Cheers

Sometimes my life feels like an unevenly written sit-com. I think if anyone could witness what happens once I pick up the kids from school, if anyone were to shadow me as a me-in-training, they'd either be astonished that I was sane or would be selling my life to a producer. Or both. But at least I would have someone else with whom I could laugh or cry or shake my head in amazement or hang my head in despair. Or drink.

At the moment, after my first day back to work in a week and my first day picking up kids from school in as long, I think I may not survive this parenting thing.

My eldest daughter now has a "boyfriend" (I'm putting it in quotes so it seems, to me anyway, less real). She has "kissed" him "a couple of times" but they're "taking it slow." She is 12 and a half. Almost.

Did you like the kissing? I want to know, hoping against hope that she did not.
She did, sorta. Did he? He seemed to, she says. "In fact, he just smiled afterwards, like he didn't have a care in the world."

I wish I could say the same of me.

It's not even 6pm. I'm having a glass of wine. It seems to have helped. I think this is a bad pattern. The wine-drinking and the boyfriend kissing. Both bad, so young in life.

I'm trying to slice garlic for dinner, now - after realizing that a head (not a clove, a head) of garlic was missing from the fridge and had been put in daughter #1's desk drawer for her private snacking (which may, actually, solve the boyfriend kissing problem). And daughter #2 tag-teams the pre-teen announcements with her own emergency:

"Mom, there's a big problem with my room." She looks like she may cry.

"What is it?" I ask, thinking maybe more plutonium has been found, like that last time.

"I don't have any hanging files."

This is what happens when you add hanging files to one daughter's desk and not the other's.

"Hmm. That is a problem," I agree (because the wine is already making me agreeable) "But," I explain, "We can't have hanging files until we find those 2 metal bars that go in the bottom desk drawer. You need those to hang the files on, and I have no idea where they are."

"Or," I stupidly muse out loud, "we could make something to go there and hold the files."

So for your entertainment, you can guess what I'll be doing after dinner:

a) sleeping, because I wake up at 3:45am every work day, and one glass of wine will knock me on my butt

b) figuring out a way to make faux hanging-file-bar-things, because it's only fair, and besides, my second daughter's problem is easier to face than my first daughter's latest development

c) offering more raw garlic to daughter #1

d) sending both kids to bed early so I can lose myself in an intellectually pointless episode of Friends. You know, the TV series that the rest of America watched 15 years ago

e) gloating over having written a blog post

f) all of the above

Cheers.

Vacation

I have been on vacation. I have been on an extended sabbatical-like vacation from family and work but not from home, and it has been lovely. I have evidently been on vacation from blogging, too, but I have rough-drafts (for my own reference) of what happened between 2/10 and 2/19, as well as those other days between then and now.

I have written a couple of poems - although one was a haiku and such hardly counts in my mind. Sorry, but there it is. So little, so little.

I have figured out the next important plot points in the old novel. I have started to write them.

Most importantly, I have reorganized the office in our home to be my own space. A writer's study, as it were. I've cleared out everything that was not mine, or didn't have to be there. And now I'm reintroducing what didn't fit before, finding better places for it. And I'm getting rid of things, too. Thank heavens for the school rummage sale!

I have written. I have given blood - literally, although I know some writers who consider that writing amounts to the same thing.

I have done much less than I thought I would, but I guess that's the current lesson I'm learning. Great expectations not quite fulfilled, but certainly more done than would have been if I'd set my sights too low.

A thought about messengers

I've always loved that the word for angel comes from the Greek for messenger, άγγελοσ. It's always felt true that angels, those messengers from outside (or perhaps far inside) our day-to-day perceived realm, might be so beyond our current ken as to be terrifying. I have a poem with a line, "The angel's first words are 'Do not be afraid.'" It's a telling greeting.

All too often, we translate ignorance into fear into hatred. There's a connection between this and ideology and (un)holy wars, too. But what do we know about angels? And yet instead of angels being something we cannot comprehend and therefore hate, we have made them into tall people in long white robes with wings and halos. We've simplified them and humanized them, the way we apply human characteristics to animals. How far apart are angels hovering above us with harps and bull dogs playing poker?

