I am typing this from the new laptop Jeremy bought me, a machine I have not yet praised to the heavens. Her name is Diana, for Villiers and Wynne Jones. She replaces Jane (Austen) and Iris (Murdoch). She is schmick and zhuzhy in every way, from her glassy, serene screen to the I-will-write-a-novel-now feel of her keyboard, but she really came into her own last night. I came home to find a blackout – serious news for single parents – but I made dinner on the gas rings and we watched the Doctor Who finale in QuickTime on my battery-powered emergency TV. Did I mention she came with a remote control?

My brother Al thinks Frontalot’s Mountain Kind “sounds like a granny rapping.” Oh, the cultural disconnect!

Adds: “Liked the lyrics though.”

I thought he would.

Jamey took us to see Ratatouille at Pixar. Paris, haute cuisine, CGI rodents: this film was made for Demographic Rach.

The emotional heart of the film may be the best such scene in the entire Pixar portfolio. How I blubbed.

I’ve done fuck-all for Pride this year except listen to Frontalot’s “I Love Fags” on my iPod while running.

That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of y’all. I think about you all the time. I think about what you’ve meant to me and how blighted my world would be without you, sure, but that’s not the half of it. I also think about your literary awesomeness, your dirty jackin’ house, those shirts you picked out, the determined look you get on your face, your courage, your kiss, the way you still crack me up after all these years.

Pride’s a pretty lame word for it. What I feel for you is an eleven-dimensional respect vortex of which mere pride is this world’s pale shadow.

Y’all know who you are.

R: God spoke to me as I ran.

J: O RLY?

R: Yes. And do you know what he said?

J: What did he say.

R: Miss Ollie’s Fried Chicken.

J: Did he.

R: And grits.

“John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. Everyone has the same exit strategy. It’s a coffin…”

We wait for the J-Church at Dolores Park. I gesture crossly.

R: See? That’s One Rincon, the high-rise I’m feeling really pissy about. It wrecks my view of the Bay Bridge.

J: Looks all right from here.

I go to where he’s standing; a light pole blocks out the entire skyscraper, leaving only the Bay Bridge.

R: You’re the BEST HUSBAND EVER! You give me PERSPECTIVE!

“We saw the mola mola! I went gaga!”

My ahi sashimi came as small ruby cubes.

R: It’s the future! I’m eating food cubes!

Jeremy had roast chicken, Leonard had steak with horseradish, I had halibut with tiny savory morels. Strawberry shortcake for dessert, mmm. Then they brought us chocolate licorice truffles.

Leonard: More food cubes! Yay!

Julia woke up joyful at dawn – it’s the only thing about her I find hard to live with – and I succeeded in getting Jeremy to get up with her so I could sleep two more hours, even though it’s Father’s Day and even though he had forgotten I had a race.

It’s been a day full of small happy victories like that. I only had to walk three times over the three-mile course, and I beat my best time by a full minute. Golden Gate Park was outrageously beautiful and every lovely thing I saw had some intense personal meaning: the Conservatory and Stow Lake where Quinn took our family portraits; my De Young; the giant pink head from Burning Man. When I got home from the race the parking spot outside our house was still there for me. We met Colin and Naomi and their friends at the bus stop, and they moved on just before the J-Church arrived to take us to Dolores Park. At Dolores Park Cafe, I finished reading an article at the exact moment our sandwiches were ready; and so on.

Dolores Park was also ridiculously nice, the perfect mixture of families and pretty gay men sunbathing. Heather Lee and her friend Jane came to sit beside us. We saw a cat on a leash and a boy with a t-shirt that said “Define ‘boyfriend.'” On the way home we picked up sausages at Drewe’s. At home, J’s Major and Minor napped while Claire and I watched Spider-Man. Leonard is coming to stay for a couple of nights; RESTful Web Services is artfully strewn across the dinner table. I do think my boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places. Happy Father’s day, Big Daddy J.

“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.