Travels in my backyard

Sleepaway, away away

2011-07-17T16:05:00.002-06:00

My kid has had first-time jitters about going to sleepaway camp for a while now, and is on her way there, with her dad to drop her off and a best friend to bunk with for a week, which is all happening as I write this post. As coincidence has it, they're riding there with another girl who is adopted and who goes up to Snow Mountain Ranch in the summer for a heritage camp as well, which we have been doing with our daughter each summer for more than half her life. The difference is that we all go to her heritage camp together, but she is doing this on her own.

I feel terrible on one level about letting her go to camp -- nay, encouraging her to go -- given that she's experiencing such mixed feelings about entering the rapids of hormonal flux. I have parental jitters about the worst happening because I am not there. I feel our house and our routines and our adjacent rooms have become a talisman in and of themselves. At home, we can watch over each other constantly, but this is an untethering. I think we share the feeling that we are launching her up into space without a plan by sending her away from us like this.

I have to remember, when I'm feeling anxious that my daughter and knows how to stand up for herself. She was the one who said "No" when Will The Creepy Bus-Driver asked her to say things into his cellphone about another boy on the bus. Thank heavens, and thank me, too, for taking her absolutely seriously when she said she felt nervous around that person. Of course she would feel weird around an adult who was playing unexpected games in the few minutes he had with her every day, and turned and said to my face and hers that he was "just playing along with her and her friend, who had started it." As if he were supposed to be their big bus-driving buddy, their playful pal, not the guardian we expected to escort our tender darlings safely home from school every day. My point is that my daughter does know right from wrong and can take a stand when she needs to.

She really loved the sentiment "Take things in stride," from a framed picture containing "Lessons from a horse." I hope she can internalize more and more of that feeling of taking things in stride, adjusting as she goes, not necessarily stopping but skirting obstacles and continuing on as we all do.

I know too that my daughter has great untapped reserves of strength, and more resilience than she sometimes believes she has. She relies heavily and continuously on us, her parents, for support, which is fine and good, but I think it will be healthy for her to rely on herself, too -- to see and hear up close how other girls in the same situation do and don't rely on themselves.

I love her and worry about her but also trust her and have a huge amount of faith in her that I hope buoys her when she's feeling heavy. So I send her a wish and a prayer: I wish her a great first camp experience! May she make many great memories and friends and always be safe.

Oh, but here's what made me sit down and write about this in the first place. She goes off to camp, I sit down at the computer to start catching up on some writing, and this I find a document my daughter has written. It reads:
"nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

I still think she's going to be all right.

2011-06-07T22:47:00.001-06:00

Two things:

One: I had been giving myself a hard time about not having made photo albums but finally realized that I have all of my photos online where my daughter can (and often does) browse them. Sure, there are still a zillion notes and charming bits of art or artifice I will want to sift through and preserve in a more organized fashion. But now she can see herself through time, even if time is relative for us: for her, it started at birth. For us, her time started later than her birth, so there are gaps in our chronological records.

"We are awash in images," wrote A.O. Scott in a recent essay responding to his contemporary dilemma -- and Susan Sontag's notion that we should control the flow of images lest we become addicted to them. But I and I see and I know my daughter sees something worth looking for in the pictures of the past.

Two: A fun short film idea: The Band-Aid. A Band-Aid's journey through a dance class. Even the paper wrapping could play a role, so to speak.

A Runway Success!

2011-04-14T22:38:00.007-06:00

I just got back from the sweetest event to benefit the Boulder Valley School District's School Food Project: "Recycled to Runway," a fashion show by kids in a class at Common Threads who made their clothes out of trash. Anthropologie hosted the event, delicious food was catered by Whole Foods, and some very nice wines were donated by Frasca Food and Wine and The Kitchen.

Most of the girls were a little keyed-up and rushed up and down the runway. The MC repeatedly had to ask them to stick around at the end of the runway for a second and turn around once more, and it was great when they stayed to chat a little or answer a question about their process. Waylon Lewis, editor of Elephant Magazine, asked one of the designers, “Is your dress comfortable?” and got an honest answer: “No, not at all.”

Watching them zoom up the runway and back in their creations I thought how brave they all were. Even the designers competing on Project Runway didn't have to model their own fashions like these kids were doing!

A couple of the dresses were made with colorful candy wrappers, one was ingeniously decorated with Izze cans cut into interesting shapes, and another girl who said she was “inspired by prom dresses, and really nice dress-up dresses,” wore a gown made of plastic trash bags and dryer sheets, and carried a clutch made of gift cards, the magnetic-stripe kind. “It was hard to use the hot gun just right,” she said. “Too hot and you'd melt a hole in the dress. If it wasn't hot enough, the bags wouldn't stick.”

Another girl, wearing a well constructed dress made of brightly colored plastic shopping bags from Whole Foods said, “I broke three needles making this.” One described her material as “food boxes.” A high school boy used layered newspapers and paint to create an interesting, fashion-forward, graphic tunic shirt with a laced spine and wings painted on either side. One girl made a cocktail dress decorated abundantly with loops of VHS tape for a fabulous spangly effect (her clutch was a VHS cartridge—awesome!). Can you tell a) who I hoped would win (I couldn't help it: girl with the spangly VHS tape dress) and b) that I left early, before the winner was announced?

Wannabe connected

2011-02-15T10:01:00.003-07:00

New playlist: Want to be connected

Inspiration: In Lisa Jones' book Broken: A Love Story, Jones tells about making friends on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming with people and animals. At one point in the story, someone teases a young man about being a "wannabe." Her friend Stanford says, "Want to be connected." Don't we all?

"Braided Hair," featuring Speech + Neneh Cherry, from 1 Giant Leap
"Breathe Together," by The Mothers, from The Township Sessions
"Nu" by Timbuktu, from Afrikya Vol. 1: A musical journey through Africa
"Bryn" by Vampire Weekend, from Vampire Weekend
"Loco de Amor" by David Byrne, from Rei Momo
"Tukka Yoots Riddim," by US3 (with samples from "Sookie Sookie" as performed by Grant Green), from Hand on the Torch
"Strange Apparition" by Beck, from The Information
"The Main Thing" by Roxy Music, from Avalon
"Magick Carpet Ride" by The Brooklyn Funk Essentials, from In The Buzz Bag
"The Big Sky" by Kate Bush, from Hounds of Love
"Shanti/Ashtangi" by Madonna, from Ray of Light
"Llegare" by Sidestepper, from 3 am: In Beats We Trust
"Let Love Rule" by Lenny Kravitz, from Let Love Rule
"Until the End of the World" by U2, from the Until The End of the World soundtrack
"Rock On Hanuman" by M.C. Yogi, from Elephant Power

Beautifully different

2010-12-10T11:06:00.001-07:00

What is the first thing I think of when I ask what makes me "beautifully different?" Dressing for beauty and fun! I love the way I find interesting combinations of things to wear. Other people say nice things about that, too. I was wearing my shiny-threaded overcoat that has such a great drape over a long sweater and a wacky top and got some really nice compliments. It's so much fun to cheer people up just the way I like to be cheered up by seeing someone dress inspiringly. And it's a continuing positive feedback loop. I'm going to go put on something fun right now!

The kinder, gentler approach

2010-12-10T10:57:00.002-07:00

I am revisiting a project that is terribly difficult and unpleasant on many levels, and reminds me all too much of where I was and not where I want to be. In working on that project again, I find I have to do more research to find more specifics: my organizational scheme of my book is based on a list of characteristics, for example, which I didn't actually have a copy of in my book yet. I am searching for the characteristics I remembered seeing in my earlier research but one mysteriously is not turning up on the lists in this round of discoveries. It's a puzzle. I love that part of being able to find things you need on the internet. Compared to doing research in school, Google makes it cake-eatingly easy. You just have to be creative and persistent to get the best results. But that's true for everything, isn't it?

One thing I am look for more now is other voices of people like me, people who have survived something threatening and want to set the record straight at last so it doesn't eat them from the inside out (many of us lugging household skeletons into closets suspect this is the true root of cancer, when it's not something obvious like poisoning from chemicals).

Everyone says it when they have an unpopular opinion about something (a corporation, say -- I've just read the book A Civil Action so that is weighing heavily on my mind) or someone (the sociopath in your midst) -- "I thought maybe I was going crazy."

It's a terrible feeling, thinking you are over the edge because you believe something no one around you ever wants to see or admit is that close to them, that threatening. Darkness looks you in the eye, and when you tell others, they draw back from you like you've been bitten by the vampire. And it does make you feel crazy, different, vampiric, creepy, and dark to witness it, tell the tale. But you have to or you'll suffer, like living through an earthquake and needing to talk about it for such a long time after.

I saw a documentary about Lariam, an antimalarial drug, that terrified me, saying it can cause brain lesions -- permanent brain damage! -- that induced psychosis in people. In the film, Taken as Directed, these people were devastated, their optimism gone. One said it was like seeing the devil. And we wonder when we hear about someone going crazy and shooting a bunch of people to bits, but do we ever hear whether they had recently had a course of Lariam administered, or whether they had been exposed to other extreme protocols that fundamentally changed the way their brains worked? I'm feeling that neither my daughter nor I should take it. Too dangerous. And we need less of things in our lives that make us feel like we are going crazy, not more. We can't afford to go toward darkness, even if it is an unintended side-effect of another action.

It's good to keep in mind, as I burrow back into this project again, that it's not a preoccupation with the dark and the past, which is what the quick-judging pragmatist might say. No, instead I am going toward the light, illuminating things, making things easier for the next person who knows someone like this to figure out how to spot the tell-tale traits and avoid the devastating effect someone like that can have on anyone in their vicinity.

So I'm advocating a kinder, gentler approach to things lately. I just wrote to the makers of Off and asked for a case of their clip-on mosquito repellents to give to orphanages to put by windows or anywhere they are needed. Nets are probably a good gift, too. I'll ask around.

I am being kind and gentle with myself about the reverb10 prompts, too. It's a busy time, and I'm working hard, and haven't been up to the daily prompting and blogging rhythm. That's okay, I know. But to get on the path toward catching up, the best community thing I did this year was probably continuing to help with the Garden-to-Table project at my school. Surprised I didn't say speaking at Ignite Boulder 12? Or the Thriller flash mob downtown? Those fall close on the garden's heels, I admit, but so does helping the kids in my daughter's classroom learn more about conflict resolution. It's all good.

Wanna make something of it? Do it!

2010-12-06T10:07:00.002-07:00

Today's writing prompt: The last thing I made.

Well, let's see. I made coffee just now. But you meant something lasting, right? I made a cookbook (out of a collection of two women's recipes and nutrition tips) just last week. I think it turned out well. I learned and re-learned a lot in the process. I also made crustless pumpkin pie when I went over to my in-laws' for dinner. I noticed that when I was frustrated with my progress on the cookbook project, my thoughts immediately turned to cooking. I've had a recipe out for a flourless carrot cake that looks amazing, but I refused to let myself do something that would take a lot of time when I was in the middle of my cookbook project. (Which answers the question: Did you have to clear space for the project? Why, yes, I did. It felt like the project took up space. But I let that happen. And it worked! I finished it on time for a deadline but then that fell through -- the folks who wrote it wanted to have the cookbook available at an event last Friday but the event's organizer nixed the idea, so I don't know what's happening with the printing. It is out of my hands. But I do like the way the cookbook turned out. It's a nifty little book with some good stuff in it, and I will let you know when it is available to all.)

Other things I've made recently: Matching winter scarves for my in-laws, and dinners. I've been wanting to make up songs but don't quite know how to go about it. I made soup for a soup swap recently, and want to do that again. But it is true that lately, cooking is my go-to activity when I want to create something -- and my novel is calling me to work on it more and more, too, which I am doing.

I am casting about for something to make for my writers' group. I was trying to think of something everyone might like (little carrot cakes?) and then thought: our web site. If I could have a site ready by the time we meet next week, the group would be thrilled. I just don't know if I can pull that off. But it's a good goal.

Reflections: We may never have this knowledge again

2010-12-05T11:54:00.003-07:00

That's another reason I write, to continue to respond to the prompt of my most recent post. I know I will never see things this way again. I am groping my way forward in the tule fog, the dark, the blurry view of naivete. And I'd better call it like I see it now because I will never see it this way again. I know things will change, times will change, perspectives will change with experience and exposure to new ideas and people.

So does that leave me with nothing? We have a trope: When my husband and I ask one another, "Can I bring you anything?" the other occasionally responds, "I have nothing left to hope for." Which is from a sign in Asia's failed attempt at saying: "We leave you nothing else to be desired. All your needs will be fulfilled here." But truly, I am so filled with love and gratitude for this fragile state of joy and peace at those moments that I feel I lack nothing, I have nothing to hope for beyond this. So love is the wonder and the light in my life, which happens to be the response to the reverb10 prompt and a nice seed for thought.

And while we're on the topic of wonders, I have to give a big shout-out to music! I still think the lyric is a little cheesy but I agree with Michael Franti that everyone deserves music. And with Johnny Cash, when he sang, "Get rhythm when you get the blues. A jumpy rhythm makes you feel so fine, It'll shake all the trouble from your worried mind. Get rhythm when you get the blues." For me there is truth in that. A few years ago I wondered whether I was depressed, and I am wondering that lately. But I decided to exercise. I started going to the gym three times a week. I thought I would want to swim, but I have never bonded with swimming here in this pool. Maybe it was too cold for the first five years since our rec center was remodeled and I got turned off and I should try it again, but in the meantime I stumbled back into my dance class and discovered, in a room full of people who share my love and interest in movement and dance and joy and energy, what quickly became my primary source of balance.

Now I go four times a week to dance for 45-50 minutes and cool down for another few, and I find as long as I can dance every week I feel good. I stay sane and healthy. And my goodness, there's so much to learn about committing to a gesture or a movement or a pattern, to being ready to change direction on a dime, to moving together with a group and doing your own thing all at once, to learning to move within my own levels (my lesson for this week was anything at any time can take you back to level 1, and that is just fine).

As for things I've let go of this year, the final prompt for the moment: Being an editor for other people. I just keep getting rebuffed at a certain level. It works against human nature: People don't like to be told what to do. And I love editing but I suppose I'll just have to do it for myself for now. It's like painting my house: I care almost too much to do it for anyone but me, perhaps. But I think if I commit to myself, I can go far with it! So I know what is really at the top of my wish list: A package of 10 ISBN numbers. Woohoo!

Prompt of the day: What keeps me from writing?

2010-12-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

I listen to Talk of the Nation on NPR a lot and today's, if you didn't already hear it, was about bullying. Lots of different people reported different things, one that someone had found him on facebook and apologized for long ago bullying, another who was on facebook and a bully got in touch and started bullying her all over again (horrors). One woman said she realized that she was so angry and scared all the time about being bullied that she had become a bully toward other people, always ready to go off if they didn't do what she expected. That resonated with me. And then the host read from someone's email, I think, and it described a person's path to better living after having survived the hell of bullying and the author was very apologetic for having taken all that anger and fear out on others for so long. I really felt a jolt of recognition then about things I've both struggled with and their costs, the tolls those misplaced emotions have taken in my life, on my friendships.

Another thought: I had a conversation with my mother not so very long ago, that set off such a series of ripples for her. It seemed like a trivial thing. I said, "Not everyone likes creamy food," when my mom was making something or talking about some kind of food my daughter was less than enthused about. My mother could hardly believe it! Someone who doesn't like creamy food? What? The very idea was unthinkable at first. We talked about it for days! And that conversation went on to reverberate for a while and later morphed into one about mind-reading. I said to my mother at one point, "I can't read your mind. You have to tell me what you want." And she just looked at me. Really? As if she'd never quite realized we were that different from one another, different enough to have separate perspectives on the same thing. I feel like there's something in having been habitually underestimated or underprotected as kids that makes us all so defensive and sometimes angry about not being understood, as if we feel it is part of a grand conspiracy and this present communication breakdown is further proof of our being at the ground zero of misunderstanding.

So I hope it makes sense when I say that fear of being misunderstood is a cause of procrastination for me, and yet is also one of my biggest motivators for writing down what I am thinking.

Shipbuilding

2010-12-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

Today's #reverb10 prompt is to reflect on the past year, picking a single word to encapsulate it. I came up with shipbuilding, because it feels like I'm gearing up for the next phase.

Woohoo!

This just in: I didn't do Nanowrimo after all

2010-11-28T15:59:00.002-07:00

But maybe there's a good reason I didn't leap into a new project just now.

After a couple of days, my high-concept story idea still felt like just a series of anecdotes and so I didn't push it but stuck it on the back burner to simmer (or leave the lid off the box and let the ants keep filing around -- choose your favorite metaphor). Not doing Nano this year was fine; this month I couldn't feel comfortable about making those 1,600 words a day a priority. I had other, more pressing issues: family business and starting to hunt for jobs again. So I let that idea sit, and there it is now, while my other book, the one I started last November and thought I'd finished in May but felt there was something missing, has started telling me more about its endings.

One of the things that caught my attention recently was listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast. The title and podcast intro prepares you for the onslaught of F-bombs and some crude humor, but those aside, Maron is a discerning and thoughtful interviewer, who clearly prepares but lets things go off script (unlike, say, someone like one of my interviewing heroes, Ira Glass, who when interviewed by Marc Maron in a rare turn on the other side of the table said he writes everything he says on This American Life). Maron is a Los Angeles stand-up comedian who loves to talk with comics and humorists and other folks he knows or wants to understand. He is probably most famous at this point for his interviews with comedian Carlos Mencia, who trails behind him a long train of detractors who swear he steals other comedians' jokes. So in a two-part interview, Maron sits down in his studio (aka his garage) and confronts Mencia with his reputation as a joke thief. He manages to do this in a respectful and curious way, with great tact; he says he basically wants to know not only what Carlos Mencia's own take is on his reputation but also how the guy sleeps at night.

Now, it turns out Maron has had his own personal point of contention with Mencia. Years earlier, Maron had been headlining an L.A. comedy club one weeknight when Mencia came in. Mencia said, "Just let me go on before you. I'll do five minutes." Mencia performed for over an hour, as Maron tells it. Maron was so furious at being bumped off his headlining gig that he left the club before Mencia got off the stage. Maron reminds Mencia of this incident in the interview and pretty much gets blown off. "An hour? Really? I'm sure it wasn't a whole hour!" Mencia protests. But then Maron thinks about this interview with Mencia and feels unsatisfied. He decides he can't just put it up on his site like it's a normal one-hour interview, because he's been steamrolled to some extent, not given anything real. So Maron does a second segment, and leads it off by talking to some other stand-ups who have been bumped off their stages by Mencia, or saw him rip off jokes, either theirs or someone else's. Then Maron goes back to Mencia with all of this evidence that he really does steal material and act like a dick, as if to say "What the fuck?" one more time until he gets some from-the-gut answers.

At first Mencia tries to stave him off with the same old soft focus, but Maron presses him to explain himself. Mencia finally says he does it to get ahead in the business. And you can see it: his are acts of aggression that say, "Look, I am more famous than you so I can do whatever I want and you can't do anything about it." Maron is an appealing master of ceremonies because you can feel him: his ethics are like racehorses ready to bust out of the gates, all pent up with nowhere to go around this guy. The interview becomes such a surprise because it is not the chip-on-the-shoulder rehash of old accusations but an existential frustration with a failure to comprehend another individual's motivations and choices, an inability to empathize with another comedian's decision-making processes.

This is high drama, with real stakes for both of them, and you do understand by the end of the interview why each one of them can sleep at night (they are wired differently, Maron a mensch, a stand-up guy, in the best-man sense, and Mencia because that's what he thinks he has to do to make it in this street-fight of a world). Maron never says, "This guy is a thief and a parasite," a conclusion most people listening to the interview would expect him to reach. Instead he concludes that Mencia is a performer, not a writer, and too bad the guy thinks of it as such a dog-eat-dog world that he has to go around acting like he's all that because he looks like a dick when he acts like that. As you can see, I highly recommend these interviews. Certainly, not all of them are as dramatic or compelling, but Maron usually tries to go somewhere interesting with each of his interviewees.

Short story long, listening to those interviews gave me loads of ideas for my story. Over the past couple of weeks I've been letting all these ideas cook and meld and they are starting to taste like something, and reveal these arcs that weren't there before, the texture and fun of the storytelling part. It's exciting to feel that way about it. Maybe I liked those Mencia interviews because I'm wrestling with the same thing every time I sit down to write jokes for the story, and I am finding I need lots of inspiration from other folks who do it well. Once you've borrowed inspiration by listening to a bunch of comics, who's to say you can write anything truly original? Your comedy will always be colored by what you hear and what you like and what's funny to you and what everyone around you thinks is funny.

I'm psyched both to be finishing this book now that I know how to revise it and looking for work. I have a lot to offer. Let's see what happens!

Oh, and I'm going to do this nifty, fun reflection/intention project called Reverb10. It might help with everything I want to do right now.

Quote of the day: We don't starve.

2010-11-16T22:48:00.004-07:00

My children dictate my schedule--I have done vast amounts since they were born because they keep me from my desk and make me impatient to get back to it. I don't count words so much anymore, or note beginnings and endings. I work on several things at once, so there is always a file to open and no such thing as a blank page. I like working. What discipline I have comes from the fact that I don't do any of the other things I am supposed to do. Housework, personal administration--everything else goes to hell. My husband cooks. We don't starve.

--Anne Enright, in The Secret Miracle (a survey of writers' ideas and self-reported habits edited by Daniel Alarcon

File under This is going better than I expected

2010-11-05T12:04:00.001-06:00

It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time and I'm so very far behind! By the end of today, if I don't write more today, I will be three days behind. But having allowed myself to give up on completing the writing of my novel this year, I reread what I had written so far and decided to sit down and work on it some more just now. If any of you who know me read it you would know exactly what it is about. I had told my sister about an idea I had for a novel's gimmick--not that novels need gimmicks, mind you, but this actually seemed like an idea that would test the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, which I always think is interesting. My sister liked the idea, too. But then I ended up doing it with material I wasn't expecting to work with, yet.

So. We'll see. Will I have some big writing days and catch up in time to write the thing this month? I think of someone I know in Tennessee who writes 25,000 words in a day and wonder, who am I kidding? Will this take longer to work out than this month? I'm not sure it matters; I can't just put the story aside quite yet, now that I've opened the lid of the box a crack. The ideas in it are already busy like ants; I just have to watch them and see where they go. As I told my BFF, what am I going to say? "No, thanks, come again next year"? I don't think so.

Motto

2010-10-22T11:32:00.002-06:00

These days, I'd have to say my motto (and six-word bio) would be:

Getting sweaty is not a crime.

I would throw it on the floor!

2010-09-08T13:24:00.000-06:00

Since I quote this fairly regularly now, I'll just put it on my blog. It's from a Larry King Live interview with Julia Child that aired on August 15, 2002.

KING: I ... hate broccoli, hate it, wouldn't go near it, wouldn't touch it, what do you hate?

CHILD: I don't like cilantro.

KING: What is that?

CHILD: It's an herb that it has a kind of a taste that I don't like.

KING: Is there an everyday food you hate, like broccoli?

CHILD: No, I don't think so. I mean, if it's properly cooked and properly served, I can't think of anything I hate.

KING: So you'll eat...

CHILD: Except cilantro and arugula I don't like at all.

KING: Arugula?

CHILD: They're both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.

KING: So you would never order it.

CHILD: Never, I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.

How about you? Would you eat them, or throw them on the floor?

Adjustments for sea-level bread recipes

2010-09-02T09:51:00.032-06:00

I keep these guidelines posted so I can see them when I open the cupboard door to get baking powder and/or baking soda.

Adjustments for bread recipes at 5,000 feet/1524 meters

Reduce yeast or other leavening by 50 percent.
For each cup of liquid, add another 3 tablespoons of the same liquid, or water, milk. You can add another egg if you are making a tender dough, such as a challah, brioche, or sweet roll. (The alternative is a chewy dough with a substantial crust, as with the marvelously easy-to-make Speedy No-Knead Bread recipe.)
Decrease baking temperature by 25° F (13° C).*

Here's the link to my 20-slide "deck" from my IgniteBoulder presentation. Wow, was that some fun.

Adjustments for sea-level cake recipes at 5,000 feet

2010-09-02T09:39:00.008-06:00

Adjustments for sea-level cake recipes at 5,000 feet/1524 meters

Reduce baking powder, baking soda by 50 percent.
Reduce sugar by 2-1/2 tablespoons per cup.
For each cup of liquid, add another 3 tablespoons of liquid (or an egg)
Increase flour by 2 tablespoons
Increase baking temperature by 15° F (10° C).*

Source: The High Altitude Cookbook by Beverly Anderson Nemiro and Donna Miller Hamilton, 1969

* Other sources say a rule of thumb is to increase the temperature by up to 10 percent (so a recipe calling for baking at 350° F would be adjusted to about 385° F). Remember to check the oven a little earlier than the recipe specifies whenever you increase baking temperatures.

Here's the link to my slides for my IgniteBoulder presentation on this topic.

Hey, kids! Let's put on a show!

2010-09-01T23:33:00.000-06:00

In a recent piece of writing, I wrote about the skepticism I grew up with and how over time I came to see things that had no explanations: communication between humans and animals, being able to see things in the future, and working affirmations. Tonight, as I pictured myself calmly fielding heckling from the audience with a smooth, "You don't need any more leavening, do you, dear?" I realized I was no longer petrified about the talk I am giving tomorrow night in front of a bigger audience than I've ever put myself in front of before. I had stopped saying, "Holy sh*t, Batman!" before each iteration of "I'm speaking at IgniteBoulder!" I'd finally started affirming it: "I'm speaking." And it became so. Well, is still becoming, technically, but if everything goes according to plan, I'm going to saunter up the hill on my bike and meet everyone up there and help put on a show!

My, how things change

2010-08-19T22:00:00.003-06:00

Our child bounded into the room after her first day of school and announced, Mom, today I learned how they took these groups of people, Group One and Group Two, and before a test, they told everyone in Group One, "You're really smart," and in Group Two they told everyone, "If you work really hard, you can do well on this test." Guess who did better? Group Two did! Everyone in Group One said, "I don't have to try so hard," and they didn't do as well on the test as the Group Two people.

I was delighted. I had heard the same thing, I told her. I had just read about the same study. And if she learned just that fact in school today, that was pretty good, I thought.

I didn't say this then but this study, which I read about in Daniel Pink's book Drive, felt like the nail in the coffin of the "self-esteem movement," really a giant social experiment perpetrated on youth back in the big-haired/tight-pantsed end of the millenium.

My co-self-defense instructor, Raquel, who went to Stanford, knew this when we coached the tween and teen girls at their yells and self-defense moves back then. Raquel probably knew it from being coached on the sports field, an experience I completely missed the value of at the time. (Nor would my parents have tolerated the costs -- social or financial -- of joining a team in our nonconformist family. It is still a marvel to me that my father was on a football team -- I have never known him as a team player. You should have seen my parents' faces when I begged for the money for a cheerleading outfit so I could try out for the cheerleading team. (In retrospect: Way to separate the haves from the haves-not, junior high football cheerleading squad!) I gave up on that fantasy within a day or two, and now you know something about the kinds of short-lived passions that have fallen by the wayside along with the long-lived ones I have nurtured.)

Raquel in those classes was able to find the vein of toughness in those girls quickly, in a way that I had no idea how to do, given my own dysfunctional background and social conditioning. Despite having recently completed a ten-week self-defense class and having just trained to teach self defense with the Stanford teaching/training group, I still knew so little about being strong, still lugged around plenty of the dysfunctional, codependent (another 1990s watchword that has fallen from favor) behavior that had compelled me to seek out self-defense training. I needed to find some ease in the world and to some extent I did.

Writing this is making me want to get out my training materials and make a class for local kids and families. Put all that training to use. It has helped me so many times, in so many ways, not just in deflecting unwanted attentions but also in sorting out what has something to do with me and what doesn't.

