Jeremy’s wushu school held a demonstration at the Asian Art Museum last night. Wushu is derived from Chinese martial arts; it’s a combination of forms and sparring. The forms are like a beautiful, gymnastic dance. The sparring is scary and exciting, all whirring swords and nunchucks! And it doesn’t hurt that everyone is wearing brightly coloured silk pajamas.

Teacher Philip did his drunken fist routine, where the fighter is pretending to be impaired to Lull the opponent into a False Sense of Security. His wife Zhang Hong Mei, a former Chinese national champion, danced with two swords. She is so fast and strong and graceful that even if you are sitting ten feet away from her you cannot believe your eyes.

The kids were enthralled and inspired. All the way home they were practising their forms.

I don’t want to claim to be running again, but I have been out twice in a week. It reminds me how much I love our hill. On Sunday, on the way up, I saw a hummingbird standing in the air among the Eugenia Street callistemon.

Then, when I got to the top of the hill, the red-tailed hawk that lives in the pines flew directly over my head to the hillside. He was so close I could see the sky between his tail feathers.

He glared at me gazing at him, his eyes yellow and mad, then he flew up and back over my head. Something trailed from his talons that I thought were jesses until I realized it was the tail of the mouse he’d just caught.

I went to bed at the girls’ bedtime a couple of nights last week and felt much better. Then of course I ran around like a nutter all weekend. Visited George the horse, of whom more presently, maybe, for cuddles and manure; took the manure to Armistead Maupin Elementary, where I spread it around a pair of fig trees. Worked in the sun to help build the cob bench and got thoroughly sunburned. Claire and another girl were at war with the boys. The boys were a Wookie-Clone alliance, armed with light sabers. Claire and her sidekick fought back with guns. I thought that showed admirable initiative and a sound grasp of tactics.

I took home some squash blossoms and two yellow zucchinis from the school garden, which made me feel all warm and locavorous over having turned horse poo into summer squash. I tried to make squash blossom fritters, which were not especially successful. Then J and I went to the Dark Knight for a date, which was also not very successful. Heath Ledger was brilliant and heartbreaking, but other than that it was just a big shouty film and dumber than most. I walked out ten minutes before the end. Salome and I are going to get the DVD of Brokeback and have a good sob over that.

Sunday I took Claire to her piano class, and she and her teacher played a duet of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy while I grinned until my face split in half and my heart exploded with pride. You could practically tell it was actually Ode to Joy! Claire has been practicing furiously ever since we watched a YouTube of some ten-year-old prodigy playing Chopin. “He’s better than me!” she wailed. “I bet he practices a lot,” I said, and that was it. She played every night for a week.

Can you tell how tired I am from my intermittent posting and general lack of coherence? I stay up late and sleep badly and get up early. Last night I dreamed there was a huge earthquake in Grantchester. Shockwaves ran out under the green grass like ripples on a pond.

“Oh Julia.”

“What has she done?”

“She’s dropped the keys through the hole into the DVD cabinet. And it’s locked.”

“Oh. Crap.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we hook it out?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll get a coathanger.”

“Too stiff. There aren’t enough degrees of freedom.”

“Sure there are. Let me try.”

“No I’ll do it.”

“Huh. It’s not going to come up that way.”

“I wonder if we can get it through this slot?”

“No way, the keys are too thick. Do we have a magnet?”

“No. How about if I go through here and lift it up to you?”

“That might work. There you go. Steady…”

“Ready?”

“Got it!”

(The keys are now hanging off a bulldog clip that is too big to go through the hole. What we should have done in the first place.)

Seriously great day, the first for a while. Morning playdate with the other Armistead Maupin parents, who are all gorgeous and charming and interested in the same kinds of gossip as I am (this year’s School District lottery having furnished us with way too much material, unfortunately.) Side trip back to Bernal for Claire’s piano class, during which I started a new-to-me Kerry Greenwood that is irresistibly reminiscent of my beloved Sunshine, which if you haven’t read, do! (The book list on the left there is so far out of date that it may never be caught up.)

The playdate went on for satisfying ages, at the end of which I was trembly with hunger and about to fall into that unable-to-decide-what-to-eat state when in the nick of time I remembered El Metate! Alemany works as a handy teleport from Excelsior to darkest Mission, and then there was a parking space (there is never a parking space) and twenty minutes later I was stuffed full of breaded fish tacos and happy as a pig.

When we got home there was a parking space! (There is never a parking space!) And the downstairses were just getting home, so Claire was swallowed up into their entourage and Jeremy and Julia had a nap, and since my services were not required I went to the mailbox and got a chai and cookies from Nervous Dog and dropped over to the Murgisteads to hang. And now I am home, with dinner-makings and a new piece of terrace-knickknackery, and the J’s are awake and the cat is healthy and hydrated and happy. Seriously great day.

