la femme follette

pulsing

For dinner tonight I made the lentil salad from stupid June's issue of House Beautiful.

It was ok.  Fille & I had it each on a bed of romaine with a poached egg.  My son doesn't eat eggs. 

I had tea with Eve yesterday; she was somewhat harried & distractable.  The 4 of us traveled to The New Barnes on Monday & it is everything every other reviewer says it is:  lighted (also, somehow more distressingly full of screaming children, idk).  Sunday Fifille & I had a restful, provincial-NYC visit; it was lovely.

It had been years since I'd had such a small radius on a NYC run:  We came into Penn Station in the late morning to saunter over to show for our brunch reservations at Cookshop; the ballet was at The Joyce, which was 2 more blocks downtown, back over on Eighth Ave.  The company was Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet -- they were so fantastic.  On our way back to Penn Station, we stopped to avail ourselves of 30 minutes of reflexology -- which isn't actually as good as it sounds once you work out it is only 15 minutes per foot -- and we were home by 9. 

It was really great.  Now the pool club is up + running every day & nothing gets done.  I swim a million yards while the kids goof around, mostly so I don't have to talk to anyone about anything.  If you'd like to reach me, leave me alone.  Goes double for you.  Yes, you.

provisional

This is going to drive at least two of you right out of your minds, but I let Mr Fox feed me, like, all the time.  He presses food into my hand & I tuck in. 

Everyone is totally envious of Mr Fox, for one reason or another, except my actual husband -- the one who lives with me, etc.  Lillo interrupted me one day when I was ringing off with [this or that reason I had to go, pertaining to Mr Fox], saying, "Why doesn't this guy have a job?!?" 

Ahahaha!

Anyhow,  Mari & I were sauntering over to the playground Friday to catch up with our kids + Extra Girl when Mr Fox wheeled up alongside of us.  We three were talking while he pulled down a little spray of berries from the tree above us and handed them to me.

They are Juneberries.  Say what?  Also known as Saskatoon.  I made them verify this wasn't a trick, a hit job hired out by Mari (or anyone else, for that matter), and then made him eat three times the amount he had handed to me, scrutinizing him the whole while.

They are pretty tasty, reminding me of the "strawberries" in major mass-market ice cream.  Or something, idk.  Eating them gives me a sense-memory of Baskin Robbins Ice Cream "parlors," so if you happen upon them & have similar feelings well up inside you, whisper them to me, please.  Anyhow, I saw Mr Fox this morning & he was in fine fettle, so maybe I can sublimate my rhubarb thing into these growing-all-over berries. 

Fille & I are off to NYC tomorrow to get a little culture, returning home in time for Shavout. I do not anticipate any granola-girls' rooting-around, not least because NYC is killing people with its trees.  We went roller skating today & I feel lucky enough to be in one piece, and also, suddenly, I no longer perceive biking as the same certain peril I judged it to be this morning.  For one thing, no one says, "Oh, it's just like wearing a pair of skates!"  Guess what, there is a reason for that.

Please let me know if you forage anything extra-plus during this next couple of days, I will not hold it against you if  you only pluck it from the long buffet table. 

 

blue who

We had blueberry casserole for lunch.  Any time we give a dish a pet name, it is True Love.

 

The given name is "Baked Oatmeal," from a not-too-too-long-ago issue of Martha Stewart's Whole Living.  I was going through a stack of magazines from Martha Stewart, looking for the recipes I wanted to archive, suffering page-turner's fatigue, you know, and my eye was caught by a closing/serving instruction to drizzle on with melted butter.  Wait, what again?  Go back.  Tell me now.  Yes.

On the night I sliced all those potatoes, Fifille & Garçon were going through Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book to find a suitable recipe for a pile of thinly-sliced potatoes.  They were murmuring & reading and I heard Fille say to him, with a sad determination, "I could never be vegan."  I suspect it is about the butter.  I guess it could be about the cheese, but she has a cheese ceiling & no such thing exists for butter.  We are proud of her & so are many of you, I know.

When we were back home, at the legendary and yet prosaic Lou Mitchell's, we told her she could totally manage to spread her 2 pieces of toast on with 3 little peel-off cups of butter.  It was like a chug-a-lug contest.  You can totally get all three on there, we encouraged her matter-of-factly. 

She faltered for a minute when she realized the toast had been brushed with butter on the line.  I helped her out, explaining that was different butter.  "That was liquid butter, this is solid butter.  It's different.  Like ice in yr water."  I mean, fuck, right?  Seriously, come on!  Anyhow, she lathered on her 3 cups and there was a lot of high-fiving.  Just like a chug-a-lug contest.  Yes.   It was only an eighth-inch thick.  Fuck, I've seen people eat 10 times the butter piled on 1/3 the real estate, just because it was called frosting. 

OMG, butter.  How great to have a functioning, athletic, 11-year-old girl who eats butter at appropriate times, who is afraid of no food.  God is good.  Last week she said to me, while we were in the car, this:

All the girls in ballet class think their legs are fat because they jiggle when they jeté.

First, let us all clasp hands + thank God I was not operating the vehicle.  I was parked in the grocery-store parking lot.  Also, her father was there, in the passenger seat, not goading me exactly, but fixing me with a look.  A look that said, You're on again, baby.  Knock 'em dead.  But I was thinking, OMG, I'm so tired!  It was just last week we sat around for a long time, the 4 of us, talking about the NYT cellulite story.

 A long time ago, probably as many as four years ago, Fille saw a store-window advertisement for some Aveda product, the target of which was frizz.  Because some idiot let her learn to read, she asked me later, yk, what is frizz?  I told her it was a wide-ranging definition, but mostly it was marketing.  I reminded her of what remains after she brushed her curls smooth for ballet's bun, how when she let it down after class, she did not care for the resonant bigness of it (having v.t. issues, Reader, bonne chance), and that is what is demonized as frizz.

What came of that conversation, though, how I concluded it, laid the cornerstone for the place where I will dwell during these years she is entering, she with her friends. I told her everyone feels bad about themselves sometimes.  Everyone wakes up some day, everyone, and looks in the mirror & says, Omigod, it's me again! Even people who say, And omigosh with the perfect flawlessness, again!  It is fleeting for the strongest people, who move along from there.  But:

Any time you want to believe in a bad feeling about yourself, someone will be all too willing to help you, and they will take your money for something that they say will fix the problem the two of you have created.  So you have to decide how you want to live.   

We come back to that all the time -- constructs created by marketing, a culture holding fast to expectations no one can meet because people have bought into fantasy images, this kind of unquestioning devotion to unrealistic and unreachable standards. (Ophelia, breathe.)   

It was heartbreaking and insane to read about women in their sixth decade of life who were embarrassed by cellulite.  I mean, really?  The one woman who hoped to one day wear a bathing suit?  Even though Fifille was adorably puzzled & a little tart ("I mean, isn't she going to wear a dress at her wedding?"), I said to her, all grave & everything,  "This is where a woman can end up after a lifetime of believing in made-up problems marketers say she has."

So then, God, it was super-heartbreaking to hear about these 9-to-11-year-olds talking about their fat legs.  I swear to you, not one of these girls is fat, and they are not going to be fat.  We see their parents, their grandparents, all the time in school.  If we could grow them to their final statures today -- like super-speed --  they would all be between 5'8' and 5'10' and all wear a 4 or a 6, except 2 girls, one who projects shorter and proportionally more slender, and Fille, who is her father's child, you all know.

I asked Fille if her legs jiggled.  She said, "Yes! I told them, Legs jiggle because you have skin and ... legs!"  I asked her what they said.

"They said, 'Oh, Fille! You have the skinniest legs!  You're so skinny!'" she told me.  When she said those words, I placemarked the sentence by pressing my hand to Mari's forearm, and told him much later,  That is what I meant when she was 5 and I said no daughter but the one I have with you would dance ballet on my watch.

I reminded her what I told her about the cellulite ladies, about being long toward the end of a road.  I told her that at her age, they are all on the beginning of that road, yk?  Choose how you want to live.  Get your guns out.

Mari was less metaphysical, less bound-up in the deconstruction of patriarchy for sure.  "Tell them," he said, "that they aren't fat; they jiggle because they are weak.  Tell them to get strong."

Fille giggled righteously & said, "I know!" before I got involved, spluttering a little, telling her to tell no one that, and maybe if she does,  definitely tell no one her dad said to say that.  Good Lord.

It was a couple of weeks ago, we were talking while were on a walk, she & I.  It was before the cellulite story, before the heart-restorative story of this little girl, which also took up a lot of time, talking as we always have about the falseness of photographic images -- how the reason that one never sees women or men who look like the women or men in magazines is not because they live on some special island somewhere, it is because they do not actually look anything like that, because the images are not real.

The topic of our discussion, as we walked, was the outgrowth of a pair of jeans she was wearing.  They were already too short, and in my opinion, not enough room in the waist anymore.  She was resisting the latter assessment, which I wanted to address.

"You do know, honey," I started, somewhat gingerly, "you will not just get taller, but you --" I faltered, not wanting to say will get wider.  "You will grow in every direction." 

 "Yes," said she, confidently, excitedly, like a little girl who is still light enough to need to ride in a baby seat & wants desperately to pass that by. 

But then she said, in a still-excited, but more matter-of-fact tone, declarative, even, "I will become curvaceous."

The word she used! The fact that she already knew this! That sentence, when she said it,  blew away a whole raft of worries I had not even ever realized I had for her.  Expecto Patronum!  Yes.  So that was good.  This is a good life. 

Blueberry Casserole
(adapted from Whole Living magazine)

Butter an 8x8-inch baking dish.  Melt 3 tablespoons butter.  Cool.  In yr pre-heated oven (375F) toast 1.5c of almonds (I use pre-sliced ones, but you can do what you like, chopping later) & cool. 

While you wait, mix 2c rolled oats with: 1/3c granulated sweetener; 1/2tsp salt; and 1tsp baking powder.  

To the cooled butter, add one egg.  Whisk.  Add 2 cups milk + 2tsp vanilla.  Mix & mix.

Add half of your almonds to your dry oat mixture.  I have also always added 1/2c of almond meal, also, but you can skip that, I guess.  Mix & mix there, too.  

Pour about 2.5cups of frozen blueberries in the bottom of the baking pan (enough to cover it in a single layer, but x3).  Cover the berries over with the dry oat mixture, pour the milk mixture over the whole thing.  Scatter the remaining (chopped) almonds and another cup of blueberries on top.  Bake for about 45 minutes.  Or so.  You'll get the hang of it. 

I usually cut it into 6 pieces for breakfast, 8 for lunch.  Serve with a couple of teaspoons of melted butter per portion & then have some maple syrup, too.     

still, life.

We went back, Friday night, to the museum to take in the van Gogh exhibit, and frankly, should have just gotten a room since the weekend was busy-busy bridge-crossy full of cultural events.  Alors.

Eve accompanied us to the exhibit.  It was nice to see her and everyone played together nicely.  The museum was open until the unthinkable hour of midnight, because the people of the mid-Atlantic region need to see van Gogh, and honestly, my pert complaining about their refusal to accomodate notwithstanding, there are no museums I can think of readily that just grin & bear it with 2nd-shift hours in the waning days of an exciting tour.

It was a nice representation of the work in the period bounded by 1886-1890, roughly chaptered into: Paris; The Wheatfield Era; Clumps of Grass; Sous Bois; Radical Still Lifes. The audio-tour's exegesis used a lot of van Gogh's correspondence, which was very interesting -- he is rarely portrayed as being sociable or having a successful relationship with anyone but his brother.

In the outset, a museum guard was after me to tell me that I could not have my cell phone out during the exhibit, as there were no photos allowed.  I knew there were no photos allowed, which is why I was using the MemoPad function on Mari's camera-less BlackBerry, which I switched with him because my BlackBerry is outfitted with all kinds of recording devices.  I gaily showed her how my phone had no camera and pointed to the notes I was taking on the screen. 

 

I took this photo during Wednesday's general admission in the regular galleries, where photography is, in fact, allowed.  This is extremely representative of what was in the exhibit; also, paintings here & here.

Still Life with a Bouquet of Daisies, 1886.  Oil on paper, mounted on wood.  Vincent van Gogh.  Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright.

 

"I am just using it to take notes," I said. reassuringly, sympathetic to her rigor.  "It is the 21stc, so I tend not to have pen & paper."

She was sympathetic to me, but insisted I put it away.  I asked her, coyly, "Do you have a pen?"  Because I did have a Moleskine, but I did not have a pen.  She told me then that there were to be no cameras, no cell phones, and no pens or paper in the exhibit.  Um, ok, whatever then.  I mean, right?  We had entered the zone of OK now you're just making shit up to be on a power trip.  I mean, honestly.  I got a pen from Mari and took notes on paper freely through the remaining galleries with no trouble at all.  But be warned, because the ubiquitous cell phone has ruined things for compulsive note-takers all over.  I did have similar dust-up at the National Gallery's Gauguin exhibit last summer, though they backed off (reluctantly) when I showed them there was no camera.

Anyhow.  The curation was tremendous; it seemed as if the narrative around which they collected pieces was to put aside this idea -- widely promulgated -- that van Gogh was just a wild maniac who flailed in desperation at the end.  The exhibit ended on a really optimistic note, with this painting, which I had never seen, nor heard the story behind.  Until then, I'd had no idea van Gogh ever experienced even one single moment of joy in his adult life, none of the five of us had (3 of us adults, 1 with a baccalaureate in art history), so that was a really high note to end on, we all agreed.

Again, Garçon was somehow listless & self-indulgent + amiable & civilized, at once.  The same as the time immediately preceding this trip, I let it go.  Just, yk, Whatever, child.  I don't care about you.  Shhhhh.  And all was well.

Things are fine, really.  I read this book a couple of months ago, called Unhappy Teens.  The reason I read it, mostly, was because it was written by a goddamn M.D., not some Ph.D. pretending to have some vast clinical experience, which (as we have seen), means only as much as you are willing to let it affect you.  Also, my care & keeping of a teenager was imminent. The primary thrust of this book was to say this:  By the time your child is a teenager, they know what you expect.  Shut up about it.  They know it.  Every time you talk about the thing, you make it into a thing.  Let the thing go & watch the thing happen. 

