Dustpan Alley

Better Than Bullets

2010-09-13T17:02:43Z

I'm still working on my hub-site where one can see all my different projects in one place and get to them easily but I now have my new personal blog up and running. Please come and visit and if you like it subscribe!

Better Than Bullets

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How is it different than Dustpan Alley? It's not. Except it's a new chapter that doesn't bear the name of my defunct failed business. Same content as before: crotchets, social observations, political outrage, civil rights supporting speeches, and lots of unsolicited advice to go with your morning coffee.

A New Chapter Is Opening

2010-08-15T03:52:05Z

I am not a ghost. Or a mirage in my own desert of sleep. I am not risen nor am I ash. I am returned from New York City, the Blogher Conference, and a whole lot of underground sweat drenched inferno. It turns out the devil is the subway in August.

This post may self destruct at any time. I am here because I have some reflections to share for anyone who may stumble on this message or catch it in the feed reader. I am hoping that most of my loved blog friends will catch wind of it.

Taking a break from personal blogging and from all facebook activity has been good for me. It has reminded me that my voice must be the first one I listen to before all others. It has reminded me to listen to the quiet; that I am not lonely in myself, only in the world. It has given me the space to concentrate heavily on writing my book. I'm halfway through the first draft and after a three week life/work/travel/gastroenteritis break from working on the book I'm eager to sink myself back into it.

Going to New York was fantastic. I spent a great deal of time alone, walking the streets, not like a hooker. I walked an average of 40 blocks a day. My work people covered me for the whole week I was gone which means I got a true bona fide vacation from absolutely everything. Which makes me deeply grateful to all the people, including Philip and Max, who helped the trip happen. A much needed refreshment. The first two days I spent meeting the people I work with (for the first time!) and attending talks at the conference on writing. I had some food-star sightings (Padma Lakshmi!) and talked to some people I was truly pleased to meet (especially Diane Jacob of "Will Write for Food" and Minnie of "Thank You for not Being Perky").

One of the sessions I attended was like a cold smack on the head. It forced me to realize that if I want to get my book published I can't be a reclusive non-internet person. I can probably continue to refuse to have a cell phone, but I need to engage with my online community.

There's one thing in my life I'm certain of. Just one: I will get my book published. Whether I do it in a big long tedious slog through the self publishing route or the even more tedious demoralizing slog through the inevitable rejection notices from publishing houses, I don't know. I only know that I am going to get published. I think anyone who has followed me here will understand that this is a refreshing change from my "cursed by the goddamn universe" attitude recently screamed out into the ether in a most unbecoming pitch of blackness.

What I'm here to report is that while Dustpan Alley truly is a closed chapter, a new one is opening and I'm hoping that some of you will jump into it with me. How will it be different? I can't know for sure until I jump in myself. I'm talking about starting a new personal blog. Perhaps to some people it makes more sense to simply continue with this one I've spent four years writing already. I have changed so much, my goals, my life, my attitudes, my knowledge, my everything is so changed from the first post on Dustpan Alley that I need the symbolic shutting down of a phase in life I am evolving out of.

I don't have all the details worked out yet but here it is roughly: I will be creating for myself a website with my name on it. On that website you will be able to go to any of my projects (blogs) and can subscribe to the ones that interest you and ignore the ones that don't. Me, but more compartmentalized. The website will be the hub of all my activities.

Stitch and Boots will continue to be my urban homesteading notebook and over time I hope it will become a truly useful site for information about growing, cooking, and making things. I'll have a personal blog which will be like Dustpan Alley in that it will have the voice my blog friends have said they enjoy reading (because I can't help myself anyway) but will hopefully be a better version. Frocked Weekly will be the place I can catalog all my vintage patterns, make design commentaries, and put up design inspirations.

Lastly there will be a Cricket and Grey blog which won't be particularly active for a while but will eventually be the place to go to find out what's going on with the book.

I am not opening comments back up here. This doesn't mean I don't want to hear from you if you have something to say. If you would like to say something, feel free to email me at: angelinawilliamson1 at gmail dot com.

One And A Half Million Words

2010-06-12T06:30:14Z

In four years I have written nearly a million and a half words on Dustpan Alley. In that time I have gone from being a fairly hopeful person to becoming excessively caustic and bitter. I started with a business in a new state, (or rather a new town in a state I loved living in as a kid), thinking I was building a fresh start for myself and my family. It felt like an adventure and I knew in my bones that everything would work out, that the previous year of bad luck we'd had would change, that we'd build ourselves a shiny new life.

The blog became my chronicle and often my lifeline as I developed friendships here that I wasn't developing in my new town. It was my happy place. When I look at the early posts I can feel the optimism informing even the anxious and the depressed posts. My pictures were terrible and my narrative was sketchy. The progression of change and growth is very clear in the chronological archives.

I was wrong, of course. Very little has worked out. My life is still mid train-wreck. Our closest friends, with whom we shared much of this strange Oregon adventure, are going home to California and it feels like a chapter closing. It's becoming more and more probable that we'll have to leave the house we're living in to rent something much cheaper. Which means giving up my garden, my roses, my fruit trees, and my chickens. It's looking like we may never own a home again. It's unclear what our next move is or how our life will unfold from here on out.

What IS clear that we have not hit the bottom of hell yet.

I have, for four years, and with one and a half million words, put myself out there with all my mess, my imperfections, and my contradictions for others to see. For others to scrutinize if they wish. For others to share in. Some of that has been empowering. But so many times I've cut myself open and pushed raw muscle onto the page and the silences that echo back are louder than the support and happy noise of friends. It's the silence that has begun to eat away at me.

The silences have become a fresh form of self destruction. I find myself wondering if any of my friends and family would notice, would bother to call me if they opened up my blog and saw that I was thinking of cutting my head off to spite a sandwich. It has become the same kind of self torture I engaged in when I was completely invisibly falling apart after my parents' divorce, experiencing a dangerous bout of disassociation, and I felt so alone and I was in such desperate need of help but my parents were so self absorbed that they actually didn't even notice I was depressed. The slash marks across my arms practically bled out on my dinner plate in front of them and they couldn't see anything but themselves.

My blog has become my razor blade.

I 'm a really angry person. I've been angry since I was a kid but this is the first time in my life I've become openly and hostilely angry. Kung Fu has brought to the surface what no amount of writing alone could do. It has forced me to feel the anger in my own body and admit the deep disappointments I feel in others. It's always been a cinch to feel disappointment in myself, but until recently you could have pulled all my teeth out and I would have worked really hard not to admit to feeling it for others. Working out my anger, frustration, and disappointments on my blog is not only unhealthy for me, it's dangerous.

Writing this blog has made a lot of good things happen as well and I would like, in closing this chapter of my life, to acknowledge that through writing here I have met so many caring impossibly supportive people that filled some of the hurtful silences, I got one of my designs published in a book, and without Dustpan Alley I would never have gotten my job. It was through writing this blog that I eventually unlocked the door to the most pure form of telling the truth:

Truth through fiction.

I've made it easy for people to get just enough of me, to snatch whatever it is they want from me, without having to commit themselves to any kind of real entanglement or inconvenience. Such is the toxic nature of Facebook and all social media for me. To have 130 people get to casually call themselves your "friends" and invite them to take whatever little snippets from you that are convenient without having to give anything in return is a queer form of prostitution of the spirit.

It's time for a complete retreat from the world. It's time to stop giving myself away to everyone. I've known I needed to do this for a long time but I didn't have the guts. Facebook is like heroine to me. When I turn it off I get itchy to read the chatter and hear the social noise and so I say "Just a little more. Just this once!" I use it to fill the empty spaces in my life. It hurts me but I find it irresistible. I have been open, available, present, and loud for four years on this blog and now I need to take it back. I need to shut the access off.

I don't own, nor will I ever own, a cell phone because I don't wish to be available to people all the time. Having an online social life turned into the same thing as having a cell phone. I see everyone out there in the world twitching constantly with their cellphones, checking their messages obsessively, and texting people who aren't with them at the cost of those who are. This is not a world I want to be part of. Yet here I am in my own house with the people I love the most and I can't stop checking for messages from people on Facebook and my blog who aren't here which is robbing my kid and my husband of my full and genuine attention.

I am withdrawing myself from online life. I've made real friendships here and I can't promise to keep up with emails or letters and god knows I won't call anyone, but for those wonderful real friendships I've made: let's find each other in real life. Let's have actual tea together and let me cook for you. When I come your way I just might reach out and demand some good old fashioned hang out time with cell phones off and no computers. There's a little train trip I've been meaning to make to Eugene and I think I might find a way to squeeze that in this summer. Just know that I don't forget the people who have been good to me. I never forget kindness and I am adamantly loyal.

In the meantime I plan to work hard at not getting fired from my paying job, putting all of my best writing energy into writing Cricket and Grey which I hope will get published and someday find it's way into your hands, and to spend quality time with my astonishing kid.

Lastly, and I think most importantly, I intend to master my punches and my 360 kicks. I intend to find what I need in myself which is as it should be and I know that part of what I need is to train hard to bring my body back to a recognizable shape and dependability, and I believe that Kung Fu is a major part of that road back to myself. I want, and I intend to develop, the fluid grace of the black belts in my Kung Fu school. When they perform the most violent actions their energy is calm, focused, and strangely beautiful.

I hope that the next time we meet I'll have so much more to give you than I have today.

One and a half million words and no regrets.

Oil Birds: My Shame Is Infinite

2010-06-08T19:50:35Z

Human beings are the worst thing that's ever happened to this planet. Worse than locusts, earthquakes, ice ages, and plagues. Why? Because none of those things have managed to wipe us out.

I'm in a caustic mood today.

I had to see a picture on a blog of the birds that have been coated with oil from the oil spill and it made me wish a thousand harms on myself. Luckily, my life is already punishing me. But when I saw those birds I just wanted all humans, every single damn effing one of us to have to wear the oil we use everyday like those birds have to do.

I think we should all have to swim in it and drink it.

Every time I get on my scooter I'm saying "Yes!" to killing off wildlife. It isn't just when we spill the oil that I'm being complicit to harm. I'm complicit to harm because the whole society we've built around having lots of POWER is harmful. If it isn't oil it's nuclear for which there is no harmless disposal. Oh yeah, I know, we BURY the toxic waste. As though that isn't going to bite us in the ass with massive sickness down the road. As if that isn't going to corrode eventually or fill up the ocean or the desert and begin to seep and sicken.

