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Originally uploaded by yatima.

Jules inspects Martha inspecting a rock.

New York, Brasserie 8 1/2. Pork sausage with apple and cognac pannacotta. Roast sucking pig with crackling.

“It’s like three-dimensional bacon.”

“Cubic baconium!”

“I like the cockles. All it needs is dairy, and it’s the ultimate treyf meal.”

“You do realize we’re breaking Lent for you?”

“We declared it a feast day.”

“It is the Equinox.”

“And the Year of the Pig!”

Today I cracked the ten-mile mark. Not that I ran ten miles today – oh, no! Ho ho ho ho – but that I’ve run my 1 1/2 mile track seven times now. I’m on a Kinks kick and I have to tell you, listening to Waterloo Sunset while looking down at San Francisco, my heavenly city? Is a peak experience.

I started running because I was having a bad-body-image moment. I’m still carrying a lot of post-pregnancy weight. After Claire the fat just fell off me. After Julia it just stayed on. There’s no visible difference yet, only two weeks after I started, but the truth is I’m not really running to lose weight any more. Oh, the idea of having less body-fat is appealing, but it’s not as appealing as the fogdrifts over the city, the wildflowers coming out on the shoulder of the hill, the neighbors walking their dogs, the Kinks on my iPod. I came for the exercise and I stayed for the pleasure of it.

Who knew? Always before I thought I needed other people to push me; they pushed too hard; so I hated exercise. Now I trot along at my own lazy speed, with the result that I enjoy the run enormously and look forward to going out again. I won’t win a marathon any time soon, but I’m hoping to complete a 5k on Sunday. And this is the real surprise: every day I can run a little further. Every day my version of a lazy run is a tiny bit less embarrassing.

They say it takes 21 days to acquire a habit. Does that mean 21 days elapsed since I first ran on March 2? That’ll be this Friday. Or 21 days on which I ran? That’s be April 18, my grandmother’s 101st birthday.

Either way, wish me luck. And envy me my fog, and hill, and owls.

Bewildered and appalled by reports from this week’s conference on human trafficking and by rumours of a DHS-ICE raid on the day laborers on, of all streets, Cesar Chavez; and still half-living in the world of the film Children of Men, which although it is an earth-shattering and incredible film is not an especially nice place to live; I finally got off my arse and got an account on Kiva.org.

Kiva is one of my favourite things in the whole world right now, along with Recchiuti chocolates, Jeremy and the children and high realist fiction. It’s democratic microcredit. You get to lend small amounts of money to individual people in the developing world. Meet my new business partners, Akossiwa Alanyo in Togo, Faalevela Robertson in Samoa, Sarah Mukuhi Ndungu in Kenya and Tatyana Pilipyenko in Ukraine.

Together, we’re going to change this motherfucking world if we have to do it one damn dairy cow at a time.

J: Claire’s socks are missing.

R: They were on the bed.

J: I know. Julia got them. Now they’re somewhere in the Juliasphere.

R starts to laugh.

J: You know – anywhere in the house that’s, like, this far off the ground.

R: I know exactly what you mean.

She’s at the insanely delicious age between twelve and eighteen months when children are so joyously perfect you want to gobble their pink cheeks and take bong hits off the smell of their hair. She is pure love, with a fat belly and a bottom as big as a melon. She’s toddling like a champ, but when she topples she’s like a Weebl going over backwards onto her round rump. She actually uses this topple in a very characteristic manouever, when she’ll sidle around in front of you and then go Weebling – *plump* – onto your lap.

Whenever one of her people appears on the scene, she squeals “Yay!” She has quite the vocab, in fact, recorded here for your Julia-interpreting convenience:

AGUA!
BABY!
BEBE GATO! (All cats are called Bebe-gato – an honorific, I think.)
BYE! (You can go now.)
DADDY!
DAIRE! (Rather a fetching title for Claire.)
DAT! (That.)
DAY-DEE! (I think Julia considers Daisy her own dog.)
DISS! (This.)
DOG! VOOFF!
GOCK! (Sock.)
HAI!
HAT!
HOT!
MI-YO! (Milo.)
MUMMY!
LA NARIZ!
LOS OJOS!
PATO! (Zapato. For some reason both girls became obsessed early on with shoes. I blame Salome.)
POOPOO? (Can mean poop, diaper, toilet, wipe, fart or just genial smalltalk.)
TA-TU! (Thank-you!)

I think the most endearing things she’s doing right now, though, are keeping track of your conversation, her wide eyes going from one speaker to the next; imitating the burble and flow of a conversation in strings of what are evidently very meaningful syllables; and most gloriously of all, understanding the rhythm and inflection of jokes, and joining in the laughter almost before it begins. It makes her seem uncannily wise and extraordinarily good company.

I am the luckiest woman alive.

On Saturday Claire and I went to see Fiddler on the Roof at SOTA.

C: What’s happening?