Ok, so I have to say that there has been -- in all the years leading up to this one -- no lack of exposition in our parenting.  There is a lot of transparency in our work.  So I think that my child, even more than the mean, is well-equipped to know what the expectations are.  Then when he was 13, yk, I said, Fuck it, good, he can do it himself, I have done all I can.  So that is going pretty well.  Sometimes he tries to get in my face, as is his way, and I just don't care about him.  It's like, "Are you still here?  Shh.  I don't care about you.  I'm reading The New Yorker, you're in my light." 

It is also somewhat helpful to have the maniacal , clusterfucking sideshow of last winter still ringing in our ears, so that when I have to, I can say, "You know, this is the kind of behavior that you have that when we report it makes professionals say that you belong in a mental hospital.  Do you need a rest in the mental hospital?  Think about it."  Because honestly, I do not have the time.

One hilariously adorable thing about him this last few weeks:  Annie Clark.  My son, who cares about nothing, I promise you, was genuinely moved by the accomplishments of little handless Annie Clark & her penmanship award.  Why, just last week, we were talking about Miss Annie Clark, by way of Marcel Duchamp & his poor, shattered Large Glass. 

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923.   Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels.  Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Katherine S. Dreier.

As we sat right here, Garçon was totally dismissive of my musings that maybe Annie took her inspiration from Duchamp's spirit of persistence and ascribed to her v realistic, logical, laudable steps toward a goal, the sort of which I had no idea he even realized existed.  God bless you, Annie Clark.  Seriously. 

Anyhow.  I miss you, little weblog, come back to me!  xox

              

time can do so much

Due to a confluence of factors, there was reveille en fanfare this morning featuring a medley of The Righteous Brothers and a piano sorely in need of a tuner.  I have been thinking of Ghost ever since.  Ghost, right?  I forgot about that movie!  Holy crap!  But I was enjoined to participate in my own bloggy project et voilà, ok.

We traveled across the river today, since I was feeling better than I have in weeks, with the intention of seeing a major van Gogh exhibit in its final days.  We could not, because I do not pay attention to all of the discrete member mailings & emails from every museum we patronize like I should.  Had I, I would have realized that the Philadelphia Museum of Art treats its members like the general public when it comes to special exhibits with timed tickets.  The Phillips, The Barnes, MoMA, all give the green light to members to go on in at their convenience, whatever, thank you so much for yr fat checks, but not this one.   But whatever, we will endure the drive again & today, we took on general admission ... alors là.

You know,  we are show-goers -- we have to be, to make best use of membership fees and the way in which we can avail ourselves endlessly of our proximity -- and it has been such a long time since we have just loafed around a museum, loafing.  It was really great.  Even though Garçon was kind of inert during the excursion, it was fun.  I actually started to let it get to me & then I remembered this time & yk, even if he is ... Jesus Christ, you know what: it's enough to bring him to the water.  And he is 13, so I have to not care more than ever. 

But even a loafer's agenda needs a little direction.  I decided we should make our way to Étant Donnés, and honestly, I stand by my assessment -- who the hell would ever think to look for it in grimy old Philadelphia?

It is a long trip to the end of one of the wings.  Along the way, yk, plenty of the late 19th/early 20thc.  Fun.  Loafy!

The Large Bathers, 1884-87. Oil on canvas. Auguste Renoir. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Mr & Mrs Carroll S Tyson Jr Collection.

The Large Bathers is one of those canvases that draws me in every time we go here -- partly because of its location (location, location) in the corridors, but also because it is so replete with work and life.

Fifille mentioned today how you can see the girl underwater as you would in life.  Yes.  I mean, Jackson Pollack doesn't care about that kind of realism, but it is quite a thing. 

Cy Twombly would not care about it either.  I felt sad, today, knowing Twombly wasn't here in the world anymore. 

Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978. Parts 4, 5, and 6 of 10 parts. Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas. Cy Twombly. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Samuel S White, III and Vera White. 

 

I was happy, in fact, to move into a room of Ellsworth Kelly canvases & remember he is very much alive.  Also, to send a quickie MMS to my pal Alex. 

Left to right:  Barge, 1955, oil on canvas; White and Black, 1955, oil on canvas (Collection of the artist); Study for Atlantic, 1956, oil on canvas, 2 joined panels (on loan from Jack Shear).  Ellsworth Kelly.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

Alex!  Speaking of you! 

Étant Donnés: 1. la chute d'eau, 2. le gaz d'éclairage ... , 1946-66. Mixed media assemblage. Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of The Cassandra Foundation.

This is, you know, when you look through the holes in the door! 

I remember last time we saw this, at the special Étant Donnés: Bits & Bobs exhibit: the security guard was all up in our grills about how we should not let our children see this part of it.  He was nearly hysterical and we were utterly nonplussed, plus all Thank you, but we heard you, now myob, ok?

I mean, isn't everyone's elementary-school kid readied for a weird kind of a mixed-media roadside womanslaughter display?  No?  Then go to more fucking museums already!  Sure! 

But please, please, let us get to what is really important.

Becky!

These are things which are for sale.  I promise you, if the salmon-colored creamer pitcher had been in this inventory, nothing would have stood between me and it.  Or, the turquoise sugar bowl, whichever.  As it was I had to pry myself away from it all.

I hope you are all happy. À bientôt!

 

if I had a hammer.

I flipped the calendar page this morning to see Fifille wrote this.  Adorbs!  High fives to homeschool! 

 
I think she has union gains confused with Gen 2:2.

 

I know, you're like, "Wait, no.  That's not how it goes, honey.  You are usually much more  OMIGOD YESSSSSSSSSSSS HIGH-FIVES TO ME I DID IT!!! than this."

 

Right, but I was like that in January.  We were at Sal's, sacked out in front of his teevee, watching October Sky.  Fille asked, "Why does Homer have to work in the mine?  His dad got hurt at work." 

Then Garçon told her, "Because his dad was management, [Fille], not union."   OMIGOD YESSSSSSSSSSSS HIGH-FIVES TO ME I DID IT!!!

 And don't you just always love Chris Cooper anyway?  Hearts!

Yeah, but high-fives to homeschool, mostly.  Garçon was doing a theatre class with a mixed-age group from 10-14.  He told me that the instructor asked the kids, "What makes a good story?"

Garçon said -- I don't know how many kids answered before him -- "Well, a good story needs conflict.  Your hero needs to overcome obstacles." 

So, first of all, when he told me this story, I thought, Get the fuck out of here!  This child has listened to something I have said?!?  Because that is a stock phrase from my mouth & you know it.  The second thing is, I guess, the instructor was like, WHOA, DUDE!  TOO FAST!  Which made me laugh, a little.

The three of us then started talking about basic narrative conflicts --  Man v Nature, Man v Man, Man v Himself -- I was asking them to name books they knew that used one of these conflicts.  But every time I would say, "Man against Man," or whatever, Fifille would pipe up in helpful concert.

"Or Woman against Woman, or Man.  Or Woman against Nature, or Woman against Herself," she would say, over & over, with some increasing amount of insistence. 

This went on for some time, her interrupting & pedantically revising, before I realized: She has no idea that we generalize with the masculine.  Whoa!  That was some kind of mind-erasing shit for me.  Breathe deep, Ophelia!  Twirl!

So that's mostly what we're up to here, yk, Commies, dismantling the patriarchy.  You have a great night.  xox

oh, a wiseguy!

Mari told me we were going to see The Three Stooges, sure, but that before the weekend was finished, I would see Wrath of the Titans. I could not believe his super-grouch insistence but whatever, yk, marriage.

Oh, he was driving us to the drive-in!  Surprises! The children did not remember ever having been to one, but Mari & I have not been to a drive-in since the kids were small enough to conk out in their carseats, which was a time that ended many, many years ago. 

When we were in Chicago, the kids had 115 channels to pick from & they were always watching the Stooges. I was so proud.

So most of us thoroughly enjoyed The Three Stooges, Mari saw Wrath of the Titans, and I went to sleep.  Fille & I just curled up together in the passenger seat & zzzzZzZzzzzzzzzzz.  Not at the outset, just after a while when it seemed like we could watch it better with our eyes closed. 

Everyone: happy!  Yk, marriage.  xox

sugar & spice

Look, look, look who is here!  More early than ever!  Bienvenue, Madame! 

In the very last days of January, Fifille had her audition class for the Prestigious Ballet School's Summer Intensive which interested her.  She seemed fine & mostly looking forward to the challenge.  She has always been lauded as among the best in her class, for years, but she knew that the girls at this audition would also be among the best, and then the rest of her mental-preparations came from Dwayne Johnson's character in The Tooth Fairy, and if you have seen it, then you know.  Her outlook was mostly, "If I am not any good, it will be good to know now."

We three left her at the venerable institution for the class and went to get a snack, plus poke around the town.  I was waiting for her outside the studio when it ended, a little late.  She ran to me and clung, discreetly, eyes full of tears, totally worried. 

"Everyone was so much better than me."  She was woeful.

I was not woeful.  "Honey, all of those girls were older than you."  She was at the bottom of the group's age range.  According to the first draft of her account, everything was fine by her until centerwork when everyone's legs went so much higher than hers.

Honestly?  This?

I see no downside to auditioning at her age, in being subject to high standards for relatively low stakes.  There is value in the experience of that kind of pressure with not too much bound up in the outcome.  Mostly because of things like this, the needless worry, the comparing, etc. 

I told her, "When you get in there, somewhere with judges, whose job is to judge you, but you get caught up in judging yrself and everyone else and making decisions, instead of letting the judges judge yr best work, from which you are distracted by yr ad-hoc judging ... well, that is not what you are there for."

You know?  Plus, I would not send her to anything if I did not think her best was good enough.  So we talked about that, the issue of my veracity. 

As the full story came out over the following days, we zeroed in on some very positive things that she has for her own, forever, no matter the outcome.  There were things she has never done -- pirouette, for one -- which she was asked to do and she performed.  Well, a 10-year-old on the Vaganova syllabus has not done a pirouette yet, and everyone knows that, so go her.  Also, at this age, the girls are not judged so much on training as they are on their potential, their bodies, really. 

 She was not accepted, which by the time we found out was fine.  It was pretty roundly accepted, by that point, that because she choked so bad, it was totally a slim possibility, and lo.  Her coterie of ballet people had a lot of really useful things to say to her, we have reviewed comportment under pressure and the rest,  so, the whole experience was valuable.  There is no way to do a mock-up, and this milieu is not one where everyone gets a trophy. 

Alors!

In February, a few days after the rejection, it was time for Observation.  We had not seen Fifille dance since May of 2010.  Well, in The Nutcracker, but it was a bit part & who could keep their eyes open?  After class, I said to Mari, "I see why she was not accepted to that intensive."  She was weak and she was stiff.  It is not a good combination for a ballet student.

On the bright side, she was much more at-ease than ever she had been with the parent audience, and her lack of self-consciousness was a thing everyone mentioned during our post-class exchange of bonhomie.  I passed this feedback along to her when we sat down the following week for our postmortem.

Usually, I take a few photos of her for our own documentation, but while watching her in February it occurred to me that she could use photo and video to review her own self.  My camera shoots video!  I can make technology work for me!  Then, I would not have to offer any opinion at all; I am not a student of the Vaganova syllabus, and she is her own worst critic. 

Mostly, in an observation postmortem, I let her lead.  I will always mention to her the evident lack of core strength, and remind her it will cause her to overcompensate in other ways (& has indeed led her to weak stiffness) which detract from her form in ways she can readily see in the photographs.  We talk about ways to hold herself, things to remember neuromuscularly, transferring her Pilates Matwork to the barre.  I think that as a family, we spend more time talking about core strength than most. 

This time, I did not actually say too much, except at the review of one photo in which she was actually listing (while in the clutches of her old nemesis relevé lent).

In a way recognizable to Jim Taylor and Becky, I asked her, "So, what do you think about all this?"

Fifille is tentative in her process, but once she decides something she is certain.  She was quiet for a minute, weighing all the things in her mind, and then spoke slowly and with great confidence to tell me she would like to meet with June.

June was her physical therapist when she broke her arm.  She specializes in dance physiotherapy, dance rehab, dance-injury prevention, and she is highly-regarded in our burgh and in Fifille's ken.  So now Fifille has a trainer in June, and a personalized, goal-oriented exercise regimen from her, which is good.  She first saw June the week after she asked, I try to make time for her to work through her exercises 4 days a week and she gets them in about 3.  There are owl stickers on the calendar for her exertions. 

 

Fifille came to me just before her birthday to report feeling improved strength in class, even with her archnemesis.  Then when we returned from vacation, I felt she had gotten enough traction to go back to June for a follow-up & the results are that yes! she is much, much stronger and very much improved in her range of motions and now she has a greatly-increased regimen.  So increased that I have to help her again.  Oh, I didn't say already, right: she needs a spotter and a counter and a cheering-onner, a brisk-rubdowner.  She is only 11, yk. 

She is not in posession of superpowers yet, which dismays her father greatly, while he waves the invoices at me.  Because, yk, injury prevention doesn't cost $27.99.

So, as you can see, things are great here as we sail on.  So fun to catch up & backfill!  I have not even begun to unpack the whole Travelogue yet!  I hope to, but I may never!  It is the way of the world.  À bientôt!

when morning comes twice a day.

 

I was lying in bed this morning, before dawn, actually experiencing true anxiety about April 1st coming this weekend and my calendar guy here being on the previous month, and what is there to tread lightly around on April Fools' Day and what a day to avoid the whole internet, anyhow, right? Not as if there is anything to say, anyway. Except everything. Every day, there is something new for my head to swim around -- shootings, beatings, fires! -- and what is there to say anyway? Plus, so many have said so much about so many things, and there is nothing to add.

 

 

It's funny: I started shying away from my blog back in January mostly unintentionally -- there were some dirt-world happenings, events & goings-on which I wanted to document, but more abstractly than filing 15 or 18 inches because I did not want to reveal too much about us, in a geospherical way, to the whole wide world. The things which were happening were important, and specific, but I was waiting for my feelings to distill to their true generality in our life. (see: roman-fleuve if never you have.)

