The New and Unapprehended Adventures of Sidewalk Monkey

Sidewalk Monkey queries,

2011-11-29T21:43:00.001-08:00

"How come I can run an acupuncture practice, but I can't keep basic shit, like remembering to bring my gym clothes to work or not losing my ukulele in the closet or not spilling a beverage inside my purse twice a week, together?"

Jam Guy thinks for two seconds and then says,

"It's because one is taking care of others and the other is taking care of you, and you've always prioritized taking care of others."

I love this man because he is daily confronted with my forgetfulness and my scatteredness and my awkwardness and he turns them into virtues. Somehow. This is my example of the redeeming power of love.

Facebook status post, 4/22/11

2011-06-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

When I was living on the Lower East Side, someone posted a fruit-bearing fig tree in a container on the free section of Craigslist. I emailed the poster, but I was too late by, like, a million emailers. I was sad; a container fig tree seemed like the best thing ever. Eight or so years later and a whole continent away, a giant 90-year-old fig tree fruits riotously in my backyard.

How does this happen, this wanting something so much and then being gifted its exaggeratedly superlative version? It is a metaphor for my whole life. I don't walk in gratitude, I swim in it, daily. Hourly.

On Mother's Day, 2011.

2011-05-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

So your mother died when you were 19, and sometimes maybe it seems like people expect you to have gotten over it, already. Which blows your mind, because you never expect anyone to just get over losing anything they loved, not even a goldfish, not even a job, not even a plastic hair thingy. Love is love. Loss is loss. You don't get used to any of it.

Sometimes your father seems impatient that you haven't gotten over it. And that is particularly astounding, because he is further away from getting over anything than anyone you have ever met, or heard of even, ever.

Sometimes your friends lose things they love and you fall all over yourself trying to tell them it's okay to never get over it, that even if the rest of the world lobs deadlines at them like grenades, you want to be a path for them in which it's always okay to walk wounded. You mean, with a yearning to help them that hurts up to your collarbone, to give them the space you learned to need. But. This is not what anyone wants to hear right after they lose something they love. In the bleeding, stinging abyss of their loss, they ask you: When does it get better? They want to hear: Soon; or, A little better every day; or, Be strong, time heals all. And the words rise to your lips: I don't know, yet.

You don't lie about this. Lying would be exactly what you don't want to do, about this.

And they think you are talking about your mom, how you still miss her every day. They are right, in part. She was the first thing you loved, after all. Everyone is born trying to hold on to what they love. What they don't know is that you knew from the beginning that every day we are failing and failing and failing. Losing is the one given. Love isn't.

Bragging.

2011-03-03T08:44:00.000-08:00

I am not sure that I could get a job in today's market. But it looks like I have made one, and that is pretty cool.

out of my mind, please

2011-02-27T18:08:00.001-08:00

Dear chronic anxiety: What have you done for me lately?

No, really. You hang out chewing on the sides of my brain all day, every day. You quiet for a few moments while I am treating a patient, which is maybe why I try so hard to fill my days treating patients, but then afterward you are there when a patient tells me they are feeling better for the first time in years, whispering: maybe it wasn't the acupuncture. i bet he knows it wasn't the acupuncture. you can't really help anyone with anything.

You hiss they are SO annoyed with you, they feel sorry for you, they think you are fat when I hang out with friends or they think you are bragging and full of yourself and they can see right through that, they think you are grossly insecure. You push all the buttons that make me stumble over myself trying to make sure that my friends will know I did not mean to offend, and then when my friends laugh and tell me they weren't offended, how could they be offended? you cackle now they think you are just so weird. just stop talking, already, GOD, you are so weird and awkward. and fat.

The moment you notice I am home and happily settled on the couch with the love of my life, you remind me nothing is forever, no one is impervious to harm, life is precarious, what are you doing to protect him? We start to eat the lovely dinner he prepared and you don't let me serve myself first even if he asks me to serve myself first because what if you take the one piece of chicken he really wanted? what if you take more than your fair share of the greens? you want to deprive him, you want to make him sad, you want to let your own husband, the beautiful man who has made you this beautiful dinner, this beautiful life, go hungry? you are so fucking selfish, so greedy, so disgustingly gluttonous. glutton! stop eating so fast, you are repulsive, stop eating so slow, you will hurt his feelings, are you getting drunk again? again, really, when your mother died of cancer that crept to her liver, you can't even respect your own liver? do you think the wine will shut me up? you want to race and see which gets shut down first, my voice or your precious fucking liver?

My husband and I get ready for bed, for the blissful quiet moments where we rest skin against skin waiting for sleep to come, and you ratchet up your efforts: there are so many ways you or he or the dog or the cat could die tonight because you weren't careful enough. the stove, the floor, the outlets, the corners of things. the house, this life, it is a minefield. try to be happy for one second, fine, but that might be the second that you forget to look and step on a mine.

My therapist told me one day that she's noticed that the most anxiety-ridden people are the ones who do best in a crisis. She told me a story of one woman who was so afflicted with anxiety it was hard for her to leave the house. One day this woman walked out of her bedroom and into the kitchen and saw that the kitchen was engulfed in rapidly-spreading flames. She grabbed her cat and her dog and walked calmly out of the house to the church across the street, where she called the fire department. Then she waited on the steps of the church, holding her pets, for help to arrive. In short, she did everything exactly right. When her friends asked her, "But weren't you terrified?" she replied, "Well, it wasn't any different from every day."

