I drove Claire out to Coastal Camp this morning.

Some explanation for the non-USonians may be called for: school is out, and thanks to the weird counterintuitive school calendar around here this means we rejoice in our graduating-kindergartener’s company for the next eleven weeks. Fortunately everyone else is in the same boat, so there are many options for parking your beloved short person with responsible adults during the working day. I went a bit mad with credit cards back in February, and Claire got the classic career mom’s overcompensatory holidays: spring break at Acrosports, then this camp, a science camp in Noe and a Mandarin immersion program over the summer.

My God, but Rodeo Lagoon is beautiful in the morning. It’s a green-grey, steep-sided valley, full of wildflowers, that opens out to the green-grey Pacific. Flocks of turkeys walked around gobbling; Claire found them hilarious. I left her with the very sweet and competent camp counselors, and she grinned and gave me two thumbs up as I drove away. It felt like ripping my heart out. These days my separation anxiety is worse than hers. I suspect that trend will continue.

Three deer walked in front of my car and stopped and looked at me with their lovely inhuman expressionless faces, like models. One had a scruffy little fawn, white spots still bright on its rump.

How come grownups don’t get summer camp?

“Look, mummy!”

Julia has her dress pulled up like an apron. It is full of sand.

“It is my baby belly,” she explains.

“You’re having a baby?”

“Yes.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“What’s her name?”

Julia looks thoughtfully into her dress.

“Sandy.”

Claire’s choice for bedtime reading was the Cartoon Shakespeare Twelfth Night.

Here’s an observation. If your God is telling you to go and shoot a doctor while he is at church with his family? You have a bad God.

Abortion is a matter on which people of conscience can differ, but murder is not.

Doctor Tiller had more compassion and human decency than all of his opponents combined.

I gave in his memory to Medical Students for Choice and the National Network of Abortion Funds.

ETA: Abortion protestors have abortions.

Birth moms have abortions.

My friend had an abortion that saved her life.

Claire: “I am emptying my Carnavale balloons.” Jeremy: “You are Deflater-mouse.”

—–

Claire: “But the TV is our God!

—–

Ruairi appears with the pony puppet, all tangled in its strings. “I knitting!” he cries. “I knitting a HORSE!”

—–

Small robots marched around my coffee table, and were given tangerine food cubes.

—–

“Lost In The Fog” at the Roxie: boy meets horse, boy loses horse.

—–

Julia: “It’s raining mucher! It’s raining even much!”

—–

Rach betters TV: The News Hour With Tom Lehrer

—–

Claire to Julia, in bath: “The water snakes are not, I repeat, NOT, your friends.”

—–

For all its downsides, a plutonium mug would keep my coffee hot.

—–

Julia: “WHOO! I’m fallin’! Oof! I falled.”

—–

According to my records this is the second Thursday this week.

Kamikaze Heart

Longtime readers (there will be a test) may recall my delight in Sweet Can Productions’ marvellous show Habitat; Kamikaze Heart, from the performance arm of local urban circus school Acrosports, draws on many of the same traditions, including the brilliant and eye-popping art of aerial silks.

The plot of Kamikaze Heart is pretty much a wry tall tale on which to string a bunch of feats. My favourite bit was where the swan-who-was-the-ghost-of-the-beautiful-grantwriter was flying over the b-boy competition on her way back from Iraq (long story) and the performer did a dance with two bungees fixed to her hips from opposite sides above the stage.

As she bounced and swung the rhythm of the elastics really did seem like great wings, beating: a primal archetype for the harbingers of death, or birth. It reminded me of Grant’s description of the first production he saw of Tony Kushner’s Millennium Approaches, where the Angel came down from on a wire above the heads of the audience, screaming.

Where Acrosports won my heart for ever and always, though, was as we came out into the lobby. The whole cast was there, and the instant that Nancy Kate “Fancy Legs” Siefker, in full costume and makeup, laid her eyes on my Claire, she recognized her from Acrosports spring camp, went down on one knee and held out her arms: Claire flew into her embrace.

