“That’s magical thinking.”

“I realize that’s magical thinking…”

“Heh.”

“Haha!”

“Spooky.”

“There’s NO WAY it could be a coincidence…”

I sort of suspect not.

Cashier, ringing up The Dangerous Book for Boys: This looks great. We just got a new shipment in.

Me (pointedly): It’s for my daughters.

Cashier: Oh good! It’s dangerous for boys, but it’s fine for girls.

“I’ll get you some medicine,” said Jeremy, and a minute later handed an earachey Claire a third of a measuring-cup-worth of acetaminophen (or paracetamol as they call it in the English-speaking world).

That’s when I realized I’d accidentally overdosed her the night before. This despite the dangers of doing so being tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

Without timely treatment, paracetamol overdose can lead to liver failure and death within days.

By the time we saw our pediatrician, he (the pediatrician), Jeremy and I had all independently worked out that based on her weight and the concentration of the liquid I had actually only given her a double dose, whereas it takes ten times the recommended dose to cause toxicity.

Claire is perfectly fine.

And Wikipedia goes on to describe:

…children having relatively larger kidneys and livers than adults and hence being more tolerant of paracetamol overdose than adults. Acute paracetamol overdose in children rarely causes illness or death with chronic supratherapeutic doses being the major cause of toxicity in children.

All of which said, acetaminophen (or paracetamol) is a very potent drug with a frighteningly inadequate buffer zone between a safe dose and tragedy. Which tragedy I rehearsed, over and over, on the drive to the pediatrician, trying to answer Claire’s questions brightly and not burst into tears.

I fully expected the pediatrician to yell at me, and I fully deserved it, but instead he told me about a time a kid drank turpentine on his watch. The kid was fine. The doctor is a very kind man. And he’s right about one thing: I won’t make that mistake again.

“Mum, can you carry my backpack?” Claire asked as we left.

“Sure,” I said, thinking ‘Girl, if it comes to it, you can have my liver.’

Jamey: Gilbert just cracks me up with the mail slot action.

Carole: He just flops it open?

Jamey: Yeah, so you have to bend down and look right in.

Rachel: Oh, MAIL SLOT action. I thought you said MALE SLUT action…

“It’s a good thing Australians don’t give their kids place-names when they’re trying to be pretentious. Imagine the swarms of Brookvales.”

“Kill-ARA! Come here RIGHT NOW!”

“I’m warning you, Wollstonecraft.”

I stuck with this book after what I thought was an infuriatingly smug first chapter, and I’m glad I did. The third and last chapter, “Sane Now”, is so potent a mixture of stuff-I’d-gradually-worked-out-for-myself and things-I-hadn’t-thought-of-but-that-make-excellent-sense that I had to stop myself from repeatedly writing “It’s so true!” in the margins in purple biro. With similar heroic restraint I shall excerpt choice bits but refrain from quoting it all.

“The sane parents can never get protecting their child right; indeed don’t think of parenting as something that one can get right, but as something that one muddles through. The sane parent knows that being a child means being unprepared for life, and so needing a parent in order to live it; but the sane parent also knows that life is not exactly the kind of thing that can be prepared for. For a child growing up, life is by definition full of surprises; the adult tries to keep these as surprises, rather than traumas, through a devoted attentiveness. But sane parenting always involves a growing sense of how little, as well as how much, one can protect one’s child from; of just how little a life can be programmed. Sane parents do not invent their children, they just create the conditions in which they might grow.

“The sane adult is protective – and not only of children, but of himself and others – in a way that avoids covertly undermining the strengths of those who are apparently in need of protection (“The friends of the born nurse/ are always getting worse,” as W. H. Auden wrote). The sane adult assumes that it is possible for people to get pleasure from who they happen to be, and that part of this pleasure is bound up with versions of self-reliance that are not merely a more or less bitter denial of the need for other people.”

“…Adults are the ones who are supposed to know what’s best for children (quite soon, of course, the children start answering back); it is the oppressive legacy, more insidious than is often noticed, of using parents and children as the model for what goes on between adults that adults begin to behave like parents to other adults. Sane adult kindness involves finding out, one way or another, what the other person thinks is best for her, and then making a choice; no sane adults can know in any absolute sense what is best for them, but no sane kind adults could claim to know others better than they know themselves. They could claim to know them in other ways than they know themselves, but not in better ways. And, by the same token, no sane, kind person can accept a description of another person as in any sense true if that person herself does not accept it.

“The sane, kind person believes that getting on with people (including oneself) is more important than knowing or understanding people. That, in fact, if knowing or understanding people has a point, it is that it is in the service of getting on with them. For the sane person good manners can only possibly mean being a genial person; and the enemy of geniality, of the kind of sociability that makes people feel better, is the excessive need to be special…”

I could go on, but you know; just read it.

