Dustpan Alley

Jude the Cheating Dude

2009-11-10T17:08:04Z

Jude Law is much too handsome for his own good. I recently watched the movie "The Holiday" in which he falls for a character played by Cameron Diaz. I'm sorry to say that between the two of them, Jude is the more beautiful one. It's difficult to believe his character, though, after hearing about his cheating habits. He should endeavor to be less good looking and not cheat on his women.

I think my quince is more beautiful than Jude Law. I need to cook it. A worm crawled out of the core yesterday. There are moments when this kind of thing makes me a little reluctant to eat but often times the worms don't do any worse damage than hang out in the core which I never eat anyway. I got only one of these beauties, I need to cook it today.

I have recently started watching "Burn Notice" (the first season) and I love it! Jeffrey Donovan, while not as cursed with the same beauty that Jude Law suffers from, is handsome in an unconventional way. Half the time I think he's really strange looking but then the rest of the time I think he's got so much charm (his character does) that if I was a fictional character in a story I would much rather be going out with Donovan than Law. Gabrielle Anwar gets to play a great character but she is bone thin and it makes her look stringy and rangy. She needs to put on about 15 pounds at least.

But speaking of not being a porker like me...HA!...I have been talking to a professional nutritionist and fitness trainer who happens to be the wife of my Kung Fu instructor. I think she's actually retired from her profession and mostly teaches Kung Fu to the little kids (she's a black belt!) and homesteads. She has been generously giving me her time and so I offered to teach her daughter to sew in exchange. Yesterday, after looking at a diary of my diet she had some suggestions to make:

1. I need more polyunsaturated fats and so she suggested more olive oil for one.

2. I need more protein in the early part of the day, instead of waiting to eat it for lunch. Nut butters, eggs, soy, beans. Along these same lines she suggested eating more diary proteins later in the day and not eating them or limiting them early in the day. She said it's better to have really good protein in the morning and diary derived proteins for either afternoon snacks or dessert.

3. Suggested adding quinoi to my grain circulation because it provides a complete protein.

4. If I eat cheese for a snack I should eat it with whole grain bread to make it a more complete protein.

5. Suggested I take in a brisk walk before sitting down to work to get my metabolism going in the morning.

6. Should get a total of 30 minutes exercise every single day. In addition to this, my Kung Fu teacher says that all people should be doing a minimum of 15 minutes stretches a day with the ideal being more like 30 minutes a day.

I'm going to be working on all of this.

For those of you wondering about the progress of my disease...which is such a weird thing to say...the prescription ointment is working. Though it doesn't please me that my own home made salve didn't work in this instance, at least something is because I'm pretty much sick to death of having something going on on my face.

We have finally figured out that we can plant a walnut tree in our front yard provided they are self fertile or that the distance another walnut tree has to be isn't too restrictive (there are other walnut trees in the neighborhood but I don't know which kinds). This makes me so happy! A source of nut that I actually like growing in my own yard is fantastic! In case you didn't know this, our front "yard" is concrete. We're all set up to park three cars and a scooter or two cars and a scooter and a camper or one car, an RV, and a scooter. But as you all know we have no RV, just one "car" and one scooter. That's a lot of concrete.

A walnut tree, for those of you not in the know, has a chemical in it's roots and leaves that prevent most other plants from growing around them. A totally natural and effective herbicide. (Should I attempt to make a solution to try on the pathways of my medicinal garden?) So not having much else planted in the front makes it a great spot. In addition to that there's the orientation of the sun in that spot: It's the northernmost part of our lot so a tree growing large there won't cast shade on the rest of my garden but it will get large enough itself to get all the sunshine it needs. The downside? Yes, there's a downside but I don't feel like being negative about it right now.

Walnut sauce for pasta....walnuts on pear salad...spiced walnuts...

I still haven't harvested my rose hips. I will do that today.

That concludes my notes for today. I've got to ride my bike to run a few errands before the kid gets home and then I've got to cook some really super food (today I'm making home made pasta with a butternut squash sauce seasoned with thyme and cream and white beans.)

I hope you all have a fungus free day/face!!!!!

*I think our car is kind of lame. It is still dragging its axis around with us in it so I'm not going to complain, but calling it a car is a stretch, it's much more of a money-sucker or a deep pocket with wheels or a black hole in which money disappears and nothing else changes much. At the moment we have a cracked windshield, a constantly lighting up something or other that is apparently meaningless and yet stressful when it beeps for our attention, at least one window that won't stay up, and then there's the tons of money we spent to "degunk" the engine. $4000 that degunking cost us. Which could have bought us a whole different used car. Enough. The thing still drives and we don't drive much anyway.

Intersexuality, parties, my continuing disease, small town life, and other curiosities.

2009-11-08T00:40:44Z

I am going to a party tonight. I don't like parties. I went to a party a couple of weeks ago that had the most fantastic Mariachi band playing and I got to talk with lots of people I really like and the birthday gal is always fun to be around...yet I was so exhausted for a few days afterwords.

I'm never sure if it would make me look better to be so delicate that I fade away at the merest social exertion or if it's better to simply come right out and let people know the whole anxiety/people/parties/noise/too many conversations/and the aftermath of days of needing to hide from people or risk eating their heads off their shoulders like a giant praying mantis.

I still go to parties because I'm easily guiltable by people I like.

So I am going to try not to be a moron and attempt to seem intelligent and not scary.

As you know, you should keep your children away from me because I am a bad influence and might be dangerous. I might let it leak that I think sin is ridiculous and that basically I won't be devastated if nature gets rid of my weak ass, Darwinian style, in favor of stronger humans. I also might let it slip that I also wouldn't be devastated if the human race was reduced in number by 75%. Your children will never sleep again I'm sure.

Anyway...the thunder and lightening this morning was fantastic! The lightening was so strong it actually seemed to frizzle in the air like a wild sparking electrical cord about to catch fire, which, it basically is. It's been dark all day and the rain is huge and slanted and the leaves have been littering the air like garbage dumped out from a great height. This weather makes me very happy to be alive (for as long as mother nature sees fit to let me remain) and this is what makes being alive worthwhile. To see the atmosphere come undone with the wild winds and wet remnants of summer.

I have somehow been managing to get more posts uploaded to Stich and Boots in the last couple of weeks and I'm very proud of the content that I've been putting up. Today I posted my friend Lisa E's recipe for ratatouille and the second article in my "Cooking For Beginners" series. This is the why of my being here. To share this information, to help people learn to do things that could potentially increase their quality and enjoyment of life. Hopefully to give courage where courage is needed.

The hopelessness I have been experiencing on the physical front is really no different today but I'm forcing myself to approach each day fresh and not look too far forward at my future as the world's largest woman. Meanwhile I am eating good food (lentil soup with arugala- even though I don't really like arugala) and trying to bring my mind continuously back to the fact that I am making a lot of better choices for myself now than I was three months ago. Like all humans I am a work in progress up until my last day on earth.

A nice change for me is that having shed people from my life who weren't good for me has helped me to feel so much more at peace in this weird community of mine. I felt so lonely before, trying to fit in where I don't belong. Now that I have released that somewhat useless tangle from my life I feel lucky to have the friends I do have and it is so much easier to see that I have a truly lovely group of friends here and I still have my very close friends in California. The warmth from the friends I have who give me so much support and let me be the very messy strange person I am is enough to keep any person afloat. Not feeling left out of things is a great feeling.

The annoying, lingering, stupid, crappy, and ugly situation that is still living on my mouth is, well, still there...lingering. Apparently I had a secondary situation possibly brought on by the impetigo, that is fungal. There's a name for it that I forget. Since I couldn't afford the medication (a cream for external application)* I have been treating it herbally. I would very much like to report that my efforts have been successful but you already know, from the sentence above, that it has not worked. I have been using my antifungal salve (which I've had success with for treating athlete's foot), plus the herbal spray I made for my dog's hot spots, and finally I resorted to dabbing tiny bits of an over the counter antifungal I had lying around...nothing has relieved the cracking of the corners of my mouth. It hurts. Not like breaking a bone or giving birth hurts, obviously, but it constantly stings and continues to make me look diseased.

(Another reason to keep me away from your children. I look mangy.)

All week I've been toying with the idea of finally telling the story about my fight with the chauvinist pig I had last winter which, at the time, I was obliged to say nothing about.

While I can see that my readership is very small and I'm inclined, always, to assume that no one local ever reads it, this is patently untrue. Aside from the totally cool couple who read my blog fairly often, it seems that whenever I assume no one in McMinnville is looking and I open up about anything- I find myself in an unpleasant social tangle from which there is no very fun solution.

The reason I still toy with, and occasionally do, tell stories or share opinions which either directly involve or allude to interactions with local people is because this is my life, these are my stories too. My opinions don't need to be shared by the people I live around but I have a right to my view and my blog is the one place I should always be able to tell my own stories. If I talk about my life here it will inevitably involve others because I don't live in a vacuum.

It seems that even when I actually don't think my opinions are offensive they manage to offend someone.

Like the whole homeschooling discussion/debacle in which I said I thought it was a good choice for some people and that I believe every parent has the right to choose how to educate their own children but that I certainly didn't think homeschooling is without flaws...it seemed to me that I was saying that I'm totally open minded about it but that I don't think it's the perfect solution any more than public school is perfect. Jesus! Nothing is perfect! Anyway- I got in heaps of trouble for that and it turned out to be the obnoxious event that ultimately led to the dissolution of a "friendship".

(I dare to bring it up again because if anyone still has arrows to shoot at me for saying something in this world is just as imperfect as pretty much everything else...uh, you really are just looking for a fight. Which is always such a great example to our children.)

So, back to the question of the chauvinist. I actually had a man refuse to do business with me because I am a woman, I mean, isn't that a story that needs to be told? He's not even as old as I am. Previously I have only encountered real deeply insulting chauvinists in the over-sixty crowd. I'm racking my brains to think who (besides the culprit and his loving chauvinist-supporting girlfriend) will be angry with me bringing such an egregious story to light. Anyone out there know what and who I'm talking about who would like to declare themselves right now and tell me why I shouldn't expose such hideous conduct in a fellow towns-person?

Maybe it's enough to tell you only that much and say that I have never, until that moment, considered myself a real feminist. It opened my eyes to the lucky fact that all the men in my circles would never behave in that way since they all respect not only women in general but their own women in particular.

