life

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It Continues Unabated

I have believed my entire life that good will prevail, that the greed of imperialism and corporatism would fail, that eventually in the battle against those who seek power for its own sake, who destroy this lovely planet for their own narrow gains in the moment, would all lose in the end and we would embrace one another and our home as sacred.  I have believed that the selfishness of the individual who isn’t at the top of the corporate or power ladder would somehow dissipate and there would be more balance between feminine and masculine energies.  Even though imperialism has spread from one place to another and destroyed entire populations on every continent, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake, I thought ultimately, those who seek harmony with our earth and one another would ultimately prevail.

Yet I realize that it continues to get worse, as it always has–Europe stole Africa, North America, South America, the South Pacific, India, and Australia. Europe’s North American protege steals from Asia and the middle east. Imperialism has taken the entire planet.  My country is killing people all over the world.  My country takes what it wants and cares not for the consequences to the people from whom it takes or the planet from whom it takes.  My country steals from this planet, all in the name of greed and power, regardless of the long term result.  My country does all this while waving its flag claiming its superiority over everyone and everything.  What a mockery of true superiority.  What a mockery of all that is decent and good.

The reality is that imperialism and greed have won, are winning, will continue to win until there is nothing left.  Our race learns nothing from the mistakes of the past, because we as individuals did not experience them.  The last victims of the Holocaust are dying off even as new versions of it have continued, nearly unabated.  In spite of all evidence to the contrary, America and its citizens continue to ignore global climate change, pretending it isn’t man-made so they can continue to live as they want unabated because making any changes beyond clicking a button on a mouse or sorting out some recycling is the limit of what they are willing to do.  We take from the Mexicans through imperialism and corporatism, leaving nothing for them in their home place, then beat their citizens in whatever way possible to keep them from trying to escape. We take from China and southeast Asia through imperialism and corporatism, allowing anything that makes us more money, while ignoring flagrant human rights violations.  We take from our oceans. We take from our land.  We take and take, and on, and on.

I look around at the world and, while I recognize that giving up hope of stopping what we are doing to one another and to the planet would be akin to joining the dark forces, I simultaneously realize that those who wish for something different are fighting a losing battle.  I suppose there is some miniscule percentile of a possibility that we can stop them, but reality is grim.  I fear it is going to take a global Holocaust, not just of people, but of the planet, to force people to realize that the pursuit of wealth and greed will destroy us.

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How to Tell if a Cantaloupe is Ripe

Standing in the grocery store aisle, I overheard another customer ask one of the customer service people in produce how to tell if a cantaloupe is ripe.  I don’t know, said the clerk.  I think you tap on it and if it sounds hollow it is ripe. He was not correct.  Well, not completely incorrect, but the method he was offering is definitely not the best method for checking the ripeness of a cantaloupe. This is not the first time I have heard this question asked, and I rarely hear the correct answer.

I grew up on a small farm.  Although it wasn’t huge, we grew  many things.  One of these many things was cantaloupe.  In late summer early fall when the sun was still hot, I would run up my parent’s driveway after school, grab a couple of melons, take them into the house, and eat them warm, straight off the vine.  There was nothing more sweet and delicious, the sunny orange flesh nearly melting in my mouth.  My mother had learned to grow cantaloupes (also known as muskmelons) from another small time grower, who probably learned the same way.  Via anecdote, the growth and ripening of the plants traveled to the side of our hill, south facing and perfect for cantaloupes.

The best way to tell if a cantaloupe is ripe is to smell the small circle at the base of the melon where the stem used to be.  If it smells sweet and delicious, the melon is ripe and ready to go.  The thing about cantaloupes is that once they are taken from the vine, they are only ripe a very short time before they break down and decompose. This means that a lot of time in the stores, none of the melons will have this smell.  This is because none of them are ripe. They can’t pick them ripe because they would never make the journey to the store in time. If you find a melon with this sweet smell, eat it within a couple or three days, or it will be moldy before you know it.  Although, as is often the case with fruits and vegetables, you can lengthen the time until they are too ripe by putting them into the refrigerator.

The other way to tell a cantaloupe is on its way to ripe is the color.  Cantaloupes are covered with funny beige lines that look like sea coral.  Underneath, if the melon isn’t ripe, it is a sagey, greenish color.  Once it ripens, the entire melon turns beige to match the funny lines.  A melon without the sweet smell but colored all over that cantaloupe beige color will be ripe very soon.  These ones are your best bet if you aren’t planning to eat your melon right away.

What it is it about thumping that so many people find useful?  When melons aren’t ripe, their flesh is denser.  With honeydews and watermelons, whose rinds contain lots of water, it is easier to tell when thumping on them whether they are dense or not.  Not so with cantaloupes. Their rinds are like burlap and not watery at all.  Someone who has handled large numbers of them might be able to tell, but the method is not foolproof and often people end up with cantaloupes that need another few weeks to ripen.  Use the smell test–it works every time.

That’s the scoop on cantaloupes. Enjoy!

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Ouch

I had a dental implant put in yesterday.  It was fine as long as I was doped up on ibuprofen.  Apparently though, that was keeping the pain at bay because it woke me up in the middle of the night hurting.  I left the prescription ibuprofen in the car.  Milla left the non-prescription ibuprofen somewhere besides where it goes. This meant I had to get up and go down to the garage and open the car in the middle of the night and get the ibuprofen.  Just the act of rising and transporting myself to the car, retrieving the ibuprofen, and returning was enough to increase the throb to the point where I knew sleep would be futile.  Now it is the middle of the night and I’m awake and this hurts.

I hope it stops soon.

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The Gap is so Dumb

The Gap is so dumb.  Okay, I know my even saying that is dumb, but seriously, it is.  I don’t love the Gap.  I don’t like their business practices very much, plus some of their stuff is really expensive for what it is (although I realize their model is to price really high then get people to buy on sales).

Anyway, even though I don’t love them, I will go in there for t-shirts and things because they are one of the few places left that sell t-shirts that are not so thin you can see through them. I hate that trend.  I think the stores want us to think we are supposed to layer them or something, but that’s a load of baloney.  First of all, once a person is past 24, layering a bunch of t-shirts looks ridiculous, like you’re trying to be 19 again or something.  Secondly, if you are more than 98 pounds, layering a bunch of t-shirts just makes you look bigger and if you’re already bigger than you want to be, why would you want to look bigger still?  Finally, I think their pretending like that is what we are supposed to be doing is a load of crap.  Retailers just want to charge the same price for a crappy thin t-shirt as we pay for one that is woven more densely, that way they make more money for less product.  That’s the ultimate point, I think, to get us all used to thin, junky t-shirts so we think the thick ones are a luxury and they can charge more.

Again, anyway.  The point of my saying the Gap is so dumb is that I bought this shirt at the Gap recently on clearance (their model, get you to buy on clearance because that is all their junk is worth), and it had this tag on it that read THIS FABRIC IS PURE SPRING, LIGHT AND AIRY WITH A SOFT SEXY DRAPE.  Wow.  Seriously?  Having worked for my very feminine, gay uncle in his fashion designing business, I have to ask, “What drag queen came up with that bullshit, anyway?”  Pure spring — seriously?  Soft, sexy drape?  Um, no.

Another reason the Gap is stupid is that lately they have been trying out this “sexy drape” thing on many clothing items by sewing in horrible folds and creases in places where there should be none.  It’s like they want to permanently place an ugly wrinkle after wearing something to sleep in.  For instance, they have these tank tops with straps that are bent, then sewn, then bent.  Basically, it makes the strap not lie flat.  I don’t want straps that don’t lie flat because they don’t lie in a straight line either, which means half the time my bra strap is hanging out.  Now, there are tops I will wear with my bra straps showing because that is the look, but this tank top is not one of them.  It looks like a dressy tank top only it has this ugly, weird twisty strap thing going on, and you can’t iron it out.  Unfortunately, when I bought the shirt, I thought the strap was just messed up and needed to be ironed, so I bought the shirt.  Unfortunately again, I bought it with some things I bought for Milla, she carried the bag, and she put the receipt inside the bag.  This means that when we got home and she dumped her things out and I forgot about my shirt for a few days, by the time I remembered it and realized the strap was a big mess, the receipt was lost.  This did, however, provide me with an opportunity to explain to Milla that she should place the receipt in my wallet from now on, so all was not lost in the cause, although I don’t think the lesson was worth $18.99.

In any case, I have this weird label here from another shirt I bought there on clearance.  This shirt was only like $4.99, down from $78 — seriously, Gap?  Seriously?  Are you smoking crack? Do you think ANYONE in their right mind is going to buy this junk for that?  — But I digress.  The shirt in question is made from some kind of drapey fabric.  It is made to wear under a suit jacket or something, which is what I bought it for.  But it too has a weird flap sewn in that makes zero sense.  When I bought it, I noticed the flap and examined it carefully to see whether I could sew or iron it into something normal.  I could, and the price was right, so I bought it.  I had also tried on many others with weird twists or drapes or whatever the hell that I did not buy because they were such big messes, there was no way ironing or sewing would work things out, but this one was okay.  I also tried on some pants where they sewed in messed up, wrinkly cuffs.  I don’t like messed up, wrinkly cuffs.  I like my cuffed pants to have the cuffs lying flat and even all around.  Ewww.  Did not buy those even though they were only $7.99 or something on clearance. The ridiculous cuffs were probably why they were so cheap on clearance.

So I bring home this shirt and hang it in the closet, then take it out to iron the weird wrinkle thing and see this tag and have to wonder about the drag queen who wrote it. Actually, it was probably a committee of drag queens because corporations love committees to come up with stupid things to try and get people to buy.  The drag queens are probably the kind who can’t get a job at Calvin Klein or Prada or whatever, so they are working at the Gap trying to break into the business.  I don’t know.  In any case, they come up with these stupid sewn in wrinkles and flaps then add a tag that says PURE SPRING, LIGHT AND AIRY WITH A SOFT SEXY DRAPE.  Another aside, Gap, if you are going to use the one comma, why not go all the way and use them in other places too, like after the word sexy?  But again a digression.  I had to laugh.  You think you can sew in weird flaps and the clothing item is now going to have a soft, sexy drape?  No.  It doesn’t work that way, especially on mass-produced, sweatshop from China crap from the Gap.

I’m just saying.

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Miscellaneous Blatherings

I have finished two chapters in two days, but now I have to work at the job that makes me money.  I don’t want to.  I’m burned out.  I took a small break, but I think I need a vacation where I leave the continent.  We are planning one of those, but it will not arrive soon enough.  There are other things happening in the meantime that I look forward to.  I just need to keep plugging away at the day job until I get over the funk.  It will happen; it has before.

Isabel has taken to letting her dollies nurse on her, or nurse on me before she nurses.  She is very generous, that one.

I have also been working on the second book at the same time as the first. Both are right there, in my brain, so when I want to work on one, I start typing and out it comes.  The problem is that I want to finish both and there isn’t enough time in the day.  But it will happen.  I’m glad enough for the work that is coming.

Milla is getting taller and growing things like breasts.  She complained about the bra I bought her so I just bought her some bigger ones.  As has been the case since she was tiny she likes her clothing five sizes too big.  I have to say that I prefer that to the opposite alternative.

Our next door neighbor is moving away.  Ours has not been a cordial acquaintance.  Mostly it hasn’t been an acquaintance at all, but what contact there has been has been unfriendly. She does not seem to like us, and we really don’t like her in return.  We have vowed to take a pie to the new tenant, hoping that a beginning kindness will at least give rise to the possibility of a friendly acquaintance.  We shall see.  I am glad, though, that the neighbor who does not like us is leaving.

It is sunnyish today, which is an improvement over downpours.  I’m glad that it is not brightly sunny or I would lament leaving work until the last day.  As it is, I will get it done without grumbling that I’m doing it in exchange for good weather.

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Monday

One of my several books is finally coming together.  I have been plugging away steadily and actually making a dent in getting it done.  The result though, is that when I have time to sit and write, it doesn’t happen here.  Many days, like this one, the choice is eat, write, cello, or French.  Usually only eat wins.  Tonight I bought plant starts for the garden, and since it was not raining I decided to plant those instead of all my other potential projects, so I managed only eat and plant.  Oh, and pull weeds.  First I had to pull weeds out of the planter boxes in order to plant the vegetables in them.  The ground was soft and loamy, perfect for pulling weeds and also for planting.  Oregon’s weather today was as schizophrenic as ever, unable to decide between warm sun and pounding rain.  I’m a bit dismayed by the rains we are getting.  They are more like east coast rains than typical Oregon rains, but things are changing in the weather world, so I should not be surprised.

In any case, it was pouring rain when I bought the baby plants, but by the time we got home, I made dinner and we ate it, the sun had decided to come out and stay out until dusk when I completed the planting.  This was quite satisfactory.  I love digging in the dirt and growing things.  It makes me feel centered.  Isabel came outside with me and helped. She scolded Ava whenever Ava barked at the wind, or the walking neighbor, or the squirrel, or the cat, or the way her fur fell across her face.  Isabel also made her hoo sound and showed me plants, helped me to pick weeds, and showed me how her coat snaps.  She liked pulling out the old leaves from the flower bulbs that have already bloomed for the year.  She stacked them in the stack of discarded plant parts and old rooty things.  Then she watched closely as I dug holes and placed baby lettuce or baby corn into them.  Adorable.

I finished this gardening project at dusk and my hands were filthy, so I figured it was as good a time as any to take a bath.  However, taking a bath and getting baby ready for bed took up the whole evening, leaving me basically no time for cello, French, or writing.  Now I should be sleeping but I’m typing this.  Why?  I have no idea.  I just pulled out the computer and started to go.  I can’t say what insane motivation drove me to it.  I am going to overcome this motivation now and go to sleep because the only time I’m going to get writing done during the week is in the early morning, which means getting up early, and if I am going to get any sleep at all (which is necessary in my brain for coherent writing), I have to stop this now and turn out the light.

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Poem for Mine Enemy

Your hatred implodes.

Who is left malevolent and inauspicious, veiled with portent, menace, and shrouds of peril?

No clemency for your fury, nor chastisement for your wretched mediocrity.

The only soul experiencing your anguish is you.

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High School

A couple of days ago I listened to a story on This American Life about prom.  It got me thinking about mine because the people interviewed kept remarking just how important prom was.  One person even went so far as to say it was second in importance to a wedding.  Seriously?  I don’t know that I agree with that.  Prom is certainly a ubiquitous high school event, but it wasn’t anything at all life-changing for me, and it wasn’t because I was an anarchist or anything.  I just didn’t really care.  I thought it was a dumb dance.  I was not one of those people who spent all of high school looking forward to attending.  I did finally obtain a boyfriend by senior year so I actually had a prom date.  If I hadn’t gotten the boyfriend, I probably would not have gone.  I was much more concerned with acquiring a boyfriend than attending prom, and much more surprised and shocked that this happened than I ever would have been at getting a prom date.

For me, the story of how I got my first boyfriend was practically out of a high school movie.   Every February, our school hosted a Valentine’s Day school dance.  For some reason, one of the most attractive, most popular boys in school asked me to dance.  A lot.  We danced together all evening.  This was a surprise to me.  He was Mr. High School All-American boy.  Extremely popular, he had attended the schools in my town his entire life.  This meant something in our little town; it meant you knew everyone and everyone knew you.  This could be a bad thing, but for a lot of people, it accorded them with additional status.  Eric had this status in spades, plus he was captain of the football team and President of the Senior class.  Seriously.  He also had blonde hair and blue eyes, lovely chiseled features, and an athletic build.

I, on the other hand, was not Miss High School All-American girl.  I had the blonde hair and blue eyes, but my hair was short, and for the dance in question, I had tried beforehand to trim my bangs.  After cutting, I realized they were crooked, so I cut them again and made them crooked the other direction.  By the time I was done, they were about two inches long and still crooked.  I was also skinny as a rail, with no breasts to speak of.  Certainly not curvy.  I imagine I was prettyish, but definitely not a beauty and never one of the girls the boys talked about or wanted.  I spent most of my time buried in books, riding my horse, or acting weird because my friends thought it was funny and I liked making them laugh.  My parents lived like they never had money, no matter how much they had, so my clothes were not name brands, which I cared about in those days.  (One nice thing about growing up was giving up that ridiculous delusion.)

In spite of my average appearance and lack of social standing, here we were at this Valentine’s Day dance and Eric was dancing with me.  My friends couldn’t believe it.  “He must like you!” said Marie.  “He keeps dancing with you!”  I didn’t quite believe he liked me.  Deanna kept giggling every time he came near.  “Stop it,” I would hiss to her in a whisper before heading to the dance floor.  Kari just smiled her poker-face smile.

Over the weekend after the dance, my friends and I spent many hours on the phone deconstructing the dance and its portent.  Did Eric like me, or was he just being nice?  I could not believe that he did.  They could not believe that he did not.  On Monday, I was embarrassed and terrified at the prospect of seeing Eric. We had a class together the last period of the day.  I spent most of that day a nervous wreck, wondering what would happen in that class.  I was terrified.

Later that afternoon, we were all in Mr. Fisk’s class listening to him drone on about who-knows-what.  Mr. Fisk’s stories were fascinating as sophomores and stupid by the time we were seniors.  I don’t remember now how it transpired, but somewhere along the line in the class a note was transferred to Eric.  I think it was supposed to be from me to Marie or Marie to me, or something like that, but it was about how much I liked him.  He sent me a note and we agreed to both ask to go to the bathroom at the same time.  A few minutes later, Eric got up, asked to use the bathroom, and left.  Heart pounding, 30 seconds later, I asked to go to the bathroom as well.  Mr. Fisk was none the wiser and let me follow Eric. He probably didn’t even notice we were out at the same time. We were the good kids, the ones who always turned in our homework and would never leave to go fraternize and cause trouble, so bathroom passes were easy to come by.

Eric was waiting by the bathroom.  He was wearing his Levi’s 501 jeans, a pink polo shirt, and white sneakers.  I thought he looked amazing.  He said hi and then kissed me.  Exhilarating.

We were going out after that.  We never had a conversation where he asked me to be his girlfriend or anything, I just was.  I adored him.  Completely smitten, I would do anything he wanted to do or go anywhere he wanted to, just to be with him.  Compared to stories of teenage activities I hear about these days, our actions were so tame.  I would never have considered having sex with him, not in a million years.  Honestly, we never made it past second base, but to both of us, this was a lot.

How is it that I managed to get the most popular boy in school for my boyfriend senior year?  I mean really?  I think about this time and I have to wonder.  I know part of it is that this most popular boy in school was unique in some respects.  So often the popular kids are so idealized that we have a vision of how they must be, but to become truly popular and liked by everyone (which Eric certainly was), that person must possess some characteristic of some sort that makes people like them.  Eric was truly likeable.  Plus he’d been in the same town schools since kindergarten.  Plus he was handsome.   Really.  Blonde.  Blue-eyed.  Captain of the football team.  President of the class.  I mean, come on, was this for real?

It was.  That is what is so remarkable to me.  I look back now and for the first time truly marvel at it.  I mean, come on!  Do you think he could have been more of a cliché?  And it’s even more amazing that I, with my background and thought processes, could have had him as my first real boyfriend.  That alone is a feat in and of itself.

One night, we were making out in the backseat of his housemate’s ginormous 70’s automobile.  The thing was a boat on wheels.  I was supposed to be spending the night at Marie’s house, and a group of us had all gone and done something that evening.  Eric and I parked the boat outside her house and started kissing in the backseat.  It was cold out and the windows fogged up.  At some point, I realized there was a round light moving along the back window.  We both sat up quickly and pulled on our shirts (each other’s, as it turned out).  Then we heard a tap on the window.

Humiliated, Eric opened the car door and got out.  The officer took him aside and scolded him.  He then stuck his head in the car and asked me my name and where I was supposed to be. Terrified and humiliated as well, I told him.  He said I should go into my friend’s house and go to bed.  It was probably only 11:30, but I was scared and obeyed without question.

I spent the next week completely terrified that the stop would show up in the local paper.  A weekly, the local paper did not have much to report on, and therefore contained a section listing every petty grievance to which the police force responded.  I was certain our names would be listed with our transgression for all–especially and including my parents–to see.  Thankfully, this never transpired.

Because I now had a boyfriend, prom seemed like it might actually be fun. My friends were all going and I looked forward to hanging out with them.  My mom is an excellent seamstress, and after looking and finding no dresses that I liked, she offered to make a prom dress for me.  I picked out a pink satin and some pink tulle.  She made a long dress with a fitted bodice, with a pink ribbon around the center and tulle around the collar, which sat off the shoulder on my collar bones.  I liked it fine.  Looking at it now, I think it’s kind of boring, but I enjoyed getting dressed up.  Eric looked amazing in his tuxedo, and he arrived in the boat to pick me up, a pink corsage in hand to match the boutonniere on his lapel.

The best memory I have of prom is that my best friend Marie won as prom queen.  She had a huge crush on a good friend of Eric’s named Gary.  Gary had a girlfriend, but for prom king and queen, there would be a dance.  When it was announced that Marie was queen and Gary was king, I was thrilled to death for her.  She was able to dance with the boy she liked for an entire slow song.  I could tell watching her dance, her head against his shoulder, that she was in heaven.

After prom, we went to a party at some friends of Eric’s and sat in a hot tub before he took me home.  Most of them were drinking alcohol and this scared me.  I didn’t find that part of the night much fun.  I can’t remember when I got home, but I don’t think it was very late.

One other huge aspect of my relationship with Eric was that shortly prior to our starting to date, he had become “born again.”  Over the course of our courtship, he became more and more heavily involved in the church.  In an effort to please him, I went along.  I had been friends for some time with another girl who was extremely involved in her church.  I started going with her, mainly because I had a crush on David W. and David W. was in youth group.  David W. would flirt with me at youth group and I enjoyed this.  Also, my friend’s parents would take us for pie after church.  Having grown up in a family that went out to eat maybe once every two years, this was an immense treat.

Interestingly, while I was attending church and trying to be a good Christian, I was discovering a lot of hypocrisies that bothered me immensely.  One morning, the pastor described faithful Muslims praying to Mecca.  He spent a good deal of time describing the scene, to the point I could practically feel the warmth of the sun on my back and the rug under my knees.  Then he dropped a bomb saying, “Isn’t it a shame that all these millions of faithful Muslims are going to hell?  I could not tolerate or believe this.  This sermon was a turning point for me.  I had serious doubts about Christianity and organized religion in general anyway, and that statement made me start looking for inconsistencies, which were not difficult to come by.

However, I kept my doubts to myself.  Eric would drag me to youth group on Wednesday and church twice a day on Sunday and I would go with him because usually after we would make out in the back of his truck and I liked doing that.  I went along with the church thing, even so far as memorizing the entire book of Romans because he did so as well, and I believed that he wanted me to.  I would pray with him, and discuss the Bible with him.  Mainly I just wanted to be with him and this offered me the greatest opportunity.

