Work dinner with people Jeremy knows. You know how terrified I am of other chimpanzees – you may even have seen me bare my teeth at them in an abject signal of submission. But Konrad and Alyssa are extremely nice and funny. They have an excellent joke about a Rabbi Weasel, and they laughed when I described the Apple Newton: “Of course, this was years before you were born.” Alyssa took Claire and I took Julia and we had piggyback races down the hill. As Claire was falling asleep, she said: “I loved it when Alyssa gave me a piggyback.”

I read Cryoburn, which was okay, and then I went back and reread Cordelia’s Honor, which is by far my favourite of the Vorkosigan novels, because Cordelia is my favourite character. I like what Aral says about her: that honor pours out of her like a fountain; but even more, I like that whenever she faces a dilemma, she always chooses the most generous option.

“I’ve always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” said Vortala.

“Yes,” said Vorkosigan.

“I’ve always felt that theists were more ruthless than atheists,” said Ezar Vorbarra.

“If you think it’s really wrong,” said Cordelia to Vorkosigan, “that’s one thing. Maybe that’s the test. But if it’s only fear of failure—you have not the right to refuse the gift for that.”

“It’s an impossible job.”

“That happens, sometimes.”

I mention this because people have been firing similar observations at me for weeks, which is both irritating and awesome. My self-deprecating schtick has reached the end of its useful life, and circumstances require me to want more, to be greedy, to be ambitious. It’s part of what’s been going wrong with my riding. So Dez had me riding perfect Bella on Thursday night, and she got me tilting my chin up to look ahead over fences, and suddenly I could count the strides in and see how to keep my balance on the landing.

And then today I was on Manny, and Erin had us warm up and nothing went wrong, and then I jumped a crossrail and rolled back and jumped it the other way and nothing went wrong, and then she had us do the same exercise over a huge vertical. Which was clearly impossible, on the hardest horse I have ever ridden, in the depth of a slump, with the fence at the upper limit of what I’m capable of.

So I stuck my chin in the air and jammed my heels down and counted my strides and did it four times.

I was so relieved! I said to Erin: “Can I quit on that?” Erin grinned and said: “No.” She added the skinny hay bale and another rollback to the wall, and Manny of his own cognizance added some huge spooks in the far corner. We jumped around it twice. It wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t fall off. Erin said: “You’re an educated rider now. You can’t go on thinking that you’re just lucky, that you just had a good day. You have to ride like you mean it.”

But I am never sincere about anything, ever! But I have carefully schooled myself to only want things I know I can have! But I don’t take emotional risks!

To refuse the test is to refuse the gift.

Erin is leaving to take a fantastic job in Florida. Florida’s damn lucky to get her.

Remember that awesomely righteous lady who confronted the flasher dude on the New York subway? Yeah? Guess what she teaches. (Also: the hair! The pearls! I LOFF HER.)

Got back to the studio after weeks out and all my joints click. Not a cheery click but a cartilage-over-bone click. To which I say: whuh? This late-thirties thing has its bogus moments, and makes me look sideways at my impending fortiness. What, though, are my choices? Anyway other aspects of late-thirtiness, like being Sane and Solvent and Happy, rock the known world. So it goes.

Riding and taiji are at some weird level almost exactly the same thing. Still not sure how to unblock myself, except by noting that I am blocked. Come, my chi, flow, and make a badass outta me!

So Tangled, the movie, is frankly pretty adorable and – better still! – it has respectable worldbuilding! It always drives Claire mad when we stay to watch the credits (“MAMA! I want to LEAVE NOW!”), but people, there was a map! An accurate map, of the fairy kingdom! It was epically cool. Also the heroine getting a (spoiler!) cute short haircut was a key plot point. Also there was a charismatic horse. So I was mostly very happy.

Only mostly, though, because we saw it immediately after I read Emma Donoghue’s Booker-longlisted novel Room, which is based in part on the Fritzl and Dugard kidnappings. Donoghue’s first novel is the exquisite Hood, and I met her a million years ago in Dublin and she was very nice. Like me, she seems to have read every single thing published about Elisabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard. Those kidnappings are at once your worst nightmare and weirdly compelling, because at least the bad man didn’t kill you, right? At least you escaped? But after how much suffering and loss. Here’s a thought to keep you up at night: how many more prisoners are there out there, that we haven’t rescued yet?