The Girlfriend Experience

I enjoyed this film as I was watching it. I like Steven Soderbergh’s laconic, respectful direction, his subdued palette and his attention to his actors, and his films have, for the most part, treated women as human – Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, even the completely unnecessary remake of Solaris. I never bothered with the Oceans films because with few expections I find celebrities boring and the prospect of watching them have a circle-jerk is deeply unappealling.

The best thing about Girlfriend, by far, is Sasha Grey’s performance as the expensive escort. Grey’s a porn star looking to diversify, and she’s brilliant at showing how an escort needs to be a sort of social chameleon, giving every client what he thinks he needs, while keeping her important part locked away where no one can get at it. (She’s also rapturously, implausibly beautiful.)

But Girlfriend left a bad taste in my mouth. The script is from the same team that brought us the Oceans films and while it tries to satirize that clubby, rich-men atmosphere of Hollywood and Wall Street pre-crash and the kinds of people who use wildly expensive escort services, it’s a bit inescapably of that world itself.

Most damningly, the only sympathetic male character, David, a client who actually listens to the escort and who of course she falls for, is played by one of the writers. His name is, guess what, David. The character is a Mary Sue, a Mary Sue of a rich john, and that makes me feel ill.

As another character points out, the only reason anyone is shelling out thousands for the girlfriend experience is because this woman is so improbably gorgeous. No one would care about her inner life if she weren’t so radiant, and by the same token, it’s not really her inner life, her thoughts and feelings and desires and hopes, that everyone is trying to drag out of her. What her greedy clients (and by implication we as the voyeuristic audience) really want is to break down her defenses and possess her.

Yuck. And what if she were just ordinary-looking? I was teaching Julia Marxist chess the other day. “These are the pawns. The point of this game is that the pawns all die, and nobody cares.”

Marie Antoinette

Kirsten Dunst is adorable. I have a new theory about anachronistic period films like this one and A Knight’s Tale; the music is of our youth, and as we age it all gets wound up in generic yardage of Pastness imported fresh from the Past fields of darkest Past-landia. Our high school dances are so long ago now we might as well have been wearing corsets and bustles and have had absurd beehive hair. Winona is Spock’s mother! We are old.

JULIA: Tell me a story! Tell me a story about MERMAIDS!

RACHEL: Well. Hundreds of years ago when the British were exploring the oceans in huge wooden ships, sometimes the sailors would be months and months away from land and they would start to miss women. Because the sailors were nearly all men. And sometimes when they were in the waters around say Australia or Florida they would see dugongs or manatees and think that they were women with the tails of fish. And that is where mermaids came from. Look, here is a picture of a manatee. Isn’t she lovely? Doesn’t she look like a mermaid?

JULIA: Yes!

RACHEL: Manatees like to be thought of as very big. So when you meet a manatee, the polite way to greet her is to say “Oh, the huge manatee!”

JULIA: “Oh, the huge manatee!”

RACHEL: Excellent. Go and tell your daddy.

ME: …my old riding instructor, David.

CLAIRE (uncertainly): His name was Day-vid?

ME: Yes, that’s right, David.

CLAIRE (scornfully): That’s not a real name.

ME: Whuh?

CLAIRE: I’ve never heard of it!

ME: *wibble*

CLAIRE (with finality): *I* don’t know anyone called David.

ME: Well. No. I guess you don’t.

1. ordinary everyday suckage

They love to live in big groups and move around and graze for twenty hours a day, so we split them up and put them in 12×12 stalls and give them a handful of big meals. Eighty percent of show horses have ulcers. We give them grain to build up their muscle; the protein and carbs can make them colic or founder. Horses can’t throw up, so colic is often fatal. Founder is toxic buildup inside the hoofs, where the inflamed tissue can’t swell but must press against the hoof wall. It’s agonizing.

