us). Seven of the guests were neighbors, two were S's preschool teachers (current & past). D's father was the only relative who made it - and since he (and my oldest brother) have the same birthday as S., we were celebrating his day too.

There were no party games. I'd bought some "fun foam" for the kids to make things with, and that kept them very entertained. They just played, apart from that. And we had cake. Giant Care Bears on a Sugar Rainbow cake. Let me know if you'd like some - we have extra left over and it's going to take all my will power - plus this statement in writing in my blog - for me not to have any more of it.

July 31, 2004

It shouldn't take 4 hours of shopping to put on a small casual birthday party. Should it?

I hate shopping, and I always have. In particular, I don't like to window shop. I figure, if I can't have it, I don't want to waste my time or pine away and think about whether I'd like to have it. Half of the time, when I'm buying myself a "treat," I walk around the store with it for a while, doing other shopping, and then I put it back before I buy it. I ask myself, "Do I need this, or do I just want it?" Until the last few years, if I didn't really need it, I didn't get it. And I also never bought anything that wasn't on sale. Now I am less of a bargain hunter, but I still don't like to shop.

Part of my dislike for shopping may be a mild agoraphobia - agora being the Greek for a gathering place (like the marketplace), appropriately enough. I'm not so good surrounded by crowds of consumers. I have the same problem at amusement parks -a different type of consumer, but the same idea. Crowds of travelers I seem to be just fine with, so the subway in Japan should be okay. I think what makes a difference is whether the people are moving with a purpose or wandering aimlessly with a shopping basket and/or a glazed look on their faces like body snatcher victims.

And who likes Costco's stacks of heavy goods towering over their heads? We just live too close to the San Andreas fault for me to think warehouse shopping is a good idea. I for one do not want to die under a stack of Kirkwood branded canned goods after a strong rattle.

Another reason I hate shopping is the sense of waste. I distinctly remember many times when I would walk into a department store and see stacks and racks of new things - thousands and thousands of items- bright, and cheerful, and ready to buy. So much stuff. Who needs that much? How many of those things will the stores really sell? What happens to the things they don't sell? It has made me almost physically sick in the past. Now, if I think about it, it makes me want to never shop again.

Are these the suppressed emotions from a past life in a third world country, or what? I don't know. I just know that I'm no fun to shop with. R. deserves a medal after spending those 4 hours with me today. Poor kid. Good thing she likes to shop.

July 30, 2004

Sophie's having a birthday party Sunday, which means I expect to spend tomorrow cleaning up the back yard and otherwise trying to make things presentable - mostly for the sake of her few little friends who might be coming here who haven't been here before. I almost don't care what they think, but it is gratifying to tidy and bring order to things, especially when they're in a state that's so far gone that the change will be especially noticeable.

D's mother will probably come and his father certainly will. His sister might. The family dynamics are not fun, especially since his parents do not speak to one another at all, and his sister only exchanges the briefest of greetings with their mother - and that's only a development that's fairly recent.

But we'll all survive it. I think I will try for the second night in a row to go to bed before 10pm. I was trying to read earlier this evening and fell asleep doing that. Which is nothing new, but still, maybe I'll actually listen to my body for a change tonight and say I've done enough for today.

Yesterday morning my mother called, obviously upset, to tell me that one of my sister's two dogs had died. My sister is single, and her dogs have been so central a part of her life, and were so inseparable from one another, that this is a real blow. Her other dog isn't eating, but J. is keeping a close eye on her, taking her to work with her today, etc. It's hard.

I have no skill with words at all tonight; I'm only blogging out of habit.
God willing, tomorrow will be a better day...