It's really funny how living here has made me know myself so much better than I previously did because of how few people here are really at all like me. I have found and become friends with most of the people who are. But being surrounded by so many Christians who take it for granted that I too am a Christian (until I disabuse them of this assumption) has exposed my unease about religion completely. I could always be comfortable in the Bay Area because religion isn't the glue of the community there. I have been asking myself lately if I'm actually a bigot when it comes to religion. I could be so much more open minded about it when I never (or very rarely) found myself around people thanking Jesus out loud and talking about bible school and bible groups and wanting to know what church I attend and even trying to convert me.

I haven't come up with an answer yet. I know I believe that all these Christians have a right to believe as they do and I have no desire to prevent them or change them- and this is the whole patriotic anthem in our country isn't it?- but I have almost no patience for people who earnestly talk about the glory of Jesus in ordinary conversations. I also know, and am not comfortable about this at all, that I respect people a lot less (and think them not particularly intelligent) when their faith prevents them from believing the proofs of science where proof has actually been well established. Nothing can make me lose respect for a person's intelligence faster than them suggesting that evolution isn't real.

Christians who are at peace with science co-existing with faith I don't worry about nor judge.

Am I a religious bigot?** I don't know. Maybe you think so. Maybe you don't.

I know that many Christians who don't think it's right to terminate a pregnancy because they view it as murder but who don't see it as wrong to use science to create life where god has obviously not wished life to grow*** are irrational and hypocritical. You can't have it both ways. If only God can be allowed to bring death than only god can be allowed to create life. That kind of shit really bothers me.

I know now that I can't be friends with any Christian who thinks being gay is a sin. I tried to find a way to be ok with that. But even being complaisant enough about it to hang out with such a person hurt some fundamental part of myself that knows that being gay is just as natural and arbitrary as our gender actually is. If being gay is a sin then does God expect intersexual humans to never have a sexual existence****? If God actually demanded that of any human I would have to conclude that he/she is actually unbelievably cruel to create any person with both genders so that they may never love another human without sinning. I don't see the value in a deity that creates humans that it can only punish because of the body he/she gave them.

But at the base of all of that is the simple fact that no one should care as long as the two people involved are consensual partners.

So I find my little community here is forcing me to evaluate myself in new and sometimes unpleasant ways.

Looking at it from a philosophical point of view I can only conclude that this will make me a better person more aware of my prejudices and my own shortcomings which better equips me to improve myself and evolve.

*It isn't at all expensive but a missing paycheck and the necessity for a complete advance from Philip's bosses made every penny seem like a million dollars.

**At least from the literal definition of bigot I am not a bigot.

***Since I don't object to women having a choice to terminate a pregnancy if it's the very best choice for her and the potential life inside her, it also doesn't bother me if women use science to create a more hospitable environment for conception. It isn't hypocritical to my personal beliefs.

****Perhaps being born with more than one or some unique combination of female and male sexual organs is a gift that we have been too busy labeling as a freakish scary anomaly in the production of the human body to understand and celebrate. It seems that there is some kind of blessing, or should be, for people who get some of both sexes. It seems as though such people have been given something extraordinary and it would be amazing if a time came when people revered such bodies as beautiful and intriguing rather than frightening for being so unique. And maybe people who are born with some of both male and female reproductive organs would grow up healthier and happier if encouraged to be themselves than to have to choose to be either man or woman which is not what they are. Why can't we allow this? Why can't we encourage this?

If an intersexual person felt strongly that they wanted to be more male or more female because that is who they know themselves to be- then it seems right to give them that possibility but what if being intersexual in a world where it is respected as an extra mode of being human rather than something to be hidden allowed a lot of people to explore who they are without painful surgery? I don't know. I am not such a person and cannot personally know what challenges and tough experiences and feelings must accompany it. I'd like to know more though. I'd like to hear more stories than I have. Aside from seeing a couple of programs on the discovery channel about it I am ignorant. But not because I wish to be.

As you can see by this insanely long "foot note" this is a subject I think is important and intriguing and thoughts keep surging up about this. This isn't the first time I've thought about this either. I can't say I'd know how to be respectful around an intersexual person while I have so much curiosity and I would want to flood them with the kinds of questions it is only seemly to ask people you know well. But I would not judge them or be afraid of anyone who had an ambiguous sexual identity. It would only drive me mad not to be able to get to know them and learn about them. I would only be able to hope that my acceptance of the diversity of the human form would be obvious to them and that it would also be obvious that the curiosity cannot be helped but a wish to genuinely understand and know someone can never be an insulting desire.

End of foot note.

The Unslappable Doris Day

2009-11-06T08:53:19Z

I used to worry a little bit that Doris Day was supposedly a big slut in real life. I also remember being worried about similar things I read about Mary Astor revealed through some particularly damning (and salacious!) lines in her diary in which she- oh- I can't even put it down here because it's too coarse even for me to repeat.

But here's the deal: sometimes you're up on your "Friday" night* quite late and you hear an awful cover of a song whose original then flies through your head like a sweet liquor and suddenly you absolutely have to hear the original because it's like eating the perfect peach on the hottest day of summer with the metal fan blowing hot air across your face in a travesty of effort to cool you off.

I heard the most awful cover of "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps" played in a fairly good movie tonight** and all of a sudden I needed to hear the original and yet I didn't actually know the name of the song or who originally sang it. I knew only that I had first heard it on the soundtrack of "Strictly Ballroom". I looked it up.

Doris. Blond wholesome (slutty) Doris! I love her. I think I like the idea of her as an easy lady more than I enjoy her studio persona as the all American girl around the corner who is corn fed and everything baseball and "Golly!" and smackable. I am listening to it right now and I think you should too.

Go ahead and look it up and then listen to it. Oh the slink, the slithery voice, the quiver of sexy without going overboard. I see what they all saw in her. That voice, when it's not trying to be insufferably cute reflects a woman who knows things and I think maybe "slut" is also the wrong epithet. She's experienced and canny and better than the men she sleeps with.

I have underestimated her even as I enjoyed her. Knowing now that she is the voice of this song is like finding out that the little sparkler you ignited on the fourth was actually a bomb.

I have two favorite Doris Day films and neither of them are her oh-so-beloved Rock Hudson hook-ups. "Midnight Lace" with Rex Harrison is shivery and she's less the baseball-apple pie slappable ingenue than she is an actual real person in an unlikely situation and though I am not particularly crushing on Rex Harrison in general (My Fair Lady: YAWN!!!) but in this movie he is...I don't know...kind of delicious.

The other movie of Doris' that I adore is "The Man Who Knew Too Much" with Jimmy Stewart. She does a wee bit of simpering but over all she is believable and charming and she sings that husky voiced version of "Que Sera Sera" which, by the way, I am now listening to.

I dislike the mythical Doris but I adore something in Doris that is always just under the covers.

So I am up in the wee hours bringing Doris out of the vault and anticipating a good sleep in. These are my roots. Doris is my early education. What makes women beautiful. What sexy singing sounds like. Hips, lips, a voice, and a million hidden jewels. Christina Aguilera has nothing on Doris. Doris only shows you just enough so that you find yourself wanting to undress the quiet and disrobe the windows to see the casings beneath. Hide a lot to show everything. A concept lost on most young ladies now. When you are mostly covered, a knee is as exotic as a dewy lotus blossom floating in a tropical pond. When most of your body is covered the swell of a breast is like a promise of something much more naked that only comes with peeled layers.

Striptease is not about being a sad stripper on Broadway doing the poles or the private booths. It isn't seedy or wasted or vulgar. It's more like the promise of paradise that can only be achieved in private and with the proper appreciation.

Except that sometimes you get barred from the real show because droolers are discouraged.

Oh Doris! I'm so sorry I dismissed you after all the love I felt for you. My early education in womanhood. I would have liked to see your real face.

Oh love. You are better than the plasticized American ideal being erected across the strip mall billboards. You are the flesh of man's real dreams.

Long live your contribution to sex!

*Which might actually be any night of the week, the important thing is that it's the first night of your weekend...

**Cake is the band who made the dismal cover.

I Am The Hippopotamus In Fantasia

2009-11-05T00:08:15Z

The last scrap of hope that I will ever stop gaining weight has turned to acrid ash. I was very hopeful at the beginning of the year just as I have been hopeful every single year for three years in spite of the ever increasing evidence that my body is not going to listen to diet and exercise. It is not going to return to a place of comfort. It will not respond as it should. I will tell you now that my body feels like a sinking vessel. It feels like an envelope of death. It's so strange to have wanted to die so ardently when I was fifteen but to be in a body that had all the health and vitality any human being could desire. I hadn't started smoking yet. I was thin enough without being skinny. I had great skin. I didn't drink any alcohol or coffee. Yet I was as withered inside as an old woman whose friends had already died and left her alone.

Like a big tan colored walnut that opens to reveal a shriveled blackened nut hiding inside.

Here I am now, with no desire to die and so much to look forward to and achievements to be proud of and yet my body is a hideous mass of unrelenting creaks and weakness and fat and scars and illness and no matter what efforts I make I have steadily been gaining weight ever since I broke my hip. I swore I wouldn't bring that up again. How can I not? It's when my body completely stopped working. What the break didn't deteriorate the intense stress of three very traumatic years have stepped in to finish me off.

Over the years I have continually bounced back. Made resolutions...but not empty ones! There were the months of working out at home and watching my calories and I did, temporarily lose ten pounds only to gain 15 back as soon as my store closed down. And then I gained some more. Even after joining the gym and going religiously for a few months- no change. More gain. More gain. Like a runaway train. It's as though my body gave up long before I did. And each time my efforts failed to give results I got more depressed on top of the stress and depression already draped over my not particularly strong shoulders.

A Long Interruption During Which I Practice The Art Of Fighting With Sticks

I can't say that anything I wrote above is untrue. I wish I could. I think my body is trying to snuff me out. In spite of that dreadful possibility I want to say that I went to Kung Fu class tonight barely holding back all my tears of frustration, anger, grief, and fear. I carried a charcoal aura above my head and didn't understand how I was going to benefit from my class.

Oh sweet carrion! How could I ask such a thing? Have I not learned yet that there is a power in this discipline to answer to the chaos in my spirit? It's undeniable that in the beginning I was a little unfocused. However, as we did our complimentary flow exercises over and over and over it became a meditation and it was all about not getting whacked in the neck by an attacker. I soon found myself in that calm place again. That calm place in which I purposely compose myself in postures of violence with grace.

Oh no, I have no real grace, that isn't the point. I am the hippopotamus in Fantasia twirling around in that ridiculously tiny tu-tu. No true grace- but who gives a shit? The grace is in my intention, in my concentration, in my discipline.