And the fact of the matter is, I am pretty good in a crisis. And I should be: they are rehearsed in my head daily, probably hourly, whether I like it or not: the propane-delivery truck careens across lanes in front of you; the smoke billows from the ceiling and burns your lungs; the madman takes you in a group of hostages; the earth quakes and you're on the seventh floor; and none of these are as terrifying as maybe your husband is sick, maybe your sister needs help, maybe your father blames you. maybe you will break all of their hearts.

I am good in a crisis, whether it is a crisis of the broken-leg variety or the broken-heart variety. I am calm, collected, rehearsed. But it is not worth it, not even close. Even with this small advantage, I would never choose anxiety. I would rather be a completely useless, panicked idiot in one fire than live every day in a burning house.

Tribe

2011-02-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Today on the creek path, I passed another cyclist. He was bearded, and pulling a bike trailer with a baby in it. Like me, he was dressed for work, with one pants leg cuffed and a helmet on. We nodded to each other and I felt a flash of recognition: I thought--right there is my people. Northern California, thank you for being you, all of you bike-commuters, beard-sporters, organic-produce-growers, yoga-practicers, local-business-supporters, homemade-gift-givers, ecology-protectors, food-and-wine-makers: I am home.

Wiser

2011-01-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

So for years, I've been parting my hair in one direction because it shows off my little patch of white hair--I tell people I want to put those five or six silver threads on display because I earned them. And it's true, I do, and I did. But on New Year's Eve, I parted my hair the other way while getting ready to go out--and lo and behold, more silver. Intrigued, I parted it yet again, and--you guessed it--even more. Looks like I can part my hair indiscriminately now and show off my hard-earned greys.

If five or six white hairs was a good thing, then like fifty ought to be an even better thing. Right?

Right?

Christmas morning, 2010

2010-12-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

Jam Guy: I'm going to the store now.

Sidewalk Monkey: Okay. Give me a hug first.

Jam Guy: Okay.

Sidewalk Monkey: Wait. Do you maybe not want to hug me because I'm sick? Because if you don't, I understand...Here! [Pulls sweater hood all the way down over her face.] This will protect you from the germs!

Jam Guy: ...

SM: Hee hee! Oh, ow, it makes my headache worse when I laugh. Hee! Oww. [Clasps arms around head.] Hee hee hee OWWWW.

JG, bemused, watching SM as she stands with a face covered in knitwear and elbows, giggling and groaning: Yup. That's my wife. I married her.

SM: Hee hee hee! Ohhh. Stop, stop, my head. Hey, I'm glad I kept this sweater.

JG: Because you can pull the hood over your face?

SM: No, because Fair Isle knits are fashionable again.

JG: Good job, honey.

SM: HA! Owwwww.

Favor returned.

2010-10-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

On Sunday afternoon, I was tossing something in the yard waste bin when I noticed a very small ladybug being very still on the rim of the bin. She was like half the size of a full-grown ladybug, and didn't even have any spots yet. I thought she'd maybe gotten trapped under the lid, and hadn't had anything to eat for a while. She was awfully still. I wasn't sure she wasn't dead.

I put my finger over to her and she stirred a little, then climbed onto my hand. I thought I would put her in the melon patch, but when I lowered her towards one of the big fuzzy leaves, she climbed further up my hand. It seemed a pretty clear rejection of the melon patch.

So then I took her over to the tomato vines. I wasn't sure if she'd be into those either, but there are lots of plants in the garden, so I wasn't super worried. I moved my hand towards a tomato leaf, and before I'd even gotten all the way there, she sort of leaped from my hand onto the leaf and immediately disappeared over its edge to the other side of it. I waited a second, I guess wondering if that was a bid for privacy, and then peeked at the other side of the leaf. She had immediately caught an aphid and was eating it.

That was pretty much the fastest I've ever had a favor returned.

Awesome quote of the day

2010-10-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Sidewalk Monkey: Okay, I'm gonna have a beer, because that's what Jesus would do.

The Plan

2010-08-14T21:45:00.001-07:00

My father taught me how to polish shoes when I was about five. He taught me that you take shoes to the cobbler when the soles wear out instead of just buying a new pair. He owned few pieces of clothing, all in shades of brown so everything matched, plus one grey suit for when he needed a suit. In Honolulu, you don't need a suit very often. Still, he wouldn't go anywhere outside of the house in shorts, changing into brown slacks for a trip to the drugstore or the farmers' market. He said that growing up, he'd had only two sets of clothes--one to wear while the other was being washed. The first pieces of laundry I ever folded and ironed were his handkerchiefs, an easy shape to practice on. He ironed everything, down to those handkerchiefs and his underwear, and when my sister was tall enough to reach the ironing board she ironed everything of his when he didn't do it, and when she went to college on the mainland I did it.

Today he lives in Tampa with a woman who is more casual about appearances than my beautifully lipsticked and coiffed mother, and he wears shorts and T-shirts in the humid, hurricane-pregnant weather. I don't know if he polishes his shoes anymore or if he's found a cobbler there, but he has a tall, elaborate shoehorn that he's proud of.

I've thought my whole life I've rebelled against his care and thrift with clothes, spending my first college- and post-college job paychecks on piles of cheaply-made, trendy pieces that I'd wear a few times and then relegate to the backs of drawers and even now spending blithely on more secondhand couture pencil skirts and wrap sweaters than anyone could possibly need filched at sample-sale prices from flea markets. I think of myself as hard on my clothes, wearing them on my bicycle commute or to squat and pull weeds in the garden. I will not iron.