At the same time, I confess I've felt just a wee bit fired up about the coming change of season. Back-to-school time always affects me this way. September and February are the months when I have to take care to not take on too many projects. "So much depends upon the weather." It's weird because it feels great: All systems feel like they are firing and I am coming up with all kinds of fine ideas (a baking at altitude app, and a cookbook app to sell as a school fundraiser are the latest ones), but they are ideas that I would have trouble carrying out if there were three of me, given all the projects I'm already juggling at this moment. I had a good summer, organizationally speaking, but am not quite managing everything on my own personal list, like the household stuff. I haven't cleaned my daughter's desk or emptied out that one closet, or washed the windows (and I am wondering why? because these projects are no fun).

The best thing I did today was to take my research-fried brain to my writer's group meeting and announce I couldn't complete the task I had taken on, that I was the wrong person for the job. I was seeing too many options, and finding no effective ways to weed out what wasn't appropriate, and the task was overloading my circuitry. Before I had said much, one of the group said, "Do you need to not do this? It seems like you might be a little frazzled by it." I looked at her, felt a wash of relief but held back tears. "Thank you for hearing me," I said and then I couldn't help spilling a few of those tears. Later I said, "I feel like I am always coming to this group begging for understanding!" Another group member gave me a generous hug and said, "That you can have, in abundance!" And suddenly it's Oooeeee, I see abundance everywhere!

So I came home and instead of diving back into the intellectual puzzle that is Cloud Atlas I read the first pages of two other books I like so far (Jodi Picoult's House Rules and a collection of the kind of confessional essays I am a sucker for called The Bitch in the House. I'm trying to slow myself down, but still get a lot done. Make sense? I know. I'm not sure it does to me, either.

Life used to be so hard

2010-07-25T12:27:00.005-06:00

I let my child come up with the idea of the cats being her siblings, which she did in time, but I've never called them my offspring. I thought it was weird when people said, “This is Smiley. He's 15, and he's my only child,” which was often followed by a chin-scratch of the pet in question and an “Aren'tcha, my boy?” But we're all guilty of anthropomorphizing around here, I know. We are always asking our daughter to back off on certain behaviors because “He doesn't like that,” or we simply know things from experience: “Cats like to chase a toy you move just out of sight. They don't like it when you run at them with the toy.”

And our youngster insists that our tolerant boy-cat, who, like the cat in the new children's classic, Olivia, by Ian Falconer

"When she got up, she moved the cat
And moved the cat
And brushed her teeth"

just lets her ferry him from floor to lap to couch. The other day I had to tell her again she can't ride him. He's a scant 15 pounds; she's 50. Plus, it's inappropriate.

But our dear gorgeous gray cat loves us all and lets us be who we are, enthusiastically accompanying us on our bumblings through daily life and love. He has a fragile peace with our ancient crone of a kitty, the true alpha kitty, that little black scaredy-cat who seemed so fragile but grew into the hardiest of the bunch, now about 100 in people years. She is the grande dame, reigning over our bedroom. She sleeps in the trench between us on top of the bed (snug but still scaredy), while the gray boy sometimes sleeps where he can see who's in the yard, or sometimes joins us all, sleeping in his spot at the foot of the bed, or yowls at critters or longings only he hears at those hours.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(That last was an accidental but appropriate insertion while I was petting the gray cat, and made me laugh so much I left it in there.)

You put de lime in de coconut

2010-06-27T22:46:00.008-06:00

My, but I'm a good cook. I don't like to brag, but I made something good today.

Tonight we had leftovers for dinner (my sweetie's been cooking a lot, too, which is super), and I devoted my energies to dessert. We'd had Key Lime pie in Florida and I had been wanting to experiment. I thought: what about using coconut milk? I went hunting for recipes but wasn't finding what I wanted. So I figured I'd build the pie I wanted. Then I stumbled into a recipe that I adapted to get coconut into the crust and was ready to go.

Coconut-Lime Pie

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Lightly butter a 9" pie plate.

Separate 5 eggs, putting the five yolks in a small bowl and three of the egg whites in a medium-sized bowl (save the remaining egg whites if you will use them for something else; they'll keep for up to a week in the fridge).

For the coconut meringue crust:
3 egg whites
1 tablespoon sugar
8 cookies (ginger snaps, graham crackers, animal crackers, gluten-free if desired)
1/4 cup toasted almonds
3 tablespoons softened or melted butter
1/4 cup toasted shredded coconut (sweetened or unsweetened)

Beat the 3 egg whites with the sugar until the meringue forms soft peaks when you stop the beaters and lift them out of the bowl.

Process or blend the cookies, almonds, butter, and toasted coconut until the crumbs resemble coarse sand. Fold this mixture into the meringue. Spread the folded meringue mixture quickly and gently into the pie plate and up the sides. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the meringue crust is just starting to turn golden.

While baking the crust, prepare the filling:

Beat together or blend in a blender:
1/2 of a 14-oz. can sweetened, condensed milk
1/2 of a 14-oz. can coconut milk (Note: NOT sweetened cream of coconut)
5 egg yolks
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup lime juice
finely grated zest of 1 lime

Pour the filling into the hot meringue shell and bake the pie at 350 for about 25 minutes or until tiny bubbles pop on the surface.

Cool long enough for the pie to set (2 hours is best) if you can stand to wait that long before you eat it. (I couldn't. And then I tried some later, after it had set. It was even better.)

By the way, I froze everything I did not use except the egg whites. I froze the 1/2 can each of coconut milk and the sweetened, condensed milk; and I poured the remaining lime juice into an ice-cube tray to freeze for future uses. What if I put all of those things in the food processor with some avocado and some agave syrup? Hmmmm. Sounds like a good ice cream recipe, no?

Here you are

2010-06-20T16:46:00.010-06:00

Hi everyone, from the here and now.

One thing I've been meaning to write about is having recently received a request for participation in a geolocation-based social network, which I ignored for a whole mess of reasons, all peculiar to me. But the fact is, I like being where I am, but not necessarily telling the world where I am. Sometimes you can figure out exactly where I am. If I'm tweeting airport codes, it's usually because I am going from that airport to another airport any second. Usually, however, I rarely want to say where I am until I've already left. It was just a matter of time before someone aggregated all those geolocating foursquare updates as they did on PleaseRobMe.com and used them for ill. I have felt concerned from my first tweet onward about embracing a behavior that would enable such abuse.

Yet I know I delude myself if I think I'm invisible online, if I think my online persona is fully compartmentalized, discrete, from my IRL (in-real-life) persona.

But what must we shield to protect ourselves from that most insidious and hideous theft: the one that can turn a whole life around and throw it on the ground -- and stomp on it? What can and can't I say here? Am I taking a huge risk by saying anything at all? Finding balance is tricky for me in this area; I was trained to fly low, stay under the radar, be invisible, adaptable, take care of things instead of complaining about them. My instinct now is to pull back and clam up tight.

Yet. Another impulse I hardly understand rises up, rears its scaled, reptilian head and says I have to tell everyone about what the world looks like to someone who experienced all I did as a kid. So many people still can't believe it. Here is a memory of my dear old father: we went to see movies sometimes, and this time it was the double feature of Convoy, followed by Deliverance, Deliverance then repeated. I watched, with my father in the next seat and no one else in the car, the dreadful suspense, that terrible squealing scene, everything. Twice. And now I have to tell you because I can't stand having to keep that kind of stuff to myself any more. That's what I mean when I say "living out loud."

For years, I didn't believe that was the kind of thing anyone would call abuse. But when I was supposed to be feeling free and confident as a newly minted and educated adult, I couldn't understand why I felt so bad and carried around so much hurt, nor why all that codependent stuff I was doing -- the leaping to help, assuming responsibility where I had none -- just wasn't working for me anymore. Now I see why that wasn't working: I no longer had those dysfunctional people all around to jump in and mop up after. But I felt ashamed of myself for having that background, and all the deficits that entailed. I felt it just showed up how out of whack things were in my world, and I took that personally for a while.

Major edit, 24 June:
Rereading this post as I originally wrote it I think, My, what an internal argument I have going ("Say it! Say it loud!" "Shush!" etc.)! At first I felt embarrassed for airing this emotional response to a recent memory. But this is sort of the crux of my blog, isn't it? Why say it if I'm not going to say all of it? If some of it's going to be off-limits? Isn't that letting myself censor me before I've had the opportunity to state my piece? Or should I have just edited that second half into a separate post?

How about this: You be the judge! And the best comment wins a (smallish) Gomez t-shirt once worn by yours truly (but since laundered)!

Good dog

2010-06-13T22:04:00.003-06:00

When I look back on that time, I wonder how, and why, did we of all people have a dog? I was six and we had just moved into a communal household in Boulder. A couple of months earlier my sister had died. We were figuring out how to get along in this new town, so different from the northern California commune we'd just come from. Our eventful three years in California had all but wiped clean any memories I had of living in Denver three years before that. My father, mother, and I now lived in a three-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot house that already had three college students living in it. There was a hanging wicker swinging chair in the living room that I liked to sit in when I listened to my favorite records, by the Beatles and The Band.

Our dog's name was Pig. Pig was a barky, scruffy mutt, and a joy to be with. Pig was also a compulsive gnawer who left no shoe unchewed, which made our family unpopular with our housemates sometimes. In a black-and-white photograph from that time, I am playing in the backyard with the dog. My hair is in loose braids and I am wearing my brown dress trimmed with white rick-rack and the fringe on my Billy the Kid leather jacket is flying. I remember my dog and me smiling and free.

But I also remember how my father would find Pig in his way and kick her so hard she yelped with pain and surprise. She skulked after him, trying to win him over the way she had me, but he never liked her. He didn't see the sweet innocence that shone through her eyes. To him she was just a victim, a dog who was already as low as it could go and thus invited kicking, as in that awful saying about kicking a dog when it's down.

Which of course made me love Pig even more than I already did. But this made me scared to love her, too.

People we lived with learned about my father. They found out that he could kick a dog in front of a child, that he could and would yell at, threaten, or hit a woman. Soon we lived by ourselves, in a tiny, freestanding cottage we rented next to the owners' house. They were a family of seven: two Catholic parents and five kids, one my age, with a big color TV right in the living room and a cupboard full of sweet, crunchy cereals. You can imagine where I liked to pretend I lived when I didn't feel like going home. Some nights, the mom would knock on our door and threaten to call the police when she heard my father yelling, my mother screaming, or glass breaking. Usually my father would talk her down, but a couple of times the police did come to our door. Today, animal control and social services would be called in. Back then, my father just got warnings.

By the time we lived in the tiny house by ourselves, with only a rotating cast of cats for my father to kick around, we didn't have Pig anymore. I like to think one of our college-student roommates adopted our silly, sweet dog, someone like Spritz, who ferried me on his motorcycle (with my parents' blessing) to his family's house in St. Louis, dropping me into the midst of his siblings and parents, perhaps the sweetest, most wholesome family I'd ever met, for two blissful weeks of eating midwestern meals like hot dogs and macaroni and jello salads, riding bikes to the city pool, and watching horror movies all gathered around that big color TV in their family room -- their house was so big they had a family room! But I digress. Somewhere along the way Pig disappeared, and I still hold out a hope it was someone like Spritz who saw what was happening and rescued her from a worse fate.

Recently my mother brought up the subject of our dog Pig, inspired by my recent project of disinterring some of the storied bones of my past. She said I always had a strong code of ethics. She said: “Your father would kick the dog, or the cats, but you never did.” And it was true. I was their friend. I would let them sleep on my bed. I wanted to comfort my pets when my father had been cruel to them, and often felt paralyzed with the fear of what would happen if I were kind to them when he was angry.

Today I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about violence toward animals. The author, Charles Siebert, cited a veterinary forensics expert who asserted that animal abuse can represent “the tip of the iceberg” in a household, an indicator of an individual who doesn't respect spouses' or children's boundaries, either. I felt so sad reading that, for us and all the abuse we saw, and for all the pets I thought just wandered off or had been “taken to the pound” to be adopted out again by some other family who could take care of a pet because, somehow my father always turned it all back against us, the women and girls, and insisted we were the ones who had failed our pets and now had to suffer their loss. Now I wonder what really happened to them. As I unpacked more gnarly boxes of memories, I asked about our pets, and my mother confirmed that my father had “disappeared” some of them. I can't be sure what happened to them but I remember sweet Martha the calico kitty, who had her babies and vanished soon after that, and the burly gray beauty Billy Kitty, who “must have wandered off and gotten lost.” My mother told me a horrific story about a capuchin monkey he had brought home as a pet when I was very young and my sister was even younger.

A couple of years ago, on a vacation to the Mayan Riviera in Mexico with my family, I arranged for us to visit a little place in the jungle between Akumal and Tulum where they rescue monkeys that have been adopted as pets and abused or abandoned. They allowed us to go in a cage with the monkeys. They are amazing creatures, full of energy and childlike curiosity. When I first snorkeled, I feared I'd feel I did not belong in the undersea world, which instead was what I experienced with the monkeys. They couldn't just accept me and keep going about their day. They had to test me and mess with me and one of them leaped into the arms of my husband and launched into sweet talk for the next five or six minutes. Another soon had to be dissuaded from chewing on my toes and ankles. My daughter refused to go in the cage with them. I didn't blame her at all, but I was a lot bigger than the monkeys so was only a bit nervous, but not frightened. Later, we were walking under one monkey who felt slighted when I didn't give him, the alpha dude, the attention I had showed to his roommate; he grabbed onto my hair when I got near and would not let go. Ouch! My scalp stung for hours after, and the episode badly frightened my daughter. Suddenly I understood firsthand why the rescue people said they segregate the new monkeys for a long time before they allow them to mix with the established monkey population.

So I was taught some kind of lesson, got my monkey smackdown. But even after that painful experience, I wouldn't have dreamed of hurting one of them. (Nor would I be deluded enough to want to adopt one, thank you very much.)

On my last visit to my mother's, I watched episodes of The Dog Whisperer, which, like Law & Order, seems to be on most hours of the day. I immediately saw why she loves the show. Cesar Millan, the dog behavior specialist who is the show's star, understands the dog's mentality: he understands the need for order within the pack. So Millan goes around and rehabilitates dogs, and trains people, as his motto goes. Always, he seeks one thing from dogs: a calm and submissive state. The thing about Cesar is that he will outwait and outwit a dog to achieve that state. He will do anything it takes, and with some dogs it takes a lot. A few even get through his skin and unsettle him and he has to step back and start all over with that dog when his energy is back. As soon as I read that book by the real horse whisperer, about how you can turn away and let a horse know you trust it, to win the horse's trust, I knew it was true, and I've seen it since many times over since I read it. And while that piece of advice made horses more comprehensible for me, I admit to being nipped by the 12-year-old appaloosa mare my daughter was riding a couple of summers ago for not paying proper attention to her one day. To my credit, that horse's owner was also impressed when I noticed Shoshoni flinch when I touched one of her flanks when brushing her; it turned out she'd been bitten there by another horse a couple of days earlier.

With every passing moment I feel I learn a little more about true compassion from being with my cats, being around friends' dogs, and seeing my child adore animals – although sometimes her love is so smothery that I feel I have to protect the poor pets from her overbearing attentions. Whether the satisfying symbiosis of my relationship with pets is due to the increased flow of the “trust hormone” oxytocin, or a parasite some say cats infect us with that will ultimately compel us to let our cats eat our brains, either way, we seem to be stuck with one another. I find one of the best things about living without abuse is being able to love my people and animals as much as I want to, which turns out to be constantly, tenderly, freely, and deeply.

The coinci dance

2010-06-05T23:07:00.004-06:00

When we chose our daughter's middle name, which I choose not to reveal here for the sake of our family's privacy, I liked the idea of picking a name that had been in my family for several generations. The middle name we picked was the middle name of my cousin, my aunt, my father's mother, and her mother; my mother's grandmother even had a variant of the same name. It seemed like a lovely thing to give my daughter something that identified her as the fifth generation to share something in my family; for once, some continuity would originate in my side of the family, I felt.

Now I notice an odd little coincidence here: I know two people from outside this country with this name. A couple of years ago, I joined a writing group, and in this group is a woman from an Asian country. She has a lovely name that her parents gave her, but the name I learned first for her is the name she had picked as her "English name" because she thought it was pretty and would be easier for Americans to remember. This this name turns out to be the same name we picked for our daughter's middle name.

It strikes me as funny that I know two people, neither one born in this country, who have this name as their English names. Maybe there are many, many more than I realize, and this is a popular name among immigrants from other countries as well, but I prefer to feel lucky to have noticed this bit of happenstance.

Funny feelings about finishing my first draft

2010-05-14T08:19:00.005-06:00

I finally finished one! It was a surprise to me that it would come this quickly -- I had set a deadline of a couple of weeks from now, but I got to what felt like the end of my novel yesterday. Ever since then, I've been mentally standing on a hilltop and shouting/singing for joy (which right now is taking the form of an Ok Go song: "Every day is the same, we're praying for rain." Ironic, in this coldest spring almost ever in these parts). I even did something funny and clever to end the story, and I was able to let go of putting all the comedy in to "git er dun," as the Florida handyman's truck boasts.

It feels amazing, and not amazing at all. Now that I've reached an ending (I'm not going to say THE end yet), I am trying to catch all the things I said I was putting in (foreshadowings, habits like doodling daisy chains, etc.), fix all the holes, weave the characters throughout, and so forth. I started all kinds of things, but none but her story got very far. But it's also a third-person limited perspective story; if my emcee can't see or perceive it, it's not in there. So I just have to take a whole bunch of these descriptions and fill them with dialogue and description instead of exposition. And I want to see her play with those good characters again -- she started some nice friendships with people who all come around for her big moments. But like thinning plants -- pulling out flourishing sprouts just so some of the other sprouts can turn into big, productive plants -- it feels odd to stop her story there when there's so much more that would happen for this person. Which could mean it's a series, but maybe not. I still have two other novels and a memoir to finish once I'm done with this one!

So to write this I have had to retreat, hole up and find my own story. Now, to flesh it out, I must get out there to live and listen, tune into what I hear in my head, and bring the story up to that standard. But it's good to know what it is like to finish a first draft! Hooray! And on with the second!

A thing worth doing poorly at first is a thing worth doing

2010-04-29T10:07:00.004-06:00

I heard a good piece of advice about writing I want to hand along. It goes against what all our parents said to us, which was: "A job worth doing is worth doing well." That advice certainly helped me become more thorough about some of the tasks I took on. But in writing, that pressure to achieve early perfection may be misplaced. One writer says instead: A job worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. Think about it. This turns around the willingness to look silly or bad or make something unusable/unsalable/unpalatable at first. I can tell when I reread my writing that I made myself sit down and write some days, despite not feeling any clarity about where I was headed. Sometimes it works and sometimes it fails. But next to all the other successful and semisuccessful attempts, which can be improved in the editing, the failures stand out in relief and can be edited out.

It's a great power we have: the ability to edit. We all do it, all the time, whether we think of it as "editing" or not. Look out a window. What do you see? What do you include and what do you leave out when you describe your view from the window (such as power lines, signs, vehicles)? Look at yourself in the mirror. Stand there and look for an entire minute, without looking away. What do you see that you don't usually see? The ways in which we edit our worlds absolutely affect how we respond to them. Just like the bumper sticker says: "Don't believe everything you think."

Thinkering Institute: Beyond Newtonian laws

2010-04-29T08:30:00.012-06:00

Here a glimpse of what's cooking here at my one-woman think tank.

Isn't that word Geronimo! about that jumping-off, what you say when you let go of the rope or run and leap past the edge, when there's no going back and you're in free-fall for what seems like an flash and a roaring eternity? That is how I'm feeling about the book I'm working on right now. I printed out all 61,000 words of it and read it in one sitting yesterday. It made me happy -- the story and the fact that it occupies a place in the world now. Sure, I see problems all over it, but they're all solvable; there's a whole and a reason for being and a bunch of interesting scenes and people to weave together, and a main character I am rooting for and hope you will too. It's all very exciting and there's still a lot to do. I figure I need about 10-20 more writing days to get to the end of the plot (and I may need an epilogue as well). I was just reading an interesting piece about how Joseph Campbell arrived at the idea of "bliss" (it's not quite what I'd thought: it's more like that Geronimo! moment). My friend Gever may have started me thinking about this when he recently posted about leaping off cliffs on his Tinkering School blog.

The jumping-off part of this project is my attempt to answer violence with nonviolence. My protagonist is still vibrating from the effects of living with the constant, continuous threat of violence, and it takes her a while to be able to conceive of any other way. But once she does, she never wants to go back to the other mode: it feels wrong and bad and soul-destroying. So she has to find a path, to learn to be more creative than everyone around her who just wants to get to the end of the story, to end the bad guy's story, an eye for an eye, tit-for-tat. I still am not sure how I will solve this riddle. There's a Newtonian action-reaction balance I am looking hard at. Is that equilibrium truly necessary or even desirable in this universe?

This led to thoughts of how we collectively value things, which of course made me think of Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: A Comedy of Values, which is one of those books I think should be required reading for anyone who lives in a society and is capable of reading it. Because it's about living in society, I might not choose this as desert-island reading (I like Chesterson's response when asked what book he would take if stranded on a desert island: The Art of Shipbuilding). But I am living in a society that is having to think hard about individual and group values at this moment of economic recalibration, and violence is one of the things groups collectively condone or resist. Not only do we see a lot of violence in our media but many of us are also exposed to acts of violence in our private lives, whether being bullied at school or work, or suffering physical or emotional abuse at home. There's a certain amount of tolerance for violence and bullying, a sense that it can't be stopped. This is backwards I think, and also goes to the heart of our financial crisis. We've come to value some things that intrinsically have no value. We've colluded in endowing them with their power, and now we must dismantle this big facade and rebuild something more sustainable, supportive, and enduring.

Capitalists like to say we saw the collapse of communism a few years ago, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. I'm sure there are Marxists out there right now crowing about the crumbling edifices of capitalism, too. What I see is the end of an era of valuing money and might in the abstract and the specific. To survive the next era we are going to need to adapt and value other things even more highly: creativity, connection, love, innovation. More money and growth for their own sakes simply aren't sustainable values, in and of themselves. For example, I find it interesting that this country has corporate laws enforcing a growth-at-all-costs belief system that prohibit targets of corporate takeovers from resisting a merger, even if the merger would clearly weaken or destroy the target company's production or business.

I am doing a lot of reading at the same time as all this cogitating and writing the ending of my novel. One topic I am reading about is nonviolence. I have found some interesting things already, having just scratched the surface. I never knew this, but Gandhi said that he learned the path to nonviolence from his wife, whom early in their marriage he had first tried to bully into submission. It wasn't working, he said, and she showed him the path to nonviolence by teaching him that no differences between them made her deserving of how he was treating her. Then I read about how if one person is a tyrant but everyone agrees that person is a tyrant, there is no need to subdue that person because all of society can turn away from the tyrant. I see parallels in the degrees to which we as a society are willing to accept money and might as ideals and to look the other way as despotic rulers looting and pillaging the very things that gave them their strengths. Can't we all just turn away from those outmoded definitions of power and influence and turn instead to the power each of us has within us to do good in the world, to be of service to others and our own truths. What if we weren't all competing to be first to use up the last of the resources and instead were each of us supporting and encouraging the other in engaging with our communities and our very own selves?

The food-obsession-shame spiral

2010-03-26T09:40:00.003-06:00

I just read Ainsley Drew's blog post about being anorexic. It was honest and well written and intimately describes something I've been observing in and around me.

There's a cultural pattern in which so many of us are food-obsessed -- for whatever reasons: genetics, allergy issues, veganism, concern for the environment, etc. -- to the point of religious fervor (psychologists might even be tempted to call it "scrupulosity"). Ainsley Drew in her blog said what so many say these days: "I became obsessed with food and ashamed of my obsession." Just as she phrased it, it's all of a piece: the food-shame-obsession spiral. Much in our landscape today shoves many of us toward this obsession about food, whether it's the proliferation of organic food options, the detailed labels on food products, the fashion magazines, and the skinniness of our pop stars, just to name a few. It's a difficult tide to resist.

As I see it, having struggled with different dimensions of food obsession myself, all we can do is choose what to take into our bodies. Contrary to common wisdom (e.g., "Your body is your temple," which may not be so helpful right when you're in the throes of food- or body-obsession), we may have to learn how to be slightly less-vigilant gatekeepers. I see personal power and taking up space as elements of this, too, and think this is why more women and gay men are likely to fall victim to this strain of obsession. I think what has kept me from becoming anorexic is that I have learned to take up space and exercise my power in the world. I like having mass, presence.

For any of you who are struggling with food- or body-related obsessions, I wish you balance and health. Also, I would love to hear what has worked and not worked for you. Peace be with you.

Hierarchies of needs

2010-02-25T13:48:00.008-07:00

Here's a piece I just wrote for my writing group's February assignment, on "moving."

You say “write about moving” and I try hard to skirt the obvious and think about writing about dancing and discovering more about my physical presence on the earth every day, an aspect of my life I have come to treasure in my middling age.

Yet I can't help circling back to the fact that we moved a lot. Much more than most other people I knew. Even my daughter who was born halfway around the world has only moved twice, once to the orphanage when she was a newborn, and once to the house where we all live now. When I was a child, we moved, and moved again and moved some more, leaving one behind, forever it turned out, just like everyone said. We had so many addresses I couldn't remember them all, but my mother kept track, and wrote them down for me before we could both forget them, bless her soul. The longest we had an address during my childhood was three years. When I started going to kindergarten, I was amazed that most of my friends had lived in their houses for their entire lives. We hadn't even had a house some of the time.

Looking at the list of addresses where I've lived can be painful. I didn't have a special doll or stuffy to tote everywhere I went. I had my sister and my mother, but after a while I didn't even have my sister anymore. We dressed in clothes we found in free boxes, bought secondhand, or even found on the street. I was proud of my ability to sleep anywhere. Was it any wonder that, when my grandfather came to town and dazzled me with visions of debutantes dancing across the ballroom floor at the Brown Palace Hotel, I begged him to buy me a special doll, a brand-new one, even though my parents had explicitly instructed me not to ask for anything for Christmas?

Now I think about moving sometimes, but we chose well when we bought our first house 15 years ago. and I like its modest size; I can clean all the floors at once if I want to. I feel so fortunate to be where we are that I don't want to upset our happy apple cart -- I'm far more risk-averse than my parents were, I notice, as a parent and homeowner and free agent. I'm not as likely as I thought I would be as an adult to want to pull up roots and relocate. My husband and I did it once, for six months in Germany, and it was one of the most difficult periods of my life. Without the ability to translate, I was without my sense of humor and verbal agility, and often felt I didn't have much to offer. The heavy gray weather didn't help matters. The phrase “Out of sight, out of mind” would ricochet around my brain, making me wonder whether my friends were all forgetting about me.

A couple of years ago, I was seized with the idea that I should move with my family to India, we should get tech jobs, and write a book about the experience. I'm fairly certain more than one person or family have since gone and done this, and have written books or are making documentaries about it, which I'm a little surprised to find brings me relief. Ahhh, I don't have to do that!

The fact that my daughter has had some special needs has made me feel very fortunate to be able to get some help sorting through them and working with her. She would be a different person today if we hadn't been able to do that. What gets to me is: We didn't know enough to help my sister the way she needed help when I was a child. And what an opportunity this has been for my daughter; learning about her needs has helped every last one of us in some way. I didn't know enough when my little girl was tiny to know what she needed, although people tried to help me see it. I just did what I could, loving her and sticking close by, and trying (if not always succeeding) to find nonviolent ways to respond, counter to some of my initial instincts, which I knew were wrong but didn't have as much modeling to fill in for them as one might wish when one is suddenly spending many hours a day with one's little baby. When she started getting independent, e.g., walking, I started trying to push her away, too early for her abilities I now know. It turned out she couldn't see well. Now that she can, she is far less fearful about the world at large than she was when she was small. I was worried that she was so clingy; now I see how she couldn't always see faces, probably not enough to recognize whether people were friendly or hostile. Of course she clung to me; I always sorted such things out for her. Now she has more skills and we can support her better, instead of getting mad that she isn't like we were when we were smaller. Being able to provide her not only with love but also with stability and consistency closes some circuit within me and her and allows energy to flow where it hadn't been flowing before.

