The only benefit I can see

of blogging daily this month - or, I should say, of having an entry recorded for every day this month - is that I proved to myself that I could do so.

I might have stretched myself a little here or there, I might have gotten back into the grove of daily writing.

By thinking about something worthwhile to say every day, I realized both how much I get lost in trivia and logistics and how little I allow myself to sink down and contemplate and write about more meaningful stuff. So much for being a philosophy minor in college.

Honest review of monthly writing goals reached:
wrote 3 new poems, edited a couple of old ones
wrote most of one more chapter in the novel - the most I've added to it in probably a year

bah.
Onward, McDuff! (which allusion, by the way, I must have slightly wrong - because I cannot find the source for it online, only other allusions that must also be wrong. MacDuff doesn't get me any closer to the answer - suggestions, oh my 2 readers?)

Poetry

Ellen Bass' poem "If You Knew" was featured in Garrison Keillor The Writer's Almanac on 11/25/07. That's the second time in a week someone has pointed me to Keillor's page, and now I see from other poems that I like his selection, even if I don't always like the way he reads a poem.

The link to Ellen's web site, where she shares the poem from The Human Line, is here. But I hope she doesn't mind me quoting the poem itself. I consider it another way of pointing readers to her work.



If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Remind me again

Why I'm attempting to post daily this month?

Was it because I was feeling my life was too dull and I wanted to add something to my to-do list?

Yeah. That was probably it.


My schedule today, for my own future amusement:
4:07 drag myself out of bed by telling myself what a good person I am for getting up
5:00-1:13 work and all it entails
1:50-2:20 work out at gym (climbed around 100 flights of stairs while reading the beginning of a Connie Willis short story. I love Connie Willis)
2:30-3:00 go with D to his chiropractic appointment. See x-rays, the curvature, the results. Good news: no "underlying pathology" to worry about ("it's not a tumor!") Bad news: 60 weeks of appointments.
3:00-3:10 pick up S and one of her friends at school.
3:10-3:30 vacuum classroom
3:40-6:00 supervise playdate, make dinner (ratatouille from the Moosewood cookbook. My favorite)
6:00-6:30 take other child home, pick up R from her playdate, take R to math club
6:40-7:20 kill time with S at the outlet mall. Don't know what I was thinking. It only ended with bitterness because we walked away without buying her anything. Her. Life. Is. So. Hard. Sometimes.
7:30-8:00 pick up R at math club, talk to math teacher. He thinks she's extremely bright. Always nice to hear that from a teacher who is himself brilliant.
8:00-9:15 come home, take care of incapacitated husband and wound up children. Get all to bed.

D. had an acupuncture appointment at 5:00 and class at 6:00 (a quiz he couldn't miss), and maybe because of that or the above schedule, the rest of the night went like this:

9:16 realize that we COMPLETELY MISSED a rehearsal for S for the Nutcracker. Not good. Especially so close to the performance. I called the studio & left a message right away apologizing, and I'll probably call again today and grovel. I have advanced permission to use the "my husband is in so much pain and going to so many Dr. appointments it distracted me from my focus on the rehearsal schedule and it won't happen again" excuse. Fortunately, it's not like she's dancing the part of Clara this year or anything.

9:18-10:15 fret over what a failure I am for missing the rehearsal. Let dog out. Cover birds. Lock doors. Let dog in. Fret some more. Tell myself to lighten up on myself. Rationalize. Feel bad that I didn't write. Tell myself I'll get up extra early to wash the dishes and write. Recognize that this is probably a lie I am telling myself. Fret over lying to myself.

It's not a pretty picture, is it? But it's sometimes hard to jump off our treadmills, and I've been running on this one for a while, chewing the worry cud for years.

On a lighter and much more vain and shallow note, I've just bought new pants and they're 2 sizes smaller than what I was wearing a year ago. And they fit. Comfortably. I'm now smaller than I've been since I was 15, and have much more strength and tone to boot. Couldn't have done it without the support group I have, though. Kudos to them.

