Rachael

Happy Writing Thought for the Day:

“The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.” Natalie Goldberg

Psst! Don’t tell anyone, though.

I’ve tried so hard, at various times in my life to be the dressed-in-black angst-ridden writer, and no one’s ever bought it. I would form my face into a mask of bleak despair and then laugh on accident. The only thing I got right was the smoking, oh lordy, was I good at that, but no one ever bought that either. I can’t count the number of times people said, “You just don’t look like a smoker.” I wanted to stamp my feet and yell, “Oh, yes, I do!” but I didn’t really know what they meant.

I suppose I don’t look like a writer, either, not the kind Hollywood (and Dave Eggers) promotes, but maybe Natalie Goldberg would recognize me?

Today I’m going to be a world-loving writer. Yep. Big plans for the day.

Backstory: My car has had a shimmy for a while. Maybe a year or so. A bad shimmy at certain speeds, and it recently got MUCH worse, making it really difficult to drive between the speeds of 55 and 65. This blew, because Bay Area traffic usually traps you right in the 60mph range. I got used to the cheek-shaking judder and apologized to shocked friends and family. “Yep, I need to get the alignment checked.” But I never felt like I had the extra money. I wanted to get it done last week, but Mom was coming in to town, and I knew we’d be driving a hell of a lot. I didn’t want to take the chance of getting my car caught in a mechanic’s shop. I put it off until Monday, when I took it to the tire place.

“I need an alignment.”
“Okay. When was the last time you bought tires?”
“Those are the ones that came with the car, but the tread looks okay.”
“You get them rotated?”
Silence.
“Let’s go look.”
We walk.
“See? The tread’s just fine.”
“Uh-huh.” He kneels, looks, turns the wheel so I can see the inside tread.

There is none. At all. I’ve been running on two-inch wide strips of the metal fibers that lace under the tread – NO TREAD AT ALL – on the inside of ALL four tires.

Holy crap. My knees got a little wobbly as I realized how lucky I had been – my mind flashed on driving up the mountains to Yosemite last month, driving my sisters to the City, driving my mother to Stanford last week!

So, after I recovered, I bought four new tires and an alignment, and my car drives like the sports car she is now. Lord.

To celebrate, I’m driving down the coast today with the destination of Duarte’s, the home of the best olallieberry pie in the universe. Bethany took me there last year, and I want to recreate the drive today. I’m taking the laptop, and I plan to do some writing over some coffee. I might even hit the yarn shop in Half-Moon Bay. It’s overcast today, but sometimes that’s the best way to drive with the top down. In Greta’s honor, I’ll wear sunglasses (I’ll have to find a pair, first).

Here’s a photo of me and Bethy on her birthday earlier this year, Christy took it. I love this picture. We were on our way to the Mystery Spot and we were soooo goofy all day. That’s what life’s about, huh? Enjoy your day and be a little goofy. But rotate your tires, okay?

You know what’s nice about working days? I’ll tell ya. Most of you just probably take this for granted, but it’s AMAZING.

Let me run it down for you:
*When you lie down at night, you’re tired. I don’t know why this is so, but I spent four years working midnights running on adrenaline and coffee. I always had to trick my body into sleeping. I never felt tired, not even after being up for thirty hours. Stupid and slow, yes; tired, no.
*When you wake up, even on a day off (like today), it’s still relatively early. It’s morning, in other words. This is revolutionary.
*No more TylenolPM! I kept those folks in business. I’ve read they’re actually firing the CEO because of the lost revenue now that Rachael isn’t medicating.
*Kitties cuddle with you more.
*Best of all, I have seven nights a week to play with. This means at least three or four can be spent AT HOME, my favorite place to be. But I can call my sister Christy and say, “Hey, wanna get a beer after work?” Before, this led to snorts and guffaws, although it’s amazing how many people will actually get a beer with you at seven in the morning. Okay. One did. But that’s kind of amazing, innit?

So Christy and I grabbed a beer (actually two, but neither of us finished the second) and sat at a groovy bar down the street from both my work and her house. We talked and laughed and it was AWESOME. I felt like a grownup, but a cool grownup. I’m thirty-one, it’s time that I feel that way occasionally, I guess. We were pestered by a very drunk man who acted as the Reason You Don’t Ever Want to Make Drinking Too Habitual. The poster-boy for embarrassment. Poor thing. But he was REALLY annoying. If he had yelled, “Woo-woo, ladies, overrrr herrrre” one more time I would have…. Well, I don’t know what I would have. But I would have found out.

So: Working days is nice. Appreciate your night sleep. There are plenty of people who aren’t getting any of it – working nights so you can be safe (okay, also so they get the paycheck. But still). I used to hate getting the whiny calls from people who moaned, “That dog is barking so loudly, I just can’t sleeeepppp. And I have to work in the morning…… People just don’t understand…. This is so hard on me….. I need my sleep at night….. Please make it stop…..” I had no problem sending an officer out to assist with the problem – barking dogs while you’re sleeping are certainly annoying. But don’t whinge to the person whose eyes have been bloodshot for what feels like years. She’d like to sleep, too, but has to wait until daylight hours while the gardeners are leaf-blowing, while CalTrans is resealing the road in front, and while the kids next door thump bass from their cars. She can’t call anyone to shut them up.

