Lessons from Being a Mom This Week

My husband is out of town for a week, and with the holidays and all meaning I'm off work, it's just been Me & the Baby Toddler.

Oh my goodness. All hail the single mothers of the world. It is not easy.

As I write this, she is stumbling in circles, her mouth full of bagel, in her diaper, carrying a yellow duck, nose running. The dog is rolling his eyes. I am scraping out a couple minutes to type on the computer, which she has so far not let me do all morning. I don't have much time.

I need to put down these mental notes to myself of things I have learned during this intense one-on- one time with my daughter:

1) anything that will fall over, will (even if it's just there 'for a moment')

2) forget the usefulness of bookmarks - remember page numbers - they will be removed and tossed

3) any standing water (dog dish, mop bucket) will end up splashed on the floor

4) if it's forbidden, it's fun - possible remedy - FORBID EVERYTHING?

5) A toddler is kind of like Armaggedon. Isn't there something in the Bible about what is done will be undone and what is undone will be done? Lesson: remember the little terror is holy.

6) Seinfeld is a brilliant, brilliant man, for one schtick alone - the thing about how his Nighttime Guy doesn't care about Morning Guy, so he does whatever he likes, thinking 'Morning Guy will deal with it, not me!' So Morning Guy hates Nighttime Guy.

Currently, my Morning Mother wants to strangle Nighttime Mama, who went out drinking Black Russians last night, passed out without turning any lights off or the heat on, slept all night with her contacts in, and had to wake up at 6:30 a.m. to play with her baby.

7) Everything you buy for your child you are really buying for yourself. I want to buy her new books because if I have to read Moo Moo Brown Cow one more time, I will turn back into a meat-eater. Also, I indulged in some new bath toys last night because the thousand identical yellow rubber duckies we currently have clogging the bathtub are starting to remind me of the eerie, freakish clones I'm reading in my sci fi book (the one where I've lost my place).

And you have to admit: the cute clothes are just for showing off the baby. She could care less.

8) There's this freaky book called Runaway Bunny in which the baby bunny keeps saying how she's going to run away from her mum and the mum bunny is like, 'whatever you do, wherever you go, I'll come find you and get you.' It's so loving! And so terrifying! Like the mama bunny is part of the SS or something.

But everytime my toddler screams when I wipe her nose, I know that this kind of love requires being hated and despised. I don't think my own mother ever got this. She wanted to be loved too much. She forgot that to love a child is to give up being loved back.

9) Making up the rules sounds like fun, when you're a kid. But now as a parent, I realize it's hard, not only to make them up, but to keep them up.

Being without my husband this week has been easy in some ways but awful in others. Mostly, as a friend put it, without a partner around, you get lost in your own head, you start to doubt yourself when you're making it up as you go along.

And then he calls and questions you and you wish you could send a punch through the telephone line. He is trying to be helpful and give input. He doesn't know you're at the point where you zone out for minutes at a time, that you can't sleep, that you are losing the ability to make decisions... that when she's playing in the dog dish, you let her, because it gives you a couple minutes of uninterrupted time... and then you feel guilty about it...

You wish he was back home. Having a partner of any kind really really helps. Just someone to bounce ideas off of, to complain to, to discuss poop with, to voice doubts to...

10) When people say being a mother is the hardest job ever, they are not quoting a magnet. They are speaking the truth. At least for Americans, without the benefit of extended families. So many of our own mothers did not mother us properly, because they themselves weren't mothered properly, so here we are now, trying to mother properly without examples or roadmaps, maybe only some sitcom episodes from the 80s and 90s...

11) Toilets, trash cans, and dirt are fun fun fun.

12) The thing about having a child is you do have to a) grow up yourself and b) learn to play again. It's this weird double-stretch.

Growing up myself for me means
- putting my needs behind everyone else's, but still taking care of myself
- being assertive, not passive aggressive, or aggressive
- tying my shoe laces, putting my crap away, cleaning up after myself, not eating like a bachelorette, thinking ahead
- driving safer, to protect her, and myself
- eating healthier, because I want to protect me for her
- following some rules without questioning them (hardest thing)
- watching my language
- no watching tv around her
- living conciously, to set a good example
- not feeling sorry for myself anymore

In general, just not indulging in the luxury of getting to be as childish or annoying as I would like to be if I didn't have a little mimic-sponge beside me...

And part two, learning to play again... this is the good part, that makes up for the growing up part. I get to scribble and talk in funny voices and sing silly songs and see the world again for the new, beautiful thing it is... I get to sit on the bathroom floor with my baby, letting her pet my hair... I get to study grass... I get to turn her sock into a squeaky character that makes her giggle... I get to dance to cheesy music...

The thing is, it's hard, after training myself to seem 'adult' to let go, to take time to just be, to just let myself be ridiculous... but it's essential. You don't do projects with a baby toddler really. You have to live in the moment. You have to learn to drop whatever you're doing and pick up something else. You can't get attached to a goal or plan or a schedule or a nice pair of pants.

You can only get attached to the baby.