I like Madeleine L'Engle's concept from A Wind in the Door of a cherubim being a compilation of wings, eyes, and spurts of flame and smoke. A creature with a voice like a cello.

There is so much we don't know, can't know. Yet. And most of us therefore don't think about it, while others (I'm not specifically singling you out, Josh) spend a lot of time thinking about the unknown. I could get lost there, too, and sometimes I regret spending so little time seeking enlightenment through the blossom of a weed or the swirl of steam over a teacup.

But even if I don't delve into mystery on a regular basis, I hope, I pray, that I will avoid reducing the sacred to pablum.

Friday on the fly

Today I did not go to the gym as planned; instead, I ran a couple of errands and then, before picking up the kids, sneaked a peak at the very beginning of the new Battelstar Galactica series. There was a time when I was such a big Battlestar Galactica fan (not when it was first out, somehow, but when it was already in syndication), that I knew every line to more than one episode. I was aided in this memorization by the audio tape I created by holding the black chunk of a tape recorder up to the TV screen so I could replay the sounds, even if I couldn't record the video. My friends and I tried to figure out how Pyramid was played. I swore using BSG swear words. (I sometimes still do.) I made satirical drawings showing how to tell the difference between Cylons and Storm Troopers. This would have been around 1980 or 1981, I’d guess, just as puberty was tweaking my already overly imaginative brain. But it seems like a million yarens ago now.

**
After I picked up the girls from school, we ran one more errand to buy a birthday present, came home and sewed for a bit, then took R to school for the long-anticipated sleep-over. There were more chaperones and no one was sleeping outside, thanks to the rain, so I felt better about leaving her. We had celebratory sushi (D’s A was my excuse this time), and I watched a video with D & S until I fell asleep on the couch.

I woke up to watch one more episode of Friends. I seem to be doing a lot of escaping into video these days. I doubt it’ll turn into any kind of trend, but it does feel like I'm living on the edge. Whoo-hoo. Look out.

Thursday tidbit

In my ongoing retro-post series

R. was taken out to the barn for her knightly task by the other girl’s mom, and S. and I took a 3-hour nap. THREE HOURS. Ahhh....

We got up for dinner only, and got to bed fairly early again. D. came home much later to report that he had gotten an A on his class mid-term and an A for the first semester. I’m so happy for him. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when one is in school because one wants to be, and not because one has to be.

Wednesday, a little less brief

I helped with the 6th grade lit. circle again today. Josh had brought it to my attention that the book (The Bronze Bow) was recently taken off the curriculum at a nearby school district because of criticism from parents and religious leaders in the community that the book is anti-Semitic and promotes Christianity, and is in general not good enough as a literary piece to warrant teaching in spite of those other factors, besides being considered not applicable to the Roman history block it was supposed to compliment. This prompted me to do more research and speak individually to the class teacher (who was aware of the debate) and to the other two lit circle leaders. There were fascinating reactions from everyone, who felt (as did I, frankly), that the book does not degrade Jews or make the case that Christianity is better than Judaism, and felt even more strongly (as I did not) that there was such a thing as being too politically correct or careful. My concern is that I might have cultural blinders on, or be underestimating the hurt this book has caused people.

However, the whole hububb simply emphasized for me the need to teach children to be smart readers: be sensitive to the influence of an author’s own background or intentions, understand that historical fiction is both liberated and handicapped by our incomplete knowledge or skewed perspective of history, understand the power of the written word for good and ill.

As it turned out, none of the 4 kids I worked with saw a reason for the fuss at the other school, and in the cold rainy weather at the tail end of a demanding school day, they certainly weren't up for any philosophical conversation about the dangers of mis-interpreting text. So I didn't push it. These are kids who have been exposed to a lot of religions and mythologies in their years at this Waldorf-inspired school, so maybe they are just more accepting of the idea that people have different belief systems? (A tolerance that some friends of mine would call "open-minded" and others would call "lukewarm" - and therefore to be spit out.) In any case, we ended up focusing much more on the story and the characters and how the children responded to both than we did discussing anything else.

After school, R. went to a homework club and S. fell asleep on the couch for the 2nd day in a row. The flu has clearly taken a toll on her. That, and/or it's another growth spurt.