Currently listening to

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. It's a story about changelings. In Donohue's page describing the creatures, I'm reminded of myself as a child. I don't know that I was especially frightened of adults (apart from my terror over possibly making a mistake, heaven forbid). But my favorite thing to do (and therapists could have a field day with this) was to hide away in small spaces, like cupboards or under desks. Or to read. Or, ideally, do both at the same time. I also loved the woods, and was certain until I was in my mid-twenties that my ideal home would be a small house somewhere with trees on all sides. Ideally Oak, the Druid's tree, and Rowan, with its magical ability to fend of evil. Here's part of what Donohue says about hobgoblins:

they are hypersensitive; they can squeeze into small spaces; they are all we used to be. Hiding in the woods, burrowing under the library, holding on to their mythical nature, they are as frightened of us, as we are of them.

The book is interesting, and narrated fairly well, with alternating narrators taking the chapters that are told by the point of view of the stolen child and the changeling who took his place. But it's hard to say how much it would grip me if I were reading it and not listening to it. I've become so critical lately. No movies or books seem perfect enough. It probably reflects some deeply hidden dissatisfaction with my life or myself. Which makes me want to crawl into a cabinet, actually.

Consumerism Countdown

Christmas shopping.

I haven’t done any yet. Zilch. Zero. Zip.

And Saturday, according to the calendars I’ve been reading lately, is December first. Golly!

Usually, because of my controlling nature, adherence to traditional gender roles, and tendency to be a martyr, I do the majority of the Christmas shopping. But some years, D and I tackle the holidays together. This year promises to be one of those collaborative efforts, provided D has a diagnosis and better treatment for his back and isn’t in a fog of pain killers. (Actually, maybe one is better able to pick out presents in a freer, less inhibited manner, when one has had a little percocet...)

One year, when I was in college and before our year-long Break Up (after which we got back together again better, stronger, wiser) during the brief time when D and I (chastely, I might note) shared an apartment with a couple of other young adults our age, we made all of our presents out of gingerbread. We made gingerbread Victorians for the three people we knew who lived in Victorian houses. We made log cabins. We made classic gingerbread houses. We made our D&D playing friend a long sword out of gingerbread. And true to form, the piece de resistance (and I am not making this up) was a gingerbread Millennium Falcon. Ah, those were the good old geekier-than-thou days.

One year after we were married but when we were still broke, we made, with mixed success, about thirty candles for people on our lists. And yes, some of them were melted down from other candles we already owned. We were that broke.

This year, I may follow through with my annual threat to just get everyone a potholder in the interest of fairness and frugality (not to mention practicality). But the reality is, at some point, I’ll make a heroic effort to get everyone something good-enough-if-not-perfect, and will undoubtedly over-compensate in some areas and fall short in others, and do too much of it all last minute.

At least I can count on help from D again, as I can every year, with the Christmas cards. I just have to find or take the right Pictures of the Girls to send out. And I have the names and addresses of new relatives to add to the list – hooray!

Day of nonrest

The upside to working a Sunday is how much more productive I am once I come home; I know I have only a few hours to accomplish whatever else (like washing the last of the pans and filing papers in the office) I might want to accomplish over the weekend.

After we did work, homework, chores, the girls and I brought the bunnies in and let them play in the living room. It's hard to tell when a rabbit is truly happy, but they seemed to have fun.

Saturday, and Done with the Cooking

This morning I dropped off R. at the riding clinic, which was taught by an Olympic trainer. I delivered her to the barn just after 7am. It was 27 degrees outside. Brrrr!

I went to the gym (Dude. I had seconds and pie Thursday), and then got today's bird in the oven. The mangling and wrestling and negotiating that goes on between me and still-partially-frozen turkeys every year makes me feel like I'm living an episode of I Love Lucy. Today, for example, I spent twenty minutes running water into the cavity of the bird trying to defrost the ice that was holding its neck in place, periodically pulling and tugging at the neck in the hopes of yanking it free. The recipe I use calls for rubbing a special herb butter under the skin of the breast, and if that isn't a weird sensation, I might as well start delivering babies for fun.

D's dad came over for the dinner (as opposed to supper), and I picked up R and we all ate the traditional two-hours-later-than-I-think-the-turkey-will-be-done. We're having a friend of R's over for the night, as an act of compassion for a fellow human being in difficult circumstances. (Her 10-year-old brother has 4 friends staying the night for his birthday.) R had a great time at the clinic, and by all accounts, did very well with the flatwork and jumping. She shines after she's had time with horses. No amount of dirt and grime and horse drool on her shoulders takes away from how happy she looks after she's cantered a few jumps.