Because I never wrote them down, they started to be the things I was talking about, when people were calling to find out what they were. So in a way, for a little while, I lost my voice here because I was using it to whisper right into the ears of the people for whom I write.  During this time, something happened which was eminently bloggable, the actual stuff of this blog since time began. It was nothing, except to me it was everything. It was a precious little flame nurtured along from the speck of a hard-to-find ember that I had not realized was there. I was protecting it so it would blaze into something truly useful; it was a secret, it was private, I had not told Mari, I had spoken of it to no one, and actually I was not confident I had the language to express it as part of a dialogue, without it being accidentally blown out.

 

On the phone with the Israeli, just in a regular send-and-receive catch-up, I opened my mouth & breathed fire. There was no preamble, it was very matter-of-fact, and if I can mix the metaphors, I realized as I started speaking that this is a song we know by heart, he & I. 

So, that was weird. Just to me. I mean, if my husband doesn't know anything about me, he knows that I am secretive, and he doesn't care, but to me it was so strange -- it was emblematic of a thing that does not exist between us at all, so far away from who he knows me to be. It is like I have written before, during a snowy time, how I will think, "Oh, that is how I was," but in truth, this is who I am. But, really it was nothing. I mean, when I told the Israeli, there was no revelation implicit in it. It was like, "Well, of course you did, cookie."  The whole episode & its interplay chewed up tons of mental bandwidth -- the knowingness, the being known, at the same time there was no infrastructure for this part of me in my actual marriage, but oh, so with the guy Mari calls "my other husband" -- and I had to stay in the gym; it was bananas. 

 

February came. I rebelled against everything I know. One morning, I laid in bed, sulky & sullen, filled with resentment. Other people, I complained to myself, do not have to get up in the dark every morning to trip over roadkill and go to the gym and come back from the gym while it is still dark outside just to keep things on an even keel. They do whatever they want. They drink coffee! They eat Pop-Tarts! They never drink water! Well, I am going to go back to sleep!

 

Back to sleep turned into late-sleeping. Days and days in a row of sleeping until 7:30 or 8 and then sulkily indulging myself all morning in the tub. Scandalous morning-naps. This did not make things any better. In fact, as is reasonable to predict, it only made things darker and became a classic case of how people feel so good when they are doing the right things, they forget why those things had to be a habit in the first place.

 

 

Everything felt too hard and the simplest things were beyond my ability. For example, one day I had to go to the bank to withdraw a lot of money (in our cashless society!) to be able to pay our mechanic. Then I had to take public transit to pick up the car on the other side of the county. It was almost more than I could handle: the form-fillerism of dirt-world banking; the taking public transit on a route I had never run; plus the worry of having $1100 in real green cash on my person. Also, the children along with me, blabbering incessantly. But it was manageable. I had faith in myself! We were 25 feet from our house and I remembered I had the dollhouse rent checks back at the house, which I could take to the bank. I paused, and thought about it, but it made me feel like I had cartoon birds circling around my head, so we continued. 

Of course, I had to explain pitifully to Mari why I had not done something so easy. I had to make a second trip the next day to finish the work I could not manage the first. This led to more self-indulgent sleeping, instead of going to the gym. Everything remained too hard, sulking continued. The kids were fine, everyone was fed and things were cleaned, but ugh. Halfway between Charlie, I almost went crazy when Mario got busted and Ah, lunch! I think I am going crazy!

  

  

Then there was Lent and its Action, which had the effect of clarifying things, if nothing else. At the end of February, Mr Fox called to ask me about something. I was putting lunch on the table at the same time I was listening to him. He was not having it, the interruptions I was tolerating while he talked. I protested that I had to feed the children, think of the children! He asked what was for lunch, I told him (soup) & invited him over. He told me he would come over, but put a ban on multi-tasking.

What? Yes. He arrived and I was enjoined to sit in my seat and eat lunch. I would do one thing and that was eat, civilized, no going around, no filling glasses, no checking one more thing.

"It's exhausting to watch," he complained. "You're always doing, like, five things at a time." I mean, really. Exhausting to watch? Walk it off, dude! Every time I started to do a bunch of things at once, he redirected. There was a lot going on. There is a lot to do! But I never realized how many things I do at one time.

At the very end of February, its final days, a sequence of events ended with having some work done at the dollhouse. You know, the dollhouse that is not my project. But anyhow, it was 2 days of work. "Work," I mean, I was not replacing the HVAC system myself. I was on-site to answer questions, shape & guide, and write big checks. But it was like work in that it was an all-day endeavor and the dollhouse is income-generating, and a source that I tend to manage.

 

 

It was tedious, mostly, and for 2 days I had to scramble for dinner and had not seen the kids all day, but whatever just like a billion other going-to-work moms on the planet. On the first day of March, I had to get the kids up & fed & out the door to get to their dentist appointment on time. When we got there, precisely 10 minutes early and not-on-empty, I felt like Jonas Salk, Emperor Xerxes, and Jack LaLanne! At once! I was heroic! This job I do is hard! The way I do it is exhausting to watch! It isn't just that it feels too hard, there is a difficulty about it I have failed to respect!

 

 

 

Why is it -- this occurred to me for the very first time in this way -- that I don't take better care of myself and so eliminate long stretches of sulking in the tub every day? Or why do I not sulk in the tub more often, routinely? And I know, I know, you're like, "You don't eat garbage! You go to the gym! You drink a lot of water every day!" Yeah, ok, whatever. Eating like a bird and skipping meals and going to the gym for two hours before the sun comes up after sleeping for 6 is no way to take care of myself. We all need to remember that I have a complicated and dysfunctional relationship with appetites and stoicism and denial and self-discipline and wanting and self-restraint. For me, for years, I feel like not pouring in a fifth of whiskey and 2 packs of cigarettes and two liters of coffee is award-winning self-care. And it is, if you are a self-destructive personality like I am. But when you see things clearly, you can change.

 

 

 

Change is what that Mayan prophecy is all about, you know. I read about it, at the end of last year. It is not about catastrophes and John Cusack – evidently it is about a paradigm shift, wherein the weak will be strong and the boots on the throats everywhere will be lifted, bonds will be cast aside. Everything will go topsy-turvy! Like, for example, how it is 2012, and Lillo is freed from his psycho girlfriend because she got tired of us texting each other daily about the weather and while she was reading all of his text messages on his phone she saw how I called her a name because of that day she called me & hung up about 87 times.  You know, like what happens when you snoop through someone's things & see someone calling you a nutter because you are acting like a nut where they can see. 

That girl was so odd, like if Fatal Attraction were reprised with her playing all the parts from that movie -- even Michael Douglas's! --  and then Lillo, Mari, and I were in some kind of other kind of movie. Like ... if you could imagine a movie with Jason Statham, Seth Rogen, and, yk, Debi Mazar. So, then, if those two movies were in a mash-up and then it would be just exactly, totally like that. Anyhow, now she’s gone & he is free, is the point. I felt bad about it, for about an hour, and then I was absolved by Lillo, which, ok, obviously because I'm still awesome.  2012!

profusion

We stepped out last week to take a trip to view Washington's Peak Cherry Blossom Show.

 

It was a fun trip.  There was a Living Social deal for a Potomac River Cruise, so I snapped it up and the four of us + Sal went one evening.  Honestly, how many times can you see the blossoms from the sidewalk, right?  They are the same every year.  Pink & snowy and really lovely.  You can't really lose, so why not see them from the water?!

 

 

It was thoroughly enjoyable and as I have written previously, it feels so, so good in this era of constant, diluted, elective digital contact to be able to say to a friend I will see you.  And then to see them, and do something together ... to have so much fun that you are actually unable to take the time to tweet about how much fun you are having.  Imagine!

I do not think I had ever been on the water in Washington.  It is flattering to its features!

 

The Watergate!  Is on the water!  Yes, that Watergate!  I knew that, but never thought about it, zooming along Rock Creek Parkway to get to & from the dentist.  It's in the name: water.

I do not love boats, but I think I have been on more freaking boat rides & tour cruises in the past 2 years than all the years prior. 

I liked that peak bloom was so early.  I liked thinking of all the people who were just here for depressing sales meetings or for firing people or getting fired or putting their grandmother to sleep or working on their dissertations, and to think of how they were just here when the cherry trees bloomed a week-and-a-half early, and they got to see it, by chance.  Maybe it prodded them to believe in something, to think that the luck could be theirs -- maybe they will propose or make a change or feel propelled forward by this beauty -- what fortune!  What cheer!

This is the Potomac River spider. 

It was first discovered at Mt Vernon in the anteroom of Martha Washington in 1925.  Later in the 20thc, it was relocated by U.S. Park Service Preservationists to Lady Bird Johnson Park.  Winters, it shelters itself in the river cruise ship's window flaps under the protection of Rangers.  Yes.

Then we came home & had a birthday. 

 

That was nice, too.  Á bientôt, see you!  xoxo

 

 

 

Mk 9, 49

We were in Washington's Ridiculous National Harbor Resort Area for President's Day weekend. I know, a week ago.  It was a horrible destination, I would not recommend it ever for anyone's getaway weekend, and that is even as I know that you probably would not be visiting during a Katsucon.

Looking back, that was its only charming feature, and girls dressed up like that one blue Jedi girl -- same sort as the dancing girl with Jabba the Hut, but blue and more awesome -- are not a permanence on the National Harbor's landscape.  

The Woodrow Wilson Bridge isssszzZzzZzzzz.  We had a great, old, Old Town dinner with old friends & their same-aged children, so that was the favorite + best.   

 

On the way down & back, we listened to Angela's Ashes.  Since then,  now any complaint from a child is managed by shaming: 

"Think of Jesus, hanging on the cross, suffering, his hands and feet torn to shreds, the wound in his side, bleeding?  Don't you think he'd like to have the troubles you have?  The folding of your own clothes & washing the dishes you ate from?  WELL?  Think of the Virgin Mary, with her only son hanging from the cross, her suffering.  Don't you think I would rather have you complaining and whining than hanging from a cross?  Well, right now, it pains me to admit to you that I don't know."

Then, conveniently, it was Lent.  Nice timing, that, since I was already thinking deeply of Jesus & the way he was bleeding from his side, what since I dislocated two ribs getting it on.  Right.  So, I went to my guy.  OK+ ow. 

Then it was erev Ash Wednesday & I turned myself toward Lenten introspections, about which I do not feel ready to hold forth.  This morning I was dreaming about doing regular things, yk, making breakfast & chatting in the hall about laundry, and in my dream it wasn't Lent.  When I woke up & realized it was, in fact, Lent, I burst into actual tears & sobbing.  I know.  It's supposed to be hard.  It is.

 

 

I bought this necklace while we were away, browsing with Fifille at a store called Charming Charlie.   

 

Shopping there made me realize I have a lot of nice jewelry that I really love but I rarely wear.  Necklace-wise, half of it has been gifted to me by Mari.  It made me feel unsettled, this realization, and reminds me of what I always tell Mari:  If ever you leave me, make certain it is for an heiress.  You will be requiring of her personal-security employees.  I require she has a helicopter.  Please only leave me for Veronica Lodge. 

Then he always grabs me up & says, "Baby, you are so Veronica Lodge."    I see his point. 

I did not feel like this necklace was Veronica Lodge -- not compared with all the real metals and gemstones I have at home.  I walked around the store, clutching it anyway, and bought it in the end, along with a headband for Fille.

I wore the necklace last Wednesday, the first day after I saw the chiropractor that I felt well enough to stand up straight.  I love it.  First of all, it is sparkly.  Second of all, it is noisy.  It reminds me of those clankety charm anklets from the headshop that a number of us wore all around summers in ol' barefoot Madison.  Kowalski once said, "I can hear you coming."  (I just wanted him to be ready for me!)  But because it is around my neck, not my leg, it isn't so relentlessly noisy.  Just if I change direction quickly, or maybe if I spin.

OMG this necklace is a gateway necklace!  Yes!  All my other necklaces are super-appealing to me now!  Friday, I could not wear the clankety necklace, but I knew there was another necklace more suited to what I was wearing & the occasion!  Exciting.

 

I mean, you know, the necklace gate is wide and the road is broad, and crowded.  No one cries big, raindrop-sized tears there.  Also, if ever Jesus or even the Franciscans call me up to walk with them, I'm going to have to get rid of them.  Heavy.  OK. 

 

This song has nothing to do with Lent, but I think it hits our high points in a summary, thusly:  is the season; Veronica Lodge; plans for living like so; promised lands.  Also relevant(!) because The Zombies were on World Cafe Live late last year, and Rod Argent told a story about Elvis -- about the privilege of knowingness and upon whom it is bestowed -- that took my breath away.  It was exactly as written in Matthew 13. 

 

Je t'embrasse.  Enjoy yr wkend.    

sopa

I made this soup for the first time about a yr ago: as soon as it came in my Whole Living email.  Fille & I hate quinoa as much as Garçon loves the stuff, but I try to remain open to it.  That is what Fille hilariously says about so many ingredients -- I don't like [whatever] but I remain open to it.  She makes me laugh.

The thing is, though, the soup was awful.  Dishwatery & loose.  The first night the three of us were sampling it, Fille declared it to need tomato paste.  She was right; I knew it as soon as she said it, but testing bore it out.  Tomato paste, what a smarty!

 

Prettier photos have been shot.

I asked Garçon in November, when we were having it for dinner at Sal's (low points!), "How many days in a row could you eat this?"  I know that because of his age he is hungry all of the time, but because of his restrictions, he can't just drink up gallons of milk or eat a billion sandwiches, so that means I am more involved in a billion meals per day than I would like.  I wanted something I could keep in the fridge/freezer, something full of protein & vitamins that he could gobble as freely as he liked. 

"Every day, Mom.  I could eat it 590 days in a row."

Oh, ok, good!  Great! 

Black Bean & Quinoa Soup

Chop an onion.  Also, chop 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and as many carrots as you want.  I like 3.  Also, I no longer peel carrots to put them in soup.  Too busyworker!  Warm 2 tablespoons olive oil and dump the vegetables in with a couple of teaspoons of salt and just sweat them a little.  Ok, a lot.  Poke around.