S. is close to R.'s height as it is, so R. said about the possibility, "God, I hope she's not doing that!"

Tuesday in brief

Today I am able to walk a little easier, but still clearly recovering from the race.

I neglected to mention a Pointy (writer’s group) meeting in the evening yesterday. So nice to share the projects we’re each working on with one another, and I’m lucky to have supportive friends who are also great editors!

After school today, R. went with a friend after school to get her (the friend’s) ears pierced. The friend, like R., had been forced by her mother to wait until she was 12 for this rite of passage.

I was 10 when I had my ears pierced. My mother (then 40) and my sister (then 8) had theirs done at the same time. I remember that it was shortly before our family’s Christmas trip to Hawaii. I can’t tell you exactly why the 2 memories are joined – maybe it was because we’d had to take the ear-care kit with us to the hotel? Or I’d been able to get a pair of shell earrings that I wouldn’t have had a need for, before? Either way, the piercing itself is not as significant in my memory as is the fact that the three of us did it together; a shared new experience for all of us, a small but still (for a 10-year-old) exciting adventure embarked upon together.

I don’t relay this story to S., who at 7 now feels that she shouldn’t have to wait until 12 to get her ears pierced. (The “It’s not fair!” refrain.) It doesn’t help that R. agrees that her little sister shouldn’t have to endure non-pierceness as long as she, the first born trail blazer, had to wait. But I'm standing my ground. For now.

Meet the Press

Quite an exciting day at work.

Literally a bus-load of press arrived to tour as part of a Cisco event: our company was chosen by Cisco to be be showcased as a unique customer case study for their products. We had journalists from several important IT trades including Computerworld, eWeek, Information Week, InfoWorld, Network World, SC Magazine and CRN. There were so many people, they had two separate tour groups going through the building and getting the scoop on who we are and what we do from each department head. There were also journalists from Japan with an interpreter, but even though I brushed up on my greetings and had my meishi (business card) ready, the groups moved through while I was on the phone and I never had to use either. Fine with me.

Nice to have that kind of recognition from the industry in general, though. I've been with the company for 9 years and I still think what we do is way cool. And I am not just writing this because a couple of my colleagues sometimes read this blog. Honest.

Race Day, Day of Rest

There's probably a mathematical way to calculate this - a formula using distance plus muscle fatigue divided by attitude and training with the square root of the power of endorphins and recovery from the flu thrown in, but for whatever equation you use, the last 3.1 miles of a 13.1 mile race are always as long as the first 10 miles. And the last 1.1 miles is as hard as the 2 miles before that seemed to be.

But I promised myself a whole ton of water, and (dog-gone-it) all the little carby snacks I wanted at the finish line, and I managed to run the race slowly but steadily. One pit stop. Only one walking stint (for 2 minutes). Far from my best time - 2:31 (2:36 by their clock, I think, but it took 5 minutes to cross the start line because there were about 9,000 people there). But I did it.

Spent the rest of the day lying on the couch and even watched another video with the kids. Sheer hedonism. Out of control.

Off a beat

S woke up with a fever and the second kind of flu. No ballet class or rehearsal for her for Snow White.
R made it as far as riding lessons and getting on the horse (a well-tempered grey named Harley), but then I was called back 5 minutes from the barn by the instructor, who said R was looking very pale and probably shouldn't ride. Strike two.

I was responsible for food delivery to 9 families for the Food for Families program (through our Committee on the Homeless in town) but because it was the second Sat. in a row - I was picking up someone else's turn last week - I forgot (!) and was an unprecedented 2 hours late with the boxes. Fortunately, everyone was still home and no one was too irritated at the lateness of their groceries. You would think it wouldn't matter what time the food arrives, but it does, because they have to sign for the boxes and can't go anywhere until we get there.

The rest of the day was spent mostly being lazy and even - as a family - watching a video, something that hardly ever happens. The video was lousy. The company was great. And lazing was lovely.

Got to bed fairly early in preparation for the half marathon Sunday, which D. says I'm crazy to try to do since I just got over the flu a couple of days ago. But I trained for this and (more to the point, if you know me) I paid for it. So I'm going and I may run even slower than usual, but I'm doing it, dang it all.