R: The girls are hoping they’ll get to marry someone nice. Do you want to get married?

C: No.

R: Okay.

C: When I grow up. Then I’ll get married.

R: Okay. Who will you marry?

C: Maybe Rowan? Or Ada?

R: I hope you marry someone you love as much as I love Daddy.

C: *I* love Daddy! I’m going to marry Daddy.

Ran. Saw owl. Thought about how delighted I am by predators – bobcat in Marin – coyotes in Orinda and Portola Valley – nature’s proof that an ecosystem is generating surplus. Thought about post-scarcity economies. I met Boy Shannon on the J-Church yesterday and we spent the ride vehemently agreeing about things, as is our wont. He made a very shrewd point about the miracle of the loaves and the fishes being a metaphor for post-scarcity.

At the top of Prentiss Street I (literally) ran into Coach Charlotte and the Workout on the Hill; I felt a bit self-conscious, wondering how she would react to my freelance exercise regime. She was thrilled and held me up as an example to the grunts.

On BART I bumped into Jeff Wishnie, polymath: old Burning Man friend, tech entrepreneur, paragliding instructor and now CTO of Inveneo, building Wifi in northern Uganda. He told me about the huge gulf between the almost-modern capital city Kampala and the refugee camps. Darfur, I guessed? Well, no, not even refugees (he corrected himself) but internally displaced persons, IDPs, which is actually worse. They’d be better off if they had managed to cross an international border. These people are actually the victims of insane religious zealot Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which kidnaps and brainwashes children.

Got off the train, bought coffee and a pastry, walked to work under the ridiculous abundance of sunshine and sharply defined buildings in the clear drinkable air that is San Francisco at this time of year, wondered what the world would be like if everyone had enough to eat and people felt basically okay. Thought about post-scarcity economies. Thought about my kids.

“Baudrillard is dead.”

“Really?”

“So it seems.”

Ran yesterday and today. Ipod: Mixalot, Coulton, the Goose extended remix of Ray’s Whoopass, which has a lovely slow bridge that helps get me up the Eugenia stairs.

Saw the owl! Think I saw Artolog too; whoever it was had a VERY BIG LENS.

Didn’t get as big a runner’s high today, so I’m thinking my body only wants to run every other day. Besides, I’m lazy, so I can’t be doing this daily exercise. I’ll lose my mojo.

In other news, I FUNNY.

Marketroid: One hundred percent of development should be test-driven!

Me: Sounds extreme.

If you don’t get it, don’t worry.

DSC_3731.JPG

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

…and I’ll rip your head off. Are we good? Good.

Mr Mark Pesce of Sydney, Australia writes to note that on the contrary, I am your performing monkey. The Yatima organization regrets the error.

Last night another person asked if I were pregnant again. (The first one was my mother, on our Sydney trip. I complained about this to my brother Al and he said “Well she’s always been a terrible mother.” I told my mother this and she laughed. You see what I have to deal with.) I am not pregnant, merely fat.

So Jeremy bought me a shiny ice-blue iPod nano and an armband, and I loaded up the iPod with free nerdcore and Creative Commons remixes so I wouldn’t have to give any more money to the horrible recording industry, and I laid out my sweat pants and sports bra and tank and hoodie and running shoes.

And this morning I ran around the top of Bernal Hill. It was gorgeous up there, of course – grass-green and rust red and the sun has come out and both bridges were as clear as spider-webs spangled with dew. I had to walk the uphills, wheezing like the sloth I am, but the music helped a lot. The MIA Super Mario Bros mashup still cracks me up.

I can’t think of anything funny to blog. I’m not your performing monkey! I don’t have to dance for you!

Jeremy remembered it was our anniversary today. I’d forgotten. We met Milo and Salome and caught the J-Church to Yerba Buena. Cream puff from Beard Papa, then ten-pin bowling, then naps all round. Now I am drinking and watching the Oscars. Hugh Jackman looks kinda shabby, Will Smith’s ears stick out. I prefer my husband, cranky as he is.

Seven years ago today, I walked across Cooper Park in a pale gold bias-cut shift and gold Roman sandals, my arm linked with my father’s, my face aching with its grin, to where Jeremy stood under the pine trees in his black pants, linen shirt and Issey Miyake vest. Emer and Alain threw rose petals at my feet, and four-year-old Kelly wore a tiny version of my dress in electric blue. Everyone was high on sunshine and champagne. The caterers outdid themselves. It was a great wedding.

We’ve been bickering continually of late, but I must say that marrying him was by some substantial margin the wisest thing I have ever done.

…hey bama,
bama bama O;
bama hey bama Obama!

She fell asleep in Jeremy’s lap at 8pm last night, and I actually had to wake her up this morning to hand her over to Rosario. A miracle.

Claire woke first and came and snuggled in bed.

C: Mummy?

R: Mmm?

C: When I grow up, I want to be…

R: Mmm?

