la femme follette

serenity

I knew that once I linked feeling bananas to my radio silence, there would be auditing.  Mostly, I feel like I feel fine, busy, birthdays, trips,  etcI would like to build a bonfire & pitch everything in our home right into it, but fine. 

I have not yet made it back to the gym.

I was catching up with Kowalski this morning between this & that (some kind of a day where before 10 a.m. I had already crashed a men's room in the interest of not wetting my pants), and I told him I would probably flesh out the thing we were touching on someday here, if ever I felt like documenting again, whenever the day might come.  I mean, I feel fine, is what I was explaining to him.  We just had an incredible vaca on top of my good, clarifying Lenten action & I feel like I might write in a lucid + revealing + secret-whispering way, yk, in that way that I like to whisper secrets right into yr ear while typing on the worldwide web, but I was not feeling like it.

He offered that maybe I was turning into a new person who no longer obsessively documented.  Before that chat, I was going to bring Creeley to my national poetries again -- relevant as Creeley's cagey candor always is to me and especially in the face of all the hardcore loving raining down upon me this last week or so -- and then Kowalski brilliantly changed the earworm from Must/ I think of everything/ as earned to in my plan to be myself/ I became someone else, so you can laud him or not whatever xo

	Lisa Jarnot - Brooklyn Anchorage
	Found at Brooklyn Anchorage on KOhit.net

Brooklyn Anchorage
Lisa Jarnot

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

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!

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.    

pie; maybe pancake

 

this old thing

Hi, yes, many things -- ballet, recipes, marital secret-keeping, knitting, homeschool redistribution of rights + resources, and I'm still holding out on Mental Hospital.  Totally!  Yet, I hope you came with yr Faygo Red Pop & a bag of Bugles, because this is where I am today.

1. I confess herein that when I read this story about the $300ish rent-controlled (huge!) apartment in the Village, my only & immediate reaction was What steps do I have to take to get married to that dude?  Because a rent-controlled lease conveys.  I would lock that shit down, honestly.  And if you know anything at all, you know it would be an Anna-Nicole level probate battle. 



2. Lana Del Rey:  I love her.  It is funny because the "Video Games" single started getting radio play at the end of November, and I thought it was being warbled by someone much older, more worn down, rode hard, put away wet.  Then I saw the video & was amazeypants at how young!  Which was something of a topic already afoot here in our house vis à vis Adele & her really off-base cover of this song how she has this gorgeous, rich instrument of a voice which she mostly uses to belt out a lot of chirping (she is the beltiest chirper!) about Facebook misunderstandings.  Additionally, the realization upon her death that Etta James was 22 years old when she recorded "I'd Rather Go Blind" and wow.  22!  Ok.
   
   
3. Because three different people have asked -- three being a holy number -- regarding the late, great Etta James:  I was in fact subjected to "Sunday Kind of Love," endlessly, vituperatively + yodelingly. 
   
   
4. I went with Jolie to a Fancy Town estate sale on Saturday morning.  I was kind of into it, but was mostly along for the ride.  Then I saw this bag, behind a neatly-organized Imelda-style pile of stuff inside of a closet.   
   
   
   
   
   
   I have always wanted a Louis bucket.  Always.  Mostly -- and this I think maybe only Charlie will recognize -- so I can pull that Upper West Side powerplay of What, this old thing? when necessary.  OK, but a good girl reared all Franciscan-y in the Midwest can not avenge herself in that way with a bag for which she paid full-price, even as that is the spirit of the manuever.  (If you would like to split the hair wherein a Franciscanette from the homeland should not avail herself of the wordless clawing in the play, I say to you: When in Rome.) 
   
   I took it to the sales directress & told her, "I will take this for $12."  I had the bills in my hand and I was ready to deal.  She was aghast and gave me the once-over.  Ok, so speaking of when in Rome, I was outfitted Rome-ly, mostly just by straining under the heft of my left ring finger, but I bring it, a little. 
   
   She said patiently, as a person who is surely used to dealing with skinflints, "I am afraid $150 is the best price I can give you for that." 
   
   
   The fact is, this bag is no longer in production. The one that is, its closest cousin, is almost 10x her best price. Whatever. 
   
   I gaily explained to her that I could give her $25. "It's a purse," I finished, calmly, as if she were a sister who had fallen under the spell of a powerful cult leader. 
   
   She countered, explaining to me in a kind of brittle tone that it was a Louis Vuitton.  I held up my hand while my mouth dropped open a little.  I gasped.  Not so fast, it all said.  "This purse has a tag in it that says it was made in America."
   
   
   
   
   
   It does!
   
   If you know, than you know that little paper tag is the most authentic authentication a Louis Vuitton handbag can have.  She did not. So she apologized, briefly, and told me in a hurried way $12 was fine.  Can I just say that Mari has no idea what this all means, except that obvsly for once I was charged the true value of a handbag.  Lord.
   
   
5. Let's talk about teevee: 
   • Mad Men.  Due to some knitting willingness since the summer, we have finally watched the entire first season and a couple of epis of the 2nd.  Why is it so slow, this show?  This show is like the guy at work who is always like, yk, "Oh, man!  How was yr weekend?  Oh, I had a great weekend!  Pret-ty great weekend.  Oh, you had a great weekend?  Whoa, maybe you don't know from great weekend, brother.  Wow, etc," zzZzZzzzzz all to get you to say, What did you do this weekend, which you do not because you do not care.  It is just like that!
   • Weeds.  I started watching Weeds however many years ago that I first found it on DVD at the library, maybe 4?  I am just now on Season 3, is it?  Where U-Turn keels over & his pal smothers him.  I described that episode (who knows why?) to Mari & it is now a joke between us to stand in our new lexicon for crocodile tears.  U-Turrrrrn!  one of us says, to the other, melodramatically.  Ha, ha-ha.

For some reason, writing about crocodile tears reminded me of my senior-year English teacher who had the hots for me -- we were an entire classroom of girls all agog at his condition, like, "Dude!  Seriously!  Jailbait!  We're all wearing douchey uniforms!"  I mean, he never touched me or said anything pervy ... he would just stop talking in the middle of a sentence sometimes and everyone would look up & he would be staring at me.  My yearbook is covered with references to my mind-control powers.  He was the one who had me do the presentation of "The Miller's Tale."  God, I totally wonder what happened to that guy.     

 

sleepy

Mari has been home since Thursday, hanging around.  I have been mostly lying around, usually in bed, knitting.  We went to a hockey game on Friday & again on Saturday.  Overtime periods galore.  

 

 I am not sure if this scoreboard is a message about the Mayan prophecy or maybe something regarding Lunar New Year, or even perhaps the Father + Son & Holy Spirit.  But I took a photo, just in case we need to refer back to it. 

 

Mari & the kids were supposed to go to NYC yesterday, but just could not extricate themselves from the cocoon of our home & all of its food in the fridge.  Yawn.  I thought he was going back to the office Wednesday, but he said he goes back to the office, yk, sometime.  Like in the olden days.  Yum.

 

I took some of my knitting time to work on a sampler-stitch swatch for the Granny Square Knit-Assembly.  An actual swatch is being knitted.  I mean, I think this is the first time I have ever swatched.  No, wait: I swatched a long time ago for Kowalski's first pair of socks, because I was not sure how the yarn would knit up in the round.  I wound up not using that yarn, nor that pattern.

Usually, I just start knitting the thing & then check the gauge when there is a fat lot of fabric.  If the gauge is off, I rip it back.   I know I am not the only one.  But this time, with the pieces and parts & all the sewing, I want to make sure that I know how many stitches to cast on for my finished size. 

Valentine's Day is out there, on the horizon.  I am longing a lot, as is normal & usual & well-documented at this time of the year.  At least no one has almost died yet in 2012.  Jesus. 

I was doing the holiday cards in December & Mari said to me, after watching for a while, "Are you really going to write a personal note on each card?"  (There were 75 cards.)  

I said, "Yeah, I'm sending a card, right?  It's personal, honey."

He shook his head and rifled through the pile of already-personalized cards.  "You have really got to send valentines."  He just can't let that go!

 

After a slow & grating beginning, I am loving Pinterest.  So much, yes. 

 

Mrs Israeli & my Favorite Youngest Son are on their way to Tel Aviv right now, so safe travels to them.  Bisous for you all.  2012!        

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!   

 

 

reformation

We had oatmeal pancakes for the first time in a long time for New Year's breakfast.

I am notorious in my pancake-hatred; it is as nearly renowned as my ketchup-hatred.  My instant appreciation of these made the rounds fairly quickly, with some pretty significant people rushing to their griddles to find out what had wooed me thus. 

They are not a pretty pancake.  In fact, the greatest feedback I received was complaints over their failure to turn, their breakableness, which led to v many a-ha moments with old friends regarding an invitation to consider their ideal coloration of a cooked-pancake.  It was one of those things that lingered with me for a while, this kind of knowing about a guy's ideal pancake.  It stood there, taunting me, a testament to a thing I had long tried to sidestep and sidle by.  Anyhow.

Anyhow, we like them and they meet our needs.  Mari made bacon to go alongside for the two of us, but meh.  Pancakes are enough already.  Now oatmeal + bacon:  that is breakfast high-rolling. 

À bientôt, j'espère.  Also:  Fuck 'em, Bucky.  xox

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. 

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!

      

metaspherical

I hate my calendar guy to be stuck on the previous month, so even though I have been suffering from Becky-itis, I forge ahead.  I thought about NaBloPoMo, for a sec, 'tis the season, but even if I use Alex as a model, meh.  It's funny, I did it last year because I thought I had such a great time when I did it three years ago, and then after about a week I remembered:  No, a great time was not had.  My earnest examination of the Jolie-Aniston conflict remains a low point in this blog, for me.  Also, now that Mari is working from home much of the time again, I mostly just want to lie around in my chonies listening to Wilco + The Beastie Boys, showing off my conjugal zeal.

 

I made panisse today, to go with our boring soup.  They are pretty.  They are also pretty easy, but people who can eat croutons and beignets and hot-water cornbread can live a full life without ever having these cross their lips.

Anyhow.

 

I was hard-cooking half of our last dozen eggs this afternoon, the beginnings of egg salad, thinking of sending a wry text-message to Fantastic Mr Fox about how since last we talked about my family's egg consumption (five days ago, when he was in a position to pick up some local food for me), we were down by three-and-a-half dozen!

(Four dozen eggs, he scoffed then.  Four?  then he laughed for real, plucking the $20 from my light grip.) 

But my handheld was in another room.  So, I was thinking of his forty-eight-egg amazement, while I frowned over the quality and capacity of the bubbles in the water -- is this a simmer or a boil here? -- and I noticed the price tag on the egg carton read $3.25. 

I remembered those eggs -- those particular eggs from that particular farm -- being $3 the last time I bought them, but I guessed I was wrong.  But I had instructed Mr Fox that I would like him to pick up 4 dozen of "the 3-dollar eggs."  And yet!  Lo, on my kitchen counter, the eggs that were on my mind!  Those are what he brought me!  Even though my instructions were flawed!  He stepped into the breach and bought the closest, most-likeliest item!  Then brought it back to me!  There was no confusion nor chaos! Nary a cellular-phone call about how no $3 eggs existed in the marketplace!  No empty-handed return with the mournful tale of the missing eggs!

I know for a fact there are four of you reading this who may be a little stroked-out in yr chairs right now at the very idea of such luxury.  I know!  He is like an electric boyfriend. 

Mari was going to ask him to go on a little neighborly outing to chainsaw up a fallen tree -- yk, for firewood -- the idea being we could share it between our households.  I was just in the middle of murmuring, Oh, that sounds like a fine way for you two to pass the time when I remembered something Algren said last week.

"Oh, that sounds like a fine way for you -- mmmphrrgl!  No!"  I threw out my hand to Mari, ready to grab his forearm if I needed to make him see my point.  "You can't do that!  I saw this years ago on an episode of Law & Order!" I clung to him a little, fretfully. 

"No accidents, honey!"

Seriously!  Didn't you see that episode?  You should tell me all about it because I only remember the germ of conflict in it.  They went rock-climbing?  You know?  Ahaha!

Omigod, speaking of Becky-itis's irate-message component:  No to all of you!  Mr Fox is a grownup!  He is my age!  If he were a child, I would never think he was foxy!  Does anyone know anyone anymore?

I really did try to be less awesome that one time.

Let this day be ever remembered as the date Scheherazade met Jack Bauer.  It was amazing, and everything any one of you has come to expect from me.  It was, I think, my finest moment.  Mari said, to me, after my report, while he brushed golden stardust from my low-cut, flatteringly-twirly cloak, he said, Who are these motherfuckers in the world who have never read Sun Tzu and thought to act accordingly?

Weaklings, is whom.  Whose enemies are data-mining their egregious displays.  I was amazing, and I would love to tell any one of you about it, as long as we are on a secure line.  Let's kiss!

 

I am in receipt of a message along the last week from each one of my cookalong pals to tell me they do not know Italian plums.  What?   

 
 

Here they are.  I spotted them yesterday in the market called prune plums.  They are not like regular plums, they are less-watery and firmer, more texturally similar to a grape than a plum.  Or the difference between a peach and an apricot.  They just came into season, now.  If I can find them,  I am confident any one of you can, unless you make me think of upside down.  But, yes! 

 

I am so busy with the start of everything, the clusterfucking, snackpacking, lunchmaking grind, and also, falling ill.  I can not tell (because while I am amazing in a great many ways, with the light shooting from my fingertips and the ends of my hair and all, I am kind of a dope) if it is seasonal allergies or a good old-fashioned cold.  In any case, whatever.  I took a Claritin-D, 4 advil, a shot of feverfew tincture, and a tall drink of Emergen-C.  One of those things will help me. 

If you are keeping up with the SodaStream Chronicles, please know that I purchased one, new in the box, from a young lady via the Craigslist for us$65.   À bientôt! xoxo.   

bun

Ms Minty was in São Paulo a couple of weeks ago, and she let on about her exposure to pão de queijo, which, you know, yes.  I had this long talk with Sal, while I was using one of his two (!) blenders, about whether or not I had ever eaten these as a girl, like did I have some long history with them, because I "dated that Brazilian guy."

"No, I didn't," I corrected him.

"You did.  You went out with a Brazilian guy," he insisted.