D's back is still hurting, but Monday he'll see a Dr. and a chiropractor about it, and I'm starting to preach P.T. I can't imagine how frustrating this is for him, and my heart again goes out to those folks (including the ones near and dear to me) who are living with chronic pain. It takes superhuman strength and grace to bear that kind of load.


...
Off to supervise the night-time routine, but I can't leave without wishing Kate a very happy birthday. Celebrate, K!

The day between

This is the day between two Thanksgiving meals, where I worked 7-3 then did errands and chores and spent the evening watching a fair-to-middling movie with my family. Sometimes what makes quality time with D and the kids is just that it's downtime, and we're together.

Having said that, I'm also so grateful to them for letting me dash off to the gym while they had dinner without me, because I so needed the workout!

Was up way way too late tonight cooking for tomorrow, and tomorrow I'll be up very early to take R to a riding clinic, and then I'll focus on getting the next turkey in the oven. With any luck, I'll manage to work on my poetry too, somewhere in there...

Grateful

I started to write out a Thanksgiving list - the expected "what I'm thankful for."
The short list: Everything
The details:
life on this planet, at this place & in this time
the people I'm sharing that time with: my husband,
my daughters, the rest of my family - relatives by upbringing, birth and marriage
my few but valued friends
my health - physical, emotional, mental (holding steady at the moment)
my home - even when it's at its cluttered worst, it's a roof over my head and a blessing

but all that seemed so EXPECTED, that I didn't want to put it down.

And I thought about writing the MENU from today's meal (just to impress you all, because there were more different gourmet dishes than there were diners), but that, too, seemed contrived.

So I'm just saying that it's a day-after retro-post, I don't have enough time to say anything profound because of clamoring children, and for those of you who are disappointed, I say if you're relying on me for entertainment or enlightenment, you should should consider alternatives. At least for the next few days of cooking, serving, cleaning, working, repeat.

The downside to aquarium ownership

The day was unremarkable, but the evening was marked by the loss of our youngest and (at the time of his demise) largest koi, Nanashi. His name meant "nameless" or "anonymous," and you would think that it's silly to be sad about the loss of a fish (especially compared to the loss of a dog or cat, as friends who have recently suffered in that way can attest). But we got him when he was about 2" long, and he was 18" long when he died, and we're mourning all the same. It's a little different when the fish are as big as a cat, and are hand-fed every morning in 400 gallon tank in your living room.

Nanashi is the gold & white fellow (or gal, it's hard to tell with koi) in the pictures from February below. We still have the light orange Lao Tsu, our elder koi, and the silver Yosho, but whatever suddenly affected Nanashi in the tank water was affecting them too, which meant a 200+ gallon water change tonight in the hopes of saving everyone else. They're all fine as of now, and we may never know what happened. It wasn't old age, though - koi can live 100 to 200 years, apparently, if kept right. Apparently, a pond in Japan is the best method, so we're already handicapped with our tank in northern California. But D does an amazing job with keeping everything running well, and it's hard to realize that one's best efforts can mean nothing in the face of some unknown agent of mortality.

























Post-script - those 18" are body only and don't include the tail, probably another 3" or more. And he was only 2 years old....

Consumerism and Mortality

Watching the ebb & flow of people through Costco today while I waited for new tires made me think about death, about how we're all going to die and buying things is not so much life-affirming as death-denying.

Apparently my negative feelings about shopping go deeper than I thought. There's a poem in there. I'm working on it.

Sick child went to school (well enough), well child had an all-day play date. I cleaned the birdcage, bought - more shopping! - most of what I still needed for tomorrow and Saturday (2 dinners again this year). And I drove R's classmates to the ballroom dance class last night although R herself didn't go. After I got back at 8:45 I made a frantic but incomplete attempt to clean the house for today's babysitter. I'm comforted by the fact that I've seen said babysitter's bedroom and can only hope that she doesn't hold others to standards of tidiness that are higher than those to which she holds herself.

And the bird cage waits one more day

But I promise I'll clean it out tomorrow. Honest. Not that the parakeets seem to mind, but I do.

I did manage to move the hutch and all the antique glasses (my great-grandmother's) from its temporary wall to it's original wall, now that the pantry piece of the remodel work is done.