Discipline that says that I will continue coming to class every week no matter how ashamed I am of my body. I will come to class because I know it is the best thing I have done for myself all year besides finally write a god damned book.

I have thought about the expense of coming to this particular school of martial arts and asked myself if we shouldn't try to find a less expensive one seeing as we have so little money. The answer is no.

For this to work for us it has to be extraordinary. It has to be something completely original and powerful. We are not the usual suspects. We are not the expected dinner guests. We are peculiar people. We need something more than the usual to sustain us and nurture us. I have to say that the martial arts school we are going to offers so much more than I would ever have expected of an actual modern martial arts school. It's got something more due to the completely passionate (INSANE) Kung Fu Master who runs it. It's his energy that feeds the school and asks everyone to be more- to always be more than we thought we could be. We come to class and he asks us to give 110%. He's old school in many ways and progressive in others.

In every class our Sifu gives us talks about different aspects of life, awareness, spirituality, health, and becoming our best. He doesn't tell us to be Christian* (I have no idea what his actual spiritual beliefs are) he merely makes it plain that we all have something to explore below the surface, that there is MORE to all of this self defense. He talks to us about the reality of violence and he talks to us about not eating fast food and he talks about working on our mental state. He brings it all together. It's an entire round encompassing and life giving education. Especially to someone like me.

Tonight I got to meditate with sticks and with the gliding beautiful thoughtful motions of joint locking.

I don't have any hope for my body left. Is hope necessary? Hope is necessary for people to survive bad times. Hope is more important than food at certain junctures in life. But is it vital that I hope I will lose weight in order for it to happen? I have always thought hope and faith were separate beings but today I'm not so sure. I'm giving that some thought. Many things in life will happen whether or not we hope for them or not. Whether we believe they will happen or not. If you want to kill yourself, is it really necessary to hope that eating nothing for a month will kill you? If you fail to eat for a month you will die whether you hoped for that outcome or not, right?

I am going to continue going to Kung Fu. I am going to continue adding more practice to my days off. I know what my dreams look like. I know what they taste like. I am going to continue to reign in the beer and endeavor to eat healthily. I will not stop making effort to do the things that I know are healthy for me. But that doesn't mean I believe that doing them is going to transform me. Ever.

Dudes.

DUDES!

I was totally just lying about hope. I FEEL hopeless today. I feel hopeless often. I sink continually. I am 10,000 leagues under the sea but it is a lie to say I have lost all scraps of hope.

Cause I'm still bailing water.

*Triple thank God for that. Probably nothing would make me hot-foot it out of there faster than a little godly lecture.

Life In A Small American Town

2009-11-02T17:17:54Z

When I moved to McMinnville, a "city" with a population of only 30,000 people, I was so excited to be moving away from all the usual gunfire, sprawling shopping malls, and the city malaise that I imagined I was surrounded by. The last time I lived in a small town I was a disaffected depressed teen who had a posse of close friends to moan into my Earl Grey tea with. It was a good experience for me and being forced to move away to the comparatively congested Bay Area (where I was born) I had a shockingly difficult time adjusting to the change. I had to make friends all over again and I moved around a lot in the Bay Area. I always dreamed of moving back to a small town where life is smaller and hopefully slower and cleaner.

I don't think I committed the crime of thinking that living in a small community is simpler, but I did expect it to be cozier and safer. I've been thinking a lot about the three and a half years we've lived here now and how different the reality of this small town is from my expectation of it. People ask me all the time "Why did you choose to move to McMinnville?" That's an excellent question. I always say that we were looking for a small town within commuting distance of Portland and McMinnville was the best one we found. The truth is that we didn't have a lot of time to study Oregon and figure out where we'd fit in best and enjoy life the most.

One of the things people told me most often as a fresh faced new-comer is that McMinnville is a very cliquish place. It seemed overall so friendly I didn't completely believe it. I didn't have trouble meeting friendly people. However, it's one thing to say hello to people on the street or to be a casual person invited to their "public" parties (the ones they invite everyone to) but finding people with whom you can make a deep and lasting friendship has proved to be much more challenging and complicated. I'm not the only in-comer who has observed this difficulty.

I always loved those shows on television about small towns where everyone knows each other and is in each other's business like "Northern Exposure". It seemed that you would be bound to fit in because eventually everyone would have to accept you. What a little romance that is! The reality is a shadow of that intimacy. Yes, in a small town it is nearly impossible to truly ignore people you don't like, but that doesn't mean that eventually everyone will be friends.

I have made quite a few enemies here in my cozy sweet little town. I don't think I've ever been one to deny my culpability when things have gone wrong between myself and others. After the most recent dust up, which resulted in a shiny new enemy, I have spent a lot of time thinking about small town life in a different light than I used to. I've been thinking about how I fit in, or don't. About how many people I had thought I would become good friends with that have turned out to be surface acquaintances. The people who might have let me into their lives while I was a retail store owner were definitely less inviting once I was just an unemployed depressed nobody. It isn't that I was ever exactly snubbed but that the exchanges became less warm and I could feel barriers drawn where they hadn't been before. Which would have been devastating if I had really wanted to be let into their private circles.

I didn't think of small towns as having such definite social levels- but why not? People are people no matter whether they live in small tribes or giant masses. Social structure is the silent divider whether you have a monarchy or not. It's human nature.

I don't feel any resentment. Only curiosity. It's funny now when I'm invited to something only because it's necessary in order to be politic and I know it but I'm not sure if the people doing the politically right move in inviting me know that I know why I am being included.

I have been excluded from quite a few social circles and sometimes it's hurt to know that I was only partly let in but never fully included, but now that I have pretty much had myself ejected from every possible established clique here in McMinnville what I find is that my close friends, the ones who are happy to see me and my family any time we want to drop in, those who love us and enjoy us in all our freakitude, are mostly outsiders like ourselves. This is always how it shakes down in my life. I belong with the outsiders, the ones that don't fit in anywhere else. Like in High School when I didn't fit in with the punks because I wasn't rough and mean and angry enough; I didn't fit in with the death rockers because I was too theatrical and in spite of all the black I was still too colorful; I didn't fit in with the geeks because I wasn't smart enough; I didn't fit in with anyone but a strange band of other people who defied classification.

This sleepy little town that all but closes up on Sundays so everyone can attend church (!!) put a spell on me- it's the only rational explanation for why I was wanting so much to fit in with the wrong groups of people.

I am so much happier and less lonely now that I am back to my comfortable little niche in society; being friendly with almost everyone in town (because I'm pretty gregarious) but close to very few people. The people I am close to are dear and wonderful friends who are also misfits in their own ways. What most of my friends and I have in common is: we're transplants from more cosmopolitan cities. We aren't church goers. We have two or fewer children. We are liberal both socially and politically. We are not particularly tolerant of religious evangelism and we are ardently pro-choice and supporters of civil rights for gay Americans. We like casual drop ins from each other and love talking about music and philosophy while drinking lots of beer and eating the best food on earth.

I suppose I could always move if I wanted to. If I felt too unwelcome. But for all the things I don't like about this town, there are twice as many things I love about it. It's going to change a lot over the next twenty years. There will be a lot more people like me and my misfit friends settling in. It will become more sophisticated. It will become less poor. It will grow. It will become more diverse culturally. How do I know all this? Because that's the kind of thing that happens to cute towns located within commuting distance of hip cities like Portland.

I'm going to be here to watch it change.

I'm going to be able to tell stories about how it used to be back when we first came here in the early spring of '06 because I don't plan on moving even if I end up so unpopular I have to wear a scarlet letter "F" on my coat to warn everyone of my status as "FREAK".

I am what I am.

And I live in a small American town called McMinnville.

Before the primordial ooze, there was you.

2009-11-01T06:05:34Z

Before the primordial ooze, there was you. Where the light slid seamlessly from wood to lake to fish to the thing that emerged with a full heart and scillia moving fretfully into the light...there was you to greet the first longing. By the light of the unrelenting sun you beat down your desire like an off-gassing landfill: toxic and attractive with the smell of pineapple stretching across fresh dewy skin. Like a teen beating with the pulse of a resolute and passionate heart you deliver an elixir of excitement greater than the sum of your parts.

I am as old as you are and I know your name. I would scream it into the stark moon that shines tonight if it weren't for the broken bones you hide. I would uncover your weakness for all its hideousness if it weren't for the hideousness I cradle in my own breast like the endless moving tides, like the afterlife with second thoughts, with hesitation and tears.

We are the same. You and me. We look like enemies but we cherish the same principle from opposite ends. Call it what you will, we are no different from each other than the soil from the compost. We become each other. We weave, we spin, we knit into the moon like dark twin sisters. You still spit while I receive it passively. On this night especially. When the spirits rise, the candles whinny, and the night drawls out in accents earthy and sporous.

Wet like the inception and as serious as the beginning, we are here with each other: rich and poor. I will say your name, laced with Spanish moss and the silk of Orb Weavers freshly woven into the light. You and I are not separate. We are not strangers of birth. We are the same seed divided and loved by earth. Flickering with light into the great sea of stars- as strong as the milky way- as infinite as the universe. Just you and I. Just what we are.

Simple like seeds thrown from umbels into the damp of winter by relentless winds.

In the calm I say your name and you answer.

In the calm is our own prayer. Private like communion, private like penance.

There are no walls here besides the stones which hold us in formation.

There is only the sister speech. The binding pain. The laborious distance between abuse and relief. We tread this tenderly, like emaciated prisoners of war. You and I. Connected by discipline and desire. You and I. Connected by love and calling.

The light stretches across your planes like a desperate caress; dropping shadows across your spirit like a deep recess.

Don't mistake me! Hear what I am thinking with your skin, with your strength, with you will...

What is best in you I always see. You may stumble. You may trip across the road with your entrails aching to unravel behind you and I will know, I will understand, and I will offer you a trough in which to rest them. What you are is what I love. What you are is what I value. I will always ask for more in the deficit of light but when the sun rises on what is real I know who you are. Always. I know.

I am not psychic, but I am full of love.

Dreaming of knocking up some logs.

2009-10-28T20:04:45Z

A collection of random thoughts:

Crusading against psychiatric medications is dangerous for those who need them. Unless you are an individual trained to determine if a person really needs them, don't ever suggest that a mentally ill person stop taking their meds. Unless you are their therapist or the psychologist working with them, you have no authority to suggest that the meds are more dangerous than their mental state. Mentally ill people do kill themselves sometimes when not being supported by meds. Even if they might not kill themselves, many mentally ill people harm themselves in desperation and much of the time they do it where you can't see or help them.

Sentimentality really irritates me.