"I did not.  I went out with 4 Colombians, a Costa Rican, and two guys from the Pyrenees, one French, one Spanish."  I was irritated, a little.  "Also, a guy from Buenos Aires I completely fucked over, ugh."

There was a long monologue of certainty, filled with error, intended to refresh my memory of the Brazilian suitor.  It was only irritating because I knew for a fact I was right.  I mean, it wasn't irritating because someone else was telling me about my romantic history.  No.

Just recently, Eve and I were remembering some event from our past and when the name of a guy who was a necessary part of it came up, I said to her, "I forgot all about him!  Omigod, did we have sex?"

"No," she said.  Then she reconsidered.  "Well, you know ... I don't think you went all the way."

"Wow, ummmmmm," I racked my brain.  "I dunno."  (Meanwhile, Mari: completely agog.)  "That guy's file is really smudged up.  I'll have to take yr word for it, Evie."

But the point is that the long, biographical testimonial to Proof of Brazilian Suitor drew to a close, finally, and I said, "No, that guy was Welsh."  Honestly.     

Anyhow, these cheesy tapioca buns are a great idea, even better if everyone is sodden-upon from museum-going in the Irene-beset nation's capitol.

 
 Stock photo, from my own food studio, lol.

 They are cute, aren't they?  Like Kogepan.

I used sheeps' milk feta, if you want to know. 

Anyhow.  Oh, hurricane!  Whatever!  My God!  Where to start?  How to pick a lede? 

We are not at home, obvsly, at the tail end of some great, quality, earthshakey visiting at Sal's.  Friday afternoon came and Sal was home from the office when the children & I returned from museum-going. 

"I think you should leave the children with me and take your husband to the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City.  They have a fabulous, Canceled-MLK-Dedication rate of $129!"

I demurred, Sal insisted, etc.  I resisted firmly and with finality on the grounds that I had every intention of seeing the Stella/Kandinsky exhibit at the Phillips Saturday morning, plus also I had no desire to pay for parking and after last time, I just wanted to ditch the car and walk hand-in-hand on my romantic getaway.  Sal made noises about a downtown hotel and I put the kibosh on him.  Then we all four went to meet up with Mari at the Hirshhorn for the Friday Sculpture Jam.

Saturday, we were half-lazing, half-headed out to duPont Circle, when Sal began again in the campaign of our Saturday to Sunday romantic getaway.  I allowed that it would be taken under consideration when we returned.  When we did return, I announced in my hyper-organized way that after a hot dinner, when people could think clearly, we would make some decisions. 

Right after dinner, Sal's roof started leaking.  Omg, quelle horreur!  Measures needed to be taken and it is a good thing that Sal was not home dealing with this crisis -- getting up on the roof, nailing and fussing in a driving rain, mopping and swabbing and relocating porous items -- with only my dumb kids for company.

After we got that sorted out -- and thank God Sal drank down the bottle of vodka soon thereafter, because I was feeling pretty susceptible -- we were pretty wired and wondering what else we would have to fare.  Not to mention fretting a little about our own house, faraway, sitting in the path of the storm.  We replaced our roof entirely 10 years ago.  We live at the top of a hill.  I was worried about a power outage and what of the chest freezer's wares.  (Everything is fine there.  And here!)

We tucked ourselves all in on the sofa sectional to watch National Treasure, and everyone wanted something high in carbohydrates to eat.  More buns!  With blueberry jam! was the most-repeated idea.

But we did not have more feta.  Also, I had already chucked the jam into Sal's freezer.  And while I had heard tapioca buns are interpreted in Korean food with no cheese, just sesame seeds, I was nervous to leave out the fatty binding of cheese in a pinch.

I mean, they would probably just turn out like a popover, right, sure but ... do you know what has cheesily-similar properties?  Chocolate.  Fatty, solid till it melts, etc.  I swapped it in, gram for gram. 

 

They were ok.  A little less puffy, but that could have just as easily been due to my distractability.

They reminded us of chocolate-glazed crullers.  We discussed this, the three of us, long into the night, mesmerized by the endless Irene coverage, listening for the pattering of water on our strategically-placed Mylar blanket-carpet; a first-alert system for the failure of the Great Hurricane Roof Hack. 

It was not the richness of a cruller, but the chewy, slightly-sticky texture and this slight reminder of  a cruller's egginess -- more similar to a churro.  I could have done a better job grating the chocolate, but I do not think I will repeat. 

 

The chewy, totally-unphotogenic, mochi-ness of the interior is the same as when it was cheesy.  But the sweetness of the chocolate is not enhanced by the bun and the bun is not brought forth the same as with the salty unctuousness of the cheese, but anyhow.  Maybe with a fattier, saltier chocolate? (Valrhona.)  Yes. 

If there were a recipe, I would totally dedicate it to secretly Santos.  xo         

screw

All of my gym clothes are too big, which, yk, go-go gymgoing, but anyhow.  One morning a couple of weeks ago, I did not make it to the gym because my pants would not stay up on the walk from the car.  HauteLook had a Marika feature a day or two later, so good. 

 

As proof of how get it over with I was about it, Fifille said to me, while I was taking my back-to-school photo here, "Er, Femme?  Are those butterflies on yr pants?"  Yes!  I don't know!  It's fine!

Omigod, the EarthquapocalypsssssszzzZzZzZzZzzzzzZzzzZzZ.  What?  Omg.  People are calling, people are texting, I have no idea about their outpouring of love + concern -- Are you all all right?  -- for the first five or six missives.  You know, I was thinking this morning that Santos prob has 5.9m earthshakes all the time & she never talks about it & I never hear.  Here is my Earthshakey, True-Life, Non-Events Account. 

I was sitting in the dining room, closest to the back door, waiting for AAA to come winch my car out of Sal's driveway.  I heard the tow truck approach.  I realized it was not a tow truck.  I wondered if Pam and Addison, next door, were getting their floors refinished.  Why hadn't Pam mentioned it when I saw her?  Exciting! 

But, it could not be a floor sander.  Our floor was noisy all over.  Oh, it's just trackw-- Er, the Metro doesn't run under Sal's house ...   

Here is the only interesting thing about the earthquake.  As I began to realize -- and this was all very rapid-fire thinking, I think the whole thing lasted a minute? -- that what was jouncing the house was not mechanical vibration, I sifted through to my next conclusions, which were in this order:  a. terrorists, (no. no, that can't be right) b. Ohhh, earthquake.  (Earthquake, what the eff?)  Terrorists first, though, you see.

It is also, I think, worth noting that if I had never sat though a similar event in Los Angeles as a child (I thought it was mechanical vibration almost till the end then, too), I never would have concluded earthquake on my own.  I mean, Jesus, Sal has a tensionless, oversized, venetian blind propped up on a dining-room windowsill that unravels, clattering all the way to the floor, if you bang the door too hard.  It stayed firmly-fixed in place all the while.  And honestly, I thought these people in Washington couldn't shut up about snow. 

Let us now call, on this rare, leisurely morning, the roll of honor.  Oh, I am in receipt of yr other emails, yr voice mails, piling up around me in drifts, with their accusations of "slipping that in."  Yeah, I've got yr slipping it in right here. 

1. What's up with the boozing?  Do those 5 words look familiar?  I wrote them, last week, in that order, which is the very definition of not slipping it in.  After I wrote a love note to a long-lost cocktail.  I was not trying to get away with anything.  Things have been a little grim on the inside here.  Grim.  My choices were a. have a drink or b. have sex with strangers, but never c. drink a fifth of whiskey plus have sex with strangers.  That would be overreacting.  Grim!? you say.  Honey-bunny, cupcake, do tell!  Obvsly, in dribs and drabs, as I process, I'll write it here, like I have been for years.  Unlessssss you refuse to stop reminding me you are data-mining here.  That makes me shy, you know.
   
   
   
2. The Fantastic Mr Fox.  Again, I wrote all about it.  What else is there?  Hubba hubba.  Remember for all the long years we have lived in this nominal college town the joke has been building about my Fantasy Grad-School Boyfriend?  He was going to be old-enough so as to be interesting, tidy, there would be no cartoon characters carved in the butter at his well-appointed, grownup's house.  There would be no Legos on the floor to stab me in the bare feet, a claw-foot tub, the walls papered with pages from the Kama Sutra.   Oh, hahaha, how girlishly we embellished this hilarity, the kernel of which -- as I recall -- was a throwaway line about how I do not care for young men.  Well, it is like we dreamed him and he came to life.  And he is sssssssssssmart.  So let me press myself against halacha in this matter and never be alone with him.  For starters.  Also, cling to what is good, because if we all think back, we can remember that in times of despair, I only have sex with strangers & he is not one!  Phew!  Mostly I reflect upon 2011's Lenten action to avoid saying anything stupid.  I already did say something stupefyingly stupid, though.  It was pretty awesome & right up there with the Amazing Freudian Slip for Lillo of 1997.  But since then, I have applied myself to the lasting lessons of privation, again.
   
   
   
3. The weekly appointment with a team of cleaners.  Ok, I did sneak that in, a little.  But not on purpose!  Because it is a lot of writing and I was placemarking.  Plus, I am still working through a lot of it, in addition to just completing the work that I have hired them in order to be able to do, because they are not supposed to be a permanent staffing solution.  I can keep my own house clean, in normal circumstances.   
   
   
   
4. The baby, Fille, going to the beach with almost-total strangers.  Yes.  She made friends a few weeks ago with a same-aged girl from the only other truly-granola homeschooling family I have ever met in real life.  Coincidentally, I finally met the patriarch of this family a day or two before she met the girl -- they are outstanding civilians in our town, I have just never met them.  I do not cultivate people, you know.  But I liked the dad -- he is distractable, yet sharp, and he talks about everything as if you already know it, which is fine by me because I like to pick up as I go.
   
   Fille & the eldest girl (there are five) got on strong and when they called about 18 days later to invite Fille to the beach with them for the day, I said yes.  It was funny, when I stopped round to their house later, the girls' mother told me she'd told her husband before he called, "You said she seemed shy, she doesn't even know us!  She's never going to say yes!"  And all of that is true, but they did not invite me and Fille is not shy.  Also, these 2 kids of mine are old enough now that they can judge what makes them comfortable, they are big, and they have a lot of liberties.  A lot. 
   
   Which reminds me of a funny, idiotic presumption Dr Bombay made -- Omg, you are with them all the time.  Am not, neither!  Less & less every minute!  Why, every day this summer -- except for driving to ballet class and/or guitar lessons -- they have been at the pool, or the library, or the park/playground, and I have been right here at home, getting shit done.  They experimented with public transit!  One time this summer, one of my kids was out past 10p.m. walking home from the library 6 miles away & he got a ride home in a police car! (We will never let that go, the surprise in that suburban hike & the realization that no matter what, if he could do that, at least some of our job was done.) They feel appropriately-agéd and everyone is happy.  Anyhow, Fille had a blast with her pal and I was glad we have made their acquaintance.  Especially a house full of granola-homeschool girls.  OMG SQUEEEE. 
   
   
   

Speaking of the roll of honor ... I will write down this neighbor story in league with Becky, who is who she says she is and stands by her words.  (Obvsly, but she seems to have to explain it a lot.)  Is it the reporter's problem if a subject's profile makes the subject look ridiculous?  No.  If you did not know that, look it up.

So, pursuant to the topic of Quotidian Freedoms, no one else's great, big children are going anywhere by themselves, or even with siblings.  I get that.  The people in Ballet Town recoil in horror when they find out the children have been trained up on commuter rail-riding.  Whatever.  You know ... people can chauffeur all they want, but we bought our house on this side of the county line so that we would not have to drive children around like the King and Queen of Siam until which day we just gave them a set of car keys. 

All the publicly-transporting is new, but on the ground in our town, our kids are on their third blissful summer of free rein.  It started out with baby steps four years ago, but by now it is just two feet and a wristwatch, go with God, be where you say you are going to be, follow the route we work out, be home at [whatever time].  Old news. 

Last week, the kids wanted to go to the park and I said it was fine, sure, be home by x o'clock.  Then they nanced around on the block a little more, nancing the way they do, yk, getting distracted, running in & out of the house.  I told them to let me know when they were Actually Leaving & went back to what I was doing inside.  During the Nancing Period, they got mixed up with their pals who live across the street.  Presumably, there was more nancing.

I had to rebuild this from an amused debrief, but it seems what happened is that the Follette children said to the Neighbor Kids, "We are going to the park. Want to come?"  (The Neighbor Kids are the same age -- 12, 10, set of 8yo twins)

Neighbor Kids, or a representative, whichever, whatever, went to ask their mother, Ms Mixed-Up, who said fine, good, whatever.  This was at the same time as Fifille ran back here to shout through the screen door they were leaving.  Good riddance. About an hour later, I was in the garden, swearing, and Ms Mixed-Up drove by.  She stopped, and called through her passenger-side window.  "Oh, is Mari home?" 

No. 

"I mean," chuckling self-consciously, "of course he's at the park."

Mari is in Washington.

"Are the kids here?" 

 No, they are at the park. 

"But one of them, yr kids ... are my kids here?" 

[blank look, says only,Ne comprends pas.]  What? 

She got out of her car, and frankly, in retrospect, she was a little aggressive toward me, considering she was the dope who didn't know where her own kids were.  "My kids said they were going to the park with you." 

I thought about this for a minute, then responded.  "No.  Your children must have said they were going to the park with my children.  I'm here, at my house, obvsly.  My children are at the park, possibly with yours, it seems." She processed this, quailed, raced back to her car & sped off.

See, Ms Mixed-Up has had this problem of chaperone-presumptionbefore with me.  It would seem to me that when she heard my kids were involved, she would think to double-check the situation were supervised to her liking.  Jesus, yk, hers are the same damn kids who came down one day a couple of years ago to play thinking I was hosting an indoor playdate.  No.  Children belong outside, playing.  Especially six of them.  I gave them a pitcher of water, all the outdoor toys + games, and plastic cups.  They live across the street!  And then Ms Mixed-Up --  now that this is all rushing back to me, I remember -- hovered around outside between our houses, who knows why.  So I invited her in for coffee, and when she accepted, I let her in and firmly shut the door behind us.  Ahahaha.  I thought of it as a Queen of the 70s intervention.  Ok, that was a little bit mean of me to do to her, but honestly.  It still makes me snicker.   Anyhow.  That is just a little something I slipped in with fullness.  Ok, that's racy!  MmmmMmMmmmMmmmmmmmm.