Last man standing, fallen

D succumbed to the flu today (the stomach variety, as opposed to the high-fever/cough variety). We were all in bed by 7:30pm.

I definitely feel like we're out of balance and things are falling apart around here, a little, and temporarily.

It's like our own little family re-enactment of the Dark Ages. Without the fleas.

Sick, that's all

About 5 emergency trips to the bathroom and 20 hours of sleep later, I feel I'm well enough on the mend to go to work Friday...

Better to have this now than *just* before the half marathon Sunday, I suppose.

Happy soul, miserable body

The day went so well until just before midnight. Work, a short run at the gym cut even shorter because R was home sick & needed tlc, then (once D was home & we could tag-team parenting), I escaped to a Kay Ryan reading hosted by Marin Poetry Center and a fundraiser for their H.S. Poetry program.

Okay, I know this is not very eloquent, but Kay Ryan rocks.

Besides a score of awards including a Guggenheim fellowship and NEA fellowship, she was named to the "It List" by Entertainment Weekly (for what that's worth), and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. As she explained at the reading, the poem is installed in plastic along length of a low retaining wall. She said, "I like to think of kids running by, and reading it. And, you know, defacing it."

She's got that combination of wry humor, and dead seriousness, and true gift, that makes her irresistible (to my sensibilities, anyway). She's a minimalist. Her work is deceptively accessible, but upon re-reading (she repeated many of the poems she read), only gets better.

I like what she said about going to an AWP conference:

Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions.

Yeah. My kinda gal. When I grow up, I want to be a lot like Kay Ryan.

I just need to make some changes in my life to facilitate getting somewhere with my work. Well, actually writing the poems, and then getting somewhere with them. D and I had a brief talk about it and I feel more supported than ever by him in this regard. He who does not (of his own volition) read poetry.

So. All well and good, until I get home feeling questionable, and go to bed early only to wake up with S's version of the flu. Not the weight loss plan I'd envisioned.

Here's a Kay Ryan poem from the poetryfoundation archive as an end-note, though:

All Shall Be Restored
by Kay Ryan

The grains shall be collected

from the thousand shores

to which they found their way,

and the boulder restored,

and the boulder itself replaced

in the cliff, and likewise

the cliff shall rise

or subside until the plate of earth

is without fissure. Restoration

knows no half measure. It will

not stop when the treasured and lost

bronze horse remounts the steps.

Even this horse will founder backward

to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,

which themselves shall bubble and

drain back to green veins in stone.

And every word written shall lift off

letter by letter, the backward text

read ever briefer, ever more antic

in its effort to insist that nothing

shall be lost.

On the mend

The girls are both better. It's almost as though they had 2 different flu's - R had a fever and no energy, but her stomach was fine and now she has a post-flu cough. S was sick to her stomach every 2 hours for 10 hours, but had no real fever.

D and I remain well, although I was sabotaged again by a glass of wine with dinner and I fell asleep early on the couch and woke up an hour later, very grumpy in part because D had been playing a PS2 game in the same room while I slept and the incessant maddening tune that accompanied it had invaded my dreams, and in part because I didn't get to the gym for a short run like I'd told myself I would.

I think I need to just plain NOT drink alcohol. Even a small glass seems to erode my humanity, and between that and lots of "comfort eating" while I was home with the girls, my self-esteem is in sad shape.

I need to write a poem to restore my faith in myself.

Make that two

S is down for the count, too. She woke up at 2am (just after R finally settled down for the night from her nightmares) to say that she felt like she was going to "frow up."

I must say that I have never met a more conversational nauseous person in my life. She was so matter-of-fact about it that I didn't take her seriously at first.

It's a conversation worth recording - soon, before I forget it! - but not at the moment...

Both girls out of school & D & I tag-teamed it, both missing some work.

Had a great writer's meeting with the Pointy gals - we all brought something, yay! to finish the day.