And that's a good thing.

Living in Peace

I was sitting out on the porch the other night, thinking about how lucky, really, I am to be living here and now. Most people in the world at this very moment are living in some kind of strife, whether it be hunger or homelessness, poverty or war. We're lucky to be the Fat Cats we are. People have been striving for fat cattishness forever, and it probably won't last very long, so the question that came to my mind was: What are we doing with it?

Seriously, what good are we making of this peace and plenty? Are we enjoying it? Are we deepening our souls, educating our minds, expanding our wisdom, embracing beauty? Are we creating art and literature, elements of a high, happy culture? Are we evolving as we should be, given that we have so much given?

In some respects, I could probably say yes to this. For all the sense of decay - moral, political, intellectual, etc., - there are actually some wonderful things happening in this country. I'm grateful for them:

a) the rise of awareness about the planet, organic food, etc., - there's more and more people getting hip with the situation of earth's unhealthiness, and their own...
b) the rise of tolerance - yes, I know, it sucks that there's not free gay marriage in every state, but in the media and in general, there's more acceptance of interracial marriage, women leaders, and gay people than ever
c) more good television - say what you like, but as much as there's loadfulls of crappy programming, there's also really awesome, smart, challenging TV being created
d) increased quality of human connection - through blogs and yahoo groups, there's more people bonding, forming communities, and there are nice people...

Yeah, I know, you could temper each of these items with horror stories of intolerance, crap, sucky people, religious dogma, how expensive things are, etc. But I'd rather be living now that in the 1950s, and there's lots of reasons for that. I'm in a warm house, typing on a laptop, wearing organic lotion, a healthy daughter asleep, and I am lucky. I want to make the most of this luck. I want to be responsible for the terror and oppression my country spreads over the world - I want to continue to promote and give my life to helping others achieve this peace - but I also want to accept and enjoy it, because it is a gift, and I feel like it would be ungrateful to squander it by complaining about how it's not good enough...

It's kind of like my friend who had the trust fund and felt guilty about it. She drove me crazy with her apologies, her self-deprecation, her shame. I just wanted to yell at her, "Relish it! Spend the money! Embrace it! Share the wealth, but goshdarn, have fun! You're lucky!"

It's hard to not feel guilty for having this luck, especially when you mine its roots and find that slavery and oppression and the blood of abused workers fed and built the foundations of it. It is hard to know how to behave, to enjoy shopping or driving if you think of all the people who suffer for the oil for the clothes for the shoes that I buy, use, and wear...

Oh dear, my argument unravels...

Blogging is Exhausting

If this whole blogging experiment is going to lead to anything substantial, there has to be a better way. I'm getting overwhelmed. To 'keep up' with all the blogs to which I subscribe, let alone to read new ones, connect with others, etc., can take more than 24 hours a day.

The thing with books is: they're finite. You can see how far left you have to read quite easily, by pinching the pages together that you've not yet read and pretending you can judge the body fat of text your reading will burn away.

Blogs: infinity. No end in sight. Each one grows in both directions everyday, creating streams of archived pasts and outstretched strands to other blogs. New blogs crop every day, like bacteria strains. There's no way out, only small ways to try and stay afloat.

So I'm thinking, there has to be some kind of constraint. I need to be part of a blogging circle, the way my mom is part of a quilting bee. Kind of like Cville Blogs, only smaller, and the thing would be inbred, sweetly incestuous. It would last for a distinct amount of time- six months, maybe. Then you could switch to a different circle. But at least after that six months you would feel like you knew the other bloggers somewhat -- that you had read their writing, not just skimmed it.

Well, following my own advice, I just trolled some of the other NaBloPoMo bloggers.

One that I really liked: http://mytopography.com/2006/11/12/two-kinds-of-prayers/ This woman is an artistic teacher.

I also liked "my pink toes" but his comments weren't working. The guy was afraid of cancer.

I actually feel kind of touched by other humans.

Is that pathetic?

SNL Was Actually Good

SNL was actually good last night! I mean, I did this increasingly rare thing while watching it... I laughed.

Yay! I can't help it: I grew up looking forward to staying up Saturday nights to watch this show, and it's nice to still have that to look forward to...

Dream.

I dreamt I was an assassin. I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling the guilt of the dream heavily, as real on my body as the blanket.

The stars stick on the sky
because I say they do

because I want to weigh the time
with heavy rocks

with words I try to write
against their slipping

it works until the stanza stops
and I can't love you

the past becomes the past is why
and you are going

with the stars gone

Failure

Yeah, so I can't just postdate this entry to make up for missing a post yesterday. I mean, I could, and that's my instinct, because it's not like I'm doing this for a grade or anything, but I won't. I'm trying to toughen up my integrity. I don't exactly know where or how I learned to so easily coat my inadequacies and failures with the thick sauce of argument and excuse. It's not exactly lying. It's more like salad dressing. You disguise the broccoli and radishes, so that your tastebuds get tricked into eating them.

That's what I tend to do with the truth when it is not so delicious. I hate admitting that. But that's part of learning to tell the truth. Doing so when it makes me taste like a yucky vegetable.