Ahahaha!  À bientôt!                   

cranky hour. drink specials.

• I will start here:  I don't know who Rick Perry is.  I don't want to, because look at how he's got you all so worked up.  No, you can't tell me.  No means no.  I am not going to let you rub it on me.  I'm not even going to put my hand on it.  No.  Here is what I will whisper in yr ear, while you get all heated up about the GOP primary, determined to show yr current-events stuff, etc, I'm going to blow your mind:  Remember McKinley.  Yes.  Didn't that feel good?

 

• On the way to Washington last week, all I could think about was the large, ever-present bottle of Rose's lime juice in Sal's refrigerator door, and how I would immediately upon my arrival be putting it to its best use, the vodka gimlet.  Sadly, the only vodka Sal had in his lair was Grey Goose, but you know what?  I said fuck it.  I will take those lashes in hell.  I had quite forgotten about vodka's tingly, rubbing-alcohol aspect, like drinking the snapping of rubberbands.  It had been almost 20 years since my last gimlet, a sweating glass perched on the clawfoot-caddy thing in the bathtub at Mr Kowalski's.  So far this past 7 days, I have had four of these tangy, scurvy-preventing cocktails.  (I know, I can hear you, What's up with the boozing?  Shh.  Later.)

 

• Also, related to drinks: if you know the SodaStream story, be advised that it ended with me pouting & asking why I had to jump through hoops & Mari asking why I just didn't tell him I was going to buy one, instead of volunteering to jump through hoops.  I said, still pouting, "Because that is not how Lucy Ricardo would do it!"  Then he told me he was not Ricky Ricardo and I was like, "Ugh, again, I know!"  Yes.

 

• Speaking of antics.  Yesterday the Fantastic Mr Fox was was returning an empty CSA box to me.  I had my hands full of cutting flowers to arrange, but called him from the screen door into the kitchen.  I told him I wanted him to take half of a huge cantaloupe -- no one will eat it but Fille & she can't keep up.  I asked him to stay put just a sec for its receipt while I was rushed to finish snipping the huge mass of flowers, stems underwater.  While my back was to him & the water running, he got down the cutting board, a knife, and neatly halved the cantaloupe that had been sitting on the countertop.  I saw none of this until he asked, indicating the half that was to stay, "Do you want me to wrap this?"  Um, foxy!  Hubba hubba.  No cocktails around this guy!  Children always right where they can see us!  Mmmmmphrggggl.  Have mercy!

 

• On to neighbors.  Mari is home.  He reported shortly after his arrival that on the walk home he encountered our around-the-corner NIMBY neighbor who asked him a weird question about me being home from rehab.  WHAT THE HELL?  Because Mari is null-gangster at the oddest times, he did not ask her WHAT THE HELL?  So, I marched right over hill & dale to do just that.  Mari scrambled to catch up with me because he can sometimes be a moderating influence.  He also knew that I was people-revved from a homeschooling-antisociable event today.  Vroom.  Let's open it up, now. 
  
  I let him lead while I stood, fixing Ms Nimby with an expectant gaze and a foot-tapping countenance.  She said, "Oh, I can't remember who told me that.  Just, yk, people talk."  She apologized for repeating gossip, said she did not even know what came over her, she was just trying to make conversation with Mari, repeated that she could not remember who told her such a thing, just, yk, people.  
  
  I brightened up, sweetly, empathetically, and leaned in -- close and understanding, just between us girls-- and told her, with great compassion and big, blinkety eyelashes,  "Oh, I know.  Those are the same people that go around telling everyone you tricked the lady who owned [Ms Nimby's rental property three doors down from us] into signing the deed over to you while she was on her deathbed."  I nodded, somberly, sorrowfully, fully understanding our plight in our little 2-gal canoe.  Sharing is caring!  "They say," I told her, full of grim reality, "you stole it from her family." 
  
  It is true, that this is what people say about her.  It predates our residence by many, many years, so I have zero idea as to its veracity.  I made a tsking kind of a face recognizable to all midwesterners.  People.  Fie on them. 
  
  She protested, there may have been spluttering, and I just nodded, full of her protest's gravity.  "Yes, Ms Nimby," I told her politely and filled with sympathy.  "But that is what people say about you, nonetheless.  So I know just how you feel."  Then we wrapped up after a little gardening + zoning-board chatter and Mari & I sallied back home together, me leading Mari by the hand a little, as he was still reeling at the katana's prowess in my assault.  When it is surgical, you don't get any blood-spray all over you.  You can walk right in & make a cocktail.  Also?  Don't start nothing and there won't be nothing.  Bitch.      

 

• Related to rental property.  Remember this whole land-barony project of Mari's?  Oh, Mari?  The guy who is all summer in the office with Very Important Client Face Time on Steroids?  Oh, the one who has not been available to manage his land-barony project?  Right.  It has not been a problem, I would not say, but this was not supposed to be my freaking thing at all, see?  Anyhow, there were 3 friends living there -- two renewed their lease for a year and one left.  I got some of the lowdown on why they parted ways while I was doing the girls' year-end walkthrough last month.  Of course, the young man did not leave his key when he moved out and has not responded to anyone's messages/missives about any of the end-of-lease stuff, not even where to send back his security deposit.  We four decided we would wait until 30 days-ish had gone by before taking any steps. 
  
  When I was reviewing with the young ladies about this & a little more random-feeling dish this morning, on an adorable speakerphone-call (they work together, the girls), they told me something that chilled my blood and I asked, trying to keep it even-toned, "How old is [Mr Roomie]?"  He is 24.  It is certainly possible I was too stricken by that one episode of ER, where Lucy was killed & Carter was turned into a drug addict, but it sounded the super-hecks like the onset of schizophrenia to me.  The locksmith flies at 8:30 tomorrow morning and I might not sleep until that very minute.  Fingers crossed.  Keep the cocktails coming!        

messages. messengers. angels, too. nyc.

If you know my work, this might be a no-brainer, but about five years ago, after a NYC reading I gave, in the post-event glad-handing and well-wishing, etc, a guy told me that my work was as if Gil Scott-Heron wrote love poems.

If you know me, or maybe if you are a close reader here, you already know that I am of the opinion that most people talk too much, especially to me.  Plus, also, people are always in the world saying things, so audibility obvsly does not confer veracity.  So, I did not think too much about it, besides a regularly-gracious response to the guy's positivity and some polite, mildly-anxious chitchat. 

I had not thought about his assessment for years, but then last night, Alex tweeted a link to "B" Movie, referring to it as "lesser-known" -- which ... I guess one's acquaintance with it depends upon whose house it was in which they were reared -- but anyhow I was listening to it for the first time in a very long time this morning.  It was different from, say, the extra-iconic Revolution or Comment #1, in that with those I have maintained such familiarity that in some ways I do not even hear them any more when I hear them, if you see what I mean.

After the third of fourth time he lays out the solfège of his score, if you will, it started to remind me of a number of my own poems, not with its relevance, nor its power, not at all, but with its flexible, unspooling tenacity and its endless references to 20thc popular culture, his wordplay and repetition.  There was this use of cultural references that one might not have thought to use in an exegesis of his subject, but they of course, once composed, made a perfect, unbeatable image in their new context.  Just like the guy tried to tell me. (Sorry, guy.) 

Anyhow, so this morning, after I made this connection, all of a sudden it felt so personal to me, Scott-Heron's death, his life and what he leaves behind. Not to mention the manifestation of a heretofore unrealized pervasiveness in a culture such that he could influence me without my knowledge, without my intent.  It made me so sad -- big, splashy, raindrop-sized tears kind of sad -- this belated realization of this incidental mentorship.  Because I like to give credit where it is due, and also because it was that awful feeling of losing something I never knew I had, when already I am grasping at every shred of currency from my childhood that has power and reach in my real life.

Besides everything else about him, when you listen to his work, read his candor and conceptual assembly, it is kind of depressing that everything he turned upon with his laser eyes is still a stupid problem today,  In general, it is a bad time to be in a retrospective position toward his work, because when you listen to so much of it now, with our shitty economy and sad people and three American wars and all the kind of bullshit of current events I never chitter-chatter about here ... it is super-depressing.  On top of  all of that, now he is dead.

I really am surprised at how sad I have felt all along -- even all of the 15 hours before I figured out he was my imaginary patron!  Much of the sorrow is because 62 is way too young to die, like, as a number.  But specifically, it feels sad because the last decade of his life seemed so painful for him -- filled with addiction, there was imprisonment, there were allegations of fiscal duplicity -- and now he is gone.  It is over, and there will be no late-in-life redemption. 

Now he is late and great, but I feel like it has been so for some time.  He has recorded, and performed, sure, but while seeming like a ghost, rambling around his own grand, haunted castle of greatness.  Last summer, there was a profile of him in The New Yorker, where he reveals a great many things, among them that the last CD he recorded is, to him, someone else's project.  That it came about, he said, because someone else was really interested in making it and it didn't harm him.  It was -- to use the very apt word of an old colleague -- heartbreaking. 

I think a lot of the reason his death feels so sad to me -- if I can mix some metaphors -- is because it seals the deal on what was already a hard pill to swallow.  Anyhow.  I love this interview with him so, so much.  "I consider myself a piano player." 

Adieu, que Dieu vous garde.

Time
Elle Case

My memory hurts from time. Time
kneels on the ice, pushing sawdust into
the crack, eats a piece of apple pie with
cheese. I will have to suffer more intensely
than I would have if I had accepted the
sufferings of time. Time attracts hum-
mingbirds. Time has the Midas touch. I
have more tone than ever, but still not time.
I want to correct the appearance of lines
and wrinkles, as in some of the works of
Kafka, where particular details of time are
directly translated into a temporal reality.
Time got Janet Lee Bouvier a Reno divorce,
then made tasseled buttons in Central Park.
Have I asked time for too much? To grow old
with my love, see our children grow up together?
Time is surrounded by ashes. Imitating time means
imitating time's virtues, love for penance. The world
pours out tremendous adoration, but time rears us
normally. Time shovels Cheerios, compresses the
lower back, keeps on keeping on. Time doesn't
love us for who we are, time will leave us.

my equilibrium. my car keys. my pride.

I want to get this all down, even as I should probably devote my life to silence.

 

This statue of the Virgin is outside a convent on Capitol Hill.  Honestly.

Earlier this year, Kowalski's mother was dying, ergo, the Zac Posen Showdown, for starters.  Mother Kowalski took her time, months.  Listen, we should all want the same consideration as was afforded to her when we are that age, but it was so long by the end I could not remember when it started.

It was all upsetting to Kowalski, for a number of reasons -- some beyond the petty censurings of presumption, none of which I have permission to unravel here -- and it was upsetting to me.  First of all, I am a great fan of Mother Kowalski.  Second of all, Kowalski is extremely dear to me and his distress -- his wide-openness -- was palpable in every direction.  He was confused and confusing!  He was unpredictably and uncharacteristically emotional!  At the randomest times!  While I was cool about it, the fact is that in February I sent a confessional email to a friend that read, partially, and [it] feels every time like his hands are all the way inside my pants.

So, first of all, that was obviously not his intent, and second of all, My Issues.  Let us review the lasting lessons of sweet talk's forbearance, right?  Before sweet talk, my tactics were much simpler -- Oh, all this confessing is making me uncomfortable! I can take yr mind offa that.  Look at these.  Nice, right?  Come here.    

But that is a thing of the past, because, yk, married.  Also, the lessons of that Lenten action endure.  But, man, even as unguarded as Kowalski was, I could still tell he was holding back at least a good 40% of his inside voice.  I worried, even as I knew he would never let on there was anything to worry about, and if ever I did reveal my fretting, he would shut up tight, and so lose his only outlet for processing.  So, I devoted my life to a beatific silence. 

I spent a lot of time -- weeks and weeks -- holding the phone to my ear with my hand clamped over my mouth, just listening.  Many times, we would end the call and what I was left with, what I had not said, oh, it would burn so hot and I would lie across the bed, exhausted, and think, What I need, what I need, is ... is a cow's fur purse.  Also, a cookie.  Just one little Taiuti cow's-fur purse and two little almond-flour cookies.  Nearly every night, this went on for months.

Even after the Zac Posen Standoff, I did not really put the distresses together.  I mean, kind of, in a piecemeal way, but it was not until I hit bottom that I realized I was having a Systemic Issue.  Even then, I did not know why, but I knew something was up.  I do not, yk ... Catholic girl and works of charity and all that?  I am a shopper but not a buyer.   

Normally, looking in a store is to me like viewing in a museum gallery -- it's just nice to look at it, nice to visit the stuff, ooh & ahhh, know the prices, investigate the market, touch things.  Forever.  Let us not rush into any kind of relationship.  If I buy something then I have to be the caretaker of the [whatever]!  I have to find a place to put it and govern its use and I can only have/wear/carry/display one thing at a time, so, yk, really. At some point -- and this low-water mark varies by individual, I think --  acquisition becomes more about something besides the thing being acquired.  I could buy all the nice things in the world and then hole up in my house with them on the shelves, in cupboards, in the rafters, but really?  Come on! 

It is ok to appreciate nice things, maybe even to want them, but for 23 years straight, I walked in the waters of Jesus saying that if you want to be complete, sell everything you own, give the money to the poor.  You will have treasure waiting in Heaven, stay with him.  But I also know what Judaism tells us about the reality of humanity, what Buddhism says about everything being fleeting and in turn.  It is ok to look at things, to appreciate them.  Lots of times, when something is so perfect and I am so filled with wanting I almost can't breathe?

 

Invariably, I take a photo of it.  Or I draw a little diagram of what was so neat about it.  Then I go on.     

Also, really?  How much stuff can a person really love?  Look at Gollum, ok?  The Precious?  One ring.  Look it up!  I have a terror of any kind of hoarder-like behavior.  Just because it is clean and also Elfa Shelving was hoarded and installed does not make it less odious.  Look at Imelda Marcos.  Right?  Yes.  Not that fetishy, one-note materialism is not its own problem.  Look at Gollum, and again, The Precious.  Look it up!

I do, however, love shopping.  Love, love, love, true love.  Shopping & I don't go all the way, though.  I like to go out with shopping and flirt with shopping and sit in a dark bar with shopping, just a tiny bit too close and just a smidge too docile while shopping tells me a story full of the truth of who he is, borne along by his fourth or fifth cocktail -- that is all fine.