The book is beautifully written but I almost couldn’t read it, so fast was I turning the pages to make sure they escaped. It made me claustrophobic. My pulse is racing just thinking about it.

And so to Tangled, where Rapunzel is locked in a tower for eighteen years. My issues with this, where to begin. Note that the bad man has become a Goth woman! And that the kidnapping is not for sex but because of this woman’s vanity! Oh vain women, you are so totally worse than the patriarchy, Disney is kind enough to point out. Note also that Rapunzel’s mother and father never even get to speak, and that the only rescue strategy we see is them flying lanterns every year on her birthday – completely charming, even if appropriated from Thailand and Taiwan, but not exactly thorough.

Rapunzel’s mother and father do not, for example, take the kingdom apart stone by stone with their bare hands.

Dear Goddess in whom I only secretly believe, help me teach my daughters to tear down walls.

Little red mare gives me my confidence back. She’s not called Bella for nothing.

I had a second disastrous lesson on Omni, so I am now officially In A Slump, which is great because it takes the pressure off for next time. I don’t like riding in the indoor arena and I keep nearly crashing into the other riders. That makes me tense up, and then Omni tenses up, and then we go backwards or up, or sometimes backwards AND up, which is Not Recommended.

Still, there was funny stuff. Colin had noticed me putting Omni’s polo wraps on before the ride. Afterwards, he was walking through the barn and said to a kid: “You looked good out there!” He saw me and said something like: “Bit rough today, eh?” I said: “At least the polo wraps stayed on.” Colin said: “Oh yeah. THEY looked good.”

Of course it makes me question what the hell I am doing. I will never be a professional. I may never be any good. I don’t ride often enough to improve rapidly. I tried riding more often, and it played hell with work and family time and then I got sick. What I am mostly doing is arresting the decline in my riding that took place in the years and years I didn’t ride: with the goal, I suppose, of one day being able to ride every day, at which point I might not suck.

It’s my retirement savings!

I skived a little this morning and took the Mister to the peerless Sandbox Bakery before work. That end of Cortland Street is a reliable source of street crazy.

Very Well Dressed Woman: Is that your boyfriend?

Me: This? Um.

VWDW: Is he your boyfriend?

Me: We’ve been married for eleven years.

VWDW: Do you have a family? Do you have children?

Jeremy: Yes.

Me: Two girls.

VWDW: Having any more?

Me and Jeremy, in unison: No.

VWDW: God came into this world as a child. God came into this world as a consuming fire.

Me: …there is that.

VWDW: I don’t know about families.

And then she walked away.

Me: You know, technically I think she’s right.

Jeremy: Yes, you do.

Last night before we went to sleep we piled all her presents on the end of her bed.

I am not a fan of mornings. But if you have to wake up, it might as well be to the sound of your big daughter saying, “Wow! Cool!” and your little daughter squealing: “This is the BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.”

Later there was dim sum, and later still cupcakes; but me, I am still grinning like fule over that squeal.

And then the riding. As you may have surmised, it has somewhat sucked of late because of the Virus That Will Not Go Away. This was extra frustrating on all levels: I had booked extra lessons through October. There’s a new horse in the barn, Manny, an ultra dark bay with a golden muzzle like a giant Dartmoor pony. Riding him was like being given the keys to a Ferrari. “HOLY SHI…!”

I asked Erin: “Is this what all fancy horses are like?” She said “Are you kidding me? This is where they START.”

Then the virus turned me into a crone and I kept having to drop out of lessons half way through because: exhausted. And then the rains came and lessons moved indoors and both Manny and Omni find the indoor arena VERY VERY EXCITING, and I kept nearly falling off. And my confidence took a massive hit, and I didn’t feel like jumping.