Also cared for the sick child, met with the well child's teacher for a conference, made copious cups of tea and soup, and ferried the Little Tea to Nutcracker rehearsal. Not necessarily in that order.

Cursed dusk and the demise of energy

The good news is that after one acupuncture session, D. is much, much better (and to my relief off the questionably effective pain pills). The bad news is that R. is now sick. She missed school Friday - math assignment due, Spanish quiz, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with it - and rallied over the weekend enough that against my better maternal judgment I let her go to the barn & have her riding lesson today. Now she's miserable with a fever and bad sore throat and we have only ourselves to blame. I only hope she'll make it to school tomorrow.

S is fine and I'm fine. In fact, I was buzzing with energy and even feeling downright inspired most of the day, craving a top-to-bottom housecleaning binge after running up to R's school for my turn to clean her classroom. (The truth is, I think I made regular coffee instead of decaf by mistake. After a couple of months of decaf, it's amazing how optimistic and motivated 10 ounces of the real stuff can make me.)

I got quite a bit done - S and I cleaned out the rabbit hutch, I swept and raked the leaves off the front yard, did dishes, tidied in general. But sure enough, as the day grew darker and the hour later, I felt myself incapable of anything but getting the girls to bed (lots of soup and then tea for R) and crashing myself. So sad. If ONLY I could maintain the momentum I feel in the afternoon past 6pm, I could get SO MUCH done. Coffee at 4pm would probably do the trick, but that's a slippery slope for me, and best left alone. Besides, on the occasions when I do get a second wind, I'm often up to 10:30 or later, and back to the less-than-five-hours-of-sleep dilemma. As Pooh would say, "Oh, bother."

In the groove

Today, I wrote for about 3 hours: an hour and a half in two different cafes with two different sets of writerly companions: a duo of Nanowrimo novelists, and then another third of my writer's group. This creativity is a state of mind, and I just don't let myself go into that dreamy what-if, play it out, mark it down mode often enough. It's not magic. It's just work, and not always hard work at that.

And they all had lung cancer in the end...

Wednesday, R's math tutor and R. and I solved Einstein's Riddle. There are links to it online, and some claim that Einstein said that only 2% of the population could solve the riddle, but I think that's hogwash. There may be a small percentage of the population that would have the persistence to bother, I suppose, but it's certainly do-able. It's also known as the Zebra Puzzle, and this wikipedia entry gives more history and tips for solving it.

Here's the riddle as we saw it, if you feel inspired. It's a logic problem, and I could work on these all day compulsively like I do a jigsaw puzzle (and I don't look at the picture for one of those, btw, because I consider that cheating).

There are no tricks to this riddle. It might help to have a pencil and paper handy. We used a big white board and dry-erase markers and worked out it together.

1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

THE QUESTION: WHO OWNS THE FISH?

HINTS

1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.


We solved it in about 15 minutes, and it was more fun for me than eating a box of truffles.
(I also didn't have to jog it off afterwards as I would have the chocolate...)

Creativity deferred

It's the working mother/wife/artist's dilemma: which to put first?
the family, with it's legitimate needs and requirements for being healthy, happy & cohesive?
or the work, that pays for some of that health and happiness?
or the creative acts and time alone that feed the soul of the person who helps feed the family?

There are days when these demands truly conflict, and even the most creative juggling won't include everything.

My priorities are nearly always:
1) kids and husband
2) work
3) self

Not that 1 & 2 don't contribute to 3 - I get a great deal of satisfaction out of my work, and my children and husband do so much good for me in so many ways (both intentionally and in spite of what feels like their best efforts to the contrary). But I know that if I put off that third priority for any length of time, I'm a bitter, cranky woman and about as much fun to be around as Dick Cheney on a hunting trip.