Mostly, I stick to the staid respectability of Buying.  Buying is not the same as going all the way with Shopping.  Buying is different -- a utilitarian endeavor.  There is a lot of buying in my world, there has to be, a family of four eats a lot of food, uses a lot of soaps, the children are always growing.  My relationship with Shopping gives me the information I need to make critical, factual, informed decisions about Buying whenever I need to, instead of just being distracted by advertising or end-cap displays.  It is much the same as banging every guy in the county gave me all the data I needed to make a sound decision when a guy would turn to an idea about having, holding.  Buying is about What Is Real.  Shopping is about Possibility.  I think. 

But whenever the Shopping's seamy charm starts pressing up against me while I am Buying, it is always a sign there is something else going on and I need to walk right out of the store, immediately.  In the past, I have referred to this trouble as Cake Mind (cake! cookies! cow's-fur purses!).  

I go back & forth:  was hitting bottom this last spring the impulsive designer handbag?  Or was it the cat food? 

I bought a Foley & Corinna bag -- exactly like the one I own, but in red -- from the clearance page at Piperlime.  The day that it came ... ugh.  It felt exactly like every time a sweet, dopey guy I banged & wanted to pretend never happened would finally corner me somewhere.  It would sink in for him  -- slowly, pooling a little on the surface -- that I had been avoiding him deliberately, that I had very little interest in ever seeing him again, and surely not with his pants on. 

 
 

It felt so fucking good to buy that purse.   Just about as good as it felt to let a guy do whatever he wanted while he was too drunk to remember, because I was never as drunk as I pretended to be. Standing in my dining room, I remembered how heady it was, the buying, how loaded it felt.  Holding it in my hands, I did not want it.  (I already have one just like it.)  Also, it was non-returnable, which I know must have appealed to me when I clicked so many times to get it to my house.  It was like going home with a townie stranger who lived in the next county -- there were no backsies once I boarded that pickup, and I was never going to run into him at the library.

The truth is -- while it is much, much cooler to say that I hit bottom with a fancy-bag -- I definitely hit bottom at the Petco.  We had to buy cat food.  Mari dropped me off in front of the door and waited in the parking lot with the children.  What could go wrong? 

The cat food we normally buy was shelved next to another, similarly-nutritive, cat food which was and remains significantly less-expensive than the one we were using.  That second cat food was on sale:  if you bought 10 cans of food, sale-priced at 25% off, you would receive a free 3-lb bag of their kibble. 

This meant that I could buy their usual kibble, feed them the new canned food with what was left of the old in transition, and have a 3-lb bag of kibble to mix in toward the end of their last bag of current kibble, thereby transitioning them to the new, similarly-nutritive, but significantly-less-expensive kibble. 

 My home-ec hoarder response kicked in, somewhere in it my amateur animal-nutritionist decided to employ a more gradual switchitive solution, involving a half-bag (6lbs) of kibble mixed with a 3-lb bag of new kibble, for a week and then adding a second 3-lb bag of kibble, thereby increasing the new-kibble to old-kibble ratio, which is better, and then, once they were switchified, obviously, they would be eating this new-kibble, and they are giving away this kibble three pounds at at time! 

Are you even following this?  Seriously!

Shopping was breathing his breath in my ear, menacing me from behind with one hand wound in my hair and the other trailing along my thigh, sneaking under my hem.  I sank weakly to the floor.  Sometime later, I came out of the store, shaken and stunned.  Mari pulled the car around to help me unload the cart.

 
That was me, with Shopping.  Mmmmmmm.

"Hey," he said, totally casually.  "Why'd you buy so much cat food?"

I burst into fat, raindrop-sized tears and sobbing.  He was all, yk, Wait!  No!  What'd I say? 

When I explained it to him, he was sweet & listening, reviewing the receipt while I told him, about the shopping, and the confusions and the Cake Mind and the distractions.  The great deal on kibble. 

"It's fine, honey.  The math works out, and it's just cat food, they'll eat it.  It's fine."

More crying.  That is like saying it's ok because it's beer and not whiskey!  You don't understand!  More crying, again.

No one actually envies Mari, you know.

This realization did not stop me from going into stores, however.  The MAC store encounter was pure defiance, a taking a triple-dog dare, like the Joplin lyric -- nothing left to lose.  Some among you will realize this schema of mine.  I felt so beyond any kind of recourse.  It was a four or five days more before I gave Shopping a hard little shove with the edge of my foot and shut the door firmly against his pleas.

A week later, maybe 10 days, Mother Kowalski let go & went gently.  Adieu, belle-mère,  que Dieu vous garde.  After that, there were things to do -- the situation was actionable, in every dimension -- formalities were addressed, also frailties.  Still, my house was topsy-turvy (still!), Mari was away at the office 5 days in a row each and every week, kittens kept getting sick, and still, as far as I knew, I was incapable of walking into the most ordinary stores.  

Baseball came back!  The weather improved in every dimension!  The children had their birthdays!  I busied myself thinking less about the possibilities of shopping and more amusing myself with the potentialities of Pretend Adulterous Sojourn with our best pal's brother!  Yes!  Forget about shopping!  Distract bigger-er!  Yes!  I went home, with my family, which was a whole project that I put on almost all by myself! It was great!  It reminded me of everything I love about Chicago and why we will never live there again.  We saw friends older & newer, everyone so dear, and everything was just right.

I came back, and felt right as rain.  Then my wedding anniversary was right away!  Two small getaway codas, it was good.  So good that on Wednesday,  I thought about how the windowboxes around back could use some color.  It was rainy, so we headed out to the nursery because I knew, rightly, that it would be deserted.  While I was there I was told by a fellow gardener -- who spotted me longing after a hanging basket -- that 10-in hanging baskets were on sale at the greengrocer for $6.  Ok, if you know anything about the cost of live, seasonal decorations, you know that price too good to pass by.  Just as a principle!  I mean, for God's sake, there is a recession in America and a $6 hanging geranium is going to keep everything afloat in every direction!  Great!

 

I bought a hanging basket of geraniums for the backyard, and also a few 4-inch pots for the window boxes, more 4-inch annuals for the pots back & front, plus also three hanging baskets for my next-door neighbor's porch, as long as I was there.  This is right when my home-ec hoarder kicked in a ilttle and it started to feel a little crazy.  At the same time, I texted a sweet pal about something else & added at the end a desperate plea for direction.  She sweetly and empathetically went in a bunch of directions and it snapped me out of it.  I re-focused and bought a last basket for the ballet school's courtyard and left, dignity intact.  It was a success.

The trip was such a success that I decided to brave the Target store to see if Tuesday's inventory report from their website was accurate, if there was indeed a far-flung, mid-county store which still had both colors of the Calypso St Barth's elephant teapot.  At the greengrocer, I was already halfway to that store.  Ok, sure.  I am game.

The store did, in fact, have 2 pink teapots and one blue one.  One.  Now, I did not know if I wanted pink or blue.  I had not actually given it too much thought, since I did not actually expect to find myself confronted with them.  Oh.  Hm.

 

Shopping was all over my Buying.  Shopping likes to watch, you know. 

I like things in pairs, because I like symmetry.  I like that color of blue that the elephant teapot comes in, as evidenced by the number of mid-century pottery's occasional dishes and console bowls I have in that tint.  I wanted to buy the pair in pink and the one in blue (Clean them out!), then take all three home and decide.  I could always return any I did not want.  I might decide that a single elephant teapot would do ... or a single in each color.  Or something.  Fine!  Easy!  Breezy! 

 

I bought some other stuff while I was there, but none of it was a big deal.  It was not anything I went in to buy, per se, but serendipitous, non-fantasy buying is not a problem.  The baby availed herself of a couple of the cute Calypso tops on prominent display, while she tried those on and fussed + dithered, I went over to the beauty section to check out the Calypso St Barth's travel cases.  I traveled a lot in April and I needed something differently-organized to hold my makeups & grooming goo; I saw one of the cases online and it looked like just the ticket.

Then I whiled away at the kind of incidental buying I hate to get bound-up in:  when it is something that we need & will use, but for which could have just as easily postponed the purchase.  So, hair elastics, bobby pins, Advil, mascara because it is probably already time to throw out my current tube, to keep things hygenic, and the same for the pot of creme eyeliner, fine. 

By that time, Fille was back with her selections, we took our stuff to the checkout, I had to try & run the math of Is It Better to run this charge on our Usual-Miles Card or on the Stupid Target Card & get 5% discounted?  OH!  Right?

Anyhow, back to the matter of the elephant teapots, both in my head and at this point, in this (unending, I know) narrative.  I was squeaked down in a weird part of the county, where two Target stores are about 4 miles apart.  I thought I would cruise by the opposite Target & see what they had, teapot-wise.

The children were complaining about this next errand.  I told them I wanted to have a pair and what if I did not want the pink ones and further, what if I let the having of a pair of pink unduly influence me into having a color that did not actually satisfy me?

 

I am surprised, actually, that Fille did not tell me I sounded ridiculous.  She generally will intervene in a redirection if she thinks I have lost the thread of a trip.  "Mom, what else do we need to get here?"  is her best line.  I have found out since that she was certain she preferred the blue to the pink and did not wish to dissuade me.  Which is why the next trip drove her out of her mind.

When we got to the second Target, we were closing in on the lone, blue elephant teapot on the shelf.  The stores that we were at had them on end-displays, facing the main-traffic aisle of the store.  We were maybe 4 aisles up the aisle-road.  It was midday, the store was kind of empty.  There was a woman in the center aisle, walking toward the teapot, and as I picked up my pace, I let my brain actually formulate the idea that I would take it from her if she picked it up before I got there.

Then I kind of watched that plan of action swirl around in my head.

If you are in on the Tolkien joke, let me point out to you that my birthday is on the calendar.  I was totally going to strangle this lady, and take my teapot birthday present deep into the Misty Mountains.  Totally.

So, I took a casual left into coffeemakers and griddles and whatever and had a few deep breaths.  The woman did not buy the teapot, and I kind of did not want it any more, because, duh.  Both children were satisfied, "Great, let's go then!"

I know, you probably started this thinking I was the girl of yr dreams, finally, and now you know I am just as messed up as I have ever been, but prettier somehow.  Or, you are a stranger who never really thought anything of me, but read along out of perverse curiousity and now you are sure I am weak and oversexed, at a minimum, and a cheapskate, plus am going to go bald, lose my teeth, and turn green.  Not at all the junior philanthropist I could be if I applied myself.  Anyhow. 

We all like the blue one best.  Just the one, actually.  I don't know, maybe if I had two, but I could get one on eBay ...

 

Mari says she looks just like Dumbo's mom in the part before she goes crazy and wails on those kids.  He is, of course, completely into it.  Happy Mothers' Day.  If you read all this, mother or not, I salute you.    

may flowers

Good Lord.  I have so much to document and no time to sit here. 

First of all, spring's front-door decor is on.  So much more about that some day soon.

 

 

Also, the sweet kitten we called "Groucho" who became "Secret Squirrel" and also who is the "Baby Cat" in the absence of any littermates.  She has -- you can see it if you squint -- markings on her front legs that, when fitted together, make a heart-shape. 

 

We had a cat with heart-shaped markings once -- this is the same goddamned cat, I swear.  She disdains everyone except Mari, who she also refrains from biting, same as Daisy.  God.  Of course, if she were to live here for another 10 or 12 years, I would be crying my eyes out at the end, but right now, she is a pain. 

 

Look at who else is here.

 

Yes.  Exciting!  It is extremely busy here, while I keep the home fires burning for Mari, who loves the endless challenge of his work, and of course I am always glad in these times that he simply has a freaking job, but the toll of all that housepainting and the whole-family travel and all has caught up and might be like a big snowball blocking me at every turn.  It feels like I have a little house in Pompeii ... busy.   

superspleen

April 13 is a day that will live in infamy for how hateful and prissy I was.  All day, I was jerky and unrelenting in my scowling resentment of people who just do not do it the way civilized people have agreed.

 

Also, I made an almond-tart kind of a thing from Mark Bittman last summer (two summers ago?) to test its waters again when I get to the gluten-free matzo-brei-ing of 2011.  (I know! A verb I made it into.  More about matzo brei later.) 

 

I was not feeling judgy, is the thing.  To me, judgment is more acceptable, or at least not so taxing.  I don't know.  April 13 was all about me feeling personally encumbered by people not following the rules.  Inside my mind there was a lot of pouting and throwing myself to the floor in protest of the unfairness of the way some people just do whatever they want, in defiance of agreed-upon, well-publicized standards.

It reminds me of a time when we first moved back East.  Some slutty tramp from our homeland, a woman of literal ill-repute, with whom Mari had the most tenuous personal and professional connection back home, started emailing my husband.  I happened to see the first communiqué while I was at his office, using his email (this was 14 years ago, it was a different digital landscape) to ... I forget what.  I mean, it was me sending email but I do not remember the details. 

I responded to it, as myself, totally Minnesota-nice.  I can only recall part of it, and it was so empirically offensive I can not even print it here, for fear the eyes of some people I love will be burned right out of their heads.  (I totally saddled up the patriarchy and rode all over her.)

I can not believe she ever recovered from the blood loss, however, she sent another email, a different time, when I happened to be there again.  It still makes me laugh, how frustrating this must have been for her, to send these missives in a pneumatic tube to a man far away and then constantly have his carpet-bombing wife replying.  Ahahaha.   

Anyhow, the point is that after the second email I got a phone call from a mutual friend.  "Friend."  He was actually a friend mutually between Mari and the Lowlife Creeper; he was an acquaintance of mine, due to the fact that I was married to a pal of his and also, I banged his roommate a couple of years before.  The "Friend" was upset on behalf of the Lowlife.  I told him, in my reasonable voice, that he should go fuck himself, that it was categorically unacceptable and anti-social to personally message a married man about getting together, particularly when no investment had ever been made in the wife. 

Remember the Facebook chart?  Yes.  That is drawn from the annals of polite society.  Oh, sure, it's spruced up a little in parts with an Eastern Promises flavor, but honestly, yes. 

The "Friend" protested that this was not the world in which Lowlife Creeper lived.  That is when I got angry about it.  Lowlife Creeper was not adhering to some misunderstood, undervalued, authentic, aboriginal paradigm -- she had bad manners and bad behavior.  Then, she went around and disingenuously whined pitiably to a bunch of other cretins about my reasonably-firefighting pushback from the ramparts of the dominant culture.