For any power to be acceptable it has to be not only renewable but belong to a system in which the waste is somehow a benefit to something else, like soil for example. Horses are a perfect example. But obviously if everyone used horses instead of cars we'd have more manure than we could safely and productively use in the environment.

Ultimately everything boils down to the fact that there are too many people on the earth and all of them want to live a high tech fast paced lifestyle.

There are too many people.

Don't think I'm passing the buck on to everyone else as though I think I'm doing enough myself. I'm not.

I realized recently just what a sickening product of my country I am. This "way of life" that Americans are always waxing proud about isn't anything to be proud of and its arrogance is insidious. I wouldn't be caught dead defending our WAY OF LIFE yet I have been living, making decisions, and trying to arrange my life in a distinctly American way.

I kept asking how I could afford the life I wanted to live.

How can I afford this life I think I deserve to live and expect to be able to live? Apparently I was willing to do almost anything to hold up a model of life that was out of my reach. I banked on more than I should have banked on. I took risks. I made decisions that dug me in deeper until I was standing at the bottom of a big fucking dark hole asking "Why isn't anything I'm doing working?!"

And then, in a breathtaking moment of clarity I saw what the real problem was. I saw why nothing has been working out for us. Maybe it's a little bleak. Maybe it sounds a little dire.
And I know it does because people, on hearing me talk this way, try to edge me back to the other camp of trying to have the life I want to have.

I am now determined to ask only this:

What is the life I can actually afford?

And whatever that is, I must simply make the best of it.

I'm not living on potential any more. And neither should our country.

We shouldn't be making all of our decisions based on a determination to live the kind of lives we're used to living when there was lots of fossil fuel just lying around. People. We've already exhausted an insane amount of power in the century of using oil to fuel everything. We had billions of babies we shouldn't have had because suddenly we could afford to. Food got cheaper for a while. Transportation got easier. We didn't have to work so hard at first compared to before. Industrialization exploded which gave jobs to all those billions of people who now needed a way to support themselves. It was great. We could have lights on in our houses all night. We could run amazing power tools and gadgets to make everything easier. We can drive wherever we want.

It was a poisonous boon to us. It has caused us to build all of our expectations, our "way of life", our ideals of what a "good" life consists of around the availability of oil. Because it seemed endless. All you have to do is drill and it will spill. We never stopped to think about long term effects of an exploded population. We never bothered to ask how we could sustain such momentum. History demands that we never believe in a permanent growth or a permanent upswing.

Here we are. Talking about our "rights", our rights as Americans to live a certain quality of life. To live however the goddamn hell we want to because our forefathers gave us the right to do whatever we wanted.

NO THEY DIDN'T.

Just like everything else, we interpret everything to underline our own agenda. To support our own selfish desires. In case anyone has failed to notice it, our forefathers wrote the outline for this country before the industrialization of our nation. They were writing rules to govern an agrarian society. Not of industrial farmers, of family farmers.

But that's not even the point.

Americans are in love with the idea of having "rights". No one and nothing has the right to live however they want without considering everyone and everything else around them. We are all accountable to not only each other but to the tit mouse in the field.

Rights is a man-made concept. In nature there are no rights. It's just the way we rationalize and justify everything we do.

No rights.

The human race needs to do some dying off.

I'm tired of hearing people say "I'm so tired of hearing people tell me I shouldn't drive so much." or "God, these environmentalists are so sanctimonious!" Right. If someone makes an effort at change there are people behind them saying "Shut up already. So what?! Goody for you that you're so CON-CHEE-EN-CHOUS." assuming that if someone is making changes they're automatically looking down on everyone else. And ahead of them there is always someone doing twice as much saying "You're not doing nearly enough. You're, like, putting a tiny band-aid on a severed arm."

Tired of hearing the dire fear mongers tell you what's going to happen in 30 years from now? Tired of feeling like you have to get too uncomfortable to make change? Are you feeling resentful that people are trying to tell you what to do, like to drive less, have fewer children, and eat food grown with fewer pesticides?

A lot of people I know and a great many people who read this blog are already people making changes in what ways they feel they can, and most of you are doing a lot more than I am. So I'm not necessarily trying to shout anyone down who's come here to read this. I'm just saying the obvious truth here.

I'm angry at human beings as a whole today.

But it doesn't matter because our "way of life" simply isn't sustainable. When oil truly runs out I predict that in our determination not to substantially change the way we live we'll rely more and more on nuclear power and that will buy us some time until we begin to die off from radiation leakage. And people are going to demand more CURES for the things that ail us and we'll spend lots of resources trying to fix the symptoms of our excess and our arrogance which is our disease.

Eventually we're going to pay for all of this in a really huge way. This "way of life" that we have no right to live will be removed from us and replaced with the life that humans can scrabble for themselves on resources that actually exist.

People will starve. Industries will fall. People will die off. Water will be more and more contaminated and not enough of it to satiate the thirst of the people who don't die. It doesn't matter what we do because we won't do the one thing, the ONE thing we have to do if we want to have a different story for our species:

To ask ourselves what kind of life us humans can live without shitting in our own cage? We have to ask ourselves NOT what kind of power source we can come up with that will allow us to keep living the way we're used to living once oil is completely gone, but to ask what kind of lives we can live with 75% less power at our disposal.

I think it's funny that I'm writing a book about a post oil existence and I'm writing with such optimism and lightness when I think the reality is going to be a lot more like I've heard Cormac McCarthy's version is in "The Road" and I'm not sure how I can be writing with such optimism I don't actually feel.

When I saw the picture of the birds, black with oil, knowing that so many of them are going to die because we're so greedy to be able to drive where we want and whenever we want, I felt sick to my stomach with a shame of the deepest most viral kind. I am so ashamed to be human and it isn't that I'm just ashamed of other humans. I'm ashamed that I'm complicit in that disaster just as much as people driving Hummers are.

I believe that human beings are the lowest of all the animals on the planet.

I believe that human beings are lesser in worth than cockroaches.

I know it's a dire view. I know that it isn't exactly a helpful view. But it's the feeling I have in my gut every time I see human filth. Which is everywhere. And people have the gall to believe they have a right to do as they please because GOD says we're superior.

Which is one of the main reasons I will never believe in God. Because if I believed in God I would hate him/her/it more than I hate humans for creating a world that was pretty gorgeous, worked pretty well, had all kinds of built in checks and balances for all the species living on it. And then "he" creates us? The worst thing that ever happened to this planet. What kind of being designs creatures like us?

No, I can never believe any being, celestial or earthly, could intentionally create such a destructive and evil force as humans.

I will continue to move towards my ideal of change. I will continue to use petrol less and not buy petroleum products and to produce less waste and though nothing I can ever do can be enough, I will do them because I want to be able to look at the wounded, the contaminated, and the innocent animals out there who are suffering because of me and say "I see what horrors I am complicit in and I'm not alright with it and I am making better choices every day because I know your value is greater than mine."

The following accounting is for myself and isn't a self congratulatory inventory nor is it produced here to make anyone else feel lesser. What you do, the choices you make is less my concern than the ones I make for myself. It doesn't matter to me if what I do doesn't make a big difference; even if it can't stop us from ruination as a species, I still have to live with myself.

Here are areas we've been working on:

I reuse all ziplock bags at least once, often twice.

Max uses a cloth lunch bag every day (actually made of nylon and plastic lined, so that's not good)

We all wear predominantly natural fibers.

We eat about 65% organic foods

We never ever water our lawn. Damn thing grows anyway.

We grow mostly things in our yard that benefit birds and insects or feed us.

We purchase very little online.

We don't buy very much stuff (mostly buy things we need when we need them. Books being something of an indulgence.)

We work hard not to support any companies who have a track record of environmental neglect or that support political parties who aren't known for having environmental concerns.

We are constantly investigating what we can buy locally, especially when it is something also made locally.

We don't have air conditioning.

We turned our heat down to 58 degrees all winter. Though not to use less power, just to spend less. Has the extra benefit of using less power.

When the car is working we only use it once or twice a week. It's been broken for two months. We bicycle. All of us.

The scooter, which I have used way more than I should, uses a fraction of the gasoline than the car does.

When the scooter was broken I did ALL of my errands on the bicycle, lost ten pounds, and didn't feel like my life was really hard because of having to bicycle everywhere. And I live in a REALLY rainy area.

We rarely ever use paper towels or paper napkins. I've bought exactly two rolls in the past 12 months.

We work in the town we live in. Philip makes 2/3 less income by working here, but it means he has a five minute bicycle ride to work.

We never use any petroleum based pesticides in our garden. In fact, we haven't used any approved organic measures either for two years. Much to the detriment to my fruit trees which really needed some dormant oil which is an organic pest control.

I have been successfully remembering to take my own grocery bags with me whenever I leave the house for a year now. I do forget every now and then but I have no build up of plastic bags like I used to.

I don't buy gossip mags like I used to except on very rare occasions.

All my cleaners, detergents, and bath products are a minimum of 99% natural and preservative free, all of them are non-petroleum based.

We compost most of our food scraps and trimmings.

We have never bought a brand new car. (But I did, in contrast, buy my scooter new and looking back now I wouldn't do that again.)

We try to fix what breaks first before buying new.

I am only buying used laptops. It has it's downsides but even if I could afford to buy new I'd still buy used.

I wear all my garments twice before washing (EXCEPT FOR UNDERGARMENTS, which I'm adamant about wearing fresh everyday. I'm sure everyone is relieved to know that.)

We use bottled water only a few times a year in emergency thirst situations and when we travel. We all have metal water bottles and we fill them with our own filtered water.

Areas in need of bigger improvements:

We need to shut off all power that's not being used such as turning lights off in rooms we're not using. Turn off my computer every night.

Need to find a way to get post consumer recycled toilet paper every month. Trader Joe's has the best most affordable 100% recycled toilet paper (80% post consumer). The people who are doing family wipes are doing the only truly sustainable toilet wipe situation and if the rest of my life was simplified enough I'd like to make that change.

Need to make my own feminine pads. The materials in the ones I use are super creepy and it makes me cringe that I'm heaping it onto the environment. This is an easier change than going cloth toilet wipes.