Showjumping champion and USET president William Steinkraus says we keep them like prisoners in solitary confinement.

Just sitting on their backs is bad enough; that’s where a big cat would jump on them to break their necks. The vast majority of us, myself absolutely included, ride badly and jab their mouths, kick their ribs and flop around on their backs.

And this is just the beginning.

2. advanced suckage in many diabolical forms

These are only the English sports, that I know reasonably well.

In dressage, aficionados of rollkur fill the horse’s mouth with bondage equipment that would not disgrace an Inquisition torturer, and force the animal to walk, trot and canter with its chin to its chest.

In showjumping, lazy trainers will have assistants lift the top pole of the fence to hit a jumping horse on the sensitive coronet band, a practice known as rapping or poling. It’s supposed to teach the horse to be more careful. What I think it teaches the horse is that neither its own best judgment nor the sense and goodwill of its rider are to be trusted.

Almost unbelievably, showjumping was also the sport where an unknown but large number of big-name trainers paid a hit man to electrocute their horses for the insurance money.

Eventing may be the ultimate test of horsemanship. It’s the sport I used to watch on TV with my dad, the one I always dreamed of competing in. It combines dressage and showjumping with a thrilling, gruelling cross-country course over fixed fences. In showjumping, if you hit a fence, the fence falls. In cross-country, you fall.

1997 was supposed to be a bad year for the sport. Three top riders died. But the bad year never ended. In the ten years that followed, thirty-seven more people have been killed. That’s not including the catastrophic injuries to riders, or the dead horses. Mike Winter’s Kingpin died at Kentucky Rolex this year. His heart exploded. Phillip Dutton’s Bailey Wick died at Jersey Fresh on the weekend. His pelvis broke and opened an artery. These days it’s considered a good upper-level 3DE if no horse or rider is killed or maimed.

I love eventing, but here’s a prediction so blindingly obvious at this point that it’s practically just an observation. If the sport doesn’t stop slaughtering its own athletes it won’t exist in another ten years.

JULIA: Mama, copy me!

ME, OBEDIENTLY: Mama, copy me!

JULIA: Good!

ME: Good!

JULIA: Julia, would you like some ice cream?

ME: Julia, would you like – hey! Wait a minute!

At YO’S SUSHI, soaking up Asahi beer and SUNSHINE. The children are fed MISO. IDYLLIC, it is.

ME: Hey Claire, there’s a position coming open on the Supreme Court.

CLAIRE: Hmm?

ME: Do you think you could finish your law degree by, oh, say June?

CLAIRE: But I’m just a kid.

ME: But I’ve always wanted to say “my daughter, the Supreme Court justice.”

CLAIRE, PRAGMATICALLY: Well, you just said it.

There is a PAUSE.

ME: I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long.

JEREMY: At least we know she has the right kind of legalistic mind.

Tricky Elle was sold, which I am pleased about, because all horses deserve their own person. There are also new school horses, including tricky Bella, to keep me on my toes. Bella is a bit smaller and a lot skinnier than the other horses I have been riding, with a somewhat upright shoulder and not much muscle on her neck. (Note that these conformational observations are purely technical; it is equally correct to point out that she is a fabulously beautiful copper-bright showjumper mare.) Although for quite different reasons, because she’s unquestionably a jumper and not a hunter, Bella, like Elle, pulls me all out of balance. And this is a bit scary but it’s mostly very challenging and interesting and makes me appreciate all over again what fun it is and what a huge privilege to ride a bunch of different horses at this exalted level.

In the horse world where I grew up, school horses of this quality simply didn’t exist. I went to a couple of very good riding schools, and when you reached the top standard – a half-Perch or an ancient OTTB – your only real choice was to go get a horse of your own and have private lessons, which is what I did, firstly with Alfie and Tina Wommelsdorf, and then many years later with Noah and David Murdoch. All the Olympians. Now these were peak experiences of my life, so let’s not go imagining that I am ungrateful. But the arrangement had some drawbacks, in that my progress in riding was intimately bound up not only with the capacity but also with the physical condition of one specific animal. Alfie was old, and then he got arthritis and had to be retired; Noah was hot, and then he got a stone bruise, and that was me out for months and months.