(Yes, I am indeed eating a salad right now.)

I am not even going to blame it on my parents. I know that growing up acting had something to do with it. Acting has often been lambasted with aspersions of wickedness for its kinship with fiction, which is made up, like a lie. That's why some religious groups outlaw the theater. That's why the theater world always seems a bit slippery in character. Because people are slipping in and out of characters. And that makes it hard sometimes to have one that's solid, grounded, and true.

My father often philosophized about the distinction between fact and truth. He was an amateur historian. One of my favorite memories of him: he's pontificating in his jaunty, jovial way before a group of other cpers in metal chairs in a semicircle around him. I'm walking by, stopping to listen. It's outside, on the grounds of the church where the summer sessions were held. It's summer in California, but my dad is still wearing a long-sleeved shirt over his t-shirt. He dresses like an Arab, in layers.

He's telling a story from history, I think European. I don't know which story. He was a good story teller. I passed the European AP test with a 4 without a class or studying because of his stories. And he's saying how there are facts and truths but the two aren't the same.

Maybe he understood that so well because of his immersion in acting, because inhabiting characters could portray truths if not strict factual details. Many of the historical roles he played summer after summer: Churchill, Patton, an RAF chaplain from WWII, and Maurice Chevalier, and a French swordsman, and Harpo Marx. He collected the necessary props and accessories: bowties, cigars, fake guns, stage swords, a curly wig, a silver pocket watch. Also a leather pouch holding thirty fake pieces of silver for his singlet performance of Judas - an especially intense one-man play that frightened me when I saw it as a young child, because my father, under the bright stage lights, sweat pouring from his temples, cried and screamed like a man about to commit suicide for betraying his Christ.

I have all of these things now, in boxes. The effects of a dead person -- but stranger, the effects of myriad dead characters, who died and died everytime the curtain closed. With my father died a host -- I mean, a host of souls, or the host of a host of souls. It's an odd assortment of relics that piece together an incomplete man. My memory is also incomplete. I write this with weakening confidence. My recollection feels watered down, a shallow puddle at my feet. How much will I have to make up to make up for the lacking thereof?

And can I trust myself to be my father's historian? Can I tell his story with even a small measure of the authenticity with which he told the stories of people he didn't even know or touch the way I knew him?

I think this is why I wrote poems, why I became a (failed) poet. Because it's easier to take the remnants and leave them small and inconclusive than to try and tease out a sustained narrative. It feels more truthful to leave pieces as pieces.

My father's ashes are still in a box, too. By now I should have found an urn or a proper scenic river in which to throw them. I've had some ideas. But nothing seems right. He didn't belong anywhere physically, not really, except in his body and voice. Which are gone.

This is ridiculous, of course, to keep writing when I've failed already. But honestly, I have to keep going. I am too used to quitting if I can't be perfect. Quitting or covering up. But I won't do either, this time. I'll keep going forward, a failure though I am, but an honest one.

Angel. Yeah, Me.

When I first auditioned as the lead singer for the band Darker Days, Johnny, the guitar player, exclaimed, 'she sings like an angel.'

And yes: that has stuck in my head.

It's been about ten years since I wailed my high-pitched babbles into the microphone in that basement, Yam hammering the drums, T walking the bass.

I didn't know what I was doing. T. heard me singing Ella Fitzgerald songs in the shower. He told me to come and try out.

He truly loved me. What is it, about being loved like that? Being appreciated for all one's talents? He always thought I was funny, too. We clicked on every level.

Eventually, the band split. Johnny was a manipulator. He tried to work T and me against each other. Yam dressed her dogs up in bomber jackets.

And T never played again, really. He was devastated.

So much for being an angel.

Fake sausage links

I love fake bacon. It's really, really good.

I also am loving the Cville Blogs this week. I guess because we've all experienced the election together - a single event we're all writing about - it makes it almost (sniff!) feel like a community!

When are we having another get-together? Can we go camping?

I love this link from Bruno & the Professor - wit and wisdom of Rumsfeld:

Also, from my new favoritely entertaining blog Yes But No But Yes:
-Why I love men with bald heads: a lesson on using smiley faces making you a loser.
- Funny: women doing glute squeezes.

Is it ok that I posted last night after 12? I started writing before then...?

Superficial

I cannot believe the Democrats have taken over. And it was Virginia that did it.

Will it be a superficial victory?

---

One of the effects of mixing the worlds of theater and Christianity: the prevalence of soul-jabbing judgment that is ultimately extremely superficial.

My mother, for instance. She makes a lot of assumptions about people's character based on things like their sunglasses.

As in, “He has a problem with arrogance.”

“Yes, Mom, he does.” She's so wise, my mother, I think. My ex IS so arrogant.

“Like the time he came to Texas, wearing those surfer sunglasses.” Huh? “We don't dress like that in Texas. He thought he was so cool. He's got that issue from his father. That deep-seeded anger toward the world.”

The incident she was relating had occurred eight years before, when T and I came to spend Christmas with her.