And yet: I know how to polish shoes, how to sew a button, how to find a tailor that will save the skirt I then won't have to throw away. I take my favorite shoes to a local cobbler for reconditioning and keep bringing them back, year after year, until the cobbler turns up his hands and tells me it's time for new shoes. I wash all my clothes on the delicate cycle, fishing one or another garment out before moving the laundry into the dryer because the tag warns me to hang dry, except for a few that I wash in the sink with Woolite because the tag warns me not to put it in a machine. I brush pills from cashmere and spend an hour working on a marinara stain.

And I avoid waste in other ways: I compost, I cook old vegetables into a mush for the dog, I give the cat the drained water from the tuna can, I rub watermelon and aloe rinds on my face for their skin-beautifying properties before composting those. I rescue ladybugs from the leaves of weeds destined for the yard waste bin and place them on the leaves of tomato plants that need defense against aphids. I try to find artists or imaginative gardeners to give the used-up pieces of yard debris--fencing, broken wheelbarrow, creepy cupid planter--that surface from time to time at our place and that would otherwise end up at the landfill. I eat leftovers for a few days after most people probably would.

In these ways I am like my father, careful with resources and respectful of them, and I see this despite a lifetime of trying to flaunt my differences. Both of us, in our own way, are aware that nothing can really be taken for granted.

And other similarities: Both of us take only the most carefully calculated risks, although he celebrates the "carefully calculated" part and I celebrate the "risk" part. What is careful about leaving a guaranteed, well-appointed government position in his hometown and traveling halfway around the work to build a life in a country where you are instantly penalized for your passport accent, where the intellect that built you a reputation as a scholar to reckon with in your country of origin is unreadable through your dark skin? And compared to that, what, really, is all that risky about moving to a town you'd never heard of before falling in love with one of its inhabitants but where you have a place to stay and a person who loves you? All I did--I, the risk-taker of the family--was take a flying leap into arms I knew would catch me. (Knowing, in all fairness, that I could be wrong about those arms because I had been wrong about arms before--but knowing also that I could always leap back, that New York City wasn't going anywhere.) What he did--he, the solid, unimpetuous rock of our family; he, the planner, the lister of pros and cons--was take a leap into unknown terms, knowing he might not actually be able to leap back, and knowing the only person that was going to catch him on the other side was himself.

Here is the path, laid out in front of me, the work I have now to do: I have a father to love, still. I have a father to forgive. I have myself to forgive, myself to love, and both of us to try to understand. I know this is an ancient storm that I am navigating, this yawning, seismic fissure between father and daughter, generation and generation, old country and new country. I have a father to lose, but not yet. I have moments in which to be present with him. I have time, still, to remember all we have in common, and to let our differences dim quietly while the love we share, the one real thing that will remain of either of us, shines.

Letter

2010-07-27T16:35:00.001-07:00

Dear Psycho Ex:

I am in receipt of your recent email. I have some points I'd like to make in response. Please consider this a do-not-reply email. I realize it is frustrating to have someone getting angry at you and not be able to respond. I realize this because I was on the receiving end of a lot of your anger for a long time, and I didn't respond to your anger then because it always just made you more angry. Today, Mr. Psycho Ex, it is your turn to stuff it. Ready? Okay.

1) It is WEIRD to tell someone that you think it is weird that they got married. ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN BROKEN UP FOR OVER THREE YEARS. It implies that you perceive a totally, egregiously inappropriate connection between you and said someone, one which has not been reinforced by said someone AT ALL. Said someone never implied post-breakup that she would change her mind and marry you. The fact that you asked her to marry you post-breakup and her immediate refusal should have helped you understand this. The fact that you went around during your post-breakup apartment search telling prospective landlords that "your wife Sidewalk Monkey" was just out of town and would be moving in with you upon her return does not make you married to her. IT MAKES YOU CRAZY.

2) DO NOT PUT WINKY SMILEY-FACES IN EMAILS WHERE YOU ARE BEING A PSYCHO STALKER. It is only socially acceptable to put winky smiley-faces in emails sent between friends. Psycho stalkers and their unfortunate stalkees ARE NOT FRIENDS WITH EACH OTHER.

3) Really? In your (entirely unsolicited) opinion, you believe that "we will never replace the chemistry we had"? Where to begin with this? What do you know about the chemistry I have now with my husband? Can I tell you that I didn't know how amazing chemistry can feel until I met my husband? Can I tell you than he and I are a team in a real way, in an equal partnership, that he really respects and accepts everything about me and the things we achieve together are truly remarkable products of the cooperation of two human beings that complement each other? That I never feel like we are a team with a contingency, that I never feel worried that he respects and accepts me unless and until I put on a pair of shoes with a heel or wear a pretty skirt or watch a TV show that has male actors in it or take a job in an office with more men than women or raise my head walking down the street or choose male friends/doctors/counselors/clients? Can I tell you that because of the "chemistry" that you and I had--the chemistry of controller and controllee, of false idol and misguided idolator, of narcissist and nurturer--I felt like I had to resign myself to a narrow, dim life of watching the pavement and feeling less-than? That meeting the man I married gave me back my faith, changed me back into the full and whole person I was before I knew you and made me believe that love could be everything I had hoped it would be, and then some, and that love could bring me freedom instead of taking it away?

4) Can I also tell you, along the lines of the more specific "physical...and emotional chemistry" that you reference, that you were selfish and predictable and not that good in bed? That, without giving you more insight than is appropriate into the intimacies of my relationship with my husband, I kind of want to weep a little bit every day for the girl I was when I was with you, who thought she liked sex but had no idea till now just how good it can be?