Today, instead of having a horse who is boyfriend-and-unborn-children-and-sporting-partner all rolled into one, I have been absorbed into a busy, efficient, successful East Coast-style hunter-jumper A barn, where excellent grooms clean and tack up the horses for me, and excellent trainers condition them, and excellent vets advise on their nutrition and health. The place just absolutely buoys my spirits with its attention to detail, with the many small meals the horses are fed, with the cleanliness of the tack and the aisles and the jumps. And like a proper unsentimental adult amateur in the European tradition, I have ridden four different horses in as many months. I have revelled in the clockwork generosity of Austin and Cassie, and I have worked hard to meet the challenges posed by Elle and Bella. It feels like gross disloyalty to say so, but I can’t help feeling I’ve learned more by switching around like this than I did in whole years at Samurai or Glenoaks.

Today, for example, I had several moments when I thought I was having a very bad lesson. Bella and I got into an unconstructive loop where I was worried about my crest release and kept slowing and slowing her down and looking at the fences or the ground near them instead of up and over and away. And she is little and fast and likes to go go go, and she got more and more irked with me and ended up having a bad chip in front of one oxer. Same old lesson: let go. I had to ease up and trust her speed. I had to look up and over the fences and trust that she would get me where we were going.

And as soon as I did all this, of course, I found my balance on her and she forgave me for everything and we went racing around and over the jumps in glorious style, and the sun came out and I listened to Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba all the way home and my blood turned to apple brandy in my veins.

Julia protested the human condition at 3am and so came into bed with us, where she promptly peed. Potty training is going well, one just has to allow for these setbacks. I didn’t really sleep again until about five, when I found myself being chased by a sweaty cowboy around the old Sydney Showground, trying to get to a riding lesson on time; and then there was a series of flashes and pops above the San Bruno Mountains, and first one mushroom cloud and then another and another rose against the dark cloudy sky. “Oh shit,” I said eloquently, for the terrorists had finally obtained nukes, and I wished fervently that it could be just another atomic war dream.

And then I woke up. So however swinish and spectral today might be, at least it isn’t that.

Our number came up at Good Prospect Community Garden! Right now the plot is a mess of artichoke, sage and lemon verbena, but we’re going to cut it all back and plant cherry toms and summer squash! There are lemons and limes and apples and pears and concord grapes and raspberries and it is SO VERY BEAUTIFUL that words cannot adequately describe.

And today I rode Fluffy the Seagull the Horse the Bicycle part of the way to work. Check me out! I am all San Franciscan and sustainable and stuff!

In my last riding lesson on Cassie, Mare of Mares, I was mistakenly put in with a group of shiny teenysomethings who are rillyrilly good. It ended with us having to do flying changes at the canter, without stirrups. It was rillyrilly hard!

Afterwards one of the sparkly young X-Men said to me: “You looked good on her.”

It is embarrassing how pleased I still am, over a week later, at this crumb of praise.

My goodness but I made myself ill last week. I got on a plane on Wednesday sort-of-knowing that I was coming down with something nasty, and when I got to my destination I could neither swallow nor hear. My ears popped about twelve hours later, at which point EVERYTHING BECAME VERY LOUD; then I got on another plane to come home and the same thing happened again.

But my throat stayed raw and horrible for days and days. Talking hurt, breathing hurt and swallowing my own saliva felt like choking down a small roll of rusty barbwire. Every. Damn. Time. I do not think I am particularly wimpy, despite my brothers’ longstanding characterization of me as such; I have had broken ankle bones and ribs and gotten back on the fool horses that gave them to me, and I gave birth to my two babies without any epidurals. Beat that, boyos! But I trudged up to the Emergency Room on Saturday and described my throat pain, unironically, as “severe.” The doctors were very nice but it was viral, which I sort of knew. Nothing to be done. I went home and went to bed.