It's so typical of my mother to put so much stake in something so sleight. It's so typical of an artist or an actress, you might say - a small symbol encapsulating a large truth. But like an artist or an actress, the truths she found were things she created, not necessarily pre-existing to her interpretation.

T didn't wear those sunglasses because he was feeling arrogant toward the state of Texas; he didn't slide them on gleefully saying, now I'm really sticking it to those cowpokes. They were cheapo sunglasses he happened to have. He didn't think in terms of dressing Texan; who would? I certainly didn't show up in boots; why should he? It so irked me that she would make these ridiculous kind of judgments, with no basis in fact whatsoever. I always get hooked with her, because sometimes she IS sort of right; T did have anger and arrogance issues, stemming from insecurity, etc. But it really had nothing to do with his choice of eyewear. I was married to the man for six years. I know.

Of course, she put herself through the same scrutiny. She came to visit me in Charlottesville one time and practically peed her panties worrying about where she could purchase 'city shorts.' What the hell are city shorts, I didn't ask, because I don't say 'hell' around my mother.

What are city shorts? I said, trying to stay tame.

All I have are country shorts, they don't fit in here, here in the city.

Of course, if my mother actually paid attention to the real superficial details of things, she'd know that Charlottesville is very far from being a city.

She'd also know that no one gave a damn what kind of shorts she was wearing.

My resentment, as you might have guessed, mostly stems from having had her critical eye trained so fiercely on me.

Like if I wore all-black. To her this meant I was shrouding myself in the cloak of Satan.

Or if my lipstick had smeared off. Obviously I was trying to be a manly lesbian. Never mind I always wore more makeup growing up than anyone else in my peer group. Or that wearing makeup does not correlate to sexuality (hello lipstick lesbians!).

The Election

My husband is flipping between the channels. We're watching the slick, whirling graphics blending reds and blues into swirling numbers and graphs, while putty-faced, powdered men in suits make projections, provide 'analysis,' and chuckle at their own witticisms. The cameras are particularly zoomy. And the count is very close. Too close.

This country scares me. Ever since Bush was elected, I've been terrified by our gradual slide toward absolute idiocy. His ascendency didn't start it, but it sure threw our power situation into a stark relief, a shadow on the wall with contours easy to read, the shape of debacle, the shade of lies and untruths by which we now live.

It's been a strange, unwieldy day, most of it not fit for public consumption. The darkness of November clamps down quickly in the evenings. I'm glad I don't live in the country anymore.

I am not a Democrat anymore. When I was 17 I was - and proud of it, even though I was the only such thing at my high school, and constantly made fun of by my government teacher for being a Clinton-supporter. Later, her son, the class valedictorian, ran off to Texas to perform nude in a stage play. Ha ha.

Some might say it doesn't matter who gets elected. Power corrupts no matter who it is being corrupted. But I think it does matter. Sometimes individuals matter, not as demographic groups or political bodies, but as thinking beings who make small choices that, like the butterfly, set a skirmish going in the wind of a distant country.

Are You There, Dude? It's me, Retard.

I meant to start this off as a Serious Post, digging into my past with the unforgiving claws of my inner kitten honesty, that innocent hungry furry being that won't take no for an answer when she smells fresh blood, which is always coursing through me.

(Reason #1 Why I Will Never be a Successful Writer: My analogies are most often perverse and just very, very bad. My best friend Linda Lin told me this in 9th grade via a letter passed to me during Health class. I shrugged her analysis off, but the criticism has lived in me like - here we go! - a small mote of glass, clear and sharp, swimming slowly and secretly through my veins towards my heart, its tiny bite eventually will kill my dreams...Oh yeah. I am terrible.)

Anyway, as you can see from the title of this post, 'serious' is not on the agenda tonight. I'm on the goofy side of the moon tonight. Just like yesterday, when I kept doing my jig-dance at S, my ridiculous imitation of the crazy cloggers that appear on channel 14 public access every night, in endless, time-numbing loops of scuffing and scuffling and hipping and hopping that are frankly horrifyingly mesmerizing. Who are these people? Who in this day and age chooses to clog?

It would be one thing if these performers in their jazzercize blue leotards with mini ruffles around their hips and white leather shoes were all school age - you know, soaking in their past hillbilly culture the way some might take a violin or ballet lesson. But no, there's black people and old people and fat people and all kinds of people you would not expect to see bouncing up and down and wagging their feet around, occasionally clapping their hands and hooting, in lines...
The best thing is when they go freestyle, and the feet fly in all directions.

Anyway. I grew up tapdancing, which maybe grew out of clogging or hamboning, which are related, I'm guessing, to Irish dancing and square dancing? - I'm not sure. In tapdancing, though, you get to move your body and vary the routine, whereas the clogging choreography seems to repeat in endless loops. You also get to tapdance to better music. No offense. And tapdancing is nice and loud. You shuffle, but with metal parts. Like a robot.