5) Your saying you think it should have been you and I getting married is creepy, and makes me feel worried and aggrieved for your wife. Listen closely, and make no mistake: I am grateful every day that I married my husband. I am grateful I did not marry you. Every day I look forward to spending my life with my own happy, beautiful family--do you really think I need you to have children that are smart and well-adjusted and creative? I do not ever picture you and I happily raising a family together. When I try to picture what my life would have been like if I had stayed with you, I always picture myself on a dirty, pilling couch, surrounded by children whom I love because they are my children and who break my heart and fill me with guilt because they do not respect their mother and are afraid of their father. And I picture myself, on that couch, getting smaller and smaller and my face getting blurrier and blurrier, shrinking inches every minute, my face erasing while no one notices, until I just disappear.

6) So you regret the art I am not inspiring in you? That does make it awfully tempting to come back to you. BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT I WANT MY LIFE TO BE LIKE: Me, doing nothing with my life except sitting around depressed in ugly clothes, attempting to be the shadowy imagined muse lady you think you want, while you make bad art, pick on me and smoke my entire paycheck. DREAMY.

7) Saying you are going to keep writing until I respond is not a normal friendly gesture. Even if you say it in a nauseatingly cutesy way with puzzling and irrelevant exclamation points, it is something a stalker says. And it is particularly abnormal given that I have not responded to anything you've written in years, that I changed my phone number and my email address and even my physical address in an attempt to foil your efforts to contact me. Seriously, buddy, take me off your Christmas-card list. And every other list. Get me on your personal do-not-call registry.

8) So you have "almost completely" worked out your "suppressed mother issues"? Oooh, tempting again--that whatever you are able to blame for making me deeply, stickily, scarringly unhappy for YEARS is "almost" cleared up. But not quite. But that's okay, you say, because you're a good person underneath! Truth be told, kid, I know you are a good person underneath. I always said it. But that doesn't mean you're not responsible for your actions. Guess what? I HAVE MOTHER ISSUES TOO. Remember which one of us has the dead mother? Hint: NOT YOU. Guess what else? I didn't take my mother issues out on you. I didn't break furniture, call you names, make you feel unsafe, constantly threaten to leave you or humiliate you if you didn't change your clothes and bow your head. Years and years younger than you, I rose above the injustice of nature that you sank under, and I saw you couldn't see your own way clear of your past. But you weren't ready for help, and I wasn't ready to sacrifice my whole life to your grief, your shame and your rage. And I thank everything that is good in the world that neither of us were ready to do what looked necessary and vital at that time, because when I ran away from you I ran into a life that kept opening wider and wider the further I ran.

And today, against all sorts of odds, only a very small percentage of which you have anything to do with, I am happy. I am living a life that is so open, so full of texture and fragrance and color, so much more in every way than I knew life could be three years ago. I love my husband. I love where we live, the world we have created for ourselves, the day-to-day joy and gratitude that we move through. As it turns out, now that I have finally given myself permission to steer my own life, I am a fucking awesome driver. I am a pedal-to-the-metal badass who does her own stunts, and I am as safe as a grandma because I know not to take my life for granted. I leapt across a continent and landed all four tires, still spinning, on a country road, at a winding creek, in a patchwork quilt of vineyards. My life. My home.

This is the gift you have unknowingly given me, the legacy of the hurt I remember every time I think of you: I know now how grateful I should be for my every day, my every unjudged breath. For that I can forgive you everything.

But if you really are the good person you say you are, if you really understand how wrongly you wounded me, if you are truly perceptive enough to be ashamed of the behavior that routinely caused me to hide in the bathtub, then you must know that it is not right for you to contact me. You must know that I would have written you back if I wanted to be in touch with you; you must know I am not afraid of using words. You must know I don't contact you because I don't want to have contact. You must know that the same words of regret and apology and cloying affection that you used three years ago will not change my mind today. I can forgive you--but you make it harder every time you barge into my inbox with your thinly-veiled fury. You must know what the right thing to do is, the most compassionate, most stand-up, caring thing you could do for me: Leave. Me. Alone.

I am done hiding in the bathtub. I am done hiding anywhere. I am standing in my own light and there is no room for you here.

Sincerely,
Sidewalk Monkey

shoe lust birthday boots!

2010-07-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

the last pair in my size in the COUNTRY, gifted to me by the amazing, amazing Jam Guy.

Yeah, meant to post this nearer to my actual BIRTHDAY instead of nearly eight months later, but better late than never. I have been wearing these almost every day--literally, like, there might be one day each month I DON'T wear them--for the last almost eight months. Thank you, honey!

lava carves its own path.

2010-07-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

i was in an abusive relationship for a long time because sorrow and shame fit into me like a key, because the door to me was built early to open much too easily to punishment. when hurt came my way, i couldn't help but let it in, it felt so made for me.

but now.

now i am with someone who wants to melt me with the caution and patience of some old sage of metalworkers, not to resculpt me into something built to open to him, but to leave me an unformed flow, molten and dangerous and free.

thoughts during the journey homeward from Tampa

2010-06-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

These all are harbingers of the onrush of older age: when I am tired or overwrought, I run my hands all over my face (maybe to hide the fatigue or fright I used to wear more openly and willingly, like a Girl Scout badge for Strength in the Wilderness of the World); I reconsider the martini at the airport based on the early hour in the city I am flying home to (where once anywhere near noon in my destination city OR departure city OR layover city would have been enough reason to take my place in the lineup of throat-clearing, awkwardly displaced travelers in a bar where nobody knows your name and you know you will likely regret you came, if not when a stranger begins detailing his last week of fishing triumphs to you, then when the martini rises sourly in your throat during takeoff or landing or turbulence); and I spend three and a half days with my father and do not once feel throttled by rage fueled by grief (and feel, instead, only the originating grief, and though it is far less bearable than the rage, do not wish to exchange it, preferring and choosing the inevitably forward motion of truth).

