Something’s working, anyway. Tonight I wrote 500 words on the novel (now at 13K) and 500 words on a new short story.

The last couple of days have been very difficult and sad, for no reason I can exactly fathom. The kids are doing their schoolwork and I am reading my work mail; maybe it’s trying to live in two worlds at once that’s doing it to me. Wanting to be back in San Francisco, wanting not to leave Australia. My divided loyalties, my inability to do justice to either set of obligations.

I have a very weird chemical-burn-like thing on my neck. Best guess is a caterpillar. It’s healing now, or at least the burned skin is sloughing off. Sarah had one of these too. Sarah: how is yours?

I have large bruises on my inner calves, exactly where jodhpurs have patches, and for exactly the same reason. Riding English in jeans is whack.

I have a large bruise on my hip, where I slipped on the pool stairs while holding Julia and made sure she landed on top of me while I took the force of the blow. As I explained to the kids afterwards, this is pure instinct, not a moral choice, and when they have my grandchildren I will protect the grandchildren at the expense of the kids. “It’s not called the selfish gene for nothing!”

Maybe best of all, I had a visual or ocular or opthalmic migraine last night.

We were at dinner with Jess and Mark and their boys, and I kept taking my glasses off to polish them because I was seeing spectra at the edge of the lenses. Then I looked up at something Mark said and realized I was still seeing the spectra without my glasses on. They were in multiple zigzag lines and they were flashing bright rainbow colours.

Both Jeremy and Mark have had them before and recognized them from my description. When I got home I learned that they are called scintillating scotoma. There was no headache. I did feel loopy afterwards, but apparently that’s normal.

Mum: it’s harmless.

It was very gratifying to find the exact thing I saw described here:

and to be able to show it to Claire. “Isn’t my brain interesting?” “Yes, Mama.”

ETA: How could I forget the scratch on my toe where I walked through barbed wire at Woodsreef!

So we’re back in Sydney, I guess. It’s overcast.

We visited Ric in Lulworth. He was okay. Afterwards…

Claire: Why do we have to visit Ric?

Jeremy: Because he’s my Dad.

Me: If your Dad were sick would you visit him?

C: But I’m shy of Ric.

J: I’m shy of him too.

Me: I’m not shy of him but seeing him this way makes me really sad.

J: Yeah. It’s not shyness. It’s sadness. And you don’t want to cry in front of him because that would just make him sad.

Me: Right, so I do this horrible smiling-all-the-time thing. I’m hideous.

J: Don’t be silly. It’s obvious how much he likes to see you.

At this, I burst into tears.

Me: Oh, to get through a single day without blubbing.

Next we visited Thussy. Thussy and her Reg are two of my favourite people on earth. She is Austrian. He is a former RAF pilot. In their house, it is always World War Two. Reg has walked away from plane crashes and fought off cancer and is now a bouncy and bellicose 87. I suspect he will outlive me. We whisked Thussy away to Cottage Point Kiosk for awesome fish and chips.

Thussy! Has met! George! Morris! She says he is very nice. Thussy has also tickled a rhinoceros named Ferdinand and hiked in Nepal and ridden in Iran and Patagonia. Good luck having an awesomer godmother than mine.

Next we met Mary and Andrew and Vincent at a chocolate cafe in St Ives. The chocolate was delicious and the company was even better. We have been making an effort to meet new people lately and have had a 100% They Are Lovely, We Like Them Very Much result, which seems absurdly yet gratifyingly high.

Oh yeah so I have a blog.

Julia got a splinter. Non-coercive efforts to get it out having failed, I held her down while Jeremy dug it out with a needle. Julia screamed and beat me on the back, yelling “You don’t like me any more! THIS IS THE WORST WORST WORST DAY EVER.”

Parenting can be fun! It came out. It was quite the little barb. Afterwards Julia and I held each other and sobbed.

Words: 500. This is hard.

Once there was a girl. Isn’t there always? When this one was very young and not very clever at all, she thought she wanted to be very truly run after, like Old Man Kangaroo. She was a little bit lazy and a little bit vain. She thought it would be nicer to be loved than to love, because somebody else would be doing all the work. When she was only a little bit older, along came a person who did all the running, just like in the story. He chased and chased and chased.

But despite everything she wasn’t sure she wanted to let him catch her. She had noticed that his jokes were a little bit too angry and his unguarded expression a little bit too sour. She was always trying to cheer him up, and it started to tire her out. Still, flattery counts for a lot. And he chased and chased and chased her, which no one else had ever done. And she was actually quite lazy and quite vain.

When things were going well for her, she tried to be sweet to him. And then for a while things went very badly for her. And he was still running and running and running after her. And when she fell over, he picked her up.