Stupid cat ate the wet food! And has been quite charming ever since we got her home, setting aside her understandable objections to the meds.

She may need a new epithet. But I won’t rush it. She’s bound to do something awful soon.

The stupid cat won’t eat wet food. She never has eaten wet food, of course, but I wish she would tonight.

She had her teeth cleaned under a general anaesthetic this morning, and the vet extracted three teeth that had deep lesions and must have been causing her a fair bit of pain. She’s had her teeth cleaned before but she’s an old lady now, and it was hard to drop her off this morning. The gloomy part of me was convinced she would die under the anaesthetic, or at least savage a vet nurse. Or the sky would fall. Rock on, gloomy self! You’re the life of the damn party.

One time when I went to pick her up after she had her teeth done, the stupid cat made me feel like a big shiny hero. She was all cranky and hissing and backed into a corner of her cage, but as soon as she saw me she crept into my arms and purred. The people were wowed by my cat-fu! Today, not so much. She was as pissed off at me as she was at the entire rest of the world, and she wanted us all dead. I had to trick her into her carrying cage by hiding it under a towel.

She’s an expensive waste of space, that cat, and a standing joke among all our friends. (Your cat sends you to the emergency room one time…) I call her my id, and it’s not quite a joke. I like it that she’s beautiful, coal black with yellow-green eyes and the world’s softest fur. But that’s not why I love her. It annoys me that she’s a bitey little bitch, but that makes no difference to how I love her.

I just love her. She doesn’t need to have a point. And if I can feel that way about something small and cranky, I suppose other people can feel that way about me.

Finally finally finally got to see Up the Yangtze, on the fourth try. Lots of handheld camera work, which makes me physically ill; even the memory is making me queasy as I write this. Staggering film nonetheless. China has always been fascinating, but for the last ten years it’s become, or has gone back to being, the tumultuous center of all human life, or maybe it always was and I am just less young and foolish than I used to be. There are cities in China I have barely heard of, that are three times the size of London. Did I say staggering already?

Up the Yangtze starts as a nostalgic cruise by a Chinese Canadian director down the Three Gorges, one of the last such cruises before the dam gates close in 2011 and the entire region is flooded. Then the film dives into the lives of two of the employees on the cruise ship. Jerry Chen Bo Yu is a goodlooking teenage boy from a middle-class, urban family; but he is not a fraction as handsome and charming as he thinks he is.

Yu Shui is only sixteen. Her family has been farming the land abandoned by the people of Fengdu the Ghost City as they moved out of the way of the floodwaters; which means that over the course of the film, the patched-together shack itself disappears beneath the river. The time-lapse sequence in which we watch the farm drown is as effective a memento mori as I have seen. Nevertheless this was a smart choice on the part of Yu Shui’s parents, as these desperately poor, illiterate people grew corn and potatoes there and were able to raise three healthy children, at least for a while.

Yu Shui wants to go to university and become a scientist, but there is no money for her to finish high school (and she didn’t do well enough to earn a scholarship.) So she ends up on the cruise ship, learning English and crying into filthy sinks after endless washing-up. I had jobs like that myself as a teenager, but it was to pay my horse’s vet bills, not to feed my mum and dad. And in any case I sucked at that kind of work and swore to get a job sitting on my butt, and sure enough thanks to my parents’ generosity and other large chunks of unearned privilege, I did. My heart went out to Yu Shui and to all the people like her, who deserve better.

(The Westerners don’t come across well at all. For a start, we’re funny-looking, with our weird pink faces and blue eyes like cold marbles and colourless wavy hair. But worse, we are arrogant sons of bitches. One woman says to Jerry, as she’s leaving the ship: “I have to congratulate you. You were much less obtrusive than I expected you to be.” He feels pretty much the same way about her.)

Werner Herzog gets thanked in the acknowledgements and, like Encounters at the End of the World, Up the Yangtze works better than most science fiction. We don’t need to imagine contact when it’s happening all the time, between people who might as well be from different planets: Canada and China. The film achieves a lot, but I think what I will remember longest is the shy, complicated heroism of Yu Shui’s father and mother. “How could we do this to you,” her mother asks Yu Shui, “if we had a choice?”

chloe the goat

Originally uploaded by artolog

She’s becoming quite the neighborhood celeb.

It’s been crazy. I got that bistro set for the terrace and we’ve had friends over nearly every night to sit out there and drink sauvignon blanc with us. Which has been delightful, except that I am always hungover which makes me even grumpier in the mornings. Hard to imagine but true. On the bright side I got chunky gold streaks in my hair, and between that and the excellent European foundation garments making me feel like a million pounds sterling, I am probably the cutest I have ever been.