Will we move again? Hard to say, but living on a block with great neighbors, kids around my daughter's age, and great transportation options to just about anywhere, I have a hard time summoning any motivation to relocate. What a relief, another thing I don't have to do.

Oh, the places I've lived!

1963
S. Columbine St., Denver, CO

1964
S. Federal Blvd., Denver

1967
Berthoud, CO

1967
Gough St., San Francisco, CA

1968
Julian St., The Rectory, San Francisco

1968
Noe St., San Francisco

1968
Pierce St., San Francisco

1968
Cole St., San Francisco

1968
Olompali Ranch, Novato, CA

1969
Nederland, CO

1969
37th St. & Baseline Rd., Boulder, CO

1970
High St., Boulder

1973
Canyon Blvd., Boulder-Mother and father separate, divorce

1974
South St., Boulder-with father and stepmother

1974
Mapleton Ave., Boulder-with father and stepmother

1974
18th & Spruce St., Boulder-Mother

1974
28th St., Boulder-Mother

1974
15th & Spruce St., Boulder-Mother and stepfather

1975
Bluff St., Boulder-Mother and stepfather

1975
Broadway, Boulder-with father and stepmother

1976
S. Boulder Rd., Boulder-with mother and stepfather

1981
Vienna Way, Venice, CA-with mother and stepfather

1982
UC Davis off-campus student housing, Davis, CA

1983
Blake St., Berkeley, CA

1983
Walnut St., Berkeley

1985
Pilkington Ave., Santa Cruz, CA

1989
Fair Oaks Ave., San Francisco, CA

1990
Laidley St., San Francisco

1991
Friends' apartment, Dortmund, Germany

1991
Our apartment, Dortmund

1992
Don & Joyce & Steve's house, Mapleton Ave., Boulder, CO

1992
8th St., Boulder

1996
Catalpa Way, Boulder

Farewell, Lucille Clifton, or Why we don't critique content in my writers' group

2010-02-24T11:17:00.003-07:00

My poetry teacher at UC Santa Cruz died recently, which undammed a wash of complicated feelings. I liked her poems, but the best thing about being in her class was the other writers I met there.

Once I was feeling comfortable in the class, I submitted a poem about being a child in my father's car while he drove us home from a party, drunk. Lucille Clifton, instead of critiquing my poem on its literary merits, attacked my content: "A father wouldn't do that to his children. This isn't believable. This couldn't happen."

Really!? This was astonishing news to me.

But you know how it is when someone tells you "This can't be done" or "No, you are dead wrong on this"-- and you just have to set them straight. I was so flummoxed at first by Lucille Clifton's reactions to me and my work that I deliberately didn't pick up my final critique from her, which in a way was just hurting myself because now it means I probably only have a couple of those poems from long ago. Miz Clifton, I now see more clearly, had a chip on her shoulder about discrimination and privilege, understandably given our time and place. I am guessing that to her, most of us at UCSC appeared to be just-weaned, still-sniveling symbols of privilege. She asked aspiring poets who wanted to take her class to write about a time when they were in the minority. She barely believed me when I said that being from a hippie family made me different from my peers, even though I felt those differences acutely every day that I was in school or watched television or had some other opportunity to see how other kids my age lived. I believe she had in her mind a notion about what it meant to be a hippie that didn't quite match my situation. I didn't know enough about the way things were to explain that I wasn't talking about being the kid of privileged parents who had decided to chuck the whole establishment scene, but rather was talking about being a kid of a sociopathic father and a manic-depressive mother. Now I know, and I still feel a need to set the record straight.

I only worry that all this dwelling on what happened is giving me some kind of chip on my own shoulder. I feel compelled to record each new set of revelations, and I keep hoping that process will make it easier to leave behind me. But I haven't fully been able to name what has been whittling away at my shoulder all these years, and I now I can.

Not only can things happen that way but they did, to me. Bless your heart, Lucille Clifton, for not having the capacity to see evil in a father's heart, but I did. And if you are willing to listen, I'll tell you how it was.

Being us

2010-02-17T14:06:00.006-07:00

Every now and then I'll say:

"I love Prince!" or some other equally grand declaration.

My sweetheart will challenge me: "I think you just like the idea of Prince."

But here's the thing about the Princes and the Lady Gagas and the Johnny Weirs of the world: They are doing their best by being most true to themselves. I felt that way the other day watching the Oprah episode about the woman who went from being Tim to Kimberly. She documented it in a fascinating documentary film Kimberly made about her experience switching genders that I attended at BIFF last winter. Oh, and by the way, Kimberly is a lesbian now, and has a partner. Oprah, bless her pointy little soul, really tried to wrap her arms around the transgender thing but couldn't quite let herself go there, so offered Kim's story in her "be your best self" format. Oprah celebrated that Kim was able to go back and become friends with her buddies from the football team for which she'd been the star quarterback, back in the day when she was a boy and feeling like she was in the wrong body. Oprah brought Kimberly's mom on the show and told her face to face she wished she'd told her about her feelings earlier. Not much outlet for thoughts like that in Helena, Montana, up to the point where he made the leap to being she.

But today, Kimberly is living proof that being yourself can change things for the better, and offer others a broader view, which is why yes, I really do like Lady Gaga. And I flat-out love Prince.

We're baking with electricity now

2010-02-05T13:49:00.006-07:00

Making that delightful no-knead bread has been quite an experience, one that has made me think about what it means to make your own food. I remember lots of baking in my childhood, my mother's and when we lived in communal situations she always helped cook. I thought the kitchen was always one of the most interesting places to be. My mom baked for a living after she and my father split up, making pies for restaurants with a friend, and then as pastry chef at Caribou Ranch. She baked healthy breads, adjusting as needed for the 8,000-foot altitude, and even concocted wholesome meals and wedding cakes for the crews of musicians who came up to make their records.

When my husband and I were young and living in the Bay Area, we were turned onto Greens and ate at Chez Panisse and Jeremiah Tower's restaurants and and it turned out that we were living in one of the epicenters not only of a major earthquake (Santa Cruz, 1989) but also of a revolution in the way huge swaths of the population were starting to see the food they consume and the chefs who prepared it -- chefs have in subsequent years been recognized as more than cooks but as curators of food. Our batch of early health-foodie revolutionary tracts -- one of the Moosewood Cookbooks, Laurel's Kitchen, a copy of Adele Davis' Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit that I never used, intermingled with The Joy of Cooking and the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook and the New York Times Cookbook as the cooking canon of our time and place, one of the very best was the lovingly compiled Tassajara Bread Book. I have enjoyed recipes from other Tassajara cookbooks, but there is an attitude of calm support and peace with the natural proceedings you are about to engage in that is unlike any other cookbook I have ever read or cooked with.

And so we made many loaves of bread and relished the scent and texture and experience, experimented with the balance of white and wheat flour, and loved the results, even when the proceedings seemed to take the better part of a day.

Yet, despite all that calming Zen baking advice, I was always concerned that I'd gone past the smooth-as-a-baby's-bottom phase in kneading my dough and into the tearing-the-gluten-bonds phase that would make my bread tough and chewy. Every loaf of kneaded dough I've made has made me fret about that.

So the no-knead dough was a revelation. I was suddenly more anxious about overhandling the dough when you hardly touched it except to spill it out of its bowl and fold it a couple of times and let it rest, then spill it into a piping hot dutch oven that you cover and bake for about 20 minutes, and uncover and bake another 15. It turned out I needn't have worried -- that dough is about the most forgiving, beautiful stuff on the planet. I have not worried once about torn gluten strands since I started baking this way, and if I feel like making kneaded bread, I know I always can. But I am far more likely to do this instead.

Crusty, Crackling, No-Knead Bread

This is my version of the Speedy No-Knead Bread recipe that the New York Times published recently.

In a deep bowl, measure and stir:
3 cups flour (or 150 grams)*
1-1/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 packet or about 1 tsp. yeast**

Pour in:
1-1/4 cups water (no warmer than 110 degrees F/44 C)
1/4 cup plain lowfat or whole-milk yogurt (or use all water if you wish to make this nondairy)

Stir the ingredients together for a minute or two, until you have a shaggy, sticky dough and all the ingredients are well blended. Scrape the dough down the sides of the bowl and cover the top of the bowl with a damp towel. If your house is chilly, make a place for your dough to rest by heating your oven to 200 F (95 C) for about five minutes and turning the oven off before you put the covered bowl inside the oven to rest from 3-8 hours.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, fold it in half once, and fold it in half again. (Expect a loose dough that barely lets you handle it.) Cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap for 30 minutes. After 10 minutes, start preheating your oven to 450 F (235 C) and put your 6- to 10-quart dutch oven and the lid in the oven to preheat as well (be sure to unscrew and remove the handle on your lid if it is not heatproof -- many of them aren't. If you have to do this, twist a small piece of aluminum foil and insert it into the hole where the lid screw was to seal the hole because the steam from the baking bread is what initially allows the beautiful crust to develop).

After the oven and dutch oven are preheated, use a pizza peel or a flexible cutting board to gather up your dough and put it into the dutch oven. Bake on the middle oven shelf for 20 minutes. Remove the dutch oven lid and bake for another 15-20 minutes, or until the loaf is a rich golden-brown.

Remove dutch oven and set it on the stove. Take the loaf out of the dutch oven and set it on a counter or cutting board to cool for a few minutes, if you can wait that long before slicing and eating it.

*My current favorite blend is about 1/3 white winter wheat flour to 2/3 unbleached organic white flour.
**Fleischmann's or Star rapid-rise both work well -- and you don't have to proof them in warm water first.

A decade

2010-01-30T17:50:00.003-07:00

If there's one thing I could take away from this past week, and only one, it would be that the fire burning within is what we have, and it's up to us to stoke it. I am doing my best to devote time and energy to the work I want to do most, to put off the housework before I put off the writing. Everyone has much to juggle; I have less than many, but one of the tricky things to keep aloft is my own ambition, my need to tell these stories.

It's not easy to spend so much of one's time doing something -- striving for some kind of mastery -- that is largely invisible to everyone. In Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hours concept, if you spend eight hours of every day doing one thing you wanted to master, it would take you 1,000 days of practicing to become really good at it. That's eight hours every day, which almost never happens. So double your 1,000 days, or more realistically quadruple them, and maybe you're talking about 10-12 years to achieve mastery, unless you are blessed with lots of time every single day for your practice. Or you set a specific goal: a novel by a certain deadline, a marathon you want to complete, and you structure everything around meeting that goal. That's how I haven't been thinking but how I'd like to switch.

This practice feeds me, too: I feel so grateful for every day and every minute I can write. And dance, love, walk, be here, be with you.

I kissed some foot on twitter today

2010-01-21T21:16:00.005-07:00

Ruhlman is the what-if-John McPhee and M.F.K. Fisher-had-a-lovechild of our time in his full absorption in all things cooking related, and I'm such a groupie.

I can't help it. I'm a tad aflutter: Michael Ruhlman thanked me today when I paid him a compliment on twitter. I'm reading his latest book, Ratio, and the book pretty much cemented the rock star analogy for me. (He also wrote a trilogy: The Making of a Chef, Soul of a Chef, & Reach of a Chef, good books all. Oh, and he helped Thomas Keller write his cookbook. Amazing. And his instincts are so true, so good; here he's come up with great formulas, great examples, and some amazingly yummy-looking recipes that I have yet to try out. His preoccupation with food is something I recognize; it drives everyone on one side of my family (every last one a gourmet-food seeker, crazy for the stuff).

I am raving about this book because I find it a rare thing, a fine and flexible reference tool in the spirit of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's more than just a cookbook but rather a liberating way to think about cooking, perhaps even a way to demystify cooking for a whole bunch of people. Once you have learned the basic ratios (and once you've procured a decent kitchen scale with a "tare weight" button), you have a great set of places from which to launch yourself, especially if you are a tinkerer like me who can hardly leave a recipe alone.

In contrast to Ruhlman, who is after some quintessential information about the best ways to prepare food, I keep circling back to what has become something of a new meditation for me: "What if I didn't have the best lunch possible but a good lunch?" What's the difference between best and enough? What does it mean that there is a gap? It doesn't necessarily mean I need to close the gap. I can have a good lunch without making things too fancy.

I heard a great thing -- at least the author of the book where I read it made me feel I heard it: In Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself, Lisick talks about one spiritual guide, one of the people she consults for help in the course of a yearlong life makeover that involves taking the advice of America's most popular self-help gurus, one per month. Irresistible premise, right? I couldn't put it down. It was good, too: She's funny and sharp, if a little mean, which isn't surprising considering her hipster-than-thou life before her grand experiment (even her husband is a super-hipster -- his band opens several shows for Radiohead!) and considering her former disdain for outside expertise of any kind she has a refreshing willingness to submit to the logic of her new 12-pack of teachers. The one that struck me says to a crowd gathered to hear her communicate with people no longer dwelling in the physical world, "A martyr can only nail up one of his hands." I have been chewing on that one ever since I heard it. (And you, dear reader, deserve a prize for most tenacious if you've made it this far without rolling your eyes and clicking to the next big or little thing.)

In other news: The most popular exclamation I hear among the kids at my daughter's school is "What the...?" with equal emphasis on "What" and "the." And today I heard my daughter's schoolmate say "OMG," complete with Valley-Girl emphasis, in conversation. I'm not sure my kid knew what her friend was saying. I wonder whether her friend learned it from older siblings or from TV. I'm guessing the latter. It strikes me as extra ironic because the girl saying it is from a Catholic family. Wouldn't that be taking the Lord's name in vain somehow?

Oh, and there's this little circle thing we do with our knees, where we draw a circle with one knee and then the other. That used to be so hard. I could barely pick my leg up and drag it across my body. It still aches sometimes but today I was thinking, "Where would I be if I weren't doing this?" It's so hard to imagine, I don't even feel like trying.

Current resolutions

2010-01-14T08:39:00.002-07:00

Finish at least one novel
Earn money for writing
Be a better friend
Love more
Kvetch less
Use fewer exclamation points
Go hear some more live music
Make another film
Sing more
Write down lyrics
Keep on dancing

A teaser from the new novel I'm writing

2010-01-13T08:54:00.001-07:00

She'd bombed. Flamed out. Died. Big time.

“Everyone has to do it once,” they told her after, allowing her to bond with them over shared failures. “It's good to get that out of the way early.”

And: “Now you know how the worst night feels. If you can go back out there after a night like that and not take it too personally, you might have what it takes to make it in this hellish business.”

It made Lydia feel better to hear it. 99 percent of people who dream of this probably never ever try it, she thought, with pride. And it's weird but it's a freaking thrill and a half. She was unable to stop the smile from stretching her lips wide. By the end of the night her face had ached from all the grinning. She was high as a kite, soaring over her old life. Plus, she was funny as hell with all those new brothers. If that five minutes was the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she could even stand doing it again, she felt fine about that. If that were true, who knew, maybe she could be the next Seinfeld.

Lydia's secret excuse for her crash-and-burn of a debut was being in disguise. She cut herself a great deal of slack for it instead of beating herself over the head and concluding she was no good. Her material was pretty good, she thought, but it was trickier finding the way to deliver it, while trying on a whole new persona. She couldn't just drop the persona when her set was over like most performers, she quickly saw; if she wanted to snare the bird she would have to keep it up during the bantering-in-the-bar portion of the evening with the comedians' brotherhood after. She had to be Carmen Flame. She liked the joke of having red hair and being named something smoldering and Latin sounding.

It was like trying to join a fraternity suddenly being around all these guys kind of like her, odd balances of Introversion and Extroversion in the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. She hadn't quite figured out who she wanted to be with them yet. She hadn't yet connected well with her audience, or herself, which was making her feel less worthy of connecting with the accomplished fellows in this group, every last one of them (she thought) with more experience in a month than she'd had in her whole life.

Onstage, Lydia had been worried under her false bravado, which of course the audience sniffed out immediately, nosing her jokes as dispassionately as dogs poking around a pile of leaves while she died in front of everyone, afraid her delivery was rushed and trying not hold back from her inclination to be snarky, which she knew could turn an audience on her in a second. Fear made her sweat, drove her on. She dreaded being booed or hooked off the stage. She'd seen one club owner ring a loud bell or buzzer on the performers – they never knew which to expect – that startled each comedian into submission, abruptly ending their desperate not-quite five-minute sets. You could see the stress of wondering on every comic's face a few minutes into each set: Will my sound be a bell or a buzzer?

No mojo that time. Oh, well, too bad, she thought. But she sure liked the electricity and the instant camaraderie of it, and had felt more alive this night than at any time except riding through the country so busy with thoughts of what she might do when she stopped somewhere and started setting down new roots that she hadn't noticed she'd been singing to herself for miles, alternating between “This Land Is Your Land” and “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” the songs' repeating refrains in the background of her mind like Muzak at the supermarket.

2010-01-12T09:05:00.002-07:00

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes "Awww!”'- Jack Kerouac

This inspires me and also makes me recoil, all at once. I'm still immersed in judgement about candles that burn bright, the ones who suck all the air out of the room -- you probably know someone, at least one, like that, right? But I also want to be that passionate about my work.

That said, time for dance class!

xoxo

All those channels

2010-01-11T21:47:00.007-07:00

A Facebook friend had a question: "Does anyone get this cable channel? We don't and we hear we're on TV."

Sorry, can't help, I replied. No cable. We keep a TV downstairs, mostly for movies. I usually have one show I'm interested in at any given time, sometimes two. Now they are "So You Think You Can Dance" and "Glee," which I made a feeble attempt at watching religiously. They have since fallen off my schedule and I rarely remember they're on at the right times.

The Mister of the house likes to say, "We don't get TV," which isn't strictly true, as he's carefully edited our setup to get the most out of the new digital broadcast signal. But even with the new, improved picture quality and channel selection, there's still hardly anything on broadcast TV.

We haven't had cable in about 20 years -- it was still on for a while after we moved into our little cottage on the hill in San Francisco, but after it finally got turned off, after three months or so, we just never opted in. This fact was remarkable if you consider the sheer number of mailings from the cable company we received over the years (I can't count the number of times I thought, "Oh, this looks like a pretty good deal"). Plus I spent some of my formative teen years with a parent who thought cable was a necessity, and there is always the allure of the premium channels on our friends' TVs and on vacations.

But the deal was never good enough to tip it toward entering into a contract. Because like sex, there was no going back. I knew that much. Once we had cable, we'd deem it a necessity everafter.

I recently read that Bobby and Danette Stuckey of Frasca fame don't have a TV, so couldn't watch Bobby's "Today Show" appearance or Lachlan's "Top Chef" episode at home. Is it a trend? Or three parallel anecdotes?

If I had cable I'd be less likely to update this blog. I'd be less likely to make progress on any of my novels. I would be less likely to read as many books, which might just mean I'd be that much less interested in writing one. But lately I've been reading good ones that make me want to tell stories that are this enriching and enlightening: Lorrie Moore's Gate at the Stairs, Michelle Huneven's Blame and Michael Ruhlman's middle book of his Chef trilogy, The Soul of a Chef, plus the usual Michael Connellys and Anne Perrys and such liberally mixed in.

I always wonder when I see those surveys saying the average amount of time people in the US watch television is more than four hours a day, who has that kind of time for TV-watching? I guess if you watch it for an hour in the morning as you ready for your day, and then you have it on in the background and then watch a little prime-time, a news show, and some of the late show, you're there. But that's a lot of noise in your life!

I've learned a few things from television (a topic for a future blog post), but in the balance the box gives back so little of the time I invest in it, relative to everything else in my life. Now that I've written today (earlier I started Book Two, or Chapter 51, of my novel, Time to read--about Fat? Milk? Kenny Shropsin? Best Friends Forever? Heidi Julavits? Haruki Murakami writing nonfiction? Ahh, choices, choices.

Food and faith

2010-01-06T08:30:00.003-07:00

So cozy inside.

There's a storm brewing outside -- it got worse by the minute as I dropped my child at school and returned home after. Nothing falling, yet. And the ground covered with awful ice patches everywhere. Hips will shatter, should snow fall on these lumpy slicks lurking all around.

So: my next writing goal is revising and extending the rest of my current novel. She is poised on the brink of a sting operation, in catching him at his own game. I need to work out the details about her MO (modus operandi is the Latin phrase called out by the acronym).

And then a turning point, where she realizes she doesn't want any part of his game, and mirroring his behavior to trap him at what he will do anyway is not only unfair but also morally wrong and she can't do that another minute or her life might as well just be declared wasted. She has to live her life instead. She can't keep on reacting to his madness; she wastes all her own resources trying to keep up with him. And she never can, because he's miserable with what he's become but can't give up being a bully with all the power it brings him.

That's the emotional plot line. Now to scene-out the mechanics. That's what's next.

___

It is sad to lose a generation. There is always the death of what might have been for those in a branch that chose to live far from their mothers instead of near. So many stories we never heard, never let ourselves hang around long enough to get to know everyone and be a part of.

That happened before I knew it when my maternal grandmother died a few years ago. But that was never offered. She wasn't accessible in any real way -- she'd just blow into town every few years. Or once we went to see her on her turf, in Barcelona, and she led us to the place listed in our Let's Go book as the most rock-bottom cheap but decent food in all of the city, where you could eat a hearty meal for $4 in the midst of all the hoity-toity tapas bars that line the streets and keep the city humming every night. We ate there with her apologizing for the place but the food was good and cheap and we bought hers. I remember meeting her for lunch at the Emporium, across the street from where I worked in San Francisco, near the Powell and Market cable-car turnaround, back when there was still a Woolworth's with a lunch counter and blue-plate specials. I think I harbored a notion that she would take me shopping, but she had the opposite idea and I bought her a scarf in the end. She'd found the least-expensive thing in there and made me buy her one. I had a job, after all, so I was surprised but gracious about it, if a tiny bit resentful. I got one shopping spree out of my grandparents, but have never had parents or grandparents who blew into town to take me shopping. Sigh; some dreams die hard.

I think of people like my grandmother, who seemed afraid to consume much to stay alive, and how my mother does the same thing now, and how others in my sphere are trying to teach me about self-negation, sacrificing for the good of all. My heart reaction to that is no! I know I have entered into phases of food paralysis, when my ideas about what is healthy change and I see food outside that sphere as something less than nourishing. It is a form of anorexia concerned with foreign or polluting foods. I still have it, when we go to someone's house and aren't comfortable with what they eat. My kid abhors McDonald's and I'm with her.

Not long ago I read and started passing around a funny memoir, Jenny Traig's Devil in the Details, about a woman hitting puberty and entering into a life of scrupulosity, obsessiveness over process and correctness. Traig was half Jewish, and at the moment puberty struck, she dove into her religion, especially around food preparation and bodily functions. She had obsessive-compulsive disorder and this was where she expressed her depth of feeling and commitment: to eating correctly and handling food correctly, in observance of Jewish dietary laws about mixing meat and dairy and keeping a truly Kosher kitchen. (And bathroom.)

There was that Aha! when I read about her challenges; I remembered trying a diet when I was 13 that involved a lot of hamburger and pineapple, and thinking everything else was bad and having a hard time starting back up eating other foods again. And then learning about people's challenges with gluten, I wanted to believe it could help our kid with her mood swings, or could cure me of inflexibility and joint pain. And suddenly wheat seemed to be looming everywhere. We caught out a waitress who said no, hoisin sauce doesn't have wheat in it. We Googled it on our little phone.

But for a while I didn't believe in wheat. Now I am just more aware of it as one grain we eat. I tire of it and have to make something with this blend of gluten-free flours I've developed. I like to take occasional breaks from our monoculture wheat culture. So I make banana bread with gluten-free flour. Crepes with buckwheat flour. Those beautiful panisse sticks with garbanzo flour.

Sometimes with food as with nothing else, it's hard to know what to believe in.

No sharks allowed

2010-01-03T20:06:00.003-07:00

I was in the car listening to a Led Zeppelin song on the radio, loving the intro and how beautiful it was but simultaneously dreading the bridge, which turns the song into something else entirely -- something else, as a woman, to be dreaded. It's that energy that says, "I'm full of lust and I'm not taking no for an answer. You're in my path and I'm comin' at ya, ready or not."

I just thought for the ten-thousandth time how much more I would have liked those guys if they could have done more than a song or two that was simply beautiful and not full of all that pushy "baby, baby" energy.

Then I opened the New York Times Book Review to discover there's a new biography of them that to hear the reviewer tell it leaves out much about the music and rehashes the gnarly details of their decadent rock stardom. There's some hideous incident involving a woman and a shark that I can only imagine. A bandmember pooh-poohed all that, though, saying they'd only done all that nasty business "for a laugh." "The thing I remember most from that time was the laughter," he said. I wonder if all those women remember the laughter the same way. Ick.

Misloved

2009-12-07T11:50:00.003-07:00

Gathering song lyrics for my new novel's chapter epigrams has been fun during this project because it's reinforced the notion that this is a story with universal appeal. Everyone's been misunderstood, underestimated, and misjudged at some point or another. Nearly everyone has loved and those who have loved either know someone or are people who have been loved badly – misused and misloved by someone who has no idea how to treat others with respect. It's been fun to develop a character in this situation for whom I wanted to root for the whole way, cheer on, help dust off and steadfastly pursue her own goals despite all the gravitational pulls of friends, family, and her own Achilles heels: being alone, lacking confidence.

Yet something more than that mean guy needs to be pushing Lydia away from her old life. What is it?

Misloved. That would be a good title, too, wouldn't it? An interesting echo of Beloved.

I just wrote a 50,000-word novel and boy is my neck sore

2009-12-02T15:24:00.007-07:00

I did it! At 11:57 pm on Tuesday, November 30, I copied and pasted my novel into the handy-dandy Nanowrimo word-count validation box: 50,016 words! I am a winner!

But in answer to your follow-up question: No, it's not finished. I tried, really I did, but I couldn't wrap it up that fast. One good thing about where I stopped two days ago (more like one-and-a-half days ago, in writing time): I'm in the middle of a suspenseful part of the story, which makes me want to get back and finish it. Only I'm too sore right now to type more than this.

In answer to your next follow-up question, yes, I'm exhausted. Writing the 50,016 words in the space of one month (a 30-day month, mind you) wasn't as difficult as I've found it in years past. It was plenty challenging nonetheless, and it took a huge push at the very end to finish before the deadline. That may be the most brilliant thing about Nanowrimo right there: that it gives you a seemingly impossible deadline to meet. There are enough other people doing it -- and getting it done early, no less -- that it seems like a perfect stretch goal: tough, but doable. O, that crafty Chris Baty (the guy who started it all a few years ago).

And when you win, talk about intrinsic rewards! You sure don't do it for the purple banner on your Nanowrimo profile. You do it so you have done it. You do it because you'll have thousands of words of a story you wouldn't have written otherwise, even if you have given yourself permission to allow them to be terrible and you'll have to rewrite it all. You do it for the writing itself. You do it to get better at writing a novel. You do it to get better at meeting a deadline. You do it to get better at pacing yourself. And you do it because once you have done it, frankly, it's a little addictive and you'd feel like a wuss if you didn't at least try. At least those are the reasons I do it. Oh, and the awesome reactions from friends and family. It is fun being the person in the family most likely to write a novel in a month! Thanks for your support.