Add one teaspoon of cumin.  Also, add 2tsp chili powder if you have it.  If you do not, just use 1tsp of paprika or smoked paprika or a smidge of cayenne and black pepper or whatever.  Add 1tsp of oregano, which, if you don't have oregano ... I dunno what to tell you.   Lather in 2 or 3 tbspful of tomato paste.  Stir & stir until mixed up.  Turn the heat down because the sugar in the tomatoes will burn, but when you smell it all caramelly, it's time to move along. 

Add one quart of water or broth or love the one you're with; also one 14-oz can of tomatoes and a chipotle chili canned with the adobo sauce.  I never use that, because adobo usually has wheat or corn or soy or something.  I usually use the chipotle salsa, I just dump the whole jar in, which checks out label-wise for us, but do your own thing. 

Add 1/2 cup quinoa, 2c cooked black beans (which is one 15-oz can + a smidge of the second, I believe, or do it yrself*), bring it to a boil, cover & simmer for about 15-20 minutes.  Garnish with spring onions, cilantro, olive oil, red onions, parsley, chip-strips, epazote, nopales, whatever.  It is soup.  Go crazy.

 

*Cooking yr own dried black beans:  Open the bag & rinse.  Add to a pot with 3qts water.  Add two bay leaves & a handful of cumin seeds if you want.  Maybe chuck in a whole onion.  Boil the hell out of them until they are done.  Hold with cooking liquid to cover in the fridge or freezer.  Easy. 

bears all things. believes all things. hopes all things. endures.

Remember how I was writing about split-sole ballet flats?  They need sewing, they come incomplete.  It is not the biggest deal, but it is something to be done.  Another thing on a long list of things.

 

 

Pointe shoes need elastics and ribbons sewn on.  Just stop because I will not even.  Her flats are leather, so it is pretty easy to sew to the lining without going through it.  Satin shoes are an entirely different thing.  Also, 4 sewn-on things per shoe.  No. 

I am not the hand-stitcher in the family, Mari is.  I mean, I like the dainty stitches required in hemming and finishing exterior seams, but honestly, anyone who lives here will wait forever for me to sew on their buttons.  When we got the note from school about the handwork-demo, I told Mari he would have to go.  He did, but somehow I wound up being the stitchery supervisor this weekend.  I mean, the meeting was mostly about where to fasten.

I think it was when I broke it to him that he would have to use mattress stitch -- invisible from either side -- which Fifille knows perfectly well from her knitting times.  But maybe he did not want to deal with her sulky attitude, which was a factor, definitely.

"Why, Mommy, why do I have to sew them on myself?  You have always sewed my elastics.  Why me, whyyyyyyy?"

Honestly.  Earlier this year, there was a day where I thought, from about two rooms away, that I would have to strangle her.  The hair-tossing, the eye-rolling, the foot-stomping, the kicking little kicks at the pillars and columns and staircases of the world.  The mumbling little mumbly, grumbly complaints under the breath.  Oh.  Oh, no.

Lucky for her, on that day I was awash in the satiny-pink afterglow of some heavy (metaphorical) lovin' the Israeli had laid on me.  So, I was watching her give the dishwasher's kick plate tiny little kicks, reeling, kind of analyzing how she was wicked, wicked, and I stopped. 

You know, and I know this is well-known -- even if you have never said it to my face -- I was wicked as a girl.  Not a 10-year-old girl, either; a 20-year-old girl.  When I was 20 (and 21, and 22), I was unspeakably wicked to my favorite + best, the Israeli, at intervals from the minute he began serving his compulsory, from 7,000 miles away.  In case you have never considered this, let me assure you that in the 20th century, it took an incredible amount of dedicated ruination to get a message across at that distance, but I succeeded by either epistolary action or default.  Sometimes I let other people do my dirty work for me -- everyone loves to gossip.

When he returned, I was not measurably better.  Things were much worse before they would improve, but all along the way, I have to admit he never killed me.  He doesn't just take it, but mostly he just waits it out, until I am who he knows me to be at my best.  In the meantime, he would never deny me a thing.  So I felt like, yk, OK, this is a minimum standard I have to achieve as the actual mother of this child.       

But Mari did not have this whole cathartic time with his present + his past, and plus he was not interested in showing her something he did not know at all when I was available to direct her.  So I did it. 

 

I explained to her that I have been sewing on her elastics as a courtesy because she was more comfortabe in shoes which came unfinished.  The other girls wore shoes that came finished.  Now that everyone is in shoes that come unfinished, she can be one of the everyones taking care of the business.  There was huffing in futility.  I waited, pleasantly, while playing upon her familiarity with the work because of a different project which she had enjoyed.   

She remembered how to do the stitch, and agreed, so I got things all pinned for her elastics.  Pinning, basting, try-ons.  Fine.  That was yesterday.  The funny thing that happened between Mari telling her she would be doing it with me (she had been hoping to get her way from her Pop, seeing as he is more malleable than I am in this way) and her getting the first shoe's elastic sewn on was that she realized Zomigod I can do this myself!  Me!  Not a baby!

It was just like the time Charlie & I watched her go all the way down the block all by herself (all! by herself!) to see if the neighbor had an ice-cream scoop.  She was bounding and smiling and so happy & so big.  It was huge. 

 

Look, sewing & smiling!

She did a great job -- careful, tiny, even.  Right now she is clomping around upstairs in them, trying to learn to walk while wearing them.  She is so pleased with herself.  "Mommy, everyone else's mom or grandmother is sewing their shoes for them!"

 

I mean, I told her, I don't know, maybe she will grow up & look back & think, Jesus maybe my mother could have sewed my shoes for me because I was only ten years old, but we will have to see.  Je t'embrasse.

lifted

When the girls returned from Winter Break, the letter went home with each of them. The En Pointe Temps are upon us.

 

 

It takes some kind of time to be fitted for your first shoe.  There is an HR-traning-like portion of the endeavor for the child.  We took it easy today & sauntered over.  I mean, after a to-do & a trip & parking & some lunch.  The store is well-known to us by now, all these years later.   I have always loved the way the store is just a warren of pointe shoes.

 

 

The family is venerated for their fitting-superiority & its second generation -- retired dancers -- are the truest ad-hoc counselors on this ballet kinda stuff we have ever had.  I can ask them anything, and they will give the best answers.  Like bartenders, but without liquor.  I totally appreciate their counsel; today I showed with a box of sea-salt caramels in tribute.

 

 

Fifille is super excited and sat in the living room for a long time tonight, trying them on & admiring them.  They don't even have the fasteners sewn on yet; the classroom demonstration of fastener-attachment is not for 3 weeks. 

 

 

I had not realized she would be able to go up on them right away.  All of this is such a mystery to me.  I know, it wouldn't be if only I would read Agrippina's book.  Yk, those shoes are mostly just papier mâché.  Someone should make an English country waxed-satin version!  Yes!  Bisous!

amber waves

When we were in Washington again, I can't even remember when ... I guess it was the time before Christmas; the mental-hospital/Holocaust-Memorial times (irony!), we took another quick pre-closing look at the National Archives' exhibit, What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?

Eucalyptus can just grow in the ground in North America? Why do we not have koalas?

It was really, really good.  We saw it right after in opened in June, and wanted a second look (because we did not just see the shit out of it the first time), but by then it was Summer in Our Nation's Capital and ugh, no.  Long lines!  Horrible people!  Bleargh! 

Anyhow, one morning while we were lying around, practicing our layabout, life-of-leisure moves, Garçon said, suddenly filled with purpose, "We should finish seeing that food exhibit, Mom!  It's going to close pretty soon!"

Because obviously, you see, he belongs immediately in a locked psychiatric ward.  Oh, am I talking about that?  No, not yet.  Shh.  Shhhhhh.

We set out right in that next few minutes to walk over & do just that.  It was a really good exhibit, really carefully-curated, and not to get into too much endless narration, but the second trip had really high yields.  We had walked the entire road of the exhibit, but there was so much, and we wanted to go back, yk, to absorb.  I like to apply the SQRRR method to museum-going & the children do, too.

Anyhow.  There was no photography allowed, otherwise I would have blogged the shit out of it months ago. 

Why am I writing about this?  Oh!  Right, yes.  Sorry.  (tap-tap-typing-tap-tap)

 

So, Garçon wanted the exhibit catalog (danger! to society!), and also the cookbook.  I demurred the cookbook, ultimately, because I have enough cookbooks; please understand I am in danger of becoming a cookbook hoarder, especially antique cookbooks.  Plus, this cookbook was $30 and I did not want LBJ's corn-dodger recipe that badly.  But!  Perusing the book to judge its worth, I saw there were two WWI pamphlets credited in every recipe that appealed.  They both came from the Office of Food Administration and were, obvs,  of keen interest to me:  "Wheatless Wednesdays" and "Potato Possibilities."

This is what the Library of Congress is for, and lying so conveniently between the Archives and Sal's house, too!  Wonderful!  God Bless America!

 

This is the bread called Oaten Bread.  The recipe is: 2c ground oats, 4tsp baking powder, 1tsp salt, 1cup milk, and one egg.  Mix dry, mix wet, mix together, let rise for 30 minutes, greased loaf pans in a moderate oven for 35 minutes.  I took this to mean a hair over 350F and also used one loaf pan for the whole thing.  I also, the third time I made it, cut the salt in half to no bakering effect.  It was way too salty before. 

It does not suck; it is not pretending to be anything it isn't.  Also, bears a mighty strange textural resemblance to cornbread, I think.  (It's been at least 5 years since I have had cornbread.  I should ask Mari or Fille, which had not occurred to me.)  It is the perfect vehicle for jam, nut butters, and possibly egg salad.  Definitely alongside soup, slathered in butter.  Or with 2 poached eggs and the last of the boczek from Christmas.  Yes.  À bientôt.

vroom

I made cookies Monday. 

I used Elana Amsterdam's chocolate-chip/cranberry/walnut recipe, but subbed in cherries.  I put aside a half-dozen for my celiacky next-door neighbor, but our ways parted before I could give them to her.   

So, it's just me & these six cookies.  Staring each other down, revving our engines.  Hm.

Holiday undecking free to commence, finally.  As already written elsewhere on the internet, on Boxing Day when there were still three more nights of Hanukkah, I was like, OMG, get the fuck out of here, Winter Holidays!  Shoo!  I could have dismantled everything on Dec 29, too, by avoiding this real-life Christmas Day exchange with the children:

"Excuse me, children," then they came on their little floor-slapping feet.  "Why is everyone congregated in the stable with the Holy Family?  With camels, and trunks of precious resins and metals?"

 

(All of the animals were always there, and the Kellies with their hot cocoa were a gray area.  Fille said they were serving in a midwifery capacity, and being a proponent of things-Marian, I let it go.)

They hemmed & hawed, reaching no accord, then shrugged at each other.  Garçon spoke for them both & told me they just put everyone in for Christmas.

You know, I could just take a vow of silence and it would be just about the same to the knowledge base of everyone who lives here, big & small. 

"The Baby goes in on Christmas Eve.  The Wise Men do not get there until later.  Why do you think it is called Three Kings Day?"

Fille wriggled forward toward me like a balletic Arnold Horshack.  "Oh, I know!  Because they were there for the brit!"

It did, as the Israeli would prognosticate when I told him this story, break my heart a little to tell her she was wrong.  But I did get to give them the lowdown on the history of the Octave Day (nerdout Mariology!).

 

Also from the out-of-the-mouths file:

Femme (serving a second lunch to Garçon):  Ok, here it is, but I re-heated it in the microwave, so now it has been irradiated & is devoid of all nutrients.

Garçon: Er, Mom?

Femme: I know,  I know (!), you don't believe that.

Garçon:  Yeah, no, I don't believe that, Mom.

Femme:  And that's fine!  You like machines!  But as your mother, I am obligated to tell you when I believe I have served you food that is void of nutrition. 

 

That is more of an out-of-my-mouth anecdote, you know.

I have been looking for a copy of My Life & Hard Times for Garçon for most of the last few months.  I think he will love it, but no bookstore has it.  And I only met one bookstore employee who even knew who Thurber was.  You either know how this is not a non sequitor or you do not.  Bonne chance!  Do not let me begin the endless narration.  À bientôt!   

 

 

serendipity. synchronicity.

If you might be taking your sensitive child along to see Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes endeavor, work in a trip to fully take in the Holocaust Memorial Museum's special exhibit on Nazi propaganda a few days prior. 

 

Because Moriarty's casual sadism has got nothing on the designs of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels.  I looked over at her during a scary part -- when Holmes was in a bad way & Moriarty was being super-madman -- just to check in, and she was enraptured -- totally secure in the knowledge that this was made-up.  Superb.  Phew.

 

Hanukkah is just somehow going the fuck on and on -- practically to the New Year! -- and it is getting me down.  Then it was on Christmas (unrelenting!), and I had some cake-issues -- two cakes went down the Nigella road.  We can get back to that, because I love to talk about fucking it up.  But, anyhow, in spite of the elation of fucking it up endlessly, I decided that I could withstand any kind of disappoinment and so I tried again -- for the first time in many years -- with the Hanukkah doughnut.

 

I grew up with latkes being on the periphery -- fried dough was the main event.  Just plain yeasted doughnuts -- bimuelos -- and when I met the Israeli, my eyes were widened to the jelly doughnut -- sufganiyot -- which are way less intensive than a bunch of grating of potatoes, with a bigger payoff, obvsly. 

I tried to adapt a doughnut our first gluten-free holiday, and it was te-he-herrible.  Not even filled with jelly were they edible.  When I made pão de queijo in the summer, it got me thinking.  Pão de queijo batter is, mostly, just pâte à choux, I mean, in its bones.  The oil, the eggs, the whirling.  Hm.  I substituted tapioca flour for all-purpose in the boilerplate pâte à choux sketch.  Et voila. 

 

I felt like Louis Pasteur.  You have no idea.  No idea. 