Asquigglemar depicted, also: placeholder for discussion of running, three months in.

These are the first things they say.

Julia: Yay! People!

Claire (thoughtfully): I love power.

Accompanied by Claire and Julia on kazoo.

Got home exhausted. Sophie, James, William, Salome, Jack, Milo, Jan, Ric, Quinn, Aaron and Ada came over. I made zucchini orzo and warm kale salad for nine, tidied up, gave Claire and Ada a bath, drank too much and made my usual terrible jokes. Really great night.

Applied to Viable Paradise. Now bracing myself for inevitable crushing rejection. At least I got a mention on Language Log!

Jan: I hate it when people start getting older and they have to tell you all about their heart, or their liver, or their skin.

Ric: I call it the organ recital.

• zombies at Sunset Scavenger finally delivered our composting bin
  
• owl is back, after being gone for a week
  
• Claire’s favourite teddy bear possibly found?
  
• respected ancestors in town
  
• celebratory dinner reservations at Chouchou!

Wine helps. Thanks to everyone who sent jokes. Gold star to Skud for making both me and Jeremy LOL:

Q. Why do Marxists drink soy chai lattes?
A. Because proper tea is theft.

…but I have no jokes today.

Mrs I. Marrett of Brisbane, Australia writes:

“All I decided was that Daoism matched quite well with how I thought about the world

“(pokes out her tongue!)”

To which the Yatima Organization replies, maturely: Yeah, well nyerny.

Anent recent discussions of Harry Harlow, Mr A. Swartz of San Francisco, California writes to recommend Robert Karen’s Becoming Attached. It does sound fabulous – but it’s not in the San Francisco Public Library! Or the Mechanics Library! The Yatima Organization grumpily resigns itself to actually buying a book.

Time for a Kiva update! Faalevela Robertson, who runs the store in Samoa, has repaid 8% of her loan. Randomly, it turns out that Marcio who I know through work is a co-investor in Faalevela’s business: I find this ultra cool. Meanwhile in Kenya, Sarah Mukuhi Ndungu is kicking it out of the park! She has already repaid 20% of the money she borrowed in March to buy a dairy cow. HOT DAMN, WOMAN.

So here’s the thing about Krishnamurti. During the Great Not Getting Into Oxford Tantrum of ’93, my mother, who let’s not forget is Awesome, arranged for me to spend a week at the beautiful Stroud Monastery on a hill in the bush north of Sydney.

At that point Stroud was still run by the Poor Clares and by Wendy Hope Solling, Sister Angela, a delightful lunatic who built the mud brick cabins by hand after recovering from breast cancer. At one point she’d died on the operating table. God sent her back with this message:

“Death is dancy, darlings. There’s light and flowers and the most glorious music and we’ll all just be dancing and dancing!”

This all took place before I realized I was a sardonic supporting character in the movie of my life, back when still I thought I was the tragic female lead, so things were about as bad and crazy as they could be. I used to fall asleep with my hand on the earth wall so I wouldn’t float away in the night. Naturally I desperately wanted Sister Angela to like me and to See My Potential, so every time I opened my mouth it was to say something banal, unintentionally offensive or outright idiotic.

And naturally there was another woman there, much much older – probably about the age I am now – extremely cute, funny as hell and originally from California:

“A little nowhere place called Ojai. Spelt Oh jay ay eye, but pronounced Oh hi! You’ve never heard of it.”

“Just read a novel set there,” I said snottily. This was true, but I’m buggered if I can remember the title or anything else about it, and my Google-fu fails me.

“Oh really?” she said kindly, tactfully shifting her attention back to Sister Angela. “So anyway there are these two Great Ironies that define my life. First is that I spent twenty years trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, meditating. I’d sit down and there would just be this huge, vacant… nothing.”

“Darling, that’s what you meditate FOR.”

“Of course! And it took me twenty years to work that out. I know, right? And THEN, I’ve spent these twenty years travelling – Tibet, Nepal, an island out in the Hebrides where I worked on an oil rig, and the whole time I have been looking for the teacher who will make it all make sense for me. And eventually I give up and go back to Ojai, and THAT’S when I meet Krishnamurti…”

Sister Angela, laughing: “He’d been there all along.”

“Half a mile from the house I grew up in, yes.”

We fade out on gales of laughter and larval Rachel scowling bitterly into her bread pudding.

R: My sister decided she was a Daoist after reading (wait for it)… can you guess?

D: The Tao of Pooh.

R: Indeed.

D: At least it wasn’t that fucking quantum mechanics book, what was it, The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

R: No no no no! …that was my Dad.