Smaller house. We sure didn't seek out a house this big (1900 square feet) and we were happy with a house that was 1260 square feet. Though we did end up finishing the attic which put us at a little over 1400 square feet. That is more than enough space for a family of three. If we don't get to keep this house then I'll be happy to get a much smaller one.

If I ever own again or if we stay in this house a grey water system is a MUST. It's illegal in the state of Oregon but I don't give a shit. If I have a right to let whatever chemicals and scary crap I want to go down the drains to the public sewage and water system I should have a right, and indeed a willingness, to use that same water to water my own yard.

Find a better longer lasting non-petroleum based material for putting produce in. I still use the plastic produce bags because they keep produce in much better shape in the fridge. It really bothers me. But I weigh using those against the waste of non-bagged produce that wilts and then is not used.

Stop buying fashion magazines. I did this for several years and can do it again. I love them and I've let myself indulge in the past two years again.

My hand lotion. I use St. Ives as my everyday hand lotion. It is the only body product I use that is not 99% natural and preservative and paraben free. I have some other more natural lotions around here that I don't like. My hands hurt when dry and the consistency and smell of a lotion is intensely important to me. I use a lot of it. I will panic when I don't have lotion on hand and if I put any on my hands that make them feel weird. I don't mean panic in a euphemistic way of saying "I don't like it", I mean I PANIC. I either need to find a good natural one or I need to find a recipe to make one that I like.

For a start.

There are other things too. I would say that my psyche meds are the very last frontier for me because without them everything else falls apart. Maybe some people can find all the aid they need in natural herbal remedies for mental illness but after 30 years of pursuing only natural herbal remedies for my mental illness I am 100% satisfied that the dangers of life without them are too great, especially now that I have a kid. So I'll make almost any change before I'll give those up and make myself vulnerable again to persistent and pervasive mental illness whose ultimate risk is suicide.

But before I get to that line, there is a world of possible improvements I can make.

So tonight, as I sign off to go work on my more optimistic look at the future in fiction, I want to say I'm so desperately sorry that our greed and our "way of life" comes at such a devastating cost to creatures much more innocent than a human newborn can ever be. I don't pray to deities either male or female, I only know that there is this earth that we're on and if I could have nature answer a prayer I'd have her erase us completely from the crust and atmosphere.

I listened to this piece while writing this post:

En Aranjuez con tu Amore by Andrea Bocelli

But I wanted to leave you with "Snow Goose" by Jean Redpath because it is the natural conclusion. I couldn't find a link to any version of it. I listen to the one I found on Rhapsody. If you can find it, please listen to it. It's for the birds.

Here's a tiny excerpt: Snow Goose

Grey: forest water and abandoned sails

2010-06-06T07:36:25Z

You will come in ships full of coffee and cloth bearing false white flags of surrender only to land and melt into the sharp resinous conifers, shooting the birds up into the fresher higher canopy where none can catch; only watch helplessly as feathers rise, and song is keening like your soul just ripped the mast and tore to ground. You have become the damp mist across virgin cheek cold from the night and fresh from sleep, roused by butterfly cry and you take nothing here.

This is not where you hunt. This is not where you take. This is not your dream, if you can be said to know a dream of your own. Clouded by salt pork and canned water, any land is like apricots fuming gently in the warm summer sun. Take that arrow into the dark again, into the woods where the needles grab at your jodhpurs and rip at your arms. Here you will find cover to watch the unfolding, the story in the clearing, the courage that will rip your tight chest wide open. No blood, no blood of your own here. Enough will come. Enough will follow. Sit in your shadows and watch fierce eyes burn at the edges and fists break through the curious smoke of an early morning burn pile.

It will never taste as rangy as this again, like wild cougar on a spit at the beach. It will never smell like this again, like the acrid after-shock of winter. Still your beating heart, wear your enemy closer than yourself. Hold it still, hold it close and never breath- the humus underfoot will suck you in with its rich underground pull. Set your heart out on the sun-warmed rock because it no longer belongs to you.

She'll save half a peach for you. That is all. Restless like the pulling of the ocean, like a great tidal reef she'll draw you like a leaf into gutter. She has no idea of the power she has and it's best this way, her fumbling forward into light, carrying you with her, unaware of the full weight of you. Her force is rapid like waterfalls and you can't retreat. Not now. Not again. She'll not see the shimmering past, the dark tapestry of fear and loathing that once shadowed your skin. She's too fast, too complete to feel the small nicks; the small divots taken from your faith by lesser beings.

The great field of blue camass lilies calls like water to a sailor but you must wait for her hand. She'll take you across true like her father might have bade her do if he weren't already dead. Don't speak yet. Don't break the ferry's spell. Cross the water and taste the electric air. She's wild with it, in her hair, her skin, and it's you.

It's you.

The Almost Aquiline Nose

2010-06-05T18:18:33Z

So while I am trying to hold my shit together enough to make a public appearance today, I distract myself with the question of noses. I am trying to design my main male character, Grey, and having to describe his physical form is difficult. I don't spend a lot of time evaluating men's bodies. I kid you not. The classic hero shape is not appealing to me. I think "rock hard abs" are distressing and vulgar. Bulging muscles of any kind repulse me. Just the regular kind you get from being active and doing yard work is fine. Any kind of body which may only be achieved by an unnatural relationship with a gym is a curiosity at best, and at worst makes me shiver in distaste.

Grey has a medium build. But more important than build is his nose. Noses are very important to me. It breaks my heart that so many people have taken great noses and traded them in for something that, when you weren't born with it, is insipid. Snub noses are fine on the people who were born with them, but (and I'm so sorry to get personal here) I think a snub nose leaves much to be desired as an ideal.

Growing up I never hated my nose nor loved my nose. I wished it had a little more character, is all. One day, the day the above picture was developed and put into my hands, I made a deliriously happy discovery: I had a tiny bump on my nose!! I could only see it when in complete and stark profile. Do you see it? My nose isn't perfectly straight.

Come on- look closer. There is a gentle bump in the middle. If I could choose any nose at all in the universe of nose variations I'd have an aquiline nose.* "What's that?" you ask? It's what I almost have. It's a nose with a bump along the line which is the opposite of a Greek nose which is almost painfully straight. I love a Greek nose too, but an aquiline nose is the finest of them all. Look at my "enhanced" picture below to see what I'm talking about.

As it happens, the outline I've created with my semi-clumsy photo-shop paintbrush has illustrated the nose I wish I actually had. But I'll take what I can get.

One of the most beautiful women in the world is my friend Tara who has the most exquisite nose and I'd show you a picture if I could find one. She has the best example of an aquiline nose I've ever seen, not an "almost aquiline" like mine.

I cherish the small bump on my nose though I wish it was more pronounced. I hope that as I get older it grows. You know they say noses never stop growing? Here's my fingers crossed on that...

My cousin Carrie also has a gorgeous nose. It gives her face a keen intelligence, a regality, and it just plain adds a layer of beauty that it gives me much pleasure to see. You can't take a person with a tiny "ski jump" nose seriously, but no one can argue with an aquiline. It gives a strength to a face, a chiseled sculptural impression.

Ever notice how the best most revered sculptures in the world don't have Hollywood noses? Rodin may not have been sculpting Romans and Greeks, but even he didn't memorialize insipid small noses.**

Why's everyone so in love with snub or button or little noses? What have they got to offer anyone? Barbie would have never let anyone dress her in crap bubble-gum pink if she'd had a Greek or an aquiline nose.

I gave Grey a Greek nose because I gave Cricket an aquiline one. Why not? Why not give each of them one of my favorite noses?

I'm going to end this silly post with an observation that may seem simplistic and will obviously not be addressing exceptions which do surely exist...here it is:

I think people are best looking with the bodies, skin, and faces they're born with. I really do. I think brown skin is beautiful, but not on people who were born pale. I don't think tans make people look better unless it's a gentle incidental one they got from a little sunshine NOT the kind you get from baking yourself under the sun. I think tanning salon tans are creepy shit. I think big boobs can be an amazing asset to a woman's body, but not if she didn't naturally have them.

I believe in making the best of what we've been given to work with. I believe in wearing clothes that make what shape we have stand out in the best possible way. I believe in wearing some makeup for fun, for drama, and to enhance things we might actually like about our faces. I believe in taking care of a body to be healthy, to let it shine, but I don't believe in obsessing about five pounds of weight or letting your life's goal be to have washboard abs you can play bass with.

Because I am obese I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling unhappy and depressed about how I look. I take many self portraits of my head to ameliorate the self loathing I feel for the rest of me. However, when I'm not obese I really don't obsess about my body or my looks at all.

Oh, and on that front, this week I hit a personal best: I rode a total of 12.5 miles on my bicycle in ONE day AND also went to Kung Fu the same day.

AND I lost 2 more pounds this week.

Anyway, I love my almost aquiline nose. I hope that anyone else out there who has an actual bona fide aquiline nose will understand what a gift they have and know that their profile is a thing of beauty.

*Like all styles of noses, there are extremes of an aquiline. Mine doesn't even truly qualify as one, it only hints at aquiline. What aquiline literally means is to curve like an eagle's beak. So aquiline can mean something very like a "hawk nose" or it can merely imply a bump, or lack of straightness. I tried to link to Wikipedia's example and am having trouble, hopefully it will appear. My favorite in the aquiline range is the style of nose my red pen created which is the kind of aquiline my friend Tara and my cousin Carrie have. My preference isn't for eagle-noses as much as for ones with a distinct bump in the line.

**I've got a feeling some smart ass art major is going to discredit me on that one.

No Place Is Paradise

2010-06-05T16:00:08Z

Yesterday we got the crushing news that our closest friends here in Oregon are moving back home to Santa Rosa. They moved up here at the exact same time we did. We never knew each other when we lived in Santa Rosa. Oregon brought us together. If they hadn't been here like an anchor to our diminishing sanity, to remind us of all the things we believe in and respect, we would have drowned under the weight and the roughness of this gun toting conservative mostly religious homeschooling tooth rotting county where it is every young teen girl's goal to start having babies when she's done with high school (though if they start coming at fourteen, who's going to complain about God's gifts?).

No, not everyone here is like that. (That may only describe 80% of the people here.)

Santa Rosa fancies it has a problem with teen pregnancies and being here makes a joke of that. Santa Rosa has no idea what a problem with teen pregnancies looks like in a community.