 

What happened with the cakes was too much sugar, two times.  I did not take a photo of the actual failing, but it looked just like the last time this happened, with a volcano of cake.  Blech.

The first time, I thought it was that I had subbed in blanched almond flour for the wheat flour.  That was some of it, because in the second cake I used starchier flours and it was at least cake-like in its crumpled-up way, if not an actual cake.

 

The problem was mostly too much sugar.  I had subbed -- besides the flour -- granulated sugar for brown sugar 1:1.  No.  Down with cooking by volume!  Brown sugar weighs 6 ounces to a one-cup measure and granulated sugar is 8 ounces.  So, I used a third more sugar than the recipe called for.  Now I know.  Live & learn. 

But: doughnuts!  Dude!

blabbity-blob

I'm not actually blogging because I do not actually feel like the endless narration.

The black cakes came out great, if in need of a little breathing/evaporation of the post-baking brushing of rum.  After the last trip to the pasticciera -- I am not being insufferable using the Italian, it's just that otherwise, in our house, if I just say Going to the bakery! there needs to be qualification, but if I say On my way to the pasticciera! I am only speaking of one place. 

 

Or maybe it is insufferable, for example, if one is illiterate.  But in that case, you were neither invited, nor are you valued generally as reader of this space.  Capisce?

 

Anyhow, after the last trip to the pasticciera, I could hardly stand firm against the wrapped-up cakes anymore and even though I was saving every single one of them for a Dec 24/25 experience, I caved.  It's fine, the lapse in discipline.  I am happy about chewing through a slice, now & then, with a hot cup of tea.  I see the need for the peel I chose against; it's awfully sweet & peel would bring it up in flavor.

See, how the endless narration just slips out?!

Let us cling to the lifeboat of a list, ok?

• I think I could take the contents of all the neighbors' recycling bins and strew them through our house, on the floors, and my children would never notice.  Or, if they did notice ("Jesus, what a dump"), they would never reach down to place anything into a refuse container with their own hands.  OK.
• I settled on $75 for the children's guitar instructor, attending a heartfelt note commending his meritorious attentions to my son, in particular.  Mari still frowned at me, while I was assembling my heartily-overthought denominations into an envelope.  He choked similarly when I gifted Fille with a crisp $20 bill for a perfect-perfect dental checkup.  Honey, I told him then, rolling my eyes.  $20 every 6 months is comprised of a nickel every time she brushes.  This is a similarly-cumulative payout, less than $1 per lesson.  Everyone is happy.
• Am listening to Christmas radio, wondering how "My Favorite Things" became a Christmas song when the context it attends is not and also, trying to work out what would happen if Joe Jackson came upon Katherine Jackson in a clinch with Santa, in fact.
• The psychologist -- we like to call her Dr Vajazzler -- conferenced with us about her report in the first week of December, still recommending immediate inpatient admission for Garçon .  The following day, I went through a long list of every psychiatric facility with a pedes ward in the region and every one of them replied to me -- kindly & filled with the weight of their credentials -- by saying, essentially, This is an inappropriate recommendation for the child in this report.  What the hell?  I called Dr Vajazzler & said, "So, everyone says no to your recommendation & can you reconcile your urgency & their apathy?"  She railed at me for a long time, extremely defensive, super-bitchy, and that was the last I heard from her or anyone in her facility. 
  
  Until I sent an email yesterday which asked, essentially, once you cut through all the duplicitous civilizations of it, Does my kid need acute psychiatric intervention or not?  Are you totally unprofessional, or are you just completely incompetent?  Check 1 for yes, 2 for no.  Write me back!  Then the reply-to-all shenanigans commenced.  If you know, or if you are a close reader in this space, you know that these missteps were like the suediest handbag ever.  There was actual glee, with tiny, mincing, clapping.  Also, squealing.  Then I proceeded to fuck with them.  They must have figured out they were all emailing me in error, because today there is total radio silence.  Wankers.  Also, WTF about standards of care?  We recommend surgery!  Oh, well, but the surgeons don't, so ...  So I still recommend surgery!  I do!  Surgical!  I'm right!  This is your fault because you homeschool!  What?

Oh!  Accidental narration!  A spill!  Argle-bargle!

 

Mari found a sweater in a put-away pile of winter clothes I never wear, up in the attic.

"Is this Fille's?" he asked, reasonably. 

"It's mine!"  I said, snatching at it.  Then I inspected it closely.  It is a Michael Kors half-alpaca, half-merino sweater & I adore it, but have never worn it because it is never cold enough here to have even thought about wearing it.  I must have clutched it to my heart in the store without looking at it, and then somehow purchased it without realizing that it would only fit me if I were to keep my breasts in my pocket.  But my child is cold all the time and we have a similar kind of severity in our fashion aesthetic (french cuffs on the wedding gown, people), so alors.  Bonne chance, pretty girl.

I guess I should get back to comporting myself as a person who operates on a Holiday Open House paradigm, baking & procuring & all.  Hm.  I miss sports-journalism blogging already.  À la prochaine. 

moonlight. firelight.

I hustled my family out of the house on Saturday afternoon, bustling them in hats & scarves down to the highway and then beyond the wall, marching along the Queen of Hearts landscaping to the Ivy-League ice rink.  The weather was clear and crisp and just-right. 

Mari was the whole time shocked by my initiative & leadership role, as passive deferment rooted in a kind of agoraphobic tendency is usually my family-outing way.  It is just that all the other days in the week I am timekeeping & bustling and bicep-gripping, so when he is home & available to go with us, let him ... you know, there is a nautical metaphor that means take charge of it which I want to use here.  Maybe pirate-y, even.  Use it if you know it, because that is what I meant. 

I give all the credit to Twitter.  Sometimes, there are these event-related tweets that come at the right time, right when the mental ground is fertile for the seed of a plan, when anything seems possible.  Right when I will fiddle with my handheld out of nervousness or indecision, there it will be, positively serendipitous.  This is the second or maybe third time this has happened -- I know one of the other times was a call to attend the Executive Order 9066 Day of Remembrance, when all we had on our docket was a trip to Mt Vernon no one was too excited about.  Anyhow.

I shoved the children into their orange Hobey-seats one row behind ours.  "Hockey: it is like football on ice," I told them.  They stared at me.

"She means soccer," Mari explained.  The children nodded, relieved, because they know how to play the game English-only Americans call soccer.  I threw my hands up and turned toward the ice and its warming up + pre-game kibbitzing.

Fifille loved hockey -- which, of course: dudes wielding sticks are smashing into each other and a hard thing is hitting the glass with a scary cracking noise at random moments, producing ambience -- pronouncing it to be one million times better than baseball.  Garçon thought it was fine and fun, which, coming from him, is an accolade.     

It was fine & fun, except things were touch & go for the redhaired, sophomore goalie from British Columbia.

After Princeton tied the game in the last minute of the 2nd period, scoring two goals 10 seconds apart, everyone was so! excited!  Early in the 3rd, the Crimson scored easily to lead again.  Mari came back from the snack bar, asking what happened. 

"The puck went by the goalie," I told him.  "He seems really frustrated."  We were sitting right behind the cage.

"No, but what happened?"

"The puck, honey," I was patient, since my tendency with my mouth is to overly-reduce. "It slid past him on the large portion of ice he left open on his right."

"No way, that sucks."  Then he ate a hot dog.

Halfway through the third period, Harvard scored again.  I think this time the puck bounced off of the goalie a little first, but still.  He seemed crushed.  Crushed. 

 

Lookit how you can see how bereft he looks, even from the rear, even in a shitty cameraphone photograph!  Twenty seconds after I took this photo, Princeton scored and his relief was palpable, even through the plexiglass.  I still felt sad for him, especially in the last couple of minutes of the game, when he went off the ice so they could bring 6 men forward.  Sad! 

I was explaining the ditched-defense manuever to Fifille when "I don't even know you," is what Mari said to me.  What does that even mean?  Before that, he was all not-unlike the first time he found out I could really do math; for example, while I was shouting to the referee heavens not to remand cutie-cute Crimson #13 to the penalty box for holding.  That guy was wholly focused on the puck!  He never even saw the dude who tripped on his stick!  That dude tripped! 

But I do not even see why Mari would say that.  Chicago has a NHL team!  One of my college roommates is married to her Badger Hockey beau!  Just because I am not always going on about something doesn't mean I can't work it up when the cause presents itself!  That is what he should know after all these years. 

Princeton lost, in the end, but it was a highly-enjoyable game.  Harvard has a formidable team; it was a pleasure to watch them skate & shoot.  This concludes my sports-journalism blogging.  You're welcome.

Speaking of one ought to know and sporting:  someone has finally figured out she can use the banister on the 2nd floor landing as a barre. 

 

Goodness, I got her this book.  We are now in our house on a first name basis with Agrippina Vaganova.  As in, "Agrippina says that your knees should always be in line with your toes during [whatever zzZzZzzzz]." Or, "Do you know that Agrippina says that when you practice so that  [whatever zzzZzZzzzZzzz] your arms will become automatically so?"  This is all a kind of excited honing & polishing in readiness for her audition.   

 

 

She still made time to visit with her BFF and eat gobs of candy.  Sunday they had kits from IKEA + the inventory procured during a $9 trip to the supermarket with the bulk-candy bins.  I made royal icing in my new KitchenAid mixer which, I am happy to say, is not better than my former Sunbeam/Oster stand mixer of 16 years, now bequeathed to Mr Fox.  But I will get the KA meat-mincer attachment and then it will be better, empirically so. 

You know there is a lot of candy-consumption when you go and find a new toothbrush in the cabinet so you can make your child and her guest stop playing and brush their teeth.   

Holiday weekends are for entertaining!  Mostly. À la prochaine.

afterword

Well, that was a little different.

 

I have a vague recollection of being deep in the Nutcracker Mines when I wrote a really lengthy, heavily-metaphorical and metaspherical comment on Becky's weblog.  It might indeed be a litle manic, in the reading of it.  What I remember is just being so appalled by the willingness to be martyred all around me.  The disorganization!  The slapdash presentation of informations!  

I felt like there was some kind of presumption of a native interest on our family's part which would, naturally (of course!), cover over any slutty brushwork on the parts of the principals.  Oh, you would like me to be available for 10 evenings in a row?  Beginning in 7 days?  That can not happen.  Prior commitments and all, sorry. 

I mean, come on.  Seriously?  I took a survey of the moms -- So are you actually available on such short notice, as a rule? Let alone at the start of the holiday season?   There were a couple of moms who were gritted of teeth and rolling of eye (Ballet Pals, no surprise), but generally, they were fully willing to get up on the cross.  Oh, hi, Femme!  I'm so glad you've come.  Could you just wiggle that nail into my feet? Right there, where I pre-drilled the hole.   We went on our scheduled getaway, whatever to others' failure-to-plan being my emergency.  No.

The thing is, if anyone had said, back in September, "We don't have the schedule fine-tuned right now.  Can you just hang loose and not make any plans for November without checking?"  I would have at least known what I was dealing with.

Fifille was the same as she was 4 years ago, on the matter of performance.  After the excitement of having made it to Nutcracker-eligibility had faded, she was pretty down on the project.  How I wish I had a photo of her little face from the morning I woke her -- the day after 2 matinees and an evening performance -- to tell her we'd let her sleep as long as we could and now -- less than an hour before her call time for the 3rd public show -- she would have to drink a smoothie through a straw in Hair and Makeup.  

However, exactly the same as four years ago, the backstage sorority remains any performance's strongest selling point. 

Because what is not to like about lathering on more & more eyeliner on each other and playing cards, romping around in hoodies and tights and Uggs, while waiting to be summoned by the Costume BattleAxe? 

 

Different from four years ago is that this year she can dance the role she was given.  She is absolutely able to execute the steps involved in her part of the show.  Real dancing, not just makework twirling and putting her chubby fist coquettishly under her chin while planting her elbow on her knee while in a lunge, child-pageant style.  I understand -- and she does, too, conceptually -- that ballet is a performing art.  So, while I am perfectly happy to let her remain on her grindstone forthwith, I do sense that there is some work to do on her in this way; something between the doing and showing needs shoring up, to ward off Emily Dickinsonitis, but not now, not at 10.  Plus, she has given us every reason to believe she is working on these fortifications herself.

I had given her the NYT piece about The Very Young Ballerina, which she read over a few days.  If you did not see it -- 70s photoessay chronicled VYB's life on the path to stardom and then she fucked it up.  Hubris, you know.  OK, sure.  VYB was handpicked by Balanchine to be Clara in the year she was photoessayed.  Great.  VYB said (I forget if it was young VYB or old VYB who said this in a quote), "I was born to play this role, I loved it, etc, zzz."

OK, but VYB didn't go to class, so boo to her.  The school kicked her out. This was the point I made to Fille when I handed her the newspaper section, while she was feeling ambivalent about being down-in-the-mouth about the show when many (but not all) of her friends were so! excited! about being under the lights!  It is fine to love performing, but that is yr reward for doing the work.  Also known as Fame costs, you pay right here in sweat.  Ok.

 

Before the Sunday matinee, after a while of sitting quietly through yet another bun composition (my tip for you: Elnett Satin), she said to me, suddenly-outraged, totally indignant, "And that woman was all Oh, I was made to dance the role of Clarrrra because I'm so speeeeeciallllllll, but Mom, Clara doesn't even dance!  She mostly sits on a bench and watches everyone else dance!"

I thought about this and countered, offering that Clara dances in the party scene, and a little bit in MarzipanLand or wherever. 

She was unrelenting, "Mom, in the party scene she gets carried around, mostly.  She doesn't even have a good pas de deux with the Nutcracker in [MarzipanLand or wherever]. "

She was waving one hand in the aforementioned flaming-ceiling, what-the-hecks gesture.  "The Sugarplum Fairy is the star of the Nutcracker, Mom.  The star.  Clara is just a little girl sitting on a bench." 

Right after the show wrapped -- but not before she washed her hair for the first time in 6 days, since before dress rehearsal --  she came to me to ask if I would help her get her audition scheduled for [Prestigious Regional Ballet School]'s summer intensive session.  This is an entirely different chapter in parenting that opened when we sat to do that, and we will talk about that another time.  When it comes up, which I am sure it will.