Nostalgia is like sentimentality only worse because people who are always looking back to the past with longing often miss out on the good things that are happening right now. As far as I can observe, the people I've known with a real flair for nostalgia didn't appreciate the things they're remembering until after it was already in the past. That, to me, is like deliberate unhappiness and is as useful as opening your umbrella up after your clothes are already soaked. I have no patience for it.

A train is passing through town and I love the sound of it. I hope a day never comes when there are no more freight trains. Every time I hear them I stop what I'm doing and listen. Excuse me... (afterwords...) it's such a pretty sound. I've always loved it.

Last year I made a plum dipping sauce from the yellow plums that hang over our fence from the neighbor's yard. I added some jalapeno and ginger to it to make it savory. I intended it to be used like a sweet and sour dipping sauce for pot stickers or egg rolls. Neither of which I have ever made. It took me a year but I finally made vegetarian pot stickers and they were good!! I tried the plum sauce and I have to admit that you can't taste the pepper or the ginger but the slight tang of it with the sweet made a great dipping sauce just like I'd hoped! I love it when that happens. It makes me so excited that I have three plum trees planted. (Elephant Heart, Santa Rosa, and Green Gage) I really want a damson too but I think that might be plum overkill.

It always gives me a tiny shock to hear that people actually study the bible for pleasure, on their own time. I did that for a while when I was eleven years old during my brief stint as a Born Again Christian*. It had all the improbability of a fairytale and the convoluted over-wordy mind numbingly tortured passages of a William Faulkner novel.

It's been a year since I've mentioned how much I hate Halloween, right? It used to be my second favorite holiday of the year but now I dread it.

There are a lot of super creepy crafts out there. I don't mean creepy in a cool way. Just creepy. Like "Precious Moments" creepy.

The idea of liquid pie disgusts me. As in: pumpkin pie latte or apple pie shake...I'll have to eat liquid food when I loose all my teeth, until then I want pie to be pie and shakes to be shakes.

And for that matter I'm not interested in weird foods like lettuce flavored ice cream topped with aerated brie. Yes, there is fancy food like that being made out there. I can't tell you how I know or I'll have to be silenced with a chef's knife. I don't like science to get into bed with my food. I also don't want to turn potato chips into pudding to be served next to a tiny wedge of the most expensive special fermented tempeh.    Food like that is to home cooking what bondage is to regular old sex. Basically it's food fetishism. Something for people who are always looking to up the ante on the thrill of food. (And are never satisfied I think.)

I can't believe there isn't a fad diet of eating flesh that's still alive. I was going to build on this theme but that just made me kind of sick to my stomach.

I would like to put a few logs in my back yard and knock them up with some morel and shitake spores. Maybe even some basic crimini spores. Do you think they'll pop up all over my yard if I do that? Wouldn't that be amazing?! I have plenty of questionable mushrooms that live in my lawn- wouldn't it be so incredible if I had a lawn full of morels instead?!

My dreams of growing some of my own almonds have been dashed by those who refuse to lie to me. They will not fruit here. Dammit.   The only nut that will grow in our area that can be kept small is the hazelnut. One of the very few nuts I dislike. I love walnuts and I could grow one here but I don't have room in my yard. They get big. They're beautiful trees too. I love them. Not enough room. I feel that for my little homestead to be complete I need to grow some form of plant based protein. I have hens for some animal protein but one source of protein doesn't seem like enough.** Enough for what?

Oh you know, like if there was a civil war...or food stopped being available for shipping and we could only eat locally produced food...

So I'm off now because my kiddo was sent home from school with a fever, a headache, dizziness, and a slight cough. Must take care of him and be ready for whatever this is which might be nothing but a little glitchy day with his body. Sometimes this happens. Wish us luck and may all of you stay healthy!

*Yeah, I know!

**As I was walking to Max's school to bring him home I realized how idiotic that is: beans! Beans are a fantastic source of protein and are easy to grow and store too. I'm so much happier now that I remembered about other plant based sources of protein. Of course, there are no omega fatty acids in beans that I know of. Must barter for nuts then. Or eat a hazelnut every day in the hopes I will acquire a taste for them. But they're so green and mean and thin flavored. I kind of like pistachios. I'll bet those only grow in Jamaica or somewhere like that.

It's not just inconvenient, it's a hard truth.

2009-10-28T15:12:55Z

I've been thinking a lot about food lately and the future of humans. I feel troubled about it all.

Very very troubled.

Today's thoughts about the environment have been brought to you by the newest diet crazes I've been seeing popping up all over the place. The Paleo diet and the raw food diet. It's all over the internet and among my friends as well. Read on and see how thinking about food, one of our most basic needs, easily turns into a discussion of the inevitability of the extinction of the human race.

I think the "paleo" diet is seriously flawed.

I also think the "raw" diet is seriously flawed.

Both of them seem to be inspired by the idea of "what humans were meant to be eating" because that's what we ate before there was agriculture or before we were evolved into the species we are now. First of all- I will never be a paleo-centric eater because I can't abide the idea of putting dead flesh in my mouth. I don't care if anyone else does, honestly, but I don't want it in mine. The Paleo diet consists of meat (fish, poultry, and red meat) and vegetables. No grains. None. And, I assume, no dairy. No Paleolithic person was chasing after wild buffalo to milk them.

I believe the Paleo diet is an ecologically irresponsible way to eat unless the population of the earth decreases dramatically and land for wild animals to thrive so that man/woman can hunt them increases dramatically. Meat raised on factory farms is not healthy to the earth, the animals, or the humans that then consume them. So unless you buy all wild caught/pasture raised fish/meat/game then you are contributing to a failed system of feeding the human population. With the land available to us for cultivating it is much more responsible to raise grains and vegetables than meat. Who can afford to buy enough responsibly raised meat to sustain their energy without grains? I'm thinking that the Paleo diet is for the rich in the world only.

Is it healthier? I don't really look to Paleo humans for my life and health advice. Partly because what little we know about them fails to impress me with it's alternative reality to the present. They lived in tribes and spent a lot of their time simply hunting and gathering. That's a radically different lifestyle to the modern day lifestyle most of us have. Whatever diet they had (and not that much is known about it anyway) worked for their lifestyle of being on the move, hunting, gathering, living in caves...they weren't sedentary. You can't know that a diet scrabbled together by prehistoric man is going to have a healthy effect on modern man. A whole lotta thousands of years of evolution lay between us and them.

As for raw...oy. Raw. You know, I don't digest very many raw things well. You wanna know how I know? I have a crazy hippie mother who periodically chose to feed us things raw that were generally things you cook, like tofu, and sprouted beans with the beans still attached, broccoli, cabbage, zucchini, and cauliflower. I notice that the whole raw food movement is rife with vegetable shakes in which you pulverize a bunch of raw vegetables into a smooth green beverage. Is this a form of pre-digesting it all? Gross. This is obviously not a diet meat eaters could live on. We might have eaten lots of our meat raw in the Paleo times but the way the meat is raised on the modern farm makes eating raw meat a health hazard. Eating raw (vegetables) if you buy most of your produce from corporate farms gives you the same health risks as raw meat as far as I can tell. The benefits of raw seem pretty slim to me. Raw grains? That seems harsh on the human system.

Still, if any of you are doing these diets and it makes you feel great- who am I to argue? Mostly what I'm establishing here is that I am never going to fall for some kind of diet fad, not even if all my best friends follow them.

People are omnivores. I believe that a variety of food is the best bet for good health. Responsibly grown food with no hormones and it should all be organic, though many of us can't afford all organic. We should be aiming for that.

I know that many people have food allergies that are serious and seek diets that won't kill them and I would do the same. Some people believe everyone is dairy intolerant and wheat allergic (suggesting that they just don't know it)...but if this was true I don't think people would have continued to consume both regularly for a few thousand years. Doesn't it occur to anyone that what may be the underlying problem is the processing and the pesticides that have changed our ability to consume these things without getting sick? I personally never feel sick when eating dairy or wheat. I would know if I did. I don't eat bell peppers because they make me feel gross.

I think there's a cumulative effect of of over processing grains and eating dairy and meat that's pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and that are fed their own excrement and hooves and other gross things that no being should be eating. I think we're reaching critical mass now in our country (and other developed countries) with all the environmental and food related illnesses. I think more and more bodies are breaking down because this crap is everywhere.

Cancer is not a mystery to me. Want to prevent cancer? Maybe we should stop using so much/any plastic. I have reduced my use of it but I still use it. I think about that a lot. How all those things are off-gassing in the atmosphere all the time. The nuclear disasters that have occurred- you think that all that nasty chemical poisoning just dissipated? Oil spills in the ocean- where do humans store the oil that gets "cleaned up"? In tanks buried in the earth or in the sea? I mean, all this dangerous energy we're producing doesn't just magically go away. It's here. All around us. All the time. In the soil. In our skin. In our bodies. In our breast milk whether we purposely put it there or not. So we're giving all these poisons to our babies too. And it stays in their bodies a very long time.

Increasing rates of infertility is no mystery either. There have been concrete connections drawn between fertility and birth defect rates in animals living in heavily polluted waterways and habitats.*

In case anyone was confused about this: we are animals too and we're breathing, eating, sleeping, walking, coughing, shitting, littering, trashing, and reproducing in the same filth the other species are. The only difference is that humans made all this toxic waste, animals didn't. So far no frog or deer or cat has produced nuclear power or made toxic levels of gasses or decimated miles of forest and habitats within a few short years of history.

It's us.

People who aren't sure if global warming is the fault of humans have their heads stuck where the sun don't shine.

Here's what needs to happen: No more pesticides. A negative birthrate across the globe. No more factory farming. No more hormones and antibiotics given to animals raised for meat. Pasture raised only. Stop using plastics (yikes!). Travel by bicycle or very fuel efficient vehicles. No more airplane travel. No more using toxic cleaners or corrosive chemicals to unclog plumbing. Up our recycling rate a hundred percent. Grow our own food.

So many more things to do.

Am I doing all of those things?

NO.

But I know that I need to improve in a thousand ways and so do most other people.

I don't believe in Armageddon but I do believe in the demise of single species on earth. It's not something you really have to have "faith" in. Look at all the fossils we've found of creatures that no longer exist on earth. They outgrew their resources. That's what we're doing right now. We humans have been instrumental in pushing a lot of species into extinction ourselves. I'm not going to say that it isn't the way of nature because actually it is. One species is always pushing another one out. What's bad is that no one is big enough or bad enough compete with us except ourselves.