Until yesterday! When I got on Omni and Dez was teaching and made me trot, trot, circle, hold the outside rein, vibrate the inside rein, bend him around my leg. And he softened and his back got swingy and he started to come through. I used to think of Omni as The Professor, because if I touched him with my heel he would stop and put his head down and pigroot, sometimes with a little girly squeal. Basically exactly what Jean-Paul Descoeudres used to do to a first-year archaeology student who used Encyclopaedia Britannica as a source. (Not me, but I watched and had the fear of God put in me.)

Like all the horses that come into the McIntosh program, Omni has blossomed. It’s remarkable what top-quality hay and regular exercise will do to a horse. Bella has turned out nice; Omni is turning out super-fancy, and hot! He needs the strong warmup to get him forward and listening and using all his energy for good; otherwise, if you try to bottle him up, he will fizz and pop. (Remind you of anyone OH HELLO MISTER NOAH?) He’d been doing a lot of up and backwards lately. He’s not mean at all, just full of bean. The challenge is to channel it forwards.

But I did it! I got some very nice round softness out of him, and I started to fix my tension over fences, and best of all I kept up the good riding for a whole hour. I remembered that I am not just a passenger, that I am not (yet) an old lady, that I can ride. Massive relief.

I didn’t come anywhere close to achieving my riding goals for the year (Anne Kursinski clinic, comfortable at 2’9″.) But I did fix some other things: my lower leg isn’t swinging so much. Um. That’s it, really, and a big part of that was raising my stirrups a hole. I get discouraged if I let myself think about it too much; except that, though I am not progressing very fast (at all?), I am not actually regressing, which I did every year that I wasn’t riding. Still sucking at harder things, on better horses.

September was so overscheduled I kept singing Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (although technically, it was Dean Gray’s mashup, since I’ve never heard the original.) That left me complacent and unprepared for the rigours of October, which turned out to be a Terrible Mistake. We all returned from Oz slightly under the weather, and four weeks later, I’m still not better: very sore throat, sinus headache, aptitude to fall asleep in the afternoon even more pronounced than usual. It was in this sleepwalky phase that I came home from a Seattle trip at, like, midnight. I paid for the airport parking, put my wallet on top of my briefcase and thought, “If I don’t tuck that into a pocket, I will drop it in the street.”

And sure enough. It’s the second time this year I’ve lost my wallet, so I had the routine down, and nearly everything cancelled and reordered in 48 hours. Someone mailed the notes from the kids through the mailslot, which was …weird. They were the only really irreplaceable things, though, declarations of love in toddler handwriting on post-it-notes. I made a police report at the Ingleside station – a very odd place, in Balboa Park under the freeway, with bulletproof windows; I kept thinking about the Frenchs Forest police station so clean and open, with tropical fish in an aquarium. The officer made a funny joke about me ending up in Guantanamo, which earned him my best Look Of Death. He was extremely nice, though.

I spent a horrible few days thinking I wouldn’t be able to travel, but my fantastic attorney Minette Saved Christmas. I have an existential horror of being undocumented. I couldn’t sleep and I kept having panic attacks. I fetishize the documents themselves, as if they are my identity, as if my green card were issued through a clerical error that will be corrected as soon as someone realizes (doesn’t help that it’s dated April 1st.) Having noticed that, I overcame it a bit; as the Mister keeps pointing out, my permanent resident status exists separately from the green card, and the green card is in the process of being replaced.

Of course the very night I’d come to terms with all this, the homeless man who had found my wallet, and who had mailed the kids’ notes back, brought the rest back as well. So that’s nice. He would have brought the rest back earlier but he was picked up by the police and placed on 72-hour psychiatric hold. “I live a troubled life,” he said. Another lesson in how lucky I am, and how much I owe to other people, who aren’t so lucky.

You can be
whatever you want to be
for Halloween!
Oh that’s just a zombie!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It’s just a kid, it’s just a kid,
A kid a kid a kid a kid a kid a kid
I know it is!
Let’s go and check.
Oops!
It’s just a kid.
It’s my little brother.
Let’s go away!