Our friends may be gone in as soon as six weeks. Six weeks and then we're going to have no anchor of normalcy. We've made some other friends here. Friends we love and value. But none around whom we can be completely ourselves. 100% let down our guard and still be loved and not spark a mean debate or hurt feelings. They were the only family here with whom we could spend time as a family. If the boys didn't get along we didn't care "Get your shit together boys or one of you can play alone in the basement and one of you in the attic! Stat!" Families around here aren't like that. Everyone is insular and inwardly protective. Just different.

These are friends who if we're going to hang out at their house and we get there early and they aren't home yet we can walk in the door and be at home and they won't feel all weird and annoyed to find us sitting at their kitchen counter waiting for them; they'd rush through the door and greet us with smiles and hugs like we're exactly the people they most want to see in the whole world. I'm not sure they'll ever know how much that greeting has kept me buoyed when everything else was crumbling at our feet. When all our other friendships here are complicated and never a whole family friendship, seeing them is always like seeing family.

They have been disillusioned by Oregon as much as we have. We all felt the same excitement moving up here and sense of adventure. We were all giddy with the slightest snow and happy to be away from the bone penetrating heat of Santa Rosa in the summer. We relished the rougher landscape, touching the wilds as you can't do in Sonoma for all the rurality it has. And at about the same rate we came to know the darker side of life here near the wilds.

They've had enough. They're going home. I tried so hard not to cry on the phone. I'm really happy for them to make a decision that's going to improve their life and fulfill them and I'm so happy for them to be heading home to be among truly kindred spirits again; family and friends. They're going to go back to where they belong. I love them so much that I can't want anything better for them than that.

I'm completely devastated.

Our other close friends whose house is like our other house are moving to Portland.

Max is losing one of his few close friends here too.

The first thing I did when she told me they were going home was to check rental prices in Santa Rosa because I don't honestly know if I can bear to live here without them. I have been missing home a lot lately too. Painfully wanting to be where our friends are family and we're welcome to come crashing in any time we want.

The housing prices are out of our range. We can't go back. There're no jobs there. California pushed us out four years ago and we took the plunge. I loved Oregon as a kid and had always wanted to come back. I always said Oregon had my heart. I am not a very sentimental person and yet I spent years missing Oregon when I was in California. It wasn't until I learned to love my birth state, California, and found my way to happiness there, that it pushed me away. Said "Go back to that place you've been pining for all these years! There's no place for you here. Get!"

Irony is the star that rules my life.

It felt like punishment then, but I took the road out. The road of adventure, of chances, of change, and said "Oregon will embrace us! Oregon is a wonderful place and if California doesn't want us we'll make Oregon our home!"

Sometimes punishment has no end game.

When we moved here we observed that if we moved to Oregon we'd never be able to afford to move back. I'm afraid it's true. I know this now, at the same time that I'm discovering that Oregon has no place for me either. I don't belong and the hard truth is that I never will. Portland isn't big enough to fill this state with people I understand.

The romance was over two years ago. I still run out into the snow like a kid who's been living in a cave and I laugh and jump around like a madperson and know that in California I never got to throw snowballs in my own back yard. I still love that I can legally keep chickens and I love the rain. I love the cooler climate. I love the forests and the rocky cold Oregon beaches.

So my friend said she believes I'll come home eventually too. Home.

I wish we had a choice to go back to California because if we could I'd be packing up right now.

Even though there's no place for us there anymore either.

And then there's this: I have become a bitter ravaged obese person since leaving California. We were on a low ebb when we left, it's true. I know everyone was shaking their heads wondering how one family can have such a string of bad luck. What with the attic fire the year before that pushed us out of our house for five excruciating months. Then Philip losing his job. Then the hip breaking followed by the continuing joblessness and finally Philip breaking his arm. A lot of head shaking. At least we're lucky...(fill in the blank).

And we all had no idea that that was just the beginning of a dark clawing into the mouth of hell. We've used up all our resources to make a good life. Trying to start a business. Almost doing it right. Losing. Losing. Losers. How many ways can the universe find to say "YOU LOSE!"?

So here we are. Our choices are few. We can try to stay in this house, for which outcome we're at the mercy of the bank and the only reason the bank will even consider helping us is because of Obama's administration forcing banks to help the population drowning in steep outrageous mortgages. So for everyone who hates Obama enough to paint him as a Nazi:

FUCK YOU.

If the bank doesn't lower the mortgage enough our choices are these:

Rent some crappy tiny depressing place here in McMinnville.
Rent some crappy little depressing place in Portland.

If we get to keep our house we'll stay here for a while.

If we don't, and I have to live in a crappy ass depressing apartment, let it be in a city that while full of itself is at least standing up for things I believe in and in which I won't have to listen to people piss on the things I believe and the person I am at least once a day.

My only hesitation is that Max loves it in McMinnville. Mostly. Except for when he's being harassed for not believing in God.

And when he heard that one of his best friends here is moving back to California he admitted that he sometimes wants to move back too.

Can't go back home.

Where else is there to go? We're limited to living in communities as poor as this one. Now would be a great time to skip out of the country. Except that no country wants the poor chaff from the United States.

We're middle aged with no prospects. No brilliant careers to look forward to. That's behind us now.

It's amazing how fragile my good will has become towards this place. This state. Without the temperance our closest friends offered, there is no buffer.

It's fairly telling that nearly all of the other good friends we've made here have come from somewhere else and are constantly wishing to return to the places they left and I'm pretty sure they'll all leave as soon as their ships come in.

I'm going to cry myself out for a while. And then I'm going to get on with the business of falling. It can always get worse and what I've learned is that it most certainly will. I'm going to write my book and I'm going to keep working at whittling away at this horrible suffocating body of mine until I am free of it. I am not going to pretend to love it here. I've defended it long enough and now it's open war.

Believe it or not I don't regret anything. I don't regret leaving California. No matter what happens to us, and it's US for God's sake- it's bound to be interestingly depressing, I've learned so much by moving here.

It's strange belonging no where. It's like a constant irritant.

As a slight side note I thought it was curious that when I was looking up rental prices in Santa Rosa I felt a strange little jab of resentment for all the friends and family who never visited us here, I thought :

Why go back to California? It's not like my own Dad has bothered to visit us here once in four years. Most of our oldest friends haven't been here either. We've gone down there twice because we missed them all so much but only three of them ever came to visit us here. I think that says a lot. We couldn't afford our trips down there but we did it because we missed our friends and family so much. But if we move back there who will have time for us? Who has time for anyone anymore? At least while we're living here we can all just say it's the distance keeping us apart.

No place is a paradise.

That's the damn truth.

Notes on a novel: Will Cricket Ever Hear "The Piano Man"?

2010-06-03T07:22:34Z

I've written 12,000 possibly useful words for Cricket and Grey, the book. I was thinking the other 2,000 were tossers but the more I sit here way past my bedtime not drinking beer and listening to "The Piano Man" ad infinitum, I am realizing how much those 2,000 words that won't be in my novel have actually helped me define my perspective and has told me things about my main character that I might not have figured out if it wasn't for having written them. That's not waste. I have to watch how I talk about things, especially to myself.

Because I reread the 10,000 words I deemed a good beginning and even though I have said about 100 times in two days that it is a ROUGH DRAFT of a first chapter, I found myself itching to rewrite it tonight. Because there are a thousand things to smooth, to cut, to clean, to clarify...and I want to stay up all night right now and get it right.

This is the writer's hunger.

I'm drifting through tonight's exercise of writing character analysis listening to "The Piano Man" by Billy Joel. I just designed the sex life of a sociopath to it.

I wonder if the fact that I don't know how to pluralize "analysis" means I should get born again and discover a less wordy calling in life?

I have to listen to music to write. It stirs things up. It takes me places that only music can take me. My tastes are wildly eclectic and I am constantly searching for the song of the moment, it has to be good enough that I can listen to it at least 50 times.

The other main song of the night was "Cracked Actor" by David Bowie. I designed a life changing event for the sociopath to that song. A character that is rapidly becoming more interesting and important.

Building people the easy way. This is so much better than being pregnant and giving birth with your own skin and bones being torn apart and then having to be responsible for a living breathing human being that you will let loose on the world at some mature point but will never stop worrying about ever again.

Building people with words and music is so much easier.

Billy Joel may not have reinvented himself to suit the tastes of listeners now but the reason I can listen to this song a hundred times on a Wednesday night is because he is such a wonderful lyricist. It isn't just his piano playing or song writing, it's the words. The fact that he had all that talent together in one head makes me kind of sick.

Cricket will probably never have heard this song.

When I started the 10,000 word chapter I had a very strong idea of what the conflict in the story was. By the time I got to about 5,000 words I was really working into the conflict that will power the story. And when I finished I felt satisfied that I was solid with the conflict. Then last night I'm (up too late, not drinking beer) reading Elizabeth George's chapter on conflict and something she said opened up a skylight in my skull and I had to jump from bed and run to write more book notes because the true conflict was completely different from the superficial conflict and it felt like opening up the soul of this thing I'm building.

I hate the expression "wordsmith". I hate when it pops into my head.

It's easier to make a character you love truly flawed than I originally thought. At first you want them to be perfect so that everyone will love them. Like real people. Aren't perfect people who everyone wants to be? You imagine this fictional person that you want to build a whole world around and at first you see them in this yellow halo of goodness, because this is your hero. So you make all the other characters ruthlessly flawed thinking that's perfect because you need horribly flawed people to make trouble for your perfect fictional hero.

But the problem with that is that no one actually really loves perfect people.

I personally hate them.*

Once you realize how hateful your perfect hero is it becomes a little easier to let go.

I like Cricket a lot more now that I've given her a lot of personal issues to grapple with publicly.

I love the word "pugilist" but I don't know why. It sounds nothing like what it is.

It sounds like someone who wins vomit contests.

It's time to go to sleep. It's been a long day. Tomorrow promises to be longer.

Having this book to sit down to and write at the end of the day makes it all worth it. I wonder what it would be like to have all the time in the day to write books?

I hope to find out before I die.

*Am aware that no people are perfect. It's the IDEA of perfection that makes me feel mean.