 

Next time, we are going to talk about manicures, holiday decorating, and jeans.  Because it's what's on the outside that matters.  Hopefully I can get that in before I have to placemark/process another episode of Stupid Doctors.  I will screenwrite it featuring Muppets in every role.  Mari will be played by Sam the Eagle!  My part will, naturally, be cast with the manipulative, ready-to-rumble Mlle Cochon trying her best to act as one of those sweet, submissive Gonzo-chickens while endlessly leaking around the edges. "Oh, excusez-moi!  You slipped upon the floor!  Right onto my knife!  Is that ... sacre bleu! Lard?  However did that get there?  Are you all right?  Oh, er, I mean, Cluck, cluck, cluck.  Trillll." Yes.  We go to the mat on Thursday.  (Stupid doctors, come on!)

Gros bisous, mon choux,  à bientôt! 

AIDS is not over

It is World AIDS Day, you could know. 

My children & some other neighborhood children -- Commie homeschoolers, every one of them -- performed a small show they cooked up while (& since) wrapping on their Big Show earlier this month.  In it, they each brought forth a brief, somber, monologue representing different children from different groups around the world who were infected with HIV.

 

I had seen a couple of dress rehearsals squeezed in on a couple of mornings & thought I was tough, but in the end I was only happy I'd worn a handknit, heathered-brown wrap, instead of my regulation-black pashmina.  If you have a child you know nothing shows up better on black than snot.  Then while I was surreptitiously wiping myself off on my winterwear accessories, an elderly gentleman from the agéd-living facility where they were presenting gave me his hanky and FORGET ABOUT IT, I just could not even.

Thirty-one days until 2012.  Maybe fewer if you think I'm walking around upside-down.  Good night.

  

wetwork

We were in Washington for the holiday, visiting with friends.  It was nice, I hope the same for you and your family + friends.

 

Jupiter has been on such an unbelievably bright display all month.

Before we left -- like while I was sitting in the freaking driveway, idling -- the nurse from the hospital with whom we had been dealing called.  She had seemed sensible right up to this moment, when she called to try to renege on a previously-set meeting date to get us to come in sooner for a meeting.

As discussed, all around, everything is cake right now on the Garçon front.  I don't ask him to do anything except take care of his own self and he doesn't destroy anything by throwing it at me.  E-Z. 

The kids had a hippie homeschoolers' participation -- Garçon had a huge role, in fact -- in a community theatre production that ran last week, then we had the holiday, obvs, and now we are turning our fullest attentions to The Nutcracker and this weekend's run of 6 shows in 3 days.  Wonderful.  Exhausting.  And, frankly, all of it using up all the time we had for Extra Anything.

As to which result, we told these hospital people that unless he was hearing voices (which she had intimated he was & then recanted while I stood in the cold on Mari's cell phone in front of a mental hospital that could not screen him nor see him, asking her holy what the hell?) which he revealed only to them (entirely possible, sure) our first availability to dive back into their obviously disorganized waters was the first full week in December.  Because we are reasonable, see, plus also organized and they are obviously needful of a lot of flexibility while they sort things out as they go, so we wanted to make sure our family calendar is clear enough to sop up their freaking bullshit.   (Fool me twice, shame on the Luiseño.)

Anyhow.  On the phone, the day we left, Nurse Ratched was demanding a new date for the meeting with the two of us, the doctor who sent us on a wild goose chase, her resident, and the senior person in their department.  That date was earlier by a full week than what I told them represented our first availability, after which there was a meeting already set.  We thought.  No backsies!  So I told her no, while leaving, "WTF don't you understand English?" unsaid.

Because I am a fucking classy broad.

Then Nurse Ratched persisted, telling me that the senior physician in their department was available on this day but not on that day and our son needed to move forward with this care, blahblahblah, and after a while of exchanging sweet-yet-firm conversational demurrals, I cut her off.  The end.  I mean, seriously.  Because when do you want to die?  Tomorrow?  The day after tomorrow?  Bitch?

"You know, I don't have to go to work, but what I do know is that if the day should come that my husband needs to be at a meeting because he fucked up the lead direction on a project, he will not tell anyone he doesn't have meetings on this day or that day, no.  He will make the meeting happen when the  people want to see him. 

"Also, let me put this to you bluntly, because I have implied it without elucidating it:  I don't care at this moment what any of you think about our son's care.  Your outfit has lost the privilege of professional discretions due to the colossal disaster engineered by you just last week.  Let's get all on the same page, in the same room, and my husband and I will evaluate whether or not you are the professionals we want leading the project of our family.  Then maybe we'll be happy to go forward.  Hmm?"

So Mari was sitting in the passenger seat, kind of shaking his palms-upturned hands back & forth, as if they were pans sauteing at a high heat.  This is a gesture we cribbed from the preschool Fifille which mostly conveys a silent astonishment akin to Wait, what is happening?  Why are flaming chunks of the ceiling falling down all around us?  Whoa! 

I mean, I made the case clear to Mari weeks ago that we had to come out swinging with the hospital in every interaction because they have the weight to go to the state and claim we are neglectful and fuck that since they are not bowling us over with their qualifications.  However, Nurse Ratched had -- in all previous interactions -- been not a pain in the ass.  Until this phone call.

I made a show of gazing past Mari's gesturing, wrapped up the call with the nurse and rang off.  He asked me why I'd had to be so mean.  It was an accusation.  In my ongoing work to create my Wife of the Year portfolio, I did not respond to the bullshit in the charge, but instead looked at him, pitiably, and said, benevolently, "She told me that sometimes when she has an appointment, she just takes an early lunch.  Maybe you could just do that, is what she said."

I mean, first of all, how incredibly ridiculous, to offer such kindergarten, junior-intern's advice to any grownup person at all who has made clear that they are not available?  Secondly, what the fuck?  I should have my husband adjust his work schedule so we can meet up with you at your workplace?   Get yr client-service priorities straight!  But then, the killer is, as you are likely to know, to offer that as yr homespun, R.N.'s solution to the man in my husband's position?  OMG.

Anyhow, Mari barked up laughing around a mouthful of orange juice, immediately revoked his charge, and snickered intermittently all the way to the big bridge over the river.  I mean, right?

Then, we had pre-Thanksgiving, erev Thanksgiving, and actual Thanksgiving.  A zero-makework turkey, slathered in butter, roasted itself without fuss or bother while we took in the National Museum of the American Indian, which we thought was the place to be on Thursday.      

NMAI is my favorite museum, ever since they showed me Fritz Scholder and he stole my heart.

Also, James Luna. 

James Luna, The Artifact Piece. First performed in 1987, San Diego's Museum of Man.

 

If you can only know one piece of Luna's oeuvre, it has to be this.

 

But even probably without those guys, it would be my favorite, most important museum.  I forget what we were looking at, exactly, when I looked at Mari and said, "Every time a child tells me Indians used to live here long ago, I want to ssssssssslap them across the face."  It is so true and the only thing that stops me is that I know they are never told better, but OMG, does no one have parents?

 

Friday, we were at the American History museum, sitting in the cafe, visiting with Selene and checking in at intervals with our four at-large children at intervals, meeting up in Julia Child's Kitchen.  Speaking of no one having parents. 

 

I just desultorily chose the Child's Kitchen exhibit because it was close to the museum cafe, easy to find on the map, and hard to miss,  but I was drawn in, a little. 

 

Mostly, I was drawn in by the hordes of people who were so excited to be there.  Their excitement was contagious!

  

Then I got an email from another g.d. hospital professional -- the lead psychologist.  What the hell?  It is like they love the abuse.  I read it aloud to our table and Mari said nothing, but Selena chimed in with a fat lot of what to say about an experience in her family with a silly behavioral health professional.  Later, Saturday morning, I sent a perfect, perfect email which reeked of gasoline, one which came right up to actually calling her incompetent without actually saying, "OMFG, wtf are you so incompetent for?"

It did feature the accelerant-perfumed sentence, "Do you even know what you are doing there?" and the underlings whom she had copied on her outgoing message were included on my reply, so, yeah.  Because right in the email I gave her a matter-of-fact chapter & verse recap on how she fucked up.  Then, in a metaphorical way, I reminded her that she did not want me to strike any matches. 

It was a literary thing of beauty and even if you have known me for 20 years or more-- and seen me in nuclear action over & over, just laying waste to shit & going back to salt the rubble -- you would still say "Jesus Christ" when you read it.  And then you might have to sit with it a little while, admiring.  Honest.

The thing is, her reply to me was so fucking beautiful and the smartest thing she has done yet, wherein she came right to the fence of saying forget about it without actually writing "OMFG, Jesus, fucking forget it."  So things might be looking up, with that!  I think we are learning so much about one another in this dynamic.  Yes!

 

Oh, also, this, speaking of what is said & unsaid, omigod:

I was leaving the Willard Hotel on Friday night, on my way to get a bowl of Corner Bakery's fabulous lentil soup, and the man in his sleeping bag on Pennsylvania Ave-- on the sidewalk at the edge of the pool of the Willard's exterior lights -- stopped me & asked if I could help him.

"Sir, can I bring you a bowl of soup?" was my rejoinder.  He said yes, so I proceeded to take his order for dinner.  He flip-flopped on a sandwich and told me plaintively he could not get warm.  I assured him I would return shortly.

I did, with a large bowl of soup, a grilled-cheese sandwich, and a hot chocolate.  I set all of it carefully next to him and went inside of the hotel.  A while later, I was waiting outside for Mari to come with the car, nursing a cup of hot tea from the Starbucks on the opposite corner.  A doorman from the Willard approached me and said something I did not understand, mostly because he was finished talking by the time I realized he wasn't uttering some kind of boilerplate obsequiousness.

I invited him to repeat himself.  This time I heard him fine.  He said, "You gave food to the man?"

Reader, it was an accusation. 

I was thinking a lot of things, but said nothing.  I mean, if they didn't want dude laying on the sidewalk soliciting assistance and possibly picnicking then why the fuck didn't they man up and call the police on him?  At the same -- possibly incongruous -- time I was thinking OMFG I'm sitting in front of this 4-star hotel blinged-out like Carmela Soprano and an employee wants to get it on with me?  Is the world still turning?  Uh-uh.   

I stood up.  Doorman wanted to be in a confrontation and so I rose to meet it.  I said to him, only, "Yes.  I did."

Then I stood there, placidly.  I did not even raise my eyebrow in that come-and-get-it-I-dare-you invitational gesture you know I love to do, because there was nothing else to say besides Yes and  I did.  I waited, silently, while the light of rightness shone from my fingertips and my eyelashes and the ends of my hair, blinding him with the truth of humanity.  He said nothing more, which is too bad, because besides all the truth and the light and the rightness, I was thinking, deep inside, Say something else.  Anything else will do because brother, I am going to blog about you.

Then he walked away.  Because there was nothing for him to say.  And this is the lesson in which Roosevelt competently instructed us:  Speak softly and carry a big can of gasoline. 

     

the night's a girl

When we were at Arlington, we noticed this engraved granite quoting JFK, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds," etc.  I espouse a variation on that sentiment all the time:  If you display your weaknesses, your enemies will exploit them.  Oh, hahaha.  No, just kidding.  I mean, of course I say that, too, I say it all the time!  But the variation of that sentiment I am always repeating is Good behavior is its own reward.  

It was nice to see it, yk, there.  So I could say, yk, See, other people believe it, too.  They were important.

In another tale of deference to the witness of others:

Fifille is bummed out about performing in The Nutcracker.  She has expressed just wanting to be at the barre, doing what she is supposed to be doing, instead of all this costuming, making-up folderol.  The girls in her class are split between Omigod, Nutcracker Show! and Oh. Already? I seized upon this NYT story from this morning and gave it to her.  You have the love the work; performance is the glory for having the love of the grind.  There is nothing wrong with wishing for cast-in-Nutcracker backsies, especially at 10.      

 

Oh!  Remember when I said I was hoping someone would get to the other 30ish% of the patriarchal deconstruction required for Penn State Coverup Processing?  And if I saw it, I would be sure to let you know?  Here it is.  It's brief, like, yk, it's an introduction.  He gets right into it and pins you up against the wall and piles all yr hair in his hand and breathes on yr neck, but then he's all done.  Like, "That's it?  Aren't you going to stick it in?"  But, you know, Sunday Review space constraints and you get the idea.  Someone else can work you over.  Like on the late-late date, hello?

 

Speaking of late-late date.  Saturday-nite Drive-By Truckers! 

 

There is ol' Patterson Hood, getting ready to tell us about how he did a whole buncha crazy, stupid shit.  Hearts. 

We wore earplugs this time, which seemed (having never done it) like it would be totally uncool.  Opposite.  Best.  Hearing=great today.  Love.

Doctors and one senior hospital administrator were, late Friday, taken to task by me in a way which reminded my husband of the young demolition expert for whom he fell.  He was in love with the whole show -- starting with my chiding them for sending us someplace that could not accomodate us -- Even the lousiest, 2-star hotel makes sure they send you to a restaurant that is open for dinner, I said -- but particularly enamored of the way I detonated the building while talking to them about an example of what normally happens if professional discretion goes sideways due to a fuckup, as did ours with them.

I get that my husband's job is different from yours -- for one thing, as it pertains directly to national security, his job is important, I said, sweetly, sympathetically, before going on with just stuff & bothersomeness about very reasonable expectations for cleanup & accounting and how I very reasonably and sweetly expected this all to be addressed, and with some great amount of haste.  After the holiday, of course.  Because I am reasonable.  Also, sweet.  Until I am not, but, you know. 

I am enjoying the BloPo of Becky and her sister, Amy, this month.  Check it out.

Amy's story of a precious child in the air reminded me of a time with on my way back to Madison from a boyfriend's surgical conference one winter.  I already had a pretty loose grip on things, facing the dread of flying as I was when -- while sitting on the tarmac -- a baby started wailing from the back of the plane.  My beau hardly noticed: his specialty was pediatrics.  I noticed, but determined to cope, I gripped his arm and asked him if he could apply himself quickly & with his masculine ease to getting me a teeny bottle of rum.