When will
the sun
shine through the year?
The bright sunny days
I love them
I love the sun
I love my mother
coming with me

The sun bright shining
The sun bright shine in the world

…not to schedule my treats too close together. They were all pretty splendid, but now I need to sleep for a week. Also AMERICAN HEALTH CARE good Christ you are Kafkaesque. The babies broke my thyroid (which is okay, they’re totally worth it) and I’ma be on synthetic thyroid hormones for, well, ever. So! You’d think this would be all right, right? You’d think I could just autorefill and cruise into my chemist, sorry, pharmacy, once a month or so to pick up the levothyroxine?

Yeah. YOU WOULD THINK. But no, every three months, my handsome endocrinologist has to SIGN OFF on the fact that yes, Rach’s thyroid: still broken, please give her the meds, which have no amusing side-effects other than preventing her from devolving into a sloth. And since my endocrinologist is, in addition to being handsome, very dashing and flirty, he is always in with a patient. And so he does not sign off. And so I run out of meds, which turns me into a bitchy sloth –

You may not have ever had thyroid fog, huh? Perhaps these sloth references are being lost on you. Sans levothyroxine, I get very very sensitive to cold, and I slow down physically and, much weirder, mentally. The characteristic sign of thyroid fog is when Jeremy finds me on the couch with a blanket over me, shivering even though it’s warm, and nothing about this strikes me as strange. The first rule of thyroid fog is that it never occurs to me that it’s thyroid fog.

The oddest part is that when I’m not fogged in I don’t notice this, but when I am fogged, all the fizzy popping association-of-ideas that’s constantly going on inside my brain, the pattern matching, the shreds of cello music and lines from Yeats read long ago, Jeremy’s explanations of impedance matching, that short story of Delany’s, the air on my skin, how much I love my Frye’s harness boots, oh that’s how I can spin that new company, I should have been mellower with Claire this morning, what shall I get my mother for her birthday – all of that goes away. So, unfortunately, does my resolution not to get snippy with underpaid service employees no matter how much they stonewall me. So there were some sharp exchanges on the phone, which resulted in me not getting my prescription filled before we drove up to Oz. As a matter of fact, thyroid fog isn’t so bad when I can zone out looking at the Garcia River or huddled in front of the pot-bellied stove; it’s almost pleasant, like the pure physicality of sleep-dep and new-baby-love. But I suspect it makes me very boring to talk to.

Plus I tried to overcompensate by getting my Martha Stewart on. Note to future self: writing lists of clothes and food to take to Oz, plus a checklist of what’s in which bag, worked brilliantly, especially because it lets the girls pack for themselves. Having a plan for what to cook when is also probably a good idea, but you didn’t need to massively over-cater every meal and generate a metric fuckton of washing up. Take a chill pill! …oh, right.

God, though. Oz Farm. So achingly familiar now, the whole hellish drive up (the kids throwing up their milkshakes on the switchbacks over the coast range), the dirt road across the meadow and into the trees, the valley and the farm itself: a world transformed. A busy and happy 21st century CSA built inside the bones of a hippie commune. Then past the farm and through the woods to the river, and then across the log bridge and through a little bit of Middle Earth to the Domes. At which point I sit down in the sunshine and stare across the meadow at the redwoods, and will spend most of the next few days doing pretty much just that.

At harvest time the meadow grass is bone-dry and armed with burrs. It’s yellow and cream and ivory and grey, with much darker grey sticks sticking out of it. And it describes the wind like iron filings describe a magnetic field, in the approved Miyazaki fashion. And the meadow is fringed with bay laurel and live oak and, of course, the redwoods, the most charismatic and enigmatic of all trees.

I didn’t see the deer Ada startled when she was out exploring at dawn, or the bat that whirred over Danny and Liz in their bed, but I saw more raptors than I could count, and great ominous ravens. I saw large speckled lizards and snakes as small and beautiful as bracelets, swimming in the river with their heads above water and their bodies describing mathematical functions of awesome grace. And I spent too much time staring at the sky, which was over-photoshopped blue at noon, sponge-streaked grey-and-apricot trompe l’oeil at dawn and dusk and then at night, the endless dark well behind the Milky Way, with satellites swimming across it.

Nature’s cool.