She was very tired indeed by that time, so she didn’t run away.

It took years to clean up the mess.

All those years later, when she finally reached a clear patch in her life, she was walking across a mall between two office buildings one day, and she said to herself, What do I want now? A face came into her mind. Its jokes were not angry at all. Its unguarded expression was one of keen interest.

This time she was quite sure. And that’s when the good part of her life began.

Don’t plan an overseas trip with two children right around Christmas; don’t do it. I’ve done this often enough now that my words should carry some weight. I was doing all right until yesterday, when things blew up at work, and now I am numbly swathing toys in three-year-old wrapping paper, drinking tea and contemplating the task of packing for three weeks in another hemisphere. It is 10.15pm.

The ultimate first world problem is probably the anticipation of missing one’s bad-tempered fourteen-year-old cat. The Germans have a word for that, right? There’s nothing wrong with her except her long-standing anger issues and her regular winter gimpiness. Her coat is good, her eyes are bright, her teeth are sharp and she is as curious and opinionated as ever. But she is nearly fifteen, and one day she will die, and I will be inconsolable.

Worse things happen. I know.

While I quite liked all three books, I think it’s symptomatic of the pathology of the modern West that the protagonists of Franzen’s Freedom, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Lipsyte’s The Ask are all sad white men who orbit the uberrich like anxious and stupid moths. And they are all subjected to ritual humiliation, lovingly detailed. And did I mention that they are all transparent authorial stand-ins?

Ah, Bush’s America. Zombie Bush’s America, in fact, in which Cheney has a Cylon heart and the rest of us have a Democratic administration and everything’s getting worse, especially if you were shortsighted enough to be born in Iraq or Afghanistan. (What were you thinking?) People, by which I suppose I mean novelists, are very open about their envy these days. They document the dewy features and lithe musculature of the wealthy. They specify the exact brand of luxury crap they wish they could afford. (William Gibson’s especially ridiculous in this regard, but I’m letting him off because I have finally realized that he’s a comedian. Also he offers a vision of what an alternative life might be like, which none of the others do.) In Zombie Bush’s America there is endless shame in not being rich (for very large values of rich, note well; mere upper-middle-class-ness is the most shameful condition of all, HOW CAN I SHOW MY FACE) and no shame in admitting how abjectly ashamed you are. Quite the reverse. It’s as if Jane Austen approved of Lady Catherine de Burgh.

Of course the most revolting thing about this whole queasy ritual is that if the writer abases himself disgustingly enough, the amused uberrich will anoint him (yes, always a him) and he’ll get to be superrich himself. I’m going to be a prescriptive little bitch here and say that writers should not aspire to the condition of plutocrats; not because I hold writers to higher standards (ha!), but because NO ONE SHOULD.

(There, that should prevent any NetNannyed corporate types from reading my blog.) Jeremy claims “Shit for Cunts” was the original title of the (slightly disappointing) Banksy documentary, now (slightly disappointingly) titled “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” And indeed, I was attempting to gift shop when I asked a couple of Borders employees where their science section was.

Me “I looked near Social Science and Philosophy and even Religion, but I couldn’t find it.”

Borders dude: “It’s on the top floor, right over in the back corner.”

Me: “I see. You couldn’t find anywhere more out-of-the-way?”

Borders lady, condescendingly: “Ma’am, it’s a big store.”

Me: “Sure, but there are three shelves of astrology right here. I’m just sayin’.”

Borders dude, seriously: “I am very sorry.”

He was nice, but I left anyway, and ordered the books I wanted off the Green Apple site instead.

I just realized a bunch of my summery clothes weren’t in any of the places I thought they were.

I investigated further and found a bag I hadn’t unpacked since we came back from Oz Farm.

Ambition to become absent-minded in my old age: amply fulfilled!

Bella is a bad horse! (1)

Bella is a very bad horse! (2)

She teleported sideways last night – alarmed by antics on the sidelines, not actually her fault and if I’d had a better seat, I might have stayed on. As it was I ended up flat on my back, looking up at her forelegs as she twisted in midair to avoid landing on my face.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t frightened at the time, and am not frightened in retrospect. If I’ve fallen off Bella twice it’s because I ride her more, trust her more and push myself harder on her.

So I got back on! As they say! The rest of the lesson was fun.

(1) Bella is a good horse.

(2) Bella may be the best horse in the world. Research is ongoing.

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!

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.

…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!

…went almost two weeks without being in the same time zone for more than three hours.

That kinda blew.

All better now. He does snore a blue streak. It’s very soothing.

ETA:

J: If I reek of garlic it’s because I was making YOUR DINNER.

R: Slaving over a hot clove.