So to put this in practical terms, here's a what I mean. D is still in (undiagnosed) excruciating pain in his upper spine. The lab results are apparently in but his doctor hasn't called him, and meanwhile he's taking pain medication - a necessary evil for him to function at all - and will be seeing a friend who is an acupuncturist tomorrow. He's maintained amazingly good spirits in spite of the agony, and I know it's not because of the drugs, because they've had limited effects in general. (Except that his reading tonight of Heckedy Peg was inspired.) The girls' schedules are as full as they can be without it tipping over into "too much" (okay, maybe they're tottering on that edge in the overbooked direction), so most days this week I spent no more than 30 minutes at home between the hours of 4:30am and 6:00pm. The rest of the time I'm a Soccer Mom for kids that don't play soccer. And I can't exactly complain (note: iamnotcomplaining) because I'm the ambitious idiot who signed them up for ballet, math, riding, French, and violin. And they truly love these things and benefit from them, and their school work doesn't suffer from them. In fact, the activities support their academics as well as their creative lives. I make it to the gym for my 20-30 minutes of work out 4 days a week. Between that and the personal training I get at work 2 days a week, I'm physically in about the best shape I've ever been in, and am more than 20 lbs lighter and a dress size smaller than I was before I had kids. But what has been getting short shrift, still, in spite of those road-to-hell pavers, is my writing. My poetry. My, if you will, craft.

We'll see how that changes now that I've committed myself to writing and submitting a poem a week to an online workshop with a small but elite group of poets. Yes, something one loves should not require dares or pride (aka the fear of shame) to come into being. But if it works as a jump start - I have written an entry per day this month, after all - then perhaps the ends justify the (temporary) means.

Opportunity

You have to be careful what you put out there in the Universe. You just might get it all coming back at you.

I've got an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to writing opportunities: writer's groups soliciting me to join (one in particular for poetry, started by an editor who has published my poems in the past), contests that different writer friends have suddenly told me about, local workshops, requests for poems from new acquaintances...even the dare to blog daily in November - it all leads to a heightened focus and more output.

Maybe you can't force creativity or mug the Muse, but you certainly have a better chance of writing something good if you're actually, say, writing, than if you're only thinking of writing....

Onward!

Tuesday

I guess there's no real advantage to blogging late at night when I literally can't see straight and can't summon the energy to write anything profound or creative. I'll stick to describing one thing from the long day.


Tonight S's 2nd grade class had its Lantern Walk. After dark, we formed a parade on campus. We wove along a path lit by about a hundred luminaries. Sophia held a stick in front of her as we walked; from the stick dangled a tin can poked through with holes (she'd poked the pattern into the can with a nail & hammer). Inside the can, a lit candle flickered as we paraded, with all the other parents and students and their flickering candles, singing songs to ward off the dark. S's voice was high and clear, her own light shining brighter than that of the candle. A sickle moon hung low in the sky as we headed back to the car afterwards. She sang Au Clair de la Lune (as much as she knows from French class, anyway), which was the perfect end to the night.

Nothing [significant] to report, sir

The day off was filled primarily by Cleaning S's Room - a significant undertaking. When we were finished, she said, "Mommy, what's that big brown thing?" Sarcastic kid. She was pointing to the floor. It had been a long time since we'd seen it.

The girls and I had friends over briefly in the late afternoon, which was really nice. Although I could never get 45 people to come to my wedding right now (my sister is really so much better at friendship than I), I cherish the few close friends I have.

On another note, D went to the Dr. for the horrific back pain he's had for the last 5 days. Because the pain is in an unusual spot, mid-back & higher than one might usually see for pulled muscles, etc., the Dr. wants to "get pictures." D. was given a shot & some pills that made him only a little loopy. I'm also trying to get him to see a friend of ours who is an acupuncturist.

Tomorrow it's back to getting up at 4am for work, etc. The usual routine. I went to bed around 9:30 and only got up for this brief tea-with-the-Smiths post. Not too creative, I realize. But what I have to say at the moment nevertheless.

Terra firma

After a long day of travel and many more adventures, the girls and I made it home not long ago: safe and sound, but weary. Poor R. has school tomorrow too (which was the cause of much bitter teen mutterings and gnashing of teeth, especially because her sister's school is closed for the holiday). The girls fell asleep the minute their heads hit their pillows.

I'm so grateful to be back. And so grateful for the experiences we've just had. The travel alone (5 plane flights in 4 days with two kids in two) was a character-building experience.

It's truly only minutes before midnight (as opposed to the fudged times on my last 2 posts), and the day started a million years and many custom lines ago. So I'm signing out for now.

Hasta mañana...

El Dia de la Boda

I'm sorry to say that limited internet access time means that this is just a place-holder post.
The full details of the wedding day will have to follow. These things (and so many other things) happen.

Hola de Mexico

We have arrived in Cabo. I have only a minute of internet access to say we're here, all is well (after only a few adventures), and I hope to blog more later....