Here's another reason you don't do Nanowrimo: to make other people feel bad. I don't want my accomplishments to be things I can use to make others wish they weren't the way they were, e.g. didn't know how to sit down and write a book (or most of one) within a month. A couple of nights ago I did a Sunday NYTimes puzzle on my own, with only two clues supplied by Mr. D, and I put the puzzle down and thought: I'm better at this.

Now, what good does that do anyone to go around thinking that way? The only reason I would ever say that is to make Mr. D. feel worse. But why would I want do that? Why do I ever act like there's one way to do things, and it's mine, the better one?

Some people are excited to cheer you on when you announce that you've been writing a novel, but plenty of us writers (this one included) have also observed that certain people respond by peering at you as if you'd just sprouted a third nipple on your chin. Admitting you have a blog can draw the same kind of response. Some people roll their eyes and say to themselves, "Oh, so you like seeing yourself think. Big whoop." They wonder whether you're just saying you write personal essays and are really hunched over your laptop writing sci-fi, erotica, fan fiction, or some other freaky online genre in which only other freaky online genre freaks would be interested.

It would be nice to hand over the bound book and say, "Here, read it if you like and tell me what you think." Their eyes would pop right out. And lo and behold, yea verily, an organization called CreateSpace is offering to print a copy of your novel if you win Nanowrimo! I'll let you know how that goes.

So it's not about winning so other people lose. First, in Nanowrimo, if you write anything at all of your novel in November, it's likely more than you would have written otherwise, so you win either way. And second, there's almost always someone who writes faster or more than you, and someone who writes slower or fewer words per writing hour. Comparisons don't really help. Instead of being jealous of people who can write 10,000 words in a day, I tell myself they just get more practice in a day than I do. One of the folks at the IHOP (I keep typing "iHOP" and having to correct myself -- ha ha) said he had written nearly half his novel over the past two days. Think of it: almost 25,000 words in two days. I can be proud of not having "shamelessly padded" my story, as they say on the Nano site, to get to the 50K, though. I tried to keep the story moving. There's not enough conflict but I'll catch it on the rewrite.

And how is the writing when you write 1,600 words in a day? 5,000? (Which I did on the last day.) 13,000 (IHOP guy)? You'll never know unless you do it, or unless someone trusts you to read their rough draft. Maybe I or the folks at the IHOP (who all won, incidentally) will rewrite his and publish it; maybe it will have just been good practice and he'll move on to different projects. I'm starting to see how nearly 20 percent of its participants can meet the Nanowrimo 50K deadline but a much smaller percentage become published authors after that. The ones who do seem to be prolific, judging by the small sample I've observed in Nano's forums.

It still seems far easier to write than it is to edit and sell the writing, which are equally consuming and perhaps, despite popular mythology, the more difficult jobs. It seems that writers must be able to turn on the taps regularly but then must spend at least as much time hauling vessels around and hooking up hoses and getting the siphons started to get the writing off their own desks. I want an assistant who would be excited to do all that stuff! My mom pointed out, as usual, right around the time I had the thought: "How nice that you are an editor and a writer." The way I had thought of it was: "I'm Danny and Meg, all in one package!" But they know all about sending their stuff out, which is where I'm ignorant and why I'm as yet unpublished.

So who are the winners here? One thing's certain: there are no losers. I think we're all winners, whether it's at writing a book, or getting dinner on the table, or finishing a work project before a critical deadline, or remaining cheerful despite all odds.

NaNoWriMo day 10, 15,400 words

2009-11-10T13:00:00.005-07:00

Again, I come bearing news that this is all going rather well. I'm liking this mettle my main character is showing of late. She's not just parts of me but is more complex, someone I'd like to get to know. I'm still on track wordcount wise, with 15,000 words written that I didn't have two weeks ago. Ten days ago. I had started a version of this story but had gotten sidetracked by a memoir project that now feels like a lot of rehearsal for what I am working on this month. I might have to mine some of what I already wrote someday when I'm struggling to keep up with my recommended daily requirement, as I think of it now. So far, though, I must say the pace is working with my life and habits. Keeps me off the streets, as I often say about writing and used to say about watching films for the BIFF selection committee.

NaNoWriMo, day 6, 10,000 words

2009-11-06T23:21:00.005-07:00

Oh, rats. The dreidl song was out of my head for a while....

I just blew past the 10,000-word mark. Yippee skippee! I am enjoying reading what I'm creating. It is good stuff. I'm not holding back. I'm liking my main character's seesawing. She meets this nice lady early on and maybe you think, oh, no, is this going to be all nicey-nice all the way through? A parade of wise crones leading her to her own inner wisdom? But then the next person who says she'll help her is not so nice at all. And there are many more interesting reversals coming up for me to look forward to as the author -- heh, heh. Then a bit of a precipice. Beyond a certain point in my story, I don't have anything plotted. I'm just going to see where she goes from there. I have a feeling she will know exactly where to go.

Sleep well, y'all. I sure will, unlike my poor main character in the scene I just stopped in the midst of so I'll have lots of momentum when I pick it up again tomorrow, which is definitely one of the best writing tips I ever heard.

NaNoWriMo, day 6, 8400 words

2009-11-06T08:51:00.011-07:00

I confess, when I think of my current writing group, one voice tends to chime out over the top of the others. When her voice said one day, "It's all good material!" after I had checked in about an impossible situation that I had drawn myself into, I felt a permission to use my own raw material that I hadn't even noticed I hadn't given myself yet. So that little nugget of commentary and advice turned out to be a gift, for which I am grateful especially because it has allowed me to unbarricade a particularly dark and awful corner and allowed me to face up to some facts I'd been avoiding for a while. More material, yippee! [with only the merest hint of sarcasm]

And Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month, bless its pointy little head, is giving me a fun place to put all this. I even have some totems, some people I think of sometimes while writing. There's my mother and oldest sister, and now there are these wonderful constellations and planets shining in my sky: my writing groups, current and past, and Angela Shelton, who is a joyful example of someone standing up for herself and other victims of abuse. She too is taking some long looks at how we make abusers in our culture. There is the author of The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout, Ph.D., who gave me another key to a dark room whose door I can now fling wide open. I am loving working all of this memoir and information into the fabric of this story of a woman getting out from under an ugly, sad situation with an abuser at its core, who must begin the task of making good choices for herself. I confess I feel a little like I'm attempting to climb up there too by telling this story, which I hope can become another bright glow in a constellation that will illuminate more than just my path.

Exercise: Fill in the blanks: "_____s will be _____s!"

What phrase did you pick? One of my novel's themes is the expectations we project onto people because of how we identify them, how we sort each other into categories. Also interesting to me is how often we are right about the character of the person, but wrong about the specific details.

Plus it's a road story.

Beyond reframing: Deframing

2009-10-25T15:39:00.002-06:00

In a story from today's New York Times about changes in The Museum of Modern Art's modernist art collections, I just read a great thing. MoMA decided to change the display of some of these paintings by removing their frames. I love this quote: “'Now these strokes explode off the canvas,' she said happily.”

Isn't that great? It's so simple – remove the frame and you've got a whole different painting on your wall. And you get an artwork that is in the state in which the artist first experienced it. I don't imagine most painters think as they're working on their latest artwork, “I'd better make something that matches that really rococo gold frame in the corner.”

And it's such a simple exercise, elegant like that last thought Byron Katie has you do: Can you picture this differently? Can you see this picture differently? In this case the answer seems to be an emphatic yes. (The whole question about pictures and frames makes me wonder about the history of picture frames. How did we come to accept flowery, flourish-filled ornatities around our paintings in the first place?)

I love the exercise, the mental leap you can take away from this. How could you remove a frame from a problem you can't see your way out of? How could you recontextualize your problem and change your view of it?

Review: David Carr's The Night of the Gun

2009-10-22T21:09:00.008-06:00

Despite what my blog might have you believe and as much as I love making food for my family, I am more interested these days in memoir, in questioning my past and some of the assumptions I have lived with for many years. So it was with interest that I picked up a memoir that at first glance looked like it could have been written by my father and began to read.

Within a couple of days I had finished reading David Carr's memoir The Night of the Gun. I found it interesting because he was so messed up -- for a guy born with only one kidney, he played fast and loose with his mental and physical health, hoovering up enough drugs (I'd guess) to get an inner-city high school high on crack for days. Yet he was determined as hell to make something of his time every minute he was lucid enough to do something about his work. I found Carr's determination inspiring and fascinating (and so did he, examining it like it had just crept in from outdoors and draped itself over his neck [quotes mine, not Carr's]: "Say, what's this? How does it work? Can I use it for my own advantage? Yes!" I found Carr's backslides at least as interesting as his original transgressions against nature. Then he turns around and like Clark Kent emerging from the phonebooth, instantaneously swinging a great red cape, almost always gets treated as a veritable god in his work life, barely capable of doing any wrong. He gets the stories, interviewing people his peers believe can't be had, and he gets the stories right (almost always). But he eventually succumbs to the conceit that he can just slip under the radar as a garden-variety "suburban drunk," buzzing home on the train after work. Naturally, Carr gets out of control in a hurry once he follows that logical vapor trail. Perhaps this book is best read as Carr's love letter to his frontal lobe, which eventually gains the capacity to last inform his decisionmaking processes in an age- and responsibility-appropriate fashion over time. Time will tell if the reversal is permanent or if the old patterns are too ingrained, the old triggers too easy to trip.

Carr questions his thoroughly researched memoir enterprise all along and he is right to do so. That is an enterprise that can quickly get narcissistic. In fact here, he forces himself to be narcissistic. He says, I never excavated this belly button, and here is every shred of lint and many interviews to establish which piece of lint arrived when. But he is one of the lucky ones for whom his children did give him meaning and inspire him to change his entire way of life. Not too long after I tired of descriptions of the vortex of badness into which his life had devolved, I came to admire his dedication on behalf of his kids, his resoluteness to do right in their presences. Incredibly, according to his painstakingly researched and documented personal history, Carr successfully forswore crack around his "babies" but only backslid on this commitment when he was abusing alcohol (but surprisingly not cocaine or methamphetamines).

Reading his story, I even let myself wallow in a little jealousy of his twin girls, who had each other through it all and who as a result had no idea what their father had a checkered past until he told them about his bad self. I wonder if that came as a bigger shock to them than he expected. But he'd prepared them for it -- they'd hung out with ex-drunks and trying-to-recover junkies throughout their childhoods, as well as a cast of truly supporting characters who helped them get through many a tight spot.

Whatever talent he had, competition and winning was a prime motivator. Hardly a month out of rehab, Carr was already refining his story about having picked himself up and dusted himself off after getting dragged down by "the Life." He was already angling for a Best Comeback award. When a friend said he was applying for a job Carr wanted, back in the days when he was still using drugs, Carr held silent. Everyone later said he should have told his friend he'd been gunning for the same position. But no, he said nothing, and guess who got the job: David Carr did. By the accounts of the people he interviews in his memoir, as an editor he did well; some of the folks who worked with him disagree about how much good he did. But his gift for coming out on top in a competition has clearly served him well: he worked his way up to reporter for the New York Times.

I'm impressed someone that screwed up can truly have that much good in him. He says he always thought of himself as a good man with a bad habit. He gives credit to AA for placing his addiction and the rest of the physical and spiritual world in their proper perspectives in his life. I also noted that Carr returned to his Catholic roots. Catholics always seemed to have the most straightforward program for atoning for sins of anyone ("Take two Hail Marys and you're good to go"). There's a religion that doesn't drag you through the muck but lets you get on with your life, and this guy had some lost time to make up, so that served him well, too.

But Carr doesn't take any of the easy ways out, but rather takes a fearless moral inventory of himself. I think I would have regarded this as just another narcissistic James Frey-type junkie odyssey but for the part when his daughters are about four and he tries to get close to some women, but the women he's choosing are not what he wants for himself or his girls and he does something because he knows something's wrong but can't quite identify what it is. He talks to someone who helps him understand what he wants for himself and his daughters and what he has to change to make that happen. Then he up and changes. It's impressive.

Perhaps Carr is an unusually determined and competitive recovering junkie and drunk. I appreciate the object lesson he offers in his memoir. If someone like that can make that much of himself, and singlehandedly raise twin daughters, what the heck do I have to whine about?

Signs of fall: Canning concord grapes

2009-10-05T10:50:00.003-06:00

I made jam twice this week and the second batch was the best ever. Three words: Pomona's Universal Pectin. Happy happy joy joy at that discovery. My jelly had five cups of grape juice, five cups of sugar, and jelled beautifully. I can hardly wait to try another kind of fruit. Pluot jam, anyone?

In case Miley Cyrus needs a little extra songwriting help

2009-10-02T08:50:00.004-06:00

This is pretty terrible, most likely, but I gave myself the writing assignment to write a Hannah-Montana worthy song lyric:

Let's Go, Baby

I'll be a rock star
Gonna go far
You said you loved me so
Said you would never know
Said you just had to go
Here I am on the hill
Standing so still and
Waiting for you to
Catch up
Catch on
Catch on to it

(refrain)
Let's go, baby,
Up where we belong
Down into our groove
To make a new sound now
To make a new sound now, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah!

Say you don't know
Say it can't show
It's just your clingy fears,
trying to bring you tears
Throw 'em out on their ears
Here I am on the hill
Standing so still and
Waiting for you to
Catch up
Catch on
Catch on to it

Let's go, baby,
Up where we belong
Down into our groove
To make a new sound now
To make a new sound now, yeah

I'm a rock star
Gonna go far
Now you are so far away
You were all I dreamed one day
Now I'm here to stay

So let's go, baby,
Up where we belong
Down into our groove
To make a new sound now
To make a new sound now, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah!

Ok, time to boil jars for jam. Whatta life.

Separation bites

2009-09-06T20:57:00.010-06:00

It's been a heckuva year so far.

Here's but one example of what in the rear-view mirror looks like a major trend.

The outcome of recent events has left me feeling like an ass to some of my family. On the other hand, I don't feel obligated to get into it with these people just because I'm from the same fucked-up family. I keep coming back to this fundamental reality for me: I don't want the kind of drama that swirls around them in my life any more. I still believe it doesn't need to be that way, and years of experience are bearing this out handily.

Since living closer to these folks, I've picked out some family: my husband and child and mother and best friend. With them I've found another love and acceptance that is sweeter and truer and more direct in a way there's never room for in the crises or the utter absences of the characters in my nuclear family. Sure, I miss that chance with my family of origin to connect and overcome our differences to find out what we have in common. Yet every darned time, the cost seems so terribly high.

I did find it exciting to clear out some massive swaths of space earlier this year. Made a big, overwhelming task shrink way smaller in one fell swoop. It was a fun demonstration of what could be done in a day.

But what little I have to offer never feels like enough. Especially if you start talking about compensating for a certain kind of parenting lacking any valuing of emotional intelligence and growth nor any acceptable physical reality except looking good.

Gee whiz, I'm a tough audience.

And about the drama: I know, I know, I'm the one who threw the shitfit at the end. Look, that was a bit of sleight of hand (and I was pissed at the way something was done with me). Plus: things the rest of the family did not know nor was it any of my business to share were going down at the same time. I threw a wall up to try and help with that.

I've gotten pretty good at getting the biggest bang for my travel bucks and got us a great deal and the right number of rooms. One of my family was amazing, relentless: wheedled for our locations and commitments and forced me to declare out loud that I didn't want to stay "with the others." That one wanted every detail under their control, everyone in place at all the right times.

Thing is, I stew about this murky stuff of origin, but mostly I find it preferable to not go into it with them, not stir it up. I feel sad about that in turn because I do know what I'm giving up. I know we won't have many more opportunities to reminisce about people we have known and places we have been, relatives we share. I know I'm sacrificing our communal desire to reclaim shared memories. But I find I have to let go of my need to share that journey toward an old age in which the more we age, the more we recall the older stories. But at the end of the argument I keep coming around to that small still voice in my gut telling me yes or in this case no no no not that way don't.

And yet, I'm reconnecting with others in my family, and putting one foot in front of the other, and continuing to work on my stories. They're all I have, except for the vast, buoying love of my current family, my family of choice.

You know what? It's true: love hurts. But separation bites.

Thanks for listening.

My kid's class has too many kids!

2009-08-28T11:36:00.007-06:00

*Edit 9/6/09* I've been remiss in not updating you. Good news! They made a new class for our grade. As soon as I sent the letter below, I got a reply from the superintendent saying that I should talk to our principal. There was a letter from him in my child's classwork folder saying they were creating another class. Hooray!

***

This is what I wrote this morning.

Open letter to Dr. Chris King, Superintendent of Boulder Valley Schools, and the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education:

As a parent of a child attending third grade at Crest View Elementary this year, I am acutely aware of the difficulties you face: in particular those of balancing the Boulder Valley School District's budgetary concerns with the vast need for the rich resources the Boulder Valley School District has to offer. We in Boulder have set a high bar in the educational community, and in the problems we continually join to
address and correct in our schools. As a parent at a large elementary school that seems to be growing every day, I am grateful for the wide range of expertise and enrichment my daughter has been able to receive at Crest View. Crest View has proved a great resource for our family. Our daughter has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) and nearly every teacher she has encountered at Crest View has supported her education and enrichment.

Now that my child's class roster contains 32 children, however, I am concerned that my child, who has special needs (sensory integration and vision issues, along with difficulty tuning out distractions) will find having so many kids in one room an obstacle to being able to pay attention in the classroom. One day this past week, her homework was to list a few wishes about school. She wrote, "I wish I could sit next to someone quieter" (she's at a cluster of six desks) and "I wish we had no squeaky doors."

Parents and teachers have told me Ms. Baxter is considered a part-time addition to the third-grade teaching staff, and so the ratio per teacher is considered by the district to be 25-to-1, but I fear that statistic does not reflect the reality of keeping 32 kids at once moving in a steady stream through the study, work, eating, and playing that fill their 6.5 hours at school each day. Only a subset of their time involves
the children being pulled out into smaller groups. Each third-grade classroom has 31 or 32 kids; the fact is, it takes more time to get 32 kids to wash their hands before snack and lunch. When it's snowy, out of 32 kids, more are going to need help with boots and jackets. Of course, these class sizes will demand far more from the teacher at conference times. And more children need that one-on-one time with their primary teacher every day, something for which there is no substitute. Some kids are fine -- you can just see they know how to get their needs met and get their work done. But my child has benefited so much more from her classroom time when she has had that one-on-one time and been able to develop a relationship with her teacher. I don't want her and the other kids to lose their access to their teachers; the kids are at an age when their teachers' understanding and encouragement may make all the difference in whether they become more or less engaged in their schooling in the future.

Dr. King, I urge you and the Board of Education to consider add another third-grade classroom at Crest View immediately. Our neighborhood is growing, and will continue to grow as new families move or relocate from other neighborhoods into the new houses being built near the existing Four Mile Creek development at 47th and Jay Road. As the economy rebounds, more families with young children will be able to afford housing in the neighborhoods surrounding Crest View, which will drive further infill in the area as well.

We are only going to continue to need more teaching and other resources at Crest View, yet I believe our community is prepared to do what they can to support their school. One of the reasons we chose to stay at our neighborhood school was the high caliber and tremendous commitment of the community toward Crest View. I am still impressed. I contribute time in the classroom with the kids and additional volunteer work on the Garden to Table program, and am certain I'm not the only parent or community member who relishes these opportunities to give back. I also believe this means you could ask us, the Crest View community, and we would be there for you with our energy and expertise to help you find and implement solutions to these problems. We are all talented and smart people who have a huge stake in our school. I hope we can all work together on finding the most creative ways to maximize our limited resources, and I hope we can act quickly for the sake of relieving the children and their teachers from the pressures they are facing every day.

Scraped: They paved it and put in a parking spot

2009-08-27T10:22:00.002-06:00

Busy, busy! We're all back! The kid's back in school, and everyone's back at work. Me at home, and with my writing, which is going like gangbusters out of the gate already. I'm three days into this novel I keep thinking I could write really fast. It's a story about a woman who escapes her abusive husband on a Vespa, and I even have a working title for it and people and situations. There's even a research component coming right up, but I promise not to let that get in the way of the storytelling.

What I haven't thought of is a new name for my character, as she'll have to switch. It's holding me up a little. I'll have to put it in my head and shake it up at dance class, which is in 20 minutes.

So I was just dropping in to say hello to whomever is out there still. I'm glad to be home and back into the writing, and we have projects and things a comin' 'round the pike, so stay tuned.

Oh, and they finally scraped the little house at 1227-1/2 High Street away. My tree is still there, though. It's two parking spaces now. Nothing left standing but the trees that had stood on either side of the tiny house. All gone.

My life under glass, 40 years later

2009-07-26T22:57:00.008-06:00

Going to the poster art exhibit at the Denver Art Museum gave me the odd sensation of seeing the stuff I stared at every day in shop windows and tacked onto phone poles hermetically sealed and mounted on stark white expanses of wall. I both wanted to say something about having been there then, and I also wanted not to, as I wandered through the crowds and peered at the barely scrutable poster art.

I enjoyed seeing the kids, including my own, so thrilled with the "animations" -- different images were printed in different colors on the same print so that when three different colors of light were shone on the one poster, it appeared to move, like a holographic image.

I also liked making a poster as a keepsake at the museum exhibit. I had laughed and rolled my eyes at myself when I saw how many posters advertised Big Brother and the Holding Company shows. I knew I would never be able to pinpoint the show I had seen from my perch on the piano on the same stage as Janis Joplin, where in a fringed orange dress she belted out her raspy tunes and totally surprised me by being white, not black. I think we saw that show not at the Avalon Ballroom but at the Straight Theater, because I am pretty sure we came into the theater from Haight. But my memory may be misleading me; I was only four or five and quite overwhelmed by the company we were in -- all those scary looking Hells Angels.

This exhibit seemed to display an amazingly comprehensive collection of the bills advertising the explosion of music that would come to be known as part of "the San Francisco Sound." There must have been twenty or thirty for Big Brother and the Holding Company; there were probably double that for Quicksilver Messenger Service. (Someone with time on his or her hands and a nice database could make a sweet graphic displaying the frequency with which the bands appear on the posters from that era. That would be fun to see.)

We saw more than a few bizarre sounding lineups, but one thing I noticed was how the blues still provided the primary idiom, the musical lingua franca that everyone spoke and some people more than others were able to subvert to their own voices and messages. I was often uncomfortable with the blues -- especially the songs with the "I'm-your-daddy" lyrics. Ick. I loved the lazy sweetness of Taj Mahal's music, but disliked him for his cover of that horrid "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" song. Quicksilver's "Suzy Q" made me equally queasy. Some things you just know are wrong from the get-go, and I was sure about all that.

I had a nice moment of familiarity with myself when I looked at the Zap Comix books the DAM had on display and felt a sense impatience with the abstraction of the particular comic strip shown. I didn't particularly enjoy trying to decipher all that crazily drawn, difficult-to-read text back then; that graphic opacity impaired my enjoyment of the artwork and storytelling, if there was a story at all. I still feel that way. Give me a bold and clear design that supports its message, or at the very least a good story. I am still not likely to spend too much time on something unless I find it extremely beautiful or illuminating.

But goodness, I'm still feeling whomped upside the head by my recent revelation that no, my baby sister was no longer with us when we saw the televised moon landing on July 21, 1969, at the house of some rare friends who had a set (Pam and someone, Jewish friends). That must have been where we were staying when I went to that preschool for a few days. I wonder: Was driving my parents crazy then, asking whether my sister was coming back or would we meet her somewhere later, even though I'm sure I'd been told what had happened. I never saw her after she died, but I did see her unconscious, which felt like it was nearly the same thing. I think I went once to where she is buried.

And there's more to hope for and think good thoughts for than ever these days: my body, my family's and friends' bodies. Yet there's only so much I can think or say or do in a day, and again it's time to rest and recharge.

It's not what they say; it's what you do.

2009-07-23T08:46:00.003-06:00

Coming into my own.

What does that little cliche mean to me?

Being this age I'm starting to see how little it matters what anyone thinks -- it's all what you do. I know it sounds teenagerishly obvious, but so what? There it is.

So how do I make my time here matter most?

I seriously think I just have to make myself sit down and crank out the first completed draft of my novel in two weeks (I am not kidding!), working crazy hours and letting myself just get immersed in it. I am going to need rolls of wide butcher paper for mapping the storyline, just to keep myself straight with all the details, but I think doing that will help it work. (This reminds me of Matthue and Brett's creativity workshop revelations about how I see and hear and mentally map things out, which I have ever since found marvelously helpful.)

I had some notion yesterday that I was going to sit down and write for ten hours, but other things kept beckoning and I kept not sitting down to write that at all until I had no more time left. So I thought, where do I get the idea I am going to sit down and write ten chapters? I'm good for an hour or three at once usually, but that's about it. It's hard work, in the way that visiting a museum is hard work. It's a lot to take in at the museum, and a lot to process as a writer, and sometimes I don't even want to go there. But I am always glad when I do, and I would love to just plunge all the way into that story and finish it.

In a recent writing group discussion about why we write, I said in part to reach out to people,to say it's okay to be you. Another person in the group was surprised. She felt it was always just about getting in touch with the event or person or emotion of the scene, the memory.

I do these projects that have been calling out to me: Making movies. Writing my book. Writing songs. A libretto? I am so ignorant of all this! I have several great projects in the immediate future: I have to recut my gomez movie so it's waaaay shorter (i.e., under ten minutes). I have another good idea for a short film I could do over the next few days if everyone is around. (Note to me: It would be great if the chickens would come back from Ft. Collins. Maybe my neighbor would bring them back for this reason if I asked nicely. And gave her a nice bottle of wine.)

Hmm, a young, searching person in the lead in the musical -- Zac Efron wondering if he's gay. What? Musical?! I still can't believe I'm saying this out loud.

There it is.

Feeling it and singing it -- at the same time?!

2009-07-18T13:29:00.003-06:00

Today's dance class revelation: I truly don't know if I could be a rock star. They sing it every time as if they mean it, because they do, I realized. (There's that sincerity dictum I learned about from Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music -- that people who make great actors and rock stars understand something about being able to tap into sincere wellsprings of feeling to do what they do, and people can usually instantly recognize when they're faking it).

Today I felt all my emotions when we danced to the Michael Franti song about bringing our children home, pleading to stop their sacrifice in the name of war and commerce. I danced my greatest yearnings and deepest entreaties, in the spirit of a Quaker, with me plain, naked of soul, nothing interposed between me and that which I begged for mercy. I even had to go out of the hall and cry for a minute after that song, which is unusual. But after a minute I drank some water and went on with the dance.

That's the part of being a rock star that would be hard: feeling it and keeping it all moving forward when singing a song like "Time To Go Home" ("Don't take our boys away, no, don't take our girls away.... It's time to go home") or the end of Bonnie Raitt's "Louise" ("Well, everybody thought it kind of sad / When they found Louise in her room / They'd always put her down below their kind / Still some cried when she died this afternoon / Louise rode home on the mail train / Somewhere to the south I heard 'em say"). How do you feel it without succumbing to it?

The most familiar dance

2009-07-03T10:13:00.002-06:00

I think I have a crush on my dance class.

I can see how over time my teacher might have to fend off students who develop crushes on her, because she is such a good teacher, in the fullest sense of the words. But I really think for me I am in love with the knowledge I am getting from doing this kind of dancing. Somehow this particular mad amalgam of dance forms, martial arts, Feldenkrais movement principles, Yoga, and self-expression, imbued with music, my favorite art form of all, is so familiar to me.

The dance forms, which as I get deeper familiarized with them, work with the body's natural flow, our natural inclinations toward rhythm and grace. This dance is familiar in the way I recognize a neighborhood in London I've never visited before, or already know how to cook a food in a French way (even though I've hardly cracked that Gastronomique Larousse that sits so pretentiously on a shelf).

This dancing opens me to more, keeps me in the present moment. I see and feel when I slip out of the present, but it gets easier all the time to slip right back into the now.