By Saturday night I was having fever dreams of striking originality. There was a sort of architectural quality to them. It was rather like watching a freight train pass, with its cars made of large pale pastel blocks of light. I tried to harness these dreams and was given various insights, among which was the in-retrospect-blindingly-obvious fact that working myself into exhaustion and subsequent viral pharyngitis is self-defeating behaviour on a number of levels. I set to changing my priorities, which felt like a physical process of lifting giant perspex concentric circles and clicking them back into place in a different order. When I got it right it was deeply satisfying, like solving a puzzle, and I finally went to sleep.

I was somewhat better the next morning and have been feeling profoundly happy ever since. Still sick enough to cancel riding, but well enough to take great pleasure in seeing friends and going to a little movie and hanging with my best girls. Tonight I threw Claire and Jules in the bath, and made dinner for them with strawberries for dessert, and walked Claire through piano practice while Julia sang along, and brushed their teeth and read them the Dragons pop-up book and put them to bed. A perfectly ordinary evening shot through with pure golden joy.

[09:35] FurHordinge: As we were going down castro, so I said that milk was nicknamed the mayor of castro st
[09:35] FurHordinge: “Does evey street have a mayor?”
[09:35] mizchalmers: awww
[09:35] FurHordinge: No, but milk helped organize the gay men and women politically
[09:36] FurHordinge: “Like martin luther king did for the black people?”

I haven’t posted about riding for a while because the week after my last post, about falling off Elle, I fell off again. That one was worse. Again at the canter transition, but this time Elle tripped and I went over her head and faceplanted in the arena sand. (The fabulous Miss Kirsty alone in the universe made me feel better about it: I twittered that I had sand in my hair and up my nose and she replied “I am so hot for you right now.”)

Otherwise I felt like hell. Riding, which was supposed to replace Zoloft as the key endorphin guarantor of my week, had become a problem instead. I was afraid again, of falling, of hurting myself, of looking like a prize idiot. The week after the second fall I had to have a long stern conversation with myself on the drive down.

I don’t know if I can put this conversation into words. I just read Samuel Delany’s “The Tale of Old Venn” (I am only now noticing the brilliance of that title) which not only describes but tries to embody the limitations of language in encapsulating lived experience. There’s a passage in which one of Venn’s students, trying to absorb the lesson, suddenly wakes up to the play of sunlight in the leaves, the air on her skin, the distant hum of human affairs – direct sensory input. And she feels, right down in her gut, for the first time, the way language acts as a bottleneck for conveying the truth of life. However precise and brilliant the language, most of life is left out.

You’ll laugh – Salome did – when I say that reading this was the first time I realized it. I have lived in my head for so long. I have lived other peoples’ lives in books far more vividly than I ever lived my own, right up until Christmas Day 2002. And here my tale loops around. I want to make a lame Derrida-derivative pun about the Christmas *present*, but for you, dear reader, I will refrain. Feel the love.

I thought about Claire’s birth on that drive down to the barn. I thought about how I needed to find the strength to push, and how I thought it would kill me, and then the moment came when I was perfectly okay with that; I was happy enough to die if it meant that Claire would be born. At which point of course my body opened and Claire was born.

We are mortal. Forward movement is movement towards our death. To get back on the horse means accepting that I might fall off again and hurt or kill myself; but the alternative is not to live at all. Oh, these words are so hopelessly inadequate! I couldn’t know this thing until I felt it in my body, and I can’t convey it to you except in cliches. This is why it is so hard to communicate between generations! I look at myself in my twenties, pathetically cyclothymic, my judgment hopeless, my competence all over the map, and I wish I could give that smooth-skinned young self some of my own wry strength. But where did the strength come from? From all those mistakes, all those falls, all that fear, every time I got back on the damn horse. There are no shortcuts.