So don't worry. If you don't want to think about any of this, don't. The earth will find a way to decrease our numbers and possibly wipe us out if we don't do it first. We simply can't continue on forever at the rate we're growing and trashing and consuming. There won't be anything left to sustain us unless something environmental gets in our way.

What do you know? It is.

*I don't have the time to go digging up specific research and articles I've read about this in the past- you don't have to trust that they exist. If you doubt it, spend a bunch of hours doing research and you will find it's true. Unless you truly suck at researching things.

How To Choose A Spouse

2009-10-24T16:14:28Z

Over the course of the 16+ years I've been married I have heard people comment on my "luck" many times in having found a good partner. I find this terribly annoying because luck had little to do with it. What I did was snatch a good opportunity when it agreed to drive me to Vegas in a hearse for my 23rd birthday.

Over the years I have heard so many complaints from single people that it's impossible to know if someone will make a good spouse or not and that finding "The right person" is daunting and the collective sighs are pretty loud. Then my single friends say something ridiculous like "You're so lucky that you found Philip!" as though he fell from the sky into my lap like a gift from a cherubic naked angel. You don't "find" good spouses, you choose them.

I have observed the kinds of men that women often date and quite often they aren't the guys that would make good life partners. I'm always a little surprised when girls date guys with a history of cheating and then he cheats on them and they're like "Oh my god! I can't believe he'd do that to me!" and I'm like "Really? Cause he did that to his last girlfriend. I kinda saw that one coming." which makes me incredibly unpopular. That's like electing a Bush to office and then being shocked when he starts a war. Some things are not a big mystery.

I want to help. I want to share some wisdom with those single people who are still waiting for their magical significant other to drop from the sky in a big cloud of glitter. So pay attention, please:

What makes a good spouse? Everyone has some ideas about what their perfect spouse would be like. Usually it involves great sex, gorgeousness, sense of humor, plenty of money, sense of adventure, natty dresser, good manners, kind to the elderly, wants a bushel of children, and never rags on your driving skills. Almost no one ever says they want to end up with the career criminal with bad skin and manners, so why do so many people date them? I am going to list the types of people you should avoid dating if what you want is a happy ending.

The drug addict: There is plenty of room in every marriage to develop drug habits over the years- don't start off with one! Signs that a person is a drug addict: always has a liter of vodka in hand, has track marks up their arms, you met them at a party at which they were hilariously drunk, poor hygiene, hangs out with mostly drug addicts, hangs out with drug dealers, perpetually blood shot eyes are probably not due to a rare glandular problem, and steals your money. If you observe any of these behaviors or evidence of drug use, walk away fast. (This is all assuming you're not a drug addict yourself.)

The Cheater: If you acquire your partner by stealing him/her from someone else, don't be surprised if you end up being cheated on in your relationship too. Anyone not capable of breaking up with one person before having sex with another person is not an honorable type of person and the recidivist rate among cheaters is pretty high. Expect the worst. Or, better yet, don't ever date someone you know is a cheater. Your love isn't likely to change them no matter how many teddy bears and balloons your relationship produces.

Mysterious loners: Many people romanticize the loner type of person and make them out to be heroes or at least desirably difficult to assess and attain. While some mysterious loner types might be as pure as Mother Theresa, beware! If a person has no friends there is most likely a good reason for that. You should always be able to get a read on someone by the company they keep. If they keep no company then there's a chance they may be a serial killer or a polygamist with lots of secret separate lives.

The Abuser: An abusive person doesn't get better with age. They don't stop abusing as long as the person they're with keeps coming back. Love doesn't conquer all. In fact, love can really screw your mind up and cause you to make poor decisions, like staying with an abusive partner because you know that somewhere underneath that rough fist is a sweet soul. Leave. Don't marry this person. If you've been yelled at like you're a piece of shit or if you've been hit- believe me when I say: IT WILL MOST CERTAINLY HAPPEN AGAIN. The only thing that can help an abuser is to seek therapy, possibly take psyche meds, or at least stop taking crack or drinking tequila by the barrel.*

The Wishy Washy Waster: This person is, in a relationship, like a wet noodle: doesn't stick to anything until it's forced to from drying out. You can't find a backbone? There probably isn't one. Says he/she wants to get married but will never set a date? Anyone who really wants to get married will set a date. Have you noticed that every time you ask a serious question you are suddenly talking about something completely different as though someone skillfully changed the subject on you? They did. This personality doesn't know what they want but they don't want you to know that they don't know what they want because that would make them seem like a poor choice for a partner. Avoid going out with people who are still in the process of growing up.

When you exclude all those types from your list of possible spouses the pool is much smaller and easier to choose from. So what qualities make a good life partner? I know you want to say "Someone really romantic who is great in bed!" This is where I slap you out of your delusional state. Romance and sex are largely guided by hormones and hormones are largely out of everyone's control. A good sex life is a healthy part of a relationship but it isn't a solid basis for choosing a spouse. Anyone who wants to can improve in bed, but some good that will do you if they also belittle you constantly or hit you. People can have the best sex together but be incapable of conducting a healthy relationship.

Something to talk about: What you want is someone who shares many of your interests but has a few of their own that you don't share. You want commonality, not complete boredom. When you are looking for someone to spend the rest of your life with you need someone who has an interest in learning, exploring, and understanding the world you live in because this is the kind of person who will continue to be interesting so there will be plenty to talk about in the winter of your lives.

Flexibility is essential. No, I'm not talking about being able to stretch a leg around a neck. Flexibility with regards to the outcome of the future and an ability to roll with change. A willingness to rewrite life plans because without this ability expectations calcify and needs become impossible to meet. If you are dating a woman who absolutely insists that the only thing that will make her life complete is to have children, even if you want children yourself- is this a person who is capable of finding happiness with you even if you find out you can't have children? Probably not. An ability to roll and adapt to change as a couple is essential.

Companionship: This may sound like a no-brainer but if you can't talk to your partner like a friend and if you don't enjoy each other's company more than you enjoy anyone else's company then you shouldn't get hitched. It won't last. You have to like spending time together. You have to like being around each other even when your sex life isn't as hopping as it was in the beginning. Hearts and flowers and romance come and go in a relationship but companionship is steady and is what pulls you through the hard times.

Communication skills: Look for this in a prospective partner. The strong silent type might seem sexy at first but if a person is strong and silent because they are incapable of talking about anything important then they're next to useless in a partnership. Most people can't read minds. Remember that. A partner should be capable and interested in communicating what their needs and desires are and also be capable of listening to you communicate yours.

One last thing: think carefully about everything I've said here and ask yourself if you meet these guidelines for a good partner. Are you a catch? It's easy to look for and expect certain qualities in others but a good partner is going to be looking for the same things in you. So before you go out looking for your soul mate, be sure you evaluate what your weak points are and work on improving. Then continue to work on it for the rest of your life.

My point is: finding a good relationship starts with the relationship you have with yourself.

*Many abusers are teetotalers but sometimes drugs will create an abuser out of a person who used to be perfectly nice. It doesn't matter. Just leave.

The Grace Of Disarmament

2009-10-22T16:22:23Z

As most of my regular readers already know, I am not religious but I love religious art and music when it's pretty and inspiring. I also love churches and cathedrals, the older the better. This picture was taken by me inside a small cathedral in Glasgow Scotland. I love this lady. And her roses. And her robes.

It is such a strange thing to find something inside yourself that seems to be antithetical to everything you previously thought you were.

My stomach remembers what it felt like to have a fist thrust through its soft tissues. The shock of it is an imprint, a flash, a never-ending nightmare of memory. That fist must have left bruises because it hit more than once but I don't remember bruises and I don't think anyone else ever looked for them. It's the moment of blinding impact that haunts me like strobe lights randomly lighting the disused hallways of my mind and then shutting off for irregular periods of time. I don't ever consciously think about it or dwell on it. It comes and it goes, seemingly at its own will. If a memory can be allowed to have a will of its own.

I have watched a drunken fist crashing towards me in slow motion as I turned my head to see if I had left the cursing human behind me who was threatening violence- I had not. That fist was all I saw for a few seconds which in reality was probably a half a second traveling against the night to meet with my nose and my mouth. It hit me with a cartoon "Pow!" and warm blood gushed down my nose and mouth to my chin, just like in the movies. My lip was swollen and split. The feeling of knuckles crunching against the cartilage of my nose and grazing the teeth in my mouth feels like someone else's soul howling at me through time. Someone else's ragged rage having nowhere else to go but in my face.

I have seen violence done to others and been helpless to do anything: frozen with the natural terror of a powerless child. I have watched and felt rage but had no way to express it without risking violence to myself and I was so full of fear. All the time. Without an outlet to express the rage I turned it onto myself. I couldn't punish the object of my anger so I punished myself instead.

My ears soaked up so much screaming in my young life that when I hear anyone express themselves in edgy decibels verging on a yell I freeze up inside instantly. I will not tolerate it around myself. Not even when it's completely natural. It scrapes me raw inside and threatens to tear down every piece of wire I have strung up and woven across my person to keep me safe. To keep the little I have left cloistered where violence can't find it.

War is evil. I don't believe there is any reason good enough to start a war. Defending yourself on your home turf is honorable and sometimes necessary. Crossing an ocean to invade another country is wrong. Killing other people for their resources is wrong when there are other ways to survive. Killing other people for retribution is wrong. Particularly when punishing an entire nation for the crimes of a few individuals. I will not change my views on this. It is a truth so unalterable for me that you can't remove it from my spirit without removing my heart too.

So how can it be possible that I have the spirit of a warrior?

All of Max's life I have been defending his love of toy weapons and play fighting because I believe it's natural, particularly in boys, to have an instinctual interest in fighting. I have laughed about the irony of giving birth to a golden dragon warrior son since I am fiercely anti-war and anti-violence. One of my heroes is Gandhi. I have spoken of the irony of having a kid who is so unlike me. Still, irony or not, I have never been afraid of his interest in violence and weapons. It's completely human. Mothers all around me try to keep their sons from making weapons of sticks and stones while I have handed them to Max trusting completely that playing at war wouldn't make him into an evil being. Mothers around me don't encourage their sons' instinct to emerge. We are all so civilized now*, boys are the same as girls and girls are the same as boys...give the boys some dolls and encourage the girls to play football...

I saw a little sliver of what was to come right before I got pregnant. The year before getting pregnant I was taking fencing at the Santa Rosa Junior college. I couldn't explain why it attracted me when I am absolutely not interested in any kind of sport. I took the class and it made my body feel like a weak-ass pile of putty for months until I started to get stronger and getting stronger gave me something I'd never had before- a pleasure in the potential of my body. I was surprised that a sport in which every action you take is to either kill another human being or avoid being killed by one. I couldn't explain why it felt right. I tried. I tried to put it into words but that was during a rare period of writer's block and they wouldn't come to me. Why I loved holding a sword and practicing my lunges in my carport.