Greetings from the non-Midwest

2009-07-02T16:32:00.005-06:00

Life keeps unfolding in bizarre and compelling ways, always keeping me guessing. I went and helped my uncle out a bit, but haven't been able to bring myself to go back since.

I'm sitting at my messy kitchen table gearing up for a new phase of the day: the one where I go to the grocery store for a couple of items for dinner and the coming few days, then going to a dance class. Yum! Flageolet beans are soaking and a quick, barely-kneaded bread dough is sitting in a warm oven doing its yeasty thing.

Daily life is about the most basic of things. Yesterday a trip downtown on bikes turned dramatic when I made a mistake that caused an accident. Luckily we weren't in heavy traffic, but there were some scrapes and freakouts, and justified mistrust. But my poor kid might have felt worse when I accused myself of being a terrible mother out loud. "Where's the tissue box, Mom?" she asked, brimming over before she could find it.

Today I had fun making lunch: gluten-free mac and cheese from scratch, with apples, carrots, and brown rice chips. Delish, all of it, and everyone liked and ate most everything, which is always satisfying.

A couple of days ago, we returned home from Iowa, where the heat wasn't bad and the company was good. I still feel I stick out like a sore thumb there, because I seem to have come from folks who were still headed west long after these folks' ancestors settled in the Midwest. (Just a point of clarification for non-Coloradoans: Colorado is not the Midwest in our minds -- at least not until you get far enough out on the plains, in the eastern part of the state that you can't see the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.)

Often communication was easiest through the pets that circled us and begged for scraps from willing feeders. (I joked that dogs think I don't know their names because I'm always telling them, "Dream on.") One of the relatives spent most of her time treating her dogs like toddlers, taking every step with them and attending to their every need as any good mother would. And instead of being horrified, I found it sweet, and only a little sad that she didn't feel as comfortable with the people around her. But they all have a way of not talking about things that is, shall I say, a bit alien to me.

Of course I feel I am alien to them in my analytical qualities. I am always thinking of situations on many levels, trying to see context while trying to hear what people are really saying. In short, a lot of people would say I think too much, have too much time on my hands. Maybe, but I have something I want to make with it. Something I need to say. Because if I try to spill out all these complicated feelings about the food industry right there in their heartland kitchens, it won't be pretty. I can't do that to them. There's an interesting set of choices at work: it's okay to put one's energy into remodeling a bathroom or a porch, and then to talk about one's choices and travails, but they're not going to talk about that person's parents, or this person's tragedies.

All the same, it's good to see everyone up close, to smile and laugh and eat together until you want to burst. It's good to know we're all just who we are, and it's fun for me to be in a group where the grandma sits at the top of this small mountain of people. Events like that involving my own grandparents have been sparse indeed. I can't fill one hand with instances. Amazing. And here's this lovely lady who's had kids and grandkids and still laughs and gets around at 89.

And these aren't folks who are going to let any of theirs fall through the cracks, either. I saw that in how everyone looks after the youngest, who has some special needs, shall we say, but whose community is rising up to meet her.

Aw, jeez, it's raining again!

Mind-body resonance: The opposite of cognitive dissonance

2009-05-27T22:55:00.008-06:00

It occurs to me that I don't know whose idea it was to live in the town where we landed after the blitz of losing my sister 40 years ago, just before I turned six. We had left California within days of her death for Colorado, to settle in the liberal enclave of Boulder, which would be better than the cowtown that Denver was in the 1970s since the Beats had all hightailed it for the coasts. Now I see the wisdom of it. I see it could be in part my father's way of handing down something he was himself given even though the values he espouses have always tended to involve total freedom from the strictures of money and status. His gift, the gift of growing up in a safe and secure enclave, a place where I could - and did - sink roots, came at no personal cost to him, an added benefit in his eyes I am certain.

But growing up in idyllic places didn't necessarily shelter me from the evils of the world. I lost a sister and a substantial portion of my innocence to the brutality that plagued us from His Favorite Chair throughout my childhood in my laid-back college town. The times I tried to bring my grievances to the perpetrator of this violence in my life, he's pulled a Ronnie Reagan on me and disclaimed any memory of alleged events. He's never seemed particularly contrite or sorry about not knowing how to parent and not trying hard to do it when he had the chance. In recent years he has asked me to paper over all that – what he calls forgive – but I haven't felt the love that would inspire me to forgive. That's what it comes down to. I've felt the obligation conferred by family roles, but I have not felt a deep and unconditional love for who I have been and who I have become, nor for how I have chosen to live my life.

Also, I can't ignore the din of that weird and constant superliminal tallying, his continuous attempt to leverage as much influence as possible so as to claim you on his list of Friends I Drop In On When In Town (FIDIOWITs).

Thing is, you might be surprised at two things about him: the steadfastness of the FIDIOWITs who will see him year in and year out, who will let him sleep in their guest rooms and allow him to commandeer their kitchens to make coffee with great ceremony at various times of the day; you might also raise your eyebrows at the high turnover rate among his FIDIOWITS, as some recognize a certain modus operandi and turn away from its strange fascination.

Many a friend of mine has laughed at me when I yearned for coffee on the sluggish slope of an afternoon, but those times are also when I also recall my father’s rhythms – inevitably accompanied by memories of how he imposed his cycle upon everyone else. On one infamous rafting trip a few years ago, my father stripped to nothing in the middle of camp and proceeded to set a skillet on a stove and roast and hand-grind his coffee beans, then boil water and drip a pot of fresh coffee. I had stopped going rafting with him years earlier, when I'd realized I never again wanted to be dependent on him, especially in a car with him at the wheel. (If you’re going on rafting trips, there are always shuttles involved, and so it’s usually unavoidable to share cars a couple of times during the trip.) It helps that my dear husband is shy of whitewater rafting, too, so I figure we may as well all heed those instincts. With every passing year, I feel less of a need to pursue great risks for exciting payoffs, as I feel more invested in my life and loves. (And my acquisition of mountain biking skills in the past five years has suffered grievously as a result.)

To my sister, my father called my adamant feelings toward him a "grudge." There's a kernel of truth there: No, I haven't let go of everything. Especially not if letting go means pretending nothing ever happened. I haven't let go if letting go means ignoring all the scars, those dense, fibrous barriers that exist between us even now.

I'm still pissed off about some of this ancient history to call him "my birthfather" when I talk about him. One of the reasons for the endurance of this anger is the deprivation his presence imposed on the rest of us when I was growing up. There's a long backstory, but he didn't exactly fulfill the potential his parents saw for him (another detail that makes the Gilmore Girls' story familiar, except theirs is ultimately secure, funny, and loving instead of chaotic, violent, and disturbing). So much of the time he seemed to resent us, his family, for holding him back personally and financially. He has been squirrelly about money as far back as I can remember. My mother had to beg him for enough money for the absolute basics to run the household; he used every ounce of his power to persuade her that she should not have a job of her own.

The sure signs of the prism through which he saw the world were the first accusations he hurled at others from drunken lips, just after that slam of the glass of whiskey onto the table signifying the moment his inner alcoholic stew had roiled to a sputter and fume, spilling over its pot. Deceitful! Secretive! Selfish! he would cry, lashing out while we women and children ran for cover. Hours later it would be like sifting through the wreckage at a battlefield, however subtle the revelations of the landscape. We were always on high alert as we scanned for broken things or worse, bruised or broken people. We didn't know who would come back to the house and the chair in the living room and the dinner table and the whiskey bottle that night or the next, whether that man would be angry or contrite, whether the wounds inflicted this time would be visible damage to a face or emotional lacerations. At any given time the odds always seemed about equal, with one option appearing far worse and more potentially destructive than the other.

And everyone wondered why I was falling asleep in my classes after lunch all through junior high and high school. I was finally relaxing a little by then every day, catching up on my rest before I had to steel myself once again to face home.

I find it odd now that our father now appears to think we as his children are interested in what he has, when to me it's only stuff. He has nothing that I feel belongs to me. It feels a bit ironic, though, in that he always accused his father of attaching strings to every gift, requiring hoops to be jumped or barrels cleared for every contribution he was expected to put up for school or anything else. Now my father seems to be grasping for that power himself, but I see him coming up empty-handed again and again, his hooks still baited.

We might have gone on being tolerant of one another for years but I threw the wrench into the works a couple of years back when I realized I did not trust him not to say or do something offensive around me or my child. I told him that his fundamental disrespect for women was incompatible with how I am raising my kid. Nothing I see or hear about him convinces me that has really changed in this respect (or disrespect, as the case may be). And there's the he's-doing-his-best-with-his-limited-set-of-tools argument, but even that's worn awfully thin. I see how far my mother and I have come in our adult lives, and I know many more who have risen above or gone beyond their family's or even their own expectations for themselves and made themselves better and more loving people.

For me, another evening spent propping up a myth of family closeness indicated by the time spent sitting through another recital of a many-times-told travel anecdote is not enough. I deserve more than that from my friends, and I give more of that to my friends.

Furthermore, I don't see an obligation to take care of him someday no matter what simply by virtue of his being my elder. He spent so much of his life trying to disclaim responsibility for me as quickly as he could that I feel not allowing him close enough to me to treat me in that way again is a justifiable and proportional reaction.

The great news from this side of the familial divide: refusing to engage and "forgive" doesn't mean I need to act any differently from how I truly feel. I continue to feel that honoring my own truths has been among the most healing things I have ever done. I give myself a nice pat on the back for this. Thanks, me.

Relief

2009-05-22T22:03:00.005-06:00

What a relief. I got a call from the Boulder Police officer last night and she told me that the driver in question is no longer driving that bus. Yesterday was much better then the few days that preceded it. It was traumatic but appears to be over.

I don't know why he is no longer driving that route.

I am very pleased with how seriously this was taken. The last thing the police officer on the case told me, besides the case number, was that the police would be showing the information they had gathered to the DA's office so a decision could be made about whether to pursue harassment charges.

The most difficult part of this experience, besides being forced to think about the worst that can happen, which no one really wants to do, was that as soon as all these questions came up about his behavior with the kids, I wanted action.

And truly, this was pretty fast action, considering all the "We have to go through proper channels"es I heard. It makes me wonder: did the police find anything questionable in his record, something the background check didn't catch? Did he quit? Is he driving somewhere else? Many questions and speculations remain, but I'm glad my daughter and the other kids on that bus don't have to worry about those bus rides home.

And I'm glad she told me how she felt. It meant she had hope in her mind that I could help her solve this problem. I think she was surprised and pleased at how seriously I took it. Our actions formed a circle of trust in each other and ourselves, and in others, too. She took risks in telling me, but I took her discomfort seriously. I took a lot upon myself (confronting the driver directly first, and then talking with the principal), but I also quickly saw that I couldn't decide what was legal and how he should be dealt with and needed help from people who were trained and skilled in that.

The kids are always learning about community in their school lessons, but between the freaky bus driver experience and the past two days of harvest/salad feast/second plantings, this week was positively jammed with real-life lessons in community and relying on one another.

Now I feel like I'd like to sleep for a week.

But you don't have to, and she knows it

2009-05-19T15:18:00.004-06:00

Talked to the principal again and called the bus driver's boss today. He said the drivers are subjected to intensive background checks, as I expected, and, "We have to go through our proper channels." The first step, he said, was for him to talk with the driver about the behavior.

Meanwhile, I'm writing all this down, and putting it in a letter.

Today my kid just told me this same bus driver had asked her a few months ago to say something into his phone when it was in recording mode about the other kid he'd paired my kid with, so he could play it back when the other kid got on the bus. She told him, "I'm not going to do that." "But you have to," the driver told her. "No, I'm not going to do that," she said.

She also told me more details about how his seat-blocking game works. Pairs of kids can get to the first two seats, but he blocks the rest of the seats by lying across the second row of seats, while he plays with his iPhone. (Is he taking pictures of them?) So kids who have buddies sit up front, and anyone who wants to sit alone in the back of the bus has to wait for him to clear the way.

See how he isolates kids and creates uncomfortable situations for them? This is predator behavior, friends. This is not someone who cares for children.

The momentum of ideas

2009-05-18T21:59:00.013-06:00

This is what serendipity feels like. It's been so interesting to write my own truths, at last, without wondering what others will think or do if I say the things I remember out loud. And the effects of this experience are traveling like waves and creating actions in other places.

A dear friend said to me, "This is a watershed moment. You'll remember time as before and after this event." So far this is the truth of it.

The little one and I were reading Little House stories the other night and Nellie Oleson's lawlessness sparked a memory for her. My ears had been pricking up lately at her reports about her bus driver. Now she was wishing out loud she wouldn't have the same bus driver anymore. I noticed I had been picking her up more lately.

"He keeps saying stuff to me and to [the other kid], about are we each other's boyfriend and girlfriend. I don't like it."

"You're right," I agreed. "I don't like it either."

She then started telling me what her bus driver had been doing.

I said, "I'll go talk to him on Monday. I will pick you up at school, and I will talk with him after school."

After school, I met my child at her classroom and came back out to where her bus had pulled in, the last one, at the end of the bus circle. I stepped onto the bus and told him my daughter had said he had said some things about her and another kid that were making her feel uncomfortable.

Sitting back and affecting a relaxed slump, he smiled and said, "Oh, I think there's a misunderstanding. That wasn't it at all. This was just something the kids had started playing at, and I was just keeping it going." Winking a little, like he was in on their joke, their buddy, you know.

"OK," I said, in a neutral way (that I learned from watching the show Sports Night and that really means "OK, sure, you believe that, but no, I do not"). I looked him in the eye and told him that I had once had issues with that kid and I absolutely do not want anyone encouraging him in that direction.

"I think you're misunderstanding what happened," he insisted. "This was just a game that the kids had started playing."

Out of the corner of my eye while I was in this scene, I was also observing what my kid was doing. Initially, she had shyly stepped back, away from the intensity of the confrontation. But she stepped in closer and kind of perked up when he started to reiterate that "the kids had started it." This time he looked right at her when he said it.

I felt like the wizened old woman of the fairy tale, the questing hero groveling before her after having come up with the wrong answer. Only he wasn't groveling at all. He was saying, "I'm right. Believe me."

I didn't think my kid was having any of it either.

It was when he showed zero contrition that my hackles went up. I saw no mutual desire to protect our youth from the inevitable but a-little-longer-delayable confusion of hormones and desire and misinformation in equal measures.

"They're little kids," I insisted to the driver. "That kind of talk is inappropriate, and makes them uncomfortable."

He protested a little more, but I made sure I got the final word: "I don't want anyone to encourage any more of that inappropriate talk." He smiled and nodded. I left with my child, who will not ride the bus with that driver again.

"What he said wasn't true," my kid told me as soon as we had walked away from the bus. "The kids didn't start that game. The bus driver was saying that stuff. We weren't saying it." People, kids included, know when they are being lied to.

It kept on rolling forward, this little train we set in motion. We went home, after I'd left a note for my kid's principal to call me. He reached me half an hour later and I told him what I had just said to the bus driver.

"Who's the adult here?" he asked immediately. "Exactly," I said, glad he saw the problem as I did. He apologized for not always being out at the bus circle to see the kids off at the end of the day, and he assured me that he will talk to that driver tomorrow.

After this, my kid and I were both feeling good. Then I said, "I really do want to talk to the mom of the other kid the driver had been teasing along with you. I'd think she'd want to protect him just as much as I want to protect you. I want to protect him as much as I want to protect you."

"Okay," she said, totally game. "It feels really good to do this," she added, as we hatched our plan to talk to other parents of kids who ride that bus.

I felt the same way. I had taken my complaint to the instigator first but had not been heard. My kid noticed it too, saying, "I don't think he was really listening to you." (Some of that was going both ways by the end of that confrontation, wasn't it?) Now I had to work my way up the chains that connect him to these children.

We knocked on the doors where the kids live who ride the same bus. We surprised everyone with our story, but everyone to a person exhibited the proper disgust and outrage at the behaviors we described. One kid said she felt the driver had singled her out for teasing "a few times," too. I felt bad for my timing with a fellow mom who was in the eye of a hurricane of houseguests and activities, but she was concerned and said she'd definitely call me in the morning if she couldn't call back tonight.

After I had dropped a one-minute rundown of the situation as we saw it on hurricane mom, the other child whom the driver had targeted in his little "game" came up to me, looked me right in the eye, and said, enunciating every word: "I know exactly what you are talking about."

"Thanks for telling me that. I really appreciate it." I told him warmly, meaning every word.

I was bursting with pride by then, in every one of us. I told another neighbor mom, who was just as disturbed as I but added that her kids wouldn't be affected after this year because they were changing schools anyway and they'd be carpooling. I told her I told my kid she doesn't have to ride this bus ever again. I think she was chewing on that when we walked back home.

The details kept rolling in. The puzzle pieces weren't creating a picture I relished seeing, but it was one clear picture nonetheless. My little one remembered how the driver would act nice to her and say she looked cute, but she didn't feel like he meant it. She said sometimes he would "lie down across the seats" and block a kid from getting to the seats in the back "until it's time for me to drive the bus," he'd say.

She had started feeling anxious about having to ride the bus home, and they are only on the bus for about two minutes. She told me the driver never teased them during the times they were parked on the bus circle with the doors open, when a grown-up might hear him, or when they were getting off the bus where we awaited them at the park. "He always says things when we're driving." During the two-minute ride.

Now I think back to when I came down hard on a neighbor's kid for teasing my kid a certain way and I'm sad that the solution I advocated to her was to "sit up front near the bus driver." Ugh. This is a moment when parenting flat out hurts.

But I have been praising her to the skies lately for being so brave, for trusting her feelings and instincts, and for telling me what she needed me to know so I could protect her. And I didn't give her any special reward (unless you count the popsicle in the afternoon and the ice cream dessert -- it was hot today!). But I didn't associate the sweets with the events of the day. I wanted all that good feeling about doing the right thing and protecting our friends to be its own reward, and I felt like a good, strong mama for that, too.

Of course I also felt a little sorrow at my own loss, at the fact that I didn't always have someone who knew better in my court when it counted. That my mother didn't have anyone in her court either, until she started to see what was right and wrong and aligned with people who had her best interests at heart for the first time in her life. My mother still apologizes to me for what she could not possibly have learned from her own emotionally challenged parents nor my messed-up cookie of a father.

It is great to be all the mama bear I have become, though. I see so much value in protecting my little kid and letting her be little as long as she wants to stretch that out, because there's no going backward once you've left the land of little-kiddom. I see no reason to force her to watch scary, violent films early in her life, nor to make her aware of stuff she can't even conceive of yet. With my own experience and hindsight, I see no value in making her cross lines like these before she's ready, willing, and able. Before it's all about her choices.

One of the reasons I knew she was telling the truth, I told her, was that none of this was coming from her. She's not going around making eyes at the other kid, and the other kid's not doing any of this in her direction (and in fact has said he likes her as a friend). This is why I found it so inappropriate and disturbing that the bus driver was projecting this onto them. During their two-minute ride home. (That's the detail I'm choking on at the moment. Those seem to come in waves.)

Standard disclaimer: This all happened today; other events recounted occurred within the last two weeks. I stand by every detail. I can verify times, calls made and received, verbal exchanges, etc. My daughter's story hasn't changed since she has started telling it to me. (I told her she was a good detective. She's done a fantastic thing in recalling exactly what it was about him that made her feel uncomfortable.)

Tomorrow: Taking it Upstairs

Be decisive with an egg

2009-05-14T21:36:00.003-06:00

Thought of a good memory today: I was cooking an egg, something I learned to do early in my life. But I must have been dithering somehow, because my father passed along a bit of advice. "Be decisive with eggs." It was good, timely advice he had once been given, and it helped me become a better cook of eggs and many other dishes. Many people's advice and skills contributed to my learning the skills that have turned out to be the among the most important skills, but that advice has helped me many times over.

You do know why this is a skill worth an extra mention, right? If you need to flip a pair of fried eggs, you'll have a better chance of leaving the yolks unbroken if a) you use good, fresh eggs, and b) you firmly and quickly slide your spatula under the eggs and turn them gently in your well oiled and well heated pan. You have commit to cooking your egg because it does not take much time to cook an egg.

Heated olive oil and butter at 7 on the stove dial, untill the butter foams, then the foam begins to subside. You may need to reduce the heat. Cook the egg until it is a little softer than you prefer, for it will keep cooking for another minute or two after you remove it from the heat.

More on my little sociopath*

2009-05-09T18:24:00.005-06:00

Once I had labeled that man by his correct name, in yesterday's blog post, I said I could think of a thousand examples, and I've been mentally listing them ever since. Here are a few things that have come up today.

Learning how to feel deserving came later than I expected, but I am glad I got there eventually. More than ten years ago, a dear friend whom we had followed around the Bay Area moved here, right around the time we decided to move back. She didn’t find her niche here, and during her stay in our home state she decided she wanted to be a screenwriter, so she took herself off to L.A. to make a go of it. Before she moved away, my friend essentially gave me her job. I started doing the work and realized I was well suited to it. I had a great skill set and the technical aptitude for the work. I quickly became an integral part of a team of developers; they liked working with me because I caught on quickly and wasn’t intimidated when I interviewed them about how the product was supposed to work and along the way was able to find out how it really worked and do a better job writing about it as a result.

But after my friend “gave” me her job, it took me a while to feel I truly deserved it. (She didn't really give me the job at all; the company she worked for hired me, after she recommended me and I was screened and interviewed and successfully worked through my first year there as a contractor and they made me a permanent employee. But I still didn’t feel deserving on some level. In part, my salary had nearly doubled over my previous job’s within the space of a year; it grew even more soon after when they raised salaries to achieve pay parity with our Bay Area compatriots at the same company.

So I have long puzzled over why I didn’t keep up with that friend when she moved back to California. For I still love and admire her greatly, but I was uncomfortable with her after that. Just today, with this cascade of thoughts and experiences I have been recontextualizing having read Martha Stout’s book The Sociopath Next Door, I finally had an insight about that. I think it wasn’t just that I didn’t feel deserving. I had come to feel I had taken something that didn’t belong to me. That if I had something that good, I must have acquired it by dubious means. On some subconscious level I think I felt I stole that job. Or maybe I felt too indebted to her, that I could never repay her and therefore our relationship would be forever imbalanced (because that job was such a huge gift to me and enabled us to buy our house and live where we wanted to live). And what do we do when we feel we have wronged someone somehow? We avoid them (well, those of us who have a conscience about what we've done). Looking back I see how silly an idea that was, but it fits in with all the other ideas and thoughts that have been coming up since I recognized my father for what he is.

Another “cascade moment” for me, as I this morning dubbed this flow of recollections that like puzzle pieces are all clicking neatly into place and revealing the big, bad picture, was one I came about by a weird little set of associations this morning.

I was listening to the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band,” which comes up in the random rotation every so often. And I smiled at the line about telling the “fire from the ice,” because this phrase had been a mondegreen for me, a misheard lyric that I had long heard as “the buyer from the price.” I think I was 25 or 30 when I first looked up and said, “Hold on, that makes no sense!” and went to look up the real lyric, or maybe noticed a friend not closing their lips in the same places and ways I was.

It made me think of how everything was always being measured and valued and calculated when I was growing up. Trust was one. It was as if there was a finite supply of trust between me and my father that he was always judging to come up short for some reason I had given him to mistrust me: a fib or fudge or lie he caught me in. Some of it must have been lost to evaporation; there was always less than I thought there should have been.

And the valuation of things and people, the continual calculation, meant we, my father's wife and children, were just a drain. He made us feel that way, too, when he doled out little bits of money to my mother for groceries or refused to pay for school activities that I wanted to participate in. My mother said when she had precancerous symptoms, he told her, “You should go to a different doctor. They’re just after your money.” Much later she said to herself, “What money?” We didn’t have any, according to my father. In high school, he was reporting a yearly income of $14,000, probably so those evil colleges I was thinking of attending couldn’t get any of our money.

My sister recently told my mother she thinks the business he owned and operated for years was more or less a front, that he had money independently all along, from his father and from whatever side deals he had going. This fits, too; "The Shop" was a source of stability and identity (look at that man with his own business! Providing for his family!), but it was also his alibi (“I had to work late; Dave didn’t drop his car off until I was about to leave and then I had to shoot the shit with Ben when he came to pick up his car.”), a respectable cover, a place to meet with the guys and do what he wanted behind the shop’s rolling door. Sure, he did some work there and came home with black fingernails and stinking of grease and solvent, but when I started asking him about the reputations of other mechanics and other shops in town, as an adult who had chosen not to buy a pre-fuel-injection Volvo, he’d always say something like, “I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.” Funny how every other mechanic in town was crooked but he was so upright. He always said he was better because he would explain how things worked and why they didn’t to his customers, and this time was his gift to them. In retrospect I think that was more patter, more sleight-of-mouth, so to speak, and I think a lot of his customers were bored to tears by those lengthy explanations and just wished they could pay him for his work and take their cars home. Most of them, unlike him, were probably not avoiding going home to their families; the ones that were avoiding their nearest and dearest often became his fans, his new shop buddies, his new alibis.

Another, more recent, memory of him telling me about his type of woman. "I like my women slender, pretty, and needy," he said. Rich, or at least financially independent, seems to have been a more recent addition to his list. He doesn't want someone who is after his money. He wants someone he can dominate, and who makes him look good.

I am thinking back to when my aunt told me that my father is “heartbroken” about not having us close to him, but remembering how I felt during the last couple of Thanksgiving gatherings I went to at his place, it felt hollow, like we were all arranged there to maintain his ideal image of himself, but not because he really cared for us. (Remember what he said to my aunt when he saw his granddaughter’s picture? “She’s getting away from me.” And I knew I'd made the right decision in excising him from my life.) Now I hear those words from my aunt and I think, “What heart? Because I haven’t seen much evidence of one.”

The advice Martha Stout gave about following the rule of threes was great, but saddened me, too. The rule is if someone lies or hurts you three times, that’s when you know to run, to cut them out of your life. Because once is an honest mistake, and twice, well, things happen. But three times reveals a habit of deceit and tells you who they are. What’s sad is that I can easily come up with ten lies. And if I can so easily come up with that many, it calls everything he ever said and did that seemed genuine or sincere into question.

* Because he is littler and littler, in my mind: not only physically diminished from the big, scary, imposing guy he once was, but as a human being. He's melllllltinnnng! (Say it in your best Wicked Witch of the West voice.)

My very own sociopath next door

2009-05-08T15:52:00.011-06:00

Some days I question my willingness to write about troublesome topics close to me here on this blog, but I keep coming back to the need to tell my side of my story, because my father has never, ever accepted my version, my truths. Having just finished reading a book called The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout, I have a new perspective on why that is: I don't believe he has a conscience, and so finally I see why my version of the story will never, ever match up with his. Ever.

One of the questions the book left me pondering relates to Stout's contention that sociopaths have no conscience and therefore never see a problem with themselves that needs addressing or fixing. This fits my experience; when told by people near and supposedly dear to him that he had dangerous behaviors that adversely affected not just him but others around him, he always accused everyone else of trying to manipulate him. He never saw us as trying to help him. Now I see why he couldn't conceive of that. But what I am left wondering is whether there are people without a conscience who believe themselves to have a conscience, in their own limited fashion. I think my birthfather sees himself as a moral and upright man; it's just that he doesn't have much capacity for compassion and so can't have a very well developed sense of obligation to others.

Reading that book gave me about fifty aha! moments. I saw a thousand instances where we, as his family, were arranged and manipulated: to make him look like a good person, to provide a cover for his other actions and activities, to be toyed with: battered physically or emotionally into silence or cowering fear. Meanwhile I was supposed to prove that He was Right about raising his children unconventionally, even though the reality of that included a dead child, and meant abuses like subjecting his children to active (as opposed to benign) neglect and countless dangerous situations.