"Let's presume she is not a liar," I seethed to "Friend,"  "That's unlikely, but I'll play along.

"It is reasonable and expected behavior, not some secret protocol.  Watch the news, watch Oprah, watch fucking Blossom.  Show it to [Lowlife Creeper], you stupid troglodyte fuck."  Then, with great, button-pushing satisfaction, I beeped the button on the cordless phone & ended our chat. 

No one actually envies Mari, you see.

Anyhow, it was just like that. 

Looking back, it started on April 12, at the vet, witnessing the lady and her unspayed cat with the obvsly-old injury of a mangled, bleeding tail and her refusal to have the cat spayed while being docked because it would be an abortion.  Of kittens.  Gestating in a cat she obvsly already could not care for adequately.  Omg whiskey tango foxtrot.

The dénouement was in an unfortunate scene in Ballet Town, where I was to get my hair cut.  We ran into one of the Ballet Moms while getting Fille takeout spanakopita for lunch.  While Fille was chattering her up -- I will have no truck with this woman -- she said to the woman that she thought her mother was pretty.  The woman's mother, this is.  Well, evidently, the pretty old chick is the babysitter.  Whatevs, right? 

No, not whatevs.  After Ballet Mom scathingly set Fille straight, she started lecturing Fille on the importance of not making assumptions.  It wasn't just a little educational-aside, like a primer that the child can follow up on later.  She was super-worked-up and lecturing her in this harridan's way!  When she stopped to take a breath, I said to her super-airy, super-sweetly, super-(Minnesota)nicely, "Oh, you know, kids, right?  How was she supposed to know you would let a stranger spend so much time with your children?"  Then I grabbed Fille by the bicep and we were gone, gone, in a puff of smoke! 

The rules of comportment being devalued were not esoteric!  They were the very imprint of Western Civilization!  I am writing these words while mired overall in a book about Friere's educational theory and feminist pedagogy for schoolchildren, so the ridiculousness and irony of my culture-worship is making me laugh and laugh while I am typing, but I am totally serious!  What the hell, people?  Come on!

 

Spleen
Frank O'Hara

I know so much
about things, I accept
so much, it's like
vomiting. And I am
nourished by the
shabbiness of my
knowing so much
about others and what
they do, and accepting
so much that I hate
as if I didn't know
what it is, to me.
And what it is to
them I know, and hate.

     

dayenu

When Gracie, the cat, went into heat the first time, Mari pointed out to me at some time during all the antics that he was really glad we had always just spoken openly about sex with the kids.

Yes.  Because how else to explain the cat rolling around on the floor and just acting weird.  She was also helpful as an illustration -- with Garçon and Fille right on the brink of their respective gender's adolescence -- of how hormones make an organism all goosey-loosey and just plain weird.  This will make sense to you soon.  You will yowl, and roll on the floor, and then fall faint, exhausted; in a metaphorical way.  You will see. 

 
 

This is SexCat.

When Grace, the cat, went out of the window, back when she was still fecund, he was the cat we found with her huddled under the porch.  He was one of two cats that were always trying to get into our house while she was in oestrus, but he is the one who was most persistent.  Also, the cat who won the territory dispute with the other.   

We had Grace fixed just a few days after her out-the-window/under-the-porch episode.  That was months ago, in January, I think.  Because she was coming into heat when she had her surgery, she "stayed sexy" for a little bit, as the vet explained.  One night, about a week after her surgery, she escaped, rolling around in the dark with him, foiling all attempts to bring her back inside.  Then she rolled around and howled for days more, inside.  All night.  It was a grim time. 

She has been going out these last couple of weeks, as previously described.  The first day I let her out, I spied her in the backyard, in a face-off with SexCat.  I went to the back door & opened it and she streaked in with SexCat on her heels.  She came in, but he did not.

I told Mari he was sexually harassing her.  And what the hecks?  Why?  Since being spayed, she should just not even interest him, I would think.  I mean, I do not have a degree in Feline Sexual Behavior, but I did take biology and sociology courses at university.

This morning, I let her out -- super-early for the weekend, because I like her to be back in before people start yard-working or minding business that is not their own.  Forty minutes later,  Garçon was waiting at the front door for Mari and their Haircut Trip.  He called back to me, while he was peering out the window, "Uh, Mom, SexCat is out there with Gracie.  I think he is harassing her, like you say he always harasses her."

We opened the door, and Grace was clamped to the doormat, with her tail firmly wrapped around herself, growling, while SexCat was climbing all over her.  

He is so dumb.  I was glad Mari saw it, because I have described SexCat as a cross between Pepe LePew and Jack Black as Ben Franklin in that one "Drunk History" sketch.  (I don't get it, we fucked in the snow, we fucked that time under the car, I don't understand what the problem is.)     

We let her in and rebuffed him with a plant mister.  Then she crawled into a box in the dining room and hid from us.  (Omg! Poor thing!)  Mari said, "I think I will make that cat doorbell.  She needs a cat panic-button!"  Then he left with our son, while I was fussing over our patchwork doll & admonishing the icon of dumb old SexCat.  Have we not all known a guy like him?    

 

SexCat is sitting on my front porch even now.  He is under the mostly-dormant table festooned with the rag rug that is there for UPS to try & obscure our left-packages, staring down our front door, waiting for Grace.  He has a pretty meow, fine, but doesn't our girl have a right to be on her porch & breathe freely. 

Fille asked, "Can I pet him?'  I was so incredulous, because no!  We are not getting involved with any more outside cats, ever. Also, SexCat?!  He doesn't even know no means no!

 
 

Fille said to me, in her patiently-informative way, "Mom, I think you mean RapeCat."  Yes!  Omg, it works, all the talking!

  

 

The Portion Accruing to Ears
Alice Notley

(From her 2007 book, In the Pines.)

I know, from its primacy
shadow follow down over European
clutch of tones the same
I know shadow or clutch, so

whatever is told to you, no waiver
I was there, you can say
nothing accrues in safety           and no one safe
why should you be, or make sense?

all she wore was lace. why not?
or something else. treason, why not?
quote, the only thing I'm sure of, a
            kind of metric
but that thought don't I see, gone and for-
give. You do not have a light
to shine on me. I have it.

pie: out like a lamb edition.

 
 

X. xx. 2x.

Fille's BFF, Emily, came over Saturday, for a part & parcel birthday reprise.  Fille wanted Emily to come along to the museum exhibit she had chosen for her actual birthday and then for dinner + cake.  I had to remind Fille her birthday was a Friday and Emily would be in school.

It made me laugh when she said, "Well, Mommy, it will be educational."  I told her I would ask Katharine & sell the education of it, but I would not hold my breath.  Meanwhile, we could plan to have Emily over the next day, for leftover birthday cake & a movie, maybe & toenails-polished, or whatever.

 

Emily is great.  Mari keeps saying the girls are going to get into trouble during the late-teen years, that it will involve college boys -- can I just say?  Living on an Ivy League campus makes every girl's dad into a legitimate Ambassador of Dullsville with the whole spectre of College Boys Looming.  I wish I could make that bigger.  Loooooooooooooming. 

One dude from our neighborhood has young daughters, the same range as my kids, but they also have an older daughter, and he said that he would paper campus with photos of her face that said something like UNDERAGE, I WILL GET YOU IF YOU TOUCH HER, or whatever.

He would tell this to everyone, regale them with his crafty strategic offense in parenting against the Looming (see above) Spectre of Sex-Crazed College Boys.  One day, listening to this for the umpteenth time, but conditions being right for me to pipe up, I explained to him that it sounded like a good idea, sure, but what it actually did was create a situation where if ever she is doing bad behavior or trying to sort something out for herself, strangers have something to leverage against her.  Strangers will have something to manipulate her and that will make her weak in the world.    

I had to explain it to him, going over it, backing up and making it smaller, like the Jay Smooth of Reviving Ophelia, for way longer than I would have thought a literate person needed cultural exegesis.  By the end, I had the fullest attention of a half-dozen playground dads, and I was not even using my eyelashes or talking about sports.  Also, and I did not tell them this, because it would have just confused them so:  I would so totally rather find out my jailbait kid was trying to get into a bar crawl of fraternity houses than huffing paint fumes and smoking nutmeg in some loser kid's basement before he finger-fucks her.  Aim high, Fille! 

But, anyhow, yes, I am sure that Fille & Emily will get into some kind of impressive trouble on the order of a a Judd Apatow production if they are still friends when they are teenagers.  I have known girls like Emily and also girls like Fille.  Probably what will happen, if they stay their course, is that Emily will decide she wants to do something racy or risky (and patently absurd) and Fille will say "Omg, no, we can never because [Theresa the Little Flower's reasons x infinity]" and Emily will say, "Fuck this, you never want to have any fun. I'm going with or without you, Fille."  And Fille will go because she will not want to abandon her friend to the vicissitudes of stupidity and then my telephone will ring and someone official, probably from the campus police, will tell me they have two girls that seem like they might be Fille & Emily, but with different names than the ones they were given.  Yes.

I told Mari that it is fully ok with me, because Emily is essentially a good girl with a good heart and girls with goodgirlitis like Fille would never have any fun if they did not have a daring pal like Emily.  I think the real problem will be with what is sure to be a difference in parental response between the girls' houses. 

Anyhow, allow me to put away my crystal ball.

 

Emily fits in pretty well here with our directed-loafing lifestyle.  The girls spent the first hour catching up while playing with the remaining kitten and a laser-pointer, which is about 6 times longer than I ever would have guessed that could keep them busy.  I drifted around, doing housework in the background, until they said they were ready to do one of the craft kits I set out, the flower one.

It was way too labor-intensive for two little girls.  Lots of cutting & tracing and then a lot of menial labor to stick the flower together.  Floral wire!  Floral tape!  Emily comissioned me to cut her tracings, at the same time Fille wanted me to trace more petals for her.  I had Fille do all the cutting, and I finished up the petal-tracings.  It took a long time!  We tabled it for our next visit! 

 

I gave them a snack and then they went upstairs to draw on each other.  They said they were going to draw on each others' butts and, I mean, honestly.  I just asked them not to draw anything lewd, and no drawings of naked people.

By the time they got around to assembling their own pizzas, they were deeply into a round-robin of saying "Amazeballs!" to everything.  Emily asked me while they were eating if amazeballs was about balls or testicles.  I told her I never wondered about that and I did not know.  Then I counseled them not to say it out in the world until I found out.   

 

You might notice, if you squint, there is pepperoni on both of those pizzas.  Fille asked if she could & I just told her it was, yk, up to her.  "Between me and my Pork God?" is what she said.  Cheeky, but yes.  I mean, she knows where meat comes from.  She read Diet for a New America andthat Michael Pollan book, plus that other one ... that 3-names Brooklyn guy?  Mr Three-Names?  Dunno. 

They sat around, ate pizza & sparkling grape juice & chitter-chattered while I knitted in the adjoining room.  I asked Em a bunch of clarifying questions after her account of the arduous standardized tests her class just finished last week.  It was a nice visit, I really enjoy Emily a lot.  She is a truly enjoyable child. 

Fille & Garçon each have one other friend and together have two more friends I do not enjoy.  They are not engaging and also slow-witted in the way where they look at me, slack-jawed, when I express an expectation.  They are low on accountability, which is a direct consequence of a child having no autonomy.  What I do not get is that somehow, simultaneously, these kids run the show at their houses.

There is some kind of element working there, which I don't really get, but as far as I can see, the kids manipulate the parents because they are smarter than their parents give to their credit, or something?  Not smarter, maybe I mean savvier.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like the children are in a rebellion against over-control about nonsense?  And maybe the parents cannot figure out from day to day which battle they truly wish to pick?  I do not trust my read on that fully, because I have a billion issues-on-the-inside with parental over-control about matterless shite. 

What I do know about the parents in question is they are the very same ones with whom Mari & I have this stigma of permissivity.  Mari & I are not permissive in any way at all, except about stuff that is none of our damn business.  To call us permissive is to miss the whole point of what we are and are not doing, as ridiculous (if not more) as trying to show us the brightly-lit way to NVC.

I was thinking about all of that this weekend, and then watched this video from Wisconsin last night, thinking maybe it is just our midwesterness expressing itself in parenting.  I mean, those people look real regular to me, and their kids are cleaned up and not-mumbling and clear, having the choice to make their own decisions about stuff that reflects their values. 

I don't know, but the point is that these other kids are not my favorites.  In the spirit of keeping my enemies closer, I deign to have them over more than I would like, which is just about as much as the kids are able to work out.  I am sure all four of these children will grow apart from their bonds with mine as they head into the teen years with differing familial expectations.  In the meantime I want to know where these kids are and what they are coming up with when they are right by me, so that I can extrapolate for what happens when they are not. 

They never interest me with their dull chatter, and I never think they say anything witty or hilarious.  I never let them come over for an open-ended visit & stay up late -- calling their mother for an extension, even -- at my house, returning them through the dead of night covered in body-crayon drawings and hopped up on grape juice and language possibly-inappropriate for their age (oops).    

I have never, never blogged about those other children's visits. 

 

As part of the Post-Birthday Event I bought each girl an initial charm with her own birthstone crystal and the other's.  They were so! completely! into it!  Amazeballs!  B!F!F! 

if the supermoon did not/ no, if you did not/ I wouldn't either

Baking is good to do, to keep busy in times like these --  oatmeal/chocolate-chip foolaround cookies.  I am so distracted that I just this minute found out the Badgers are in the Sweet 16.  In my defense, there are at least three twitterers who should have made that abundantly, joyfully clear; but the point is that I have not watched one single tournament game.  END OF DAYS, I know. 

 

These were kind of a failed gluten-free experiment.  They were edible, though.  Way more edible than any damn thing The Gluten-Free Girl has gushed over and rhapsodized about which turned out fucking disgusting in everyone else's kitchen.  Judge for yrself!  Thousands of words!  (I mean the photos' 1000s.) 

Supermoon, for me, had its high note on the trip to Pet(co/smart? I can never remember which is by our house and which is in Ballet Town).  There was a commotion at the automatic front door when the guy let slip the leash of his Rottweiler.  That might have been ok, but every0ne in the store was a million times surprised when the giant dog came bounding in, skidding past the Greenies section, wild, terrifying, with his hapless owner way out of his depth on the pursuit.