Bullying Doesn't Always Lead To Suicide

2010-06-02T18:54:29Z

A couple of weeks ago I was with Max was in a class type situation that wasn't actually a part of his school. The kids were having some kind of discussion with each other and I wasn't paying much attention to them so I didn't hear what they were saying until the teacher comes up to them to discuss some comment that one of the kids made.

He launched into a very long, very serious, very very serious speech about how evil bullying is. He tells them that making fun of people is never alright, that it's so hurtful that some teenagers kill themselves because they feel so bad about the bullying they suffered.

Listening to the teacher I suddenly just knew that it was my kid who was really being lectured, under the guise of a "good opportunity" to talk to the group about a serious subject. I knew that it was my kid that had made some unfortunate, and from the tone of the lecture well under way- possibly EVIL, comment. I have a sixth sense about these things. Or perhaps it's nothing more than being able to tell when all the light leaves my son's body and he turns inward in discomfort and shame.

I was getting uncomfortable with this lecture. To mention one time that bullying can lead to a person's suicide might be an effective way to get a child's attention and illustrate how serious a problem that might seem small can result in something really horrible, but in the course of a ten minute lecture, suicide from bullying was brought back to the forefront of the lesson at least three times. I am not a wimpy parent when it comes to telling my kid the worldly truths he's going to have to face, but I very nearly removed Max from the situation which I felt was, both by the strength of feeling of the teacher as well as the incredible length of the lecture, a kind of backhanded form of bullying in itself.

The irony almost took my breath away. The teacher's words were like a battering ram against those kids, and against mine who (it turns out I was correct) was the main person for whom the lecture was rolled out in the first place.

Not all children are the same and this is what makes you a better parent for your own child than I could be. I am not intending to speak for anyone else's children or experiences, I am going to speak from and for my own.

My child has a conscience. It is still under construction as is the case with nearly all kids. But though it may not be complete, mature, and deeply tested yet, I already know he has one. He nearly always knows when he's done something wrong and most of the time he feels bad about it. He has some impulse control issues that are stronger than is usual for kids his age, this being part of the ADD issue, and so he does regrettable things often without thinking and the minute he thinks about it he feels ashamed.

He also feels ashamed when he does things accidentally that upset others. He doesn't know how to deal particularly well in these situations, though I continue to try and teach him, and he often becomes a little belligerent to hide his shame.

How you give kids lessons about their behaviors, how you discipline them should be reflective of the behavior you wish to change or discipline as well as working with the child's individual nature if you want good results. When Max already feels shame about something he's done and particularly if he's already been read the proper riot act (such as by a teacher) it isn't effective for me to make a big deal out of it all over again at home. He doesn't hear me because he's already grappling with the troubling sensation of feeling like a crappy human being. He's extremely sensitive to the words people use and his propensity for taking his shame inward while projecting a kind of belligerent tough behavior outwards is truly dangerous to himself.

He doesn't talk about killing or hurting himself when he's upset with himself nearly as often as he used to but I can recognize those feelings in his face when he's experiencing them.

I work hard to find the right balance between discussing and addressing any problems Max is having and backing off before he's stopped listening. I am constantly playing against other adults in this. Other parents, other teachers, people out in the world. If they come on strong but I agree with their message I am careful to let Max know that I agree with them but also to acknowledge it when he feels someone has been harsh. I will tell him when I honestly agree with him but make sure he knows that the other person was treating the situation in the best way they knew how.

And then every once in a while some teacher or adult that Max deals with will piss me the hell off and I will let Max see my indignation. He deserves to know that sometimes mom's rage is raised by the treatment other adults give my child.

The result, so far, has been that Max trusts me. He believes that I will help him navigate these situations no matter how impossible they feel to him. He trusts me enough to be willing to talk to me about the tough situations he gets into and he looks to me to gauge the true measure of his mistakes. In my view, this is how it should be.

As is customary with Max when he suddenly finds himself in the soup, he stiffened up and shut down his face during the lecture about bullying. I anticipated a long gentle talk about the teacher's own personal point of view having driven the lecture and reassuring Max that saying "I like to make fun of people who like different things than me."* is not a sign of being evil, as was nearly suggested. The great surprise to me was that he went on to enjoy his class and didn't carry this awful shaming with him the rest of the day up until bed time. I believe it's a sign of his growing confidence in his own conscience and in his own sense of right and wrong.

The reason the speech about bullying bothered me so much, aside from the dire warnings of causing people to kill themselves, is that it was uncompromising and very BLACK AND WHITE. All teasing is bad, wasn't just the alluded to message, the teacher actually said that all teasing is bullying and bullying is always very bad. I myself was bullied quite a lot as a kid and as a person have been relentlessly teased my whole life and though I take it much better now, I didn't back when I was a kid. Even so, I am smart enough to recognize that there are many many different shades of teasing and even of bullying. Making fun of someone because they like to play basketball instead of read books is not the same as telling someone they're ugly and stupid.

Teasing is a natural part of being human. It's one of the ways we acknowledge differences between us lightly. It's how we say "Hey, that's weird to me." and everyone notices the differences between themselves and others whether they'll admit it or not. Noticing these things out loud is not, in my opinion, the heart of evil, nor is it bullying. Not unless you are saying things specifically to be mean, or unless you are relentless in your teasing. But those are shades of the issue.

I agreed with the teacher that bullying is not okay. Bullying, as I understand bullying in the definition the dictionary offers: a person who is habitually cruel or overbearing, especially to smaller or weaker people.

Making fun of people can be mean depending on the circumstances or it can be playful. A person can be playfully making fun of someone and not know until too late that the person they're making fun of is especially sensitive about it. Here in our house we make fun of each other frequently. It is meant to lighten our mood, poke a little at each other's quirks to keep them out in the open to say to each other "you're different than I am, and I like you anyway" or "you're different than I am and I like that about you", and sometimes it's very very funny.

This whole incident reminded me of a lot of issues I hear parents express about public school or about standard tests or about the challenges of sending kids to camps or basically anywhere outside of home where your child is going to be under the care of adults who aren't you.

I was worried about how Max would deal with this situation of being somewhat bullied by a lecture about the evils of bullying. I thought about dragging him out of there because I didn't think my kid deserved to have a comment he made be addressed in such a dire and PUBLIC manner. But I didn't. I decided that my job as a parent is to teach Max how to handle situations like this one. He's going to have a lot of experiences I have no control over out in the world. Sheltering him too much won't teach him how to navigate tough situations when he leaves home.

My belief, and I don't care if anyone agrees with me or not, is that the buck always stops with the parents. How Max digests and reacts to unpleasant situations, whether he really did do something terrible or not, will largely be learned through me and Philip. It's us he comes home to. It's us he turns to at the end of the day. It doesn't matter how many hours he spends with other adults and other kids outside of home every day, it's us he comes back to and looks to for guidance. It's us he watches and listens to and learns from more than any other adult figure in his life.

I have heard so many people complain about how kids fall through the cracks at public school as though that was a fault in the system. Public school isn't a replacement for parenting. You can't just send your kid to school and expect him or her to get everything they need from their teachers. You still have to know what they're doing in class all the time, you need to talk to their teachers for checkups and you need to help them with their home work and make sure they're making good progress.

Public school is a tool. Nothing more. It's a tool for educating your child if you can't afford to send them to a private school of your choice or if you can't keep them at home to teach them yourself because you work full time or because you're not educated enough yourself to do a better job than the public school.

As parents we all make different choices for our children and if we're good parents (or trying to be) then we make those decisions based on who are kids are now rather than who we hope they will become. I don't give a shit how a parent chooses to educate their children, I think there are flaws and benefits to all the choices under the sun, but what I know is that we are more responsible for our children than anyone else.

It just came to me that it wasn't this teacher's job to shape how Max responds to bullying and it isn't for him to keep Max from becoming one. It's MY job. My job to address any backlash from such a strong verbal assault and my job to still agree with the principles being espoused. My job to assure my son that teasing doesn't always lead to suicide and that sometimes teasing leads to better understanding, that sometimes it leads to laughter, and sometimes it even leads to love. It's my job to teach Max all the shades between the black and the white of the issue and MY job to make sure he knows that making mistakes will happen and doesn't mean he's a terrible person.

Max isn't falling behind in school because I WON'T let him. Me. I talk with his teacher and I sit with him every night he has homework. A kid can't fall through the cracks if their parents are standing next to them the whole time and nudging teachers when your kid needs more help and getting outside help when they have special needs.

Max has a conscience. He has mean moments like all kids do (YES I SAID ALL KIDS HAVE MEAN MOMENTS) and he's learning to hold things back a little more; to consider before he acts more often. He's possibly taking longer than his peers because of his particular challenges, but he's getting there.

If you take total responsibility for raising your kid you also get to take total credit when your kid shines.

I want to remember this. So far raising my special needs kid has been all up hill and exhausting and I haven't been able to tell if I'm doing anything right or not. Taking Max away from that experience taught me that all my hard work to temper the outside experiences Max is having with our own unique familial style of living and thinking is paying off. He is becoming more resilient and it's such a pleasure to see.

*That was the comment Max made which launched this very strong lecture.

It's Just Language

2010-05-28T19:59:21Z

The expression "boy howdy" makes me want to punch someone.

Which is only slightly worse than my old time hated expression "golly"

Which just put this into my head:
"Golly wanna chew a pollywog?"

It always puts something awful in my head.

I hate the expression "good clean fun" or "good clean...(insert word here)" which always has a distinctively Christian taint to it to me. Or it reminds me of people's nostalgic view of "the good ol' days" when no one used swear words or made raunchy jokes or ever knew what an AK47 was...you know, back when life was golden and children never died and violence was just a twinkle in Satan's eye...

Which was never real. Our grandparents did not live the golden life. It also implies that anything non-homogeneous or colorful or edgy is DIRTY. As in BAD. As in DIRTY.

I said that twice for emphasis. So yes, I really do hate all that that expression implies. I hate the ideal it embraces. White bread and milk for dinner.

Hmm, part of my dislike for it must be because it makes me think of milk which is only good for putting into baked goods. But wholesome phlegmy milk in a tall glass going to a grown person's lips... repulses me beyond belief.

Much Later

with the book spread out mentally, changing by the second

how do I catch it?
words like starlings nesting out of reach
taunting with a quick flick of wing and gloss
disappearing into the dark cracked chimney

So it begins again. The beginning must be rewritten for strength many times. If I can be counted in words when I die I'll be counted well.