He strode down the aisle to work his beautiful-person magic on the stewardess.  Next thing -- next thing -- I was whisked -- whisked! -- into first class.  He calmly folded himself in next to me, ignoring my questioning gaze, and handed me his great-grandfather's chronograph.  We'd discovered the week before on the flight to Miami that I found its heft settling -- its weight in my hands, the shiftiness in its bracelet's links, the way the steel's clinking sounded.

Once in the air, I finally asked him directly what happened.  He shushed me.  The stewardess fussed over me at intervals in an elaborate fashion.  I would ask him every time to tell me what happened, what did he tell her?  He refused me, in every language, and I sulked until I fell asleep, bored of my own petulance, cozy with my first-class airline blanket.

On the ground, in Chicago, checked into the O'Hare Hilton after retrieving his car from long-term parking, I asked him again. 

I told her you just miscarried and we could never sit by that baby. 

I was shocked, surprised!  No one ever knows anyone!  I protested, burbling, until he put his mouth over mine and that was that.     

vetted

We were in Washington last week for Veterans' Day -- in defiance of the Nutcracker's rehearsal schedule! -- and went to Arlington National Cemetery in an early observance (because Friday was going to be too-too packed!).

Here are some photos of things we stopped to admire.

 

 

 

Here, we met an older couple who -- in our exchange of pleasantries with them regarding our mutuality in appreciating the vista -- revealed they were there to have attended a funeral.  I was left wishing I were dressed an eensy bit better -- just everything the same with the viscose blouse and newish flats, but with trousers, instead of just my fancy jeans.

With that in my mind, I was saying to the children, while we were driving back to Sal's, that while I did enjoy the rambling, high-points adventure, it felt funny to me to just be walking past all these people's headstones with nary a worry about who they were, and not too much of a way on the ground to find out.  I thought the trip lacked focus, which detracted from our desired countenance of high-minded propriety, which one is endlessly counseled to achieve, all over, by the signs. 

It was Fifille's idea that we find someone to commemorate, as is the programme at The Vietnam War Memorial.  We wondered and murmured about who and Garçon volunteered the idea of finding who among the 442 Regiment is finally resting there. Hullo, homeschool! You are who I am talking about!

People are talking about homeschool here, too.  I wish I had more time to talk about all that here, but parenting is mostly driving. 

What I will offer is this:

 

All of these children, sprawled out on the ground, disrespectfully gawking at the Sentinel on duty at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?  Visiting with a school group, every one.  Socialized is hardly the same thing as civilized.  

The funny thing is that one of the topics I worry is woefully lacking in our homeschool curriculum is this kind of practical-civics stuff.  We never say the Pledge of Allegiance before breakfast or anything.  But my children know enough to not splay themselves out to leisurely watch someone else work, because that is fucking rude.  They learned that here, at home.  I mean, they spend enough time here, they might as well learn something. 

They also have learned enough in all their time here to make it easy to explain the Penn State cover-up to them.  Good, because it was all the grownups wanted to talk about, in a round-robin of completely scandalized tones -- one person would talk until their mouth locked in the fallen-open position, able to talk no more, then the next one would pick up -- and we were tired of tiptoeing around them.  Half of our usual At-Sal's group are alumni of a school with a zillion-dollar football program and a Women's Studies department, so we were not too shocked by the motive and able to seek out the right salves.  We simply cannot imagine how the rest of you are coping in this time.  How are you? 

Maybe you could read this woman's higher education take on it, because it is incredibly good, and comes out to about two-thirds of what I think needs to be said.  When I see the other one-third somewhere, you will be the first to know.  Because of all of this, I have fallen into regrettable overuse of the word outrageous. 

We are having some neighbors over for coffee + cake, I guess I'd better get on that.  Gros bisous, à la prochaine.   

  

 

take a picture, it'll last longer

We ran out of things to do ("ran out," I mean.  You know) so we did a test run of Fifille's stage makeup.  Mostly because she is going to have to learn to do it herself.  I kept saying, "Watch carefully!  There will be a test!"  It felt like a test, there was a long list of cosmetic recipe to follow:  foundation! charcoal lid shadow, brown in the crease!  eyeliner!  lippie!  rouge!  ("rouge?")

Thank God I have all the world's makeup in my bag!  Except rouge (?) and I just used lip stain.  And waterproof mascara.  I'll have to buy some, it seems. 

She could not stop looking at herself forever. 

She said, finally, exuberantly and with great satisfaction, "I look so sinister ... like a villain!"  This is how everyone can know she is ours. 

After lunch, weary of her distraction, I told her to take that stuff off her face, before her mother saw her.  She is such a fervent, Hollywood-style stalker!  She knew right away to go and get the  California Baby's Baby Shampoo!   Yes!  I am reminded of when I last saw the aesthetician at the plastics office and she asked, casually, what I used at home to take off my eye makeup and when I told her ("Baby shampoo!"), she was all, "No, seriously."  I said, "Yah, I am!"  Fuck it, my optometrist told me to use baby shampoo.  She almost fainted from all the disapproval, but my eye-guy told me true.  Best lid wash ever! 

Ok, Nutcracker Mines.  Bye!

 

lost time is never found again

Weekends are busy: busy, busy, busy.  I am, in fact, using my extra hour to blog.

 

I remade that cobbler last week, it still wasn't any good.  Let us use the image to draw us into the history of this blog, if we could travel back in time, topically, for a bit.

 

I am afraid any rejoinding commentary on the Occupation will not be any good, either.  Frankly, they were a lot more compelling before they started to run afoul of the law.  I mean, here is the thing:  if they are not protesting anti-vagrancy laws, they should go the fuck home when asked.  It does not diminish their message to only protest from dawn to dusk.  In fact, as the weather changes it bolsters the presence insofar as it means everyone left their respective shelters to roll around in the streets.  The endless, mountain-man, 24-hour camping quality of it is childish and stupid and predicated by the tedious endlessness of Facebook's 24-hour exhibitionism.

I read somewhere -- I forget where now -- where a participant talking about being rousted from the city plaza in Oakland drew a parallel -- an homage, if you will -- to the Wisconsin protests and their endlessness.  But here is the thing:  Public and endless access on-demand to the Wisconsin Capitol Building is a right written into the Wisconsin State Constitution.  That is how that happened there.  That is why there was such righteous calling-out about the ejections and evacuations.  That is why the camping out on the grounds.

Is this sort of constitutional access granted to citizens of California, lingering around Oakland?  Perhaps.  It is certainly possible; the long arm of Wisconsin's law certainly attempted to abrupt the rights of its citizens during those dark days of winter.  I do not know about California, nor Tennessee, nor Georgia, I do not live there; but if I were protesting there, I would take a moment to investigate it and figure it out. 

Furthermore, whatever anyone's Constitutional accessibility may or may not be, there are some shocking procedural issues with this grouping.  In every pre-teargas account I read from the tear-gassed, every one said the police issued a warning akin to Leave now or you will get hurt. 

What that means -- allow me, please, given my long history alongside some of this country's fiercest law-enforcement personnel -- is tear gas and rubber bullets.  I mean, just like a blazing inferno and the red truck with the flashing lights means a big hose and splashing water.  It is procedural; it is not a judgment call.

Then!  I saw a photo, in the NYT last week -- speaking of my hometown -- of some dumb fucks in Chicago, refusing police orders to clear [wherever] and they were standing up!  Linking arms!  Ok, a bunch of someones did not pass their Rules for Radicals reading test!  For God's sake!  It is written in stone!  When you want to passively resist, when you want to peacefully protest,

(and that is what all the whining from Oakland was -- We were passive, we were peaceful, meow meow meow, blur blur blur!)

you lie the fuck down on the ground. 

It is Protesting 101.  Protests for Babies.  If you have a baby, you have seen this very protest!  The one where they fall the Earth and hold like a stone?  That one.  People lying on the ground can not be fired upon:  that is procedural, it is not a judgment call.  This is America, neither procedure nor judgment call will have tanks roll over you, no worries.  But, God!

 

So!  That is where I am at with the Occupation.  They need to figure out what they want and whose life they are going to throw a wrench in to get it.  Because I am pretty sure it was not the lives of all those people in Greenwich Village last week.  Also, there needs to be some kind of centralized administration for this effort, because -- as seen with the AK-47 issue in Atlanta and the rocks + sticks + breakage in Oakland -- at this time, in this way, anyone can say "Oh, yah!  We're totally with them, innit?"  They need something to say who is in and who is not.  I get it, "But Paperwork is a Mark of the Beast!" Yeah, yeah, yeah, grow up.

 

Or, go completely sideways.  Ok, I would be remiss if I did not get back to the smart input of adorable people, here:

 

Bettina said, "Yes, yes, yes."

 Which is very positive and I will tuck under my arm as carte blanche to go on.

Becky said, "I agree that OWS is not itself the change we want to see in the world, but I don't think the bare chested drum circle guys would say that it is either. I guess I am more optimistic about it, I think it is something. It's early days, but I don't think we should hold its inchoateness against it. I'm interested to see what develops, and I do think this could be the start of the true populist mobilization we've been wondering about/hoping for. Could be, hoping." 

Ok, I agree with you that the bare-chested drummer boys neither think this is the change they would like to see.  However, I think that the whole torque of this Occupation is that the group en masse wants something to be done, not that they would do something.  The most cogent criticism I have read about the Occupation centers around the fact of their entitlement; that they seem to feel as if their very presence should inspire reparations.  When that is coupled with the galling kind of procedural ignorance they feel free to have ... I exchanged about this very briefly at fewer than 140 characters with sweetiepie Charlie, and I had to stop, because I can not abide endless 140-character ranting in a stream, but let us think of, for example, the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins.  What did they want?  Lunch.  What did they get?  Nothing.  Why did they remain?  Implacably asking for lunch.  Did they roll out a mat and sleep there?  Of course not.  Were they bare-chested?  Holding musical instruments?  Stinky?  No, of course not:  it was lunchtime.  Did they risk real trouble and real injury?  Absolutely.  The stakes were high.  The messages were clear. 

Becky, let us roll your populist movement point over to piggyback onto my engagement of Marsha.

 

Marsha said, "I'm also interested in how this will play out. Not as optimistic, though, and a wee bit cynical about the current state of the matter. If someone can secure a donation of wild-caught salmon for the family dinner surely the tools and materials needed to winterize a few score homes amongst the at-risk would be a small matter, right? And actually demonstrate this "community action" about which we're hearing so much?"

Marsha, I do not know anything about wild-caught salmon.  Does this mean they are pescatarians?  Did the General Assembly approve this callous act of speciesism?  Oh, hahahaha.

Seriously, though.  You know, we have seen a lot of civil-rights-times photos this year.  It started at Toledo's Museum of Art, which had a bunch of photographs from the sanitation workers' strike and it kind of wrapped up most recently at the Library of Congress before a series of photographs from the March on Washington.  It was one of those things, yk, where you have seen an image over and over (the aerial imagery from the Mall on that day) and then all of a sudden, you put it in its real context, like a key in a lock.  It was staggering. 

What I got around to thinking, while I was standing there taking it all in, was about how Martin Luther King was a citizen-at-large -- I think this was during the debt-ceiling standoff and the attendant grumbling over Obama.  I was thinking of how during Obama's campaign, everyone was so excited and whatever and he speaks so well and will.i.am and whatever, and that is all fine and good, but Barack Obama is a politician.  His position as the President of the United States is compromised at best. 

How, I wondered, have we gotten here, where we are looking only to politicians to craft our rhetoric, to reflect our best back to us?  Where it feels like the vast majority of Americans deride the benefits of organized labor, of medical care for our own people, of taxing corporations and having industrial work inside our own borders ...

Obviously, the kind of organizational work taken on by King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Steven Biko, Nelson Mandela, etc, is hazardous.  But I think there is more to it.  I think that nowadays, Martin Luther King, Jr would be a blogger or have a show on teevee.  Then people would listen and be filled with endorphins of righteousness and then they would go to sleep.  So, it is fine with me that these kids are out in the streets, but they need to not be idiots about it.  Instead of rejecting Congressman John Lewis because he is a politician, they need to look back, further, and consider the road he walked to get there.  They need to think bigger-er.  Populist-er.  Smarter and harder.  Read a book about Dorothy Day, for a start.

 

Everly-delightful Anthony offers this, at great & edible length:

I think the problems of the US aren't so much not enough people doing good things, but ideological. And that they're ideological, they're also structural. (Actually that's a bit arse backwards Marxism but I digress).
One of the things OWP has done well is to identify the 1%. And it's not top hatted capitalists but a very specific group who a) in the balance don't seem to produce anything of net value (finance, private sector bureaucrats) b) have hoovered up practically all the growth in national wealth over the past 3 decades c) seem to also do very nicely out of the government thankyouverymuch. And it seems that most of the structural changes have been to advance the interests of this at the expense of the rest of the nation. They're not middle class and it's not trickling down anytime ever.
So yeah you really do need a New Deal because it had everything that fair (and successful) economies should have - investment in infrastructure and education, trust in government, belief in taxes, reasonable income distribution and beating the shit out of fascists. And if there's going to be consent, then you need to shift attitudes and for this you need propaganda and OWS seems to have occupied not only physical space but also media space.
Can they keep this up? I dunno. It's a tough call. Even science seems to have trouble getting itself heard these days. Could they be helping the homeless? Sure, a few of them probably do but how much more can they do than say a decent national mental health care system, support with housing, and employment for a skilled workforce?
As Morrisey said of Band Aid:
"The whole implication was to save these people in Ethiopia, but who were they asking to save them? Some 13-year-old girl in Wigan! People like Thatcher and the royals could solve the Ethiopian problem within ten seconds"

My OWS shopping list, a few of which they've done
- support and involve unions, they've go their faults but the 5 day working week didn't just fall out of the sky
- make the community a microcosm of the community you'd like. Is there democracy, are people listened to, are people helped and cared for, is there learning and discussion, is there tolerance?
- involve and communicate with the larger community. Leverage the smaller demographic of people who can hang out in square with the stories and the involvement of the wider community.
- ban drumming

 I do think we could use a new New Deal here in the U.S., sure, but we are not going to get it any time soon.  Never, not from these people, not now.  No one is going to systemically give anyone anything.  It is sad and bad, but it is not going to happen here.  Instead of running up against the system to win the right to sleep outside for a long, long time, the focus really needs to be about something bigger, like you wrote there, like I wrote then.  There are people who are willing to step into a paradigm shift.  Not bare-chested drummers, no.  Neither politicians.  But lots and lots of people -- let's call them the 90th through the 99th percentiles -- who are aware of the unfair distribution of resources and looking for a way to help build the bridge over that gap. 