Our small town, like many, had started offering an all-night graduation party to the entire senior class.  The point was to keep teens from drinking and getting hurt or killed as a result.  I was not a drinker and looked forward to graduation and the graduation party.  My grandparents had flown in from Kansas for the event and I was excited by the prospect of all of it.

The day before graduation, Eric took me out in the afternoon to eat at a nice restaurant.  When we arrived back at my house, at the top of my parent’s driveway, he got out and gave me a hug.  Then he said, “It’s been really fun hanging out with you, but we are going to have to stop. I’m going to college in the fall, and I am afraid our relationship is interfering with my relationship with Jesus.”  There were more words, but I don’t remember them.

I was incredulous.  I had not seen this coming, not even close.  Heartbroken and numb, I stumbled into the house and into my bedroom.  I spent the rest of the afternoon lying on my bed in a pool of misery.  We were to attend a Baccalaureate dinner that night.  I dressed in the new outfit my mom had bought for me, a knit yellow sweater and white cotton skirt.  I don’t remember much of the Baccalaureate dinner except there were some speeches.  Eric was there, but he ignored me.  I stared at my plate all evening.  My parents and grandparents could tell something was wrong, but didn’t say anything.

Later, after we arrived home, I went again to my bedroom and lay on my bed, trying not to cry.  My family wanted me to come in the living room and visit, but I just couldn’t do it.  Finally, my grandma came in to talk.  I confessed what had happened.  “Oh, honey,” she said, rubbing my back.  “It seems so hard now, but you’re so young. It is for the best.”

I still remember her voice and the way she stroked my hair and back.  I also remember that graduation and the party were a drag.  My friends kept trying to get me to liven up, but I just couldn’t do it.  Forever after, when I think of graduation, the memory is colored by the fact that the day before the ceremony my first love dumped me for Jesus.

It was the best decision of course.  Eric became a successful missionary in Africa. He is still there, working on a Bible translation of some sort, I think.  I saw him at our reunion and it wasn’t weird at all.  Time heals all wounds and we had grown up. I was such a baby at 17.  I am immensely grateful Eric didn’t do something stupid like ask me to marry him.  I would have said yes in a heartbeat and it would have been the wrong decision. We would have been divorced by the time we were 20.  I’m so different from that person, I can barely remember how I thought or acted.  Most of what I remember about myself at that time makes me cringe in embarrassment.  I certainly could never have been a Christian.  The seeds of doubt in organized religion had been planted, probably before I knew the ground was tilled.

In any case, this was my prom and the story around it.  Nothing spectacular, just an old memory. It’s funny, as I’ve been writing this, how much I actually do remember.  Life is interesting and so much is forgotten.  I’m glad I remember this.

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Bedtime

Tonight I ran, pushing Isabel’s stroller, for a half an hour.  Ava ran with us.  We ran up and down hills and across sidewalks.  Many of the sidewalks were bumpy because of large tree roots.  I love the large trees; I do not love the large roots pushing up the sidewalk.  However, given the choice, I would take the trees and the bumpy sidewalks over no trees.

Anyway.  After I ran I came home, took a shower, and made dinner and washed the dishes, then Isabel was tired so I put her in jammies, changed her diaper, and put her to sleep.  I lay there too for about a half an hour.  It was only 9 o’clock.  I could have completely stayed asleep, but I was still wearing contacts and had not brushed my teeth, and then Milla came in to kiss and hug me goodnight, and I knew if I stayed there I would wake up at 1 and not go back to sleep.  I got up and started working on my book and now I’ve hit a wall, a tired wall.  I can’t write anymore.  I have to go to sleep.  I still have not taken out the contacts or brushed my teeth.  Ack.  I’m going to have to do that before I can sleep.  Instead I sit here and type this.  Okay, I quit.  I’m going to bed.

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Personal, Life, Weather

It’s raining again today, but it was sunny for three days in a row even though they said it would only be one, and I got to wear shorts yesterday it was so warm, so I can’t complain about rain today.

Apple took away my brand new MacBook Pro.  I have to say, my apple products are on the shit list right now.  I bought a new MacBook Pro.  Immediately upon bringing it home it started having this issue where the screen would not light up when I opened it.  It did not happen every time I opened the computer, but a lot of the time.  I figured it was brand new and should not do this so I exchanged it for another one.  What a mistake. The new one had the same issue, only it happened every single time I opened the computer, and it was difficult to get it to come on.  So I called Apple.  They said it was a “known issue” and told me some key fix while turning it on.  It didn’t fix it.  Every morning I have a tiny window in which to write before my baby wakes up.  I spend most of that tiny window trying to make the computer wake up, so the other day, in complete frustration, I called Apple again about this issue.  During the conversation with the Apple support representative, my ear touched my iPhone and hung it up.  Ears aren’t supposed to hang up iPhones.  I tell you, at that moment, Apple was at the height of the shit list and I was mad as hell.  While on hold during my call back, the guy I had been talking to called me again.  He apparently used my serial number to get back to me, which is a good thing because it was the only information I had given him before the call hung up.  We spent the next half an hour working through a bunch of repair things behind the scenes in the guts of the computer’s programming.

Didn’t work.  Yesterday I opened up the computer and the damn thing would not come on no matter what I did.  Here I have been touting Apple products to anyone who will listen and I am having all these issues, although I can say I am typing this on my 3-year-old MacBook that still works just fine.  I just wanted a computer with more space and RAM, which is why I bought the Pro.  Maybe I shouldn’t have.

Anyway.  In frustration, I made a Genius Bar appointment between court and my next client.  I took it in there and left it with them.  Of course the piece of shit opened up and worked just fine in front of the Genius Bar guy so I looked like a hysterical female.  However, he looked at some history thingy in the guts and saw something that backed up my story, and agreed that they would do some tests and get back to me.  They had not gotten back to me yet by late afternoon yesterday so I called, and they said it would not be ready until today.  They said they “had not finished looking into the problem,” which means “We have not gotten to your computer yet.”  Duh, I’m not dumb.

My small writing window is rapidly closing here.  Isabel woke me up today, but she has been running around and is now eating the pancakes Milla decided to make for breakfast before school (I wonder who will do THOSE dishes?). It will not be long before I am the only person in the world with whom my baby would like to interact and there are other writing things I need to do that are more important than cheering the sun or complaining about computers.

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Have Mercy

I’m probably a lone wolf in saying this, but I don’t think we should cheer the murder of anyone, even someone like Bin Laden.  Be grateful, perhaps, but cheering and flag-waving over the death of another is tasteless and crude.  I felt the same at the death of Saddam Hussein, and also at the execution of Ted Bundy.  There is just something vulgar about exuberance over the death of another, even one who has caused much harm.  We should with mercy and grace acknowledge his passing, and be grateful that he can no longer harm another, but it is simply not the time for a party.

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Blue Valentine

I started watching Blue Valentine at the theater, but Isabel would not stay asleep and so I had to leave, but I wasn’t disappointed to be walking out.  The thing was depressing and I could not get into it.  I wanted to see what happened though, so a few weeks later I began watching again on video at the point I had left off, but stopped because I simply could not get into it.  Finally tonight I decided to finish it so I could get rid of the video.  I’m glad that I did.

Blue Valentine certainly captures the beginning and the end of a bad relationship.  It brings back memories.  Funny, they caught  the things in the beginning that would go wrong later.  Not all of the relationships in my life that have ended started in such a way that the ending could have been predicted, but the ones that have certainly seemed obvious in hindsight.  The performances in Blue Valentine, especially that of Michelle Williams, captured that feeling of the beginning of a relationship you know is bad for you.  You could tell that deep down she knew it wasn’t the best choice, yet she kept on anyway, living in magical thinking while simultaneously knowing she was headed for disaster.  In my case, in the relationship that most closely mirrors that in the film, I knew.  I knew and kept on anyway, compelled by some force within myself to try and make it work.  At times I felt like I was living two lives, one experiencing and one watching mute and helpless as the train headed straight for the ravine with no tracks.

The woman in Blue Valentine seemed to know too.  There were moments of pause before she smiled and responded to Mr. Disaster.  She had that same silence about her that I did in the beginning.  The scene at the dinner table near the end of the film, where she has brought him home to meet her family was a kind of personal deja vu.  The man I introduced to my family wasn’t a high school dropout whose mother had run off with another man at age ten, but the way that he spoke to them and their responses left little doubt that they were just as shocked and wondering What the hell is she doing with this guy?  What the hell, indeed.

There are some movies that are so bleak and without hope, I have no desire to watch them.  However, there are often movies that hurt to experience, and I still think they are worth my time and energy.  I am most certainly not one of those who only goes to see Pollyanna. I didn’t love Blue Valentine–I just could not get drawn in.  Yet it is a good film and I’m glad I saw it.  Even though one may know intellectually that everything experienced is also experienced by others, it does help to be reminded. For me, Blue Valentine was like that.  I’m not the first person on this planet who knew going into a bad relationship that I was making a huge mistake, but I kept on anyway.  One thing I know for sure–and I have reiterated it for myself having watched this film–I will never, ever compromise myself like that again.

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Corporate Tax Dodgers

Go to this link to sign a petition to congress requesting that they stop all corporate tax havens.  I doubt they will care (I’m a cynic in that regard), but hey, it can’t hurt, right?

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The Garden by Joan Miro

I obviously love this painting, I’ve been using it as my page art for a couple of years now.  It is so whimsical.  I can imagine the bird in the tree chirping to the other birds nearby, “This is my place!”  Below, plants sway and lean towards the sun, while insects pause in their grazing.  Hidden beneath fronds another bird waits, dreaming of flowers.  A woman hesitates at the entrance to the garden, surveying all that lies before her. The sun, a star, gazes overhead.

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Favorite Scene in a Movie

One of my favorite scenes from a movie is during Fried Green Tomatoes after Kathy Bates has rammed the little car that took her parking spot, the two young drivers of the car come out and she says Sorry, girls.  I’m older and I have more insurance.

I love it.

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Groupon Does Business with Pure Med Spa

After several commenters noted that Groupon in Dallas is giving out a Groupon on Pure Med Spa (aka Beauty Med Spa–same name, no difference), I sent them an email saying that they really ought to reconsider promoting a company that has done so much harm.  Here was Groupon’s response:

Hi Lara,

Thanks for your feedback and sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.
We do our best to feature businesses that see Groupon as an opportunity to gain loyal customers as well as advertise their services.

We stand by all of the businesses we feature and the deals we offer, but if you ever feel let down in any way when using your Groupon, we’ll be more than happy to work with you towards satisfaction! Also, thanks for the information! I will be passing this on to the right people.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Sarah M.

support@groupon.com

I told them that I am not going to be let down, but others will be.  Who wants to be a loyal customer to a business that has stolen thousands of dollars from customers, burned people with lasers, caused one woman to require surgery because they damaged her legs, and on and on. They are being investigated by several state attorneys general and have been profiled on many television news programs for the harm they have caused.

It’s a shame that this is Groupon’s response considering the negative publicity associated with this company.  Groupon is promoting thieves and hucksters.  Send Groupon a letter letting them know if you have been harmed and what happened.  Maybe if enough people contact them, they will change their policy.

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My baby

My sweet baby holds a doll and rocks it back and forth and up and down exactly as I rock her, holding it in the same position as if it’s being nursed.

She then drops the doll with a thunk and goes and picks up the cat by the neck.  There is a limit, I suppose, to the similarities.

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In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan

This is simply disgusting and unthinkable.  I can’t believe I am a citizen of this crooked, backwards country.

This article can be found in the Business Section of the NY Times.

In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan

By JOE NOCERA

A few weeks ago, when the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide, I wrote a column lamenting the fact that none of the big fish were likely to go to prison for their roles in the financial crisis.

Soon after that column ran, I received an e-mail from a man named Richard Engle, who informed me that I was wrong. There was, in fact, someone behind bars for what he’d supposedly done during the subprime bubble. It was his 48-year-old son, Charlie.

On Valentine’s Day, the elder Mr. Engle said, his son had entered a minimum-security prison in Beaver, W.Va., to begin serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud. He then proceeded to tell me the tale of how federal agents nabbed his son — a tale he backed up with reams of documents and records that suggest, if nothing else, that when the federal government is truly motivated, there is no mountain it won’t move to prosecute someone it wants to nail. And it was definitely motivated to nail Charlie Engle.

Mr. Engle’s is a tale worth telling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its punch line. Was Mr. Engle convicted of running a crooked subprime company? Was he a mortgage broker who trafficked in predatory loans? A Wall Street huckster who sold toxic assets?

No. Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that literally millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble. Supposedly, he lied on two liar loans.

“The Department of Justice has made prosecuting financial crimes, including mortgage fraud, a high priority,” said Neil H. MacBride, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, in a statement. (Mr. MacBride, whose office prosecuted Mr. Engle, declined to be interviewed.)

Apparently, though, it’s only a high priority if the target is a borrower. Mr. Mozilo’s company made billions in profit, some of it on liar loans that he acknowledged at the time were likely to be fraudulent and which did untold damage to the economy. And he personally was paid hundreds of millions of dollars.  Though he agreed last year to a $67.5 million fine to settle fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was a small fraction of what he earned.  Otherwise, he walked.  Thus does the Justice Department display its priorities in the aftermath of the crisis.

•

It’s not just that Mr. Engle is the smallest of small fry that is bothersome about his prosecution. It is also the way the government went about building its case. Although Mr. Engle took out the two stated-income loans, as liar loans are more formally called, in late 2005 and early 2006, it wasn’t until three years later that his troubles began.

As a young man, Mr. Engle had been a serious drug addict, but after he got clean, he became an ultra-marathoner, one of the best in the world. In the fall of 2006, he and two other ultra-marathoners took on an almost unimaginable challenge: they ran across the Sahara Desert, something that had never been done before. The run took 111 days, and was documented in a film financed by Matt Damon, who served as executive producer and narrator. Mr. Engle received $30,000 for his participation.

The film, “Running the Sahara,” was released in the fall of 2008. Eventually, it caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As Mr. Nordlander later told the grand jury, “Being the special agent that I am, I was wondering, how does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and it’s very difficult to train for this part-time.” (He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he’ll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.)

Mr. Engle’s tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a business deal he’d been involved in several years earlier. (Mr. Nordlander would later inform the grand jury only of his much lower taxable income, which made it seem more suspicious.) Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took “Dumpster dives” into Mr. Engle’s garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly.

In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments.

After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlander’s grand jury testimony, “I had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didn’t mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasn’t.”

Mr. Engle added, “Everybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done. That doesn’t make me proud of the fact that I am at least a small part of the problem.”

Unbeknownst to Mr. Engle, Ms. Burrows was wearing a wire.

•

Lying on a stated-income loan is, without question, a crime, and one ought not to excuse it even though, as Mr. Engle says, “everybody was doing it” — usually with the eager encouragement of their brokers. But the Engle case raises questions not just about the government’s priorities, but about something even more basic: did he even commit the crimes he is accused of?

Partly, I concede, Mr. Engle is easy to root for. He is a personable, upbeat man who has conquered some serious demons. Part of his Sahara expedition was aimed at raising money for a charity to help bring clean water to Africa. “Every experience in life has the ability to teach lessons if I am open to them,” he wrote on a blog as he prepared to enter prison. How can you not like someone like that?

But the more I looked into it, the more I came to believe that the case against him was seriously weak. No tax charges were ever brought, even though that was Mr. Nordlander’s original rationale. Money laundering, the suspicion of which was needed to justify the undercover sting, was a nonissue as well. As for that “confession” to Ms. Burrows, take a closer look. It really isn’t a confession at all. Mr. Engle is confessing to his mortgage broker’s sins, not his own.

Perhaps anticipating that problem, when Mr. Nordlander finally arrested Mr. Engle in May 2010, he claims to have elicited a stronger, better confession while Mr. Engle was handcuffed in the back seat of his car. Mr. Engle fervently denies this. This second supposed confession, however, was never captured on tape.

As for the loans themselves, on one of them Mr. Engle claimed an income of $15,000 a month. As it turns out, his total income in 2005, according to his accountant, was $180,000, which amounts to … hmmm …$15,000 a month, though of course Mr. Engle didn’t have the kind of job that generated monthly income. (In addition to real estate speculation, Mr. Engle gave motivational speeches and earned around $50,000 a year as a producer on the hit show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”)

The monthly income listed on the second loan was $32,500, an obviously absurd amount, especially since the loan itself was for only $300,000. It was a refinance of a property Mr. Engle already owned, allowing him to pull out $80,000 of the $215,000 in equity he had in the property.

Mr. Engle claims that he never saw that $32,500 claim and never signed the papers. Indeed, a handwriting analysis conducted by the government raised the distinct possibility that Mr. Engle’s signature and his initials in several places in the mortgage documents had been forged. As it happens, Mr. Engle’s broker for that loan, John J. Hellman, recently pleaded guilty to mortgage fraud for playing fast and loose with a number of mortgage applications. Mr. Hellman testified in court that Mr. Engle had signed the mortgage application. Early this week, Mr. Hellman received a reduced sentence of 10 months, less than half of Mr. Engle’s sentence, in no small part because of his willingness to testify against Mr. Engle.

Even the jurors seemed confused about how to think about Mr. Engle’s supposed crime. When it came time to pronounce a verdict, the jury found him not guilty of providing false information to the bank, which would seem to be the only fraud he could possibly have committed. Yet it still found him guilty of mortgage fraud. “I think the prosecution convinced the jury that I was guilty of something but they weren’t sure what,” Mr. Engle wrote in an e-mail.

Like many people, Mr. Engle’s biggest mistake was believing that housing prices could only go up. When the market collapsed, Mr. Engle defaulted on the two properties, which of course is not a crime. Although his accountant tried to persuade the banks to do a complicated refinancing, they refused and foreclosed on the properties. Like many Americans, Mr. Engle wound up being punished by the market for his mistake, losing all his remaining equity along with the properties themselves. Thanks to the government, though, his punishment was far more severe than most.

At his sentencing, Mr. Engle told the judge: “I can say with confidence that I can turn negatives into positives. I have no doubt I will make the best of it.” With his inspiring prison blog, Running in Place: A Blog About Surviving Adversity, he has already begun to do that.

Even when he emerges from prison, though, his ordeal will not be over. As part of his sentence, Mr. Engle was ordered to pay $262,500 in restitution to the owner of his mortgages. And what institution might that be? You guessed it: Countrywide, now owned by Bank of America.

Angelo Mozilo ought to get a good chuckle out of that one.

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Isabel

Isabel, have patience!  Have patience, Mama? I’m only 1 and a half years old.  How am I supposed to have patience? And then I realized, today Isabel is exactly 1 and a half.  Happy 1 and a half birthday, Isabel.

Today Isabel also quacked at me. She picked up her new orange and white duck and said Wuack!  We wuacked back and forth a bit.  She is big into animal sounds.  For the longest time it was only barking, but lately, meowing is the most popular sound in her repertoire.  Maooooow, maooooow.  And now the duck.

If we blow in Ava’s face, she tries to eat the air we blow at her.  Isabel finds this completely amusing and has taken to blowing in Ava’s face as well, only she isn’t that great at blowing yet, so there is not a lot of air and Ava doesn’t respond quite as vociferously.  Instead she licks at Isabel’s blows.  Isabel, hoping for a bigger response, tries harder.

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HuckaBOO

If Huckabee is to be believed, I am causing more damage to the world than bombs because I’m a GASP! single mother!! I’m uneducated (except for that doctorate–oops, don’t tell!), I’m poor (except for my decent income–better keep quiet on that one!), I am stealing money from the state in the form of welfare (okay, I have to concede on this–I get Oregon Health Plan because I had breast cancer.  What a loser!), and I’m raising damaged children born out of wedlock who will fill the prisons because I alone ruined them since no man was around to keep me in line.  My lovely, well-behaved, HAPPY daughters are destined for hell.  What can I say?  I should just lie on the floor and waste away because I’m so worthless and so are my babies.  C’est la vie.  I love them anyway.

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Sugar

I have stopped eating most sugar and for the most part, this works just fine.  However, there are some nights (like this one), where I long to eat a giant slice of chocolate cake filled with warm, chocolate filling, or banana cream pie, or a brownie, or chocolate mousse, or vanilla cake with thick, white, creamy frosting, or something else with sugar in it.

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Love

My little daughter is perfect.  I have moments sometimes, when I’m holding her hand or looking at her, when I think to myself that I am a human and she is a human, she is my cub, my baby.  I held her hand tonight as she lay against me in the crook of my right shoulder. I could smell the warmth of her body wafting upward, see the tiny curls forming in the sweat along the base of her neck.  She held both my hands with her hands, each of her fingers warm and soft.  I picked at her baby fingernails with mine, catching the ends and pulling off the sharp places.  This is my cub, I thought. This is my little human.  Here we are, two humans, lying together in this bed in this house in the twilight as she moves into sleep.  The moment was so basic, so contented, so perfect in its simplicity.  I love my human child.  I love every moment with her.  She brings me grace and contentment.  She is perfect.

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Attitude Adjustment Bureau

I have got to do something to my brain so that instead of finding my job annoying, I re-appreciate the things about it that are so much more worthwhile than they could be. Probably a vacation would help. I haven’t taken one since I started a year and a half ago. I really want to go to Spain. Or France. Hell, right now I would love to head to Japan and help with cleanup efforts. Anything but the same old complaints from clients all the time all the time all the time. Gads, here I am wishing I could have a better attitude mainly because I’m wishing my clients had a better attitude. Not all of them, mind you. But the ones who drive me nuts obliterate the other 95%.

That said, I have several who are sweet, kind, and wonderful. One couple even baked me cinnamon rolls. That was good.

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Musing

Life is so weird. It has a feeling of layering, piece upon piece, seeming to repeat in places. But really, each moment follows the other in a line, second after second after minute after minute after hour after hour and on and on. We have moments where we create something or achieve something and in that moment it is the highlight, but then that moment passes and the highlight is old and forgotten. Strange.

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Caffeine

I weaned myself off caffeine. Then gradually, I would have a tea here, a tea there, to the point where I’m addicted to the crap again.  It isn’t as bad as it could be; I don’t drink it every day.  Yet I have gotten to the point that on the days I don’t drink it I feel like a rundown engine, like I’m in fourth gear heading up a hill, my parts clanking.

Today I haven’t had any, and while I have had a few uninterrupted hours while Isabel sleeps, I have not had the energy or spark to perform any of my creative tasks at all.  I picked up the cello and played a bit.  Blah.  I sat down here to write.  Nothing to say.  I need to finish my taxes, which really won’t be difficult, but oh, so exhausting.  I just want to lie around and watch a movie.  It’s pathetic.  I did manage a run this morning, and it’s a good thing I did it then, because I wouldn’t do it now.

Caffeine is insidious.  It’s a drug, for sure.  I’m debating just drinking some just to get over the hump. I need to work on my book.  Baby is occupied.  This is as good a time as any.  But if I do, I’m just keeping the cycle going.  When would ever be a good time? I just don’t know.

