typewriter

It's time to get back on the bus. I go back to work tomorrow, but only for an hour and a half a day. Instead of looking at it as a black hole in the middle of my sunny summer days, I've decided to re-imagine it as an incentive to keep a sensible schedule. In other words, I can't stay up all night if I've got to get up and go to work. Even if it is only for an hour and a half. Especially if it is only an hour and a half! And then because I am yoked to this strange schedule, I plan to exploit the trace element of discipline involved to build a writing schedule around it. I have also told the kids that I when I get back home, around 12:30, I want to have two hours of electronics-free living. From 12:30 to 2:30, we can eat lunch, read, clean, exercise, study, or work on projects. What we cannot do is sit on the computer, growing ever larger asses, talk on the phone, play video games on the phone, send text messages, play on Jinx's new XBOX (that he bought himself with his own savings), or anything else of that nature, with the possible exception of digital photography. (What do you think? Should shooting pictures or videos with an electronic camera be an exception to my no-electronics edict?) I will write during that time on paper, as the ancients did, avoiding the temptations of the machine.

Jinx: Funny, I don't really think of Japan or China as being Asian countries.

I am unhappy, yet I am quietly happy. The federal government is taking money out of my bank account, which they have every right to do, because I still haven't paid off all my student loans. But it throws what little balance I have achieved into a precarious state. Disaster looms. If the whole spun-sugar cage collapses under its own weight, what will I do then? Not sure. Hard to say, really. But I've got a little side project--a little book project, a self-publishing thing, personal--and when I think about it, nothing can hurt me for long. It's like I'm humming on the inside. If I had known self-publishing could make me this happy, I would have stopped looking down my nose at it years ago.

We lost John Updike today (actually, yesterday; it is four o'clock in the morning as I write this). It caught me by surprise; apparently I thought he was going to live forever. Yes, he was seventy-six, but he had that long, lean look that some men manage to carry effortlessly into their eighties and nineties. I came to Updike late, for reasons that are too stupid and fatuous to relate now, but I'm so glad I found him. He was a great writer and there is a lot left for me to read. For that I'm grateful, but I'm still sorry to see him go.

John Updike

I spend too much of my time trying to avoid things, people, and places that make me feel uncomfortable or distressed. I'm not good at shrugging things off. I am the elephant who cannot forget certain memories; memories tucked deeply into the folds of my cerebellum. But I don't know what to do about it. Time heals all wounds, or so I've heard, and I think it's generally true. But what do I do until then--until the day it doesn't hurt anymore? Should I write about these things, on the theory that it's better to draw out bad blood that to let it fester? Or should I keep trying to distract myself with British comedies and endless games of Bejeweled 2?

Criminy is shut up tight in her room and the other two are with their father tonight, which means I am essentially alone and I'm definitely feeling it. It is the natural order of things to be alone, I guess, but it feels so unnatural to me. I don't think the kids wanted to leave me, either; someday, they won't have to. But by then they'll be more grown up and maybe they won't want anything to do with me. I hope not.

Yesterday I spent time with my own mother. The kids and Duff were there, too. We ate black-eyed peas with rice and cold ham, plus scrambled eggs with sausage that I added to make sure everyone got enough to eat. It may sound like an odd combination but it all went down pleasantly enough, especially with a little fresh salsa to tie everything together. (Except the ham.) Mom had also threatened to make sauerkraut, but somehow we avoided that fate. After dinner we set up Mom's new DVD player (made by Philips--I got it at Costco for $40; I still remember buying my first VCR for $250-$300) and watched the movie I got her, which she had been wanting to see for some time: The Bucket List. Needless to say, sap that I am, I cried buckets.

Today we drove down to the Monterey Aquarium. Criminy had won tickets on the radio. We took Rojo and Sean with us, since Bambi had to work. It's a wonderful place to visit but I just wasn't into it at all. It's not as much fun now that the kids are big and they don't need me to read all the little signs to them anymore.

I resolve to Try Harder and Make Fewer Excuses for my non-achievement,
particularly in these three areas:

1) writing
2) teaching (that is, homeschooling Jinx, of course, and putting in
some real effort there, but also doing more to prep the girls for high
school and college and working and falling in love and becoming
self-sufficient, socially adept, politically aware, versed in the arts
and sciences, and productive members of society)
3) my family's health and well-being

The rest can wait. Let 2009 be good to us all.

The girls brought home their school newspaper the other day. They wanted to show me all the errors they caught (some of which were not errors, though there were plenty to go around). One they missed caught my attention particularly. The words "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" were attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. Well, Teddy might well have said it--hell, I've said it myself--but the speech properly belongs to William Shakespeare's Malvolio, he of the yellow stockings, who appears in Twelfth Night. I actually took the kids to see this play a couple of months ago, but apparently they are not yet memorizing the lines. Twelfth Night is a great favorite of mine.

It's the last weekend before the election. This feels like the most crucial election in my lifetime. Since Obama's campaign seems safe--certainly here in California, at least--my attention is almost entirely focused on the No on 8 campaign. I donated money, which I've never done before for a proposition cause, and tomorrow I'm going to a rally and taking everybody I can round up.

As far as Prop. 8 goes, here's the thing: We may lose the battle, but we won't lose this war. I hope we don't lose, of course, but even if we do, it's not over. All you carpetbagging Mormons with your fistfuls of cash, do you hear me?

I forwarded an e-mail to a friend about how the Yes on 8 people were trying to blackmail corporate donors to the No on 8 campaign. She wrote back, "It is weird that people who are acting from 'religious principles' could be so unethical."  But of course, it is not weird at all. Because the people who congratulate themselves on their moral superiority aren't keeping busy questioning their own motives. Let's see now--on the one hand, we've got the institution that brought us the Spanish Inquisition and, more recently, became synonymous with clergy sexual abuse. Then we've got the people most closely associated in people's minds with bigamous marriage between girl children and old men. These guys feel perfectly justified in coming here and preaching to us about "protecting" the family. And I'm thinking, I need to protect my family from the likes of you!

Yeah. So anyway, Monday is my birthday, and Tuesday is the election, and I dearly hope I don't spend Wednesday the same way I did the day after the last presidential election, viz., sobbing in the shower and dressing entirely in black. I do want to be crying, but crying with happiness this time, do you hear? Happiness and pride.

I should be reading these people. What am I afraid of? Big books? Big ideas? I must become more single-minded. I must clear my plate. I should be leaning into my goal continuously. This past week, this whole week, I've been tired. Either I'm tired, or I'm driving, or both. (Which is a condition I dread.) But there are simple ways to be less tired: 1) sleep more, 2) eat less, and 3) move. Like now, for instance; I could be sleeping instead of tapping this into my phone one painstaking letter at a time. What next? Will I be blinking the letters in Morse code, like the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?