Still one fallen

R still has the flu, which is unusual around here, where the 12- or 24-hour variety is the norm. I slept in and went for my run late, and walked more of the 10 miles than usual. I'm telling myself that I'm saving up for the 1/2 marathon next week, and that it's better to walk with the blister that was forming than to tear up my feet now. My old shoes are too old to do well with long runs, and my new ones are not yet broken in enough. A quandary, but hardly worth worrying about.

R. said that she felt like she was floating Saturday night. I asked, "Did your hands feel like two balloons?" and she said the sort of did, and D. told me to stop already with the Pink Floyd references. We explained the allusion to R., but in her flush-faced state, she cared even less than usual how clever we were.

Saturday in review

R still sick and S walking around with a can of Lysol like it's a security blanket periodically hissing "stay away!" to her debilitated sister.

I had food delivery and S had dance class, then several unanticipated hours home to work on chores and tend to the ill, as well as a 5-mile run at the gym, before S had to go back out to ballet rehearsal (she'll be a Bird of the Forest in Snow White in a couple of months). Then S and I were off to a birthday party for the son of one of my few blog audience members (Happy Birthday Luke!). Note to self: 5-7pm is the perfect time for a kid's party. It doesn't interrupt your day, it includes dinner, and by the time you're done, the kids can go straight to bed.

Skate night and the flu

After school, both girls had brief play - dates which gave me just enough time to grocery shop alone (alone!) before picking them up again and heading north with two of their friends to the roller skating rink for a school fund-raising skate night. On the way up, R said she had a headache she thought had been brought on by the smell of another girl's mint tea, but as soon as we walked in the door of the bright, loud, chaotic skating rink, she fell apart into little pieces and it was clear that she was sick.

I passed the baton to a couple other moms to watch S and the other girls I'd brought, and R and I hung out in the car with the heater going (R shivering and crying and telling me about her horrible day) until D came and got her. Then I went back in and skated around slowly with S many times - although she's getting quicker with each trip to the rink, it's still harder to skate slowly with her than it would be to skate quickly without her.

Now I'm just hoping no one else gets sick.

8 years ago today

This marks the anniversary of my mother's quadruple bi-pass surgery. She used to celebrate today as a second birthday.

One of the doctors (my sister would remember which one) told her that the surgery should increase her life by 5-7 years. I don't know how much mom remembered those numbers, but I wish he'd said 15-20 years instead, just in case the number did actually have an influence. She started to fail almost exactly 7 years after the procedure.

Someone pointed out to me today that some people hear a number like that and it becomes their reality, and some people hear a number like that and it becomes the odds that they're going to beat.


So, I'm cleaning up our office at home and run across a design book on country homes that had belonged to Mom. It's full of beautiful photos but not my style, and so I'm pondering whether I should donate it to the school rummage sale or trade it in at the used book store, when I notice that several of the pages are neatly dog-eared. It pulls me up short. Those were the pages Mom especially liked, apparently, and for a minute I just stand there wondering what element of what chintz pillowed, wickered, antique-scattered bedroom called to her. Did she plan to mimic it in one of her rooms? Had she already incorporated elements of this book into her house? Only she would know, but I still don't have her new phone number, the belongings have scattered to the children and charities, and the house is inhabited by a renter with her own pictures on the walls.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, and it won't be the last. Hell, I don't even need a phone number. An email address would be fine.

Wild Wednesday

After a weird night spent sleeping on the couch in between reading chapters of The Bronze Bow so I could lead a lit circle in R's class, it was one of those days where there wasn't time to do anything but hurl myself from one thing to the next.

Work included a little bug troubleshooting (which I *love*) & training a new employee, then I left early to run home for 10 minutes of typing up the lit circle discussion questions I'd come up with. Jaunted to the 1st grade class (with blueberry muffins and rice, soy & cow's milk and carrot sticks) to celebrate S's Half Birthday circle. Did the 6th grade lit circle time, back to the lower grades' campus to vacuum the 1st grade class room, then took the girls the the dentist. After that, we went to the gym so I could get in a 30 minute interval training run. We picked up dinner on the way home, after dinner I did some work for the school auction, a few chores, and squeezed in one episode of Friends. Ok, yes. Up way too late. But momentum can do that to you.

If every day were like this, I'd just sit down and become catatonic out of spite. Since it's not, I can survive it.