The aha! moment that clinched the author's premise for me was when she related "Hannah's" story. Hannah's father had been a high school principal in a small midwestern city, married and with a daughter (Hannah) who had been accepted to medical school when he went after an unarmed intruder with the gun he kept in his closet and shot him dead outside their home. Hannah's father was convicted of manslaughter, because the attack had been in the street instead of inside their home, which would have been a self-defense killing. The community was in an uproar, and mostly on his behalf: he had no criminal record or known history of violence, and so folks in his community protested the severity of his sentence. It took Hannah years to understand that in many, many ways, her father had not been the nice person or loyal family member he had presented himself as being.

A few years later, Hannah worked up the nerve to visit him in prison. The thing was, Hannah said, she would have expected someone in her father's situation -- in prison, with little to no contact with family nor friends over a couple of years -- to be dejected and downcast. Instead, Hannah said, she was surprised to see this glint in his eye, as if this was the most exciting thing to happen to him in a long time.

When I read Hannah's story, I remembered how I felt when my father came back from Mexico telling the story of his month in a Guatemalan jail for trying to bring fireworks into Mexico in the back of his car, something that would have never occurred to anyone else I know. To him it was just another adventure, another story for him to tell. With that same glint in his eye, he told us far more than we cared about the guys who make hammocks in jail. He brought back hammocks that he then resold to people -- I wheedled hard to get him to give me one. (They are nice hammocks, after all.) But as he told that story again and again after he returned from that journey, I realized I did not want to hear another one of his stories, ever again, and that was when I made the decision to tell him: Don't call me. If I want to get in touch, I will.

Since then he has asked if we could talk, so that he could share his perspective. But I feel I already know what his perspective is, and it's all about him and how we have wrongly judged him. But I'm just not buying what he's selling anymore.

In some ways it seems unhealthy to keep circling this drain that is my father, but reading this book felt like finding a key piece of the puzzle, and talking with my mother is especially reassuring. We keep telling each other, yes, it really was that bad. He really was that bad. And I do feel sad about it, but for me and my mother and stepmother and sisters and brother, and not so much anymore than for his having inherited a lousy set of tools from his parents, which is the story I had been telling until now. Now I feel I am see him more clearly than ever for who and what he really is.

There were so many little flashes of recognition reading that book, and my sadness now comes in response to my beliefs as a child that this was all good and right and normal during my formative years: the thrill-seeking, the substance abuse, the moving from place to place, the moving from person to person without having true intimate attachments to people, the apparent respect and private disdain for others. I could cite a thousand examples, general and specific.

But I liked this book in part not just because it reinforced some things I've only just started to realize about my father, but also because it validated the idea that I did the right thing in cutting him out of my life. Stout says as soon as you see the patterns -- the excessive charm/allure, flattery, the desire for you to pity them as soon as they are in a tight spot, the I'm-right-and-all-you-idiots-are-all-wrong thinking -- the best way to protect yourself from this person is to run. To cut them out of your life completely. This is what I have done, and it feels like it's helped me start moving on with my own life.

Oddly, I told my mother, the book also gave me more compassion for a college writing teacher of mine, the poet Lucille Clifton, who said she could not believe a father would drive drunk with his children in the backseat, as I wrote about in one of my poems. Now I see that despite all the evils she believed in (slavery, hell, the abuse of women), she couldn't fully conceive of a true sociopath. Lucky her, I said to my mother.

Funny things about us

2009-04-26T09:48:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I remembered my friend's theory that when you're in love, that line of hair grows between your belly-button on down.

Today I found the little jar of civet musk that my mother insisted on giving to me because she had to buy some and got too much to keep for herself. What, for all the home perfume making she and I have been doing? No (and no, we're not home perfume designers), because it's this rare extract from a civet cat. Had to have it, just the way she had to stop to check raccoons for a mojo (she finally found one, but not when she was with me, thank goodness). My mother used to eat dirt as a kid -- now of course it's a syndrome with a name: pica. This dirt-seeking must have horrified her genteel mother, born in the early 1900s and escaping Oklahoma as quickly as she learned what it meant to be from there.

I am sure I have bizarre beliefs too, manias that manifest themselves in ways that puzzle my pals. I make up stories when nothing's happening. But right now they all seem so commonplace to me that I can't pick them out.

Believe it!

2009-04-25T10:34:00.003-06:00

Today I am amazed that it's taken me this long to find out what I believe:

I believe in my existence here on this planet.

I believe in dancing, and music, listening, singing, making, or...?

I believe that if there's a "god," or God, we're way too small to know what and why that god-entity is doing.

I believe that concept it's easier for me to understand if I stick an extra "o" in "God": Good.

Conversely, I believe in love. The love of family, including all the friends who become one's adult family along the way.

I believe faith is an appealing idea. As a reality, I've never quite found the right fit. I have faith in the ever-unfolding quality of the world. Everything must pass.

As my mother has always said, "Karma is Karma, neh?"

I believe there's an untapped synergy between the mind and the gut

I believe the medical-industrial complex has egregiously mismatched its collective delusion about what they can fix with their pharmaceutical formulas and created worse problems for many, many people, just because of unexpected side effects of multiple drug interactions.

I believe writing and editing help me stay afloat and move through my life in a constructive way. Without them I could have gone off the rails as a teenager.

I believe listening to all those Who and Stones and Dead and Michael Penn and Michael Franti and Sheryl Crow and Neil Finn and Gomez lyrics has shaped me in ways I'm still trying to understand -- and make the most of.

I love films and yet persist in believing I have an obligation not only to receive stories but also to tell some of my own.

I believe in being a warm lap for a kitty or kid, or a sweetheart.

I believe any two adults of sound mind should legally be able to decide they are lifelong partners. Like I said, I believe in love.

I believe loving and being loved by my husband and daughter makes me a better person every day.

Food Safety Monsantoization Act of 2009

2009-03-20T09:31:00.010-06:00

Oooh, I think we need to do it: Take back our food.

My mind is racing with the possibilities. If this Garden to Table group at my daughter's school could get six beautiful planting beds built and filled with new plants just like that, more people could do sooooo much more. Just today I thought, why not turn another corner of our yard into a neighborhood kids' garden? I have pent-up energy here, along the urge to dig into spring soil, too.

Happy turning of the seasons, and welcome back spring and warm earth and big snows!

But really, back to this gardening thing. We need to grow more of our food supply. There's a bill lurking in a House committee right now, HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. Sounds all right, and has the sound of sweeping legislation, which we need, right? It says it's all about creating a new Food Safety Administration from some of the existing FDA infrastructure.

But wait. There's more.

It doesn't just spin off a new agency from the Food and Drug Administration, an idea that doesn't sound half bad. Instead, it's more like 1984, with food as the focus. I am not kidding. Read it. Or visit this site, which has a great analysis.

The first section my eyes darted to was the list of prohibitions.

Now, as an intellectual exercise and a favor to me, before you are further biased by anything I've said so far (whoops!), ask yourselves who would want such sweeping legislation, legislation that would criminalize farmers who refuse to toe Big Ag's lines?

The answer: Monsanto, among others. Gee, what an anticlimactic answer, I know. But there it is.

So here's where to register your outrage: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

I can't just leave you with that, though. Here's something cool and inspiring one of the Garden to Table folks sent me, as an antidote: http://www.youtube.com/user/dervaes?ob=1

***

Edit: Just saw a link to a blog post by Jill Richardson about what Monsanto really is lobbying for. Good information from the La Vida Locavore blog, which I just learned is a forum for anyone interested in food and food politics.

That great dinner party in the sky

2009-03-16T10:40:00.002-06:00

Just thinking about how odd a question that is: "If you could have some famous person over for dinner, who would it be?"

As if we're all going to get this one magical opportunity to bring someone back to life (or bring someone alive to where we are), and we're going to sit down over a three- or four-hour meal and figure out how to change the world or hear about what it's like to be Miley Cyrus if that's your pick.

I liked the idea someone on Twitter had: "Who would you have over for dinner this week?" It takes the pressure off. You can have Gandhi over this week, and Mother Teresa over next week.

How fresh was it?

2009-03-13T08:41:00.002-06:00

I posted this on Twitter a while ago, but tweets are so fleeting and I love this so much I have to spread it around, share the laughter:

From a Yelp review of a restaurant near me:

Everything tasted really fresh, like a Grand-Master Flash mixtape.

An incredible life

2009-03-12T20:10:00.002-06:00

Some randomly recollected sayings about food, inspired by Michael Pollan's project:

Finish your plate; there are children starving in China/Ethiopia.

If it smells bad, it is bad.

Stepgrandma: If it tastes good, put soap on it.

And an influential song lyric: "Only two things money can't buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes!" -Guy Clark

Another memory: "Let go, let God."

We saw it on bumperstickers (the ones with iridescent-under-black "Easy Does It"), and we heard people say it. To my father, however, it was a complete abdication of all responsibility for one's own thoughts and decisions. To him it was Christians admitting what was wrong with their religion right up front.

It's only now that I can even perceive the alternative, which would be like resting your head on your own pillow at the end of the day: something you know you can relax and rely upon to hold you, to comfort you, to give you respite or renewal. It is only now that I can conceive of being able to rest one's concerns about whether there's a God, or a good, or an Allah or an other, much less exactly what they might be responsible. But Everything?! my mind protests. I don't understand!

Which I think is the point to which I always return. I don't understand. I can't. I'm too small, too imperfect. I can perfect myself/be perfected, which is why I keep getting up every day to see what I can get done today.

But there's still this reckoning I'm doing -- I find I'm having trouble getting on with it, wrapping up and letting go of the past. Have I come to use it as a crutch? The college friend I just found is a lawyer in Los Angeles, and the last place I saw her was in her incredibly old house she lived in with her housemates. I made the faux pas of wiping a floor spill with the kitchen sponge, which called attention to how impregnated with the wear of years that floor was. She had a complicated backstory too, but was on the Erin Brockovich track, uncovering the appallingly public health hazards of living in California's Central Valley (now common knowledge http://www.cababstractsplus.org/abstracts/Abstract.aspx?AcNo=19900500664 but she was one of those covering that story early on). Clearly she wouldn't be where she is if she'd leaned on a crutch, made her refrain, "Oh, how I've been wronged." She must have gone out and said, "I'm going to prove it to those idiots who didn't believe in me every day. I'm going to have an incredible life."

My kid has a great grasp of the existential already. About Webkinz, the popular stuffed animals that have online counterparts the kids can manipulate on the web, my daughter asked, "So if Webkinz are our pets, are we Webkinz' pets?"

Why would you want to publish your writing on the internet?

2009-03-09T13:57:00.005-06:00

I wrote this in preparation for leading my writing group's workshop today. We met this morning and I spoke about these points. I gave a little Twitter demonstration.

Do you feel there are differences between writing for print and writing online? If so, why? If not, why not? Let's discuss. (We did and agreed that length is a key consideration, because of the limited time and attention people have online; and that one has very little time to attract the interest of an online reader.)

A software developer friend of ours, a fully-grown Bart Simpson-type who has worked at various software-company startups around Boulder, was working on a social media application a couple of years ago. I pooh-poohed it when I first heard about it, although back in 2000, I had been intrigued by the promise of mobile networking software that would -- gasp -- allow you to see which people in your social network were in your vicinity and even where they were.

"Why would you want that?" I demanded. I was still resisting owning a cell phone then.

"Well, there are lots of reasons..." he started, but I had lost interest.

For me, it took seeing Twitter to understand the potential of this idea.

As soon as I tried it out, I was intrigued by the way you could start following anyone. It was the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game in a social networking application, and it was proving my theory that really we are probably no more than two or three degrees of separation from most people we would be interested in meeting personally or interacting with professionally.

I found that just being myself and posting updates on the things that stood out at random moments, I had a couple of hundred followers in a fairly short time. And I wasn't aggressively trying to court new followers by following lots and lots of people; it was just a steady progression. I'd follow a few new people every day, choosing a couple of new people to follow here, and a couple more there. Some would follow me in response; others didn’t; others didn’t immediately but started following me a while later.

Today, it takes just a few minutes to start a new account on Twitter, or start a blog on Blogger, LiveJournal, or WordPress. You can apply interesting styles and templates to make your home page look playful or clean or unique; just select your favorite color scheme, or something pleasing that reflects a side of you you're itching to put out there. Any piece of writing has a place online today.

When I sit down to write, I feel like I am mining. I look for the vein. What can I tell that no one has already pulled out of this? What burden must I offload today? What am I most nervous about writing about, what scares the living hell right out of me, or what could make my mother/husband/best friend/a stranger cry?

When I clear enough space in my life -- an hour here, twenty minutes there, or a minute, I invite something in: Okay, I'm ready, I say, sitting down at my keyboard. My intentions fall somewhere along the spectrum from wanting to share a good tip, spin a good yarn, or give myself a little free therapy for my wounded heart. One way I can do this is by writing about those charged moments, the ones that can be the clearest harbingers of what needs to be done next. But sometimes it's just as satisfying to write a haiku about cats or the wild winds.

Twitter has shown me it's a good time in history to start our own channels, to become the pillars of our own media empires, to speak our own truths to power, and to cheer on the big and little things that make our day different from the last. What I see when I look around at the wild world of publishing online is that every kind of writing has a place.

In Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See writes:
"Here are a few things you might write about: Travel, anything from an around -the-world jaunt to the one-hundred-mile trip to see your wife's parents. Camping. Life in RVs. Sexual function. Sexual dysfunction. Good kids. Bad kids. Your weird childhood. Your happy childhood. Whales. Fishing. Hunting. Cooking. Tequila. Keeping a neat house. Keeping a sloppy house. Sleeping pills. Hamburgers. "Profiles" of anybody you happen to know. Alternative medicine. How you got cancer and got better, or didn't. Whatever you're interested in now. "

She's not exaggerating; there are blogs and tweets galore about all of those things and many more.

On Twitter, I'm interested in reaching out to people, but the social scientist in me would also like to see if I can grow a following who will be willing to take risks by investing in each others' work. Like microloans, if everyone gives just a little, everyone weaves a tighter social net, the kind that can even help catch you if you fall. The other night, a friend sent out a message on Twitter that a fellow who had published a children's book just needed a few more people to buy his book and his bank would give him a loan. I saw another person raise more than $25,000 to build new wells in Africa; I was one of the many people who contributed a small amount toward making someone's dream a reality.

So I write my tweets and blog posts with the hope that advancing my own ideas can benefit all of us in some small way. I hope to build connections this way, much in the way that holding a baby or petting an animal stimulates the production of oxytocin and builds trust between people and animals. You know how we tell kids, "There's no such thing as a stupid question, because chances are if you are wondering about it, there is at least one more person wondering about the same thing." Well, I write with the same hope: that if these things are on my mind, someone, somewhere might find it useful to see me attempt to verbally sort them out. And I write hoping to reduce the degrees of separation between us.

Big changes are underfoot in the information revolution. The print media are crumbling, and publishing may mean something completely different five years ago from what it means today. One day, information-gathering "bots" will roam the internets, grouping writings by not only genre or author or titles, but by subjects, themes, settings, or even regional dialects, as easily as we can look up old friends and flames on Google today. So what's most important now is to gather our stories, our thoughts, and our ideas in one place.

Just as we can't find others we're interested in if they don't write and share what they're working on, the same goes for us. We have to not only write down our most pressing ideas but we must also allow others to see what we do. I believe we owe it to each other, to the world, to use our time here to make our mark, whether the exercise has at its center the preservation of family beliefs, values, and rituals; the personal catharsis of storytelling; or a desire to inflict the emotional earthquakes of shock and fear that remind us we are lucky to be alive. The internet has made this easier than ever.

A couple of links to get you started with online publishing:

http://blogger.com
http://wordpress.com
http://twitter.com

My new media idea of the week

2009-03-09T13:15:00.006-06:00

I've been thinking about new applications that would let you "see" breaking news, facilitated by Twitter. I am interested in developing an application that lets you choose your location and see a live visualization of a text cloud formed of everyone's real-time tweets and text messages in the area. As with a map, you could zoom in or out on these aggregated tweet clouds to see them at various magnifications. People could see tweet frequency for a specified location displayed in various visualizations, e.g. stock market performance charts. Users could set thresholds (as one enters a preferred price on a web site that offers airfare-watching) so that when those norms are exceeded by a certain amount, the software notifies them automatically (by sending an email/text message/call).

I suppose if you could filter by location you could just as easily filter the messages by content and search on key words, as this blogger suggests here: http://bolindigital.com/time-location-emotion

But would people really allow this use of their content and see it as an invasion of their privacy? Or would there be a way to make it cool to opt in to add your own reporting to the mix? People could opt in to include their updates in the meta-tweet cloud -- Call it The Instant Reporter or something snappy, make everyone a contributor.

Fun with followers

2009-03-06T08:55:00.005-07:00

I try not to get caught up in Twitter numbers because they are meaningless. But I can't help admitting to a little thrill when I've approached a round number -- first 100 followers, then 200, and now nearly 300 people may read my tweets. Thing is, I've been hovering around 285 for a while and my follower numbers will go up by a couple, then down by a couple. I think what is happening is that there are people out there (and you know who you are) who try to build followings by following everyone they can find, and some of those folks presume you will automatically decide to follow them back, based on the assumption that everyone wants to broadcast as widely as possible, to be found on as many nodes as possible, to build a following as fast as one possibly can. I, however, don't automatically follow someone who looks to be advertising their business rather than offering a unique perspective or service in their tweets. And I think what happens is if I don't follow them back immediately, they drop me. If you're on Twitter, do you find this pretty typical?

But I am having fun with the same kind of thing I enjoyed when starting and continuing to write here in these blogs. It's nice to have a place for things. Despite my chaotic heaps of objects, I still believe everything has a place, and like my blog, Twitter has given me a kind of new drawer in my desk for items of a certain size and shape that had been piling up or getting lost in the shuffle of life. Only it's like the wardrobe in the Narnia books: it's a drawer that leads to a new universe. Put something in it and 285 others can see it if they want to. All I know is I care about it enough to write it down.

I do know someone who would utterly despise Twitter for its signal-to-noise ratio. He couldn't abide the cheerleading about brands and bands and stuff. But he's a professor who needs a certain space in his life and doesn't have interest in going around telling others about every new book he reads or the food he eats or the last brand of shoes he bought. He's pared down his goals: family life, teaching, writing books. He doesn't have time.

For others, however, people like me who are acutely interested in all sorts of details of everyday life, Twitter is a boon (and a lot of other things, too, of course, not all of them good). I find it fascinating to see what other people tuck away in their magic universe drawers. But not necessarily all other people.

The distillation phase

2009-03-05T09:47:00.007-07:00

Well, life is unfolding, enfolding in its own funny way.

When I'm not writing and working on projects, I'm thinking of my friend. This is the week after my dear mother flew back to her home in the west, with her two fluffy cats and housemate and the third cat (who used to be her cat but now belongs to her housemate--the immediate change following the transaction was quite astonishing to all). This week I have been catching up on some work I've promised others. But this week also has been a lesson in trusting that things would unfold as they needed to for my friend. And indeed, her life is looking different every day, not simply declining in quality as might be expected.

It took my mother saying during her visit that my friend was dying for me to really get it, that she just wasn't expected to live much longer. Then she had a stroke, on the last day of the film fest (her son had been working the event), the day after my mom had gone over to visit and give her a massage. We are both grateful that my mother got to be with her friend before and after the stroke. Over the next few days, we had urgent conversations with family and the professionals in her midst, and those conversations raised about a million questions that we quickly realized we were in no position to address. Many of those conversations are still continuing today.

But like I said, things aren't all bad. Yesterday I felt privileged to be a fly on the wall (there were a couple of us, actually) when the hospice people came. Apparently some folks had come when my friend was still in the hospital, affiliated with a different hospice organization, and they hadn't been so wonderful. These people, however, had gone out of their way to facilitate my friend's admission into Medicare and were helping her sort out her income issues immediately so she could qualify for services instead of draining family members' bank accounts (although one of them is paying for the hospice and is making sure her mortgage is paid up and her utilities paid). And the paperwork expert could be forgiven for saying the name of the form a few too many times in front of my exhausted friend, for whom numbers and letters are still challenging, because she explained how they take all their direction from the family and from her doctor. "We enfold you. We aren't here to tell you what to do or how to do it. If your needs change, we change with you."

It was a beautiful thing to see these people in a position to give help giving the help that mattered the most right when it was needed the most. It was like being at a birth; it also felt like witnessing a phase of death. The stroke might have been part of that process, and the hospice phase began yesterday. Just writing that makes me weepy again.

When my friend tired of the talk whizzing past she retired to her bed again. I came in after a while with a jar of my mother's lotion that she started making for my daughter's beautiful brown skin to keep it from being ashy. I gave her the jar and scooped a little out, melting it in my hands. I massaged her feet, because she seems very isolated and detached touch-wise right now, and her feet are clearly not getting the attention they deserve. I don't know that she's had many foot massages in her life. She was able to tell me how she is enjoying how her hands are finally softening after years of manual labor.

So I show her pictures on my camera of the crocuses she is too exhausted to walk out and see very often, remembering how she cried when she first learned she might not see this spring. I'll go back shortly and cook and massage and just be there for her and her family for a couple of hours so her people can go do their work and live their lives. And the hospice people are coming and the therapists are coming and she can still ride in the car now and again for a short trip (but gets tired easily, and mixed up about where she is).

This is a process; up close, death doesn't seem so final at all (except for that last moment when "the soul flies out" that I felt when our kitty Sophie died). A death keeps unfolding, yet the person -- perhaps the soul -- keeps going. On and on, on and on. And as my friend goes on into her good night her life may be shrinking, her world winnowed down to its barest essentials: food, love, pets, places to rest. Yet her life is also intensifying, as her disease distills her into some pure essence of love and light and life that is as fresh and new and rich as oil pressed from olives only a moment ago.

Extremely self-referential post

2009-03-03T21:41:00.007-07:00

Just in case you're not following me over on twitter, this is my favorite "tweet" I have posted this week:

There is still something weird about getting news from Twitter. It's like the game of Telephone only the message doesn't get garbled.

The only sensation I can liken it to is that of looking at a Camera Obscura and noticing how it is projects reality, what is really happening now, in real time, no deconstructing and reconstructing the image, just a reseeing of it. Perhaps you can begin to see why I've worked the Camera Obscura into my fiction. Now I guess I'll have to make Twitter figure in it.

Which reminds me of this silly tidbit: Earlier today, reading a Berenstain Bears book to my little one, I was mentally editing it, replacing "tape players" with "music players," and having the kids text each other on cell phones, among other updates that would allow contemporary kids to read them without a second thought. They got to keep their "boom box," though.

Animals! Inspired by Animals!

2009-02-18T22:02:00.002-07:00

Whoa! What a wild and wooly week it's been, hey? Despite a jarring beginning and ending, all righted itself and on I went to the festival I look forward to all year, forging my way through many, many films and many friends. Lots more of that feeling that we're all here for a reason (only I keep feeling I'd better cough up my own contribution to the genre pretty quick or people will wonder why I keep hanging 'round here like some fangrrl).

So every week I'm inching forward on that front, and BIFF as ever provided me with a healthy jolt of inspiration, on many levels.

And since I feel I am here for a reason -- that is: I really do want to make films and art -- I'll start here, where I am, by splicing my Texas footage together into a quick video. Next up Animals! Inspired by Animals! And then I'll properly edit the Gomez thingie so I can send it out.

kisses,
v.

How to tell timely tales

2009-02-12T23:50:00.007-07:00

I invariably question what I do around film fest time. Do I want to write? Direct? If I did any of those things it would take forever to hit the screen in the event a screenplay or project would survive against all odds, and we'd see something like the film we saw tonight. Rod Lurie's film Nothing But The Truth is about an issue that a few people care very passionately about and most people think is long over. If you asked most people today why Judith Miller was jailed a few years back, would they be able to answer the question? Would they understand why a journalist might be jailed for not revealing a source? And do they understand what it meant for Bush to pardon Scooter Libby? So it makes me wonder what's left for me, this little oddball who cares about these things that in the context of public discourse seem arcane and remote: Upholding our First Amendment rights, not just for us here in the U.S. but also for the sake of much of the rest of the world, which holds up our freedom of speech as a sterling example of what a free press can accomplish and how that can keep a government accountable. People think Blagojevich was bad? It can be so much worse.

The biggest question looming for me is this: How do you tell a timely story, in the time it takes to write a novel or screenplay, then get the film made and distributed? How to get in, get into it, and get out, before the story is not a story any longer?

The one I'm looking forward to is Terri Jentz' story, which she wrote in prose in the book Strange Piece of Paradise and only later, as she was seeking stories to tell in screenplays, realized her own story was far more interesting than anything else she was coming across. Now she's writing the screenplay of a movie about her story. That will be very intense. Jodie Foster, are you listening? This sounds like it could be your kind of project.

Films on my mind this week: Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Come Back to Sudan

2009-02-06T09:44:00.008-07:00

People talk about how colorful Slumdog Millionaire is, and I couldn't help thinking how realistic it seemed, having spent my own intense and surreal week in Calcutta. Watching Slumdog I had been gearing up to complain that the only thing you couldn't do was smell India when the latrine scene arrived. That's when I knew I was in good hands and relaxed and enjoyed the rest of the ride, as I had in Danny Boyle's magical Millions (it's starting to appear Boyle has a thing about big money -- he keeps naming his films after it). For the single achievement of including the omnipresent element of shit in his Indian tale, Boyle deserves the directing Oscar (I'll have to research whether that scene is in the book from which the film was adapted). But there were so many other good and bad things about India that the director grasped and packed into his picture that I feel he would deserve it on many counts.

I haven't seen all the top films -- I seldom have. I'm just not enough of a completist to make myself see everything every year. Revolutionary Road gets this year's I'd-Rather-Have-My-Fingernails-Dragged-Across-A-Chalkboard-Than-Watch-This-Film Award at My Own Private Oscars. I know it's not fair to say that without even seeing it, but the previews made it look like no more fun than the worst of the cautionary reels we used to sit through in junior-high health classes.

In Slumdog, Boyle took risks in all the things he tried to grasp about India with one big hand. Many more risks, in fact, than did Van Sant in his careful hagiography of Harvey Milk. As much as I loved watching Milk, gorgeous as it was, lit by Penn's boyish joie de vivre, seeing it felt in retrospect more static, like visiting a museum and admiring a diorama, than the celebration of the many layers of reality, the lush confusion of modern life that moved me in Slumdog.

Moving, with all its geographical and emotional meanings, is a theme in the film Come Back to Sudan. The men known as the "Lost Boys of Sudan" fled to the United States years ago and are now adults and US citizens(?). A childless Boulder woman "adopts" them and when peace comes to the Sudan they go to Africa, home. The film asks so many great questions: What does it mean to call a place home? What happens when you don't recognize the people or the landscape? What happens when you do? Bring a couple of hankies for this one. You'll be glad you did. (I'll be introducing this film and School of Thought, and conducting Q & A sessions following each film, at BIFF on Saturday Feb. 14 at the Boulder Public Library Main Branch theater at 4:15 -- come on by!)

New new media

2009-02-05T14:35:00.001-07:00

Re: those data visualizations of tweets during the inauguration, and tweets around the continent during the Super Bowl:
It's a whole new model for what we consider "news."

My idea for a new news-delivery medium: a map superimposed with tag clouds following blogs, tweets, newspaper stories, etc. -- maybe even whatever combination of those each user is interested in. As in Google Earth, you could zoom in anywhere in the world and get impressions of what people are talking/writing about at any given moment.