A Whole Lot Of Little Nothings

2010-05-27T18:31:39Z

I went to see my physician this week to talk to her about my meds since I can't afford a psychiatrist. As it turns out she's a much better psychiatrist than that idiot "real" psychiatrist I saw last fall was. What do I think makes a good psychiatrist?

Doesn't rush you.

Makes correlation between your physical and mental health.

Considers how different medications may be affecting your body.

Listens to what you're saying.

Takes things slowly, such as prescribing new meds or changing old ones.

Doesn't make you feel like a lowly diseased scab of a human being.

She didn't think coming off of both my medications at once was a good idea. She was considering my family history of mental health issues and thinks that in my case remaining medicated at all times at least with the antidepressant is the best thing for my health. I agree with her but told her my concerns about the weight, long term effects of taking the same meds, and my desperate desire to get the weight down. She does think that Paxil may be partly responsible for my ongoing weight gain in spite of exercise and healthier eating in the past year. Paxil is notorious for it. For Paxil to be effective I had to raise it up to 40mg (doesn't sound like much but I started at 10mg) and the more you take the worse the tendency to gain weight (unrelated to eating or exercise habits).

I'm coming off the Paxil, kids.

The brain shocks are really unpleasant but I'm already weaned back down to 10 mg and I've had enough.

You know what I just did? I just deleted one big invitation to trouble.

That reminds me, I have a post I wrote about parenting that is percolating for a few days so I can come back and make sure it doesn't catch my hair on fire. See how I'm trying not to invite trouble? I'm so impressed with myself.

Two days ago I had the best talk with Max. We actually have lots of good talks these days which is one of the reasons I am loving the age of nine on him. He told me he might want to become an art critic. Totally out of the blue. I love it when he says stuff like this. So we had a big discussion about how he critiques his classmates art and I tried to ascertain if he's being mean about it or being helpful. Apparently he is trying to give helpful comments. One girl took a suggestion of his and changed her drawing which he tells me was much improved and he complimented her on the finished results.

Sometimes nine year olds are more sophisticated than I thought they could be. Weren't we raising our fists, just yesterday, up at the atmosphere in chagrin at the immature and frustrating antics of six year olds?

No, wait, we were doing that last year at the whole eight year old phase. I was about to say that I finally see what people mean when they claim their children are just growing up in the blink of an eye. "It all goes by so fast, so hang onto every moment...(implied sigh of nostalgia)."

Are you kidding me?! Oh man, if I hung onto every minute of Max's childhood someone would be digging my grave as we speak.

But this nine year old phase is so cool. I'll bet this is all so I'll finally, FINALLY, start thinking I can handle being a parent and I'll finally relax a little and then BAM!

He'll be a teenager shouting from a car full of adolescents at fat women riding their bicycles.

I know I keep saying I'll probably stop blogging and I keep telling myself that it's time to return to the days when I kept all my crazy more contained and private in a thousand feverishly scrawled paper journals, and I keep asking myself why I now find the prospect of doing so much more difficult. It can be so difficult sometimes, leaving myself open to commentary, and there's so much it seems I shouldn't say out loud. There are all the times I've gotten myself in social hot water- so why is the thought of privately journaling so unappealing to me now?

Do I require an audience to work my thoughts out now?

Have I become a MEGALOMANIAC?

No. The simple truth is that whether or not I write on my blog I will have to write all this stuff somewhere. I have been doing it consistently for precisely 30 years. Nearly every day except for one dry spell. Often times I would write a few entries a day. All of this to keep more sane, sometimes to actually keep myself alive (hard to kill yourself when you're engaged in a perpetual self-pep-talk with pen and paper), and just to clear my head which fills up insanely fast with words and thoughts and so much clutter.

You know those ticker tapes that keep track of the stock market with a flow of minute incessant information flowing? That's my brain. Some people are made that way. It's very uncomfortable and the only relief is to empty the budget.

While I don't love always being so vulnerable, the blessing of putting all this personal journal style writing out there is that it makes it feel less like I'm talking to myself. The big cliche of the mentally ill and the constant joke is that we talk to ourselves out loud. In my case that has actually been true. Writing the blog feels normalizing. So, paying the price continues to be worth it. Feeling lonely is an occupational hazard of people like me and anything to reduce the sensation is a bonus.

That's why I do it even though about once a month I swear I'll stop soon.

I have a recipe to put on Stitch and Boots but I can't find my notes on it. So I keep trying to find the time to make it again. Very frustrating. I've been on the run all week. Working very hard to get my exercise in. Every day. It's a recipe for white bean salad with dandelion greens.

This past weekend the friend with whom I had a huge falling out last fall got in touch to give me some information she thought I might be able to use. We had a brief exchange of messages in which it was revealed that we have both forgiven each other and meant each other no ill. Now, in spite of my enjoyment in joking about my local enemies, I really had forgiven her many months ago and didn't expect to be forgiven myself. I let it go and hoped that the kind thoughts I put out there into the ether about her and her family would somehow be enough.

What I'm trying to say is that the power of forgiveness can't be underestimated and I feel so much better now knowing that the forgiveness is mutual.

Onwards shoveling soldier...

(That's just what popped into my head)

I have been suppressing more than just a parenting topic. I have also been dying to write about doing sports/exercise while on the rag*. There are about two men who read my blog though and I'm reluctant to gross them out. As much as women supposedly talk about everything with each other, this is still a pretty shady topic. I find it way more interesting than discussing chocolate. I have curiosity because I don't do Kung Fu while on the rag and it brings up many questions for me about what other women do. Not questions I need to answer for myself, just curiosity I would like to have sated about other women's experiences and thoughts.

That's all I'm going to say. For now. On that topic which most people would prefer to avoid.

Now it's really time to do some dishes and make that bean salad so I can post it on Stitch.

My hope is that tonight I can do work on book notes. (First of all I've lost the whole beginning I wrote, aside from the part I posted here, and Thank Godlington I did that! Secondly, I'm trying to work on character profiles, notes on energy use for the future, environmental questions to answer, and trying to outline the political situation. It won't exactly be a political book but these are details that, while you may not need to spell them out explicitly, inform a story from the ground up and if you don't know what structure is holding a fictional society together- readers will feel it.) That didn't need to be in parentheticals. I want to get into the heart of the writing but when I was working on it before I felt the lack of these details and not knowing the answers to a bunch of questions made it difficult to narrate actions because some character motivations were unclear.

Alright. If I don't get to write tonight I'll make time over the weekend. I'll put in some good hours. I tried doing that last weekend and ended up getting distracted by rereading Jane Doe. That story needs such an enormous rewrite** and yet I keep finding more parts of it that I LOVEm that are strong, and it confuses me to have one book almost finished in first draft form while working on another one. So why not finish Jane Doe first?

Because it is a draining difficult story to tell, that's why. That was the most intense writing I've ever done in my life. Nothing else can be going on while I do it.

The romance author Jill Shalvis (whose books I've never read) seems to write several books at once. I'm not quite sure how she does it. She mentions her frenetic writing on ADD. Why can't my mental illness make me write that productively?***

What was I saying about going and making food?

And now Pippa is using about four different meows to get my attention and breaking into her customary loud purring when I look at her. She may be out of food.

Time to tend the homestead!

*"on your PERIOD" to you gentler more goddess-y women.

**That's an understatement. Most books need several rewrites. This one hasn't had it's first overhaul though and I think that will be the biggest rewrite.

***Ah. We're into triple footnotes now. The blogs are easier to write than books so if any smart ass out there was going to point out that I am now writing 3 blogs- that's NOT the same as writing three books at once. Not at all.

Is There Medication For This?

2010-05-26T23:26:25Z

Is there a medication to prevent people from starting too many blogs? It must be a compulsion. Just two days ago I was talking about not blogging* at all and here I am, with my fashion blog all shiny new and making me really happy. This is purely for fun. Just to have a place to put all my fashion scraps and bits. I have only one post up. Want to come see?

Frocked Weekly

I know. It's on Blogger. I went back. Just for this one. Because I don't need two computer geniuses to help me run it or set it up. It will never move. I promise. It won't move because no one will ever help me move a blog again and I refuse to go through it again. If I want to put ads on Blogger, I can do it. If I want three columns, I can do that too. If it gets so huge I feel I need my own .com? I won't. C'mon, this is me we're talking about. I don't do things that get big. I'd love to have that headache on my hands.

So there it is. I love it. It's like a toy. Not heavy and dark and fretful and full of my blood. Just pins and fabric and fashion and color and texture and design and drape and things that catch my eye. Light and fluffy like cotton candy but with FLAVOR.

If you don't like all those things, don't come. That's all there is. Design philosophy and my own style picks.

*You must realize by now that I am not likely to stop blogging, right?

The Quality Of Blue

2010-05-24T06:13:12Z

There is an incredible freedom in letting go of the structures of dreams and the colors they used to be packaged in.

I almost made a sentence in which Frank Gehry and myself were featured in one single breath. It couldn't be pulled off in the end, because my night is all blue and magenta and I would have come back later and been uncomfortable.

My head is electric with little waves of shock like the way it might feel if you sawed off the top of your skull, open head surgery style, and poked it repeatedly with a sharp pencil or a live wire. Don't worry ma, it's only Paxil clawing its way out of my system.

Celia Cruz is singing "Rie Y Llora" in my headphones again, over and over. This song never fails to light me up like a Christmas tree and make me crazy-happy for a few minutes; or not happy, something less specific and more free. It's just the drums and that voice with the slurred "r"s and Celia's laughter cracking richly in the middle of the track with the whole number never missing a single beat. Not a breath not a hair not a shake of the hip is missed.

Fitting song to crown the week with.

There were other things, fringe thoughts, I never expressed but which cleared with the same air that everything else did. And now, here we are, and it's like my Grandmother's crystal after our house fire; chipped and scratched by 1200 degree heat and the manhandling of burly mustachioed men, yet still holding court with beveled cuts and curves of polished mineral reflecting the lucid desires of human beings in the form of unrepentant beverages splashing across skin, louder than diamonds and full of invisible poison lead. Cut, chipped, and laughing long after we drag ourselves off exhausted.

Exactly so.