I married a man who says,

2010-05-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

"Honey, why don't you grab your beer and watch your show?"

SCORE.

As though I needed another reason to love him

2010-04-21T20:01:00.001-07:00

Sidewalk Monkey, sitting next to Jam Guy on the driveway, eating the ham sandwich he's made for them during a break in a long hot day of gardening: Oh my god. This cheese is amazing. What is it?

Jam Guy, frowning: What cheese? Oh--that's not cheese. That's a slice of butter.

2010-03-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

Today we saw a peacock behind a chain-link fence. He had his tail all fanned out, trying to get the attention of a completely indifferent peahen. He rattled his tail at her a few times, like a man in a sports car gunning the motor when a pretty woman walks by--Look at me! Hey! Pretty lady! Over here! Look! Hey!

When she passed him by, he did a long and elaborate peacock dance for Adam and me, no doubt hating for his dazzling charm to go to waste, and appreciating at least having an appreciative audience. His tail spread above him like a stained-glass saint's halo in a Romanesque cathedral. He faced us, glittering, and then, with deliberate, precise steps, turned in a full circle, showing us the slivered profile of the splendid fan, the almost-hidden wings folded along the back, the incongruously fluffy, ducklinglike bottom. He turned back to us and stood statue-still, allowing us to admire him. He turned in another circle full, slow circle, in the opposite direction this time.

We made fun of him a little on the way home, because of how much he seemed to enjoy the attention, because of his comical failure to interest the hen. But I still can't get over how incredibly gorgeous he was, like a burlesque dancer, like a god with a hundred eyes, slowly fanning the drab, gaping humans with the transformative heat of his beauty.

Today I was walking around downtown doing some errands

2010-03-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

and found myself walking behind a girl who works at the news and magazine store where we pick up our coffee beans twice a week.

I have always noticed this girl because 1) downtown Santa Rosa is not a big place, and you see the same people over and over again even if you don't frequent the businesses they work at, 2) she is really, really pretty and 3) she looks ethnically ambiguous with a South Asian lean, like me. Or maybe she's Filipina, I'm not sure. But there aren't a whole lot of ethnically ambiguous brown people like me here in Santa Rosa, so I take special notice of each such person when I spot one.

Today this girl was walking with an older woman who I knew at once was her mother. I could tell because of the way the girl leaned slightly away from the older woman and the way the older woman leaned slightly towards the girl: it was a mother wanting to convey something that seemed important to her daughter and a daughter not wanting to hear it. The mother looked a lot more East Asian than the daughter, but they were definitely related--they had the same walk, they wore their exasperation with each other with the same body language, and they were exactly the same height.

I am having a good day with lots of good news and beautiful weather and everything; Jam Guy drew a happy face on my egg and rice this morning with Sriracha; our fruit trees, which have struggled through a winter of weird extremes (for Northern California, anyways) are covered in tender little springtime buds. There is no reason not to have all the hope in the world today. But seeing that mother and daughter walking together made me feel so lonely so suddenly.

Going through old drafts of stuff, I found this from last January

2010-03-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

Letter to my unconceived child

Every so often, in the lull that follows things like crises of faith, yoga classes and earthquakes, I remember you by the little flutter you make in my abdomen, curled in an unmarked tissueless organ that yawns deeply somewhere among my viscera. I feel you in the moments that I resolve to be a better person, to give everything I wished to be given, to treat my self like a temple of succor and protection. Mysterious little fish, wholly unknowable tangle of electric desire, when I am doing things right, I do everything I do so that you may swim in waters that are clean and calm.

I don't know how long I have wanted you or when you came to be part of me or which came first. I believe that I have a spleen and a pancreas and a liver because I am told that I do, but I have never felt them like I feel my heart, or like I feel you. You are a part of me that, like my heart, marches in a fragile, steady cadence, mostly unnoticed, except for knocking hard when it is time for me to pay attention.

At once so much less and so much more than my biological imperative, at times the entire reason for my existence and at others the fiercest face my self-doubt can wear: do I, can I, deserve something as whole as you? I am filled with discontent watching my body move in a mirror when I think it is the shallow reflecting pool that is only mine; but when I think of it as your little swimming hole, your oasis, then I am filled with reverence for it, with the need to be careful and gentle with it.

You are loved. You are your own. You are a link in a chain that has meaning because of you.

Sometimes eavesdropping is depressing

2010-03-06T22:24:00.000-08:00

Girl at table next to ours in a sushi restaurant: I have this, like, phobia. Of tsunamis. For real. I'm serious, I seriously have nightmares about them.

Boy, seriously: Seriously?

Girl: Yeah. Like, every night. I don't know what it is.

Boy: Do you know, like, maybe, what started it? Or like, were you involved in a tsunami, or something?

Girl: Well, you know that tsunami that hit Thailand that year?

Boy, wide-eyed: Yes?

Girl: It happened on my birthday.

Boy: ...

Girl: I hear it's really pretty in Thailand, though.

Irony

2010-02-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

Today I spent a couple of hours doing battle against the mold on our windowsills, grown during the rainy season here in its groping sort of way; I was armed with six quarts of bleach, a big steel pot, hot water, dish soap, a scrubby sponge. I spent about the same amount of time today learning how to cultivate oyster mushrooms in our home, carefully cornering away the bag of sawdust and mushroom spawn sent to me by Jam Guy's dad. Kill the fungus! Culture the fungus! Apparently I have ambivalent feelings about fungus. I am sure there is a good metaphor here.