C: …an appetizer.

Claire presents her first knock-knock joke.

Claire: Knock knock.

Julia: Nak nak!

Rachel: Who’s there?

C: Underwear! Hahahahaha!

After explanations and revisions, Claire presents her second knock-knock joke.

C: Knock knock.

Ja: Nak nak!

R: Who’s there?

C: Cow underwear.

R: Cow underwear who?

C: Cow underwear moo!

When Quinn gave me The Years of Rice and Salt I was pretty skeptical. The conceit is an interesting one – Christendom entirely wiped out by the Black Death, rather than just mostly – but I couldn’t see how it could be made into a tractable story, especially as the book spans about a thousand years. Robinson’s ingenious hack around the technical problem is also an incredibly moving narrative feat.

He takes the idea of the jati from, I suppose, Buddhist mythology? I’m offline right now and can’t check (online now, wrong, Hindu) – but in the book a jati is a group of souls, a village, that accompany one another through multiple incarnations. So we have the same characters with different names but the same initials – B., I. and K. – reappearing in life after life together, as a tiger, a princess, a scientist, a sailor, a soldier, a reforming king, in China, in Spain, in North America, Yemen, Tibet.

The structure encompasses the novel’s millennium effortlessly, and it’s also a haunting and endlessly abundant metaphor for any group of travelling companions: your community, your kith and kin, the village it takes to raise your child. It packs the same emotional punch as the Dire Straits song Brothers in Arms (yeah, I like pompous eighties Britrock, so sue me), and it ties into Ethan Zuckerman’s provocative project – to engage our imaginative sympathy on behalf of people we don’t personally know. What the human race seems to need is a way to expand its loyalties, its tribe, to include everyone. Even Ronald Reagan recognized this, with his lunatic desire for alien invasion. I say, we need to embrace intelligent aliens as part of our jati as well. Me, I need to work on including the insane Republicans.

On a cheerier note, Morrissey sings that we hate it when our friends become successful, and Clive James’ best poem is “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”, but I was actually delighted that Kate and Neal wrote wonderful books because how awkward would it be if I couldn’t think of anything nice to say about them?

Adult Themes is particularly interesting to me because it takes Australian society as a perfectly valid subject of study, noting cultural imports from North America and Europe without being engineered for resale to those markets. For all I know this has become the default mode of cultural studies in Australia, but it was new to me. After all, I cut my non-fictional teeth as Keith Windschuttle’s research assistant (not my proudest moment, though he wasn’t such an overtly racist whore back then) and now that he’s wrung every penny he can out of Aboriginal-holocaust-denying, he’s thinking of writing something about US history so he can sell more books. To which what can one say but: ugh.

None of which has anything to do with Kate except that she takes the set of prejudices and preoccupations I associate with people of Keith’s generation: real estate, marriage, children and so on; and deconstructs them as inadequate and meretricious cultural markers for adulthood. She is especially wry on the punitive economic structure of Australian society. It has become very, very difficult for young people to buy property, but in a home-ownership-obsessed society renters are considered sort of frivolous. Psych! Kate argues for replacing these shallow rites of passage – the excruciating wedding, the adjustable-rate mortgage – with a far more nuanced appreciation of modern adult lives, where for example your jati might take the place of a nuclear family.

It’s a terrific book, and it made me think pretty hard about how deeply I absorbed old-fashioned Australian prejudices without even realizing that I had done so. I loathed Sydney’s consensus reality while I lived there, but as soon as I got to San Francisco I got married, bought a house and squeezed out a couple of kids. I defined myself as a common-sensical Australian woman in contrast to the crazy Americans and their appalling taste in coffee. I made my career translating pretentious Latinate marketese into laconic Anglo-Saxon. I threw Christmas parties in summer. I sought pavlova. Mine is an expatriate patriotism, forged in exile, just as my mother’s most fervent Englishness dates from the day she stepped on the Fairsky in 1968.

Izzy and Eve is Neal’s best book, better even than his fantastic Glove Puppet, and oddly enough it deals intensely with changing structures for adulthood in Australia. Seems like the reinvented coming-of-age story has become a minor national preoccupation, for obvious reasons. There are chunks of Izzy and Eve that could have been lifted from the pages of Adult Themes and vice versa. But Neal’s take is a lyrical, melancholy, erotic urban fairy tale. Like improv jazz the book riffs around its themes, and like improv jazz a tight, complex structure underpins the appearance of effortlessness. It’s absolutely fucking brilliant.

Of course Neal had no end of trouble getting it published, and ended up going with a San Francisco house whose distributor promptly went belly-up. He’s discouraged and despite my pleas, says he doesn’t want to write any more science fiction. So I pointed him at John M. Ford and Emma Bull and the Nielsen Haydens, and now I’m going to send him Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, which is lovely, lovely, lovely. And Leonard, you need to finish my space opera so I can send that to Neal as well.