I rode Elle that day and we jumped a course in a light and forward and happy frame, as well as could be imagined given my current fitness and capacity. For my next lesson I rode Austin, my friend Beth’s magical Paint and an old, old friend of mine too, my partner in winning the first blue ribbon of my life. Austin and I get on like a house on fire. He’s a jumper, as opposed to Elle’s hunter style, much more what I am used to from Noah and the Samarai days, and I feel so safe and confident on him. We jumped a 2’3″ course! Which is tiny but still! It was amazing!

My classmate Olynda was on Elle for that lesson and this was fascinating to watch. Olynda is an ex-eventer like me, used to an uphill horse like Austin, and like me she found Elle’s long low frame very disconcerting. It was reassuring to see someone else struggle with her balance trying to make the transition from jumper to hunter style. There’s a real difference! It’s not just me!

Yesterday, greatly enfeebled by a hot sun and a very sore shoulder, I rode Elle again. It was not by any means a brilliant lesson, but I am finding my balance. I am learning to give with my hands and hips when I ask for a canter, and to make my lower leg the foundation of my seat so that I don’t risk toppling off. I also suddenly and completely got the point of show hunters.

The action of the field hunter is efficient: the horse does not waste energy bending its legs any more than it has to. This relates back to the hunt field, where the horse had to work for several hours on end, often galloping, and inefficient movement would tire the horse more quickly.

I got Elle into her perfect, cadenced, hypnotic, rocking-horse canter, and despite my various infirmities, I felt like I could stay there all day. If I haven’t already alienated every one of my dozen readers worldwide (you can blame Rose for encouraging me), I will write further obsessive essays about the origins of English equestrian culture in foxhunting and the balanced versus the hunter seat. You can’t wait! I love horses. Did you know?

I blog drunkenly yet again (alcohol like water in these islands):

I had a completely unexpected and undeserved reward tonight for getting off my ass and going out instead of sitting in my hotel room brooding on the wrongs I have been done. I hauled my middleaged and maternal ass to Bethnal Green for Grant’s Night of 1000 Chicos. I was having a perfectly nice conversation with Ian and Rod, explaining about riding Irish cobs in Hyde Park, when my eyes deceived me and I thought I saw a young Fraser Wilson walking through the door.

But it was a present-day Fraser Wilson, miraculously unaged. I may have squealed, though a dignified mama of two would not have done so. We hugged and kissed for a considerable amount of time. We held hands and babbled for an hour. It was very very hard to tear myself away; only the prospect of a flight back to my husband and daughters could have made me do it.

Fraser! It was like meeting a fictional character, or a dream. He left California before I met even Salome. He is still so beautiful and brilliant.

The whole week’s been like that; getting to spend proper time with Grant and Kirst and Jo and Mia and Jess and Mark and Chris and Cait. My friends are so smart and interesting and gorgeous! Completely unlooked-for blessings. It was hard to get on the plane to come here, and it will be almost equally hard to leave. That’s a rare and priceless thing, to have so much love in so many places.

I am more grateful than I can say.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I celebrate my geeky girlfriends, who kick my ass and keep me honest. I wouldn’t be in San Francisco happily nerding my head off if the generous, the visionary Kate Crawford, Rosanne Bersten and Rosie Cross hadn’t published my earlier, crappier work. They saw the me I wasn’t yet. Mia Ridge turns relational databases into time machines and Bobigail Grahame and Rose White can program orbiting supercomputers by tapping out binary code with their knitting needles. Written on the body? Quinn Norton could hand Jeanette Winterson her skinny ass. Liz Henry, Skud and Sumana Harihareswara are hyperconnected nodes; through them I feel directly connected to the great world where women are taking up keyboards against their oppressors. I owe Cheryl Traverse the incalculable debt of a mentee to her mentor. And there are others, of course, many others, so many that I can never do justice to them all.

May I say, though, that I love the next generation best of all?