This post is about as blah as I feel in my caffeine-deprived state.

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Avocados

Pointless ramble of the day:

I have a feeling I might turn into a giant avocado.  I have been eating at least one a day for over a month now.  They are the perfect snack–they fill me up and kill any carb craving I might have been experiencing, and they are so delicious.  Plus they are such a lovely, green color inside; sometimes yellow when not quite ripe enough, all the way to a deep, unripe apple green.  Milla and Isabel enjoy them as well.  I wonder though, what will become of the three dozen or so avocado pits we have tossed into the shrubbery next to the house, if they will sprout and become mini avocado plants that won’t bloom because it is too cold here, or if they will just die away.

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Shello Chopping

I have been dabbling with the idea of buying a cello.  I have been taking lessons for a while now and renting a cello that actually sounds rather good.  The rental price applies to the purchase of a new cello, but only for the first year.  With this in mind, my teacher and I decided to head to the luthier’s to try some out and see what could be had within my budget.  Cello shopping.  Shello chopping!

When one goes to purchase a cello, there are usually practice rooms in which to try out various choices. I called the luthier ahead of time and let them know I would be in with my instructor to try cellos.  When we got there, the saleswoman brought in six to try.  None of them sounded better than my rental cello.  Even when my instructor played, they sounded screetchy and flat.

A note about the rental cello.  When I originally went to rent it, my instructor had informed me that the shop had an excellent rental cello, with a lovely, full-bodied sound.  She hoped I would be able to get this cello to rent, and indeed I did.  Nearly every week she comments about its pretty sound.  After having gone now and listened to many cellos, I can see what she means.

Since the first six were not worthy, we asked to see a few more in the next price bracket up.  These did not sound any better than the rental cello, and cost over a $1000 more.  So we asked to see some in the next price bracket.

Another side note.  About a week before this shopping trip, I had been to the same shop to purchase a violin for my daughter.  I told them my price range, and they brought in 8 for us to try.  One of the workers in the shop came in to play for us.  Two stood out, and one of those was obviously superior.  When we went to purchase it, however, it turned out the price was about $2000 more than I had intended to spend.  We sent that one back and got the second choice, which was in our price range.

I bring this story up because while cello shopping, something similar occurred.  The saleswoman brought in three cellos in the price category that was at the top of what I could spend (and this was more than what I really wanted to spend, but I figured it would not hurt to hear them).  These cellos were far superior to the previous lot, and one Czechoslovakian cello shone above all.  It had a full, round, gorgeous sound.  When I picked it up to play, I felt a welling of emotion through my body and my chest.  It reminded me of a dressage horse, eloquent and beautiful.  Even my playing sounded lovely on this cello.  I decided to take it home for a week when it turned out the price was $1000 more than I had told them I could spend.  I wondered then, whether this was their m.o., to bring in a batch of instruments with one far superior to the others in the hope that an unwitting buyer would fall so in love, that money be damned, they would buy the instrument.  I’m not so easily swayed, and my budget is my budget because I don’t have any more to spend, and I don’t use credit.  I decided to take the gorgeous thing home, but I knew the visit would be temporary.

Another big part of the trip entailed trying various bows.  It was not until that point that I realized how much a difference a good bow makes when playing a cello.  The rental bow I have is a piece of crap.  It is a lot of work to balance properly and requires effort to run along the strings.  I tried at least a dozen bows that day and discovered how much easier it is to play with a decent bow.  I could feel the difference.  It was amazing.  And the better bows sounded better.  Even I, rough and new, didn’t sound half bad with a good bow.  I found the bow that best matched the lovely Czechoslovakian cello and arranged to take them home.

During the week, I played both the Czech cello and my rental. I played my rental with the nice bow and while it sounded better than the rental bow, the good bow was not the best match for my rental cello (bows sound different on different cellos, so one has to find a good pair).  I loved the beautiful sounds I made on the Czech cello.  However, I realized that it was outside my price range.  And having listened to a lot of cellos, I saw that my little rental actually did sound pretty good.  I decided I would try to find my rental a good bow partner and keep her for a while.  In the long run, I might spend a bit more, but for now, the cello I have does just fine.  If I ever get to the point where my playing wouldn’t make people want to hide under a rock, I will look again at spending more money, and who knows?  Maybe the Czech cello will still be there, waiting for me.  I can dream.

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I want to help Japan

The devastation in Japan is heartbreaking.  They got disaster times three, and it keeps on because of the increasing radiation danger.  It’s even worse considering their history with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, like the horror has returned.  I wish I could go there right now and start helping.  I wish there were something I could actually do with my hands to make things better.  I want to go start helping to clean up.  I want to bring food, clothes, blankets.  Yet I can’t.  I’m here.  Not only are flights in and out of the city not happening, I have a toddler and an 11-year-old.  I’m a single parent.  I can’t just pick up and leave them–I won’t.  Every time there is a catastrophe, I reiterate to myself that I can never be so far from them that I can’t get to them on foot.

I saw a photograph of a rescue worker holding a baby he found.  The next photo showed the child with her father, turning to escape a second wave of water.  I hope they got away.  My heart goes out to all of them.  I wish I could do more.

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Lame Lara

A rare night when both children fell asleep early and I don’t know what to do with myself.  I played the cello already.  I cleaned the kitchen.  I have now surfed the internets as much as I can bear.  Yet I can’t think of anything clever to do or write.  Mainly I would just like to go to sleep.  How lame is that?

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My baby is kissing the mirror

Isabel is strumming the heater vent like she strums her ukulele, Milla’s violin, and my cello.

I have said it before, but it is true.  I used to be prolific.  Go back to 2007, 2008.  You’ll see.  Every day, all the time.  Now the most writing I do is an occasional status update on facebook. Whoopee.  That’s life with a baby.  I actually had a real idea last week right in the dawn space before waking.  I lost it.  Then this morning I decided to write about cello shopping…shello chopping. Now baby is kissing the mirror, biting the ball, kissing the mirror, biting the ball.  She is a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants kind of gal.

Time to get going again.  I will watch Isabel strum, and oh, now she is shoving the ball into the mirror and singing to it.  Fun times!

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Growls

Whatever pitiful scrap of patience I maintain on a day-to-day basis is eradicated mercilessly by lack of sleep.

 

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The Sad Truth

The sad truth is that rich, power-mongers have been stealing and raiding from the earth and the rest of us for thousands of years.  It only seems more imminent now because of globalization and easier access to information.  The Romans invaded and stole all of Europe (and others raided and stole on a smaller scale before that), then Europe expanded and stole the rest of the world.  At some point, the rest of us are going to have to go much more global than simply Egypt or Tunisia or any other small uprising and say Enough is enough! If we do that however, we can’t rise up and take their place.  That story is old too.

This is what humanity does.  Are we going to ever actually change it or keep letting it happen and lamenting when it does?

As an aside, I keep trying to stop drinking chai teas from Starbucks.  I get there for a while, stopping for months. Then I get cold or whatever and drink one. Then I think one more won’t hurt. The next thing I know I’m back craving the damn things all the time again.  Like right now.  Insidious crap, caffeine.

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Mexico: The House the US Has Set on Fire

My article Mexico:  The House the US Has Set on Fire was published on Huffington Post.  You can see it here.  If you like it, please pass it on or buzz it up.  Thank you.

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Mexico: The House the US has Set on Fire

This article has been published on OpEd News.   If you like it, rate it and share it.  You can see it here.

Mexico: The House the US has Set on Fire

By Lara Gardner

opednews.com

Mexico is a house the US has set on fire, then covered its doors and windows with bars, allowing the people inside to burn alive. Fueled by easy access to weapons from their neighbors to the north, drug lords have infiltrated all sectors of society, and now Mexico is arguably the most dangerous country in North America and one of the most dangerous in the world. Deregulation, privatization of government services, liberalized trade, and the “war on drugs” have made life and poverty in Mexico so unbearable that Mexican citizens risk their lives to try and escape the burning conflagration and come to the United States. The US created this mess, and, through “border reform,” seeks to keep Mexican citizens from attempting to escape.

Even more so than in the US, the rich have gotten richer on the backs of the Mexican poor. Thanks to corporate America’s demand for low wages, Mexicans confront American sweatshops, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions, and no resources to deal with the increasing violence. As in the United States, agribusiness has destroyed the family farm. Wal-mart has put thousands of small, local businesses out of business. Free trade was sold as a means to improve the lives of Mexicans and Americans. It has led only to greater exploitation. American jobs were sent to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor with little or no safety or environmental oversight. The “war on drugs” has made outlaws wealthy and created a dangerous and corrupt police state where no one is safe. Mexicans want to escape–how can we blame them?

Immigration reform is constantly on the US agenda, yet it isn’t really about reform; it is about racism, ignorance, and fear. Americans, suffering from decades of the same economic policies that are leading to greater poverty in Mexico, blame their woes on Mexico’s victims of those policies. The smoke and mirrors illusion that the rising level of poverty in the US is caused by liberal systems, government socialism, and immigrants is part of the same lie that keeps Americans blaming and fighting one another. As long as everyone is fighting each other, the bulk of the population won’t focus on the true causes of economic disparity taking over the planet.

While it is highly unlikely that this approach will happen, Americans need to reach out and support Mexicans and Mexico. Rather than turning immigration reform into a battle at the border, the US must eliminate trade policies that benefit only the wealthy. The US also needs to help Mexico build its infrastructure, providing access to basic services such as clean water and functional sewer systems, decent transportation, and a healthy environment. We must help it form a strong education system so its citizens can achieve their dreams. We need stronger gun regulations of our own so drug dealers on both sides of the border cannot get cheap and easy access to weapons. Finally, we must end the failed “war on drugs” that has made outlaws unimaginably wealthy and forces millions to live in fear for their lives every day.

Unless the US is willing to embrace difficult solutions to a complex problem, there will be no true immigration reform. Killing, jailing, or sending back those who seek refuge here is not any answer. Real reform is formidable and ambitious, but it is also possible. True immigration reform would make the citizens of Mexico want to stay in their homeland rather than escaping to a place where our worst is still the best they can hope for.

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Jet

When I was 9 we lived in some apartments in Salem.  I was not happy there.  The other children did not like me and would not play with me.  I spent most of my time reading.  When I wasn’t reading, I was trying to get the other children to play with me. When they would not, I would hang out with local dogs and cats and imagine I had friends who were mostly horses.  As might be apparent from this and has been mentioned elsewhere, I was somewhat peculiar.

Our apartment complex was surrounded by fields.  A few years after we moved away, the fields were mowed to put in a GI Joe store, Bi-mart, and strip malls.  Ugly places.  But when I lived there, the fields did too, filled with scrub trees and brush high enough in which to make forts.  Our apartment had a patio that faced the main road, which was lined with oaks.  There was also a tall, thin oak in our patio area.  On this tree, there were often buggy creatures.

One cool, fall day while sitting on the patio breathlessly discussing my latest gymnastic championship with an imaginary sportscaster, I noticed a movement on the tree.  Always curious about things of this sort, I went over to investigate.  The movement was that of a fluffy, brown-and-black striped caterpillar.  She was crawling rapidly up the tree.  Bump.  Flat.  Bump.  Flat.  On she moved to some unknown destination.

I was utterly enchanted.  A friend!  I picked her up and placed her in my palm.  She rolled into a small circle, the two black ends of her body touching.  I walked over to a lawn chair and sat down, waiting.  Her fluffs were kind of prickly, but also kind of soft. She had a shiny, black hood for a head at one end of her oblong body.

Eventually, she wakened and began crawling up my palm and onto my arm.  I picked her up to turn her around.  She rolled back into a circle.  We continued like this for several minutes.  She would begin crawling until she started to get too far up my arm, then I would move her back to my palm.  After several rounds, I placed her on the table on our patio and watched her inching crawl.

This caterpillar was fast!  I knew if I did not keep an eye on her, she would soon be gone.  She was so fast, I decided she needed a fast name and decided on the highly original Jet.  I loved her.  I wanted to keep her until she grew into a butterfly.

I went into our apartment and began to rummage around for a jar.  I placed Jet into a bowl on the kitchen counter and located a small jar with a lid.  I took the jar and Jet out back and looked for some nature-like things with which to furnish Jet’s new home.  I found some leaves, sticks, old brush, and a few dandelion flowers, and arranged them carefully in the jar.  Then I placed Jet inside and twisted on the lid.  I then, however, began to worry that Jet would suffocate in her new home, so I reopened it and went back into the house to locate a hammer and nail with which to create a ventilation system.  I found the tools and headed back outside once again.

A short time later, Jet’s home was properly aerated so she would not suffocate.  At this point I figured she might also need hydration, and went in to get a cup of water, leaving Jet in the jar while I did so.  When I returned, I placed some droplets of water for her on a leaf.  Jet crawled around the minute space for a bit, and then just stood there on a stick.  I thought perhaps the home was boring for her, and brought her out again to play.  This went on for a couple of hours until my mom came home from work.  I showed her Jet and Jet’s new apartment before she began making dinner.

That evening, as I sat and watched television with my sister, Jet sat with me in her jar.  I would take her out to crawl, then return her to her house.  Finally my mom pointed out that Jet might be tired.  I agreed and took her upstairs to my bedroom window sill for the night.

The next morning, upon awakening, I immediately went to Jet and her jar.  She was not there!  I looked and looked, but there was definitely no fluffy, black-and-brown caterpillar in the jar.  I ran hollering into my mom’s bedroom, sobbing.  Jet is gone!  She isn’t here anymore!

My mom looked into the jar as well.  Then she pointed to a soft, brown cocoon.  See that?  She made her cocoon. So fast?  I could not believe it.  I looked skeptically into the jar. Lo and behold, there was a  cocoon!  In my frenzied excitement over the missing caterpillar, the cocoon had completely escaped my attention.  Part of the reason may have been because the cocoon was much smaller than Jet had been, or so it seemed.  It was about the same width, but only about half the length, and it was light brown.

I kept the jar in my bedroom for the next few weeks.  At first, I checked it constantly to see if a beautiful butterfly had emerged.  As time progressed though, I began to wonder if maybe Jet had died in the cocoon.  The grass and leaves shriveled up, and the jar looked decidedly bleaker than it had when I created the nest.  The cocoon looked so light and fragile, I wasn’t so sure Jet was still alive.

My childhood existed before there was an internet where one could go and look up the incubation time for caterpillars, or what kind of butterfly or moth would emerge.  I had gone to the library to see if I could find a book about Jet, but was not successful.  I had no idea how long it would take for her to grow.  Little did I realize that Jet would be wintering with me for months.

One morning the following spring, upon wakening, I went immediately to the jar, as had become my habit.  I never expected a change because it had been a very long time since she had moved into the jar and turned into a cocoon.  But this morning was different.  The cocoon was spliced neatly up one side.  However, I could not see any butterfly inside the jar.

Having been fooled once into thinking Jet had left, I was not so easily deterred this time.  I took the jar into another room where the light from the windows was much brighter than in my room.  There, among the dried leaves, grass, and dandelions, was a brown, spotted moth.  Jet was not a butterfly, but a moth!  I thought she was beautiful.  Her wings seemed still to be wet and not completely ready to fly, so I left her in the jar while I went to school.  After school, I took the jar and placed it outside with the lid off so she could fly away.  Later when I went to see her, she was gone.

Since thinking about Jet recently, I went and looked up this type of caterpillar on the internet. Somewhere along the way I learned they are often called woolly bears. I played with many more such caterpillars throughout my childhood.  In my recent research, I discovered that the moths that grow from woolly bear caterpillars are called Isia Isabella, or Tiger Moths.  I love it that these creatures who brought enchantment to my life as a girl share the same name as my youngest daughter. I also learned that I had created just the perfect habitat for little Jet to cocoon for the winter.  They like cool, small, dimly lit spaces with dirt, leaves, and dandelions, and once they are ready, they will hunker down until spring.  My cool window sill was to the west under some trees; the jar an ideal woolly bear habitat.

Interestingly, there are legends that the woolly bear can predict whether winter will be more or less severe based on the thickness of their stripe.  Some believe that if the woolly bear’s stripe is wide, winter will be mild.  If the stripe is narrow, winter will be severe.  Others believe the narrow stripe arises from more moisture, while a wide stripe comes from dry conditions.  Considering wet winters are also often severe, these two lines of thought seem in corroboration.

I don’t remember what the weather was like the year Jet wintered with us.  I lived in Oregon, so it was likely a wet winter. Compared to the many woolly bear photos I have now seen, hers was a narrow stripe.  If this one woolly bear’s stripe was any indication, perhaps the legends about the woolly bears are true.  All I know is that she was an interesting companion and brought happiness to an introverted and often lonely child, and she gave me something fun to look forward to.

Here is a photo of a woolly bear. This one looks exactly like Jet did.

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Winged Gods and Goddesses

Little girls and horses. I think part of why girls fall in love with horses is to have someone big on their side, someone on whom they can fly. I fell in love with horses before I had a logical brain, then they just lodged there, between the myelin bulges. Later when I actually acquired a horse, they were my escape from a reality that was less than. Horses were my winged gods and goddesses, flying on four legs. I was naive, silly, and fearful, but with a horse I could forget all that and imagine anything. And I did.

Before a real horse actually came to live with me, I would ride my imaginary horse along next to the school bus in the morning and again in the afternoon. Galloping freely, jumping driveways, mailboxes, shrubbery, and drainage ditches; along we would glide. As the flattened shadow of the bus crawled in among the deep spaces, lengthening and shortening according to the landscape, I would fly over them, stopped by nothing.

When I was fifteen, my dad the auction-hound bought a thoroughbred off the track. He was handsome in the way of thoroughbreds, so we named him Prince. He was a nearly black bay, a Sam Savitt thoroughbred, with perky ears and an unruly mane. He watched the world sideways, as if to ask, You talkin’ to me? I love thoroughbreds; love their minds, their impossibly long legs, the way they are fretful because they can be, but give them an opportunity and they will prove what they are capable of.

As is often the case with thoroughbreds who have been racehorses, Prince was damaged goods. Something had happened to one of his legs–I can’t recall which one now–so he was not able to jump. However, he could still be ridden, and he could certainly run. I would ride him bareback, my skinny legs clinging to his slippery back, and canter around the field below our house.

One afternoon when Prince had only lived with us for about a month, I decided to take him for a ride down the driveway. Ours was a legendary driveway. We actually had to walk a mile, one way, to the school bus, regardless of the weather. Rain, shine, snow, sleet, you name it, no matter what, we did not get down that driveway by any means other than our legs. Down the long hill into the curve over the creek, up the steep curve, down the long, rocky stretch under oaks to the west and a pasture to the east, then through the gate at another bend in the creek, around the corner, and down the last flat stretch for another half a mile. This portion ran under a cove of cottonwoods. Once while walking to the bus a bird pooped in my sister’s hair. I imagined the birds up in the trees, taking careful aim and firing. We would see poop land nearby as we trudged toward the bus. I laughed hysterically when one finally hit.  Melanie did not laugh. She was mad and she hit me in the arm for my glee. It was worth it because it wasn’t me.

The day I rode Prince down the driveway, it was severely overcast, but not yet the sort of gray where the clouds seem almost to meet the earth in their desperation to drain. The light was nearly fluorescent, and cold. I threw a small snaffle bridle on Prince, hopped on using an old tractor as a mounting block, and headed down the hill. We walked carefully along the rocks on the first part of the road. Prince was not wearing shoes and the rocks along the beginning of the driveway until it met the long flat place were large chunks, uncomfortable to bare horse hooves. Where I could, I guided him into the grass along the edges to protect the soles of his feet.

As we headed down the long stretch downhill, I felt the itch to run him, but I was also afraid. We hadn’t had him long and I wasn’t riding with a saddle. I did not know if I could get him to stop if he started to run. Yet I was an overconfident rider. I believed myself capable of so much when it came to horses and my family did nothing to disabuse me of this notion.  Ignorance is bliss, obviously. If I had only any clue then what I know now. But I didn’t.

As we met the straight, flat place, I squeezed him into a real gallop. He was only too happy to oblige. I felt his energy surge forward, the strength of him move under my narrow thighs. Too late I realized just how fast he would run and what little I meant, perched there on his back like an organ grinder’s monkey. Wrapping my fingers into his black mane, I held on for dear life and screamed.

Rock. Cold. Fear.

The wind rushing at my face ate the scream right out of my mouth. It didn’t make a dent. I lowered my head and wrapped my arms around his neck. Wind lashed my bare arms icy. I had read of landscapes passing in a blur. Now I could see what this meant–the landscape really was blurry.

In spite of the speed, in my brain it was as if time stopped, like a narrator hovering above, watching a train veer off its tracks. First the engine, then the cars, and finally the caboose, whipping like a snake’s tail where it didn’t belong. There she goes, I thought. See the horse galloping? See the skinny girl holding on? I cannot fall from here. I will not live if I fall from here. I must stay here until this horse stops running. But how can I make that happen?

Yet the road at the end of our driveway was coming, and across the road there was a fence, then there was a field, and Prince could not jump, so at some point the train’s tail would whiplash and there would be a problem. On and on we thundered and I actually settled in. I was not falling off and had joined the rhythm. But there was an end. What if someone was driving on the road as I came to meet it? I controlled nothing. If a car was coming at the same time we were coming then there would be severe damage.

No car, just the road, hooves sliding on cement, then mud, grass, fence, and crash. I hit the ground with magnificent speed, I rolled over onto my shoulder, Prince rolled across me and up and continued to run, reins flinging wildly around his neck. I sat up and screamed and screamed and screamed. Prince slowed. I screamed and screamed and screamed. Only there was something about the cold light and the wide space that made the screams seem small and insignificant.

I could see far up the road, see a car, see it drive along, slow, then continue. It did not stop so I screamed again. Prince had trotted back over towards the fence, away from me, but not far. Another car moved along the highway. It slowed beside Prince, then sped along, then slowed as it saw me. I screamed and screamed and screamed. These sounds were so tiny, escaping me. I felt like I was putting all my lungs into the screams, but they were silent in the wind. The clouds moved closer.  A drop of rain landed in my hair and then another. I realized my left shoulder was screaming too, in a different way.

The car cruised by, long and slow. Then it stopped and backed up. The people disgorged from all the doors. A gold sedan. I was rescued.

I severely bruised my shoulder that day, but other than that, I was okay. Prince was none the worse for wear. The only real difference was that for the first time in my life when it came to horses, I had fear. The next time I climbed on a horse, I remembered. I stayed on and kept going, but I could not ride bareback for a month. I would not go on the driveway.  Over time, the fear faded. Horses came back to me as gods and goddesses, my protectors, my escape from a dismal reality.

For some reason, Prince came to me recently. I remembered the merciless run down the long road, the sharp, icy air, the cold, gray light. I remembered all of it except being afraid. In spite of everything, the fear was forgotten. In its place instead was this lightning god on four legs, flashing down the road at magnificent speeds.