Hasta Luego

I'm not sure what kind of internet access I'll have when in Mexico, so I thought I'd blog while I can. We're about to go beg like idiots (or at least, I will - D's rightly too proud) for the bank people to let us in early to the safe deposit box....

Ouch

You know, I spend my workdays trying to be compassionate when telling people how their mistakes (like not backing up, or assuming a backup is good) are going to cost them. A lot.

And now I have an even deeper, more profound, understanding of how wretched they feel when they realize the price-tag carried by stupidity, assumption, laziness, disorganization, or procrastination.

So.

Um.

Some advice for those of you who are traveling outside of the U.S. and who think it's a good idea to keep your passports in a safe deposit box at the bank: it's only a good idea if you realize that they're not in the house firesafe, but really, actually are at the bank, where you dutifully took them - if you realize all this BEFORE the bank closes for the day. Especially if your flight leaves only minutes after said bank opens.

I'll just minimize the last few hours of drama and intense ticket searching frenzy and the way my credit card is on fire right now, and say that oh well! oopsie! We'll be arriving in Cabo about 6.5 hours later than planned, and will be leaving a few hours earlier than we'd expected. (And that we really hope there are no accidents between home and SFO during the precious little time we'll have to make the newly booked flight to Cabo by way of Constantinople.) The girls will get to see all sorts of parts of Mexico on the way home that they may not have expected to see. And I have a nice credit (less the fee) from the original airline for future tickets. Ha ha! Isn't life just crazy sometimes? Ha ha ha ha.

And now, I think I'll pack.

Remind me to laugh ruefully about all this.

In about five years.

Sleepy Post

Went to bed around 9pm when the girls did, in spite of all my intentions to stay up late and Get Stuff Done. D. is fighting a horrible cold and has no voice or energy left, so he also was asleep.

I'm feeling especially ill-prepared for the trip, but that's only because I always want to Get Everything Done before I go somewhere, as I'm sure I've mentioned in previous blog entries.

Set an alarm only for getting up to satisfy the quotidian requirement.
Work went well enough today, and tomorrow I work a shortened day, having planned for a few hours to run errands, wash clothes, pack.
J's surgery is over, and she's recovering, thank God.
I got some shopping for the trip done while I had the car serviced (small tube of toothpaste, suntan lotion, etc.), then picked up my new glasses on the way home. The last pair are from 3 prescriptions and 4 years ago!

This post was started at 11:53pm, and if the time shown is anything other than that, all I can say is grrrr.

Anxiety

Had about 40 minutes of strong anxiety this evening, but couldn't pinpoint why. It might be that work was especially difficult today, and I left with more hairy issues unresolved than usual. Or it could be because of the surgery that my half-sister J. is having tomorrow in Denver. Or how ill-prepared I am to leave the country with the girls for 4 days Thursday.

At any rate, it was the kind of anxiety that made me call home on my way to a night out - just to tell D. that I love him, and love the girls. Stress makes me paranoid. I think this anxiety is just a manifestation of that same kind of thing. (Um. Not to say that it take stress, paranoia, or anxiety for me to express my love for my family...)

I suspect that resolving things at work, checking in on J. after surgery, and making a To Do list for the packing & preparation will make all the difference in the world. So will sleep.

What I Won't Be Doing This Month

It's November, which means it's also nanowrimo (national novel writing month), when thousands of people set themselves the goal of creating 50,000 or more words toward a novel. I managed (by the skin of my teeth) to do this a couple of years ago.

This year, my November goal is to finish the first fat rough draft of that book - emphasis on the word "rough" - and to write and compile 100 poems towards a book-length manuscript. I already have 100 or so poems kicking around, but they need to be good poems that would work together in a single collection. So I have my work cut out for me, still.

S. finished her performances of the ballet version of Alice in Wonderland put on by her ballet company and school. This time, she played the roles of a lobster (from the Mock Turtle's story about the Lobster Quadrille) and a card (the 8 of Hearts, which she said was perfect since 8 is also her age). But while we set the dinner table, R. and I joked that she should be cast as The Queen the next time the show comes around, since she often, Leo that she is, acts the part of She Who Must Be Obeyed. S. would be the first to agree.