Contemplation of body was inevitable after so much life scouring. This speech is all disjointed because I'm trying to let go of other things. I'm trying to shake it all out like crooked dice doing the samba on an obscenely garish green felt table.

Everything is the quality of blue tonight. Not sorrow, not slow tuberculosis death, not poison on a spoon full of honey. Blue like electric energy that filters out the rude oranges and the sickly greens; blue like a match that strikes across shoes bursting into a fuchsia flare with a heart of cobalt. Blue the way the light falls into watery dreams where you are drowning until suddenly you're breathing into the dark dark ocean and everything is midnight and cold.

My ankles both hurt. An occupational hazard of being fat and an unacceptable weakness as it prevents further movement which is the only way to change the whole balance of physical power. Sometimes it feels as though my ankles are breaking and what then? Do I crawl the rest of the way down to hell? One imagines the devil lifting a hand.

The crushing weight of spirit, as it rises like rain steaming from the sudden break of sun through the clouds, is released when the rest of the dream is broken open like a snow globe shattered on the hot pavement of summer to drain away into dark gummed gutters. Too many metaphors for one night, one breath, one prison break. I swear I can't help it any more. This is the floodgate wide open and change inviting the course of blood to blue itself.

What was impossible on Monday has become the song of Sunday. I am writing as I go now. Slinking down the waterway with no slicker, no boots, just a feeling that the point of no return has become a vast complicated joke and that we have returned already so many times we just don't recognize it any more. The roses are choking out the enormous scarlet "X" that screams out the beginning of the whole story.

San Francisco. Grey towers, neon "Jesus is the light of the world" sign flickering off at dawn, dusty doorstop human beings with paper bags for feet, and the pen working frantically where a typewriter or a computer might have done more delicate damage; the pen filled with the fluid dreams of young married life and gritty windows, falling ceilings and the cold thick crust of a fridge from 1967. So many hours spent dreaming of owning a home, of settling and planting something solid, so many real estate papers read and careful plans laid.

Full circle is the the quality of blue. When you've covered pink and puce until you come round completely all over again into the blue. Always back to blue like the color of an infant's first breath.

Roots that rot and a trail of trees shed behind me like ghost towns full of apples and pears. Love is like that. Life is like that. We built a tower of intentions from old brittle redwood and shake shingles until we reached the pinnacle which at the time was merely our every day stretching out to infinity with kindness and compassion until suddenly it turned hostile and a cannibalistic frenzy ate us from the inside out of our life.

Ghost towns full of apples and pears and human skeletons.

Some people get to keep the tower of life they built from magpie scraps and hints of passion and talents. Others get a perpetual personal Armageddon of devastation, slow and cruelly intentional. What do you have?

What have I got?

I stopped counting or calculating or coloring or stapling skin back onto bones this week. This week of clearing sight and cleaning vision brought on by a chemical peel to the eyes and the brain.

We are back where we began, seventeen years ago.

Except that we are deeper now and we are more now. We are three instead of two. We have crossed fjords and cut ourselves on our own ambitions. Stripped of that dewy persistence and the belief that what we're reaching for is better than what we have, I see it all differently now. I see more in the shadows where I used to see only dust. There is a velvet chocolate absorption of sound that comes with age and experience.

With a spirit taking off again, finding flight for the first time in years, the body will inevitably follow. No matter how slowly, how painfully, the body will always follow the spirit as long as there is breath left in the lungs and the capillaries.

What was all that dreaming for if it only brought us back to the beginning? Why all the work, the stretching past our comfort with the certainty that we'd be good for it, the promotion of our dreams? Why spend our lives building an empire so fragile that the slightest change in atmosphere was capable of crushing our house of cards to pulp? Why bother? Why try at all? What was the point? All the tears shed for nothing seem so wasted in light of present degradation.

The point isn't the acquisition of anything at all. The point is to try for growth, to try for something more, to work for something larger than your 700 square foot apartment in San Francisco and to find the earth under our nails in time to understand our own place on this crusty planet. The point isn't to have and hold assets but to build assets that no bank can ever take away. Assets in the coloration of your spirit, the strength of your love for your family, and the expression of your core beliefs which might never have blossomed without experience gone seedy or without falling down deeper than you ever knew you could with all the entrails of your life spreading out around you like scarlet Crepe de Chine; like lush jungle maiden-hair.

We built strong bridges to forty. The river wound higher and rushed faster than we could have built against. This is the circuity of life at its most elemental. We started here and we come back again because there is something to see, something to learn, something to surmount. We can fight it, but it will keep coming until we submit.

There lies the secret of sight.

You have to drown in order to grow water lungs.

The walls around me shift constantly, they may be different in months, or in a year. They may be different every single year until I die. There must be some grain of peace in that, some expression that needs tasting, touching, and releasing into the wild. Because it is my constant companion now. The transient nature of my walls. White and stark like the hopeless face of a mime inviting violence to itself.

I remember the resinous woods of my youth and I reach for them this week, the tart wild berries we picked in the rain and the tents we pitched in the sharp wet forest. I left my richness there, snug in the dark hollow knot of a fir as tall as god and as reluctant to shed secrets as a shy virgin. Perhaps you'll find it when reaching into the rot and the delicate weakness of old forest trunks.

San Francisco and then earlier to the Oregon wilderness. It's eerily like my life flashing before my eyes. A tallying of unrighteous breathing and lost children escaped from my lead heart.

The quality of blue is permeating the skin of memory.

The only grace left is in the resting of a hand across a cold sheet like a swan about to skid across the surface of the lake up into a blue atmosphere with wings arched and stretched by turns in a sweeping streaking architecture of motion designed to close distances without sound.

I'll take that last grace just as I'll happily dive into the gorgeous quality of blue that has atrophied in my lungs and taught me to breath without air so that I can follow this light through the artificial stage of dreams into the heat and hell of living.

No More Band-aids: Part Two

2010-05-23T17:13:29Z

If you have not already read Part One, Here it is:
No More Band-aids: Part One

You have to recognize a problem in order to fix it.

Our problem is that we pay 40% of our gross income towards housing. We should be paying about 25% of our gross income towards housing.

Our problem is that in order to afford to be comfortable we shouldn't really be paying more than $1000 per month on housing.

We pay close to $1600 a month for our mortgage.

That's a big problem. I can sew all night long and get a ton of Etsy sales but it won't make up the difference and to do that much extra work on top of my nearly full time headline editing job is not going to make my life better. Working harder to pay for something I can't afford isn't a good solution.

That's like a Walmart employee trying to finance a Porche.

The question we should all know the answer to in our life is this: What Are My Priorities?

Is owning a house more important than spending quality time with my family? Is working a second job worth the extra few dollars I'll make? Will it ever be enough?

This week, after a lot of effort trying to come up with answers that avoided the main problem, I finally faced it head on and the truth is this:

My priorities are simple enough:

Paying my bills.
Spending quality time with my family.
Writing books.

When it comes down to it, having a garden is not the most important thing in my life. Having chickens is not as important to me as having more time to spend with my kid. Spending time with my kid and not always having most of my brain engaged in the stressful question of how we'll survive...is something my kid deserves. I can't even tell you when was the last time I hung out with Max and wasn't preoccupied the whole time with my enormous stress.

People keep telling me to enjoy my life in spite of money troubles because there will always be money to worry about. I find this advice inadequate and wrong. For people living mostly within their means this may be true. When you are living way out of your means it is useless advice. There is absolutely no off-button for stress when you can't even afford the basics and your whole life of being 3 years behind in paying taxes stretches out in front of you full of penalties and accruing interest.

It is also stupid (I'm sorry) to suggest to a person with clinical anxiety to simply enjoy life in spite of it's stresses. Not everyone can know when they're dispensing advice to someone who has clinical levels of stress, but anyone who knows me knows I have GAD and such advice borders on mean or willful ignorance. Or a disbelief that mental illness is something out of one's control. All of which are unhelpful and sometimes hurtful.

Solid solutions are much easier to devise once you are honest about the problem you are facing as well as what your true priorities are.

When I said my priorities out loud to myself everything became a lot simpler. Once I stripped away my stubborn wish not to have to start over or change direction, once I let go of my obstinate hope that somehow our prospects will change soon and this house will not be the big problem, everything became clear.

There is one option left for us as far as staying in this house is concerned. There is a government program to help people like us called Home Affordable Modification. Our bank is participating in this program which means that we can apply. Wells Fargo is notorious, however, for being difficult to work with. We already know this from trying to work with them prior to going bankrupt. I did some reading and it seems that it takes anywhere between 3 months to 17 months to negotiate a modification with them, about a truckload of paperwork, and the awesome possibility that they will refuse your request after all that hoop jumping.

We spent the better part of last year dealing with truckloads of paperwork, horrible horrible tallying of debts and learning the legal side of bankruptcy hoping that at the end of it all we would be deeply relieved and be able to stay in our house and live happily ever after with crushed credit and the shame of financial failure emblazoned on our foreheads. The thought of going through a similarly scouring paper-heavy shaming process sounds a lot like my idea of hell on earth. I would rather blow up a thousand helium balloons and have to sit in the middle of them while watching a horrible mime MIMING than go through this.

Philip is going to take on the paperwork.

A plan has been laid out. I will not share the explicit details here. It is not my desire that anyone else chime in on how we should solve our problem. Our bankruptcy lawyer has been called and hopefully tomorrow we'll have an answer we need in order to completely chart our course with the least amount of damage.

What it boils down to is that if the bank won't negotiate our loan, or if they won't bring the price down to where we can actually afford it, we will walk from the house and rent something we can afford.

This week I let go of all the things I used to think were important enough to fight for. This week I looked at the green elephant in the room. I asked myself what is really important and I answered with complete clarity. I love this house but not enough for it to swallow me whole and steal from my son all my attention and steal from me what little writing ambition I have left.

To be honest, I really enjoyed imagining being free of home ownership; imagining a future in which I'm not working 70 hours a week. The thought of living a life I can actually afford made me about a hundred pounds lighter than I was when I was avoiding the obvious.