It all came together to make perfect sense when he mounted the bored-looking, velvety mastiff back by the Martha Stewart for Pets endcap.  By the time they were hung up, the two dogs had -- by the sheer physics associated with their combined mass -- gotten themselves into the middle of the main aisle, in front of the Grooming reception area. 

Mari & I goggled at each other, dumbfounded.  We used to have a dog that was ++100lbs and there is nothing you can do to restrain a dog with that kind of lean mass.  I mean, with a bitch in heat in the store, there was no limit to the nothing dude could have done to keep that dog on the lead, but he seemed particularly ill-suited to anything even approaching the effort.

Everyone dithered & fussed, the lady who owned the mastiff, her husband showed up, the Pet[wherever] employee became involved in an Officially Useless Capacity.  I love things to be lurid, and this was like Pet Peyton Place, but I told Mari we had to bail, right at the same time he started to call out, with great feeling, Zeppelin, of all the bands he loathes.  Ooo-oooooh yeah-yeah, oooo-oooooh, yeah-yeah, when I'm dooooooown.

That was way over the supermoon for me.  And gratefully, the end of the largest part of its antics.  Except the three more times we did it before Monday morning.  I know!  Supermooooooooon!        

 

Must/I think of everything/as earned.  This is a question that could have a wide utility in this time.  For love, indeed.

For Love
Robert Creeley

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above

the others to me

important because all

 

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.

Today, what is it that

is finally so helpless,

 

different, despairs of its own

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

 

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but

what would I not

 

do, what prevention, what

thing so quickly stopped.

That is love yesterday

or tomorrow, not

 

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must

I think of everything

 

as earned. Now love also

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

 

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous

 

self-regard. But that image

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me

because it is my own.

 

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,

what have I made you into,

 

companion, good company,

crossed legs with skirt, or

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

 

Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen in

 

some other place, some

other time not this one.

A voice in my place, an

echo of that only in yours.

 

Let me stumble into

not the confession but

the obsession I begin with

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or

place beyond time, no

mind left to

 

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love

it all returns.

fookin' knackered

Crocuses are up.

 

Lenten action:  too much thinking.

I get caught up on one or the other of the qualifiers -- true, kind, necessary -- which is always the way, I guess.  Troubles0me.  Challenging!

Then -- like so many things -- let us define our terms.  For example, communication-wise, I find that kind is somehow a relative concept, the perception of which is mostly bound up in people's unwillingness to be divested of their fantasies about themselves, which means that kind somehow, as a social construct, becomes manufactured of, plus conflated with, what people want to hear.  More than that, this delusional evaluation of What Is Kind encroaches upon truth and necessity, like, all the time.  

I mean, really?  Fuck a bunch of that.

It reminds me of this ridiculous story from my youth:  My last job before Garçon was born was as the sole onsite HR manager at a 300-room property in Washington.  I was hired by one hotel corporation and almost immediately, the owner of the property awarded the management and oversight to another storied corporation, which company was then -- nearly immediately -- merged with a third corporation.  It was a mess -- the employees comprising management staff and the directorate were all over the place, coming and going, things were really unstable. 

It was precisely the kind of situation I avoid at all costs -- people were really scrambling around to maintain or establish status; there were always new players; everyone was nervous every day about their position or their place, etc.  I stayed there because: in the middle of all this corporate-merging turmoil, I found out I was pregnant and knew I was only short-timing; I could walk from our apartment in 25 minutes; Sal worked very nearby; the salary was obscenely killer (and something they were quick to correct when they hired my replacement, ha).

Anyhow.  We were having a manager's meeting one day, and the facilites gal -- Angela kind of coordinated special guests with hotel amenities, so the kind of oversight to make sure we had extra staff to peel green M&Ms for rock stars or whatever was her purview -- was all lit up because we had Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez coming for a stay. 

She had his whole bio and was lavish and sanctimonious about his importance and the honor and why he was there and  blahblahblaaaaaaah, but it was obvious she did not know a goddamn thing about him because she kept saying Gabrielle García Márquez was coming.  She also kept using the pronouns she and her.

I waited until she was finished speaking and even until no one else  had any comments or questions.  Then I just threw out there in a cool way that Gabriel García Márquez was a dude.  It was like the time the little girl said the emperor was naked. 

Angela goggled at me, boggled, and begged my pardon.

"García Márquez, Angela.  Is a man.  That's all." 

So, was it true?  Yes.  Was it necessary?  Yes!  This was not like correcting it's vs its on the internet.  We were about to have this VIP in our hotel and host him and make arrangements and everyone -- because of Angela's presentation -- thought we we were having a special visit from a laaaady.  Perhaps one with a very small dog.  Yes, necessary!  Was it kind?  Well, that is where the story kind of breaks down.   

To me, in this tale, kindness is irrelevant.  Did I tell her motivated by unkindness?  No.  Did I say or imply that she was a fucking idiot, in words or tone?  No.  I even waited to see if anyone would say anything or whatever, because the whole time she was talking, I was embarrassed for her, thinking, Man, that's awkward.  Then, when no one else said anything, presumably because they a. did not know or b. had not been listening, including my boss, I threw it out there.  It was cool.  Like, I mean, it was a meeting.  Go team, etc.

I mean, looking back at it, thinking about work and work-stories and the kind of fossilized, dysfunctional behavior I hear people have in their workplaces, I could have waited, until the meeting was over, and gone around double-checking with everyone in the meeting except Angela that they knew she was a he.  That, to me, would have been so much worse, super-uncool.

Anyhow, later, lingering around waiting for something else to happen that day, one of the catering girls told me that Angela was still in her office crying because I told her García Márquez was a man.   Untrue!  I reject this assignment of responsibility to me.  I mean, she was crying because she made a mistake, which is fine and normal and all, I guess, but that was not my issue.  Except that it confuses truth and kindness.  I mean, the truth can hurt, but that does not mean the truthteller was hurtful -- they are just the messenger.  Toughen up! 

But this is Lent, and I am trying to explore new territories with an open mind.  I do not think it is going well.  It might be driving me crazy. 

Last night, I spent an hour puzzling over a textual reply to one of my besties about something submitted for my review.  Was what I wanted to say kind?  No.  Not at all.  I mean, I could say something less hardcore, but still, not kind.  While he is one of the toughest guys I know ... here I am, bound in a promise.  So, OK.  What could I say that was actually kind?  .... Oh!  Here is the next problem -- anything that I could say that was actually kind would be untrue.  Ok! 

Then, I looked for my parachute, my favorite window that opens in these times when the doors are all shut -- Is it necessary?  To say anything at all?  Could I just skip it?  No.  This time, because of the preamble, because of the relationship, I could not just overlook my reply.  Or could I?

Ordinarily, this is the part where I kind of break it down and say, "Skip it.  Everyone is selfishly wound up & on to the next thing."  But then that ports me right back to a. Kind and b. True.  When friends ask me for something, I give it to them.  The more important it is, the more thought I give to it, sifting and winnowing to an honest answer.  The problem I run into, a lot of times, is that it is easier for me to speak with honesty than it is for people to see themselves the same.  I feel like the overlap -- the person who is willing to see with clarity what I am reflecting back -- is what separates friends from the rest.

That feels like the point of Lent to me, to sort these matters out.  But whatever, this is just the beginning.  41 days, it remains.       

all the king's men

This was the scene in my dining room Wednesday morning.

 

It has been the scene in my dining room for a couple of weeks -- since the Feb 7th or 9th or something?  But the last contractor left & took all his things on Monday evening and I was free to restore our living space.  Tuesday we were kind of dizzy with possibility and also running a few errands and the like, plus the floor in the utility-ish room that we have was too filthy with crumbled drywall (from the electricians) and sanded plaster (from the painter) that we had to stop & clean that up.

I say we, but I mean that I had to supervise Garçon crawling around with a scrub brush.  Because why should I?  He is young, he has nothing else to do.  Why should I climb around on the floor scrubbing plus also make 21 meals every week?  Right!  Anyhow.

Wednesday, I puttered around a little, not even really knowing where to begin, feeling down.  So I went to get a massage.  It was 10 in the morning, the kids were all mid-morning set, I had finished a bowl of oatmeal and a pot of tea and I called Reagan Baby.  "Hi, I'm going to get a massage.  Do you want to come with?"

She did.  Then I lied to my children -- Reagan Baby broke her right leg a month ago -- and told them I was taking Reagan Baby to a doctor's appointment and then to run some errands and I would be back in 2.5 hours.  But, a massage is kind of like a doctor's appointment and we did stop at the pharmacy on the way home, so it was not a total lie, but anyhow. 

Anyhow, then I got home and I still made not one move to restore my home.  Part of it is that I am feeling very get it out of here about a lot of the stuff that came out of the kitchen and the hallway to make room for the painting & the scaffolding & the stuff. 

The other part of it is that I am feeling very what's the point about it, because part of the problem is that some of what is in the dining room, taking up a buttload of space, is my brand-new Pilates Reformer (get a dubious diagnosis for a neuromuscular condition & run with it), still in the crate.  It needs to be unpacked for permanent residence in the room heretofore known as the playroom.  In order to do that, first we have to re-site the books and bookshelves in that room and then it just all turns into a killer octopus and you wonder if you can turn it into butter.  Like the tiger.  So, you see, then.

 

I swear I would have had a repeat of luxurious, craven uselessness today but for that we had a leaking-in-the-walls plumbing crisis.  My God.  I had to wait around for a plumber, the same one who was here last week to fix a different problem in the same bathroom, same leaking-in-the-walls kind of a thing, and I was so happy that in my nervous paralysis I had not restored the bathroom since his visit last week (groceries in living room, bicycles in dining room, bath shelving in hallway because whole bedroom is still crammed into office), so that was good, but today, after today, things were going to start to return to ship-shape around here.

 

 

So I kind of took care of a little of that.  Putting big things back where they belong and pooh-poohing needless things and getting ready to give them away.  Then I made a fire and laid on the sofa and accidentally fell asleep at 4.

Mari called.  The kids told him I was asleep, which he thought was strange until he found out it happened in front of the fire.  When I called him back, while I was making supper, he was all,  "Where did you get the logs to put in the stove?"

"Oh," I said.  "So you admit to not leaving me any split wood?"

Oh, snap!  He asked if I had Garçon do it.  I laughed -- our son is weak.  He asked if I did it -- I do not even know how, and I was still laughing, because did I get married to an Eagle Scout so I could split wood?  No, is the answer to that question.  He asked if Fille did it, which was the least ridiculous idea he had yet, and I told him.

There were those big, dry, stumpy pieces of cut logs, you know?  He did. I threw them down the porch stairs onto the sidewalk and they broke into thirds and quarters.  Then I asked Fille to go and bring it in.

No wonder I was so tired.  The loss of infrastructure, the extra visual stimulation of the chaotic house.  The lack of order to cling to -- the only proof!  That I am not actually having a nervous breakdown!  Mari will be home this weekend.  We should make good progress together, getting behind the mule and all that.  I am sure I will be happy when it is all put back the way it goes. 

 

Thank God for the bulbs.  I put them in this Stangl dish a couple of weeks ago and it reminds me of how it used to be, how things really are, behind the GLOOM AND DOOM AND MISPLACED ITEMS. 

          

cheers.

 

2010 was very different from the years immediately preceding it, and I will be a little sad to see it go, its quiet challenge, the way it held the line. 

It seemed kind of like nothing was happening, but toward the end I had to cling to lessons learned -- made clear, even -- in 2008 and 2009, the pages of such dicta I keep in a little metaphorical case chained to my metaphorical wrist.  My friend Susan died, and I assassinated my cat, Iris.  I always say -- like, not to everyone, but to myself, in a kind of Tracy Flick-y way -- I would rather regret doing something than have regret for not doing something. 

 

What was revealed to me this year -- when I got into a secure location and went over my metaphorical documents -- was the wisdom in remembering that sometimes doing nothing is choosing something, and there are times where that, in fact, can be the right choice, or the choice I will not want to regret later on, depending.

 

Then, on a lighter-yet-related note, I called old Kay a few weeks ago  & asked him how it was going at the Snow Queen's Palace and he was all, Naw, I skated out of there months ago.  I'm, um, I'm in Lapland, and this lady keeps writing notes on fish.  Did you really come all this way on your bare feet?  I was floored, just absolutely flattened, it was so unbelievably everything I had asked for in the universe, and God is so good.

 

Ok, that was not light at all.  I am incapable of lightness!  Except to say that I remain myself, and the roses will bloom whenever he returns home. 

Fille + Garçon were out of the house a lot this summer, with its long days and hot, hot weather.  They were with friends or at friends' houses or away with friends it seemed, like, all the time, and Mari & I spent all of our time watching movies, and hooking up, plus having unlimited uninterrupted conversations.  Bliiiissssssss.

 

 

 

I think we went to about 16 special + badass museum exhibitions up & down the Northeast Corridor.  We spent a lot of days in Manhattan -- consecutive days and day trips, too.  A lot of Washington, esp toward the end here. We got hooked on roller derby, which, what's not to like?  I went on six different boat rides this year -- more than all the years of my life before -- and I made a place in my house to hang out in a reclining position & sit still.  No, seriously, I did.  I named it The Treehouse.  Also, I went to bed at 10 for 40 nights, which was  curious bit of privation with penance involved.

 

I bought Twilight jewelry.  I know.

 

Music was so good this year!  So good I really can not even make a list.  It was just ... not at all like 2009, which was all so goshdarn likeable.  It was just a flood of records people were talking about and listening to and they just kept coming -- Broken Bells, The National, Josh Ritter, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Spooooooon, Grace Potter & her Nocturnals, She & Him, David Byrne, Ted Leo & his Pharmacists!  -- I told Mari, Omg, this must have been what it was like to be alive in 1969!

  

 

This is what I liked best about 2010's music:  the critical response to Janelle Monae's The Archandroid.  People loved the shit out of this record!  At the same time, people liked it without loving it even a little bit.  I was one of them!  I think Alex was another.  But it was there to be loved and people got really excited about it!  It was great!  So much better than the wan loveability of 2009's music that, in a lot of ways, just felt like a mercy fuck.  I mean.  Anyhow, one little negative thing about this year -- WTF happened to you, Kings of Leon?   

There are still 90 minutes left in 2010, but I am going to pronounce it great!  Exceeding expectations!  Thank you for reading here.  If you have never met me, I salute you!  If you know me and read along closely, you are too indulgent, and I love you back.  If you are a friend who reads along secretly, thank you for not trying to have me committed. 