Um. There is way more I wanted to say, like how great Liz’s dragon roleplay was, and how big Milo now calls me “Shadowstarkness’s human in reality – what is her name?” and how Ada curled up on my lap by the fire. And how I got a couple of Alice Adams novels at the fantastic bookstore in Guernville, and the one I’m reading is just wonderful, and why isn’t she as famous as Philip Roth and John Updike? Oh wait, I think I know. And how we bounced off to see Zoe Keating at Yoshi’s the night after we got back, and also I bought a chair. But almost-1000 words is really too long for a blog post, and so.

Do I sound miserable here? Someone asked me today if I was going through a hard time! I’m ashamed to say I laughed. Oh, my heart is breaking for the all kids who committed suicide this month, and I just sobbed my way through several relevant bits (ETA Milo’s is the best), but the reason the It Gets Better project slays me dead, every time, is precisely because I was bullied and it did get better, so much better, better than I could possibly have dreamed. Not only do I live in a city that, if it were human, I would have a helpless girlcrush on and want to make out with all the time, just look at this place, I mean, damn, I’ve had at least two occasions in the last twelve months – Jeremy’s last birthday party and the Labor Day picnic – where about five hours flowed past in real bliss. Didn’t even know that was possible. I’ve been worried my blog is getting too sappy, because I am just nauseatingly cheerful and fulfilled right now.

Anyway! Just felt I should clear that up. Today was really great. Claire, Julia and I Internationally Walked to School for cute keyrings and stickers. The webinar I gave in the morning went exceptionally well. I had a vat of Blue Bottle coffee and a very delicious bit of salmon at the reliably nommy Boulette’s Larder, right on the Bay, with several of my favourite people. In the afternoon I fooled around a little with amusing work, and then I came home to run the first math circle session for Fall. All the math parents just lovely, and even better, half of them already knew each other and were overjoyed to catch up. The new space is pretty much ideal, and it’s about sixty feet from my front door. I was able to sneak away during the third session, have a sit-down dinner with Jeremy and the kids at home, and be back in time to lock up. Now I am blogging with the MacBook on my left hip and the Beeblebooble curled up on my right. Oh look, and there’s a new MythBusters, and Jeremy just brought me tea and chocolate.

Riding lesson tomorrow! Oz Farm this weekend! Tickets to Zoe Keating next week!

Woke up hungover. Had a date night with the Mister last night. We went to Mission Beach and split a bottle of sangiovese. Mission Beach is really just an epically good place. I had a perfect arugula and peach salad, a fantastic bit of filet mignon on a bed of corn, English peas, black-eyed peas, mushrooms and garlic cloves with port jus (I wasn’t sure about the black-eyed peas but they gave the whole dish an incredibly rich earthiness and texture) (“Jus.” “Jus.” Jus.”) and a key lime pie. I ate too much, actually: I’ve been subsisting on salad and lean meats for a while, and can’t pack away three courses with my former aplomb. Then we went to see Exit Through the Gift Shop at the Roxie. It was funny.

This morning we had nothing in particular planned, so when Jeremy suggested that everyone come down and watch me ride I pointed out that we could swing by and see Robert and Gayu and Hari; so we did that, and had a yummy lunch (in Sunnyvale! I KNOW) and then I rode and Failed To Suck, and then there was a bouncy castle at Webb Ranch so of course we had to stop so the girls would bounce. I left my phone in the car where Jeremy was napping so I didn’t get a picture, but I looked at the bouncy castle which was unusually clean and bright rainbow colours, and the girls – Jules in her blue gingham dress, Claire in her leopardskin skirt and NYPL tee – and thought, I should remember this. A perfect moment in a perfect day. Let me keep it.

Now the chicken is roasting with yams and carrots and kale, and the girls are colouring, and it’s another pretty awesome moment actually.

Julia: “Mama, are rainbows really real?”

Me: “Yes, Julia, rainbows are real.”

Julia: “OH MY!”

Whatever nice things happen, a week with a bullying suicide is always a crap week. I am nearly forty and I am a proper grownup now, with a green card and a 401k and a personal style (yes I do, it’s cowgirl-librarian, shut up) and Optimal Husband and the Sproglets and the sorts of achingly, awesomely sympatico friends I only dreamed about and read about in books when I was growing up. I can drive stick shift and cook a delicious meal for an impromptu dinner party of 12 and write a publishable short story or eight, and I jump Thoroughbred horses over fences for fun.