R. made dinner - the last of the angel hair (I've gone to rice pasta), and wonderful stir-fried green beans, red pepper and garlic. She added lemon juice and a little squeezed mandarin orange juice to the pan, and it gave the veggies a great flavor. She'd like to cook dinner more often, she says. I told her this was a great idea, since I have tons of recipes that I've never tried. "I don't need your recipes. I'm going to make my own recipes," she said. So it might get fairly interesting!

Permission

Another note to self, while I bang my head against the wall that is entitled What Can I Possibly Blog About Today? (with the subtitle: And It's Only Day Three Of the Month. Lord!)

You have permission to love. Yourself, and other people. All of them. As much as you can. But yourself first, since that seems to be the tricky one. (When I feel love for myself, it stinks like a pity date.)

You have permission to try and fail. But not to not try. There's a difference between surrendering to the Now and passively expressing Denial of What Is through immobility. Move!

You have permission to try and succeed. Really. It's okay. Those painful years of being resented for being "daddy's girl," "teacher's pet," "favorite employee" can fall away. The resentment of others is not who you are. Do good things, and do them well for the joy of it and, let the accomplishment be its own reward. There's no shame in shining, in spite of what some might say. That's their own stuff clouding the skies. [The weight loss thing is a classic example. Reaching a target should be celebrated, not torn down by the insecurity of others. It's not you they're angry at, after all.]

You have permission to leave some things undone in the interest of getting a full night's sleep. Although you can get by on 5 hours a night, it doesn't do your body, mind or soul any good. Getting a full night's sleep -now, that's the way to healing and wholeness.

Write.
It will encourage the writing.

Friday. Amen.

By the end of most weeks, I feel wrung out but victorious, with the gratitude of someone who has just received a miracle diagnosis: the dreaded symptoms actually only pointed to something benign. I've swum safely to the rock of another weekend.

I love weekends, when I can sleep past 4am, be home in the daylight longer than ten minutes, and chauffeur only here and there instead of everywhere. I get caught up a little in the housework, I see my husband before noon. I have breakfast with my daughters: crepes with chocolate and strawberries and powdered sugar, bacon for them, turkey sausage, eggs, melon, and coffee out of a mug that doesn't have a lid or a company logo.

The leaves are starting to drop in the courtyard, we've lit the furnace, Thanksgiving is fast approaching - and I haven't even sat down to say yet what the light in October means to me.

First retro-post of November: day 1

Apparently, I'm still a sucker for a dare. So.

To the motivating individual who has dared me to blog daily this month, I hope you will accept this after-the-fact post (written November 2nd, early a.m.), since I only got the message about the challenge you issued just now. And we'll just have to see how this works when I'm in Mexico next week.

November 1, Day of the Dead.
I'd wanted to build an alter for Mom. I bought flowers. I knew which picture to add. I had a few other odds and ends to put in place. I had the morning off work because S didn't have school, so I thought I had time in which to do it.

Instead, I spent the day playing taxi driver/personal assistant for children. They were my children, so I didn't begrudge them their dependency on me, or resent their bake sale, Ortho appointment, Math Club, horse riding, and ballet rehearsal. I'm increasingly aware of how quickly they will be grown and (we hope) out of the house. But I have to admit that a little frustration was creeping through the cracks that for the second day in a row (after a 4 day streak) I wasn't able to sit down for an uninterrupted 30 minutes and write yesterday, let alone build that alter.

Then, while herding kids at the school bake sale (which R & I really did BAKE for, as opposed to just "distressing" the crust on a store-bought pie) - and these were kids who had barely come down from their Halloween sugar highs and were chomping at the bit to have MORE quick-and-dirty carbs - I noticed that the school had set up a table with a number of Día de los Muertos alters, and among them was one R had made for her grandmother

It was simple: a photo of Mom with the girls, all three smiling real smiles, as opposed to the "just take the damn picture" grimace you sometimes see in posed photos; a couple of little rubber ducks (which Mom always got for the girls to have in baths when they visited her), some glitter and sequins to represent a sandy beach and her southern California home, and a very touching poem in Spanish that served as a tribute. R had known they were making alters for her Spanish class. She'd gathered the pieces. and brought them to school, and crafted the alter - all without saying a word to me. I told her how much it meant to me that she'd done it, but she'd done it for herself and for Mom, and that was what really mattered.