(Reason #2 Why I Will Not be a Successful Writer: Because at this point in this draft, I very much want to go do something else. It's an itch or a tick that comes over me right at the point where I feel the momentum cascading to a pitch that will take me crashing over rapids into a swelling river of rushing brilliance - a reluctance? A knee-jerk restraint? Fear? Whatever it is, even if I take a small break, I fear I will lose all the tumble-flow that is pushing me forward through the words right now... Though the occupational therapist did tell me the other day that the human body was not meant to stay crouched in front of the computer hour after hour, which makes sense... maybe my body rebels?)

So I was jigging for S. That was the point. I was making him laugh. He was fighting a bad mood. I was goofy and silly and playing, making myself laugh, too.

Later, I realized how long it has been since I have let myself go like that. I used to be known for my whimsical, spontaneous expressions. I used to break it down any old place and time. What's been holding me back? Guilt. Guilt and sadness.

Because I used to do this for T. I used to make him so happy. And it feels disloyal to him to be happy now, to make someone else happy, in my way, which is the only way I know how. How I can feel disloyal this long after we parted, I don't know. And why that of all things is what makes me feel guilty and disloyal - being goofy - as opposed to the usual transgressions of sex, I don't know.

Maybe because humor was the bonding element of my family.

I'm suddenly realizing that I need to explain the title of this post before I completely collapse.

S. was declaring blogging dead yesterday, and I want to be clear that my interest in writing this has nothing whatsoever to do with potential readers. He has, necessarily so, an interest in an audience. It's who he is. For me, you would think the same thing. I grew up with an audience. A constant one. If it wasn't god, it was the cult. We were always on stage, figuratively and literally.

But I guess I've amended my performance space enough, through my years of pointless poetry writing, to expect no applause or critique, just the act of acting, declaring, being, without need of the dark face in the hall.

Ok, that's probably bs. But seriously: no one reads this. And that's OKAY.

But the pretension that goes along with clicking the Publish button is enough to inspire me to write, and that's what I need to keep me doing it. The physical diary, open now at my side, which no one will ever read, doesn't do it anymore. Not in the digital age...

That may seem a contradiction, but I'll pull a Walt Whitman to excuse that and continue.

I just think the word "retard" while it may be offense to the truly factually retarded is funny, and maybe I'll go to hell for it but I don't care. I used to slow my LA walk down for the limping "retard" - I would never call a real person that, only myself - in high school, when no one else would. I made friends with the slow and the drooling. That doesn't get me off for good behavior or anything. I'm just saying that not being PC doesn't mean I haven't treated others with humanity and Christian love.

Reason #3 Why I'll Never be a Successful Writer: It seems impossible for me to actually tell a full story or say anything.

And so: I blog. Shudder. Groan. Sigh.

P.S. I really do hope Linda Lin someday gets in touch with me. I continue to entertain the notion that I will indeed reunite with all the Lost Friends from my past one day, though as I age and stumble toward my death, this possibility becomes more and more a silly myth than anything else.

Bad Language

I just read a Creating Passionate Users post about how products should make users say "how f***ing cool!" and all the comments focus on whether or not using "bad" language in the workplace is ok or not.

First of all, I hate that it's called "bad" language -- but I'm not that troubled by it. If it weren't "bad," it wouldn't be any fun to say.

I remember the first time I swore. I was in fifth grade. My arch enemy rival April Basulto, representative of every evil I could imagine, with dark Lucy-hair and leader of a dumb blonde named Colette, had poked her finger in my Native American wigwam, made out of some limp putty my mother had concocted using oatmeal, water, and salt in our kitchen after the sugar cubes would not glue together to make an igloo. I stormed away from the class displays under the covered bench area on our playground, and screamed FUCK as loud as I could. (Or I dreamt it. This is one of those memories I am not sure is real or not.) But real or no, the speaking aloud of the unutterable was liberating. A release like no other, a release from the confinements of goodness.

We tend to like badness for its freedom. "I'm bad, I'm bad, you know it," sang MJ. Others are "bad to the bone." "BAD" is a strange word. It means "not good." But the precise definition of it is always in flux.

For me, cursing/cussing/'bad' language, whatever you call it, is a cultural marker of informality. When used between two people in the workplace, it is often a way of marking the relationship as closer, more intimate, more informal than when it's not used in say, a larger meeting in the conference room. But it's not just curses, but slang in general - my Californian boss says "cool" and "dude" and "awesome" to me (also a born Ca-girl), but he only lets those words out in formal meetings when he's being "charming."

What's going on here with these discussions about the workplace, whether it's about clothing or language use or taking risks, is about the changing culture of the workplace as it tries to determine if it's going to be formal or informal. Our culture at large, due, I think, to mass media - youth culture, has become extremely informal in the last 50 years. We tend to not wear hats to public events, and I've noticed that even shaking hands when introduced is considered optional behavior.

Being appropriate and respectable is no longer a valid aim for a person's professional and personal identity; we've rebelled against the Death of a Salesman ideal. To 'make it,' we need to make waves, find ourselves while making money - and it's obvious that to do so does not require ironed pants, collars, and a soapy tongue.

