Blog

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!

So this is what I’m thinking about the tattoo:

[aside – have you noticed I start most blog entries as if I’m in the middle of the conversation already? I do that when I answer the phone, too. God bless caller ID. It kind of freaks people out when I answer, “Where did you end up parking the other night?” But what am I gonna do? Pretend (“Hello??”) like I don’t know who it is, when everyone knows I have caller ID? Come on. End long aside.]

Anyway. Tattoo: I want an armband. A traditional-looking Celtic one, though it won’t be traditional – I want an aran knit cable, but I want the suggestion of sheep worked in. Leaping blue sheep, worked right into the twists. It’s going to take some kind of amazing artist – anyone know a Bay Area tattoo artist they’d recommend?

Sheep! Did you know Rachael means ewe in Hebrew? And that I’m half Kiwi, and my mother was raised on a sheep farm in New Zealand? My granddad died when my mother was a teenager, and my favorite story about him is how soft his right hand was. He’d stand by the stile and touch each lamb as he guided them into the pen, and that one constantly-lanolined hand stayed silken. Isn’t that a nice memory for my mother to have?

So I think sheep are appropriate (and also just very, very nice).

Speaking of little mamas, mine is in town. Picked her up from the train station yesterday in downtown Oakland, Jack London. I love how the trains have always dominated the face of the Square, and I got there a little early. Trapped by two slow moving trains, I parked on the wrong side of the station and took the aerial stairway over the top. I’d never climbed it before – it’s about four flights up to a steel walkway that goes right over the tracks and back down on the other side. After making sure the little mama hadn’t arrived early, I stood up there and watched the trains pushing under my feet. I could see to the Bay and back the other way to the hills. A gorgeous afternoon, warm and clear. When Mom’s train came in, I grabbed her and we went to lunch with Christy (who works in the Square) sitting outside at Jack’s (of course), watching the pitch of the boats in the channel between Alameda and Oakland. There’s an aircraft carrier docked for repainting, and the wonderful Heraclitus, a coral-reef monitoring junk that’s been to the Amazon and Antarctica, was being guarded by two punk rockers and a man in a scarlet scarf.

Then we just…. hung out. We have doctor’s appointments today down at Stanford, but yesterday was for hanging. We watched a little taped Six Feet Under. I knitted. She napped. Dinner (outside again) with a friend. A little more TV. Oh! Here’s a picture, my little mama having been claimed by Adah.

It’s so NICE to have her here. I wish she could stay longer, but she has four cats herself, none younger than nine, and she wants to go home on Friday to relieve Dad of the Cat Watching Pressure.

But doctor’s appointments aside, we expect to have a grand time today. Hope you do as well!

Okay. I did my morning pages. I DID! All of them, all three long-hand. I’m not actually going to do the whole Artist’s Way program with the Pioneer – I’ve done it recently enough, thank you. Kicked my creative ass, but in a nice way. It’s sooo worth doing. But I’m using the group’s generated creative-wind-power to get me writing the real ones again. Jeez, for over a year I’ve considered my blog a version of morning pages. Know what? It ain’t. I KNOW people read it, and while I try to toss that knowledge out and just write, I can’t do it. I’m writing for an audience. My morning pages barely have ME as an audience. I don’t ever even go back to re-read – I would yawn myself right off the chair.

But I’ve already had a small Big Thought, even today, the first day back to ’em. Good to be back.

Thanks for all the fun comments yesterday – I love oddball names. Wendy – Porn-wise, I’d be SweetPea Sunshine. Hee! Alison – I LOVE Motorcycle. That’s hot.

And now, for the thoughts I had yesterday afternoon, full of chocolate and happy.

I walked down to my local theatre for a matinee of Capturing the Friedmans. It was a gorgeous afternoon, just a little too warm for my LoTech Sweat (but I wore it anyway – there, that’s my knitting content), and I did it the right way – hit the 7-11 in order to smuggle in an Orangina and some chocolate, arrived early, bought the popcorn and kicked up my feet and read the atrocious Bay Times. My local place is one of those older theatres, a second-run art house where the screening rooms have been subdivided into little thirty-seat rooms, cozy and small. Like being at home, but with popcorn and a really big-ass screen.

For a while, during the previews, I thought I would watch the whole thing alone (why does that inspire guilt? As if I’m not worthy, somehow, of someone running the projector for lil ole me….) Then another woman came in, and sat right in front of me. I never get that. Totally empty, and that one person will always sit too close. I was slightly irritated that I’d have to be considerate with my candy-opening noise, but I got over it.

The movie was intense. I hadn’t realized how fully the family had self-documented itself, from film of Arnie’s sister who had died fifty years before in childhood, right down to hours before conviction, filming Jesse fooling around on the court-house steps. What I loved about it was its shading. There was NO black and white. You leave the theatre knowing that something happened, but even within the immediate family, there was a sense that no one really knew the truth. I was ridiculously moved by the compassion the filmmakers took with the family and I cried when the credits rolled (one of the best parts of watching a movie by yourself).