Schoolgirls

Originally uploaded by yatima

Seven hours and 38 minutes until I get home.

Jeremy is in Australia so I am spending the week cross and sad. Which is a bit ridick, because Saturday night was an especially fine Balsa Man (I made a fortress of solitude on the cliffs, and all my friends came and hung out there to watch the burn), Sunday I had a fun ride on Omni and Monday was pretty much the awesomest Glen Park picnic evar, with all-optimal people and bejewelled sunshine.

Still. Hmph.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

Eek!

Last night I dreamed Tony Abbott sat next to me on a train, maybe a Tangara. We were heading West. I don’t know why that was important. I do blame this hilariously homoerotic oped for disturbing my beauty sleep:

I could not fail to notice the walk – which with an obviously athletic body could only be described as unmistakably masculine. Indeed Tony must be the most masculine and athletic of Australia’s politicians, and not boringly so. I have often thought that had he been on the left he would be the media’s pin up boy.

My stars! Is it warm in here? Get a room, boys! The piece, disappointingly, does not continue with “…my heart palpated as he caught my eye. His eyes, twin flames under that stormy brow, burned as he huskily whispered my name…”

My dream also ended unsexily. I told Abbott off for his platforms and policies, although I did it a bit self-consciously, since most of what I object to in his position (he’s bad on gay marriage, immigration and the environment) is exactly the same as what I object to in that of his opponent. He’s a Catholic monarchist! She’s a centrist cipher! They fight (property) crime.

I have only theories about the right. Despite my decade-long flirtation with Christianity I always thought of myself as socialist, just a Fabian socialist. It was a shock to discover that my church was actually hard-right, anti-abortion, anti-feminist and come to that, anti-women and children, at least in practice.

More recently my theories have revolved around the Big Five personality traits – the idea that our personalities can be mapped along five independent vectors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This research made immediate sense to me when I first encountered it. It’s trivial to note, for example, that I score sky-high on Openness and Neuroticism, and that I am introverted as hell. In fact Julia’s the only Extravert in our little family – the only one who draws energy from company, as opposed to from solitude – and framing it in this way has helped me to accept her manic glee.

My theory is that conservative people do not score very high on Openness. Is that tautological? And it’s not even that, as a progressive, I think things are going to turn out well; it’s just that I know from bitter experience that whatever else happens, time will pass. Sometimes that’s a good thing – +1 to team White Blood Cells! go the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement! science yay science! – and sometimes it’s an awful thing – bring back the bookstores; boo to old age. But either way, there’s no point fussing about it.

I also, relatedly, subscribe to the notion that conservative religion is pretty much all about sublimating the fear of death. I know it was for me. And it would explain a lot about how conservative religious people behave; their nasty secret sins, and their otherwise weird and alien assumption that as long as their imaginary superhero in the sky “forgives” them, then despite all evidence to the contrary, no actual harm was done. They store up for themselves so many riches in heaven that they leave the earth a smoking crater. This life doesn’t matter! It’s just a starter life! Do-over! I’m not a fan. Can you tell?

Separately, I finally got a glimmer of understanding the libertarian point of view when I realized how historically late an invention the income tax is, and how little tax people used to pay:

Another income tax was implemented in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. Pitt’s new graduated income tax began at a levy of 2d in the pound (0.8333%) on incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200 (£170,542 in 2007).

Put like that, it’s obviously a shocking imposition, and I myself would far prefer not to be hurling a goodly fraction of my income at the US military establishment. But I don’t mind a bit paying for public schools; I would pay more; and I would prefer to pay for Medicare for All and a respectable public transportation infrastructure than to pay for my private health insurance or my car. My parents, you see, taught me that it is good and right to share. Because they’re pinkos.

So those are my theories: that conservatives want things to stay the same, and they don’t want to be made to share. When I think of it that way, you know, I can honestly sympathize. I don’t want to grow old and die, and I don’t like being made to do things either. But I am going to grow old and die, and I do have an awful lot of privilege while other people have far less, and it behooves me not to bogart the cash and the happiness and the, you know, access to clean water and antibiotics and so on. My ethical stance boils down to an ultra-streamlined Postel’s law: be kind and tolerant. Or even more simply, don’t be a dick (Cheney.)

Then there’s that whole weird thing about taking the Bible seriously. Or more precisely, taking extremely tiny morsels of the Bible, daisychained together with logical contortions and dubious interpretations, as an infallible guide to modern life that totally lets you off the hook for being a homophobic douchebag. I dunno. I find far more beauty and wonder and testament to the human spirit and the awesomeness of life in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But you knew that already.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

(At least you guys have preferential voting and won’t accidently Nader yourselves into a Bush administration, touch wood. But that is another ranty, for another time.)