Awesome quote of the day:

2010-01-09T20:11:00.000-08:00

Jam Guy, laughing at the delighted face I make when he hands me the beer I couldn't reach because it was across the table:

"You're like a four-year-old! But drunk."

Find me where you are

2009-12-31T18:23:00.000-08:00

There's a theory that exists in yoga, acupuncture, massage therapy and various therapeutic forms that you can hold emotion or emotion-based memories in parts of your body--actual anatomical, physically locatable spots. In acupuncture theory, the locations will vary based on the types of emotional memories--memories associated with grief may be located along the Lung meridian, for example, whereas fear-based memories may be located along the Kidney meridian. In yoga practice, I've been told we hold our emotions in our hip joints.

This morning I took a completely fantastic end of the year power-yoga class immediately followed by a "Renew" class--one a fierce, faster-paced practice where I watched sweat rain off my head onto my yoga mat, and the next a calm, joint-opening, reflective practice. In the Renew class, we did a lot of hip-focused poses.

I was in a crossed-legged seated forward fold, trying to relax into the pose, and realized my jaw was tight. I opened my mouth to stretch it, making funny faces at my mat in the dark little cave of my own curled body. I remembered then that I'd been woken by Jam Guy in the middle of last night because I'd been grinding my teeth. He woke me up by stroking my cheek softly; I knew I was safe before I opened my eyes. I woke up in the complete certainty that I would open my eyes and see him blinking at me in the dark, his quiet face a study in gentle, sleepy concern. I woke up in the complete certainty that the hand on my cheek and the eyes watching me meant I am loved.

This waking-up-feeling-safe is a new thing for me. I am not, historically, a good sleeper; I am an even worse waker-upper. Often, I wake up with a panicky start, scaring the daylights out of whomever had to wake me. (My sister, on the other hand, could fall asleep on a guided tour of a noise factory, and trying to wake her up is like trying to get a cat out of a patch of sun by offering it a bath.)

So anyways, I was stretching my jaw in my sweaty yoga cave and remembering how sweet it had been to open my eyes with Jam Guy's loving hand on my cheek and his sweet, so-beloved face facing mine. And then I was hit with another memory with such suddenness it brought tears to my eyes.

It was a day when I was about seven. I was awake and my sister was asleep, maybe napping. My mother went to wake my sister up. I was watching closely as she moved near to my sister and stroked her cheek gently, murmuring her name as chimes of love, telling her tenderly it was time to wake up. This is what I remember. I remember that at that time in our lives, when my mother needed to wake me up, she would call to me from the doorway. It was a time in our lives when, for many reasons neither bad nor good, I felt that disparity in tenderness was evidenced in other ways. This is only what I remember, and these are old memories from the perspective of a child I am not anymore. I remember I asked my mother later if she would wake me up that way, too--by stroking my cheek and saying nice things. I remember her voice and eyes softening, and I remember she did wake me up a couple of times that way, but I don't remember it sticking. I don't know if she made a habit of waking my sister up that way either.

More than anything I remember feeling an ache watching that open demonstration of love. I was glad for my sister to be receiving it. I was. But I wanted it for me too.

As an adult I know now my parents were struggling with a lot of their own demons, and I know they loved us even if they didn't always show it in ways we could recognize. I know, too, that all I have wanted really in this whole life is to love and be loved back without parameters.

But maybe I am still that child. Because I know that my heart bloomed all over the place when I realized the full circle my life has drawn from that lonely pigtailed little girl to this woman who is soaked in love like a bit of cake in a rum trifle. Then, as now, I had dark and delirious dreams and craved a loving hand on my cheek to coax me out of them. The difference is now it is given to me, and I don't have to ask for it.

This year is closing, and I am having a little bit of a hard time letting it go. It has been so sweet to me; so many dreams have come true for me in the last twelve months. Remember when I wrote that this was going to be the year of abundance? It was for me. I am grateful to it, I bowed daily with that gratitude to that abundance. And I feel certain that we were building foundations for abundance, too, this year. I feel like 2010 will be a time to build towering structures on those foundations. We are good and married. The clinic is open. My sister's beautiful work is on the L.A. theater community's radar, my father has glasses that help him see far away. Dear friends have gotten married, have gotten engaged, are moving back to California, are moving into a sense of self. With an open heart, I look forward to what we all will build, out of our love, out of our ambition, out of our desires and destinies, as the new year rolls open.

Day after Christmas thoughts

2009-12-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

I think the reason I loved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs so much was: you know how the people in the protagonists' hometown had been trying so hard and for so long to think of sardines as good, desireable food, and then all of a sudden they tasted really delicious food, food that literally fell from heaven, and their disbelief and then joy when they realized that food could be that good, that nourishing, and then how they immediately wanted more and realized how hungry they were and how greedy they could be? That is how I am, but with love, now that I know Jam Guy.

Facebook status post, Christmas 2009

2009-12-25T21:44:00.000-08:00

Wine and antipasto with good friends+long scramble on the beach with Jam Guy and Toby+dim sum for dinner+wonderful news from a good friend+Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs+hitting the sack early=perfect, perfect, perfect Christmas Day.