So, could these aimless people in the parks galvanize themselves to think bigger?  Act literate?  Fill out paperwork?  File for 501(c)(3) status?  Bring a Doctors Without Borders kind of an operation to sit on the edge of our fruited plain?  Develop a program to apprentice the willing in a trade?  Phone-bank?  Fill a database?

People like to say, "Well, if you think [xyz], then you should take the initiative!  You should do it!"  Bollocks.  Volunteering, yes!  But do we have to do everything?  The whole thing?  I am not the one sitting on my thumbs in a park day after day. 

Like so very many of the 90-99%, I am really quite busy getting on with it.  But I will tell you this:  if Mr & Mrs Sloane got a call from the Occupy Wall Street Committee to Restore America's Awesomeness asking us to write a check for one of their programs, or come down to work a phone bank for 2 hours next Saturday, or canvas for a Saturday afternoon to raise awareness about the movement and what it was doing, not what it was yammering about -- you effing betcha.  Especially mounted against the backdrop of these dreary phone calls starting t0 roll in about the Obama re-election campaign.  A little outsidery, paradigm-shiftery, make-it-happeny, extra-commie energy would be welcome.  Exciting! 

 

The Nutcracker mines mean we eat a hands-off Cypriot dish called tava almost every weekend.  The weekends we are not eating kokkinisto.  In any case, Mari is swooning in the wake of the lamb-shoulder's return.

Omg, Nutcracker mines!  Omg, volunteering!  The Nutcracker BattleAxe accosted me last week, "Don't tell me you don't have time!" she said.  Then she went on in this long-suffering way about all the things she has in her life besides her martyred Nutcracker BattleAxe Volunteerism.  Fine, right, but no.  I waited till she was finished talking -- pre-emptively taking me to task! for a demand she had not yet articulated!-- and smiled sweetly at her.

"I would never say I don't have time.  I'll just tell you I don' t want to!"  It was chirpy and just-right.  In her stunned silence, I slipped away.  It was almost like the time Medusa had to look in the mirror.  Yes!  Gros bisous, mon choux!

      

laughing forever

Fille is finishing up work on a series of scary fairies.

I'm pretty sure she is going to sell out, which is good because no one wants seasonal items left over.  Bisous!

blob

Of course, scarcely a day after I formed a concrete thought about feeling like I did not want to buy pumpkins, the Notorious Greengrocer had them in a great size 3/$10, and in the smaller, decorative size at 3/$5.  Then there were plants, also.  Houseplants, not seasonal, outdoor pot-tricks. 

 

I could scarcely contain myself at the thought of a 9-inch asparagus fern for $4, but I did, remembering all those asparagus ferns I fell for, hard, before they died.  I tried to tell myself this time would be different, that they would be ideally-located in a humid part of our house, with all the endless boiling, and all.  But good sense prevailed, so: pothos.  Whatever.  Unkillable, so fine by me.  I bought a couple more to take over to the sweet, dollhouse-living gals.   

 

This used to be where I had those two 3-tiered hanging baskets, the bottom tiers of which I have repurposed.  I initially installed them to hold, yk, onions & whatnot.  But it is bright enough in that spot that onions kept sprouting, so bright enough for a plant.  If I can get the watering right. 

Mr Fox keeps wanting to know if we will go with him to Occupy someone's Street, north or south, but I feel like, yk, no.  Hullo, Nutcracker?  But also, I am not interested in it.  I am not actually in the pursuit of a whole-whole lot of knowledge about it, but based on what I do know it seems as if it is a lot of wasted energy.  I am not even talking about the regrettable drumming.  All those people, milling around, full of presence, bearing the weight of who we all are and whatever we can each bring to something and ... they are hanging out in a park.

More than that, a lot of people are acting like this is a new kind of holding this space that exists at this time, that this is a wildly and freshly-inventive representation of the so-called 99%.  It is not.  (Omg, "Hooverville," is what Mr Fox softly interrupted to say to me when I was trying to articulate this earlier.  Gentle Reader, I was super-glad in that moment I only have sex with strangers.)  They seem to be lacking a lot of historical context, about a great many things -- all the sucking on Michael Moore's cock but the wholesale repudiation of Congressman Lewis?  But, ok, I am digressing. 

The thing of it is, it reminds me, in a lot of ways -- the volume of people, the willingness to submit to a gritty kind of existentialism, the current unemployment rate -- of the aggregated circumstances that led to the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps,  the National Youth Administration, Rural Electrification, the rest.  That period in American history produced things which endure, things that represent a chorus in time, a physical manifestation of the beautiful concert of humanity present in their overrated human microphone. 

I am not saying that there should be a demand for some kind of top-down New Deal offer put forth by Washington.  There will never be.  The quiet desperation of the masses is only half of the story of the New Deal.  If you know your U.S. history, you know the other part -- like a hand in a glove -- is that FDR essentially called a meeting with all of the nation's barons and said, "You get to choose how you part with your money: you can write a check now, or you can wait for someone to loot your shit later."  Billionaires must have been smarter then.  Perhaps they knew a lot of history.

What I am trying to say is that I wish that the Occupiers would find a way to reflect the values they claim to embody.  Yeah, yeah, I get it, they are not hanging out in a park!  They are living joyfully and interdependently in their tent cities with libraries and solar panels and potlucks and cell-phone stations and haircuts and whatever, but it just feels to me -- if this is really about social justice, and not just about being a 4-year revolutionary -- like it needs to be less insular.

It needs to think bigger-er:  teaching children how to read, repairing the broken shit in apartments in which are residing old people and the disabled, training the elderly how to use iPads, running a mobile hospital, something more tangible.  Something that allows others to be involved in other ways besides a physical presence in a public square somewhere -- by donating more goods or more services or more professional credentials or whatever .... even just cold, hard cash.  I hear Warren Buffett is dying to write a check to someone! 

I mean, people in wooden necklaces mumble this all the time so much that it has become a cliché, but it really fits here, that I wish they would be the change they want to see in the world.  Gil Scott-Heron wrote America's revolution will not be a melting pot, but a toilet bowl,  and it is kind of that bad right now.  But this show of protest just seems like so much meandering in a passive resistance, bottom-feeding off of the shitty, dominant culture everyone already knows we live in.  This is a mass of people with time & energy who are kind of letting go of the opportunity to show people what can really be taken on, when we take back what is ours, what is everyone's.  But, whatever.  I know, I have now bored you to death.  Yes. 

I hacked out an apple cobbler this morning.  It was OK.  If I make it again & it gets better, you will be the first to know.  Bisous.

cockpit

Hello, blog. 

Man, all that endless talking to neighbors was a. exhausting, but also b. by the weekend, while I was sitting in the car, letting Mari drive, staring out of the passenger-seat window, thinking about i. how I had not updated my blog since ... when? and ii. what had I been doing all week? ... Oh.  Talking to people in real time with my mouth.  Like, while standing in their living rooms.  Yes.  It was a good series of thoughts to think.

Anyhow.  That was all over today, after I filed our intentions with the correct administrators at the proper meeting, and phew.  Concerns were aired.  Support was pledged, etc.  Residents who do not run in the same neighbor-y cliques as I marveled at my surgical charm.  While I knew our close neighbors wanted to stay focused on the Serious Business of Zoning, I v much sensed they wanted to bust out of there, getting down to some A-1 speculation about why it was that Fantastic Mr Fox was driving my car, yk, around, even with me riding delicately + with languid femininity in my own passenger seat. 

It was only because I had an official-paperwork exchange to make before the hearing.  It was in a sector with no parking, so he looped around in the car until we caught up again out front.  Magical!  Like having a Tuesday-Wednesday husband!  Or, a driver!  Clapping!

Additionally, what the fuck did I care?  At day's end, the car belongs to someone else.

Not to be all emotional about moving on in automobiles, but our car has had a great run.  Kind of like Iris.  The writing has been on the wall for years, that this car was not going to last forever.  We were so fucking spoiled by that Legend, its 170,000 miles with not a single fucking issue, other than regular wear & tear.  This car was fussy and kind of lemony from the start.  Car-people have tried to placate us -- Oh, blahblahblah, it's off of Audi's assembly line!  Ok, and I have to say, I have driven Audis and it really is the exact same damn car -- sometimes people do not believe the trouble we are having with a VW so I tell them it is really an Audi & they relent -- but anyhow.  The car doesn't work.   

Maybe something went wrong in the making the circles into lines.  Bleh.  This last summer, the transmission started to have major difficulties, instead of the eccentric, finicky demands of the last 4 or 5 years.

When I say "major difficulties," I mean that it would sometimes go in reverse while in gear to drive. Monday night I could not get it into reverse and, while attempting a 3-point turn, almost ran into a large sign on a masonry footing. Most of the time, with city-driving, I would be revving the engine at 35,000 rpms to get it to second gear.  See what I mean?  Not good.  The trip down to South Carolina was without incident.  Wonderful.  Great.  Goodbye, car. 

I have spent so much time sitting in this seat, for the last 11 years.  122,000 miles does not seem like enough.  Thank you for the good times.  For all the naptime driving we did up & down the 6-lane county highway when Fille was new & Garçon was 2.   

For all the late-night, twisty, singalong driving I have done with yr sunroof open; all the ridiculous 2-lane highway travel all across the American South and Ohio's coastal highway; yr zippy responsiveness that time the dude lighting the cigarette came close to creaming us.  I will really miss your luxe interior, with its heated seats and genuine wood trim.  I will not miss yr broken glove-box hinge, yr mysteriously vacuous windshield-wiper-fluid reservoir, nor the way you blow hot engine air into the cabin.  In fact, I will not miss any of yr (frankly) inexcusable cabin-design flaws.

I will miss yr stereo + 6-CD changer most of all.  Most of all.

 

Yet I am on to a new adventure.  It should be fine.  It is funny, because everyone who knows cars is super excited about this car that is twice the age of ours and twice the mileage.  Everyone except Kowalski, who was adamant in his counsel that we just buy a new car.  Fuck that.  I am not going to pay $30,000 for a car and also pour $3000 in gasoline into it every fucking year.  No!

All I care about is not being stuck in first gear at a green light, honestly.  Mari says if we get 15,000 miles out of this car, great.  Then we can be on to the next $1100 car.  We have a new rule, though:  there is no goddamn eating in this goddamn car.  I mean, of course we will, but we can aim high, right?  I want to get the windows tinted and drive around pretending to be deposed royalty!     

I have a blister on each toe from my stupid high-heeled shoes, which I stupidly wore bare-legged and bare-footed.  I was whimpering, a little, after the hearing, on the way back to the car.  ("This grouuuuund is too haaarrrrd!")  Fantastic Mr Fox offered to carry me, and I refused, still a little whimpery.  No, because Mari will be mad if you drive our car and drive me around in our car and then also touch me plus while rescuing.  But thank you.  I meant all of it.

When I called Mari to dish about the whatsits and wherefores, I mentioned this exchange to him.  He agreed it would have been a little much for one day.  I know!   

Oh, anyhow, no, wait, I remember:  I was going to say that I was thinking, yk, Oh, blog, casting it in the light of all the richly-textured face-to-face relating I had been doing.  But then! messages and missives began pouring in about the yogurt cake's deliciousness + success!  Even from 3/4 of my people who did not know what from Italian plums!  I thought that was pretty neat, too.  Gros bisous!

parenthetically yours

Monday, Mari was home & some curious alchemy of him + our children got me encrossened (Cross out this family!) and I peeled out of here to go to the gym.  Bye!

On the way to the gym, I realized I could go to the Sadist's class, which I have not done in an age.  I first started skipping because I had some mysterious malady, remember?  For the past year, I have felt well enough (read: not too much like I would fall down) to go, but Mari has been away on Mondays and Sadist Class is scheduled at a weird, mildly-frantic time of day here.  On Monday, I walked away from all that.

I got nervous, ariving at the threshold of the studio, because, yk, Ow.  I weighed my independent-study options -- lap pool, rowing machine, StairGuy -- but told myself that it would all be fine, that Tuesday's time with Pilates Chick would work that all out.  Which it could have, in a way, but the Sadist had two words for us yesterday:  Bosu Balls.  I got through the class, but the jellified feel I was left with when we were done ... portent of doom. 

Then, Pilates Chick today was super-happy to display her merrily sadistic side, even as my locomotion could best be described as slithery.  Man.  It hurts my abs just to type this.  It hurts to brake the car.

However, I am not dead, so I will be stronger and thus, you know.  The Marines used to say, in their recruitment collateral, that pain is weakness leaving the body.  Ok.  I can not even muster up the energy to chew on a slice of cake, is how exhausted I am. 

It did not hurt me to take this photo.  All this baking and picture-clicking was Monday before delayed-onset muscle soreness set in.  I was still euphoric then.  Impervious to the louche charms of baked goods, yes. 

  

 

It is the standard yogurt cake.  I trust you -- fellas, you know who you are -- to all be able to find yogurt & pears where you are. 

Fille said, "Can you make yogurt cake with anything besides pears?"  I thought of this as a ludicrous question until I realized it was not.  It is not called yogurt-pear cake.  But my mother (and later, I) never made it with anything but pears.  It was like banana bread, for pears.  I hate banana bread.  I like yogurt cake.  This one was a little heavy on the fruit; I could have eased up.

Oh, omg, speaking of louche charm, Mr Fox came to dinner Sunday night.  Saturday?  The days are all mixed up to me now that my husband is on a different schedule.  Anyhow, love to dish, but I am not kidding, it is killing me to sit in this chair. 

Take three ibuprofen for me, every six hours.  Thank you.  One million kisses.