I got pregnant and had to stop fencing. I didn't return to it.

The sliver of sight that that experience afforded me has widened considerably in the three short months during which I've been taking Kung Fu. Opening up now is a whole new vocabulary of violence and peace. This is the way to express rage safely. This is the way to shut out the ringing in my ears from the screaming in the past. There is so much more in Kung Fu than there is in fencing. It is more personal. I'm not asking a sword to do all my work; I am always using my body; with the weapons or without them. I am so new to it that I have no grace but watching the black belts and my teacher demonstrate moves and do their forms is like watching physical poetry. It fills me with the desire to be capable of the same things because sometimes, like with music, you need to feel it for yourself. It isn't enough to simply watch. You need to feel it in your bones; the way I had to learn to play the accordion so that I could feel the sound through my skin.

I want that. I want my body to have that impossible blend of fierce strength and fluid grace.

Every time I am doing my exercises in class I am taking something back into myself that violence against me and those around me took away. When we get the plastic practice knives out I don't think "I am so against fighting with knives!" Instead I become more present in myself, in my body because the only way I can learn to deflect and disarm someone with a knife is if I am centered in the present. When the knives come out or when we all arm ourselves with rattan sticks and learn to choke each other- it isn't frightening or weird or wrong- it feels like my education as a human being has, until now, been incomplete.

The way a fierce spirit would feel if made to live in cotton wool. The way a boxer would feel if he was taught only to weave.

I have no taste for violence, yet without learning self defense I am powerless to protect myself against it. Violence is everywhere. Human beings, on the whole, are a violent species of animal. As territorial as Lions. Violence is the other side of the Peace coin. To balance both in yourself is perhaps the greatest service one can do for one's self. Balanced people are more stable.

My own child, who has brought more chaos and stress to my life than I imagined possible, has also proved to be an inspiration to me in ways I didn't think children could be to their parents. He has shown me to myself and though sometimes what he's forced me to see in myself is unbearably ugly, in trying to take care of his fierce but delicate soul he has taken me down the only road that can lead me back to myself. There are ironies within ironies here that I am not a skilled enough writer to point out.

I won't ever purposely do violence to another human being. Some people like to suggest that there are some things none of us can know until we're put in specific situations that tests us. I don't believe this is true. Regardless, I have been tested in this instance. Given the encouragement to do violence to other people I have always turned that violence on myself** instead of others. But as I learn to deflect knives, fists, and kicks in my Kung Fu classes I replay those old memories and they are changing now. Now I know what to do with that fist coming at me like a bad cartoon; I amend the memory by defending myself and the other people that drunken fist bloodied that night. Now, without thinking, in that memory my body is water around that fist and turns it against itself.

I can't really change the past. What I can do is take its power to continue hurting me away.

I'd like to do that with the grace of a warrior.

*This is not a belief endorsed by the author.

**There was exactly one instance where I did take the opportunity but having no guidance in such matters I struck a person when they were down and the second I did it I felt sick to my stomach and knew that that made me the worst kind of person.

Two points for herbal, one point for manufactured medicine.

2009-10-21T15:22:57Z

I am working hard not to get discouraged every time something unpleasant happens. I think I have PTSD from the past four years of constant intense stress and upheaval and what felt like a hell of a lot of misfortune. It seems like even little things can unravel me now that wouldn't have in the past. I've never been all that great at handling physical issues, I get panicky when things aren't right in my body. Which is all the time these days.

The impetigo didn't completely go away before I finished my antibiotics. It was almost gone and then two days off the antibiotics and it flared up again. So I'm back on the pills. Why not try something herbal this time now that I know what it is? Because I've already had this thing for a month and I'm sick of it. Impatient. Besides that I read my herbal books and even those suggest that impetigo might not go away using natural remedies.

I want to make more and more of my own medicines but there are times when it seems that the best solution is to go with the stronger modern medications. Herbal remedies never worked well for my anxiety and depression and the incredible relief the psyche meds give me is not something I'm eager to live without. I would never treat a bladder infection without antibiotics. Why? Because it can so quickly turn into a kidney infection. While a bladder infection itself is not generally dangerous, a kidney infection can kill you. I don't like to mess around with that. I think the best treatment for many things, where possible, is prevention.

I don't generally take any medication for colds or flu. Most of the time I had the flu last spring I took a homeopathic/honey cough syrup that worked well until my sinuses were so clogged and my cough so painful and dry that for two days out of the ten I resorted to over the counter decongestants. That got me through the most painful two days and then I returned to my natural remedies such as sage tea and natural cough syrup.

Now my dog has a "hot spot" on the base of her tail. We're still waiting to give our kitties shots, no way we can afford a vet visit for Chick unless it's an emergency. This didn't seem like an emergency but it was clearly distressing the dog a lot. She was constantly licking the area until part of it went bald and then it looked a little inflamed and then it started to look icky. I looked up information on "hot spots" to confirm that that was what she really had (seems clear that that was the problem) and looked up treatment.

I didn't find much information on treating it without a vet and when I called our vet she didn't have any suggestions either (that's not surprising though, they don't want lawsuits as a reward for making home treatment suggestions).

My friend Blaize, who works at a feed store, told me that the main ingredients in their best "hot spot" spray are: chamomile, aloe vera, and tea tree oil. I figured, what the hell, I have all those ingredients on hand. I added plantain to the decoction I made and after giving Chick a bath and drying her, I sprayed the infected area as well as the rest of the area where she was licking constantly...

It's working! She hasn't been licking it since last night and the dampness of the raw area is gone and it looks like it's healing. I will apply more this morning. Thank you Blaize! That's a score for natural medicine.

Now I also remind myself that the cold I got a week ago was very mild and I believe that was because of the elderberry syrup. That's another score for natural medicine!

I am truly a fan of mixing medicinal traditions to get results.

I am really relieved that Chick isn't acting distressed anymore or worrying her sore skin. I'll write this concoction up on Stitch and Boots as soon as I get a chance. I suspect that it would be worth trying for some skin irritations and infections in people too. When something comes up I'll give it a try.

So. Positive thoughts. I'm working on it. Imagining what it might be like to be healthier. I'm telling myself that these things aren't personal. It isn't as though the Universe is doing this to me to punish me. That's the beauty of not believing certain things that others believe in.

Although, I do believe in karma and it's possible that the several years of poor health that I've experienced is karmic payback.

Random tidbits:

The kid told Philip this morning that he doesn't like being in the advanced math. WHAT? My kid is in advanced math? This is either Max's view of all math in the 3rd grade or he's been put in an advanced math class...we haven't heard from the teacher at all this year and even though Max comes home with complaints about school it's been fairly smooth so far. I think it's time I chatted with his teacher.

My small quince tree (only two years old) produced one beautiful fruit. It's big and fuzzy and gorgeous. I knew it had started to develop a fruit early in the summer but I figure it would drop it and didn't check again. At a glance nothing was visible but while Philip and I were discussing the new location for the chicken coop/run he saw a big fruit on it. He didn't know what it was. It's like seeing your kid walk for the first time.

That reminds me that I never mentioned that my Elephant Heart plum tree produced one plum and it took forever for it to get ripe and when it did I tasted it hoping it was fully as good as I expected it to be: IT WAS BETTER!! I have only had Elephant Heart plums as a jam that my friend Chelsea made. I've never eaten one fresh but it's been my ambition to plant one for years after tasting her insanely flavorful jewel colored jam...I cannot wait until it begins to produce more!

My "Napolean's Hat" moss rose has produced a few hips this year and I think my "Cottage Rose" is also producing some hips for me (sometimes a rose's hips will start to swell up and then instead of turning red or orange will shrivel up and die). What isn't producing any hips is the Rugosa I planted for the express purpose of getting hips because supposedly it produces tons of gorgeous rosehips. Lies. My little "Ballerina" rose has quite a few of the tiniest rose hips you've ever seen- I can dry them whole.

My friend Riana sent me five Elderberry twigs to sprout and plant in my garden. Two might not make it but two of them already have sprouting leaves on them! The fifth one isn't giving any clues at all. I may need to cover them as it gets colder so that they will make it through the winter but I'd like them to do some rooting until then. I'm so excited to have European Elders to plant in the spring! (I had meant to buy a couple last year but had no money for them so it's extra sweet!) Thank you Riana!

My friend Jo sent me a cute British pickling book and inside the pages she stashed dollar bills and a five and a ten dollar bill that added up to twenty dollars! Such a thoughtful gift- I spent it on paying my library fine and beer. Thank you Jo! I don't think I'll be able to make anything from the pickling book this year but I will next year and if I do I'll send you a jar of whatever I make.

Food should never resemble cat vomit. I don't think too many people will disagree with that. Dogs might though.

Oh yeah, and I'm really sad that "Grey's Anatomy" is done. Forever. Kind of bummed that Izzy died. I call that mean after all she went through with Denny. I was really happy with the outcome of Dr. Hunt and Christina though. He's not even really good looking but the two of them had serious chemistry and that made them both look gorgeous.

Time to stop looking like a bum. Hope you're all having a great week so far!

Wild Elderberry

2009-10-18T08:23:04Z

The wild elderberry twigs that traveled thousands of miles to rest here in our verdant soil are busting out with messages from my sand sister. Like hummingbirds grafting silence on silence, there is a residue in the air that speaks even without words and the swelling buds on the twigs have told me all of this. As though in my own voice. The coarse grind of life has left it's texture on my skin so that I am thick like summer air and toothsome like peasant bread fresh risen from a hot brick grave.

Ripe seeds fall like earthy children, to the ground, to the surface of wet fall soil in a chaos of fertility. Some will rot like human hope, yet many will germinate impossibly bright to emerge in spring with the rising heat and the brighter longer light at the same moment that the hens' eggs begin to fill straw nests for the hungry.

There is a world of sick out there. In here. Everywhere. I would like to heal it all. I would like to reach my hand out to your fevered skin; to cool it with my feverfew petals and my cold breath. Let me lay wilted comfrey leaves across your brow in hopes that it might still your racing heart; fill your panic with calm, compress your inflamed spirit so that it might lie still long enough to see its own shape in the context of the moon.