Secret

2009-10-16T18:33:00.001-07:00

So I am now an official acupuncturist, with my official clinic and official patients and official file folders and all that. I am having a blast. I dispense official advice, much of which has to do with nutrition, since I do very sincerely believe that what you eat is the foundation of whether or not you are healthy. I suggest things--basic common-sense healthy things--like steamed greens, whole grains, lots of water, antioxidant-rich teas. I also suggest nutritious diets that are tailored specifically to a person's constitution or current symptomology. I read and research about Chinese dietary therapy, new trends in food and health, and studies on long- and short-term effects of different foods on different symptoms, all the time.

I have a little refrigerator in the office kitchenette, kindly loaned to me by Emily and Matt. Its entire contents are: about a half a case of beer and a wedge of Brie.

Notes to self

2009-09-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

Today, for the first time, I rode my bike while wearing a short skirt and cowboy boots. And I kept thinking, Why have I never done this before? I am so in my element. This is so me, so true to my real self. There is sun on my thighs; I rock this bike like a cowgirl on a racehorse. The breezes that normally feel so nice on my face feel ever nicer on my legs, even if they mean I ride a bit one-handed while clutching at my hem. I feel beautiful, I feel strong, I feel womanly, I feel quaint and modern, somehow, at the same time. Life, love, California all riot in exaggerated bliss under my sternum.

Today is also the anniversary of the day my mother died, 12 years ago. Every year as this day approaches, I am cranky and miserable, filled with dread, and I never remember why. Yesterday evening in yoga class is when I remembered, and wept all through savasana.

I almost didn't make it to yoga yesterday, but I had been emptily furious all day, with, per usual, no reason I could finger--if anything my life is filled with reasons to be full of joy--and though I was running late to yoga and hate entering a class late, I knew I just needed to be there. Downward dog has become my spiritual landing pad--I know that sounds like so much California cheese, but it's undeniable--and people around me have always been what I depend upon for a recharge. So yoga, in a circle of other people practicing, always smooths the worst knots my brain gets itself in.

So I remembered, wept, came home and wept a little more, but peacefully, in that way it is a relief to grieve when you know what you are grieving and you can't change it. Being able to grieve that way also helped me find my way back to being joyful about the things I can be joyful about: a practice about to open; a fig tree about to fruit; a husband who truly wants my dreams to come true and acts to make that happen, which is the purest and most solid definition of love I think I could ever hope to witness.

And I am joyful for sunlight and the crisp shadow of my bike on quiet tree-lined roads; joyful for knowing a woman who raised me to see the beauty in trees and to take pleasure in great breaths of good air and fabulous shoes and forward movement. I am learning to resign myself to never being resigned to not having her in my day-to-day life; I want one more talk with her so much, and that hurts me, but I never want to stop wanting it. My life is full in many ways, and she is an every-moment part of how I came to be here. I yearn for the past in ways that pull holes in my heart, but I still race forward on miles of sun, and maybe instead of pulling me in half, moving in two directions at once balances me perfectly and exactly in my present.

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy

2009-09-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was running errands in the truck, listening to the country music station.

Whoa, rewind. Let's read that again: The other day, I was running errands in the truck, listening to the country music station. Yes, this is me, Sidewalk Monkey, a young, Asian-American woman, previously of New York, NY, currently missing only a cowboy hat and a bit of straw clenched between my teeth.

Anyway. The station started playing "Desperado," by the Eagles. The only other time I'd heard this song was on a scratchy mixed tape that Brian McVey gave me in 1992 with the admonitory-sounding command to "listen carefully," to it. This was accompanied by a meaningful and baleful stare, which was probably met by my own disingenuously bewildered stare.

Sadly, the track had been rerecorded so many times that the lyrics were completely indecipherable, even to a fourteen-year-old accustomed to gluing herself to the radio every Sunday and filtering Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40 through a crackly haze of the kind of static you pick up when your house backs up to an enormous volcanic ridge. I could make out "Desperado, why don't you come to your senses," and then "...fences.." and then not much more till "before it's too late." I sensed that it was a sad song, that the boy was trying to convey feelings for me, that I should be touched, and so I was. I wondered what a desperado was, but it didn't occur to me to look it up in the dictionary. It sounded romantic, at any rate, and adventurous. Later that month Brian McVey gave me a locket, a large and brassy one attached to a chunky chain that threaded through a piece of glossy cardboard. I slept with it tucked in my hand, under my pillow, for days, amazed at such extravagance.

I don't know what happened to Brian McVey; I don't even remember how he stopped being someone I knew. I do know that he was almost my first lesson in not being able to save someone not ready to be saved--I was 14 and naive for even a 14-year-old, and he was a 19-year-old who had dropped out of high school, was riddled with mysterious ailments, and as such was an irresistibly tragic figure to many girls in the neighborhood--but luck or maybe some tiny wick of self-preservation or maybe just being 14 kept me from falling in too deeply. Maybe I was saved by the fact that I was so completely unaware of what hanging around with boys meant at that age that it never occurred to me to kiss him or let him get close enough to kiss me, or even to hold his hand. I think we just drifted out of touch, easily and mercifully.

A couple of days ago, when I heard "Desperado" on the radio, I remembered Brian McVey right away. I remembered wondering about the rest of lyrics to that song, and turned up the volume to listen more closely.

The thing is, it's a beautiful song. It is a sad song, and romantic; the 14-year-old me was right about that part. I still don't know exactly what a desperado is, and I still don't really want to look it up, preferring the image that the song creates--a lonesome, brittle woman, chasing the ideal of freedom regardless of cost, unaware that her pursuit is really bringing her in a steady loop towards home. That dual and contrary pull--towards freedom, towards home--has been such a constant in my life, something I could not have imagined when I fell asleep in my small, sure bed with the locket clutched in my hand and this scratched, unintelligible crooning pouring from my tape deck. Would it have been something I would have avoided if I had been able to hear the song those 17 years ago--if I'd been able to heed Brian's advice and listen carefully? Or, and this is maybe more likely, would I have thrown myself harder into the desperado role, hoping for someone to see the real, lost, lonely girl I really was and sing me out of my sadness?