No wonder girls love horses. They give us power and help us fly and they do so without brutality. Winged gods and goddesses, indeed.

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Booby Squishing

Today I went in for my annual booby squishing appointment.  Having been a “victim” of breast cancer, I have to have them every year.  Compared to the one where the cancer was initially discovered, these are a cake walk.  In that initial visit, the doctors could see some specks at the top of the film and therefore assumed the specks were in my armpit.  They spent the next hour and a half attempting to squish my skinny shoulder into the mammogram machine.  It did not work.  It hurt.  Finally they figured out that it was possible that the specks could be on the other side of my breast, towards the center of my chest.  One try at that location and voila!  Pay dirt.  A lesson learned that day that has since been reiterated is that mammograms are easier if one is fleshier.  There is more flesh to grab in the flat, plastic jaws.

Today’s mammogram was relatively simple.  I knew from previous visits that mammogram appointments mean waiting around, so I brought some knitting. This visit was in the new “Safeway Cancer Center.”  I hate it when medical facilities or sporting facilities or any facility that isn’t what is being used is named for some corporation.  If I go into a grocery store and it is called Safeway, fine.  If I go into an office supply store and it is called Staples, so be it.  However, I don’t want to go somewhere that is going to squish my boobs and have it called Safeway.  It’s too much of a non-sequitur.  But as is often the case, I digress.

The new booby squishing center was clearly designed with the needs of women in mind.  In fact, it looked like they got together a focus group from Lifetime television and Oprah to create a calm, breathable space, in calm, mellow colors, with calm, earthy tones.  All of this is spoken in a calm, monotone voice.  One enters a lovely, spacious lobby with a fountain.  Let the deep breathing and Ohms begin.  You are escorted into a high-ceilinged, glass-enclosed waiting area.  Nearly immediately you are called back into the “guest space” –a nice name for another waiting room.  But wait, there’s more!  This space is lavishly furnished with low-slung chairs and sofas.  Surrounding this loungey place are all the doors to the little rooms where one leaves one’s top attire and personal belongings in a locker.  Each “guest” has a personal escort to show them their own special dressing room.  This person then informs them that there is coffee and tea in the corner for them while they wait.  Dutifully, the guests remove their top garments, lock all of it in the specially-designed wooden locker (nothing like the banging metal contraption I had in high school, these are sleek, wooden, and smell brand-new).  One exits the personal dressing room to wait in the low-slung chairs.  Calm, watery, pan flute music fills the air, further adding to the illusion that one is away at a spa, awaiting a massage and relaxation, rather than waiting to have one’s boobs squashed beyond recognition.  All of it is an illusion to distract us from the fact we are squishing our boobs to catch cancer.  A couple of the women, when they spoke, betrayed in their quivering voices the fear that this could be their fate. I wanted to let them know that sometimes, it really isn’t all that bad, even when the mammogram is positive, but I remained quiet, focusing on my knitting.

For me, nearly immediately upon sitting after changing out of my top clothes, my escort came to take me back for the actual booby squishing.  She performed her duties, creating the ethereal, opaque half moons from my breasts.  I find it intriguing that mammogram photos are so moon-like when the moon has long been considered the planetary body for women.

I had a mammogram a year ago.  At that time, Isabel was about three months old.  When the plastic plate slid into place on the top of my right breast, milk squirted out in about five different directions.  I loved that.  It seems so appropriate that my gland was doing what it was supposed to while taking the photos.  Today, my breast was emptier, Isabel having just supped shortly prior to my appointment.  No milk came out at all.  When no milk flowed, I realized I actually had hoped that it would.

After the photo-taking, my mammogram technician escorted me back to the waiting area.  I gathered up my knitting, grabbed a cup of tea, and waited. And waited some more.  During this time, a dozen women came through in the same pattern.  The escort brought them in, showed them their dressing room, they sat for a moment ensconced in their pond-green dressing gown, then were called away, only to return shortly to wait and wait. In the meantime, some who had been there were called into their dressing room for a “private discussion.”  I say private in quotes because we could all hear what was being said, that the films were clear and we will see you next year.

I expected this, that my films would be clear.  Then I thought for a moment, what if they’re not? What if they call me back to squish me some more?  I imagined me telling them that I knew something was up because this is what happened last time:  they called me back for more and more and more, flattening and pressing and prodding my flesh.  I imagined that if this were the case then 2011 would begin as awfully as so many of the last years have, and I wondered if this is how life would always be, and then I realized I was going a little off the loony end and returned back to the spa room with it’s trickling music, low light, and women in green gowns.

And no, they did not take me back for more squishing.  My escort called my name, called me to my dressing room, and let me know the films were fine and they would see me next year.  All was well.

I liked this place, this woman spa space for boob squishing. I could have sat there and knitted all day.  As I waited with the other women, the only thing missing was some womanly conversation.  If that had been present, the illusion would have been complete.  As it was, this missing piece kept it from being all it could have been, but still it was all right.  Let some grocery corporation pay to keep us from contemplating why it is exactly we’re hanging out with strangers and squishing our boobs in a modern day female communal space, creating moons and attempting to avert disaster.  Whatever works, right?

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Growing Up Strange

Perhaps part of why I have not become a pillar of the intellectual community, aside from the fact I’m not thick enough to serve as a pillar, is that while growing up, I did devour books, but I was mostly interested in stories, particularly stories about horses or animals.  As a teenager, I expanded my interest to include books where girls chased boys, but not much really.  I was only interested in those if there was something especially intriguing about the girl–like if she had a horse.

I especially loved horse/girl books where the girl was the underdog who wanted a horse and succeeded through grit and determination in getting one.  I wanted to be like those girls, and I was to the extent I succeeded in getting a 35 dollar Shetland pony.

Once I acquired the pony, I had big dreams for us.  We would win competitions and show everyone it did not matter if my steed was forty inches tall.  I imagined interviews with sportscasters.  I would ask questions then answer breathlessly, as if interrupted in an effort.

Actually, interviews of this sort also extended to my gymnastic prowess.  It mattered not that by twelve, I was nearly five foot eight.  In my mind I had achieved gold in gymnastic floor exercises. I would breathlessly answer these sportscasters as well.

So while I indeed spent my childhood buried in books, I can say without equivocation it was only towards the effort of avoiding other children and immersing myself in worlds far more desirable than my own.  If I happened across a great piece of literature, it was always the result of happenstance.  I had no illusions about reading my way to fame and fortune.

Ironically, if I think of it now as I seek to live so much in the moment, I absolutely did so as a child.  My parents’ chief concerns seemed to be to first ensure we did all of our chores, second that we did not bother them with sibling arguments, and finally that we entertained ourselves so they did not have to.  I was very good at the latter.

I did the chores grudgingly.  We were promised allowances that never materialized and performed jobs I still consider beyond the necessary scope for children.  The chores usually resulted in fights with my sister.  We argued prodigiously over whose turn it was to do what, then raced to be the first one done, if only to prove our superiority over one another.  The race to finish jobs served my primary purpose, which was to either read a book or ride my horse, and preferably both.  Melanie wanted to play with her friends.  I didn’t really have a lot of friends beyond the horses in my imagination, so rushing off to live in my head was my priority.

Before I got a horse I would pretend I had one.  i once cleared my closet, opened one side, and strung a rope across the opening to keep in my stick horse.  I shredded paper for her bedding.

She was lovely.  Her stick was yellow, her fur head white.  She had large, brown  button eyes with long, plastic lashes.  I called her Snowflake.

I spent the time creating this stable, enjoying every minute I did so, imagining the conversations I would have with my trainer over her care.  Again, I played both parts.  As myself, I explained very carefully what would be the best plan for my horse’s future.  My trainer would nod and take notes, her head cocked to one side as she leaned in the stable doorway, loose breeches puffed around her hips, a cap pulled low over her brow, alá Mickey Rooney.

Snowflake stayed in my closet for months.  I was attentive for about two days, feeding and brushing.  Over time I needed my room for other things and the stick horse was relegated to the corner again, her home prior to the stable.

Finally, when I was twelve, I acquired a real horse. Of course, this horse was only 40 inches tall and therefore a pony, but I did not care. She was mine and I loved her.  Her name was Rosie.  She was a bright, red chestnut with a thick, flaxen mane and tail.  But she was tiny.  I rode her anyway.  My best friend Jodi and I both rode ponies.  We made plans together to start our own pony farm as adults, no horses allowed.

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Life Goes On…

Man, it’s pathetic how little I write on this anymore.  It seems like my days start so early and are filled to the brim until late and then I fall into bed completely exhausted, only to start it all again the next day.  Work has been a living hell.  I have been hating my job so much, trying to focus on what I like about it, trying to help people, but shit just keeps coming up that I have to deal with and it takes time away from the stuff that actually feels useful.  Today a client told me she thinks I’m wonderful and that she knows I’m fighting for her, and that part is true, I do want the very best for my clients.  But I’m not so sure about the wonderful part and I am barely keeping my head above water.  It was nice to hear though.  She brought a smile to my face.

My infant daughter brings the most smiles to my face.  She is so happy and growing and changing so much.  She smiles and makes a little hoo sound all the time about everything.  She call me Maa Maa and says bye bye when she waves.  She is the most adorable little person.  She laughs all the time. She loved Christmas.  She opened her presents one by one, handing me pieces of wrapping paper as she went.  She and Milla are the reason for the holiday for me. They enjoy themselves so much and it is utterly delightful to watch them enjoy and experience everything.

I can’t believe how tall my Milla is getting.  She has passed my friend Rita and is on her way to passing my friend Sara. She’s lanky and tall and completely gorgeous.  Luckily she is also still very much 11 and into dogs and knitting and being as comfortable as possible so she goes around dressed like a hippie all the time, which is totally fine with me because I don’t need the boys chasing her yet.  I think she will manage to be taller than they are for several years to come so by the time they figure out how amazing she is, she will be older, which can’t hurt.  She is a smart girl.  She knows how these things roll.

I have to go to bed.  It’s 11 and I get to work all day tomorrow. Lucky me. I’m grateful to have a job, but I sure wish it wasn’t such a pain in the ass sometimes.

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Ewww

Someone asked me how many times a day I have to change Isabel’s diaper, the implication being that I must change cloth more than I would change disposables. It should be the same.  If someone is changing their child less frequently because the child is wearing disposables, that means their child is sitting around in plastic soaked urine. That is just gross.

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Accident or Intention?

It has been my experience that when one does something inadvertently or accidentally to another person and it causes harm, the person apologizes profusely.  Perhaps it is a leap in logic to presume this is always the case, but I think in most cases, if someone causes harm unintentionally, apology is the appropriate and common response.  Accidental action, unintended harmful consequence, apology.  I can recall some instances where there was an accidental action, unintended harmful consequence, then acknowledgment of the harm, and acknowledgment of the action.  However, I cannot recall any situations with accidental action, unintended harmful consequence, and defense of original action without an apology.  If there was an accidental action that caused harm, there was an apology as well.

How common is it, do you think, that there is accidental action, unintended harmful consequence, then defense of the original action as accident without apology?  For instance, I trip you accidentally, you fall and get hurt, then I don’t apologize, but instead say Ah well, it was an accident…?  Considering cultural norms surrounding apology in this circumstance, it does not seem to be a stretch to presume that if I trip you and you fall and I don’t apologize, that the original tripping was not accidental.  In this instance, it would be necessary to look to the surrounding circumstances to determine whether or not my action was intentional or inadvertent.  For instance, I’m wearing big shoes that I’m not used to wearing and holding my feet out at a funny angle because the shoes feel odd.  It would not be hard to figure it really was an accident.

However, if there is a footprint on the back of your leg in such a way that for that footprint to have landed there I would have had to have kicked you, and then you were harmed, and then I did not apologize, it would not be difficult to surmise that I intended to cause harm.  I may have intended to kick and tripped instead, but the original intent was to cause some harm thereby negating the need for apology.

Ah, it is all speculation.  I know it wasn’t an accident.  If it were, there would have been profuse apology.  The resulting damage may have been greater than predicted, but harm was still the intent.  The fact there was no apology is just another factor that proves it.

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Blustery Day

There is something about blustery weather that makes me contemplative and odd.  It creates within me a paradox of desires.  On the one hand I wish to go be out, suffering the cold and sharp wind, delighting in its vigor.  On the other hand I’m a wimp when it comes to the cold, and have trouble warming once it reaches my bones. However, I’m intrigued by the energy of it so when my baby awakens from her nap, I will likely venture forth and hang out with the swirling leaves.

I’m listening to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations of Bach. Perfect music for a blustery afternoon.  I love the light of a day like this.  It’s sharp and cold, overly bright like a fluorescent bulb.  Every so often today the sun peeks through and the light grows warmer, yellow.

Ack.  I was sitting here working and writing some here, but my daughter came home with friends and I lost my momentum.  This seems to be the m.o. these days.

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I Hope We Get You, Pure Med Spa, Britesmile, et al

I have completed the article and begun submitting it to magazines. It is my goal to get the issue as much widespread attention as possible.  I would also like to educate women about how to keep from getting taken by companies like Pure Med Spa.  They keep opening (and closing) under different names so consumers can’t keep up with who is legitimate and who is a thief.  There are steps consumers can take to keep from getting harmed by any med spa company, and especially this company run by these crooks.

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Third Person Lara

Lara is staying up too late.  It is her own damn fault; she fell asleep with her infant at about 6:30 in the evening and slept until almost 9.  Bad idea.  Bad idea, indeed.  Now Lara is awake.  But Baby finally fell asleep at half past midnight, so Lara can go to sleep too, after she brushes and flosses her teeth.  Poor tired Lara. Let’s hope her infant doesn’t wake up at the butt crack of dawn.

Lara thinks she should change her name, but she doesn’t know what name to change her name to.  She doesn’t like the name Lara.  It is such a wimpy name.  Plus no one can pronounce it properly in the United States. It’s always LORuh or LAIRuh, not LARuh, like car, or bar, or far, or tar, or mar, or even the letter R.  It’s not hard (or the word hard), or difficult even, but people here can’t do it.  And even when she spells her name for people, they still stick in the damn U.  What the hell, people?  There isn’t a U.  It’s not the same name.  Laura is the feminine of Lawrence.  It is a Latin-based name.  Lara is a Slavic name.  It is not related to Lawrence.  But try telling that to the morons who refuse to call her by her proper name, dang it.  Annoying.

Okay, awake is going to win if Lara does not head to her bed.  First to the bathroom sink and the toothpaste and the toothbrush, then to the bed.  Sleep.  Sleep.  Ahhhh…

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End of the Day Pointless Rambling

I love how every time I log in to my yahoo account there is some ad for online dating with all these photos of hot men. I’ve online dated before (NEVER again) and I can say without equivocation that the men on the online dating site were never as hot as the ads. If anyone thinks they would get what is on those ads, they are smoking crack.

Today it took too long to get one of the 8 dozen things I wanted done finished.  I didn’t even get to most of what I wanted to do and now I’m really tired.  I thought of a few things to write today while immersed in the aforementioned took-too-long activity.  I don’t remember any of them, dang it.

Isabel fell asleep next to me. She is so dear. She sprouted a little tooth on the top today. So sweet!

I just want to brush my teeth and go to bed. I wonder if I should just skip all of the before bed stuff I usually do and go to bed, but I’ll pay for it if I do that so I won’t. Dang, again. Soooo tired.

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Pointless Rambling

Ahh, Lara never writes here anymore.  I’m tempted to stop using this blog and use the other one I started some time ago.  I like that one because the one person in particular who stalks me here doesn’t know where that one is at so I can say what I want without worrying I’ll get grief for it later.  It’s the Pure Med Spa thing that keeps me keeping this blog going.  I get a new note every few days from people screwed over by that company.  It has gone through about four or five incarnations since being called Pure Med Spa, yet it keeps on ticking and stealing from the public.  Seriously, the FBI needs to get involved.

My baby girl is getting bigger and bigger.  I do write on her blog DaysofIsabel.  I don’t keep it up as often as I envisioned in the beginning, but more frequently than I would have expected.  I love my babies, both the 11 month old baby and the 11 year old baby!

This has been a weird week of running into and reconnecting with old friends.  First, I ran into a lawyer friend I had lost touch with a few years back.  Then I reconnected with a guy I dated so long ago, all the major grownup things in my life had not happened yet.  Then I ran into my old paralegal from the toxic snake pit. Then yesterday I visited with a high school chum at his garage sale.  It really has been interesting reconnecting with all of these people.  I hope we can maintain better contact going forward.

We live in a neighborhood of old, lovely homes.  They are high-end homes from the turn of the century.  What I like about most of them is that they are sedate and solid, without being ostentatious or pretentious like so many of the disgusting mansions are these days. There are a few that are a bit too large, but mostly they are just really gorgeous older houses along a ridge that overlooks the city.

Apparently, one of our neighbors in one of these houses either passed away or moved to a nursing home.  There has been an estate sale going on for the last three days.  On the second day, after fighting yet again to get out of my driveway because of all the foot and parking traffic, I discovered what was going on and went over to investigate. It isn’t often I get to go inside one of these lovely old houses.

The surprise was how truly unspectacular this particular house is.  It certainly has the potential to be restored back to its original splendor, but as is often the case with old houses, it has been bombarded by ugly from the last several decades.  Hideous carpet covers much of the hardwood floors.  The bathrooms are tiny, the fixtures old and nothing special.  The kitchen is dated circa 1960, but not in a good way.  And the worst transgression is that someone built a covered porch thing out in the back that blocks the view from the house.  It’s hideous and large and seems not to accomplish much in the way of being a nice place to sit outside.

There were signs offering the house for sale at $632,000.  If I had that to spend on a house, I would not buy that one.  I think $400,000 is more its range, considering all the updating that will have to happen.  I also overheard some discussion about issues with the plumbing.  Of course, based on the prices these estate sellers were asking for simple junk, I’m not surprised someone is thinking they can get that amount for the sale price.  There was a set of big, old speakers they had priced at $800.  For some reason there was  a lot of old stereo equipment and they wanted 100s of dollars for each piece.  I have been looking for an older stereo and record player and based on what I have seen out there, those sellers were smoking crack to think an old set of speakers could bring $800.  They had a couple of old amps similar to those I have seen at other sales for which they were asking $250 and $300.  Nuts.  That’s how most stuff was there.  Some things were cheaper; they were offering 50% off anything under $50.  I bought a Shaft record in perfect condition for $1.50, a ceramic pot from Italy for $6, and a stuffed bunny for Isabel for .50c.  But most of the stuff was overpriced and nothing special.  They are going to have to drastically reduce to get rid of a lot of it.  Much will likely end up in a landfill.  This is how it goes at the end of our life if we have collected a bunch of not much.

Today I have a lot to do.  I have to finish some applications, pay some bills, finish an article, go shopping for baby party invitations, make a risotto, get the house ready for the busy week ahead, type a petition, and get some other petitions ready for hearings on Tuesday.  Tomorrow I have “oral surgery,” what they call it when they inject bone into the hole in your head where a tooth fell out 15 years ago in order to make bone grow for an implant.  Fun stuff.  They say it won’t hurt as much as a filling, but we will see.  I am not working though, in case it hurts more or for longer.

Isabel is up and crawling around.  It is time to get started on our day. We cuddled for several moments when she first awakened.  I love snuggling her. She is my joy.

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I Love My Baby

I love my baby.  I love my baby.  I love my baby.  My baby is the sweetest, most wonderful, happiest little darling in the world.

I love my baby.

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Uncertainty…

It is normal and essential to proceed with our everyday life by utilizing perceptions that reveal only fragments of objects, the beginnings of action and bits of conversation, inferences as to another’s intent, and, as a rule, only a sketchy knowledge of his background.  Such incompleteness of input leaves large areas of potential uncertainty.  (Cameron 1974, p. 678).

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Softening the Edges of My Rage

Have you ever wished for someone’s demise?  Have you ever hated with such intensity that if the object of your derision were to meet with an untimely accident you would have to hope there would be for you an alibi, because such an accident would draw suspicion upon you?  I have been there twice.  It is not a comforting place to be.

The first was the sociopathic girlfriend of my ex.  She wanted to destroy me and in her attempts, I would imagine my revenge to help me cope.  There were moments where I would fantasize her death, giving myself the satisfaction of picturing a silvery knife so sharp, its blade razor thin slipping along the surface of her neck, aligning with skin and veins, blood seeping and pooling around her nape.  At other moments I divined her foot, uselessly pressing a brake line that had been cut, her car careening helplessly over a guardrail and smashing into a tree.

Eventually I learned to circle the wagons against this woman and she turned her attentions elsewhere, but not before making my life a living hell.  After a time the revenge fantasies ceased and life continued not quite as before; I carried a little cloud about me for a while.  I needed redemption.  I’m not sure it ever came, but I did move to a new place where I could remove her from my head. She took up too much space there for a time.

In recent months I move in and out of hatred again.  This one certainly takes more space than is deserved or warranted.  For every moment it is in my head, I leave no space for love or creativity.  It doesn’t come often, but when it does, it fills me with the intensity of a raging conflagration, burning and spitting and roiling.  No wonder hell is described as fire; hating someone is a sort of hell and it blisters and scalds.  I know enough pop psychology to know that such intense hatred only harms the one who is feeling it.  On an intellectual level I understand its ramifications, and so I bend my body into yogi poses, pound my feet in Nike sneakers, force my mind away from conversations that can have no solution, breathe down into the soles of my feet.  It works–most of the time.  But then it doesn’t and with it I must contend again.

Into this hatred happened a very young, very naive and stupid girl.  She was like some desperate and obsequious puppy, hoping to be liked, having no idea what the hell she had stumbled into.  I wanted to kick her.  I had no desire to befriend this naive creature trying so hard to be nice.  I wanted to fold her in half, destroy her hopefulness, rub her face in the anguish and rage she could not know or understand.  She tripped along, coy and carefree, like a puppy with her tongue lolling, tail wagging between her legs, hoping I would be friendly. Because she came from the one I so despised, I hated who she was and what she represented before she ever said a word.  I wanted her to back away, to get out, to leave what she had found.  She was not welcome.  She had no business.  I wanted her to go and to take her syrup with her.  After I aimed several poison darts in her direction, she started to get the idea.  For a moment I felt sorry for her and tried to warn her against where she was headed, but she wanted none of that, and nipped at me.  For this nip, I bit.  Hard.

I have been advised to write, to rend this vitriol from my veins.  Write she says.  Write.  It doesn’t matter what you say, just write.  If you can place this things that are in your head in a place outside of you then you will come to a place where they no longer matter.  Write.  Remove them from you.  Link them to someplace else.  And so I do.  I have for today for this moment softened the edges of the rage.

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Thai Noon (2635 NE Alberta)

Thai Noon uses the little square cut carrots and peas mix from the frozen section of the grocery store.

‘Nuf said.