You have seen yourself naked a thousand times and enjoyed yourself in skin and light and air, yet you are still finding the limits of your spirit with blind fingers, sightless eyes, in a darkness so complete that even the night shivers in its skin with apprehension. Here you find the fences of your capability expand and shrink according to your experiments and these outlines are gorgeous, they show a sister robed in the humility of limitation; a junction at which new definitions might be drawn with the charcoal of cold fire.

It isn't for you to fit, but to define.

I walk graves everyday. I feel the dead in the soil, far beneath the asphalt. I speak with what has breathed in early dawn and died by nightfall. Ephemeral beings given only the briefest voice with which to express a thousand years of experience. Yours is a voice that resonates past twilight, into the moon, past the darkest hour.

When that light of yours flickers against impossible blows, let me light the rest of the way. I owe you a path into the morning. Into the protection of warm soil. Damp undergrowth and layers of decomposed leaves. Be ready.

Counting All The Pennies

2009-10-17T17:59:10Z

There are more impossibly pretty people in "Speed Racer" than any other movie I've ever seen. It's almost painful to watch- makes my eyes hurt. Max and I watched the movie while the sky outside darkened with clouds and a few cracks of thunder rolled past our house.

I was going to get up and get lots of things done around here. But when you have a chance to hang out with your kid on a rainy morning watching speedy cars crash and burn with all the pretty people getting quaint little smudges of grime on their noses you just have to go with the moment and enjoy it because it's not every morning that there is such cozy harmony and good coffee and a clean living room all at once. I'm glad I sat down and enjoyed the morning.

This week I did a fix-it job on our under the the sink cabinets which don't stay shut which allows the dog to root through the kitchen trash every day when we're not looking, which she does religiously. She drags whatever interesting empty (but heady-scented) food packaging she finds out to our "lawn" and licks the packaging until all the scent is gone and she leaves the shreds of paper and plastic all over the place. It took me a year to get around to the simple job of putting in magnet closures. I can't claim I managed to get it done without mishap, but it works! It's amazing how these small details can bug your brain every single day adding a thin filmy layer of barely visible stress that picks at you.

The thing about all the prettiness in the movie we watched is that the teeth were incredibly mesmerizing. All of them. The yellow ones, the yellow crooked ones, the white crooked ones, the straight white ones, the ones with the gorgeous symmetry between incisors and front teeth...Mathew Fox wouldn't be nearly so handsome if it weren't for that tooth that pushes forward slightly. If he ever gets his teeth Hollywood straightened he will lose his appeal.

That was an aside. I was going to mention the value of taking care of as many of the small stressors in your life that you can because they can add up to a lot. Things that aren't organized well in your home can make a morning run rough. Not having a place for everything means that everything hangs out in piles on top of other things. Broken things: loose door knobs, missing weather stripping, leaky showers, not enough jars for dry goods, tightly packed kitchen cupboards...all these things add stress to our lives because they prevent our lives from running smoothly. If we can't find the things we need, the socks never make it into the sock drawer, or if we can't find the brown sugar which is buried under the bags of lentils and polenta which don't have jars...we run late for everything while we look for the socks or we spend more money and time procuring things we already have because we can't see that they're already in front of us.

I have found that my house reflects the state of my mind and my life and it also creates my state of mind and my state of life. They are inextricably intertwined. I have chaos all over my house. This is how the interior of my mind looks and feels these days. Then last week end I asked Philip and Max to clean the living room because I need more help with the household stuff- I used to do it all when I wasn't working for pay- but now that I work around 30 hours a week I just can't do it all by myself. They did it. They did a great job of it.

I can't describe to you what it felt like to sit in that living room with my guys watching a movie together in such a clean and pretty room. It felt deeper than just clean, it felt restful and almost like having a chamber of my mind also cleared. My stress decreased, my enjoyment of my family increased, and my home felt, in that one clean room, like the nurturing place I knew it could be when I first walked into it.

I liked it when we had a smaller house. It was easier to keep neat and tidy. Not that I'm ever a tidy person. But there is a surprisingly huge difference between cleaning a 1200 square foot house and a 1900 square foot house. This house is hard to keep in any kind of decent clean shape. It wouldn't be so hard if I actually spent the time to organize everything. When everything has a place it is much faster to clean a house- to put things away. Much less daunting.

I personally dislike homes that are too clean and neat. They make me feel uncomfortable. Houses I can't wear my shoes through, or in which I can't bring a beverage out of the kitchen, or a home in which dishes are always washed right after dinner- homes like that make me feel like an unwelcome dirty intruder. So my house will never be like that.

What I want is balance. I want my house to be more organized than it is so that I can keep the chaos to a manageable minimum. Not so clean that I don't feel I can actually live in it, but clean enough that I am not oppressed by piles and animal hairs everywhere, and bits of string and corks- I don't want my house to look as trashed as the streets of Paris on the first day of the year 2000. Which it often does.

The process is gradual and slow for me- getting a house organized. It took me three years at the Pink house in Santa Rosa. Three years. By that time I could clean my whole house in two hours. Laundry would still take all day but I could put a week's worth of living away, clean the bathroom, change the sheets, clean the kitchen, sweep, vacuum, mop, and dust. In two hours.

In this house it takes me two hours to deal with one room.

It's important to take small steps. The living room was cleaned last week and if my guys clean it this week it will take them a quarter of the time it took them last week. I am going to ask them to do it again. If we can keep one room clean every single week that's an accomplishment. Then if I can get another one done, and then keep that one clean every week, we'll really be getting somewhere!

If you are feeling overwhelmed with your life, like I am, I suggest you clean one room this weekend. Really organize and clean it. Decide where everything in that one room goes so that next week you can zip through and just put things away instead of having to figure it all out each time. Or if you have little things around the house that are nagging at your brain and you feel overwhelmed by how many there are- pick one. Do it.

I promise that the little things in life always add up. Both the bad and the good. One penny may seem worthless to some people, but when you get a hundred of them they become a dollar. Even in this lousy economy where a loaf of good bread* costs almost $5 most people wouldn't leave a dollar on the ground like they would a penny. The pennies are everywhere you go and if you pick them up they will add up to something more.

This is something Max understands. This is something most kids understand. Adults forget how to add the good little things up. I notice that we're pretty damn good at adding up all the bad things: petty regrets, insults, misfortunes, anger, losses, and failures. What about all the small good things our lives are full of like: little apologies, forgiveness, triumphs, acts of self discipline, and working toilets.

Today I'm going to replace the weather stripping on my kitchen door through which I can see the daylight streaming in. It's not much but it's one less place the icy cold air of winter can blow into our cozy house.

What small thing are you going to do to make your life better today?

*Crappy bread will always be cheap and always be crappy.

H1N1: Are You Scared Yet?

2009-10-15T19:39:24Z

One of the hardest things about being a parent is having to make decisions for your child that may come back to haunt them later. Before Max was born we were inundated with pressure from friends, acquaintances, and the Lamaze class teachers to breast feed and not circumcise if we had a boy. For a first time parent it's pretty overwhelming. Everyone tells you what horrors will be your child's special treat if you go against their advice and how you'll regret not listening to them.

I'm more influenced by my own upbringing and my own experiences than by all the advice of well meaning (obnoxious) people trying to pressure me with fear into their view point. I always assumed I'd breast feed because I was raised by a mother who believed in doing everything the natural way. In our household there wasn't any other way. I was brought up believing that breastfeeding is best, not because of all the propaganda* the La Leche League pours out, but because women's bodies are provided with breasts that lactate when the body produces a baby- our bodies have this built in tool for feeding our young. It's clearly the first choice in feeding my child if everything turns out to function well. The pressure is so great to breast feed that sometimes women are made to feel like inadequate crap when their breasts don't make enough milk and they have to turn to formulas to feed their babies. I think that's seriously messed up!

As far as circumcision goes, I knew a boy who wasn't circumcised when he was a baby and it was important enough to him to have a penis like all the other boys at school that he got it done as a teen. Which hurt him a billion times more than it hurts infants (like my husband) fresh out of the womb. I don't know a single man who remembers the pain of circumcision who got it done at birth, there are no health risks to them because of it later in life, and it doesn't inhibit any enjoyment of their most beloved pleasure toy. On the other side of it, there aren't any health risks associated with uncircumcised penis', that's how nature originally designed them to be, and since more and more boys who would have traditionally been circumcised are now being left au naturel, it doesn't seem like such a big deal to decide not to do it. What I hate is when people compare male circumcision to female circumcision. Here's the huge difference: female circumcision makes sex painful for the rest of a woman's life. That's cruel. I believe that female circumcision is generally performed much later than infancy which means they'll never forget the pain of the procedure either.

This whole Swine Flu discussion/argument is making me both angry and tired. I feel both camps (those for vaccinating and those against it) getting hot under the collar about the decision the other camp is making. Why? This is a health decision that we're all having to make largely based on speculation and fear. I resent that. That is never a good place from which to make decisions that may (or may not) effect the long term health of you and your family.

One mom I know said she's getting it for her and her kids because she couldn't live with herself if she didn't get the vaccination and she lost one of her children to the H1N1 virus. I'm sure a lot of moms feel that way, but to me it's not at all a logical argument for getting a vaccine that may or may not protect you from the flu. Nearly all mothers in the United States put their children in cars every single day of the week and seem perfectly comfortable gambling with the odds that their kids will survive each ride. What's totally screwy about that is that a lot more people are killed in car accidents every year than are killed by the flu, yet parents don't seem to worry overly much about the higher risk of death the convenience of a car affords their lives.

I worry a lot about my kid dying in a car and he has spent less time in them than most kids we know. Max rarely gets a ride to or from school. We have always chosen to live close to schools and there's no need to use a car for that. He goes on two short car rides every week to Kung Fu and sometimes he'll go to Portland in the car as much as once a week. That's (on average) only three times he gets in a vehicle every week. How often do your kids get in a car?

But don't think I'm criticizing parents who drive their kids around a lot. I'm trying to point out that it's illogical to get all wound up over a flu that might kill your kid when you're already taking much greater risks with your childrens' lives every single day.

I am heavily biased (most people are but many won't admit it) to not believe people who are pressuring me to go in one specific direction without being able to give me enough well founded reasons why I should do it if my natural inclination is to stay put or to run the other way. People who try really hard to convince me to read a particular book or watch a particular movie generally find me swearing I never will out of resentment for being pressured. Generally speaking I know what's best for me and although I am human and make mistakes, I am much more likely to be able to live with the decisions I make if I made them by being well informed and not falling prey to other people's fears.