Whomp! I step off a sudden (and very low) soapbox that I didn’t mean to get on. I bow. Back to your regularly scheduled writing.

My sister has borrowed my camera for photos of creeks (she’s working on an environmental planning Masters at Berkeley), so no photos of the devastation that is Sam, the Mission Falls baby sweater. I’ll get a snap later, before I rip it out for the second damn time. And I’m not starting it again, either. (BUT – I love that yarn so much that I’m gonna make me (yet another) ChicKami with it when I get a minute. Maybe after the holidays.)

Instead, I’ve started an interesting sweater that I’ll document as it goes along. Interesting psuedo-cable techniques – those twisted stitches that make teeny-tiny leetle cables. Very fun.

Oh, and check the Squib’s new very cool Interweave Blog out! (and my knit-along’s listed on it, so I feel VERY special).

And there are rumors of finished Wave-Alongs – here’s a snap of Sara’s green one (how do I love thee, Cascade Indulgence, let me count all the frikken ways) which is done, just not photographed. She said it’s a leetle too long, though, at about six feet. That ROCKS!

Marcia’s done, too – go bug her for a photo. She’s also an Indulgent gal. Yum.

Writing the morning pages have been a slog lately. It’s all a state of mind, I know. Every time I do them I discover something, a little nugget of truth that I didn’t know before. Sometimes it’s a pretty big nugget. But I still whine about it. I haven’t yet arrived at the place where I do it without thinking, like breathing – make the tea and pick up the pen before the brain switches on. I’m sooo glad that I have a virtual family of people doing it with me, some probably at the very same minute or I just wouldn’t do it. There’s a lot to be said for accountability.

Reading The Vine of Desire, by Chitra Divakaruni. It’s the second of two books about two cousins raised as sisters, and I adore being inside her pages. I’ve seen her read several times, and she reads as she writes, beautifully paced, with full feeling. In the novel, Anju is thinking about being a writer. Last night I read this:

One day she sits by herself at the edge of the quad, watching. A boy in a punk haircut with a razor blade hanging from his earlobe, whizzing past on a skateboard, a young woman in slacks and a brown veil that covers her hair, an older man who carries a cat under his arm and speaks urgently and continuously to himself, an Asian couple, hands waving as they argue with energy in their own language. Watching them she sometimes forgets to breathe. That’s how much she wants to glean their interiors—what they do when alone, where they are afraid to go in their sleep. She is convinced their lives are more interesting than her own. But perhaps all who hope to be writers must believe this? She holds them in her mind like Rubik’s Cubes, turning them over to see how they are put together. She imagines their problems in jewel colors, nothing like her own fatiguing banal troubles. In a notebook that is filling up fast, she writes to her father, “I love the problems of strangers because I am not responsible for solving them.” (p.124)

Isn’t that marvelous? That’s what I LOVE about my walks in my neighborhood. I walk in the early evening, or now, in the early morning, and lights are on inside the houses, lives spilling out along with voices and children’s toys. I am so drawn to stare – to be a voyeur in not a creepy sense (well, it might be a little creepy, I guess), but in a vastly interested sense. I have to know what they do, what they think, what they’re going to do next. If I had Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility I would stand in front of houses for hours on end. Totally. As it is, I’m trying to look like a normal person, not like a crazy writer (and there’s SUCH a fine line, isn’t there?), so I glance, walk, look up at the trees, and steal one more glance. On to the next house. This is the perfect time of year, too. People take more pride during the holiday months in the interior of their homes – they like to keep the curtains open to show off lights and trees. In February everyone’s grumpy and sealed up tight.

And like Anju, I DO feel like their lives are much more interesting. They have dinner with stunning people from all over the world – they have wine cellars – they travel to places like Afghanistan – they wear only virgin cotton – they can do the Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle with ease – they make their own bagels – they can paint using their toes. And their problems ARE interesting because I’m only peripheral to them. Just passin’ by.

Okay, now I can’t wait for my walk. Walking and writing longhand again. Who knew? And here’s a little Monday fun – my good friend Winter gazing raptly at me. Or maybe he’s just perplexed. Who IS that strange woman with the camera?

I was able to take yesterday off, giving myself a lovely four day weekend. Pretty soon, a coworker will be going on maternity making this impossible, so I grabbed at the chance. And it was SO nice. I couldn’t really think of how Mom and I should spend the time right before her train left, so I thought we’d have a picnic. We grabbed some sandwiches, and I drove us over to a walking trail on Bayfarm Island. I thought it would be nice, but windy and cold like it always is.