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Stuck

Have you ever found yourself heading in a direction that you don’t want to go, into a thicket so dangerous and dense–danger ahead!–but to one side there are brambles, to another side is a bear, off to an angle is a sheer cliff, so you scramble and try to move back, but end up pushed forward, thorns stabbing you in the side, the bear’s teeth at your heels, stuck, unable to go anywhere except deeper into the dense thicket you do not want to enter?  This is how things are right now.  I’m cut and bleeding, but have no idea how to get to some stable ground.

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Venom (fiction)

The one asked the other if she could say what drew her to him in the first place.  Her answers were heartfelt, loving.

He sneered and said he did not believe her, that she was lying.

Later the other asked again if she could say what drew her to him in the first place.  She could not.  All she could remember was the ugly sneer.  It made her want violence.  She imagined her fist connecting with flesh, skin rupturing skin, bones causing breaks in the tissue, blood angling for the surface.  She imagined saliva aimed with sharp precision.  She imagined sarcasm.  All she felt was ire.  She said that the heartfelt answers were gone, that they had been true, but were no longer.

Only bile remained.

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Baby Love

It doesn’t matter where I’m at or what I’m doing, rubbing my baby’s back is like mainlining bliss. There must be some kind of direct Oxytocin hit for moms there or something.  Same with rubbing her head.  I could sit and rub her head and her back and get that blissed out feeling all day long.  She is heavenly.  Who needs the afterlife when this is available?  Ahhh, I love it.  I love her.

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Blurb

This weekend Milla had a concert in Newburg.  I realized after getting down there that I was imagining McMinnville when I was thinking of the city and deciding what to bring with me while I waited around three hours for her performance.  Unfortunately, Newburg is a lot smaller than McMinnville.  There was nothing to do.  I regretted having no book or work or computer with me.  Isabel slept a lot of the time, so I just sat in the classroom where Milla’s stuff was while she was in the green room until her performance.  Boring.  The funny thing is that when I arrived home I was so tired.  I don’t know why driving a while and then doing nothing for several hours is so exhausting, but it is.  I wish I would have had more time this weekend to accomplish something productive (like writing, or sewing, or cleaning the house).  Ah well.  It’s the end of the weekend and I need to go to bed.

As an aside, Milla’s playing and the symphony were both lovely.  She played well and has definitely improved playing with this group. She also has a new teacher who has been very good for her.  We are looking forward to the knowledge and skills she will gain working with this new instructor.

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Imagine if the Tea Party was Black, by Tim Wise

Dear Mr. Tim Wise, You are a genius.  You are so dead-on correct, I had to repost this for anyone who stumbles across what I write here.  Readers if you find me, please read this, then pass it on.

The link to this story can be found here.

“Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black” — Tim Wise

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.

Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. Wise has spoken in 48 states, on over 400 college campuses, and to community groups around the nation. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and has trained physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. His latest book is called Between Barack and a Hard Place.

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Pure Med Spa, Brite Smile, Crooks All

I finally started the article I have been planning to write for over a year.  Every two or three days another comment comes in on the company detailing further bad acts.  Over and over people tell stories of failed treatments, closed doors, lost money, and injuries.  I have been called by Jeff Nourse.  I have spoken to employees and customers.  An attorney general called me to ask what I knew about the company’s practices.  A local Portland television station profiled a victim of Pure Med Spa and called to get my input.  A financier in New York called because the CEO and CFO had contacted him to borrow money.  Basic research led him to this site and to me.  Along the way Pure Med changed to Brite Smile, and the stories continued.  More money lost.  More people harmed.

It is time to get the word out that this company is a public health hazard.  When another story popped into my inbox tonight, I stopped reading my book, pulled out the computer, and started working on the story.  The words are flowing.  I am going to write about this disaster of a company who steals its customers’ money, disfigures and scars their bodies, and runs rampant over its employees.  Then I am going to submit the story to every major woman’s magazine in this country.  Hopefully one of them will realize that this story is a big one, and that in order to protect consumers, the story needs to be told so that no one gives them another penny and nobody else gets hurt.

Some people have asked me Why aren’t these people in jail?  They are crooks!  They hurt me!  They stole my money! Why indeed.  Something needs to happen to stop them before someone else gets hurt.  If we can’t jail them, at least I can try and stop them with my words.

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Pointless Rambling

Gads.  It’s getting to the point where I can hardly stand to read anything about the news anymore.  The level of disconnect of so many citizens in this country is disheartening.  So many people get all their information from one news channel and screaming talk radio.  So many have zero knowledge about the issues they scream about.  They know a few buzzwords, but have no idea what the hell it is they are talking about.  And it seems that the typical response of these ignorant fools when presented with a logical, educated response to their ranting is to diverge off into another unrelated rant.  Seriously disheartening.

On a personal note, too often lately I have writing ideas that do not get written down.  I’m back where I was five or six years ago when I didn’t write things down and would lose so many good ideas.  I do that all the time now.  Back then, I decided to carry around a tablet to write on when I thought of something.  Then I became good at writing every day on the computer (and especially this blog) and the ideas started getting captured. Then I took my life down a path and did not end up at the expected destination and stopped writing as much and the ideas are getting lost again.  I think the notebook is going to have to return to capture some of the ideas.  Disheartening too.

Isabel is lying on my lap asleep.  Milla and I watched a movie tonight called The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.  Sadly, I could identify with Pippa’s feelings of helplessness and despair.  I loved it when she finally realized she was free from the cage of a life she created for herself.  I wonder what is going to be my catalyst.  Is there going to be one or am I stuck here forever because I made decisions I thought were the right ones and they turned out to be not so great?  For years I went through life just kind of taking it as it came.  Then I started living with intention, making decisions with some effort towards control of my destiny and things turned out worse.

Of course, here I am saying that with this daughter on my lap I would not trade for anything ever.  With Milla I knew without question that I did not regret one second of my life up until the moment she was conceived because I would not want anything to have happened that would have led to life without her.  Now I would not trade Isabel for anything, but I have regrets.  I cannot reconcile these two perspectives.  I do not know how I can want Isabel with all my heart, yet know that I hold so many regrets.  Although come to think of it the strongest of my regrets are for after she was conceived.  I could live with the choices up to that minute.  I actually wish I had done things much differently after.  So I suppose the two aren’t so different.  Good to realize.

Today I bought a Kenneth Cole leather computer bag for twenty bucks.  Not bad.  Fits the new computer.  My personal computer is a Macbook and it’s smaller, so the new computer would not fit in the bag.  I was thinking I was going to have to get some ugly thing because I didn’t want to spend much, so this was a nice buy.  I would have liked to find a yellow or orange or pink leather one, but that would have cost a lot more, so this will do.  Black works.  Plus it’s big enough I can carry files in it too.

Well I’ve wasted twenty minutes writing about not much so I’m going to stop and go to bed.  I’m tired.  Good night.

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How Do I Love Thee

Ah, sleep.  My lovely friend, you are my blissful savior.  For months you have evaded me, trickling in and out like a stealthy lover.  Yet tonight you arrived on my doorstep to spend the night, lolling beside me on my bedsheets, holding me close to your bosom.  Each time you have graced me with your spiriting presence you removed my mind, carrying it off to unknown vistas.  Your visit has restored my thoughts, revived my spirit.  Please do not leave me again–my heart and mind will break without you.

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The Olympics

I tried watching the Olympics on the internet tonight.  Greedy NBC can’t even let you watch old stuff without inserting hideous commercials so I turned it off.  Then I decided to try and watch it from another country. Canadian Television worked just fine without the stupid Proctor and Gamble ads.  Gag.  Commercials are one of the main reasons I do not own a television.  That, and most shows are so inane I can’t stand to waste my precious time watching them.  Life is happening; I would rather experience it (even when it’s not that exciting) than spend my time staring at some dumb television show.  I think back to the shows I used to watch when I had a t.v. and none of them were worth the time I spent.

I do like some of the cable series and have watched them on DVD, Six Feet Under, Weeds, and Dexter.  Unfortunately, though, whenever I get into one of these shows, they take over my life because I just want to watch and watch until I get to the end.  However, I do look back fondly on them, like a good book, which is different than mainstream television shows I spent years watching (ER, Party of Five, and Ally McBeal).  Years after I quit watching ER I tuned in.  None of the characters I had watched before were left.  I quit when they took the adopted child away from the gay doctor because she was gay.  That just made me too mad and I didn’t want to hang around for weeks to try and find out what happened, plus they always took months long breaks.

I haven’t had a television now for years and I don’t miss it.  Thought I missed it some when the Olympics started, but having tried to watch via NBC, I’ve gotten a clue how they run things and I would hate it.  I’m not missing anything.  NBC would chop the shit out of it all, ruin it with ads and cuts to other events right when things were getting interesting, keep out the athletes who aren’t their pets, and generally make viewing miserable.  I can get whatever I need right here on the internet.  I’ll log in to Ukranian television.  Yeah, that will work.

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Brain Dead

I’m so tired.  I did not sleep well early this morning before dawn and then baby woke up early.  The two of us slept a bit after she woke up, but it wasn’t long enough for me.  I had an active day and now it hit me.  I’m exhausted.

Wasn’t this a special post?

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When Conversations are Too Much Work

Have you ever had the experience where simply communicating with someone is so much work that you end up not speaking much of the time just because you don’t want to deal with the effort of it?  You find yourself silent a lot of the time or only speaking about nonsense that means not much in the scheme of things.  Then when you spend time with another person who isn’t so difficult to communicate with, it takes time to remember what it was like to have a conversation of any consequence, so you’re silent for a while.  But then once you get started you talk and talk and talk, as if you opened a dam letting the water move into the empty basin below.  Weird, these conversations that are too much effort.

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Swimming

Let me state from the outset that I have been examined by a physician and I am not clinically depressed.  I have also seen a psychiatrist and she has also said that I am not depressed.  I was. During my pregnancy, I suffered severe perinatal depression.  I came to understand that perinatal depression is often intrinsically linked to one’s relationships and support systems.  Pregnancy creates its own little hormonal time-bomb; bad relationships or lack of support can set the bomb off.  In my case, I had both.  My partner was fundamentally incapable of dealing with the mental demands of my pregnancy, and I was 3000 miles away from my friends and family.  I got well, however.  I went to a psychiatrist.  She helped me to understand the physical changes and demands of my pregnancy on my brain, and provided the support I was not getting at home.  Although I do not see her regularly anymore, I maintain contact with her and have continued taking depression screens.  I am not depressed.

I open with that caveat because I have changed in a way with which I am not quite at ease., but the lack of ease is not manifesting itself as angst.  Rather, I observe that I am how I am.  I’ve become ridiculously unflappable, even when it seems flap might be in order.  I observe people experiencing their emotions, particularly in relationships, and often I wonder what all the excitement is about.  It isn’t that I don’t feel.  Quite the contrary.  I love my daughters so much it can bring me to tears.  Yet I see how people get quite excited about things that seem so silly and I simply cannot feel it.  I feel like I’m observing beings from another planet.

I have become remarkably disengaged.  I used to feel a pressing urge to write and publish.  Lately, I have the desire to write, but it isn’t quite so urgent anymore.  Words aren’t tapping my brain.  They are there.  They swim in and swim out.  But mostly now it’s like I’m a fish swimming along observing, with no desire to share it with anyone.  Life is there.  I see it.  Now I see something else.  It’s odd, this feeling.  My head used to be so energetic.  No more.  So much of what I observe seems so unendingly ridiculous.  Humanity seems destined for demise, at a faster and faster pace, and I’m just swimming along watching.  This is part of why I haven’t found much to write about lately; nothing seems much to demand so much energy.  So much of what goes on seems such a waste of time, and I’m busy taking care of my baby, my daughter, and myself.  I’m not talking about the things that are important.  I’m not talking about working hard on things that are worthwhile.  But a lot of energy is wasted on a lot that isn’t important at all, and I cannot fathom what all the fuss is about.  The whole world seems caught up in a lot of nonsense.  A LOT of nonsense.  Reality television, piss poor bands, sports, “Tea Parties” by uneducated fools who wouldn’t know democracy if it hit them in the face, which star slept with whom, and on and on.  I know.  I’m being judgmental.  But so much of what is important is lost in the barrage of incessant noise, background constancy that distracts and distracts and distracts, numbing and pulling attention away from most of what is important.

The other day I pulled up in front of my house to wait for my daughter to bring something out to me from the house.  As I sat there waiting for her, a person drove up behind me.  They could have gone around, there was room, but did not.  After about 20 seconds, the woman gunned her engine and drove up next to me, screaming and flipping me off, before driving on.  I just looked at her.  What in the world was that about?  Why all the fuss over having to go around?  People can be seriously deranged.

Some say if you aren’t mad, you aren’t paying attention.  To some degree I agree.  But I just can’t get fired up anymore.  Over and over and over, hypocrisy, ignorance, and idiocy seem destined for superiority.  So I observe.  I feel like someone watching humanity as it drives itself over a cliff.

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Pretending This is a Better Waste of Time

I’m ashamed to admit how much time I can waste on Facebook.  I only signed up about a year ago.  It was a nice tool for keeping in touch with Portlanders after we moved to New York.  Then it became a nice tool for posting information about the baby.  Lately I find myself surfing around friends’ friends and seeing if I missed any potential friends.  I also respond to nonsense.

I read somewhere that studies have shown that surfing these sites releases some neurotransmitter similar to getting a drug.  We keep coming back for more to get that neurotransmitter, but it doesn’t provide the satisfaction of a good, real conversation.  I think I relate.  I crave connection, but with all our running around, it’s hard to get together with people.

I was sitting here tonight, reading down the News Page again and thought to myself that if I’m surfing useless Facebook information, I’m not working on my article, I’m not working on my book, I’m not writing on my blog, I’m not sewing the Presidents Day dress I want to make for Isabel.  I’m wasting time.  So here I am, writing this useless piece of information about my wasting time.  Such a better use.

Right.

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Priorities

This is happening and there are people who want to scream that Obama has a foreign birth certificate or bitch because they might have to pay some amount of taxes?  Bankers take home millions?  Good God almighty this country is FUCKED UP.

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I Just Can’t Stand It

I’m so frustrated with this country.  I wish I had never heard the results of the Massachusetts election.  I can’t stand the stupid, short-sightedness in this country.  If anyone thinks Republicans are going to do anything to fix anything, they are fucking crazy.  This country would not be in this mess if it weren’t for decades of conservative thinking.  It never works.  People think the middle of the road Democrats need to fix things immediately or they will just vote in the bastards who created the mess in the first place, and things only get worse.  Problems take years to accumulate and they want changes to happen in minutes.

Conservative thinking has made a concerted effort to make Americans believe government is the problem, then they set out to gut government in order to back up their goals, getting people to believe that laissez-faire, market-driven capitalism is in their interests.  After their jobs have been sent overseas, their homes taken from them, no healthcare, no food, gutted schools, and no social programs to speak of, Americans blame government for the problem, rather than blaming the tiny elite who manipulated them in the first place using issues like abortion and same-sex marriage to get people to vote against their economic interests.  It’s terrifying.  In reality, governments work well in many countries, countries that let governments run effectively and don’t let big money run loose to do as it pleases.

I find it ironic that the same people who lament the giant banks and their big bonuses and corrupt business practices vote in the same people who ensure these policies stay in place and their actions will become even more blatant.  It makes me crazy.  People listen to uneducated fools like Sarah Palin, think she’s “like them,” in spite of the fact her bank account is nothing like theirs and she makes our nation look like a country of fools.  They get caught up in the hateful ire of Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, without considering the motivations of these very wealthy, very hateful men.  They blame Obama for the bailouts, and he wasn’t even president when it happened!  I’m so sick of the ignorance, I can barely manage to follow politics in this country anymore.

I know the people I admire urge me to continue to try and make the world a better place, that in giving up hope, those hateful bastards win.  But seriously, how is one supposed to cope knowing things are only going to get worse and knowing I have two children for whom I want the world to be a better place, and for whom I want a planet for them to live on and prosper?  It almost makes me ashamed for having brought them into this place.  I love them more than life itself.  I only hope there is a planet for them to live on that isn’t as bleak and horrible as it seems doomed to be.

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Let’s Put an End to Pat Robertson

This article can be seen here on Huffington Post.  If you like it, Digg It or Buzz it Up.

Pat Robertson has been getting a lot of attention for his hateful, insensitive remarks about the victims of the earthquake in Haiti (and the victims of 9/11, and the Christmas Day tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina). This is understandable. Those of us with anything resembling a moral compass are shocked that he could believe such things and that he has the audacity to spew them in the wake of such tragedies.

Yet as horrendously mean-spirited as Robertson’s statements are, we should also be upset that his opinions receive national attention. Why? Because broadcasters choose to air his program. If broadcasters refused to air his nastiness, no one would have to hear about it. The way to keep him from getting national attention is to get broadcasters to stop airing his show.

Viewers can control what is shown by boycotting advertisers who fund his offensive program. If we want to stop hearing Pat Robertson, we need to make sure the broadcasters who air his program are not paid for it, thereby removing their incentive to air him.

The primary network airing The 700 Club is the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Call the CBN and tell them to stop airing this show. Call networks and tell them to stop airing the show. Tell them if they do not pull the show, you will boycott their advertisers. Then call their advertisers and tell them you will not buy their products if they advertise on networks that air The 700 Club, or if they advertise on the CBN until the network pulls the show.

The CBN should drop Pat Robertson and The 700 Club. He does not espouse Christian values (or any values at all), such as compassion, kindness, generosity, humility, or selflessness. Let’s all do our part to ensure the next time tragedy strikes, Pat Robertson’s ugliness receives zero attention because none of us have to hear it.

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Moral Ambiguities

Do we gain more as individuals if we face our darkest secrets, the parts of us we find so reprehensible, the parts that are truly unforgivable?  Is there something to be improved by this?  If we admit these things, if only to ourselves, do we cower in the face of them or realize and accept they are there and move on?  Can we do both?  What do you do if there is nothing you can do to make what you have done right except to never do anything like it again?

I’m reading this book about a man who prosecuted some of the worst criminals.  He was able to interview many of them as potential witnesses in later cases.  He said many of them were completely depressed, as if they were unable to face their own cruelty.

There are actions a person can take that may not violate any societal laws that are immoral nonetheless.  We may find them so despicable, it is difficult to live with ourselves.  What happens then?  Is there a relief in confession?  Does knowing another human being knows your worst make it somehow better?

I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

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Move Your Money

I’m very excited about a movement brewing to move money out of the big four banks (Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America) and into smaller, community-based banks.  The big banks took our bailout money, then earned record profits, returning to the same practices that caused the collapse in the first place.  In spite of their profits, they have cut lending by 100 billion dollars in spite of the bailout money that was intended to get them lending again.

In the meantime, local community banks, most of whom avoided the corrupt practices of the big banks, are having difficulty getting by, and government policies that keep propping up the big guys are making things more difficult for banks who have followed the rules.

A group of people came up with an idea to help the little banks while simultaneously sending a message with teeth to the greedy, corrupt thieves who caused the meltdown in the first place.  The idea is simple.  If enough people move their money out of the big four and into smaller, local, solvent institutions, the system will become more balanced so it can be stronger, more stable, and productive, working for economic growth instead of against it.

You can get more information at the website www.MoveYourMoney.info.  The site will have a page where you can enter your zip code to find a highly ranked local bank in your area.

Move your money.  Let’s show those banks who think they are too big to fail that we aren’t putting up with their corruption any longer.

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I Have a Cold

I have also realized that I have gotten out of the habit of writing.  I was in the habit before, and noticed when I didn’t do it, and I thought of things I wanted to say all the time.  Now I don’t think of it, although I still occasionally think of things to say.  Right now, all I can think of to say is that I have a cold and my head hurts. That’s all there is to say about that.

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I’m the Poster Child for Public Healthcare

I was published on Huffington Post last week.  To see the original story, click here.  If you like it, please share on Facebook or twitter, and feel free to buzz me up.

I’m the Poster Child for Public Healthcare
by Lara M. Gardner

I am a poster child for public health. Why do I say this? Because I live in a state where there is a low-income, public healthcare option. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was able to utilize this option for my treatment. It worked, and it worked extremely well.

Uninsured and unemployed after job-hunting for over a year in late 2006, I discovered a lump in my breast. The lump turned out to be benign, but the mammogram of that lump showed early breast cancer. The nurse-practitioner who ordered the mammogram knew about a federal program for treatment of breast and cervical cancers in low-income women. I applied for the program and was accepted for my mammogram and subsequent biopsy. Once the biopsy showed that I indeed had cancer, the Oregon Health Plan kicked in, along with the federal program, to treat my cancer.

The care I received was phenomenal. I was able to choose my doctors. My surgeon and oncologists were all brilliant, amazing physicians. All of the staff in every facility treated me with kindness and respect. Throughout the process I was a partner in my care, everyone explaining procedures at a level commensurate with my education and understanding. Never once was I made to feel like a second-class citizen because of my public health status. I completed radiation treatments and, because I take an estrogen-blocking drug, have continued on the public-health program.

As part of my care, I was required to pay $3 for doctor visits. I had two surgeries for a biopsy and lumpectomy, a needle biopsy, radiation, multiple mammograms, and attended countless doctor appointments with various practitioners. The only bills I ever received were for the $3 fees. Not once did I suffer through multiple bills, trying to sort out which my insurance company had paid, who had been billed, who was owed what. I was spared all of this thanks to public healthcare.

Since the healthcare debate has come to the fore over the last year, I have read and heard story after story of women with cancers like mine who were “covered” by private health insurance. Over and over, I have heard of the trauma and stress these women experienced at the hands of their insurance companies at the same time they were dealing with the pain, fear, and exhaustion of their illness. Each time I heard these stories, I felt grateful that I was covered by a public health plan.

Part of the health care debate has included the old canards about the Canadian and British health systems. “You can’t choose your doctor.” “You have to wait for months to get treated.” These claims have been widely discredited, and I saw nothing in my experience with American public healthcare that was lacking. I chose all of my doctors. I was served immediately.

I sincerely hope our legislators can get their act together and create a health plan that provides health care for every American so all of us can experience true and complete care, as I did. It can work. It does work. We all deserve nothing less.

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Baby Blog

When Milla was a baby, I kept a diary of her first days in pen and paper format.  Since she was born, blogs have appeared on the world scene.  I started keeping track on this blog because honestly I had nothing else I was interested in writing about and this seemed as good a place as any to write about her.  However, someday when I actually feel like writing about something other than Isabel, I would like to have this blog for that purpose so I set up a blog especially for Isabel.  It is called Days of Isabel and can be found here if anyone is interested.  In the meantime, this blog will continue to be what it has been.  I will leave up the Isabel posts, although they are transferred completely to the other blog as well.

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Day 16

Fifteenth day of life.