I love to swear. I find it deliciously fun to do so - in the appropriate place, where I know the audience hearing me won't ascribe ignorance and idiocy and immaturity to me for doing so. I learned early on that swearing didn't make my parents respect my rebelliousness, but consider me ridiculously low-class. It's not about 'being myself'; it's about having control over who I am with respect to where I am and who I'm with.

So I like Hugh's site, and I'm not offended by his use of the 'foul,' but I don't think I myself would not be able to work with people who couldn't swear. Swearing is not 'who I am,' but a way I talk. I'm reminded of urban black youth who change how they talk between home and school. Or when my family lived in East London, and I spoke Cockney at school and American at home. People who refuse to modify themselves to meet the requirements and expectations of their environment, based on some illusion of staying true to themselves, are usually just obstinate and inflexible.

This of course fits into my last post about changing who I was all the time. There's a compromise in here somewhere - a way to both 'go with the flow' and to 'stick to your roots,' to paraphrase an image I've always loved from the Tao te Ching. The idea is that the strongest plants are the ones that stay rooted in place but bend in the water and wind - those that remain stiff break and shatter. Those that loosen in the torrent die. To live properly, we must learn to be ourselves, and to know that that does not mean having no ability to edit our words or behavior, to act out, because to respect others and to honor situations is to be wise...

Someday I will figure out exactly how that works.

The Problem

The problem is that I forgot how to schedule my posts. So I didn't. I have now. I hope that counts.

I had posts to go up the past two days, but they did not, and the other part of that problem is that I am a mother of a one year old, who as I speak is attacking the cd drawer of my laptop. She loves computers, only she tends to send them doing blinking awful things.

So I feel like I've technically failed with my post a blog every day for a month challenge, though I did have things written, so I don't really feel I've failed.

So I shall persist, even if I have technically fallen off the bandwagon.

I don't really know what a bandwagon is. That's another problem.

Return of the Color Blue

This weekend I cleaned out the black banana peels rotting on the floor of my car.

I did situps with my exercise ball.

I flossed my teeth.

I got to work on time.

You say, so what? I say, this is the first time I’ve done any of these things in months.

It's not just the affect of having had a baby. It's also that part of me is still a rebellious child who hates doing things like flossing and proper banana peel disposal. I have an irrational distaste for the mundane.

Also, Daylight Savings Time ended. Josephine woke up at 5:30 a.m. So I had time to make a smoothie and coffee. I’ve decided to stop using the free coffee pods at work, even though the obsessive freeloader cheapskate in me feels obligated to because they are free, because the coffee is not fair trade, doing so incurs the weight of a paper cup, and I don’t want to waste the energy of that drat machine that has to grumble for each meager cup.

Little things do matter.

I also shopped at the natural food store. I bought gifts: some matte tea for Elaine, who is having a hard time not drinking coffee and a hard time drinking it; and organic almond cleaner for JoJo, who likes the smell when I wash Josie in it.

I’ve never understood before the sense of well-being and satisfaction possible when one makes good choices about how one spends money, but buying organic, non-exploitave products, and sharing them, really does make me feel good.

Maybe it seems silly that at the end of October I’m finally getting around to exercising and flossing and cleaning my car and just getting refreshed, but this is my favorite time of year, the cold invigorates and refreshes me.

I realized that I’m still sifting out all the values from my previous marriage I had lived by but didn’t believe in. Becoming a vegetarian was the first step -- I made that right after we separated. But gradually I’m unfettering myself from other constraints, like wearing blue. Tony hated the color blue.

I can't summarize my past.

You've done it, I'm sure. Summarized your life. Sometimes it comes out one way, sometimes another. You wrote a bio for a playbill, maybe, when you starred as one of the old biddies of Arsenic and Old Lace. Or maybe it's just what you do when meeting clients at cocktail parties in cold distant cities, in between staring through your martini glass at the sushi, imagining you are really on a cold distant star in a depressing science fiction book, but just in the first chapter, which means you'll be a hero soon, rocketing away into a new and polished galaxy.

I won't go into all the reasons why it's impossible to feel satisfied with 250 words or less to auto your biography. I'm sure they're obvious. And if they're not, then you are not the reader for me, so go away.

I mean, sure, it's possible to work up a few telling details. And as the woman last night admitted, there's types of people, they fit into categories, it's easy to hear a few lines and know immediately what you're dealing with.

Like later, when she pointed out that our server was that skiing type, with pink cheeks and a laid-back attitude, the kind that populate liberal arts colleges in Vermont and Colorado. I know who he is, she said, I totally know who he is.

But me, she didn't know me. You don't fit any of the molds I know, she said, discarding her cup of ice. You're a new one. Can I ask you questions?

She used to work in HR, which I think explains a lot.

Any detail can explain a person, I guess, if you look through it correctly, use it knowing it's not a magnifying glass but a kaledeiscope. There's shiny pieces of your own instrument interfering with your vision of the subject.

When I try to summarize my background, people say things like, "Wow, that must have been different."

To which I say, as eloquent as always, "Yep."