 

Let's kiss!  Happy New Year, beauties!  Be safe!  See you in 2011. 

facelift

Someone asked me today, "So, when will it be cold enough for you to allow that it is cold?"  I knew the answer already, and I think we can all agree: cold is when you can make ice cubes during the day in the back seat of your car, and not before.

Today, demolition was finished on our wall where our mantel used to be.  Look at how there is a perfectly-good, non-combustible, decorative mantel already under there.  Yes. 

 

We could have just had that excavated and saved a couple of thousand dollars.  I was telling the sad story of this to the mason who is in charge of the second half of the job, and he said, "You can't know what is behind the walls in these houses.  Don't beat yourself up about it." 

I agreed to go along with him.  "Live and learn," I said.  Alors.  Also, it is a wee bit rustic for my taste and I probably would have been fussing about it for the last five years, at least.

I am going to dedicate this post to Becky, who had a birthday yesterday.

I was thinking of her yesterday, and wanted to message her from the weird-o-rama pseudo-spa medical office of the vascular surgeon with whom I consulted, but I got distracted.  (Not by fake ta-tas this time, but Mari wasn't there.  I am sure if he had been, we would have flushed them out.)

I know that vascular surgeon sounds scary, but I have a varicose bundle behind each knee that is lately making me nutty with the throbbing and whatnot, and veins are handled in a Cosmetics Interface.  Well, I guess one can have them remanded in a hospital setting, but when I asked the other surgeon I knew if he did veins, he said he did not so referred me to this dude.

This is the second time I have had a reason to visit an M.D. in a Custom Cosmetics environment and all I can say about it is: scary.  That is why I was thinking of Becky, because I am pretty sure she has lately had a medical reason to be in a cosmetic environment, perhaps for her first time.

All of the Botox coffee mugs and Restalyne Post-It pads and Latisse pens,  not to mention all the collateral everywhere promising how awesomely serene + full of renewed hope your life will be if you only have liposuction on yr flanks (that is the medical term for a muffin-top, did you know this?  Flank.) or if you engage in some kind of tomfoolery known as Nectifirm. (I have no idea what that is.)  The furnishings are kind of spa-decor upscale and that is fine, but the rooms were cold and after I had my leg ultrasound and was covered with ultrasound goo, all I got to wipe off were paper towels.  I mean, hello?  Even the freaking dime-store nail salon has hot towels.  I told the doctor that, too.  In nice + encouraging words designed to invite him to consider, but I did say something. 

I just want to digress & write one thing about muffin-tops:  What the hell is the point of wearing low-rise jeans if there is not a little hiccup of flesh revealed which implies promise, or the illusion of implied promise?  Is that not how we judge the muffin?  By the quality of its top?  Yes.  So therefore, I say, I do not understand the disparagement of the muffin-top.  Ill-fitting clothing and the whole Fashion Don't of Ten pounds of potatoes crammed in a five-pound sack is its own, sad, loathsome issue, but I do not want to live in world where everyone is showing me where their bones jut out.  I want to see something jiggling around, springy and elastic, lush and inviting. I know, I am lascivious and a hedonist, sure.  Anyhow. 

The point is that these Cosmetic Enhancement Places are freaky, like Fashion Magazines Come to Life.  It occurred to me yesterday that they are like a Disney Princess Store for grownup women.  It is alarming: the whole thing is so artificial and crazy.  Maybe it is not so noticeable when you are there for the Kool-Aid, but when you are there to get something medical, like to have a thing removed, or a vein ultrasound, it kind of limits their credibility.  I think.  Maybe? I dunno. 

One thing that got me down was the looking at the Before & After books they have there, where the photos are not airbrushed, the "After" photos are depressingly anti-fantastic in their gritty reality.  It made me feel sad, because they looked the same, really, but also because ... I don't know, it just did. 

I have been noticing a lot, as I come closer & closer to 40, how I do not think much about this stuff on my own time.  I do not think I do.  Maybe I do, like a nervous tic I can not notice myself.  I did spend a couple of months bothered by some sun damage under my eyes, so I started wearing sunscreen super-vigilantly and it faded.  I liked that eye cream I got from the aesthetician in the other surgeon's office; it made me look smoother & more-rested while I was using it.  Then I started going to bed at 10:30, and I never had enough time left for the whole routine.  Guess what happened once I started going to bed at 10:30?  I looked smoother & more-rested without it, yes. 

The women in my family look great, end of story, just plain great.  My great-aunt Ophelia showed a little leg until the day she died.  Everywhere she went, as far back as I can remember and until the end of her life, men watched her coming and going.  She was not the only woman in my family to be so good-looking in perpetuity, but she was the only one who also had a Personality of Eyelashes, constantly.  So, for me, not only did I feel like, yk, I will look like this forever, but also I knew that I could keep aloft this generator of charm forever.

I have been working this over & over in my mind, a lot, since last month or so when poor Paulina Porizkova wrote on and on in the Huffington Post about her not being young anymore and all that attendant horseshit.  But, I felt sorry for her.  Where is my halo for feeling really, really sympathetic to a supermodel married to a rock star! 

I thought two things when I read that Poor Paulina piece:  1. It is terrible the only tool she had in her box of charm was her looks.  It is such a passive and powerless way to give and to be received.  When Fille was a tiny girl, maybe 3 or 4, she asked me, "What does beautiful mean?"  One presumes it was because the leading adjective anyone not living in our home had ever used to talk about her.  Strangers!  Would talk about how beautiful she was!  Both of the children!  On and on!  Like, we would say, "Oh, thank you," and then they would keep talking!  For the first: detaining us.  Second:  OK, already!  After the third exchange of effusion from strangers and sincere graciousness from me and/or Mari, we had a policy of going to the source. 

"Well, look at us, really!  You know?"  It cooled the admirers, but only 50% of the time.  The rest of the time the admirer switched to geared-up flattery about Mari and/or me.  (I think Mari's tactic was to say, "You should see my wife," which led them to talk about how handsome he was.  It was 85% of the time well-put-together older women detaining us/him/me in this way.  Whatever) 

It made me panicky, at first, her question.  I had to spend a lot of time in my life unraveling a lot of guilt about beauty privilege.  My parents pretended it did not exist, which is ridiculous, but I think typical of that generation.  I have a friend whose mother used to tell her & her sisters, "That & a token will get you on the bus," but what gets left out of that kind of neutrality & denial is the plain fact that if you arrive to this world looking a certain way, you don't even need to have the token to ride the bus.  You do not need your parents to tell you that, the world will inform you in good time, and what I was left with was a lot of shame for this unfair advantage.

Eventually, I gave it a rest.  No one else cared that I was wringing my hands and beating my breast in the night.  It did not change the way other women treated me, it did not change the way men treated me, even after they knew me & I might appeal to them to switch to a merit-based system.  By the time I was 20, I was like the girl in the "Closing Time" lyric -- drink included -- I loved you for your beauty, that doesn't make a fool of me, you were in it for your beauty, too. 

I knew that part of my task -- for Fille's future mental health -- was to come hard at the deconstruction of beauty and its privileges.  We have, in the 4 intervening years, mostly to talk about how good looks + good manners will get you anything in the world.  Also, benevolence is required.  People being generous to you means that you have psychic space to be generous at other times.  With great power comes great responsibility, like Peter Parker, you know.  She is always watching me, and I am always doing my light-up show all around & getting what I need, particularly when I do not have a leg on which to stand, plus leaving everyone feeling good about it.  

"It means," I told her then, about beautiful, "that looking at you makes people feel good."  Which is pretty much all there is to it.  That is why the admiring of such a person is called objectification.  The rest, it is up to you.  I feel like Poor Paulina had things a bit mixed up, when she said words to the effect of, "People no longer think I am beautiful," because the fact is probably more like people no longer objectify her.  That now she is expected to participate in their experience.  Her facade is no longer enough, and that must make for some sad times for a woman who is used to being looked at without doing the work of engagement.  I mean, being beautiful is a gigantic, door-opening wedge but, to mix a metaphor, one needs to be after that ready to run on all cylinders. 

The other thing I thought (2.) was what a shame that she obviously was laboring beneath the delusion that 19 or 25 or whatever was full-fledged womanhood.  I was reared with the idea that it was all-girlhood.  Even after I was married, at 23, I was a still a girl.  I was a child bride, I was the woman of the house, I would soon be the mother of my children, but I was in no way an all-the-way-grownup woman.  I think that because Poor Paulina worked at a job so hand-in-hand with Youth Culture and the Patriarchy she got mixed-up along the way.

I have written before -- it was in regards to something else, I can not remember once -- that when I was a girl, 21 or 22, Kowalski used to embellish sincere flattery by ending, almost wistfully, "But you would really be something if you were 36 ... at a minimum."  He was always after me for being so young, as if he took it personally.  I never listened to anything he said, really, but it reinforced what I already knew: that I was a girl, and that one day, were I to be so lucky, I would grow up & be a woman.  

I looked forward to my 36th birthday with such excitement, because I knew that was when I would start to be in my fullest flower.  Like Mme Carrière, right when she becomes a flower, unfurled from her tight pink bud.  There will be decades (I hope I have them all) before I go to fullest flower, petals everywhere, in an excellent, oh-what-I-have-seen mess.  

So, anyhow, when I read about Poor Paulina, I thought, "Oh, how terrible no one ever told her or showed her that she would amount to no more than a bud until her late 30s.  Sad."  Just last week, the young man working the Starbucks kiosk at the Safeway walked over to me -- where I was standing on the middle of the line -- and escorted me back to his cash register for checkout.  Probably because I am not spending my time in line fretting about my fading beauty and how I will trim dollars from my grocery bill to afford cosmetic enhancements.  Latisse, maybe, because eyelashes that work as hard as mine deserve to be as long as a giraffe's, but the rest, not so much.

But anyhow, the offices of Medical Doctors performing Primarily Cosmetic Enhancements -- staggering.  My new camera came this afternoon, so maybe I can snap some photos tomorrow and do a full exposé.  Probably not, though, because after this vein -- only one leg is medically faulty -- gets lasered into submission (tomorrow), I have to wear compression hose and not sit or stand for long periods.  Walking and lying down, only.  Tough life.  Who is going to make dinner?

One thing about Poor Paulina's diatribe -- and I am a decade younger than her, so maybe I will see someday, but she gives an age I passed years ago as the death knell of her youth-- is that she pooh-poohs clean living as anyone's key to eternal youth.  Well, maybe Poor Paulina just can not hack it long enough to reap the rewards. 

Anyhow, now I am going on a long time, such that it seems as if I am coming down on Paulina Porizkova personally, which I am not.  I really did feel sad for her.  I really was a little eye-rolling about how she blew off healthy diet + yoga as the answer to long years of preservation.  I scoffed when she called Madonna once-brunette, as Madonna was only brunette for about 4 minutes in her career -- she has always been artificial, and she continues to rock that artificial look today.  She looks like a million counterfeit dollars, Madonna does.  So much else of what Paulina said was just so patently untrue, and sad.  It made me want her to have had a better life.  Where is my halo?      

eyeballs

Look at how naughty these standing-up nursers are.  Standing-up nursing only strikes fear into the hearts of the most-annoying extended-breasto hippies (of which I am totally one), and every time I see it, I have to leave the room.  I salute her.  Especially because there are three kittens to her left eating solids for dinner.

 

I want to tap into the metasphere for a sec about books. 

I am notorious for not finishing v many novels at all, even if I should get around to starting them.  I do not enjoy very much of anything people are always talking about, because while I am reading it I feel so tired, like the author can not get off of the page and just write about the people they are writing about.  Or there is too fucking much telling and next-to-zero showing.  Or there is some kind of complicated fucking conceit, like a billion pages of "end notes" from a passively-hostile, darkly-angry midwestern sort, or whatever. 

No one seems to just be able to spin a good fucking yarn anymore.  Everyone has to show off, loop-de-looping around, telling jauntily & literarily about how the lady screamed, instead of -- as Mark Twain instructed us very convincingly -- just letting the lady scream.  It is kind of a drag.  I have re-leafed through passages of  "Old Man & the Sea" probably a dozen times this year, because it's just solid craft.  Like E.B. White said, don't write about Man, write about a Man. 

When the children were smaller Charlotte's Web came to us first as an audiobook.  If you have not had the pleasure, you do not know that E.B. White himself does the reading of the book.  Omg, you have no ideaaaaaaaaaa.  At the time, I had not read Charlotte's Web in 25 years, and as a child, I do not think I read it more than two, maybe three times.  When we listened our way to the end of it, Charlotte's death was a genuine sadness for which I was not prepared. 

Mari was disappointed, maybe a little disbelieving, as I gripped his arm in response to the death of the spider at the fairground -- You seriously don't remember this?, is what he asked. I am notoriously poor at retaining plot, for everything, just abysmal. 

But the first day we listened to the book, driving the car on a warm spring day, we made it up to the chapter where Wilbur gets out of the yard. As White narrated the book, I found that I remembered every word he was reading.

I knew Wilbur cried when everyone was calling out instructions to him, the goose would tell him to twist and turn.  As the chapter concluded, when Mr Zuckerman walks innocently, looking about calling "Pig, pig," I could recall every word that was coming, sucking in the milk hungrily and chewing the popover; it was good to be home again.  It felt like a prayer I might have learned by heart in girlhood.  I was listening and remembering all at once, afraid to breathe in the midst of the experience, thinking, this is why I read.  It might be why I write. 

And I hardly write anymore.  I say that all the time, ha, "I hardly write anymore!"  It makes Alex scoff, he's always like, "What are you talking about?  You just ..."  And then I can see him, over the phone, shaking his head in forfeit.  But I hardly write anymore, really, about anything, so much as I tap-tap along about whatever we did or whatever I thought.  Maybe it is about a process vs. content, but even so.  I used to work with a guy, a great guy, a past-in-life colleague, who currently writes fearsomely about subject matter so fucking boring and incomprehensible and pointless to me, but holy balls, he writes the shit out of it.  Circles!  He makes it look so easy, and before I know it, I know everything about nothing, painlessly. 

(His tweets, also, kill with their katana's efficiency.  Sometimes I tweet him about how he is just showing off, how much he can cram into 140 characters.  I mean it!  My tweets get a lot in there, though, I have enough facility to get it on in a tweet.  But I am not ruthless.)       