I had blocked out, completely, the woman sitting in front of me. I took my time picking up my trash and depositing it in the can, but when I went out the front, she was waiting, holding the door for me. We spent the next three blocks talking. She had spent thirty years in prosecution, so had a very unique viewpoint. I’ve spent some time on the other side – the law enforcement side, the side that takes the very first call – that of the hysterical and enraged parent or the bewildered aunt or babysitter. But the movie placed us both right into the middle of ambiguity. And isn’t that the point?

It was lovely walking in the fast-dropping night with an insta-friend. Much eye-holding, much nodding, a wave goodnight of greatest warmth. It was one of those moments that are rare and shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t LET them be rare. It was so easily grasped and so needed after an emotional experience like that.

On a totally different, frivolous note, I have to admit a deep dark secret. Reno 911! is a freaking hysterical TV show.

Don’t tell anyone.

You deserve a glamour shot now. This is Christy’s nineteen year old cat, Sebastian. This is him playing.

It’s Alison’s birthday! Yowza! You go with your brainy-lady excellent just gettin’ better every rawkin-gawking year self! We love you. (I’m in the middle of 31, by the way, and it’s awesome – a good year.)

I’ve been doing a bunch of knitting and should be done with something fun this week, but can’t show it, ‘cause it’s a secret. Oh! Maybe I’ll send a completed photo to one of y’all so you can host it, hey? Wow, that’s just me living for the compliments. That’s kinda lame. But true. I hate working on it knowing no one knows what I’m doing…. The flip side of blog-land….

Wendy (winner of the KniTattoo contest) was talking today about the other evil side of blog-land: Spam. And I have to say, the only good thing I’ve found about spam is this: Their names, when they hit your email, are great. I write them down and save them to use in my fiction somewhere down the line. They look like names, but are totally unexpected – Norris Herplunk. Myra Mantle. All right, both of those have Harry Potter echoes, too. Cool.

I love collecting names, the really out-there, crazy ones. My friend has two students with the names HerMajesty and HisRoyalHighness. At work we see a lot of good ones, including two brothers named Lemonjello and Orangejello. (The emphasis on these names is on the second syllable. When said, they don’t sound like the food at all.) I won’t tell you where I heard this name, but I can swear on Digit’s wee nose that this is a true name, one she deals with on a daily basis and married into. Are you ready?

Fonda Cox.

Can you IMAGINE? Introducing herself at a party. “Hi, I’m Fonda Cox.”

Kills me. Just slays me. Truly Boring (also verifiable and married into) used to be my favorite, but nothing beats a woman Fonda Cox.

Oh, now I’m REALLY in for some spam.

I worked thirteen hours today, and spent the last two hours of my shift thinking about the bath I was going to take. I was gonna get home, run the bath, make some tea, grab the New Yorker, and hit it. Then sleep. Nothing else. I was TOO excited.

So I get in my car, switch on my phone, and promptly get talked into going to San Francisco. I mean, come on. Have I NO willpower at all?

Nah.

Besides, friend in crisis. How can I say no? Must counsel. Of course, if said counseling comes with a beer in the back garden and the opportunity for watching pool on a gorgeous warm fall night, it’s just something I have to deal with, no?

Didn’t so much counsel my friend as just listened and asked her to take her time. My little mama has drilled this one piece of advice into my head: You don’t have decide anything right now. And that’s usually the truth, isn’t it? If you HAVE to make a decision, it’s usually not the right time. Once the right time rolls around, you’ve already made the decision in your heart and mind and it’s not hard. It might suck, yeah. But it’s not hard to make.

(I realize, though, that I have NO problem with decisions. I have a gazillion other issues, but that ain’t one of ‘em. I think I’ve internalized Mom’s advice and I Just Don’t Think About It until I have to think about it, and by then it’s a done deal. )

Try it. It’s not so bad.

God, I feel like I have so many things I was thinking about writing and they’re all gone. Piffle. All right. It’s weird, I think, that my spell-check doesn’t highlight the word piffle (or Baryshnikov or Schwarzenegger, for that matter) but flags aargh and bleah.

Non-sequiturs abound. Off to bed it is, then. I’m home before midnight and I’ll still get eight hours of sleep. I agree with Marcia when she commented that she feels like she’s getting screwed when she has to go to bed on time – I want to stay up late and still be able to get enough sleep, screw the mathematics involved. When I was leaving the bar tonight, I kept saying regretfully to people, “I’m SO sorry, but I have to get up early tomorrow. I have to work, you know.” They just stared and nodded. Yeah, dumb-ass. So do we. This whole day-shift working thing has me thrown. It feels so WEIRD to have to be at work in the morning.

Hope your morning, whatever you’re doing, is not so very weird, and that you don’t have to make any decision more difficult than which pair of your favorite socks you’ll pick to wear today. (oh – and alison – yep, Digit’s home safely, thank god. Greta suggested he might very well come home with a grand fortune from the roulette table, enough to send me back to Venice, but he just dragged in minus a collar and some scraps of pride. He’s sound asleep now, snoring and pretending I’m not typing about him….. Poor baby…..)