It wasn’t. Where we sat at a picnic table we had the perfect view of San Francisco, Alameda, and the South Bay. I’m talking postcard, bridges and sailboats and all. And it was almost too sunny and warm – we had to shed our sweaters. We walked after lunch and watched the squirrels and egrets and pelicans (and the really rich people in their glass houses – I like my glass house better). We walked so far I got a little worried on the walk back that we wouldn’t make it to the train on time.

Then again, that would have been okay. It was SUCH a nice visit.

So today, back to work. I would say back to the real world, but I just realized I don’t feel that way. My real world is right here, where I’m sitting right now. Adah on her chair, Digit out roaming, the secret project lying on the couch so close to being finished that I can put it aside and start work on the not-secret baby project for the friend of a friend. Can’t wait to get my mitts in that Mission Falls cotton – it’s been all wool all the time, and I need a break. A little, tiny, cabled break, yowza!

You gotta love a Pioneer

Melissa said something the other day that just rocked my world in a big way. For at least seven years, I’ve struggled to think of writing as getting the clay on the wheel. Once that clay is on there, once you’ve glopped it, and centered it, and pushed and pulled it, only THEN can you start spinning, start making it into something. It’s a good writing analogy. It’s fine.

But I’ve also thought: heck, I wasn’t very good at throwing pots. Whenever I did, the clay would tip and slant and slide right into a whumping lumpen blob that wasn’t even ashtray-salvageable. So in the back of my mind, I’d always had a problem with the clay idea.

Now she’s made it evident to me the analogy I’ve been looking for. In her October 8th post (and I just looked it up, and hell, I’M mentioned in the same paragraph), she writes “It’s not about lining up goblins to act as quality control managers at the gate and only permitting the best stuff to come through, it’s about letting it flow. The refining comes later. At this point we’re just shearing the sheep and gathering the fleece.”

Shearing the sheep and gathering the fleece. That’s IT! That’s what I’ve been doing for the last year with this book-project. Ain’t no clay about it – fiber is what I understand. Only after I get all that fleece carded and spun will I be able to knit it into something. I’ve been blocked lately, terrified of approaching the page because I have a Goblin Extraordinaire whispering that I don’t know where the hell the book is going, or even WHY it’s going, and I might as well eat chocolate instead. Well, screw him. I’m going to write today, even though I don’t know where the hell the book is going. That’ll come, once I’ve got those sheep good and naked.

Enjoy your weekend, write, be happy, knit a little if you like, and love someone up.

One more quick note, this is what my mom is like:

We went to see a gay comedy (Mambo Italiano), and she laughed in all the right places.
Then, driving to sis’s house, I told her about the tattoo I want. She said, “That sounds great!”

She’s from NZ, where they’re rather British in their ways and emotions. It’s probably taken a lot for her to get to this point where she can react like this. But she’s the coolest little mama ever. And I told her so.

Had a wonderful time with the little mama yesterday, doctor’s appointment notwithstanding. We arrived (really) early in Palo Alto – neither of us had (accurate) directions to Stanford, and we wanted to be sure we’d make it on time. It ain’t like we’d never been there before, but neither of us are outrageously terrific with following our noses, so we gave ourselves a big head-start. A BIG one. So we had about two hours for lunch. We sat at a sidewalk table at a little Mediterranean place in the heart of downtown, ate our wraps, and watched the people go by. I hadn’t seen that many twin-sets in one place, ever. Or Manolo Blahniks, for that matter. And everyone was talking on their hanging-cord hands-free cell phones (I have to admit a great passion for those – I don’t have one, but I believe they’ve brought back singing in the car. I used to be regularly paced by other cars who were watching me and laughing while I sung my heart out to whatever was in my stereo. Now they see my lips moving and both hands on the wheel and assume I’m just on my hands-free device. Unless, of course, I’ve got my head whipping around and my hands beating on the steering wheel. Oh, well. It could be a really good conversation).

So we watched the uber-yuppies and ate ice-cream and book-shopped and finally made it to her appointment. In the waiting room, I worked on my secret project, which the reception staff noticed. I was then forced (FORCED, I tell you) to do a mini-fashion show, showing off my LoTech sweat and my Regia socks while they brought more staff out of the back offices to see. We bonded, waving happily goodbye when they gave me the little moms back to take home. Then Mom and Christy and I went to sushi, more book-shopping, followed by a movie (Mambo Italiano, delightful). Wait. I think WE’RE the uber-yuppies…..

Oh, I CAN tell you this about my knitting – this is what I’m starting soon, for a friend-of-a-friend’s baby.

Isn’t it wonderful? Mission Falls Wee Knits, the one called Sam. One of the reasons I’m so excited about doing it is because I can’t really tell what it looks like. Actually, it’s hard to tell what ANY of their sweaters really look like, since the babies they choose seem to be in that stage where they have no backbone yet and their fat tummies are scrunched all around the sweaters.

More fun with Mom today. Happy Friday!