Not much exciting to report.  Today we went over to Gramma’s house for dinner because Daddy’s birthday was the day after Isabel’s.  We had turkey dinner and Gramma, Aunt Sarah, and Cousin Caroline held Isabel.  After dinner, Isabel and I took a nap that felt amazing.  I’m so tired all the time, so any nap is welcome.  Milla dressed doggy Ava up in baby clothes, then retired to the basement to play Rock Band and sing.  Isabel and I slept through this.  Other than that, we didn’t do much today.  It was nice to relax.  Isabel is beautiful.  I took a lot of photos of her, but then left the camera at Gramma’s so I could not download them as I had hoped to do tonight.  Ah well.  I will get it done later.

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Two Weeks Old: Pumpkins

Today Isabel is two weeks old. She had an adventurous day, of sorts.  Considering she slept through most of it, I’m not sure how much of an adventure it really was.

photoFirst we went to Sauvie Island to the pumpkin patch.  We were going to go to the main big one with the giant corn maze, but when we arrived at about 2 in the afternoon on a Saturday a couple of weeks before Halloween, we discovered that everyone else in Portland had the same idea. There was a line of cars a half a mile long on the road to the patch so when we got there, we just kept driving on past the patch.  We told Milla we would come back during the week when things would likely not be as crowded.  She was amenable to this when she saw the crowds and lines.  We drove on around part of the island and in the process, discovered another, more unknown pumpkin patch with animals, caramel apples, a smaller corn maze, a hay maze, hayrides, orchards, and flowers.

Milla and Daddy went off in search of a pumpkin while Isabel nursed on my lap as I sat on a hay bale under a fruit tree. The sun was beaming and warm, and sitting under the heat nursing baby Isabel was quite pleasant.  After she had milk I changed her diaper in the shade under another tree.  By then Milla had found her pumpkin.  She and I and the baby went to check out the corn maze and animals, I picked out a pumpkin for me, and Milla picked out a little one for Isabel. Milla pulled the wagon up to the checkout where we stopped first to buy caramel apples and cider before heading on our way.  It was certainly an enjoyable afternoon.

Later in the day, Daddy was playing with the Portland Jazz Orchestra doing a tribute to Buddy Rich.  Isabel and I went to watch him.  The Jazz Orchestra is a 17 piece big band.  I sat in the way back because I expected the music to be loud.  It was loud, but Isabel slept through the whole thing.  The only time she wiggled a bit was after a piece when the audience erupted in applause.  She was not terribly fond of the clapping.  The music was fantastic and the stories from the band member who played with the Buddy Rich band in the sixties were entertaining.  It was a fun show.

After the show, right after I got Isabel strapped into her car seat, she pooped.  I removed her from the car seat and changed her diaper in the front seat of the car, bundled her back up, strapped her in the car seat, whereupon she promptly pooped again.  Silly girl!

Overall the day was lovely. Milla is looking forward to carving her pumpkin.  I’m looking forward to sleep.  Isabel is looking forward to milk.  Easy goals, I think.

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Day 13

Twelfth day of life.

I love my baby.  She is lying her on my arms as I type, completely sacked out.  She is so cute.  She just drank a bunch of milk and crashed.  She loves her milk.

Today she had her second checkup with the midwives.  They weighed her (8 pounds, 15 ounces) and pronounced that she would likely be back up to birth weight at two weeks after birth (this Saturday).  They checked her belly button because it has been kind of oozy and said it looked normal and the ooziness would heal.  They had to perform the second half of the heal stick test where they take blood to send to the state.  Isabel did not like this but she didn’t flat out cry.  Rather she whimpered.  This was not fun for Mommy and Daddy.

I called a friend today who has been expecting a baby to adopt.  It turns out his baby was born on the same day as Isabel!  He and his wife have been waiting for a baby for nearly two years.  I am so happy for them that they finally have a daughter to love.

I have been having baby loss fears like I had with Milla, where I worry about SIDS and other disasters taking my baby from me.  I force the thoughts from my mind and do my best to avoid dangers, but the thoughts still lurk there, worries unbidden. I just love this little person so much and do not want anything to happen to her.

Today I bought her a night light for her changing table and some pictures of duckies to hang there as well.  Cute stuff.

Oh, she just made me laugh.  She is lying here sleeping on my lap and started to squirm a bit then pooted a big poot that made her jump, her eyes flying open in surprise.  This made me giggle.  Now that the bubble is out she is sleeping soundly again.

Isabel has more and more alert awake times.  She coos and talks, waving her arms and making faces.  She is a sweet baby.  She is wonderful to sleep with. She wakes up to drink milk then falls promptly asleep.  She hasn’t awakened to chat in the middle of the night in a few days, probably because she has been having an alert, awake time right before we go to bed.  I am going to check and see if the next time she doesn’t have an alert, awake time right before bed if she wakes up in the middle of the night.

In spite of these mostly sleeping nights, I am still really tired and have been taking daily naps with her.  I just can’t feel completely rested when the longest sleep stretch is three hours, but that will come later.  I am enjoying having her this age.  She is delightful.  I love her so much and am so thankful she was born.

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Day 11

Tenth day of life.

Oh, tired.  Tired to the bone.  I sleep.  I actually sleep many hours.  I just don’t sleep that many in a row, so I’m tired.  Isabel and I took three naps together today.  I was falling over in my soup I was so tired.  I had to just get up and go into the bedroom and lie down on the bed.  Normally I tend towards insomnia and cannot sleep deeply without earplugs.  Since my baby sleeps with me I am not using the earplugs and have learned to sleep without them.  This is useful.  The funny thing is when I had bad insomnia and was a walking zombie I could not fall asleep without them.  Maybe it helps to be flooded with baby love hormones.

Isabel has a cold.  I have instituted a no visitors policy.  When visitors do come again, they cannot touch my baby without first washing their hands.  She has congestion and this morning she had a fever.  She is so tiny, I hate her feeling ill at this age.  Apparently it is good for the immune system, but I still don’t like my babies to be sick.  Breastfeeding helps, considering it has immunities in it she doesn’t have and won’t for a couple of years.  She has been drinking a lot of milky.

Cutting the frenulum helped immensely with nursing.  She gulps her milk now.  I have also discovered that I basically cannot eat sugary things at all.  It gives us both gas. Since making this discovery both of us have felt better in the gas department.  I wasn’t even eating that much, just dessert after a meal.  I don’t sit around forking candy into my face or anything.  But the amount was enough to bother both of our digestive systems, so no more for me.  I’ll have fruit for dessert instead.  It’s healthier anyway.

Thoughts certainly fritter off into the ether when I’m tired.  I had a thought about something I wanted to write when I was writing about fruit for dessert and by the time I get here the thought is gone.  This is how it has been for me, but oh well, I have a baby to love so I don’t care.

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One Week Old: The Land of Cuteness

Lara Gardner’s Weblog, so long full of angst and loneliness, heartache and concern, now a lovefest to her new baby.  I’m giddy in love with this little person.  She is lying here nursing right now and making these little hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm noises between gulps.  Her little right hand is resting on her cheek, her left hand on her chest. She is so relaxed, so content, such a delightful little human.  She sighs, then hmms, then takes another drink.  Pure and utter bliss.  How boring I must be to read right now!  I don’t even care.  How wonderful it is to be bathed in gobs of loviness.  I cannot complain.

Today we went to the little shop where I bought her g diapers because I could not figure out how to use them properly.  I bought a couple of newborn sizes, and received several small sizes from Daddy’s mom.  The newborn ones didn’t work.  The small ones were too big.  It turns out that the cloth inserts really don’t work that well when they are really little.  There are disposable, biodegradable inserts that work for these little ones.  We went and bought some of these inserts and lo and behold, they work!  I’m pleased because we have been using some disposable ones, but they just aren’t as soft. They are supposed to be biodegradable.  Maybe that is why they aren’t very soft, but the non-biodegradable ones aren’t soft either, so that’s probably not it.  They just aren’t cloth, which is softer.  That’s all there is to it.

Our little dog Ava is very curious about the baby, but she is also very good.  She sits a bit of a distance away and leans her head forwardly, cautiously sniffing.  What is that thing? she seems to ask.  She looks at the baby, then looks at me, then looks back at the baby, giving her a good sniff.  Between Milla, Ava, and Isabel, we live in the land of cuteness. It is nice place to be.

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Day 7

Sixth day of life.

Tomorrow it will have been a week since Isabel was born.  Wow.  What an amazing week.  The first days with a baby are so visceral, so present.  I love it.  I spend time simply looking at her, memorizing her face, her hands, her feet, her body.  Baby love is wonderful.  Pure bliss.

Today was an eventful day for Miss Isabel.  She had her first pediatrician visit, and because she had a short frenulum, her first surgical procedure.  I really like our new pediatrician.  He is a naturopathic doctor, very practical and down to earth.  I adore his bedside manner.  He’s been a physician for years, and his relaxed manner and confidence is evident in all he does.

As I said, Isabel had a short frenulum.  The midwives pointed this out the day she was born, but I didn’t think anything of it.  After five days of nipple hell though, I decided to look up the ramifications of it.  One of the most common is the inability to latch on properly.  Isabel was doing her darndest to try, but it just wasn’t working.  Her little tongue didn’t reach far enough.  No wonder she was nursing all the time–she was hungry!!

All the websites on short frenulums (otherwise known as being tongue-tied) said clipping it was quick and painless.  I’ll agree with the former, but to call the procedure painless isn’t quite accurate. The doctor takes a pair of scissors and clips the skin under the tongue, the frenulum.  It is a cutting and it stings and bleeds.  Isabel cried for a minute until she was able to get on my breast, but I have little doubt the mini wound was sore for a little while.  I’ve cut that skin before and it smarts.  Things seemed to heal up quickly though, and the differences while nursing are remarkable.  The procedure was definitely worth it.  Isabel gets tons of milk now and her constant nursing has stopped.  The nipples appear to be on the mend, although they are still very sore.  They had cracks and scabs on them. Ouch!

Later this evening  my friend Sara came to visit, bringing her little daughter Leah and dinner for the two of us.  Daddy had a concert tonight and Milla went to watch him, so it was girls’ night here with my friend and our daughters.  It was a pleasant way to spend the evening.

Milla came home excited from the concert.  She apparently fell asleep at the end of the first set and then danced through the second!  Silly girl.  She loves big band music.  She also loves dressing up, so the evening provided her with pleasure on both counts.

Tomorrow it will be a week.  This has been one of the best weeks of my life, filled with baby love.

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Day 6

Fifth day of life.

Today was fairly uneventful.  Miss Isabel decided to be awake again last night, which was actually pretty wonderful.  She woke and ate around 1:30, then woke again around 3:30 and was up for about an hour and a half.  We went into Milla’s room to hang out because Milla has some pretty butterfly lights she leaves on at night. The light in her room is cozy and warm, perfect for a middle of the night Mama/Daughter hangout.  Isabel cooed and kicked, waved her arms, stretched her neck, and looked directly at me, practicing using her eyes. Long-legged Milla snuggled next to us, the dog at the foot of the bed.  It was a most pleasant manner in which to spend the darkened hours.

Once we went back to bed, Isabel awoke again around 7 for some milky, then fell promptly asleep until 11.  We both slept until 11 actually.  When she woke up she stayed awake for several hours.  We went for a quick visit to the store and she slept the entire time in the front-pack carrier.  We also had 2 visitors.  My friend Rita came for an hour at 2 and my friend Kathleen came for a couple of hours at 6.  Both times she slept through the visits except to have a small bit of milk.  I guess those long stretches of being awake just wore her out.

Seriously?  I am in love.  I know I have said it before, but it is true.  Baby bliss is truly blissful and amazing.  I love it.

Isabel goes for a ride in the car.

Isabel goes for a ride in the car.

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Day 5

Fourth complete day, starting the fifth.

Today Isabelle pooped.  The funny thing about babies is that it is easy to be happy about things like poop.  She has not pooped since the first day of her life when she pooped a bunch of meconium. This isn’t much of a surprise since my milk really didn’t come in fully until yesterday so she has only been eating colostrum, which generally doesn’t make poop.  Today she pooped really early this morning, like 3:30 a.m.  Then she did it again this evening.  Sweet darling little pooper.

Last night was very different than the night before.  Something I learned with Milla is that the only thing one can count on with babies is that the will always change patterns on you.  Isabelle is too young to have developed any patterns anyway, so I’m just observing how she is.  The night before she was awake for several hours.  Last night she ate at 12:30, then woke up at 3:30, fell promptly asleep after, then woke again at 7:30 and fell promptly asleep after.  She had a couple of days where she was awake a lot. Today she was asleep a lot.

Today was also her first venture into the world outside.  I needed several baby things and also really just wanted to get out of the house so she had her first car ride and visit to the store.  She slept the entire way to the first store and through the whole visit.  I wore her in my front pack and she snuggled against me.  Oh, I love her so much.

We then needed to go to JC Penney because we need a curtain to cover this high window in our room, the light through which really bothers Isabelle.  It is in the wall behind our bed so when I sit and nurse the light comes right in at her face.  I also needed some nursing bras.  This trip was exhausting.  I fed her in the car before we went in, but she did not want to be in the carrier anymore and was awake.  I did not want her hanging out in the mall.  I hate malls and especially did not want my tiny baby there.  We sat in the curtain area and she nursed some more, but when we tried putting her in the carrier with Daddy, she got upset again, so I just carried her to bras.  They did not have a bra with a normal fastener.

An aside here.  Why is it all the maternity bra companies have gone to these horrible clips that cannot be opened with one hand?  Is it a conspiracy by formula companies to keep women from breastfeeding?  Damn annoying.

Anyway, I nursed her a bit again in the bra section, then just put her in the carrier.  She fell promptly asleep.  We decided to look for bras at Motherhood Maternity since we were already there, I was tired, and wanted to get something and get it done.  The trouble is that store is at the other end of the mall.  The walk there and back wore me out completely.  Motherhood Maternity bras had the same unworkable clasp as every brand at Penney’s so I just gave up, resolving to look on the internet.  I fell asleep in the car on the way home I was so tired.

Now we are home and Isabel is still asleep.  After I get off the computer I get to snuggle and nurse my little baby again.  Right now Isabel, Milla, and Ava the dog are sprawled across the bed sleeping together.  I love my girls. They are wonderful.

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Day 4

Third complete day, beginning the fourth.

Little Isabel Lorraine, love of my life.  So far she likes being awake at night.  She finishes drinking her milky then wants to look around at us and everything.  Last night she had a long awake period, beginning at about 3:30 a.m.  Lucky for mommy, during the day she seems to like to sleep for a while between nursings, so I slept too.  I was tired.

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Day 1: Isabel Lorraine is Born!

I awoke this morning at 6:59 a.m. to a pain that hurt like a terrible menstrual cramp and ran down the insides of my legs.  Considering how many false alarms I’ve had with painful contractions, I considered that this too might not be real.  However, the pain was real enough I could not go back to sleep.  I lumbered out of bed and went to the bathroom.  In the bathroom, I started having very real, very painful contractions.  I called out to the others in the house, but they were asleep.  I was having gastrointestinal problems because the night before I made the mistake of eating cheese pasta with truffles.  I knew better.  I am allergic to milk.  Not just intolerant, but allergic.  This means that if I drink milk or get its protein in cheese or other things, I get allergy symptoms and severe gastrointestinal upset.  However I had smelled the truffles in this pasta and they were so heavenly, I thought one small scoop would not hurt.  It did.

As I sat there having contractions and going through the unpleasant side effects of eating cheese, I knew this was it.  I finally was able to get up and go tell Daddy to set up the birthing tub.  I then tried to straighten a few things in between contractions.  At 7:30, I gave up bothering to try and time them and called the midwives.  The contractions were hurting so much by then I couldn’t function when they were happening.  The tub was filling slowly, but I decided just to get in.

The contractions were intense and painful, so close together there really wasn’t any breather in between.  I begged anyone and everyone to make them stop.  I was not one of those serene women, suffering in silence.  I moaned and groaned.  My hips were hurting because the muscles were so stretched from walking around pregnant for 42 weeks.  I finally had the urge to push and at 9:19 a.m., September 26, 2009, Miss Isabel Lorraine was born.

I cannot stress enough the pleasure of having our baby at home.  As quick as my labor went, I don’t know how we would have made it to the hospital without more torturous pain anyway.  Yet after the birth, our experience compared to the birthing center in a hospital experience was so different, so mellow, so peaceful and wonderful.  My little baby was with me the entire time.  She was weighed and measured on our bed.  She snuggled closely skin to skin with a blankie wrapped around her.  She found my nipple right away and started suckling.  Perfection!

Milla was so enchanted with the entire experience.  She video-taped and helped keep the dog out of the way.  She was right there the entire time.  Mostly the midwives, Daddy, and Milla just stood to the side providing encouragement.  I did not want to be touched, but was grateful they were there. After she was as delighted with her sister as we were and could not wait to hug and hold her.  She is as in love as we are.

Isabel weighs 9 pounds, 1 ounce, and is 20.5 inches long.  A big baby!  She looks like a little peach.  Her face is round and perfect, her hair soft and blonde.  I am completely in love.

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Television is So Dumb

My daughter spent 4 1/2 months living with her father this last winter and spring.  In our house, she does not watch television and movies are limited, nor does she play idiot, I mean video games, or ever listen to music on headphones.  (She is a Waldorf student, after all, and I have followed these teachings as closely as possible.)  At Dad’s house, she was given a television in her room.  He let her play video games and bury her brain in headphones listening to true corporate crap. The differences since she spent those four months watching the stupid box are enormous.  She was  sold on corporate culture, began to believe most advertising (although she is also skeptical if the ad isn’t cute and geared toward selling to a ten-year-old), and generally thinks all the television that was left on at all hours of the day was entertaining.

I don’t know if I did her any favors keeping this shit from her if seeing it makes it so palatable.  Yet I still would not change that most of her life has not been spent in front of the idiot box.  The first couple of weeks after she came home she kept claiming she was “bored” and wanting me to entertain her.  Then she slipped back into her home routine and started knitting and creating plays for her stuffed animals and reading, doing all those things with her mind she did not do when she had an idiot box to stare at.

It blows my mind that parents find the thing “educational” and “interactive.”  It might present some content or ask questions the child answers, but the child is still sitting there on her butt, being told or asked by flashing movements, more loud and ugly these days.  The child is not out making the discovery on her own, thinking and creating, truly interacting.

Milla proved to us her ability to create and design and think on her own, using her own mind.  She planned and executed an amazing dog wedding between our dog and the neighbor dog, Luke.  She designed and sewed Ava’s gown and veil.  She made a marriage certificate with a shiny, glittery, yellow seal.  There was a guest list for us all to sign. She wrote the vows and planned the ceremony.  She chose the music for all aspects of the ceremony, including the processional, after the vows, the first dances, and the reception.  She designed decorations and hung them in the yard, Ava and Luke Tie the Knot.  All of it was thorough and amazing.  She’s ten.  This is what she does instead of staring at the television.

I was thinking about all of this this morning.  There was an ad on Dan’s computer before something he was watching on Huffington Post.  Milla saw it and said it was a funny commercial.  She had seen it at her dad’s.  She told us the premise.  To me it sounded so damn stupid and ridiculous, nothing funny at all, and I felt sad that she found this shit she had seen on the idiot box amusing.  However I long ago realized that her life is hers to live, not mine to control.  I can provide certain influences, but so do so many other things and ultimately she will make her own choices.  I can only hope that the influences I’ve provided help her to be a functional, healthy, and happy adult.  That’s the thing about parenting, if we do our jobs, this is exactly how it should be.

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Why are the Neighbors Murdering the Trees?

Two tall, beautiful trees.  Cutting them down.  Nothing wrong with them.  But the neighbors have paid some tree murderers to come and kill them.  One is gone already.  The other is on its way.  Trees that must be over a 100 years old.  I hate this.  I wish they’d leave them alone. They make the street palatable.  Our street has some dumpy little houses on it.  With the tall, old trees, the street looks stately.  Without the trees, it looks dumpy.  Idiots.  One of them has a bunker in his backyard and no plant life really.  He has giant lights he leaves on all night.  I say if you want to live in a parking lot at a military bunker, go do it, but don’t destroy a beautiful street because you don’t like the plants.

It’s just disappointing, these tree murdering neighbors.

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No Baby Yet

No baby yet.  Just kind of lumping along.  I feel like a lumbering cow and must admit to being glad not to have gained any further weight since the last midwife appointment. Right now the baby is wiggling so much it is driving me nuts.  She has not been this wiggly all at once in a while.  I don’t know what is getting her going, but she sure is moving around.  Want to come out, maybe?

My daughter is planning a dog wedding between our dog and the neighbor dog.  She designed decorations, has picked out music, and sent out invitations.  She certainly has a mind of her own, that one.

Anyway, still no baby.  Too tired to write anything else, although I must say that I am ashamed of our country and the legislators who think it is okay to catcall the president during a speech.  I hated GW, but I still felt his position deserved the respect of the other branches of government.  We have turned into a nation of freaks and ignoramuses.  Sad indeed.

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Labor Day

People have been calling to ask me if I have had the baby.  My sister called to check.  Why is it she thinks I wouldn’t tell her?  You have to call me when you are in labor she said.  Duh.  I will.  And mom too.  And his family.  And our friends.  We will tell.  Come on, how else are we going to get free food?

The other thing people have been asking like it is a hilarious joke is whether she will be born on Labor Day.  Can’t say.  Don’t know.  I’m not being induced on a certain day or having a scheduled C-Section.  Barring some rare complication, I’m having my baby at home with midwives.   No need to pretend it’s a medical catastrophe to have a baby or to have her according to some doctor’s schedule.  She’ll come when she does.  Symptoms point to an imminent arrival, but considering I am at 39 weeks, this should not be a surprise.  Maybe the next time I post anything it will be to announce her arrival.  Or maybe not.  We’ll see.

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Home Again

We have led a remarkably busy, whirlygig sort of existence over the last few weeks.  On August 5 we decided to move back to Portland.  As a child is imminent (due September 10), we wanted to accomplish a lot in a very short amount of time.  We also sent a moving truck along its merry way from NYC on August 13, and required a home for our belongings to land.  This put some pressure on us to get things done so we would not have to unload the truck into a family garage or storage unit, reload into another moving truck, and unload into whatever home we located.

Fate was with us.  We searched all day for five days for an apartment or house.  We applied at many locations and were accepted at one, but it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for.  Early the morning after that acceptance, I woke up too early (the m.o. these days) and was doing the search on Craigslist.  The first house to show up that morning was exactly what we were looking for.  I was reluctant to call because it was so early, but figured since the posting had just shown up the person must be awake.  So I called.  I am so grateful that I did.  We were the first callers and the owner said he gave priority in order of who called first.

Later that morning (last Wednesday) went and looked at the house.  Not only was it in the exact neighborhood we wanted, it was the style of house I love the most, had plenty of room, and was simply lovely.  It is a bungalow with a huge front porch, a fenced backyard, a full basement, and all the amenities we could ask for.  The old tenant was a cool guy who was heading to Canada to “hang out with his mom in Vancouver, B.C.”  He graciously agreed to allow our belongings to arrive before he departed, whenever that happened to be.  On Saturday we received the call from the driver that he would be in Oregon on Sunday.  We made arrangements for him to meet us at the house and we started calling friends.