25 random things about me

2009-02-03T23:03:00.002-07:00

1. I love maps and have a keen sense of direction, but since I turned 40 or so I've noticed that when I am stressed or tired, my map-reading skills go right out the window.
2. I am always surprising myself by having more endurance than I expected. Perhaps this is because I am in better physical shape now than I was ten years ago.
3. I had some EMDR therapy a couple of years ago that in a single session dramatically helped me become more relaxed and less fearful in traffic (although I do still get peeved easily at dumb driving).
4. I have always wanted about ten careers (musician, inventor, doctor, writer, chef, dancer, painter, fabric/clothing designer, filmmaker, photographer) but so far only have managed to work hard at getting better at a couple of things (writing/editing, and learning to be a good family member, friend, and member of my community).
5. I have had one out-of-body experience, after I broke my leg rollerskating when I was in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with my family. That night, I hovered in the corner of the ceiling and watched my bodily self hobble to the bathroom and back.
6. Some of you have already heard this: I sat on Janis Joplin's piano during a concert when I was four years old. And could hardly believe my eyes when I saw she was white, not black, as I'd thought when listening to her record.
7. I am joyfully married to someone I had a crush on when I was 12.
8. I am eternally grateful to have gone to India and met some of the people who are the reason our thriving, beautiful, and sassy daughter survived the first five months of her life. I only wish I'd known to kiss their feet then.
9. I cannot imagine my life without cats. Nor do they seem to be able to conceive of life without me, so all's well.
10. I get more squeamish about gross/gory sights the older I get. (Exception: anything having to do with my own family members.)
11. It takes enormous restraint for me to follow a recipe exactly as it is written.
12. Before I'd turned 13, I'd met some of The Beach Boys, taken soup to [the band] Chicago, been backstage at a Chick Corea/Weather Report concert, and invited Elton John's drummer, Nigel Olsson, to tea at my house (he never showed, although I had cleaned the house and made sure we had Marmite for sandwiches).
13. I don't understand why when Facebook notifies me about someone's new 25-random-things meme, the notification says I was mentioned in that person's list. But when I read it, I am not mentioned.
14. It's almost too obvious to say, but I'll say it again anyway: Music is my religion.
15. My favorite thing to say when a Jehovah's Witness knocks on my door is "I already believe."
16. I believe there's a stronger link between our brain and our gut than we comprehend today, and that healing people's guts might boost people's mental health dramatically. If I could go back to school right now, I'd study epidemiology or gastroenterology (and get over that squeamishness).
17. I like living in houses where I spend most of my time above ground level. A writing treehouse would be heavenly.
18. I don't think I'll ever be finished grieving my sister who died when we were little.
19. I used to be a purist about grammar, but now I am not. I still maintain high standards in my own writing; I'm just more pragmatic about the way people truly use language and less interested in defining "correctness" at any given moment.
20. That said, I correct typos and errors in library books when I find them. (I keep thinking someday I'll reread one of those books and find one of my corrections, but it hasn't happened yet.)
21. I get a surprising amount of pleasure from frequently tracing the same paths I walked or biked as a kid.
22. Given the duration and frequency of my musical passions, I wonder what's around the corner for me. Like the people I've loved most and always will, I'll always love The Who, Crowded House/Neil Finn, Michael Penn, Aterciopelados, Elbow, and Gomez. (The Grateful Dead deserve special mention for providing wonderful musical events and setting me on the path toward another calling: being an attentive audience.)
23. Levar Burton attended our Boulder wedding reception.
24. The older I get, the more psychic I feel, and the more empathy I have for animals. (If I have a single spirit animal, it's a border collie, even though I don't consider myself a "dog person.")
25. Given how little I've finished, I am continually surprised at how ambitious I still am.

TV lovers: You might want to watch another episode of The Office instead of reading this

2009-02-02T09:44:00.009-07:00

I am willing to keep posting little happy findings on Twitter: the things I notice people saying and doing, random acts of kindness for those I do and don't know. And I see the spirit of this is embodied in the term Whuffie, a form of social currency invented by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow in on of his novels. That's what I like most about Twitter: that trade of social currency. I'll give you something good; can't wait to see what you're offering up today.

Yet I know it's terribly important to make sure I keep protecting my time to do my other work. I need the time to think at greater length and with much broader scope, to create new work, to make up my own version of the ideal universe so I have something to strive for.

Some of what brought me to this conclusion was yesterday's television fest. We all came home from the ski area yesterday and flopped downstairs to watch the Super Bowl, which was interesting, fun, and disturbing all at once. Some things I marveled at: The fact that a guy will wear a helmet on a football field but not on a motorcycle, and that the same guy could come back from what sounded like a hellish accident to play great football less than two although you ask me, he did look a little slow to shove off that ball, for such a young guy (he's about to turn 27 in March); those sideline ditches, including the one caught by one surprised but poised gentleman, weren't pretty).

What my daughter noticed was that I was no longer upset about not skiing much earlier, and that I was serving snacks I admitted weren't all that good for us: oven-baked rolled-up cheese, chicken, and bacon quesadillas, and onion rings that we served with ketchup. Fast food.

We kept noticing during the ads that much of television's humor is meanspirited. It's geared at making people seem smaller and less and making the apparent subject look superior. It doesn't always work. There's one where a woman deliberately drenches a potential rival for a romantic interest returns, post-insult, to sucking on a drink and looking smug. Ew.

The football game we tuned in to watch along with the ads was great, full of twists and surprises of all sorts. But then it got disturbing, when one of the Steelers' players, James Harrison, who had made a great touchdown play earlier in the game, punched a Cardinal, when the other man was down and after the play had ended. Since when is this part of the all-American game of football? What happened to sportsmanship? Harrison could have felt pretty good if he'd chosen to after what he had done earlier, and instead he had to unleash a suckerpunch? Ew again. That took some of the gleam off the Steelers' well earned trophy for me. But you didn't come here for yet another Super Bowl analysis, did you?

Here's the thing: I watched some more of the ads (can anyone really take Go Daddy seriously? Yet, they do, in droves), and then a few minutes of "The Office," which I always feel sucks all the air right out of the room when it's on. I turned it off because of the meanness of Steve Carell's character, and all of the meannesses that are possible because he's in charge, which is why I always turn it off. I've lived that story; I don't need to put myself through that all over again, thank you very much. I really liked Carell in Little Miss Sunshine, but I have a hard time with the actors who are willing to do that show on command every week. It seems a peculiarly debased kind of fame, in my book only a little less masochistic than Diablo Cody's stints at sex-for-pay. What these actors give the world seems far more complicit in a humanity-crushing ethos. Wow. I guess I really don't like that show! Before you get all up in arms: I know that is what the Off switch is for. I just won't watch it any more. [rant off]

And because there was nothing on I turned to Twitter to see what was "trending" -- what topics were being discussed most, and besides the Super Bowl was "The Office." I shouldn't have been surprised but was a little that people were indeed tweeting lines and gags from the show, in addition to the expected reactions to the storyline and the determinations a) whether this episode had achieved a level implied by the hype for a double-length episode following the Super Bowl, and b) how the special guests (Jack Black, Jessica Alba, and Cloris Leachman) were incorporated into the storyline (which was in a fake feature film playing on a laptop, not in interactions with regular cast of "The Office"). I saw how Twitter lets people watch a form of TV, which I thought was kind of cool. It was like that Bob Dylan video I like where the words and music stream by, but don't always match. How great for those of us who don't have televisions -- or don't want to watch them. Who says reading is dead?

But I'd be afraid, very afraid, if all I had was TV to tell me what to strive for, and Twitter to tell me what was going on. There are a lot of people going to megachurches and other churches these days, but there are a lot of people who aren't going to anything. What I see from here is that TV takes up so much of that space religion and community-building used to occupy. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to get religious, either. I'm not. But I have a community on whom I rely and who can rely on me. In TV world, it seems to be all about getting: getting the best lines, getting the best house and the girl and the car, not necessarily in that order. Getting the best pass so you can make the best play. But what is left for the world, the community our kids are growing up in?

Feeling the way I do, about the way TV has encouraged this soulless devotion to the material world, I am heartened by the way people are reaching out across Twitter and finding each other in droves on social networking sites. I am encouraged that there are ways to be entertained that don't always involve subjecting ourselves to having our brains branded with their ideal images and preferred personality types. I am encouraged that we are finding ways to prove we are interconnected. And I know it's not that nothing bad can come of it, as we are reminded by all those commercials about banks that pledge to protect us from identity theft. It's that so much more good can come of it. We can find out more about how we are connected and how we are alike (those memes, those lists of "25 things about me" and so on, are all about that) so easily in a way we never could before.

I'm glad to see my tribe engaging in this new dance. My trip to meet people on the message board and dance in the front row at Gomez' show was a similar article and artifact of faith. I helped with the creation of that happening by being there; there's no doubt in my mind. And I intend to continue following my own dares, making things happen, engaging with new communities of like-minded people. It's all we have, right? Our energy, our goodwill, our willingness to see and be seen, to do and be done to in turn.

That's why we don't have a television set in our living room, and most of our video time is in front of films and shows that we choose and not just what's on. From my perspective, so much TV programming encourages a kind of hoarding and competitiveness that is so unproductive in my world. I'll stick to "watching TV" through Twitter posts, which always puts in perspective how much I really care about it, until "So You Think You Can Dance" comes back. I'll keep checking out DVDs if I really want to see films and shows. But I only have so much leisure time, and I must be careful but generous with what little online time I have. For me it is vital to preserve the time I need for my community, for writing, thinking, and creating my own body of work.

What do you need your time for most?

Is there room for all of us on Twitter?

2009-01-27T14:23:00.008-07:00

So no one is really asking about social media in my circles, even though I'm ready to talk about it. Because I haven't gotten to talking about it with many folks, I haven't been able to bounce a lot of my ideas about it off others. And to be honest, I am not finding Twitter as helpful for this kind of conversation as I had imagined it would be back when I started out with a couple of followers a couple of months ago.

Like so many things, I fell wholly into my discovery of Twitter and couldn't go back to the way I'd seen the world before, seemingly in an instant. Where once I had seen only grass and trees, shrubs and dirt, now I felt I could see everything beneath the surface as well: tendrils and roots of all kinds, animals' warrens and dens, great clumps of aspen roots and enormous mushrooms reaching underneath all. Rocks and gravel and clay and water and air and heat.

So I thought when I posted tweets, the 140-character (maximum) posts on Twitter, I would have more chats with people I didn't know. I simply presumed lots of people would respond to lots of the same things I am interested in, and many conversations, many threads would result.

But this has not quite been the reality.

First I see how, like in any new community, it takes a while to find one's tribe, and I feel closer to this but don't feel I have quite found many of mine yet. I started with a couple of people I know, and then reached out and followed some folks in journalism, film, art, and music. I followed some news feed sites (some were appalling -- I thought the BBC would be great and then all this perversely awful news kept crossing my screen, so I unfollowed them. I looked around my neighborhood to see which local people looked intriguing to follow. Lastly I discovered the social media kings and queens (some self-anointed, others well deserving the titles). I started encouraging friends to sign up on Twitter. Some of them did. Some of them understood it, and others remain mystified about what the fuss is about. There is still a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio in the tweets that cross my screen, but I have been directed to many more interesting blogs this way and now am starting to get a clue about other social media tools out there.

Now I have various constellations of favorite people I follow, and I've started winnowing my "Following" list. I weeded out the banal ones, the gross ones, and the mean ones. When people add me to their list, I check them out, and often follow them, although I've gotten far more selective than I was when I first signed up. I follow a lot of folks who follow me, although lately I've gotten far more discriminating, and will look at recent tweets. If everything is banal and the person is posting about going to the post office or what they eat and drink all the time, I probably won't follow them back. Or if it's just a spam channel for some business and only tries to sell, sell, sell me on their product or service, I am no more willing to follow that "person" than I am willing to have a TV blaring at me in my living room.

I loved the blog post (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/ceo-and-coo-blog/2009/01/25/how-twitter-can-make-you-a-better-and-happier-person) about how Twitter can make you a better, happier person, by the Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh (@zappos on Twitter), who's a social media favorite because of the way he and his company use Twitter and social media (specifically, just about everyone in the company uses it, a lot, and it makes them amazingly accessible and accountable as a result). I responded to him on Twitter after reading it that I'd been contemplating writing a similar post, about how Twitter's brevity and atmosphere has encouraged me to think of punchy, upbeat things to write about, and now I feel like I don't have to because he did such a great job on his post. (Here's a great example of a tweet from Tony, posted a few minutes ago: "24 hours in NY, back in SF. Flight attendant said she saw Zappos CEO on TV. I said "Me?" She said "No, saw CEO. He was much more eloquent")

To me it's fascinating that Twitter has influenced me and my writing and outlook so strongly and quickly. I tend to tackle big, thorny subjects and see dark sides of things, and I'm sure some of my posts have reflected this. But mostly I've joined the chorus of cheerleaders, of people trying to shine beams of light on little pet topics. Some of my cheeriest posts have been about the following:

Films I've watched

Film festivals/film series I work with

Friends' projects (films, etc.)

Music (what I'm listening to most, favorite podcasts, new releases)

My writing

Here's a graphical representation, a word cloud of my most-used words in all my posts on Twitter (derived using http://tweetstats.com and then http://worldle.com):

Sometimes I feel like I've just joined a chorus of cheerleaders, and I wonder if that's a good thing, or if I'm one of those people just adding to the noise of the universe. But I don't think so, because everyone who posts wants to shine a light on something, even if it's their bad mood or where they decided to go for lunch today.

And because I can't resist an investigation of the underside, not just the bright and shiny surface, I do still question whether there's room for introverts on Twitter. Or do most introverts avoid Twitter altogether because they can't imagine other people wanting to follow the thoughts that tumble around in their own heads? I follow one novelist (@mcory) who writes about depression because he experiences it, which I find a brave thing to do online, out loud (but I haven't told him that yet). Given my own tendencies toward mild mania, I have also warned people that Twitter can be a scary place in the way it attracts you to a whole new set of rabbit holes, many of which seem to lead somewhere compelling.

Yet I do believe there is room for all of us on Twitter, each us with all our quirks. It's a little like having cable TV and choosing just a few high-quality channels to watch, where you have to resolve that instead of channel surfing all the time with the hope you'll run into something good, you'll just watch a few consistently excellent channels, or tune in only when you know something interesting is on. (Clearly, I need to investigate some of the many Twitter-related tools available for helping organize datastreams and for allowing me to pay more attention to the most interesting/useful tweet streams). I am also positive Twitter is and will continue to be an important tool in community building, and has more to teach us about how we relate to one another and how what we say affects others.

Beautiful but flawed

2009-01-22T09:03:00.008-07:00

I didn't like the film The Wrestler very much when I left the theater. The brutality of the wrestling scenes is so sick there are parts I wish I hadn't spent an hour and a half etching upon my visual memory centers.

Today I saw the Oscar nominations (I know -- I don't know why I still care about them, but I absolutely, unstintingly do) and I muttered my agreement that Darren Aronofsky didn't get a Best Director nomination. Ever since, I've been thinking about that film, though, and about how it stuck in my head long after the last reel had unspooled. I think about Mickey Rourke all pumped up like a human erection, with his blond locks pouring out of the top of his head, and I think that Aronofsky's achievement in creating that vivid, if sometimes turgid, impression of a human being is a powerful achievement, one that the Academy in all its conservative wisdom has overlooked this year. What I'm trying to figure out is how much of that is the actor and how much is the director. Isn't that always in question?

Although adhering strongly to biopic conventions -- not as experimental as Van Sant's more edge-seeking work -- I'm still rooting for Milk because of Sean Penn's lit-from-within portrayal of Harvey Milk. I guess I'll have to see The Case of Benjamin Button, although I'm not otherwise drawn to that one so far. And I think The Dark Knight got just the right number of nominations. But there's a lot I haven't seen yet, as always.

Happy inauguration day

2009-01-20T23:12:00.003-07:00

Highlights of a wonder-filled day:

Getting lots of compliments on the blingy Obama tshirt my BFF gave me.

Thinking back to 29 years ago today, when my sweetie and I went out on our first date (and there's always a good chuckle about our movie choice: Kramer vs. Kramer).

Dashing up to my daughter's school so I could be with her for Obama's swearing-in.

Hearing the kids watching the ceremonies in the school library lead the applause during Obama's inaugural address.

Watching one of the kids practice her presidential wave after seeing Obama wave. Some of the kids waved back to Obama at the same time, as if he was waving at them.

Having some volunteer work to do today. Made me feel like I am where I am supposed to be.

Hearing Obama urge fifth-graders "to dream big dreams and not to sell yourselves short." (We all need to be reminded of that.)

The man who saw my tshirt when we walked by him on the way home from school and barked, simply, "Obama!"

Feeling the power and potential energy of all the people who gathered in DC for this momentous occasion and who represented the millions more of us who could not be there today.

OMG! The print media are collapsing!

2009-01-13T10:08:00.015-07:00

I can hardly stand it -- honestly, I think about this hours every day these days. Partly because I feel I am a journalist by nature (more on that later), and partly because I know lots of journalists and it makes me sad that this is so soon-to-be an extinct avenue for us writers to ply our trades. I'll have to work a newspaper's crash into this novel I'm writing because it's almost nauseatingly fascinating, in the exact way that a train wreck or building demolition fascinates.

Now it's all about blogging. (But how suddenly the focus shifts! And the game is your content but your marketing, how you are "driving traffic to your web site," and your SEO, and which I had to look up because I didn't know what that was. SEO seems to comes down to writing these shell documents that purport to be about a topic but really sound like collections of up to 500 sentences that include key words. It seems to be all about including in these web articles enough popular search terms to get search engines to find you.)

So now we can go off and earn money with this not exactly writing but more word-gathering, like woolgathering, I suppose. We can hawk a company's wares. But we can't write editorials for our local paper much longer, not the paper as we know it.

And so I grieve. It makes me sad to read Michael Hirschorn's article in the Atlantic, in which he asks what if The New York Times disappears from newsstands "like, this May?" I'm even sadder in a way to have already seen the article's publication Tweeted and have followed the link to read it online days before the hard copy arrived in my mailbox. An era is ending, and coming down hard around us, along with everything else that's imploding right now, right before our very eyes.

We still need to write it all down, I feel more acutely than ever. We need to report the truth about what we know. The newspapers of record are important because they try to get the truth about the matters at hand. The need for this work is critical to an open and democratic society, and we haven't yet figured out how we're going to replace this work. As have the reporters so far who have risked life and limb and peace of mind to go after the stories, we must remain vigilant in our pursuit of the truth, each and every day. If each of us is holed up with our laptop writing nonsense "articles" for not much fun and a little more profit and we have all taken jobs doing PR for one version of The Man or another, who will be left to write the letters when the potholes get out of hand?

It's going to as important as ever before that we each one of us take some responsibility for getting the news out, by writing letters to congress critters, blogging, or doing what we can do to report on the issues before each of us, before the city councils and our governments, all the way up the chains of our companies and our governments.

My blogs could be seen as word collections, I suppose, in which I randomly opine about various topics. But they are my reports of the truth, and no one else's. They capture what I am thinking at a particular moment, and I have found it useful to to see what themes have grabbed my attention over time. I sometimes wish each one of us could do this so we could see "tag clouds" of what everyone in Boulder is blogging about, or what city council members are writing about, or what local artists are saying (oh, wait -- that's Twitter! Well, not really, given the self-selected, early-adopter nature of the Twitter population).

At present I have a large interest in public health and that is what my novel is about, but I also think mass transit and alternative energy are tremendous avenues that can help provide economic and social solutions. So I write in hopes of helping spread the word about how that can be facilitated. I am grateful for the new social media tools, but I can't help starting to grieve the losses of our newsgathering institutions already. I didn't realize how quickly Web 2.0 would mean the demolitions of all these institutions that have been the foundations of my world.

It's as if suddenly someone announced that there will be no more college professors, and all professors will have to compete for jobs that pay $8 to $15 an hour now; that industry is gone. I like so many of us also didn't realize we were plunging into an economic quagmire whose dust and muddy waters are a long way from subsiding, and that is likely to accelerate the decline of the news agencies even further. And I'm not even sure most people realize this is happening yet (I blame my reliance on Twitter for my current angst level). I grieve selfishly, in part: until recently, I thought writing for a newspaper or magazine would always be a career possibility, and now I don't.

What will replace this? I'm having a hard time believing it's e-books, or the computer, and not just because of my old screen and older eyes. And who will send out and pay the newsgatherers? I haven't optimized my site much for search engines (I have a little by adding the metadata in the form of what blogger.com calls "labels" but most people call "tags," metadata being another fave topic of mine), but I know there's value in my perspective here in my little corner of the blogosphere (which I think of as the bloggersphere). I'm convinced there's value in my voice and others' saying, out loud, "I can't believe they still sell Lariam! If you go on a trip to a tropical land, be sure to do your research on it before you take one of those pills. Lariam can be gnarly."

Or, "Gay people are people too, and so are bisexual people."

Or, "We have to love each other."

Or, "We have to look out for each other in traffic."

You get the picture.

Write on. Tweet on, blog on, write to your representative. But keep on reporting on the truth. The media may be vanishing, but the need never will.

A Bay Area Bat Mitzvah arrives; plus extra bonus: The two Freds

2009-01-12T22:21:00.009-07:00

Things I loved: How the Bat Mitzvah took on her role and did her ceremony on her terms. How her parents' pride and love and joy in their daughter's accomplishments glowed on them like the brilliant threads woven through the tallits wrapped around their shoulders. I loved getting all teary and telling my Jewish goddaughter I was so "verklemt" and meaning every bit. I loved how the kids and how the boys and maybe girls too had Shirley Temples the bartender had mixed in a pitcher and thought they wouldn't like because they were so sweet, and I loved how the girls all took their shoes off and danced and the boys kept their shoes on and then they danced too. I loved seeing which songs they danced to and which songs they didn't. I loved how no one got out of control or anything although you could tell there was total drama in the room when a couple of people paired off, and then a few more, but not everyone -- it was all just like her mom said it would be: like a middle-school dance. I loved at the end (10:45) how there was this whooshing out and suddenly the kids were gone, and how a handful of them said thanks to the parents (and a few more called the next day) but all of them said thanks to the Bat Mitzvah girl herself and were really nice (and I later heard, thought the parents and their family and friends were really cool for dancing). I loved dancing with my daughter, and with my sweetie, and with my dear Deadhead friends. I loved the way some people took pictures and other people did not, I liked how my goddaughter stood up and all the people around her stood up for her, without just the right amount more circumstance than the ceremony at the temple itself at the party that night. I loved my godfamily's willingness to quit arguing and get done what needed to get done, and my own, for that matter. I love my godfamily's beliefs, and I love my godfamily's bellies. I loved the nonverbal conversation I had with an L.A. lawyer's wife next to the dance floor, after having both danced quite a bit. I loved being cool and uncool. I loved the picture I took of two guests, and of my older goddaughter with my daughter. I loved that I got video of my dear friend on camera dancing again! I loved giving my goddaughter something she really wanted, that she can use for a long time and that will allow her to express her true creativity. Of course, I loved it that she named her new camera "Fred" right away.* I loved feeling like our presence, each and every one of us, meant something to every other one there. I loved the connectedness I felt, even when I felt awkward at the end when everyone was saying their goodbyes. I loved the recognition of family being whom you are born to and the ones you choose to keep around you, the ones you want to watch your back, to be your best for, besides your family of origin.

What I didn't love, my only regret, was not standing up and saying something in a toast that night. I guess I wanted to speak to her more directly through the gifts I chose for her; I had a message that I thought might embarrass her or make her feel pressured to reveal her proverbial hand to too many, too soon. And sometimes toast-talk feels like showing off, total self-aggrandizement: "Look how smart I am, how much more I know than a 13-year-old." I didn't want to do that for her sake or mine. So here, now, are a few things I would have wanted to hear at 13:

Heed your instincts.

Listen to your parents. They know a few things.

If you need to find other parental figures, or friends you rely on, that's okay, too. You are allowed to lean on and love more than just your parents. (Which I'm sure this whole Bat Mitzvah-becoming process clues you into as well.)

Dare yourself to do something new, often. (Because sooner or later you will fail, but you'll always learn from failure, at least as much as you do from success.)

This was my parents' advice to me (and I've always been grateful for it because they were right): Don't go anywhere alone with anyone you don't feel 100 percent great about. You ought to be willing to tell anyone about them and go anywhere with them if you like them that much.

It sounds like a cliche, but that's because it's true: You can do anything.

*Someone expressed their surprise at the name Fred for the new camera, and my goddaughter, who was happily bonding with her new toy/tool, said, "Yeah, Fred's gay. He came out of the box." (Funnier still: at about the same time, I was back in my hotel room was writing notes about my novel character's, story arc. Did I mention his name is Fred, too? They have so much in common! I'll have to introduce them. You know how it is: they'll either love each other or hate each other!) ;-)

Closer to clean

2009-01-07T09:15:00.011-07:00

I saw a ten-minute film at the Boulder International Film Fest a couple of winters ago called "My Name is Ahmed Ahmed (and I Can't Fly Anywhere)." Ahmed Ahmed in his short film spoke of the ups and downs of being a Muslim-American comedian after 9/11, and had some really funny bits, as the film's title infers. I was delighted to see his name recently when we saw Iron Man. But what stuck with me long after I had seen his short film wasn't his gags or cheerful-if-a-bit-resigned attitude (see his sporty traveling outfit -- jeans, Nike sneakers, American football jersey, baseball cap -- he does everything short of carry an American flag and do the wave to ease the running of the TSA gauntlet): it was the prayer. There was something about seeing him wash himself when entering a mosque, and I have been thinking about that detail ever since.

I once heard someone demand how Middle Easterners who wear so much white cloth keep it clean all day, and I think of all those prayers they make -- all five. (Incidentally, an IFS film coming up this spring, Times and Winds, is organized around the five prayers.) In this post-9/11 world, I wonder whether the people who have heretofore interpreted "swarthy" as "sinister," "dark," or "suspect," as the Nancy Drew books once suggested, could first think of Muslims' devout cleanliness, instead of those rare extremists who long to be united in paradise with their 72 virgins (or golden raisins, depending on the translation). I am not religious, but I do have spiritual yearnings, so I understand the impulse to let nothing, not even a thin layer of grime, get between the individual and the object of his or her spiritual devotion. Me, when I think of Muslims, I think of a nice, funny, and really clean guy who is trying to make his living like the rest of us.

The best of times, the worst of times; and how being a Gomez fan is the opposite of television

2009-01-04T00:57:00.012-07:00

What a strange and terrible year it was, 2008. Like making a top-films list, I couldn't face the depth of it immediately, either on or before the first day of the new year, when people traditionally enter in their yearly ledgers these laments or celebrations of the time gone by, which also can feel like a clearing of the decks. "Let's sum up all we can about this year, for posterity, and because for the less lucky of these suckers this will be their fifteen seconds of fame, never to be heard from again."

But today I saw the film Milk, which I knew I needed to see, perhaps not least because like Harvey, I have always wanted to extend a message of love, hope, and acceptance to the kids and adults for that matter who despair of ever being around people who don't think they are bent or fruity or outright sick-in-the-head. And Milk was all that and more: a love letter from director Gus Van Sant to the gay-rights movement, a showcase of marvelous acting from not only Sean Penn but also James Franco and a slew of people, and a faceful of spot-on details and set-dressing decisions. (Pies in the face became a San Francisco activists' tradition at board meetings for some time after, I remember from our time living in the Bay Area in the 1980s.)

I felt I was seeing the actors and director bloom before my very eyes. This is Van Sant's newest of his series of meditations on violence (see also Elephant, My Own Private Idaho, and Last Days, among others, for examples of violence in response to societal pressures--both externalized, with gays as targets, or internalized, by suicidal rock stars who can't make their inner world match up to the outer one for example. Or here, where one man, the once-closeted Harvey Milk, takes personal responsibility for the well-being of an entire movement, not just himself or his closest circle.

It was such a gift to be able to appreciate the verve and joyfulness of Harvey Milk--and the gaping void that opened in Harvey's absence. Van Sant not only showed us why we need to have hope for our futures but also what is at stake if we don't fight for the rights of "all the Us-es" as Milk says in the film--the gays, the disabled, the elderly, the blacks, the women, the Jews, all of us. For if one of us isn't truly free, then we all feel those shackles sooner or later.