My huge bias is that I was raised by a mother who never gave us antibiotics or took us to the doctor for colds or cuts or anything less than an emergency. She did vaccinate us against the usual suspects (Polio, Smallpox, etc) because the evidence (by her adulthood) that getting those shots really worked was sound and self evident. The diseases that routinely killed and maimed her peers were barely around anymore when she had us. However, her natural living philosophy said that colds and flus are something a healthy body is able to fight off without intervention and eating healthily, getting exercise, and getting enough sleep were a good ways to prevent getting them in the first place. Add to that her multivitamin peanut butter balls and you have her method of keeping us relatively healthy. We got the usual yearly colds but I have to say we grew up as pretty healthy kids.

Her philosophy, and now mine, is that you shouldn't medicate for illnesses you don't have (unless they're a real threat to you as is the case with Polio) and you shouldn't ever put toxins of any kind in your body** but most especially ones that are manufactured in a lab. I didn't grow up taking Aspirin for anything but the very worst most persistent headache. To be honest, I don't know if I ever took a painkiller of any kind until I was a teenager. Even now I wait to see if a headache will go away on its own in a few hours rather than take pills for it.

As anyone knows who reads my blog, I am by no means an enemy of western medicine. Unlike my mother, I have given my kid antibiotics when he had infections that caused him great pain (such as ear infections) that could be dispatched much more quickly with antibiotics. But we were cautious with the children's cold products and while we have given him Acetaminophen more often than some of our friends have given their own children, I can honestly say that I have never mindlessly dosed my child.

I am against getting seasonal flu shots in general. I don't care if other people are getting them. It doesn't make me feel all defensive about my own choice (believe it or not). I think if you've decided for yourself and your children that getting the flu shot is the best protection for yourselves against the flu and it's worth getting every year- why should I be upset by it? What I don't understand is why anyone would care that I will not be getting it myself or for my family. The other vaccines that I have had and gotten for my child as well don't have to be administered every year. A few times in childhood and that's it. What risks you have from whatever creepy-ass shit is in those shots is over with. I don't like the idea of getting shot up with lab juices every single year for the rest of my life. I'm not saying I won't change my mind at some point. Especially if I enter a high risk group for the flu. That would make sense.

A friend said "Since it's free and there's little risk of side effects, it's a no-brainer to get the H1N1 shot." Just because something is free doesn't mean I should go ahead and just get it in case it works. I'm not particularly scared of side effects from getting a vaccination but what bothers me is that they don't seem all that effective, for one thing, I don't think I need it, for another, and if I get it this year, why not every year for the rest of my life? And where will it stop? Will they start having several flu shots every year and we'll all be urged to get them all? Because the shots MIGHT help? Might help when I'm not even likely to die of the flu anyway?

Jesus. I got the flu last spring and it sucked. It did. It was the worst virus I've ever had (pre-swine, by the way) and I even broke my rib from coughing. But my body fought it without anything stronger than a couple of doses of repulsive questionable nasal spray to help relieve the intense congestion in my nose for two desperate days when the natural stuff stopped helping. Did I ever, for one moment wish I had gotten a flu shot last year?

No.

Here's what I want to say to all of you: it doesn't matter what I think or what I'm going to decide. All that matters is that you feel comfortable with the decision you make for yourself and your family. No one else's conclusions matter. If I make a different choice than you, it doesn't mean I think you're making a stupid choice. It just means I'm not comfortable making the same choice as you.

Do yourself a favor if you're not sure and if you haven't already: do a bunch of reading from both perspectives. I will put a couple of things to read below. Read what the CDC has to say and be sure to read the well written articles that demand answers to unanswered questions. Both sides need to be heard in order to make an informed decision. "Informed" doesn't mean that once you read them you will think just as I do, it means that once you've read arguments from both sides from creditable sources, whatever decision you make will be an informed one.

No matter what happens later on, you can never blame yourself for making the very best decision you felt comfortable with at the time with the information at hand. We can't know the future. Don't make your decisions based on fear. Don't make them based on speculation for what might happen in several months. Make your decision based on the information you have right now. You do that and you are doing your best by your family and yourself. Don't let anyone say differently.

Here are a few things to read:

CDC pages on the swine flu

Wikipedia page on swine flu with lots of reference material listed

The New Yorker's take on it all

The Atlantic's take on it (this one brings up a lot of points and questions that I myself have and would like answers to)

The Tom Jefferson (epidemiologist) interview

I read a page at the CDC that I haven't been able to find since that had some interesting information which made me a lot less afraid of the H1N1 and I also read a great interview with the epidemiologist Tom Jefferson that I can't find now. I wish I had bookmarked those pages so I could share them with you. If I find any other well written articles I will include them, but truthfully, I'm worn out on this subject and I want everyone to stop trying to freak each other out.

*Much of what they say about breast milk is true but they have taken it to extremes and some people spout what's true about breast milk and then say things that are untrue or not proven about children raised with formula. I use the term propaganda here to illustrate my opinion that this group has turned many women into mean zealots who don't accept that sometimes breastfeeding isn't possible even when we want it to be and formula becomes necessary. When formula becomes necessary it isn't the enemy but the life giver.

**Alcohol is a toxin to the human body but I make an exception for it because the human body has been tolerating it for a few thousand years now.

As a parting note, we've been talking about the vaccinations with Max and he claims he doesn't want the vaccination (but made sure we knew he isn't afraid of shots) but I know he's going to feel some pressure at school about it. Which? I think is evil- making children afraid like that. I am confident that if Max gets the flu he will be able to live through it. However, he's a kid already full of terrible anxieties, if he starts to feel afraid of dying if he doesn't get the vaccination, I will get it for him. Not having him sitting around worrying about dying from the flu would make it worth getting him the shot. As long as he's not afraid, we're staying flu shot free. I just wanted to mention that because how Max feels about it matters to me. I am not adamantly against vaccinations, I'm just adamantly against getting unnecessary crap pumped into my body based on what I have personally deemed pretty shaky odds that it will even help...and that, my friends, is merely my opinion.

Under the dust lay beautiful bones.

2009-10-12T19:45:18Z

I wasn't going to use this picture of the house I lived in the longest in my entire life of moving around...but for some reason neither of my blogs will allow me to fetch pictures from my laptop right now and asking it to makes it freeze up like a lone woman in a Louisiana bar full of men.

I was going to talk about homely matters though so it's kind of fitting to use this picture. I have moved around a lot in my life. Not the way Army families do. Not to different states or countries. Just from house to house in specific areas. Mostly in the Bay Area. I was born in San Francisco and then spent my first year of life in Larkspur. Next I lived in Berkeley. Then El Cerito. Next was Richmond. Then Ashland Oregon. Then back to the Bay Area on Mount Tam, then Corte Madera, then Strawberry, then Corte Madera again, then San Francisco...

WAKE UP! (I know, that's pretty boring crap. You get the idea.)

This house we lived in in Ashland is the most stable environment I've ever had. I lived there for almost 8 years. I never wanted to leave. I didn't have a choice. If I'd been clever enough I might have chained myself to the porch and forced one of my divorcing parents to continue to live there. Me and the house loved each other very much. I mean, we loved each other because we were meant to be together. It had a laundry shoot- how brilliant is that?! I have been haunted by this house ever since. I dream about it all the time. More of my dreams take place in the house you see in this picture than they do in hotels with serial killers in them. That's saying a lot.

In fact, those are the two most frequent dreams I have. They aren't recurring in the sense that they are the same dream every time, just the same house or the same hotel. Different things going on, different serial killers. But the dreams with this house in them always fill me with a deep sense of loss and longing when I wake up and realize that I didn't just buy it back after all these years and move in. I wake up and feel like I'm going to die from longing. So silly to feel that about a house. A house in which a lot of bad family shit went down. But it wasn't the house's fault that we couldn't be a peaceful loving family. The house was a good house. The best house I've ever lived in.

I was incredibly angry when my parents covered the upstairs with wall to wall beige carpeting. It was previously fir floors painted glossy black with a red runner carpet and red and white Victorian style wall paper. It was gorgeous! Oh well.

I am thinking of home matters today. Yesterday Max and Philip cleaned the living room. I bribed Max to help by offering to bake him some peanut butter cookies and a dollar. While it didn't go completely smoothly, it got done and they did a wonderful job! It's unbelievable how much of a difference it makes to put things away and clean. We all watched a movie in there last night (Monsters versus Aliens) and I decorated the mantle with our small collection of Halloween knick-knacks.

It's such a small thing, to clean a room and put out decorations. But our house has taken a serious second to everything else going on and seeing how nice it can look is such a wonderful break from the chaos and dust build up we've grown used to. As much as I apparently still love "my" house in Ashland this house I have now has a lot of the same appeal and potential. (No laundry shoot though, that's a pity!)

The next thing to do is make curtains for the windows in this house. The cold is coming and although we do have storm windows on most of the windows, we still need more barriers against the cold. I hate vinyl windows and though I might be willing to replace the really bad windows in this house, if I do it will be with more wood sash windows or multi-light wood windows.

I love the idea of seasonal curtains. Breezy sheers for the warm months and lined cotton for the winter. Obviously I'd do velveteen or wool if I could afford to. What I have on hand is a lot of cotton yardage. I am going to see what muslin JoAnne's Fabrics has and see if I can buy a whole bolt of it with a 50% off coupon. People don't use curtains to keep warmth in their houses the way they used to and it's a pity.

So I have my house on my mind right now. In a really pleasant way. The chaos will continue to reign for a while. I just don't have enough time for everything. However, just that one clean room has lifted my spirits a great deal and when I look around my mangled weedy yard I see not how incapable I've been of taking care of it this year, but how it will improve at least a little bit every year. When I look at my forest green living room walls I can see how the room will be transformed (eventually) by a much nicer color.

I feel so happy that I'm about to make a third harvest from my thyme plants! Three times in five months is fantastic! I use thyme more than any other herb from my garden.

There's a really good soup in the fridge too. Soup season is here and soup is on the top of my list of favorite foods.

The impetigo is almost gone and my cold has turned out to be fairly mild.

That's a lot of stuff to feel good about.

I told Max he had to empty his basket by the front door and he did it without argument.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Plus, all week he's been sweet to me, random hugs and "I love you mama" comments. He's even snuggled in a few times.

Who replaced Max with an impostor?!

I'm kidding. He's a really great kid who had a really great week. I love it when that happens.

It's time for me to go shower and get dressed and run an errand before the kid comes home.

If anyone knows if it's possible to build one's own soaking bathtub, please let me know. Something possibly like a Japanese soaking tub or a tiled tub? People had tubs before the claw-foot. Can I learn how to construct my own to fit in a tiny bathroom? Tell me!