Here is how Oregon is different for us from New York:  In New York, we had 3 people who could help us, one of whom had to leave after an hour for another engagement, leaving 2 people plus Dan to load our truck (considering at the time I was 35 weeks pregnant, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do in the hucking boxes department).  Here, we had 10 helpers, plus Milla had two girls to play with, daughters of one of the helpers.  Loading the truck took nearly 8 hours.  Unloading took under 3.  Unloading always takes less than loading, but the speed here was phenomenal, plus everything went into the house in an organized manner.  I couldn’t unload, but I could certainly direct traffic!

Basically, since we decided on August 5 to move back to Oregon, and arrived so late August 14 it may as well have been the August 15, we have managed to find a place to live, buy a used car, find a new midwife, and begin settling in.  We have been busy, to say the least, but so far things are working out.  Dan has had a few gigs and I’m slated to return to work for a firm here after baby is born and maternity leave.  It has been a lot of work, but it has been so worth it.

A year ago I could not wait to leave Portland.  There had been a long string of hard times and it was difficult to see a future here. Having left, spent too much money, and returned, I cannot imagine being anywhere else.  I am grateful for a place among family and friends.  I am so grateful we found a house we like in the neighborhood we wanted.  Now I just need to relax and sleep through the night.  It won’t be long before our little one arrives and sleeping through the night will be a thing of the past…

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I Should Say Something

I’ve been running like a chicken with my head cut off.  On August 5, Dan and I decided to move back to Portland.  But we had to do it quickly because we have a little baby due on September 10.  We booked a moving van and began frantically packing.  We packed the entire apartment in six days!  The moving van arrived last Thursday, we loaded it up, cleaned up the apartment, and flew off on Friday.  We have spent every day since we arrived looking for a place to live so that when the moving van arrives it has a place besides Dan’s mom’s house to leave our belongings.  We have also been interviewing midwives and looking for cars. I have a job interview later this morning.  Dan got his old job back and has gigs lined up.  Overall, it’s been quite the whirlwind couple of weeks.  We have several applications in and one has been accepted, but we are waiting with bated breath to see if the application on our favorite place is accepted.  We are supposed to find out today.  I will keep my fingers crossed, then get ready to unpack. We have to nest before our little girl arrives!

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I am in Love

There are some just dog things, such as the way they trot in front of you with their ears back, going the way you go, that I just adore in this puppy of mine.  I love how wherever I go in the house she follows me.  My dog Autumn did that.  It was one of the hardest things to lose when she died.  Even as I write this, Ava is lying at my feet.  There are also some unique to Ava things I love about her.  She sits on my feet.  If I am in a place and standing and talking or sitting and talking to someone else, she perches on my foot.  She will do this when I am saying goodbye to Dan or Milla as they leave the house to go do something and I am staying home.  Ava sits there on my foot, I am staying here with her, she seems to say, you go have fun.  We will be here when you get back. Then as I move into the house to do whatever, she follows me.

Years and years ago, I may not have even been out of my teens, I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.  I don’t remember much of it at all.  I read it because it was a bestseller.  I don’t even recall its premise.  But I remember one thing vividly.  He argues that humans can never really love a dog, or any other animal, because to love as he defines it requires reciprocation in kind.  My feelings in response are unchanged:  I wholeheartedly disagree.  There are different kinds of love.  There are loves that are equally reciprocal, usually with the person we choose as a mate, but also with certain friends or even family members.  But by his definition, I could not truly love an infant or a small child or someone who does not love me back in the same way and with the same articulation.  What a limiting view of human capacity.  I absolutely love my dog, as I have loved other dogs before her. It does not matter that her adoration of me is different.  It is there.  It does not simply vanish because we come from different places.Can I Kiss You

Ava moved from the floor beneath my feet to the corner of the bed.  She likes to sit on the corner and look at us sitting here at the desk or look out the window.  She hovers with her paws over the edge of the bed frame, her head rested on them, looking at me.

She makes distinct faces, this dog.  The most common is what we call her happy face, her mouth slightly open, tongue out, eyes bright, often one ear cocked.  She’ll turn her head slightly as if to ask Do you want to play? In these moments I stop what I’m doing and play with her.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she has the most incredible bed head.  Her eyes are all sleepy, her hairs all akimbo.  She’ll crawl to the top of the bed, as if the effort is more than she can bear, then sigh and relax as we snuggle and pet her.  Later, wild dog comes out, chasing bears and fozzies, rattling them mightily from side to side until they are dead.  Sometimes she brings them to us and requests that we throw them.  We do, because watching her little sheep butt run away to get them is one of life’s greatest joys.  She does not like these stuffed creatures to have eyes.  Within a half an hour of getting a new stuffed toy she removes its eyes.  Perhaps she does not want it to see her remove all its innards piece by piece.  More likely she loves that the pieces are hard and fun to chew.

After she has a bath she runs through the house like she’s on fire, ears back, bolting from room to room. What is that, dogs running after baths?  I understand their desire to rub themselves dry on the floor, but the running around after, I wonder why they do that.  Almost every dog I have ever owned has gone running after getting a bath.  However, none of them have run like Ava does.  The others have all just gone for their run to dive into their rubs.  This one just runs like a bat out of hell from room to room, then comes and stares at me with the happy face, tongue lolling out, eyes bright. Then off she goes again to make another round.  It’s hilarious.

Ava isn’t thrilled with having baths.  She is actually one of the more obnoxious dogs I have had to bathe.  It’s a good thing she is small and easy to hold down because she really hates it and tries to escape.  Yet she is intrigued by the bathtub, or rather, people showering or bathing.  When Milla takes a shower, it is a guarantee that Ava will be in there standing on the edge of the tub, peeking around the shower curtain, her little sheep butt wagging its little tail.  When any of us bathe, she comes and stands and looks in.  Maybe she is curious why we would want to do something so hideously awful.  Or maybe she just wants our company.

As I have mentioned, she loves to snuggle.  She is thrilled at her ability to jump on the bed.  She could not always do it by herself, but she grew and figured it out and seems to take great pleasure in it.  And jumping off. I can jump on the bed!  I can jump off the bed!  See?  I launch myself many feet past the bed!  Aren’t I skilled? Anyway, she will jump on the bed if I am lying there and come and lie across my neck and sigh.  She’s my little doggie stole.  She’ll snuggle there a while and get kisses from me, and strokes and rubs.  She knows I do not like her to kiss me.  She does not even try anymore.  Dan lets her kiss him.  I think it’s gross.  But she knows he doesn’t mind so she licks him all over.  The only time she licks me is when I get out of the shower.  She will come in and lick the water off of my feet  until I dry them.

This dog makes me happy.  That’s the simple fact of it.  She came along when I was very sad.  There were so many reasons, many of them huge, for my sadness.  One of them was grief over the loss of my house and the loss of the dogs who lived with me there.  I would have dreams about them, dreams they were still alive or still lived with me.  Vivid dreams.  Then this little dog came to live with us and I suddenly felt the desire to laugh again.  I laugh every day living with her.  She’s a happy, wonderful little spirit.  Frankly, I’m completely smitten.  I am in love.

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Racism is Alive and Well in America

The following article is taken from The New York Times and can be located here.

Think Again
by Stanley Fish

Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.

The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.

The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)

Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.

He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

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Spam

I have to wonder, do the originators of the spam selling Penis Enlargement Pills and Best Orgasm Jelly Ever actually ever sell any of their crap?  Seriously.  What is their incentive in continuing to send these ads to our junk mail folders?  Is it cost effective to pay to send the ads and hope one moron in a million will actually click and buy?  I just don’t get it.

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Pregnancy Insomnia

It does not matter when I go to bed, I wake up at 6:43 a.m. every day, usually to pee, then cannot go back to sleep.  By the time my body might consider going back to sleep, it has to pee again.  Pregnancy is so fun.  There is also often the problem of a numb hip or arm.  My middle is so much heavier than I’m used to, it seems to cut off circulation.  I noticed a reflection of myself yesterday while waiting in a line.  I look funny.  I have skinny legs and skinny arms and then this watermelon in the middle.

I am carrying differently than I did with Milla, but this does not surprise me.  Milla obliterated the flat and tiny stomach muscles I had enjoyed my entire life up to that point.  I think she also shifted my guts around.  This baby also seems to like to hang out up in my ribs more than Milla ever did.  My sister complained about her babies (she has 4!!) bruising her ribs.  I had no context.  Milla liked to lie on my pelvis.  That hurt.  I think wherever baby hangs out inside us eventually hurts.  Anyway, this baby moves all over, but she does hang out near my ribs and it is quite uncomfortable.  I push and shove and rub and move her back down.  Lately she has been lower in my pelvis (in fact she’s wiggling there now), but it’s getting closer to birth time.  In fact yesterday was 2 months to due date exactly, so there isn’t a lot of time left.

I do believe I have the sweetest child in the world.  As I sit here I see the little pile of jewelry she made me last night while I was working away on the computer.  She and I were talking yesterday about some girls she met in our building.  They told her they could not imagine having no television (we do not have one).  I reiterated to Milla that I think it’s better not having one, that I never even notice not having one.  The jewelry-making provides an example why.  When we are home in the evenings, or even during the day, Milla finds things to do with herself.  She knits.  She crochets.  She draws and draws and draws.  She makes me jewelry.  When she grows up, I will have all these mementos of a childhood spent doing things rather than staring at the idiot box.  That’s a good enough reason for me not to have one.

Baby One is growing up.

Baby One is growing up.

Baby Two sucks her thumb.

Baby Two sucks her thumb.

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Mini Rant Against Retailers

Headline on Yahoo! today:  Retailers Report Weak June Sales.

Well, duh.  Has anyone been to retail stores lately?  Especially clothing stores?  It’s like retailers think we are all rolling in dough or something.  And even if we were rolling in dough, the prices on shitty crap made in China are obscene, especially at stores that like to capitalize on brand names.  Most of the stuff is piteously and poorly made, but it has a label in it, so the store charges a small fortune.  T-shirts that are so thin they are see-through.  Clothes have seams where the threads are already coming out before the clothes have even been sold.  Then the retailers want $50 or $60 for them.  And it isn’t just clothes.  Bottles of plain lotion are $15.  Razor blades–razor blades! those little pieces of metal that cost about .20 cents–are 20 bucks a pack, just so people can have four in a row.  Cereal is $6 a box, when the cost to make cereal is lower than it has ever been. It’s insane.

Here’s a clue stores:  Want to sell more stuff?  Lower prices to an affordable and reasonable level.  Forty bucks for a t-shirt is too much, especially a crappy, see-through t-shirt.  Seventy bucks for pants is ridiculous, especially since you can’t seem to vary your sizes so that people can buy things that fit.  $100 or more for a purse is stupid, especially since, in my experience, the straps or buckles break within a couple of months.  Marking things as “on sale” with a higher MSRP is for fools.  You may have been able to sell your crap for ridiculous prices a couple of years ago, but times have changed (and people were probably buying all your crap on credit then anyway.  Now the bills are due and the job is gone and there isn’t anything left to spend with.).

A special note to Goodwill:  Your stuff is USED.  Trying to sell a suitcase with a hole in it for forty bucks is never going to make you a penny. I can go buy a NEW one for that price, without the hole!  Used clothes for $10 or $15 is too much.  And an old, ratty, smelly couch for $150 is TOO MUCH!  Your racks are FILLED with crap you will never sell because, guess what?  Your prices are too high for used junk.  There was a bunch of flack a couple of years ago about your CEO making too much money.  Stop charging too much and giving the money you do make to the CEO.  Start helping the people you put on your trucks and in your ads in your pitiful attempts to look like d0-gooders and actually charge prices these people could afford.

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Pregnancy Brain

I heard someone say or I read somewhere that “pregnant women are stupid.” I have to agree. Having gone from a person with so many thoughts running through my head I had to start a blog to deal with them all so I could focus on the other stuff I wanted to write, to someone who can barely compose a coherent sentence, let alone an entire blog piece, all in the span of just under 8 months, I have to agree.

The end of the first trimester and beginning of the second were the worst.  I look back at my blog posts from that time.  The number of posts start to dwindle.  The topics become more inane.  In fact I wrote about the fact that my brain seemed not to be functioning as it had previously.   And I just wrote about the concern, but there seemed to be no real pressing urge to change it.  I was sitting there muddled in a fog.

Gradually over the last few weeks I have started feeling somewhat clearer, but by brain in no way compares to how it was when I was not pregnant.  My energy levels certainly don’t.  I have always been the sort of person who has a list of 20 things to do and gets all of them done with time left over.  Now?  Now it’s a feat if I remember, oh yeah, I have that appointment today, and manage to dress and get to it on time.  Then that’s it.  I’m done for the day.  I also used to clean the house once a week.  Now it seems it takes seeing pink around the drain in the tub to remind me to clean mildew, or the dog chewing up a roll of toilet paper to force me to drag out the vacuum cleaner.  About the only thing I’ve remained regular on in the housecleaning department is keeping the kitchen clean.  Of course, our kitchen is so tiny, if it isn’t kept clean it’s a disaster within 2 days so the “mildew ring” shows up sooner, so to speak.

Words also used to flit off my tongue.  I had a thought and a response to everything.  Often these thoughts had some intelligence behind them, and I would analyze and think around all the angles.  Not anymore.  Now I don’t even have the thoughts, let alone intelligent ones.

I have some great writing projects I’m working on.  They are like cars with broken batteries.  I give them a jump.  I get them going for a bit.  Then they stop again and languish, waiting for AAA to come and jump them again.  Only AAA takes its own sweet time.  I took months completing and revising a short story I’m pretty pleased with.  I was at the query phase, ready to send letters to the magazines I had chosen.  Incidentally, choosing the magazines took weeks.  Then I started to write the query letter, but it didn’t roll off the fingers as such letters had in the past.  I had to write something saying what the story was about.  Stuck, I stopped for the day, then took a trip to Portland, and I still haven’t finished.  It’s on the list.

The list.  I’ve started making these because I forget things.  I was never much of a list maker in my personal life.  As an attorney, I had lists.  I had calendars.  I am extremely organized.  But I never had to in my personal life.  Now I do.  If I don’t make a list, even the stories and non-fiction pieces I’m working on are forgotten.

I realize pregnancy has hijacked my brain.  I realize at some point the thoughts will return.  However, I also realize that soon there will be a little baby to take my attention and getting these things done will be a practicality nightmare.  This realization is somewhat overwhelming.  Will it be years before I get my brain back?  Will the stories I have been working on be dated by then?  I feel the urge to complete these projects, but can’t seem to get them done.  However, I have stopped just lying in bed in the morning when I can’t sleep after I had to get up for the tenth time to pee.  I have started coming here and writing a little bit now and then.  So maybe there is hope.  I guess it will be obvious by the number of posts I make here.  Or not.

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Poop Breath Monster

Gads, I love my puppy.  I know this is a silly thing to write about, but she is just such a dear, sweet, delightful little dog, and I adore her so much that I had to say so.  She is so cute.  She is small and white, with a happy grin. Her little butt looks like a sheep butt.  Her ears go up or down.  When she wakes in the morning, she actually has bed head.  She is a good dog.  The best.  The kind of dog people dream about.  She’s no Marley.  She only chews the toys that are hers.  She sits and stays and behaves well.  She doesn’t like to be told no, so when she does something requiring a no, she looks so sad, then doesn’t do it again.4-13-09d

Except for one thing.

She eats poop. Yes, she does.  Not on a regular basis, but when it happens, it’s horrible.  She’s a snuggly creature.  If I’m lying on the bed, she’ll jump up and come over and lie across my neck (she is quite small, only 8 pounds).  This is wonderful, except when she turns her head and I get a whiff of poop breath.  Then the gag reflex kicks in and it’s chaos getting her off me and trying not to vomit.  I happen to be 8 months pregnant.  Smells are stronger for a pregnant woman.  Having the smell of shit right under my nose is like taking a dose of ipecac and receiving the expected and immediate response.  Having the smell of shit on my puppy honey’s face is worse than the simple smell of shit. There is the thought of her eating the poop that adds to the gag reflex.  I have to spend the next several minutes rubbing my lavender pillow all over my face and thinking about flowers and clouds and pretty things, anything to get the idea of my puppy eating shit out of my head.  Not fun.  No, not at all.

I bought some pills to give her to help her stop the coprophagia, but ever since I bought them about a month ago, she hasn’t been doing it so the pills have languished on the shelf.  In fact, I’m not even sure exactly where I put them.  Maybe by her dog food? Maybe in the bathroom?  Maybe in the linen closet?  I don’t know.  Somewhere around here.  Before I bought them, she ate her poop about once every week.  Then I bought the pills, did not give them to her, and she stopped.  I almost forgot about them.  Then last night I was all snuggled in my bed and puppy came in for some loving–the little, poop-breath monster.  I gagged and screeched, Dan and Milla came running (they had been watching a movie together and my yelps interrupted them), and semi-chaos ensued as the puppy was rounded up, the lavender pillow tossed in my face, and efforts were made to locate the offending turds, if any remained.  Puppy’s face had to be washed and I spent 15 minutes thinking those pretty, non-poop thoughts.  Good times.

Like I said, I love my puppy.  If I can get her to stop eating poop, she’ll be perfect.

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Bombing the Moon

Ever since I heard about NASA’s intention to bomb the moon (see the story here), thoughts and reactions to the news have been flittering in and out of my head.  There are so many, I have had difficulty articulating what one definitive thing bothers me the most about it.  Yet conclusively, my overall sense is that it is WRONG. s_full-moon

Cost:  Why is it we spend billions on crap like this, chasing water on the moon, when we can’t (or won’t) spend the same amount here to conserve water?  Senseless stupidity.  I won’t even get into the waste of money when unemployment numbers are higher than ever and we are in two wars…

No Choice:  NASA does what it wants.  We might vote in a mostly new Congress every two years, but we have such little control over how they spend our money, ultimately, what difference does it make?  Legislators on both sides of the aisle are unwilling to underfund NASA.  I’ve heard all the arguments about how NASA research benefits us all, and I’m sure there are aspects of their research that do, but this is just silly.  There might be the claim they are looking for water, but it’s really a bunch of grown kids who think it’s cool to go bomb the moon and there isn’t a damn thing any of us can do about it.  If they really wanted to conserve water, just as much would be spent on the very real climate and water problems we are experiencing right here on earth.  Plus, as silly as it sounds, the moon belongs to all of us, collectively.  What right do a few have to go and harm that which isn’t theirs?  They don’t.

The Unknown:  Scientists can conduct all the earth bound tests they want to.  The simple fact is there is no way of knowing what ramifications this will have on the moon and the earth.  These planets are inextricably linked.  The earth and moon are connected gravitationally and energetically.  Messing with these forces could alter our tidal patterns, weather patterns, and who knows what else.  It’s just foolishness.  And dangerous.

I don’t know.  If enough people feel about this as I do, then perhaps we could turn public opinion against it enough to get the government to stop it.  My inclination is though, that a bunch of idiots who like movies by Michael Bay would think it’s “AWESOME” and think that naysayers like myself are just a bunch of fuddy duddies.  American ignorance is so prevalent on so much else, I would not be surprised.  On most issues, I consider myself very forward thinking.  I’m willing to try most things.  But not this.  Bombing the moon isn’t only silly, it is scary and wrong.

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Cottonhead

There is fuzz in my brain.  No, not the police, just cotton.  Thick lumps of it, blocking any attempt at coherent thought.  Do you know how many “drafts” I have saved in this blog?  Unpublished drafts of things I started and then never got around to finishing because I either could not figure out what I was going to say or because I was interrupted and when I went back I could not catch the train of thought?  Lots of them.  Lots and lots.  Sometimes what I was writing seemed like something I wanted to say, then when I went back I realized it was just stupid, so I deleted it.

We are looking for a new apartment.  I really want to move.  I really want to move before the baby comes.  But I also am not thrilled at the prospect of looking for apartments.  Yuck.  I hate the ads. So many of them are bogus crap.  Craigslist is wonderful in many ways, but the crap ads are annoying.  I flag them, but they still show up. I wish there were some way for Craigslist to improve that feature of its ads.

Well this is my mindless blurb for the day.  I really have nothing more to say.  So I’m going to work on the long list of things I need to complete.  Maybe my writing projects won’t go as slowly as usual, but I doubt it since my brain seems filled with pregnancy cotton this morning again.  Whee.

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Beached Whale

I’m just stuck, energetically, physically, mentally.  I think it’s pregnancy, but I’m not totally sure.  There have been so many changes in the last six months that could be attributable to this logjam.  However, I have experienced major changes before and not felt so inept and unable.  It’s weird having been a person with a quick mind and quick body turning into someone who has difficulty thinking of words and can’t just leap out of bed or a chair.  I feel like a beached whale, stuck here on shore, lying in the salt surf, seeing what was all around me, yet unable to do anything about it.

We recently took a trip back to Portland. While there, we ran around hither and thither, visiting and seeing family and friends.  In the past such a visit would have been delightful to me.  If there had been a free moment, I would have wanted to fill it.  This time, I was exhausted a third of the way into the trip.  A couple of times I just ran into a physical wall in the middle of the day.  I had to say Enough is enough! and go lie on the bed and take a nap.  Pregnancy was definitely the culprit there.

The first trimester of this pregnancy was a nightmare.  I suffered severe perinatal depression without knowing such a thing existed.  My boyfriend thought I was an alien, and wasn’t very supportive as a result.  I still looked like my normal self, but I was not the same person.  I overreacted to the smallest things.  I would sob and sob and sob for hours.  My brain completely fogged up.  I finally realized I was experiencing something physical, so I decided to do some research.  In the process I found Brooke Sheilds’s book on her experience with postpartum depression and discovered that a pregnant woman or one who has just given birth who has gone through an enormous amount of stress prior to the pregnancy is much more likely to suffer from depression.  Considering the level of stress in the years leading up to being pregnant, coupled with the stress of moving across the country, moving in with my new boyfriend, getting pregnant, moving away from Milla for the first time ever in her life, and I was a perfect candidate for peri or post natal depression.

Based on this information, I did further research and discovered that the leading expert on peri and post natal depression was based in New York, not far from where we live.  Her name is Dr. Margaret Spinelli.  She was conducting a study to determine whether counseling a pregnant woman to improve her interpersonal relationships would improve her depression and reduce the likelihood of it occurring after pregnancy.  I had a consultation with Dr. Spinelli and she admitted me into the study.  Since going, my moods have improved dramatically.  It also seemed to help just to know that I wasn’t actually going nuts but suffering from a physical response to being pregnant under stress, and to understand that the troubles in my relationship were making things worse.