There is a kind of writing, a discipline that produces a clean truth with such grace -- a craftsman's style, no tricks, not any glamour, just telling the story as it unfolds with so much reverence for the characters and the reader that it settles into a person's memory, as if it happened to them. That work endures, is so amazing, especially now when writing is so horrible and patchy: stories that do not know which story they are telling; work founded on a lie; surprise endings that waste a reader's time; coyness; horrible, horrible syntax (worse than mine!); making their allusions to other shitty crap of popular culture instead of using universal specificity and telling the truth of a character. Don't write about pigs. write about a pig.

Mostly, I read non-fiction, where clarity is paramount. History, mainly, but a great deal of biography and also cookbooks. Where other people sink into the bathtub holding Nora Roberts, I love a cookbook for those times.

People say, "Oh, my God, you haven't read _____?" The cappuccino crowd can be so insistent about their reeeeeeading, and while I have been known to shrug & lament, "I don't read," the truth is that I might. Sometimes, the cultural fuss about a book is so insistent that I have to check in with it. It happens like so: I read page 53. Just like that -- at the bookstore, I pick up the book, turn to page 53, and read. If I do not care about page 54, I will never look back. I will tell people, people who ask, "Have you read ____?" I will say, "I read page 53. It was no good. For starters, there was no punctuation and I think that is an aggression toward a reader."

I might even like page 53, go on to page 54, and then something around p. 113 puts me off my read and it is over.  Generally, I am perfectly happy to re-read Salinger, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Morrison, Baldwin, Thurber, Twain, Thoreau, Carver, and Chekhov for as long as it takes for something to grab me at its fifty-third page and bear me aloft to its end.

A lot of books are just too bloated with characters and a time-space continuum.  I can not follow all of that.  Middlesex?  I wanted to read it, kind of, except it was shaping up to be  too much work.  If I have to work at reading a book, I want to really know about some shit when I am finished, usually about some kind of American history 1683-1875, or maybe just any part of WWII. 

That Jhumpa Lahiri novel -- The Namesake -- was really good.  Impeccable.  Also, I mean, I took all I know about craft & brought it to poetry's door.  So, whatever.  An author can get arty on my ass -- Flower Children; A Gate at the Stairs -- and I will probably consider it really lovely.  

Anyhow.  All this to say that I started & have every intent to finish Super-Sad True Love Story, plus demanded close friends catch up to it, people who know that if I tell them I think they should read a novel, it is probably worth their time.   

Then, at the same time, I find that I can not stop wondering what happened to the characters in a book titled The Post-Birthday World, which is a book I started last year, enjoyed so far as it went, but got tired of the reading of it -- the satisfying chewiness started to hurt my jaw a little.  (It was the same with Super-Sad True Love Story, which I could have finished one day, but had to set it aside for a rest.  Also, I wanted to draw it out because it was so much fun.) 

Also, to finish what I started, and regale the metasphere with my acceptance of Becky's book recommendation -- Lee Child's Jack Reacher series -- I will say that I borrowed the first of the Reacher series from the library and read it in honor of Veteran's Day.

Yes.

It was fine, the book, and fully of the genre of formula-fiction in a series.  Serial fiction is off of my many requiring hooks.  It was for nights I spent babysitting or time on public transit.  Breaks from studying.   Airplane trips.  I read most, if not all, of Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels (I had to, though, obviously).  I read all of the Kay Scarpetta books until they got so terrible as to be unreadable, which was well into this century.  I think over the years I read up to R in the ABC lady-mysteries.   

Becky went on about the series by way of unveiling her parody of Jack Reacher's lyric, brought on by her excitement of the latest installment.  She urged we partake.  A couple of days later, talking about books with Kowalski, I thought to ask after his review.  "It's a little over the top, but you should check it out," he said.  Later that same day, the first book was at the library, just right there on the roundy thingo.  No looking!

So, for those of you who do not know, Jack Reacher is an ex-military officer, a drifter, recently laid-off from service, going around, sightseeing a homeland he has never seen because he has been away his whole life, an Army brat.  Ok.  Sure.  Fine.

1. I feel like some of his bio does not add up.  For one thing, he seems too young.  He should be at least 8 years older than he is.  Sure, he went to West Point, would have finished when he was 22, come in as an officer, put 13 years behind him and before his severance, but he just ... I feel like the character is not old enough to be so worn and so smart simultaneously.  So, that.  But, you know what?  Youth Culture, so whatever.  But everyone was too young -- the villains, the victims, the by-standers.  Whatever.   

2. On page 122, Lee Child the author writes the Jack Reacher the narrator uses the word fabulous.  To describe, specifically, the interior decor of a home to which he is invited for the first time.  That's Jack Reacher, military-enforcer, deserter-hunter, tough-guy drifter, walked into a lady's Georgia home and described it as fabulous.  Fuck me, so much bullshit.  I almost could not keep reading it after that.  But, it was Veteran's Day, and also a vet had encouraged me to give it a whirl, plus also counseled me to just stick with it when I called him promptly on the phone to bitch about the slight, so fine. 

3.  The freaking villains' dastardly plot was, like, way too fucking cerebral!  International counterfeiting, requiring a side-lesson in both environmental protection and international economies to explain the first victim's plausible tie-up on the train tracks?  Whatever.  Too hard!  That lady detective in Northern Cali -- the ABC books that the one gal writes -- her schemers are always doing something easy.  Paternity!  Real estate swindling!  Greedy heirs, battling! Authors who are not Tom Clancy should keep it low-key, explainy-wise.

4. It took dude 125 pages to get laid, which, ok, aim low, Lee Child.  (I think it is incongruous for the character he created to have to wait so long.)  Also, the sex scenes are completely off-narration.  I was reading along, thinking, "Oh, is Miss Marple telling this part?"  Plus, if I could, the way the relationship progresses to a conclusion with the lady cop did not feel type-wise.  Dudes like him have a total monastic streak.  Trevanian hits it dead-on in Shibumi.

5.  It was scary!  The villains were too psychopathic!  For what?  This is a thing with me, in every direction -- poor villain development.  If we do not understand why the villain will go to such long & lurid lengths, we have to be told.  Write it out, show us, it's your freaking job.  It always reminds me of the one MImovie where Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the villain and he's all crazy and the whole time, I thought, "OK, wow, he is really going to some lengths to get at Ethan Whatsisname ... why?"  Villain development.  J.K. Rowling developed the shit out of her villain (and it was left out of the movies, but I can not start blogging about the HP adaptation now).

6.  I did very much like the way that Reacher just kills people.  Just kills them.  If they are going to kill him, he kills first.  Not incapacitates, kills.  Not wrassles with & gives them a shot at redemption, no.  Lights out.  I think that is more realistic than not, but that could just be the degenerates with whom I have run.

7.  Child -- in this book, his first -- was too confusing in his articulation of spatial positioning and action.  His words did not accurately describe the picture of the action he was seeking to render and it was super-distracting.  Maybe he gets better later, I shall probably never know.

I will never know, because the fabulous thing left me waaaaay too insulted by the author.  Fabulous?  My god.  Also, it was too scary!  The villains were too villainous and it left me feeling a little worried about how I, too, could have regular-seeming people among me who were really international counterfeting murderers.  Honestly.  I could never watch The X-Files, either.

Also, the second book is set in Chicago, nominally, and really?  That is my hometown, I am a Chicago cop's daughter, niece, grand-niece, goddaughter, stepsister, neighbor girl to the north, south, east and west, and childhood pal.  Those do not include relationships begun in childhood with the Feds.  So no thanks, Lee Child, let us just leave it at the fabulous gaffe.  You have no idea the stringence of my requirements.  

given

Our physical proximity to the fluidity of academia, plus my husband's generosity + civicmindedness lands us at a lot of fundraisers, special receptions, and the sort.  Last night we went to an annual fundraising gala for families, to which we had never been, of which we knew not what to expect.

I did know that a foxy amphibian conservator I lured into our ken dates one of the women in charge of these sorts of events.  I really thought this event would be the usual milling around, zzZzzZz, politely-smiling, dry, educational event.  This was a wrong presumption. 

There was a dance floor, for a start. 

 

We rarely go to this museum because the acoustics are so wretched and they insist all After-5 events have really loud music in the center entryway, which is also crowded with reverberations of chatter at all times.  It is like having a hole drilled into my head and it tends to be not like us to take a special trip to hurt my head. 

Besides the dancing & the DJ, there was a crikey buttload of refreshments & noshes.  The meat of the event -- the part we knew we were getting into -- was so varied and spread over the museum galleries that we did not get even grok half of what was happening until it was over.  The children had fun, all of them, not just ours.  All parents in attendance, including us, seemed confused & unready.   

The noise of the entryway made me cross so that I spent a fair amount of time speculating with Mari as to why  all around us, women shepherding only children barely past binkies looked 10 years older than me.  Were they?  Or it it just that they were my age and one will never come back from that kind of sleep deprivation after 30?  Is it because everyone here looks about 10 years older than they are, anyhow, because of all the time at the beach, basting with baby oil and iodine?  Whatever the case, the women all looked strained, and worn.  Maybe it was the track lighting.  Maybe also the track lighting making me a complete bitch, obviously.

We made it back by Matisse and the rest fell away.  I just love Matisse so much.  He must have had a great energy, because when I am in a room of canvases he touched, it is the best feeling in the world.   

Interior at Nice (Room at the Beau Rivage), Henri Matisse. 1917-18. From the A.E. Gallatin Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I have written about how I moped and longed, deriding every museum known to me, before learning just a year or so ago that the Art Institute of Chicago -- my hometown art museum, where I spent thousands of hours as a girl -- was on a par with only a handful of museums, among them the Vatican & the Louvre.  This resolved my wistfulness & homesickness and I became willing to take museums at their word.  It has been a process.

Philadelphia's art museum, as with Princeton University's art museum, as with that wacko exurban Big Pharma Guy's "museum," plus also the Phillips' Collection, are all surprising, in that you will round a corner, and say This is where this has been all this time?  Here?  I have been reading about it and looking at photographs of it forever and it is just hanging on this wall.  Who the hell would ever look for it here?  For God's sake, PMA has Étant Donnés -- the whole blessed thing on permanent display, plus all the pieces & parts, molds & casts, fits & starts.  Duchamp created the work for installation at PMA, but still no reasonable art-lover would ever think that would actually mean to look for it in grimy old Philadelphia.       

Anyhow.  When we were vacationing in NYC in July, we went to the Matisse preview at MoMA.  It was amazing and -- in no surprise -- co-curated by MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.  It was so fucking good, so just-right in its curation.  From across the room, I saw a painting, and I did a double-take, yk, "Don't I know you?  Haven't we met?  Yes, we have."

 Mlle Yvonne Landsberg, Henri Matisse. 1914. From the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

She is home again.  It was peculiar to see her somewhere else.  It is such a striking painting, the first time I saw it, in Philadelphia, I could hardly reconcile it with what I knew of Matisse.  I was so happy for him, when I saw it, to know it was in the world and he had painted it.  Matisse, he did it!  Like, Picasso went on for years and years, but Matisse nailed it on one go.  Exciting!   

you killed Mufasa

Just to keep things organized, I have responded at some tiny-column's length to questions and comments about Dolls + Homeschooling here. 

All these cats do is wrestle + romp + tumble.  And nurse.  (Important!) 

 

The stone floor in the room(s) where they are is filthy, pawprints everywhere, and I just ... I have no idea.  Plus, they have this gross square of carpet from the doll's house, which is part of a large remnant I put in front of the litter box so that the mother did not track litter everywhere.  I saw her stretching + clawing on this portion of it one day & I brought it back with us and carpet-taped it to the stone so she would have a pre-scented piece of something to claw. 

Otherwise, she has been locked out of any room with upholstery, which is pretty easy to do.  Her claws are kind of her dealbreaker.  Like, I feel all sweet about her & then I think of my sweet, period-collection of early-20thc furniture in tatters and I cool.  I will come back to that toothy (ha) issue some other time in Cat Blogging.  There is a lot in there.  

This is Groucho.  I shied away from naming the kittens, because we are not keeping them, but we have to call the black-and-white cats something because there are three.  They are Groucho, Harlow, and Helmet Cat.

 

 

Helmet Cat is Calico's bestie, who got his (?) name because I could not think of any other way to describe him (?) and the name stuck.  A couple of weeks ago, when the only differences we could see in the black & whites were their hairlines, I would be trying to tell Mari that I was talking about [whichever] kitten, There is the ginger, and the calico.  Then the cat with the black nose, and then the cat with Eddie Munster hair and the cat with Dorothy Hamill hair, like a helmet?  The helmet part stuck.

Helmet Cat

After we knew them better, with more certainty, Eddie-Munster Cat became Baby Cat, because she is the runt.  She is the one we were always trying to talk about, because I thought she would not make it.  When they were outside, she was always on the wrong side of Mother Cat whenever they would start nursing, she would meow pitifully, and it would take her a while to get around and find a space. 

I told Mari that first day, when I told him I was worried about all of them, and how they needed to come in, even if we just let them into the basement of the doll's house, There is one baby who will not survive if they stay out there with their mom on the hustle.   

I can not lie, it made the whole thing more urgent for me.  Now that they are in our house for a week, it seems like we have always had five miniature cats + one.  Pygmy cats!  Someone should invent those!  I was sitting around with Mari over the weekend, and I thanked him for letting the cats come to our house.  He puzzled and I explained to him that once I had those cats in the car last week, I could driven them anywhere. 

That had never occurred to him, and he derided it as nonsense and the wrong choice, anyhow.  My husband, he is generous + amazing.  That is why I married him, even though I barely knew him.  I thought only of what I did know -- This dude is generous, he is amazing, and he will always choose to do the right thing.  I mean, there is nothing else to know when you are picking a husband, not unless you are Bonnie Parker, or Sharon Tate.

 

Anyhow, Baby Cat turned into Harlow shortly after we began describing her half the time as the "cat with the beauty mark."  Now to confuse everyone, Fille and I sometimes call Calico Kitten "Baby Cat" because she is such a no-eating, sucky-sucky, mama's-girl milk-monster.  But Harlow is never Baby Cat anymore unless we are concerned about her whereabouts -- even though she has gained about 83 grams this week, she is still 75% the size of her siblings. 

But for whom we are looking -- especially between Fille & I -- is simple to parse in the language of our house:  there is "Baby Cat," the pejorative, and "Baby Cat," the familiar.  Is that how we say that in English?  Anyhow.  Cats!