Back in the day, though, I was the weird nerd, with stupid glasses and horrible pimples and bad hair. I was hilarious. I stank of fear the way roadkill stinks of carrion, and like roadkill, I was irresistible to the grosser sorts of vulture. It was side-splittingly funny to point out that my skirt length was incorrect, that my shoes were not approved, that I had said something that I had apparently read in a book. The fact that I read books was just beyond funny. I was frigid, and a slut. I was uglier than shit. How about a little kiss?

This was at high school; at university, I realize now, it actually got worse, because it was subtler and more barbed. It was howlingly funny that I said “mankind”; Glenn, obviously a far better feminist than I would ever be, corrected me to “humanity” with an indulgent chuckle. I was, hilariously, “the most pretentious person” Julian had “ever met.” “I knew there had to be something I liked about you,” said Alistair, and the entire cast of the play fell about laughing. Twenty years on, the memory of these exchanges, preserved in far more vivid detail than anything nice anyone ever said, can still make me angry and ashamed.

If the bully culture I grew up in was meant to make me want to conform, it failed: all I wanted to do was get away, or failing that, set fire to the entire city, and I’m still awkward and uncomfortable whenever I go back to Sydney. I am on the defensive there, and constantly surprised when people treat me with ordinary courtesy. But I don’t think it was meant to change me. I think it was just meant to hurt. I think hurting me made the bullies and their hangers-on feel safe and included. A nice little bonding ritual for them. Bless.

I think it’s how privilege works, and that’s why it was worse at Sydney Uni. They were Grammar boys and college boys. They knew exactly how to shut people out, and why.

And even that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how desperately I craved their attention and approval: how badly I wanted Glenn and Julian and Alistair and others like them, many others like them, to be my friends. That’s why I didn’t walk away. They couldn’t hate me any more than I hated myself. It’s still hard to forgive myself for that.

Anyway, my point is, Tyler Clementi was actually way too cool to have been friends with then-me; he could play violin fantastically well, and he got into Rutgers. And the thought of him closing his computer and his cellphone and stepping off the George Washington Bridge, the thought that there will be no more violin solos, the thought that he won’t move out to San Francisco after he graduates, and get his heart broken by some asshole he met at Center Camp, and cry into his mimosas at Mission Beach, and then meet a nicer guy on OKCupid and settle down and adopt a couple of kids and join the PTA… Well, fuck you, bullies. Fuck you. You have no idea.

And to the people I bullied myself: I am beyond sorry.

All I had to do was take the farmer’s market spoils home and put them away, rescue the cream pan for Jeremy, find the girls’ swimming costumes and towels and pack everything for their swim lesson, change into a non-coffee besmirched sundress and find the matching cardigan so as to look kicky at the first New York-San Francisco International Childrens’ Film Festival. Matters were complicated somewhat by the breakfast things being left out, but this wasn’t insuperable. I shouldn’t have been so late and flustered by the time I got to the car that I slammed the car door into my face.

I really recommend not doing this.

The topology’s tricky, I admit. Imagine I am drawing diagrams for this bit: it only happened because Hedwig was parked on the steep hilly part of the next block of Eugenia, and because I was distractedly reading a chalk sign in front of some chairs out on a stoop (NOT FREE! PLEASE DO NOT TAKE!) Our neighbour kids must have been planning a sit out in the lovely sunshine, they sure do love their pavement chalk, their handwriting is improving every day: this all passed through my mind as I was glancing at the chairs and simultaneously pulling the car door open. It was as I glanced back that I saw the top corner of the door from VERY CLOSE UP, and then it hit me in my right nostril.

I didn’t see stars, as it turns out: everything just went white. Did I mention this is something you should not do? There was a lot of blood, and more pain. This all took place just after 11am, and it’s nearly 9pm and the whole lower right quadrant of my face still feels like, well, like I slammed a car door into it and got steel up my nose.

I had a lovely day otherwise.