The problem with having a "different" childhood is that, while people may be interested, they also immediately feel threatened. Everyone either likes to feel his or her family dysfunction was the worst existing, or, more simply, they don't like to be upstaged.

So I don't like to draw attention to my abnormal story. It's frankly too much. It's the kind of thing that gets therapist types salivating - seriously, I'm the dream client they always wished they had: cult beginnings of a religious and theatrical nature, runaway father, abused mother, sexuality issues, California... I've watched career counselors completely throw my career issues out the window when they get a whiff of my history. They can't help it. It's like waving red meat in front of a canine.

Normalcy is, of course, a mythical notion, impossible to judge. I have met very few people without interesting stories to tell. I've never met anyone I would label 'normal.' Boring, yes, but normal, not so much.

I won't summarize my past here. It will have to come out on its own. I'm thinking it's a better way to approach something so strange and large. Treat it like it is normal.

DUH

I realized the other night that I didn't create myself.

If you're my age, you have probably just uttered an inner "duh."

When I was in fifth grade, I hated people saying "duh," so I looked up its meaning somewhere, and found that it translated in Hawaiian to 'goldfish.'

I have a feeling that if I go right now to dictionary.com I will discover this is not so.

That's why I'm not going.

I mean, sometimes I don't want to know everything.

I just wrote the above line, but now I want to disagree with it. Because I don't believe that 'ignorance is bliss.' Or, I believe it can be true, but morally I would assert that true bliss encompasses knowledge of the truth, good and bad, and that the happiness of the sugar-coated house on the hill is either empty or hiding a murderous witch.

Speaking of witches, today was the second time in a week that I remembered how Fena met me and thought I was a witch. I am not a witch. I am not good with recipes.

Speaking of fairytales, I dreamt the other night about a fairytale in which a woman poisons her husband; but halfway through, the actors in the dream morphed into me and my mother, and she found out I'd been poisoning her, and I lied and said it was just some herbs to help her with her guilt and grief. Then I realized I didn't want her to die, and I couldn't believe I had been trying to do her in.

Maybe I'm just lazy. All this 2.0 interactivity really weighs me down. I don't always want to comment, contribute, and tag. Sometimes I just want to passively read a damn article and be done with it.

I certainly have a cantankerous streak; I owe it to my father, whom I wanted to emulate so badly when I was a young child that I dreamed of growing a beard and reading leather-bound volumes and a smoking jacket. I wanted to be a wise old man when I grew up. I didn't realize for the longest time that this was impossible unless I did drag - recreated myself as a man.

When I say I didn't create myself, although it seems obvious, I feel my brain sheds a layer of dead skin, something clarifies and lifts away (like a goddamn biore commercial).

It's not that I believe in a creator-deity. But I think it's important to make sure I don't claim a founding ownership over myself. I came from other humans, who came from this earth. I am a circumstance of this universe, a happening of this world; I am not my own, but I belong to this star system, I am a piece of the large moss and ice-covered pie that is this globe spinning under the whipped cream of the milky way.

If I considered myself the product of a creator-diety, a god, I would not only a) construct my identity around the idea of that god, but I would also b) offer my loyalties to this god.

But if I consider myself a product of this planet, my flesh is made of mud and my responsibility lies with its continuation.

As I felt the inklings of this thought tickling, I watched the brash autumn sunlight harassing the reddening tops of some tall oaks, and I felt a sense of honor that the trees and I share the same parentage, the same situation, that of finding ourselves alive, not of our own volition, but here, without any point necessary, but with plenty of beauty to apprehend.

Which is why I like to imagine goldfish anytime I can.

A Terrible Witness

This morning I was doing my usual jumbled struggle to the car – baby and car seat and purse and keys, coffee mug, diaper bag, heels spiking the slick grass hill – only, because the city has been redoing the sidewalk in front of our house, today I had an audience. It consisted of a group of surly-looking, beefy men, sitting blank-faced in a white truck parked in front of our yard. They watched me as I slung the bags around my necks, balanced the baby on my hip, stuffed my pearls in my pocket to put on later. The progress to the car is slow, pack-elephant like.

I don’t know what they were waiting for.

Then, all of a sudden, the one behind the steering wheel yells out to me.

“What’s number one?”

It takes me a minute to realize he’s referring to the sign in my yard, placed there the other night by my friend, about the marriage amendment law to be voted up or down next Tuesday.

I struggled with what to say. I was very conscious of standing on a hill, shouting to four guys in a white truck, about gay marriage amendments. I was very conscious of them seeing my ass when I bent over to tuck the baby in her carseat. I was very conscious of not knowing how annoying it is to talk about one’s political beliefs in this kind of situation.

And yet, this is often where we are when we are asked to give witness to our truths. It’s never with a flask of fresh water, a sound system, a lighted podium, and clearly written notes to follow, with a welcoming, patient audience, clapping every time you pause to breathe.