On Saturday Claire and I went to Armistead Maupin Elementary for our first garden day. It’s sort of miraculous: there’s this sliver of land between the school and the fence, and it has been planted with corn and lettuce and herbs, peaches and currants and hazelnuts. I met the PTA presidents and a bunch of other parents and Devon the eco volunteer, and Claire met Ivy and Toni who are also going into kinder and might even end up in her class.

We helped build a cob bench, a mix of clay and sand and straw that is sort of like adobe. Claire and a bunch of the other kids mixed it by stomping it with their bare feet, then we all squished it around the stones that make the core of the bench. Very primal to be building with these ancient materials: good villagey bonding experience.

Today I finally paid attention to my car’s loud whiney noise. It was whining every time I turned a corner, which was annoying because I turn corners a lot. Takes a village to fix a car: the cool punk rock bikers who live with lovely old Stan down the street diagnosed it instantly when I parked beside them yesterday as low power steering fluid.

I considered changing it myself until I researched the matter online and found that the wrong kind of fluid will cause your power steering to INSTANTLY EXPLODE or something, so I took it to Jerry’s where they fixed it as part of an oil change. Because this was Sunday and they were shorthanded I was conscripted to help them push an SUV into the garage. I love my mechanic. And my punk rock biker neighbours.

This afternoon Claire and I picked blackberries on Bernal Hill, and made them into pie.

I love my rugrats
I love to read and write
I love my neighborhood
I love the sky at night
I love the whole world
It’s made of particles
Boom de yada boom de yada
Boom de yada boom de yada

I love the calculus
I love my Twitter pals
I love good restaurants
I love the animals
I love the whole world
The solar system too
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

I love Antarctica
I love organic farms
I love the BBC
I love your loving arms
I love the whole world
It’s where I keep my stuff
Boom de yada, boom de yada
Boom de yada, boom de yada

Project-based learning isn’t something you impose on kids; it’s the sea in which they swim. With three months of martial arts under her belt, Claire was mad keen to see Kung Fu Panda. So much so that she painted the panda before we went, insisted on dim sum (Aust: yum cha) for dinner, then improvised what she claimed was Chinese-sounding music during piano practice when we got home.

I had some issues with the film. The character setup was trite, especially in the opening scenes – Po wants to do kung fu you say? But his father wants him to take over the noodle shop? Pardon me while I pass out from boredom. Much worse: the other heroes resent the newcomer in their midst and insult him and are mean to him. What kind of worthless fu is that? Looks like no fu at all to me.

(On a somewhat related note, do American filmmakers really not see what they are doing when they have characters run vertically up through the debris of collapsing buildings? Or have frightened crowds flee from walls of dust? It strikes me as profoundly uncool to work out your 9/11-based traumas in such transparent ways.)

I enjoyed the film a bit more when the it managed to partially-subvert the tedious old Chosen One plot. I’m less violently allergic to Chosen Ones than I used to be, now that I have decided we are all allowed to be the Special Predestined Protagonists of our own lives. (Aren’t I generous.) But it’s a dull trope, undemocratic and unfair. I don’t appreciate heroes like Harry Potter, who are all glowy and adorable Just Because. The rest of us have to work for a living! I like stories where the plain people do the needful by dint of hard work and cooperation. Like, uh, LIFE. Or Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Or life.

Julia, meanwhile, is making breathtaking cognitive leaps around language. Her speech is clearer and more precise and nuanced every day, and she is on the brink of understanding the relationship between letters and words. The last couple of days it’s been all about Museum ABC. “D is for dances! E is for eggs!”

You want to know my idea of a hero? Two little girls asleep in the next room. I may still be able to bench-press both of them at once, but trust me: not a force in the ‘verse can stop them.

The excellent Spanish class that Claire and Julia attend has its own DVDs and CDs of original music; one of the tracks we all like is about opposites, and ends “Triste, feliz; triste, feliz.” Sad, happy, sad, happy. I’ve taken to singing this to Jeremy when I’m feeling particularly mood-swingy.

And it’s been that kind of a week. I cried with happiness over two newly-announced pregnancies, both hard-won and full of hope. And I cried with the other thing over having to buy flowers for two funerals, one long-expected but still wrenching, the other out of the blue and incomprehensible.

And life just keeps tumbling on. I cook dinner and order school uniforms for Claire and the uniforms arrive and she puts them on and is transformed into a schoolgirl! My baby! Not possible. She has a wobbly tooth!

I am very keen to see Up the Yangtze, the documentary of the last cruise up the Three Gorges before they were dammed. I think a lot about the villagers whose homes were drowned.

Time is a river.

I planted grape vines on my terrace. I’m going to put flowers out there too. The tomatoes Aten’t Dead. I figure if we put a cafe table and chairs out there we’ll have effectively a whole nother room in the house, right? Right?