Maybe it wouldn't be so horrible to rent an apartment. Maybe we could rent one of the old ones downtown. If we paid between $700 and $1000 for rent, with all the responsibilities and costs inherent in home ownership lifted from our shoulders we would not only be able to afford to save every month to pay our taxes, we could save to take a family vacation. We might actually be able to afford some health insurance for Max. We'd be able to keep our pets up to date on their vet visits. We could all get dentistry done every once in a while to stave off the seemingly inevitable tooth loss which Oregonians suffer from at nearly all income levels, but most notably ours.*

So the future is just as uncertain as it's always been for us. Settling in, putting down roots, seeing fruit trees mature are all nice things but the reality is that it most likely isn't going to be our story.

In my desire to strip my life down to only the important things I have considered a lot of other details too. Blogging and being online a lot is an emotional drain. Sometimes is buoys me up with support from people here. Chatting with old friends on Facebook I otherwise wouldn't be in touch with can be great at times and at others I think that people drift for a reason and none of us were important enough to each other to keep in touch with when it wasn't so easy which makes our contact now fairly meaningless and shallow. Often I am irritated by so much contact with people. I put myself out there and just as often as I'm encouraged and uplifted I'm nitpicked and criticized which is wearing. So I also imagined a life with very little online presence. A life in which I cultivate the positive relationships I have in my every day life and cut off constant access to me by people I don't want in my life who inevitably find their way to me on Facebook.

Simplifying.

I don't know if I'll keep blogging into infinity or not. If I no longer have a garden and chickens and a house I may not care to be building Stitch and Boots, and anyway, any time you present informational content someone out there is eager to correct and to argue and make you wrong. I don't know that I want to have that relationship with human beings. Perhaps the time is coming to journal privately again. Pose my questions and my philosophical explorations to myself without allowing others to dive in and take me literally and constantly feel like they need to solve my every problem and answer my every question which is often simply part of my mental and emotional journey and not a plea for help or interference. The time may be coming to let go of all the things that serve to complicate my hours. I don't know. I've come to the point of quitting many times and then not had the guts to do it.

As soon as I can, I will close down the Etsy shop too. As soon as my trip to New York has been tied up and squared away. I appreciate all the support I've gotten in sales, because it's been helpful, but the minute I am able to I will shut down shop and only sew for myself because it isn't my dream to sew for people and all it is is another job that takes up all my time and doesn't pay the bills adequately enough.

I used to think owning a home was the pinnacle of life fulfillment. Back when I got to stay home with my kid and didn't have to work to help pay the mortgage and I actually had time to spend enjoying my garden and my kitchen and making curtains for the windows and cleaning and cutting flowers for my dining room table it felt like the best thing in the world. I haven't lived that life for four years now and I am finally facing the probability that I will never have that life again.

I want to be able to afford paying my bills again so that when I'm done working my hours for pay I can stop thinking about working for pay and enjoy quality time with my family. I miss playing with Max. I miss having undivided attention to share with him. I see him growing and maturing and for the last four years I have had the constant preoccupation of work and how to make enough money. Four years of my kid's life wasted on incessant and painful stress. Because I was trying to live a life that I am no longer meant to be living. It isn't just about me and my kid, it's about all of us as a family. We love our tight little group of three but how often do we get to spend time together where we completely let go of all our other concerns? We should be doing something fun together (like romp in the woods) every single weekend. I want that!

And finally, this past summer I found my way into the writing I always believed I was meant to do but which had previously eluded my efforts my whole life. I know that now is the time for me to write books. For some writers the time comes early and for others it doesn't come until middle age. More than any other writing I need to be writing books.

That's what I want.

So if any of you are in similar situations, I have one piece of advice for you:

Ask yourself what your 3 top priorities are.

When you have honestly answered that question you will be able to come up with appropriate solutions. And by appropriate I don't mean easy. I mean that the chaff will blow away and a path will present itself. Your answer for yourself might be much different than mine, and that's how it should be. I can't tell you what decisions to make or how to fix your biggest problems. I can only tell you that you can't come up with the right solution if you don't even recognize the real problem and are willing to address it directly.

If you cut your artery on life you'll find that band-aids are inadequate and will cause you to bleed out.

*Oregonians, on the whole, don't seem to care about their teeth much. While rich people here are largely dentured, the same income levels in California seem to keep more of their original teeth. I was beginning to feel that losing my teeth, always a big concern of mine, was going to happen sooner than later. I really desperately want to be able to afford some dental work.

No More Band-aids: Part One

2010-05-23T14:40:09Z

The end of the week is here and closes with a lot to consider. In asking the question "What is it we're doing wrong?!" some truths were faced this week. Truths I actually already knew but didn't know how to deal with. A very old friend of mine was making some suggestions in response to my complaint that I don't have enough time to sleep because I work 35 hours a week, then I have to do household stuff, and then I sew, and then I write. I was complaining about not having time to spend with my kid. I got really annoyed when she started making suggestions because they all represented tiny little band-aids on a much greater problem that seemed impossible to solve.

I told her that I have choices and I'm making the choice I think is the better of the two but neither are acceptable to me. I then listened to myself. All my friends and kind supporters in my life are always trying to come up with similar solutions to things like the fact that I can't pay my taxes or that I can't find time to write or to my problem of getting psychological help when I most need it. I frequently bite the people trying to help because no one is addressing the bigger issues. Including myself.

Often times in life we get into a situation that we think we can handle, we make a chain of choices that leads us down a difficult road, and once we've gone so far into the woods that we get scared and start to understand just how lost we are and just how wet the matches in our pockets have become, it feels too late to undo the situation. We think we can't get back to the starting gate so instead of facing the fact that we're lost in the forest, we start coming up with solutions that feel more doable. Maybe we decide that we'll somehow make it in the woods without fire, we'll feast on salmonberries like the bears do and we'll eventually stumble onto a stream and find drinkable water.

Unless you retrace your steps and attempt to undo your commitment to this long road that got swallowed up in darkness and trees, you won't fix anything by eating salmonberries. You'll survive, maybe, but you won't accomplish the things you intended to, you may never find your way back unless you intentionally retrace your way.

That's how I feel. I don't make enough money and Philip and I keep scrambling for more ways to make a few extra dollars to stave off further ruination. The question has always been "How do we make more money?" and then "How can we spend less money so we can get by?" and this is fine if we are only coming a little short all the time.

The truth is, and always has been, that we can't afford our mortgage. We never would have purposely put ourselves in this position. Getting the loan on this house, at the rate we got, was supposed to be temporary. It was part of a larger plan that fell apart when the bank gave us $20,000 less than we had originally gotten approved for when we bought this house by taking equity out of our other house. For our plan to work, we had to be able to sell the other house, and to do that we needed $20,000 to cover two mortgages for several months while we put the other house on the market.

Don't pick this situation to death. Don't get lost in the details. The details are no one's business and they're past now. I'm only giving the sketch because it illustrates the moment we made a choice, a poor choice, that has overshadowed our entire life for the past two years.

When we found out that we weren't getting the funds we needed to make our plan work, we still went forward. We were already packed. We were already committed to moving into the new house. Our mortgage officer failed to tell us that we weren't getting the money we needed when the bank changed their mind, so there we were on the title signing day with the choice to not sign the papers, to walk away from the house we wanted to live in, to unpack and resettle in the house that depressed me...or to sign the papers and hope that we could still sell the other house, more quickly than we originally planned.

We had only a few minutes to make the decision.* We chose to take our chances.

Right there. That's the moment we made a wrong turn. We have both agreed that in spite of everything that has happened because of our decision, we don't regret it. Not regretting something doesn't mean you don't pay for it and find payment painful.

Right there is where we took on something too big in the hopes that we would turn it around and that we could sell the old house in spite of a quickly crashing housing market. Right there is where we made a choice that has landed us in PERPETUAL SOUP.

As you all know, we couldn't sell the house. We spent $20,000 trying to afford having a house on our hands we couldn't sell, double mortgage, and then even when we rented it out we couldn't ask for enough to cover our expenses. I would like to point out that my understanding of what we needed from the bank to pull off our plan could not have been more spot on! That $20,000 we didn't get ended up being the $20,000 that sent us into bankruptcy.

So here we are. I know how we got here and we can sit around asking ourselves how we can make enough to afford this house and this mortgage all we want but the truth is just as blaring today as it was the day we signed the title for it. We can't afford this house. We always knew we couldn't afford this unless we could sell the other house, put more into the equity and refinance. None of which panned out.

What I realized this week is that we're struggling and fighting and slowly, painfully, sinking more deeply into ruin than I thought possible after having gone bankrupt because we are paying way too much money for our housing. Everything would be solved if we rented an apartment or a small house for under $1000. I've been looking at rental prices and looking at how much we're short every month of what we need to be putting aside towards taxes and shoes and clothing and the solution is so breathtakingly obvious and my stubborn desire to never move again, to not lose yet another house I love, to not have to start all over again with a new place a new garden...

or worse yet...no garden at all.

These places we can afford to live in are most of them very depressing. So I kept telling myself "NO!" I refuse to give up and live in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard and give up my hens and my sewing room and my freedom to paint the walls whatever color I want.

Then, after being so annoyed with my friend, I realized that I was annoyed because I know that our situation is untenable. We spend all our time, all hours of the day, wondering how we're going to make it work when the truth is that we never will. Reality is that I already work too many hours trying to make things work. I have this yard, yes, but no time to spend in it. I have this house, sure, but no way to fix things when they break. I have no time to clean it or enjoy it.

My kid has reached this amazing age, this wonderful place in his life, and I want to spend time enjoying that with him. I have no time because every day when I'm done working, I go do dishes and cook food, and then it's either Kung Fu time or it's time for me to write or sew. Sewing for money or writing to keep alive what little fragment of hope and dream I have left for myself.

Something has to give. But what?

The house. We can't afford our house. But we've already gone bankrupt and no bank will let us refinance. We can't just walk and go rent because we have NO MONEY saved. It all seems so impossible. But what I learned is that sometimes you have to let go of everything you think is important to find the answer and to understand how it will all work.

This is already a long post. I'm going to write the rest in the next post. It'll go up today too but then you can bite off half the story if you want. Digest and then get to the rest.

No More Band-aids: Part Two

*I just know someone is dying to nitpick me to death on the details here even though I've asked them not to: technically speaking you have three days once you sign the title papers to change your mind and call the whole thing off. So TECHNICALLY we still could have pulled out. Why are people so annoying with their need for 100% specificity? It doesn't change our perception of the need to make a quick decision and our commitment to moving away from a house that was depressing us.