Who we are, the things we stand up for, often get questioned. My vegetarianism, for instance. It’s at the awkward first lunch with a new boss in a restaurant where every item on the menu is infused with bacon fat flavoring that I’m asked “why” and expected to be coherent, cogent, and compelling. And it’s precisely at those moments than I am totally incoherent. It’s one thing to offer a professional opinion to a stranger – you’ve been trained and you’re getting paid for the knowledge you bring to the table. It’s entirely another to lay out a conclusion, thought, premise, guess at the big philosophical mysteries of life for which you are not an expert, just another amateur, like most of us for whom this is our first time on the planet.

Think about it: having two plumbers debate the cause of a stopped drain is one thing. But having the same plumbers exposing their thoughts on life after death…

So, I know these guys were thinking ‘where does she get off.’ I felt like I was having to justify myself to these wankers. I say wankers, not to be personally insulting, but to describe their behavior, which basically consists of standing or sitting around a ‘job’ for several hours, only to actually run a drill or dump some sludge for about fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t mind being a professional wanker myself.

If my friend who gave me the sign were in my position, I imagine she would have marched right up to the truck, delivered a well-put-together speech on the liberties and rights of man as outlined in the Constitution, followed by an ad hoc question and answer period, during which she would learn everyone’s name, where their kids went to school, ending with a promise from all of them that they would turn out to vote.

Me, I loudly mumbled something in my faux- nonchalant manner about the marriage thing you know against gays but if affects straight people too.

The response? “OH.”

But what did I expect? I’m not a missionary.

On the other hand, what is the point of these kinds of signs? They are a show of support, right? To what end? People who agree with the sign will nod their heads, give a mental thumb’s up; people who disagree will do the opposite and maybe pee on my lawn. But is anyone actually engaging with the sign, changing their minds, thinking “huh, if SHE is against it, I should be, too! Afterall, look at how messy her yard is! That’s a quality person I should imitate in the polls right there!”

I’m not a missionary, but this may be the only way these signs work – people look and ask, and I get a moment on the soapbox in the spotlight to share something I find to be true. If I don’t really believe it – or don’t believe in my right to believe it – then why do I have this sign in my yard?

I am constantly hampered by one of the edicts that got drilled into me as a kid: Be all things to all people. As traveling theater missionary people, my parents and I were trained and expected to shift ourselves, like chameloeons, to integrate, with every new group of people we encountered while performing on tour. If attending a conservative church, we would wear high collars. If at the 7^th Day Adventist, we’d eat vegetarian. We’d drink with Episcopalians, we’d swear with the Catholics, and we’d forgo the makeup when with the Mennonites. The idea of sticking to our individual guns on anything was disallowed. You ate what they ate. You did what they did. The only truth to which we stuck like gum on a bedpost, was that of Jesus Christ as our risen savior. After that, it was all up for grabs.

So I’m really sensitive to apprehending the biases of others, of sending invisible feelers out to men in trucks to get a sense of their macho, their upset stomachs, their Old Virginian perspectives. I know myself to be skinnier than their wives, I know the Dali bumper sticker on my car translates to ‘art fart,’ if it translates at all. I know my daughter not being in pink marks me as a questionable lesbian. I know the unweeded bushes and the unraked leaves equate to either an absent or a pussy-liberal husband. And these things, true or not, are perceived as frighteningly awful and generally just wrong.

But the main difference between me and these guys – despite my assumptions about who they are, I know my instant judgments are most likely completely off – is that I would never, question someone about a yard sign while they were struggling to get in the car with an infant and coffee and heels – just out of pure politeness.

I would never yell at a person from a truck like that, either – about anything.

Because yes, I was trained to put other people first, because I was trained to constantly be an emissary of God, and emissaries of God don’t bark at people. On top of that, I was trained to be an actress, which means, not only did I constantly feel like I was on stage – the stage Shakespeare talked about, with Mr. Omniscient as my omnipresent audience -- but I was taught to be someone who watched others to learn how they act and behave, respecting the differences in people, always as a foremost principle, because the holy part of acting is learning an incredible empathy with members of the human race. To properly play someone on stage, to slip into the skin of another person, you have to understand them. And you can’t do that if you judge them.

The only time I skirt my religious-theater training and behave rudely, “as abrasive as a brillo pad,” as I was once described, is when I get drunk. That’s when I do things like joke with the overweight president of the University of Virginia’s literary guild about calling his college the “University of Vagina,” because I thought it was a clever thing to say, and I wanted to see his reaction. That’s when I take all my clothes off in the swimming pool at a party on a Saturday afternoon in the suburbs, because I feel like it. That’s when I ask people “who are you?” right to their face, impolitely, just because I want to know.

In other words, when I get drunk, my pleasure, my curiosity, my humor, my desires, come first, and I watch everyone squirm and scowl because I am saying excessive, dirty, scrappy, rude things. Precisely because I have spent so much of my life deferring beyond the conventions of good manners to meeting the emotional requirements of hungry souls, performing the role of the good Christian child, I am prone to finding assaults on Good Sense absolutely the funniest thing ever.

Which makes me very unfit for conversations that go beyond being yelled at from city construction trucks.