I miss Cambridge. My commitment to contrariness is the stuff of legend. I particularly miss Grantchester, which is a fairly obvious sublimation of the extent to which I have always missed Grant and Kirsty.

San Francisco, my equal in contrariness, is doing its utmost to win back my affections. On Friday we left the kids with a babysitter and went to the Lumiere to see Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World. As we arrived a limo pulled up and a whole bunch of people in fancy dress got out. I regret to say I was quietly sarcastic about this, because they turned out to be the producer/cinematographer and several of the interview subjects.

Encounters is about Antarctica. Unusually for a Antarctic film it was made for no budget under the Artists and Writers program; so there were no minders following Herzog around whitewashing everything, ho ho. This shows, especially in the early scenes, where McMurdo squats on Ross Island like a filthy little mining town, and we spend a good deal of time talking to the service workers who make up 90% of the population.

If you like Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica, funded by the same program, you’ll love this film. Herzog likes the same misfit-idealists for the same reasons. And it’s not all righteous social anthropology either. You can’t really point a camera anywhere down there without seeing something unimaginably beautiful and strange. Producer Henry Kaiser is a specialist diver who blasts holes in 20-foot-thick ice with TNT, then swims in the ocean underneath.

The footage from those dives is otherworldly. There are aliens down there.

Encounters may be the best science fiction film I have ever seen.

After the excellent Q&A, Jeremy and I headed out into Russian Hill walking randomly. I wanted to try Petit Robert, although I had no idea where it was. We walked briskly up Polk, under a friendly fog, past wine bars with warm laughter spilling out. It all felt very French and lo, there was Petit Robert. Jeremy had rabbit risotto and I had moules frites. We split a bottle of really delicious pinot blanc, and the dessert came with milk jam, a kind of dulce de leche that catapulted me back to the alfajors my sister used to make by boiling cans of condensed milk, when I was a little girl.

On Saturday we went to Spanish class then drove out to the newly-reopened Warming Hut for sandwiches. I was not-quite-subliminally looking for a place as pretty as Grantchester. Crissy Field is not it; it’s striking but not beautiful. Still, I loved seeing one of the Pier 39 sea lions porpoising along right in front of us.

“Sea monster!” Jules cried joyfully.

We spent the afternoon at the Dyke Rally in Dolores Park. It was too crowded for me, I don’t really like human beings en masse, they are strange, unaccountable chimpanzees. But it was lovely drinking chardonnay with Ian and talking about Europe. We agreed that San Francisco looks and feels like a frontier town compared to Paris or London. Ian says that no one is allowed to build anything in Barcelona until they can prove the new building will be much prettier than the old one.

Today we took both kids to see Wall-E. Jules particularly loved it and was able to follow the plot very closely: “Robot! He has lost his friend. Oh! He has found his friend again!” I cried, because I am a big girly wuss, and also because the dystopian beginning – an Earth of garbage – is much more plausible than the hopeful end. I tend to think the future will look more like McMurdo and less like Grantchester or Oz Farm, but I hope I am very wrong.

Oh! I forgot to mention that a neighbour brought his kid to Martha & Bros this morning. Not his human child. His baby goat. An orphan from the herd he keeps down at the Port of San Francisco. She was adorable and soft, and capered about. A goat in the cafe! Maybe I am wrong!

I can’t remember who gave her the medical kit, but it’s the Best Toy Ever, as Doctor Dog is the Optimal Book.

It goes like this. I recline in an attitude of stoic suffering.

J: You VERY sick.

She puts the thermometer under my tongue. I accept it.

J: Very good!

She feels my forehead with the back of her hand.

J: You RILLY hot.

She gives me an injection.

J: There! All better!

Repeat 11,000 times, cuteness undimmed by repetition. My daughter the doctor!

It’s been filthy stinking hot in California for a couple of days but tonight the weather has changed; I can smell the rain coming in on a cool wind through the wide-open bay windows.

The children are asleep. Even though it began with taking Jeremy to the airport for yet another business trip, we had a wonderful day: Talbot’s Toys and Martha’s birthday party.

I feel dislocated, as if my roots go no more than an inch into California soil. I miss my Londoners sorely. And yet the jacaranda we had left for dead is covered in green foliage and flower buds. Hope hurts after such a long absence, like the ache of a muscle long out of use.

C: What are the meds for?

R: For the CRAZY.

C: Is that true?

R: Yup.

C: What does the crazy look like?

R: You can’t see it. It’s something you feel.

C: What does it feel like?

R: It feels like the dark.

C: It feels like the duck?

R: No! Like darkness.

C: Like duckness?

Cambridge already seems like a dream.

The only proofs that we were ever there are my new bras from Marks and Spencers. They are excellent, and improve my posture. So well do they lift and separate that I have nicknamed my boobs Church and State.