I know everyone's lining up to say the likes of this right now, but If Sean Penn doesn't get the acting Oscar this year, I will eat this post. But what I'd love to see even more is a directing prize for Gus. That would be super! (Incidentally, the mimeographs and typographical accuracy of the campaign posters were among the pleasures of this movie, esp the "Harvey Milk for Supervisor!" posters with the "Super" underlined--so hip!)

It's gotten quite late but in reviewing photos some of my top moments of the year were spent with family and friends of course, but also writing, taking photos, seeing and trying my amateurish hand at making films, and going to Chicago to see Gomez & friends. One of the magical things about that latter experience was getting to witness first-hand what happens when a bunch of people decide to put themselves in the story of their favorite band for a moment. It was like the polar opposite of watching television. Some people seized hold of the opportunity to see and be seen while others needed to maintain some distance, some anonymity, for the whole thing not to tumble like some proverbial house of cards. And most of us fell somewhere in between those extremes. I was delighted to have the opportunity to see that happening up close, and to be able to join in the fun in my own peculiar ways. I have not a regret.

About any of it. Happy out-with-the-old and happy new year. I wish us unity, compassion, strength, health, hope, and happiness. Who says we can't have it all? Or is love all we need, like the wise men said?

Twaikus

2008-12-19T10:33:00.001-07:00

Too busy to post something new, so here are the collected Twitter haikus of vanillagrrl, so far:

Throat December raw / Steamer jollies up the milk / Mmmm, a hot latte

Winter frost etches / Map of crystalline subway / On picture window

Cat stands on my lap / Insisting on attention / While I tweet again

Excellent haiku! / Today is your newfound friend / In the digisphere!

Eek, it's eleven! / Only three hours for work / I like the pressure

Rubbing my cold hands / together to warm them up / I will type faster

Writing about films / I have not yet seen is like / Dancing about Maine

So much work to do / For the next hundred minutes / Not allowed to tweet

What would Pa Ingalls do?

2008-12-15T09:03:00.011-07:00

Hello in there, hello!

It is too freaking cold out today for me to want to go back out, now that my child is safely ensconced at school, which is just as well because I have a ton of work right here in front of me. I'm warming up fingers and mind for painting, IFS writing, and reassembling my kid's room, not to mention packaging up stuff to send and planning dinner and sewing up seams to slim down a couple of pairs of pants. Zounds! I do need to do something physical besides painting, though. My back's all achy. Maybe I can work on all my projects and then go to the rec center for a swim and sauna. That would be a fine goal for today.

This morning I thought of Pa Ingalls when I was making my second cup of coffee, and how surprised he would likely be at how long I had been up and how little I had gotten done in that time. But I did deliver my child to school and now am hunkering down to my work. "Make hay while the sun shines," sings through my mind whenever I think of him. Today I figured that would be a nice little tool to keep in my pocket: "What Would Pa Ingalls Do?" I don't want to shame myself into anything, but I do want to feel that same sunny determination to make the most of each day we have when we're here.

Which reminds me of one of the things about the SUV-driving/McMansion-owning Evangelical Christians that troubles me the most: I fear that all the focus on things being better in the next world keeps folks from being fully invested in this one. It's such a bad setup, on so many levels. If there's revelation then there's The Rapture, which I am always amazed people really believe could happen. One guy on This American Life was talking about his experiences calling certain people when he was not certain if the Rapture had happened (and he, by extension, had been Left Behind) and when they answered he was so relieved: "Phew! The Rapture hasn't happened yet. If it had, Aunt Shirley would not have answered her phone, because she'd be in Heaven for sure." It feels like pure permission to mess things up in the here and now in some perverse way. All the good folks will go away and then it will be really bad, Hell on Earth, so who cares if things get a little crappier right now? We're like those proverbial frogs in the pot on the stove, constantly adjusting to worsening conditions, even though we know things could get really, really bad.

What inspires people to be their best selves? I know my father yearned to have that near-magical aura of competence and integrity epitomized by Charles Ingalls and Jesus, but didn't have the foundation for it. (To me the evidence for that is in how "deceitful" he always accused everyone around him of being.) In my little universe I feel I'm just now learning how to truly rely on others and to be relied upon. I'm learning how to rely on myself (I've discovered it's amazing what the always-true statement "I have a rich inner life" does for my self-confidence). I do feel people around me know I'm a little odd or something. Perhaps it's the having only one child thing, or my short fuse. But it's okay. It's a way in which we know each other, and recognize each other's limits, and no one has to fake anything or lie about anything.

Being with my family makes me want to be my best self, as does making commitments to my friends, my writing group, and others in my circle. I do like to rely and be relied upon, and to live my life in a way that is honest and true. Knowing there are people in my life and out there on Twitter doing the things I want to be doing, and reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie stories, all give me something to reach for. Knowing people publish books and have babies at the same time is good, as is knowing it is possible at approximately my age to be centered and ambitious enough to be president despite all apparent obstacles.

A belated Parade of Lights update, speaking of all things Ingalls: Last weekend, the youngest and I went downtown and dressed up in costumes and walked with the Boulder History Museum folks, mostly because a neighbor is on the board and asked us if we'd like to join in. I had just seen something about our town celebrating its 150th anniversary and felt a pang of wanting to participate in that somehow. So we said yes to our neighbor. The funny part is we went to the museum before the parade and picked out our costumes but we didn't know what other people were wearing. We decided to dress as Laura and her Ma would. So on the Saturday of the parade, I felt very casual and underdressed when we arrived downtown and saw how everyone else was dressed. But looking back I felt it wasn't all bad to have us plainer folk along, either, representin' for those settlers way back when who didn't have silk dresses with petticoats.

A good cause for the day, with a way to help right away

2008-12-10T12:03:00.003-07:00

My friend sent out the following this morning:

I don't usually forward mass email campaigns but I feel very strongly about this issue. 350.org, an international climate campaign, is calling on people all over the world to take action to safeguard the survival of all countries and peoples by signing the "Survival Declaration."

They're on the ground at the UN Climate talks in Poland right now, and they need our help to put pressure on the delagates from the wealthier countries on higher ground not to forsake the island nations that have the most to lose if the oceans rise. The e-mail they sent me is below, or just go straight to their declaration here: http://www.350.org/survival

Thanks! Love, Jessica

----------------

Dear friends,

I'm writing again from the UN Climate talks in Poland, where one thing has become heartbreakingly apparent: for some people, these negotiations aren't just about numbers and compromise and diplomacy. For some people, these negotiations are about survival.

People toss around a lot of lofty words at the UN, so let me be clear. I'm not talking about "survival" as an abstract concept, or some distant problem for future generations. I'm talking about countries and peoples getting quite literally wiped off the map within decades. I'm talking about human lives and livelihoods being destroyed by the impacts of climate change here and now.

Here's the worst part: the countries facing the biggest impacts of climate change are also the countries most poorly represented here in the United Nations.
With the static of the UN and the distractions of a 24-hour news cycle, the countries fighting on the front lines of climate change struggle to get the attention they deserve. Case in point: last week 49 of the world's most vulnerable countries endorsed the 350 target that the latest science calls for. Instead of recognizing the importance of this call, some EU leaders have been backpedaling on their already weak climate commitments.
The time has come to change the conversation in Poland, to send one clear message that cuts through the static.
That's where you come in. If we come together, we can amplify the voices of the people who are most threatened by climate change.
Can you take a stand for survival by signing the pledge here? http://www.350.org/survival

Youth from around the world are spending the next 24 hours pressuring their country's UN negotiators to sign on to the very same same survival pledge--and their efforts will be made much easier if they have people like you supporting them from every corner of the earth.

We'll put your messages directly in front of world leaders by staging a high-profile delivery on the last day of the negotiations. This plan will only work if we get enough people signing on before the end of the week to make it count. With your help, we can make the "survival principle" a key message of the UN negotiations. And upon that principle, the world can build an equitable global climate agreement around science-based targets--targets like 350, the safe upper limit of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

When I landed in Poland for the UN Climate talks a week ago, I thought I knew what to expect: a few meetings, some beaurocratic backpedaling, and some frustratingly slow progress on a global climate treaty. I wasn't prepared for feeling moved, deeply, by the stories from those on the front lines of climate change. These are stories from countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu, island nations who are losing their crops and drinking water due to the ever encroaching sea. If climate change remains unchecked, by the time I retire there may be nothing left of these nations but waves.

We can prevent a climate catastrophe. The time has come for the world to stand together. Please join us.

Thanks for all that you do,

-Jon (and Bill, Jamie, Jeremy, Kelly, May, Phil, and Will and the entire 350 team)

The list

2008-12-10T11:05:00.004-07:00

OK, time to write down those resolutions? priorities? plans? goals? impulses? all of the above_X_ for the new year.

Finish my novel. Cross everyone's paths. Let everyone run amok doing their things -- those crazy dirty tricks guys and my rock-star wanna be who can't stop herself from shouting about the food industry and her sister the chef who is trying to be three people in one, oh, and that architect, those cute, flirty folks over at the FDA, and I've been listening in on. They're onto something. Together they'll be a happening! A jam! A meltdown! A brainstorm! A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road....

Be the best partner to my sweetie. Help him in every way.

Be a good mom and a solid advocate for my daughter in school.

Be a full and present participant in my writing group at every moment.

Keep taking pictures.

Keep talking with family and friends.

Keep on eating well, and together. That is some social glue, getting together over dinner.

Remember to get outside and move around and breathe deeply every day.

Do another couple of house projects this year.

Move us forward somehow, by redecorating? Try painting and other ideas, like making built-in bookshelves, adapting window ledges to look like rock or metal or marble.

Joys of the season

2008-12-08T09:24:00.002-07:00

It's these little things we do to spur each other along, to draw each other in. One of us starts to do the Sunday crossword puzzle, and the other sidles up to help. I start a painting project that gets us to do some necessary reorganizing. My sweetie does the yard work and I come out and I come and pitch in so that it all gets done in a weekend. Then we both feel better. I vacuum the floors; my sweetie vacuums the couch. These are such little things, but they make such a difference in our life together.

What if it's the collective consciousness, not the collective unconscious?

2008-12-05T17:31:00.009-07:00

What I'm on about this week:

The Big Three's plea for cash, when what they should have done is started innovating like crazy in 1973, when we got our first inklings of problems like these. I can't believe their nerve; I've lost my compassion. I mean, those guys couldn't have shared a jet to come talk? Or proposed they conference call? Come on, where are their strategists? Where are their heads? Stuffed deep into their own pockets, searching for lint in the recesses. I swear. It just makes me want to buy a hybrid Subaru even more than I did before. Now it's spite. (Sounds like the tagline for a silly movie: "Mike Masca and the Revenge of the Blue-Masked Meanies. First it was a crusade. Now it's spite.")

The meltdown. This is the first major financial crisis in my adult life (I'm not counting my cousin-in-law's experience of being in Korea during the Asian meltdown, nor remembering President Carter's environmental speeches and resetting our thermostats two degrees lower to 66 because ours had already been at 68, back when I was 10). The financial crisis feels very much like being in the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 and being only 17 miles from the epicenter: it doesn't feel like it's over yet, even when the ground seems to have stopped rumbling and roaring. I'm still ducking under my desk and waiting for the dust to clear. It feels like it's going to be awhile.

New media: Two things caught my attention this week in this realm. First and worst, the Rocky Mountain News is up for sale. I am sad to see this. I think having a two-newspaper town is a good thing, and I like the way Westword is the little yappy dog that nips at their heels. But I also guess those guys and gals have been shopping their resumes around for a while now, knowing full well if they hang on they may go down with the ship. It's terrible to watch these ships go down, too. It is like watching another great ocean liner sink, having already seen the movie Titanic yet feeling helpless to stop it despite having all that information about what went so wrong. Do we have to recast newsgathering and dissemination as something completely different? Must we turn to grassroots support as we do for vital services like community radio? How many people who listen to community radio actually donate? Can that number be increased if the loss of that resource is threatened? Second: in a news story this week about a local man who is a key member of Obama's transition team, a graphic was embedded in the story that was a little amusing, but also rather shocking to me. (Here's the close-up, if you can't make out this key member of the team.) I was just shocked that they would completely surround an advertising graphic in a news story. Were you surprised when you saw that, too?

I keep thinking about the Spot.us independent reporting-for-pay model; what seems to me to be missing is a way to gauge a reporter's credibility. A newspaper or other institution can open that door for an individual, but it's harder for the individual to push that door open themselves. So how do you create a new, yet credible, institution that is devoted to gathering and disseminating news? Busy minds are working on this problem as we speak, but I think it's like a lot of things (e.g., the healthcare system, the gut-brain connection, and the new killer news app) in that there's plenty of room for solutions from all corners, all comers.

Five gift ideas for the chronically frugal

2008-12-01T12:43:00.009-07:00

In some ways I am profligate (I do love to eat at restaurants), but in other ways I am so frugal by upbringing and personal predilection that this new belt-tightening everyone is bracing themselves for already feels like second-nature to me. Anyway, here are a few fave frugal gift and craft ideas for when you're feeling strapped for cash but want to get creative:

1. Mix CDs. They are windows into your soul. What songs still get you going after all these years? What are you listening to this week? People love getting them, and drawing all sorts of conclusions about what is going on in your personal life based only on the songs you choose.

2. Make some refrigerator magnets. Get prints of your favorite photos and mount them on magnets that you buy from an office supply store. Often these are sold in business-card size, but you can stick two side-by-side on the back of a larger image (just peel off the backings, butt them up against one another, aligning the ends, and with scissors or a craft knife trim off any extra photo paper from around the edges).

Or with tiny, super-strong magnets, you can turn other objects into magnets. The magnets are too small and too strong to be useful on the fridge on their own, it turns out, but they set off a little brainstorm for me. I went online and ordered some neodymium disc ones, pretty small, that weren't too strong. Good magnet fodder includes tiny dolls, rocks, single earrings, buttons, and random crap I find around my house. I also use those clear pebbles decorators and florists use, which work if you can find decent ones that you can see through. They have a nice magnifying effect and look great with something glued onto the flat side. You need a strong, transparent-drying glue (it's nasty and fumacious but E-6000 is probably the best one I have found) and some fun magazine pictures, photos, or papers (origami with metallic detail works well, as do many wrapping papers). I started making so many of these I bought hole punches (a 1/2" one for the smaller pebbles, and a 1" punch for the larger ones). What's fun about them is being able to back them with anything. I gave my daughter's teacher a set of magnet pebbles I'd made by punching each of the kids' faces out of a copy of the class picture a couple of years ago.

3. If you're feeling ambitious, you could bind a book. You'll need a lot of supplies: boards, fabric or paper for covering the boards, glue, end papers, binding cord or ribbon, and the paper for the inside. You also need a vise grip and access to a drill, so this project is not for the faint of heart. But it can be so satisfying to make a personalized journal or photo album by picking out just what you think they would like and assembling it yourself.

4. Make a set of stamp-art note cards. Cut some nice thick paper or card stock in half, fold each half, and make potato stamps for printing a design on the front of each one. Cut a potato in half, and scrape away anything you don't want to print. Dip your stamp in some tempera paint and print onto a card. Make a few items of different sizes so you can mix motifs and accents.

5. Apples. Everyone loves apples. Even if the recipients don't eat them all, I once read about a study finding that one of the sexiest scents to humans is of dessicating apples. Think of it: A snack, and an aphrodisiac, all in one! Rinse them, polish them with a dishcloth, and place them into a paper bag that you decorate with some crap you've found around your house. Add a few filigrees with a colored marker, and you've just charmed the socks off some neighbor who is now mentally scrambling for what she can gift you with in return.

Breaking news

2008-11-26T21:14:00.009-07:00

Holy heck! I have been feeling that earthquakey shift in my consciousness again tonight: The definition of news has just changed for the good. I've been mentioning Twitter: well, I just picked up my computer for the first time and found that a bunch of scary stuff is going down right now. A thousand people may be dead in Mumbai. (**Edit: Now I'm hearing possibly 100 dead, 600 injured.**) The Indian Army has gone into the Taj Hotel, where they had found unexploded grenades, and terrorists were supposedly on the 18th floor, all this information broadcast in blurts from mumbaiupdates since about two hours ago. Just as I was getting up to speed on the situation, I saw the post stating that the Indian government wanted to stop the broadcast of all tweets containing the text "#Mumbai." (People agree to post with a "hashtag" in front of a topic to make it show up as trends; one can search for the string "#mumbai" and get all the news before it's even fit to print.)

It felt eerie and unsettling to tweet a query to someone who seemed to be in the middle of this maelstrom (**Edit - but who I later learned was in Boston **) and ask directly whether the government's fear is of endangering civilians or is there a possibility it could mobilize aid more quickly? Thirteen minutes ago an update came: "This is exactly what #Mumbai doesn't need: a certain tv station following the configuration of the police. That's what I'm getting at" and then a few minutes later came: "SUCCESS - the NDTV website is no longer broadcasting live video from the #Mumbai front. Thank you NDTV." So security is the issue, and too much news can be harmful, apparently.

Yet it's a torment to know this is happening right now. We can tweet about blood drives, and I can post on Facebook and hope my messages go out across those six degrees, but that's still halfway around the world. I suppose that distance feels a little more spannable with Twitter, but it's still vast.

I'm Open!

2008-11-25T15:10:00.004-07:00

So many meanings, that little exclamation. In the game, ready for any move needed, receptive, allowing for alternatives, even vulnerable. Living online the way I have been coming to do has thrown open some kind of floodgate in my concepts of identity and how good other people out there are but there are exceptions, there are other elements to be aware of, too. I know full well I am also making myself more Googlable, for better or for worse. And I can't help it: it makes me nervous.

What doesn't make me nervous is going to my writing group. I have gotten a good sense of where people are, and where I am. I try to bring in work I'm happy with, but I always get pulled up just right. I'm always surprised and impressed by their insights about my work. This week I brought in a piece that is still mostly a rant, but I got just the criticism I needed to revise it into something that has meaning and value, instead of just leaving it to stew in its own juices.

I keep wondering why it is that I think back on the film Slumdog Millionaire with such affection and it's in part the children, as I said in my Movie Habit review. Although they are forced by their circumstances to try to survive, having been orphaned by a Muslim-hating mob, all their naïve, energetic striving proves inspiring. I also admire the energy and verve of the lead character, Jamal (Dev Patel). It does take a lot for a boy in the slums to become a chai-walla at a call center, and Jamal's face and his entire stance reveal the chasm between these worlds. He persists, despite the hopelessness entailed in coming from the slums of one of the world's megacities, a much more damning fate in India than it is here, incidentally. There's something eternally optimistic about the colors themselves: the blue of plastic tarps setting off a rich palette of yellows, browns, and reds throughout, the film organizing a kaleidoscope of color out of the chaos. I returned to this because of Opal Dream, the film we're screening for our block kids' movie night, which is dark but not too dark. It's definitely not as fluffy and effervescent as Ella Enchanted, or Enchanted or any of the Disney films (although Bambi's pretty darned tragic), but it's a good and provocative story. It's not about people who are being good all the time, probably the downfall of a lot of potentially interesting tales that come out of Hollywood these days. It's about people who are forced to deal with circumstances outside their ken. It's like I said to my friend the other day: even if you don't agree with it, it puts a draft out there to edit, gives you a place to start thinking about some issues.

Do they deserve a break today?

2008-11-23T11:08:00.005-07:00

I was just considering whether to try and zoom down to Denver to catch a smidge more of the film fest, and had picked out a shorts program, which turned out to be a "first-look" or student program. That brought to mind something another selection committee member said at one of our selection meetings: that we give students a handicap in judging their films but truly they have so many resources at their fingertips, so much expertise and equipment around them, that they don't really deserve the kinder, gentler appraisal. She went on to say she's is often a lot more impressed when people on their own gather up the resources to make a film than she is when they're in film school. Food for thought, eh?

We are what we feed our kids

2008-11-21T12:42:00.007-07:00

Rocking my world this week: a couple of talks, and Twitter, all inspiring in completely different ways.

The first talk was a tirade about what we are allowing schools to feed our kids for lunch every day. Ann Cooper, who turned things around in the Berkeley school district, unleashes her fiery torrent of rhetoric and statistics to paint a damning picture of a society that has allowed our government to climb into big businesses' comfy pockets and beds.

Cooper says in her talk that if we send our children to school and we feed them bad food, that's what they learn. And what happens? We get sick. I think she's right: there's something we can do about all those additives and preservatives and hormones and pesticides we're allowing the USDA to dump on all our crops because Monsanto's too big to fail, because we've got to keep doing business with them because it's our patriotic duty and not to do so would destabilize our economy too much. We can stand up and say, our kids need real food. The problem is a lot of parents don't know it's not nutritious; they assume if it's coming from the government, it's good for us. There's a midwestern stoicism among some of my relatives that is thrift-based and also very stoic. But there comes a point when those top 10 companies responsible for feeding a huge percentage of our country's population must be recognized as having a greater interest in their short-term profits than in their consumers' long-term health. And we have to be willing to stand up and say, not only is $8 billion a year not enough money, but we must double that at least and spend it in different ways to get value for our money, that is, the health of our children and our planet.

I have some friends who are starting a new venture, writing a book and starting an NGO, both called Goodness To Go. They are trying to provide a roadmap and toolkit for anyone wanting to start a new venture. (I will definitely put in a word to advocate employing social media in their networking strategies, given all I have seen and done this week. Just this week I signed up for some stuff on Facebook and started wearing a little white ribbon tied in a double-knot to symbolize my belief that any human being should be able to marry the person of their choice. The social media explosion makes enterprises like this seem so much easier. Such amazing opportunity. It is Web 2.0. People are reaching out to one another online; there's no going back. No putting that powerful genie back in any teensy little jar.)

One Less Coffee, One More Lunch might be a good name for a charity that supports school lunch improvements (that name might be too scolding, tho -- we can sleep on that awhile longer). You could give people a way to set up little electronic accounts that let them donate their Starbucks money weekly or monthly or even daily if so motivated. Heck, offer to give away a bunch of espresso makers to provide a direct incentive for saving money and resources (all those paper cups and plastic lids and stirrer sticks and napkins, not to mention the gas and pollution expended on auto trips just for coffee that's been flown halfway around the world). Channel all that not-spent-at-Starbucks money into feeding kids better foods, getting fresher, cleaner, more local produce and staples into school districts to support total community health.

My gosh, you could even have an app with little buttons you push to pick one or more causes you'd like to support. I want to send bikes and books to Akumal. To buy kids nutritious and fresh school lunches that stoke their appetites and imaginations. To publish novels that let people know it's okay to be who they are, or to write what they have to say.

The second inspiring talk I heard was a talk by Ken Robinson an engaging and urbane fellow, just my type (and the English accent never hurt his chances either) who spun a good twenty-minute tale (all you get at TED talks, apparently). His was about learning and how schools teach kids, delivered in quite the opposite way Ann Cooper speaks, softened and readied by funny jokes and self-effacing patter. He related a triumphant anecdote about a woman who took her child for a consultation, imagining ADD or ADHD or something equally dire. The doc invented a pretext for leaving the child alone in the room and turned on the office stereo on his way out with her mother. The girl was up as soon as music came on, moving around the room.

"She's a dancer," was his diagnosis. "Get her into a dance school." And it's true. She was and we all know people who must move to be able to think. (I think our daughter has that bent. She would be great at circus school. Can you imagine what our friends and family would say if we were to announce, "We're sending our daughter to circus school!") I think a little friend of my daughter's mom is like that: I see her running all over our neighborhood, deep in her world. I feel the same need to nurture my own key strength, I suppose; I have this inner world that requires me to park myself in front of a keyboard and record something, anything, fairly often. I have to write to think things through, and I need some restorative time alone or at least quiet pretty much every day. But I have a musical intelligence, too, so I find loud music organizing and appealing, especially when performed right in front of me. I crave quiet more as I get older, I notice, but I'll still take earplugs and go listen to some live music just about anytime. And I need to work up a sweat every day, too. And our schools need to be places where all of these behaviors are valued, not just places where people are taught to think "straight" so they can hold jobs.

I'm glad I saw those talks. I would considering starting something, and it makes me want to get back to what my character is doing in my novel (o how I love saying that: novel, singular. Still feels right to combine the two. Ahhhh). Maybe I'll have to volunteer to user-test my friends' new NGO starter kit.

In other news, I'm feeling a little mindwarped, like I've just had my first warp-speed flight and lived to tell the tale. Honestly, it's all because of Twitter. At first I didn't see it. Now I think it's amazing. I love it, really, but feel strongly compelled to issue one huuuuuge caveat: I think mania and Twitter would not or do not go well together. That's my safety tip for the day ('coz I'm all about that, dontcha know?): manics, take your Twitter in appropriate doses for your tolerance. It's has an addictive allure; the rabbit hole is endless. Use it with care and discretion and it can be your friend; abuse it and it can be your enemy.

Those are my pearls for today. Ciao and peace and out.

I heard the news today, oh boy

2008-11-20T12:53:00.009-07:00

Here's my personal reaction to a film I saw at Starz Denver Film Festival last weekend:

Stop the Presses! The American Newspaper in Peril

As a home-based worker (a writer and mom) I rely heavily on the newspaper for my initial hit of what's happening in my world. I straddle two major demographics as I have my feet planted firmly in both the print and online worlds. In the audience during the panel discussion that followed the screening of Stop the Presses!, Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza's documentary about the decline of the newspaper industry and the need for new solutions for its ills, I saw how vast the gulf between those two worlds can be.

Listening to that panel discussion, I arrived at my own personal conclusion about all this talk of newspapers losing their audiences, the single-copy subscribers: I have had it up to my eartops with being lumped in with any other enormous group, whether it's the dinosaurs who only read newspapers and magazines, or it's Generations X and Y, who get their news exclusively online, or from talking with friends. We're not so one-dimensional, we the people. Take me for an example: I get the local daily delivered to my door, the Sunday New York Times, The New Yorker comes to my mailbox weekly, and I read books I check out from the library. We don't get cable nor do we have a TV in our living room, so we don't watch much, and what we do watch is mostly Netflix DVDs (I still feel badly for abandoning my local shop).

But I have also started using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter of late, which means I get and can provide instant updates whenever I want them whatever or whomever I choose to befriend or “follow” as long as they “tweet” or post brief messages on Twitter. Along with trolling for periodic updates by intriguing and popular people, I also signed up for CNN, NPR, BBC, and a few other newsgathering organizations. I am not much interested in watching movies on my iPhone but would consider watching TV episodes that way. I'm too cheap to buy a lot of stuff from iTunes. I still like to have the CDs for music I like, although I can see how those days are numbered. I still like having a physical artifact. I also prefer to do my crossword puzzles in pencil; doing them online isn't quite as satisfying.

See what I mean?

How will newspapers attract and keep readers like me, who value a variety of information streams and formats, without condescending to us or trying to give us too much of what we don't want or need? How can they make their news feeds indispensable, and get a return on their investment of staff salaries and benefits? Stop the Presses! doesn't answer the question, but it doesn't make any condescending presumptions, to its credit. I for one am anxiously waiting, watching, and even examining how I can personally can help solve this problem. It still seems like the world is still waiting for that killer news app.

One person during the panel said an argument has been advanced by an NYU prof that "there is no business model for newspapers, because there's nothing else like them.” Suddenly I feel we're getting warmer. What if that were the one assumption we took back to the empty drawing board? That whatever the model, it may not look anything like the previous one. What would we do differently? How can we support the Third Estate as one of the important pillars of our social world and reward people appropriately for the effort and risks involved in reporting stories? I think folks like Spot.Us and The Poynter Institute are on the right track; it's just convincing individuals that it's in their best interests to buy investigative reporting as well as books on Amazon and trinkets on eBay. A tough row to hoe in this barren climate.