I’m still waiting for my boyfriend to understand that my emotional reactions to most things are normal for a pregnant woman, and especially a woman with perinatal depression, but I feel better understanding that how I feel comes from a diagnosable source, one that will go away when my hormones settle down, and if they don’t, there is medication available to assist me.  Considering the level of improvement I’ve experienced without drugs, I am genuinely hoping to avoid that route completely.  I also make sure to keep my sugar intake to a minimum and exercise, because I definitely feel worse when I eat sugar or don’t exercise.

Even without perinatal depression, the physical demands of pregnancy aren’t much fun.  I did not like being pregnant with Milla.  This pregnancy is no exception.  When I was pregnant with Milla I would hear about women who said they never felt better that when they were pregnant.  My response to that was they must have felt pretty crappy the rest of their life!  I like having a clear brain.  I like having a lithe body.  I can’t wait to have the little baby out here so I can get off this beach and back into the ocean.

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Library Thieves

When I signed on to edit books for this small publishing company, the owner convinced me to buy Adobe Indesign.  Because the bundled software with 3 programs gave me way more bang for my buck, I bought that rather than just the individual program.  As part of this bundle, I got Photoshop C4, a program I had long been interested in.  Unfortunately, I have no experience with even the Elements program, so I was pretty useless when it came to trying even basic photo editing with the thing.  I’m like an infant with a space ship.  I went online to find instructions, but mostly ran into those useless advertising sites trying to get me to download “free” teasers that I could replace with a full instruction program if I wanted to pay for it.  Um. No.

I decided then that I would go to the library and look at their instruction manuals.  If I found one that was really good, I would go buy one somewhere.  Well, guess what?  Every single copy of every single instruction manual at the New York Public Library that I looked at was missing.  Some jackasses out there are ruining it for the rest of us.  Gee, thanks.  I called the library and discussed with a helper person.  He confirmed that this is indeed a problem.  He helped me do a more advanced search to sort and ensure certain books were available, but all of them had 15 or 20 holds on them.  I’m thinking maybe Amazon used might be the way to go.

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In Som Ni A

I hate not being able to sleep. For most of my adult life, I have manifested stress as insomnia.  It’s worse when I have something pending the following day, like an early appointment, or even work.  Sometimes though, when there is really no reason to have to get up early (or at all for that matter), I will awaken in the middle of the night or too early in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep.  Then when I do, the second sleep is usually too sound, or I have to wake up in the middle of its too-soundness, and end up feeling like a slug all the next day.

Last night’s insomnia was the result of being just too warm. We had a houseguest who slept in Milla’s room, so Milla slept with us.  In addition, we kept the bedroom door closed.  I wakened at 2:57 a.m. broiling like a roast chicken.  I opened the windows, but then couldn’t sleep because even with the earplugs I never sleep without, I could hear the noisy street (I have mentioned how much I hate this apartment, haven’t I?).  I also had to get up and go to the bathroom twice.  Then the brain started worrying about money, and arguing with the student loan lenders I had to send a letter too, and wondering how we are going to make the sublet request go through, and forget it.  Sleep wasn’t happening.

I was finally able to stop the brain from spinning on each of my worrywart topics, but even after changing to new earplugs, the windows were too loud.  After lying there uncomfortably, I finally opened the bedroom door and closed the windows.  That seemed to do the trick and I fell back asleep.  I woke again once to go to the bathroom (pregnant woman’s bane), but was able to fall back asleep.  Damn, I hate insomnia.

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Where is the Damn Sun?

Would I feel any differently this morning if it were sunny and nice instead of rainy and crappy?  Oregon was rainy and shitty the entire time we were there until the last day.  It had been sunny until the day before we arrived.  Now it is sunny again since we have left.  It was pouring in NY the day we left and the days up until we left.  It is pouring now.  Am I going to get any summer anywhere?

It is difficult for me to discern whether the weather has an impact on my mood when the weather rarely changes from shit.  We have had a handful of sunny days since January, and I remember feeling optimistic on those days.  Hawaii was a boring place to live, but it was so sunny and nice most of the time.  I rarely felt down like I do here most of the time.  But of course, hormones could be playing a part as well, and the constant wondering what each day will bring in my relationship.  I used to bounce back pretty easily after an argument with the boyfriend, but not really anymore.  Now I just wonder when the next one will come.  I can just hear all the preachers out there who will comment and tell me just to leave him, but I would like to ask them how they would like to be single and pregnant in a city with no friends.  It is so easy to armchair quarterback, especially someone else’s relationship.  And then of course there is this weather, this abominable, interminable, shitty-ass weather.  I wish to fuck it would get sunny already.

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Traveling is Exhausting

Traveling is exhausting.  I find it difficult to adjust quickly to time changes and whatnot, especially when I’m not sure how much of an adjustment I want to make.  Lately I have been awakening at east coast time (5 am where I’m at) and going to bed at west coast time (11 pm to midnight).  I keep hitting these walls in the middle of the afternoon and taking longer and longer naps.  This is exactly what happened to me when we moved east and I had to adjust there, only I got completely screwed up, taking horribly long naps and going to bed much too late.  It took having a regular job, going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time, to force my body to figure things out.  Then I go and screw it up by coming home for a visit, and a long enough visit to make a difference.

Several mornings I have wanted to write on this blog when I wakened too early, but I was just too tired to rouse myself enough to do it.  So I would lie there and compose in my head.  That’s a useful enterprise.  Then when I got up we had to start on our marathon running around sessions and I didn’t write a word.

Not surprisingly, the prior two paragraphs were the only one I wrote.  I was interrupted to go and do something and five days later, I’m finally sitting down to finish what I started to say.  This is how it has been since we got here.  We have gone from one place to another to another ever since we got here.  Tomorrow we leave.  Today we don’t have any specific plans except to pack, only Dan hasn’t see one of his best friends since we arrived, and he is hoping to connect with her today.  I hope that’s all we do besides eat and pack.  I’m tired.

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Insurance Companies

It is more fun to have one’s eyeballs poked with pins than it is to telephone an insurance company.

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Letters to Annoying People

Dear Hairdresser,
Here is a clue: Just because you think my hair might look “cool” with that fancy cut you propose does not mean that I want you to cut it that way. You are not me. You do not live with me and you are not someone I spend a lot of time with. This means that if you suggest a fab new do and I turn you down, you don’t cut it anyway. It also means you don’t cut it like you want to without saying anything at all. It means you do what I want, whether you like it or not.

Dear Person Who Leaves Dog Shit on the Sidewalk,
The reasons you should pick up your dog’s shit are so inherent and numerous, it honestly blows my mind that you don’t know any better. Perhaps you are simply stupid. If this is the case, you are really too stupid to own a dog. If it isn’t that you are stupid, but rather that you are careless or insensitive, then you are too careless and insensitive to own a dog. You would likely accidentally kill it or starve it to death or something. Whatever the reason, if you leave your dog’s shit on the sidewalk, find the dog a better home and go rub some dog shit on your face.

Dear Woman Who Won’t Step Aside on the Sidewalk,
Yes, you know who you are. You are the bitch who has to prove to everyone she encounters just how ALPHA she is, and in doing so, refuses to step even slightly to the side when encountering others. If someone is approaching you and there is a building or some other obstruction on the sidewalk on their side, and things are open on yours, common courtesy dictates that you step slightly to the side to allow the other person passage. You don’t prove your superiority when you refuse; rather you prove your insecurity, your pettiness, and just how pathetic you truly are. And watch out…one morning when I’ve gone without just enough sleep and my hormones are all over the map, I might actually turn around and whack you in the head with my purse. Hag.

Dear Man from blog Watt’s Up With That?,
You are a fucking moron. I realize from your consistent position near the top of the WordPress Dashboard that you must have a lot of readers. I can only hope these readers actually disagree with you, they just have a stronger stomach than I do. I can’t read your drivel or your claims that the planet’s climate isn’t changing. It doesn’t take a geoscientist to walk outside and figure out that things are drastically different. You can try to claim these are “natural” trends, in spite of the fact that nothing natural on the massive scale we are experiencing occurs in under a decade. You can try to turn people off to buying an environmental car because it’s ugly. You can do all your damage. Just know this: Any success you have in convincing people of your stupidity will only harm your children. There will be no frogs for them to play with, or polar bears or bats or numerous other creatures for them to share the planet with (although maybe that is what you want). Your offspring will fry in the sun and drown in the ocean, and just think, you did it to them! Kudos, asshole.

Dear Rush Limbaugh,
You know, I can’t say it any better than Al Franken. You are a big, fat idiot.

Dear Building Managers Everywhere,
It is not necessary to turn air conditioning up so high that buildings inside are 30 degrees in the summer just because it is 90 degrees outside. Buildings need only maintain a consistent temperature all year round, regardless of what the temperature is outside. And actually, your logic in turning the AC up in the summer is flawed. If you are going to adjust the temp inside according to the temp outside, buildings should be colder in the winter and warmer in the summer because people are wearing more clothes in the winter and fewer in the summer. Maybe if you actually turned the AC down your brains would thaw and this would be obvious.

Dear New York City,
Here’s a concept: Recycling. In a city this size, the fact that recycling isn’t required of buildings and is basically non-existent everywhere else is a deadly sin. You are a ginormous city, the biggest in the US. You have an obligation to the rest of the country and the rest of the world to recycle as much as possible. Do you do it? Not enough. You should be ashamed and get with the goddamned program already. Too much of your shit can be recycled and too much of your shit isn’t. Fix it.

Here’s another concept: Not every damn thing needs to be wrapped in plastic. Guess what? Zucchinis last longer outside of plastic and styrofoam. So do bananas. And guess what else? When a customer at a store doesn’t bring a bag, you don’t have to double-bag in plastic, one is more than enough. Or when a customer buys something like a pop or something else obviously intended to be consumed immediately, you don’t need to bag it at all. Plastic is nasty stuff. There are limited circumstances when it should be used, such as in the medical profession. Otherwise it is a non-biodegradable, environmental disaster and your overuse of the stuff, especially considering your enormous size, constitutes a criminal act. Fix it.

Dear Constant Facebook Posters,
Guess what? I don’t give a shit if you’re off to take a run or a shower or grab a cup of coffee. That isn’t the kind of information I think anyone cares about unless you are a celebrity (And people who care what celebrities do are idiots, so why would you want to please them?). It is nice to have a place where you can find that long lost high school friend and see how they are doing and what is going on in their lives. It is annoying to have to hear how so-and-so had to clean up their kid’s vomit last night or every trivial piece of crap they do every minute of every day. Oh, and guess what else? Pieces of flair are stupid. Throwing virtual water balloons proves you have no life and should consider getting one. Ditto with virtual hugs, “L’il Blue Cove” and all the other crap Facebook flunkies dream up to fuck with you. I have an idea, instead of wasting time on Facebook, how about taking all that extra time you have to waste and heading down to the library or the bookstore and getting a book and reading it. Try it, you might learn something.

Dear Self,
Time to stop bitching and pretend to work. Enough said.

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Happy Birthday, Star Bright

Anyone who knows me well knows I am basically horse crazy.  I didn’t come out horse crazy, but certainly acquired the insanity not long after birth.  I was three years old when my mom took me to visit her little sister and the sister’s pony, Patches.  I fell in love.   From that moment on, I was hooked.

When I first told my mom I wanted a horse, because her little sister was twelve when she first acquired a horse, she promised me I could have one at twelve as well.  She made the promise less with the intention of actually getting me this equine nearly a decade hence, but more to shut up my incessant requests for my own four-legged friend.  She never believed her three-year-old would remember this promise.  Ah, the naivete of parents.  Of course I remembered and at age twelve years, three months, I did indeed receive a pony of my own.

The story of that pony is for another post.  Suffice to say I absolutely adored her, but she was only 10 hands tall, which is basically forty inches.  Considering I hit 5’7″ by age 10, this pony was much too small for me.  In spite of my adoration, I eventually had to sell her and purchased a larger pony.   I continued to grow and outgrew her as well.  At age 14 I was 5’9″ tall and it was time to move on from ponies.  I simply needed a horse to accommodate my ever-lengthening legs.

I had started doing some work for local farmers, helping out with horse training and stable cleaning.  Through this I met a couple who had purchased a two-year-old gelding they did not have the time or experience to train.  They offered him to me to buy for $200.  Having just sold my pony to a good friend for $350, I had enough to buy him.  They called him Volcano because he was born on the day Mount St. Helens erupted, May 18, 1980.

I remember the day I went and picked up my very own horse.  I was so proud as I walked him up the road along the railroad tracks from their farm to ours.  Though I would never have admitted it to anyone, and although I was terribly excited, I was also a bit frightened.  He was big!  I changed his name to Star Bright because of the bright star on his chestnut face, plus Volcano seemed a name that did not bode well.  I took him home and settled him in.  He was my horsey companion for the next twelve years.  Life in my extremely dysfunctional family was difficult; Star made those years as a teenager bearable and even brought me happiness.

Star was an amazing horse.  He could perform circus tricks and would give me a hug with his foreleg in exchange for a treat.  I rode him hunt seat and also in gymkhana.  At one horse show, I rode him in an equitation semi-finals class in the morning, which we won, placing us in the finals that evening.  That day, I rode him in a bunch of gymkhana classes because he seemed to really enjoy the speed and agility required for these gaming events.  He won the hi-point championship for the gymkhana.  Then that evening, still energetic, I rode him in the hunt-seat equitation finals and we won reserve champion.  He was amazing like that.  The horse was as happy in a show ring as he was trekking up the side of a hill or at the beach playing in the water.

Keeping a horse after I grew up and moved away from my parents’ farm was a bit difficult to say the least.  I moved him around and even leased him for a year while I traveled.  I was modeling at the time and spent a good deal of time out of the country.  At some point, it became clear that keeping him was not in his best interest.  He needed someone who could focus on him and I wasn’t doing it. My parents didn’t keep horses anymore, so he could not go back to their place, and he would have been ignored there anyway.

The day I sold him was heartbreaking.  He would not go into his new owner’s trailer.  It was as if he knew what I was doing and did not want to go.  I felt horribly guilty and sad.  I visited him at his new home and he always remembered me.  The new owners eventually sold him to someone else, a woman in a small town in the northwestern part of Oregon.  The last time I went to visit him, he was 19 years old, and seemed genuinely happy to see me.   He rubbed his head on my chest.  I rode him and visited, then said goodbye, not realizing I would never see him again.  The farm was over two hours from my home in Portland.  The next time I tried to contact the owners to arrange a visit, their number had been disconnected.  I was not able to locate them and do not know how Star’s life turned out.

Every year on May 18, the rest of the world remembers the day Mount St. Helens blew its ash all over Oregon and Washington, flattening trees and decimating a forest.  I, however, remember May 18 as the day my Star was born.  Not a year goes by I don’t remember this day and think about the big chestnut horse who made me happy.   Happy Birthday, Star Bright.  Thank you for being my friend.

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And Then

Liz Cheney is as big a fucking hate-mongering idiot as her devil father.  Spawn of the devil keeps his evil going…

I may have been followed this morning.  A woman I had seen on the train got onto the elevator with me and did not choose a floor while I was on the elevator.  I do have to say though, that she did not get off at the 6th floor as I did.

When I go to businesses that ask my name, I make one up.  Your name?  Aristophanes.  Spell that one.  Then pronounce it.

We are losing.  Here is my prediction of what is going to happen:   The ginormous corporations will continue to get bigger and proliferate.  The masses, increasingly ignorant and sedated with fast food, television, noise,  sports, and religion will become even stupider, turning back into the peasants of the middle ages.  The power elite are going to win and the poor are going to help them.  The poor want to be rich and if they were given the means, they would act the same way so they don’t question being constantly sold and mollified with product, trying so hard, kissing vacations goodbye and futilely trying to shovel their toddlers into Harvard.  Since they will not become a part of that which they seek, they go along and buy their lottery tickets, stuffing their faces, plugging earphones into their heads and turning up the music so they can drown out their own oblivion.  They believe it when they are told there is a magnificent being in the sky who cares about them and will take care of them after death so they don’t have to concern themselves with the fact that the place in which they are actually living right here and right now carries other possibilities.    Numbed and choking on corn and petroleum, they will let the power class continue to take them and take the planet.  In time, those of us who are in the minority and see the damage and want change may rise up and revolt, but success is an unlikely prospect.

And a thought from my friend Carin:  Something that’s been bugging me.  Self righteous boobs claiming to be upstanding and moral whilst they are posing half nude with photographers, getting boob jobs and participating in a meat, sorry, “beauty” pageant.  Or teenage twits who claim they are the voice of abstinence-only sex ed while holding their baby that they conceived obviously not through abstinence.

As I walk to the subway, ride the subway, and walk to my office, I’m filled with thoughts and observations.  The moment I walk through the door and sit down under the flourescent lights, the thoughts fritter away into the ether.  I wonder as I’m walking if I should stop and write some of the thoughts into my notebook, but I don’t do it.  My notebook used to be full of thoughts, but right now the only words there are a note I took to remind myself to contact my daughter’s school about an art teacher who smashes art pieces she deems unworthy of her almighty judgment.  Other than that, nothing.  Is it the flourescent lights?  Maybe it’s the air-conditioning.  Maybe it blows the thoughts from my brain.

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Watch Out for the Big, Bad Pig

So a week ago I published a blurb about the swine flu thinking everyone was freaking out for nothing.  For a few days after, I wondered if maybe I got it wrong.  Now however, I’m back to my original premise.  I was also right about the foolish overreacting that would take place.  Some ountries have banned travel to Mexico.  Others have killed off a bunch of pigs.  Everyone is still all freaked out.  Yet the numbers of deaths have remained quite small and very contained even though the flu itself has shown up in many places.  Craziness.

The killing of the pigs really bugs me.  In spite of assertions by doctors and other scientists that this flu isn’t caught from eating pork, nor can it be transmitted from pigs to humans, Egypt killed over 300,000 pigs.  In response, the WHO came out with a statement that the name needs to be changed because killing pigs is unnecessary.

All the news organizations went nuts when a toddler died from the flu outside of Mexico, the first case outside that country.  EGADS!  It’s spreading!  Someone outside Mexico died!  We’re all going to get it!  It’s pandemic! We’re all dead!  Um, yeah.  Lost in the uproar was the fact the child was Mexican and had just been in Mexico.  It wasn’t like the flu came crawling across the border, snaking its way north in ever increasing tentacles.  Yet that is what the media worldwide seemed to want people to believe.

The actual truth is that most of the people who died had not gotten treatment when they should have.  For everyone else who has contracted the flu, their illnesses have been sh0rt-lived and they have recovered.  The trick was early detection and intervention.  It would be nice if the news media could find a nice balance between letting people know they should do something and acting like lunatics.  Unfortunately they usually lean towards lunacy.

The nasty right-winger radio hosts have used the swine flu as an opportunity to spread their hate mongering, lies, and racism.  They blatantly lie, claiming that we’re all going to get sick from Mexicans and we better close our borders further.  It’s disgusting.  Maybe any idiots who believe their bullshit will lock themselves in their homes with a gun and stop wandering the streets. If this happens, I guess in a twisted way the hate mongerers have performed a public service.

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Nonsense and Cuteness

I am writing this bit of nonsense because I made a commitment to myself to write something every day, even if it’s a bit of nonsense.  I have many writing projects to work on, but today is a busy day out of the house so I will have to postpone those projects until later.  In the meantime, I’ll just write a nonsensey tidbit with the hope that in sitting here and not surfing Huffington Post and the New York Times I will actually be doing something productive, when really I should be blowdrying my hair.

I will also add some visual candy for anyone who happens across this page today.  This is my daughter’s darling puppy, Ava.  This was taken the day of her first walk.  She was a little tired along the way and took a rest in my arms.  She is a pure delight and we all love her very much.

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More Ava

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Hypnotized

I have a cold and my brain is fuzzy. I sat down here thinking there was something I wanted to write, but now I’m here and all I can think about is sleep.  There is a lulling buzz in the front of my skull.  It’s the viruses doing their little dance trying to take over my mind.  Dan is listening to some choral music that is much too monotonous.  My brain slips into its rolls and waves, the rhythms begging it only to sleep.

We got a new puppy.  Her name is Ava.  She is adorable.  Eat, potty, play, sleep.  Eat, potty, play sleep.  She’s rhythmical too.  Here is her photo:

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Charade and Socialists

Milla, Boyfriend, and I watched the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn movie Charade tonight.  Good flick.  Milla really liked it.  Some things were kind of dated, but it was still enjoyable.  And Audrey Hepburn’s outfits were fantastic. It’s like the child of Duplicity, keeps you guessing.  Anyway, I recommend it.

On another note, I avoid the news lately.  In my current mental state, I simply can’t handle all the negativity.  However, I peruse a few pages including Huffington Post.  Today there was a story (see it here) regarding a Republican moron, er, congressman, who has created a, shhhhhh!  Secret list of socialists!!  Oooooh!  Can you BELIEVE this?  I was so upset, I could hardly stand it.  No wonder I don’t read the news anymore.  The one time I do and I discover socialists are creeping into our guvment.

Well, we’re just gonna have to root them dang socialites out, I’m telling you.  Get rid of anyone who thinks the guvment should pay for schools or roads or hell, social security (see that horrible word social in there?  It’s like herpes, you can’t get rid of it).  Big bad socialites, wanting the guvment to help pay for things like healthcare, education, transportation, and the like.  Hell, we should let people who can’t afford it DIE if they can’t go to the doctor.  And what’s the point of paying for schools?  They all teach the wrong stuff anyway.  And don’t even get me started on transportation.  All roads should be toll roads. That way the people who can afford it will drive and the rest can just stay home.  And if they can’t afford a home, well too bad for them!  Shit.  What is this world coming to people?  I swear, the anti-American bastards, we should just line them up and shoot them.

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Giving Birth to a Kitten

I dreamed I gave birth to a kitten. Giving birth to the kitten was normal. It was black and white.  As it tried to nurse I realized that it was not the human I had been expecting. I remembered registering for baby things on Amazon.  I realized I would have to tell everyone that I did not need those things because I did not have a baby, I had a cat.  I knew why the birth had happened months before it should have, because the kitten’s gestational period was shorter than a baby’s.  I missed the baby that was not human.  I loved the kitten but was so sad it was not a human with arms and legs.

Damn weird dream.

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I Do Not Like Hairs

I do not like other people’s hairs.  I do not like them in my food. I do not like them in the shower or on a toilet seat or in a sink or touching me.  I know this is slightly ridiculous.  There is just something about another’s hairs curving or curling and lying there in a sauce or remaining, reminding me of another’s skin cells lining the space.  The worst are hairs on public toilets.  They leave little doubt from whence they came.  I will not sit on them.  If the seat is damp enough they cannot be removed by breath, I do not sit there.

I do not mind Milla’s hairs or Dan’s hairs or even pet hairs really.  I actually enjoy running my hands and fingers through those hairs.  It is the stranger hair or the person less than close to me hair that really creeps me out.  I would just prefer not to touch it or have it in the shower with me, that’s all.

I know.  I’m weird.  I get it.