And on the other hand, maybe I would have just laughed. I laughed in the truck when the song was over, laughed and laughed as I pulled back into the driveway with the groceries Jam Guy had requested I pick up for him to make dinner with. The song includes lyrics like "You ain't gettin' no younger...Your prison is walking through this world all alone." Beautiful lyrics. But--I was 14!

No, I wasn't getting any younger, thank heavens, since I had finally, like, mastered pre-algebra, or whatever. Brian McVey, wherever you are, I hope you are happy and whole. But, dude. Seriously. Who dedicates a song with lyrics like "You better let somebody love you before it's too late," to a 14-year old? Do you think she might suddenly worry that she is becoming haglike and had better ride off into the sunset with you while somebody, anybody will still have her? That once she hit 15, all her dreams of love and gentle romance, dreams dreamed over department-store trinkets and hand-me-down tape decks, might come crashing down like so much rained-out Aqua Net?

I guess it's always funny thinking back to how serious everything was at that age. I remember girlfriend after girlfriend gravely approaching me to say things like, "Gavin and I are having problems." Or Gavin would approach me with the same vague concern; it would usually come from one or both of them after a couple of days of silent hand-holding while gazing off into opposite directions. For no apparent reason, I was the group-appointed relationship counselor. Certainly I had no relationship experience of my own. I suppose if it had occurred to me that what Brian and I were doing might constitute a relationship, I might consider it to be problematic. But since all we did was talk on the phone and mope around the mall with our respective friends trailing along, I was mystified--pleased, but still mystified--by the locket and mixed tape.

I think now maybe Brian thought I was playing hard-to-get, which explains the lyrics a little more. I was just playing--playing at my last year of really being a little girl while all around me peers were playing at being women. (For crying out loud, I would get Cinnabon frosting all over myself at the mall.) Of course Brian wouldn't have seen this--he was, like most 19-year-old-boys, not overburdened with subtlety or perceptiveness. He had a completely different set of experiences than I had. I wonder if he saw, in my scooting to give him too much room on the food-court bench or my leaving parties too early, avoidance or fear or pride instead of utter ignorance of his intentions.

It is probably all for the best that I didn't hear those lyrics, because along with being more naive and trusting than probably any 14-year-old you've ever met, I was also as insecure as any 14-year-old you've ever met. Geez. I may have been saved from the Brian McVeys of the world, and safely delivered to my Jam Guy, finally, at the ripe and spinsterlike age of 28-going-on-29, by the imperfect technology of home tape recording and its own application of the surprisingly benevolent law of diminishing returns.

On how Sidewalk Monkey, one year after moving to Santa Rosa, continues to realize she no longer lives in New York

2009-08-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

Late last week, I was late for work because I thought there was a skunk hanging out in my driveway. As it turned out--after I skulked fearfully in a wide radius around it for fifteen minutes, called my temp job to report that I would be late because the skunk was blocking my way to my truck which I had to drive to work because my bike had a busted tire, and called Jam Guy to warn him to be careful about the skunk when he came home for lunch--it wasn't actually a skunk, or even in the same Linnaen taxonomic class as a skunk. It was a chicken.

Granted, it was a not any kind of chicken I had ever seen before (and when later that day a friend stopped over and the chicken was still hanging out, our friend exclaimed, "Check out this crazy bird!" as though he'd discovered some exotic avian species). It was, I found by Google-image-searching "black chicken with white mop head," a Polish Bantam hen. It looked like this:

I took some pictures of it--mostly to prove to poor Jam Guy and my vastly amused coworkers that I am not such a crazy city girl that I can't tell a bird from a mammal. But this image, pulled off of the fascinating site backyardchickens.com, is much clearer. I mean, you can kind of see how it looks like a skunk, right? Like a skunk with its little white booty in the air, all ready to spray you with skunkiness?

Anyways. So this is my life now. I used to wake up in New York City, feeling all grouchy because police activity or someone barfing in the gutter had interrupted my sleep, jockey for a spot at the bodega coffee counter, shoulder through rush hour pedestrian traffic, clutch my coffee against the press of bodies in a subway car. Those were my morning battles then. Now I wake up here, grouchy because sunrise-awakened songbirds interrupted my sleep, attempt to get into my pickup truck, and am forestalled by a freaky-deaky chicken with a head that looks like a skunk butt.

Life is good here, and I will take songbirds and chickens and Jam Guy over everything the city offered me. But the curve of my learning about living in a place with such present agricultural roots just stretches longer and longer, and I think I am a long way from the peak of it.

How you know that your dog has eaten too many figs, which are falling off the tree left and right

2009-07-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

Because figs have a lot--A LOT--of fiber, your dog wakes you up a couple of times in the middle of the night to be let outside, and the rest of the night, while he sweetly insists on sleeping right next to your bed, his tummy rumbles so loudly it keeps you awake.

Also, he gets chubby.

I know I've been neglecting to blog here.

2009-07-24T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's not an excuse, just an explanation: every day there are blog posts running through my head, and then every evening I get too busy/tired/drunk to write them down.

More will come soon.

In the meantime, it's been a while since we had some shoe lust.

Remember those Cole Haan Sierra boots that inspired Major Serious Shoe Lust? They still make me drool (and they're on sale now, though not exactly a deal). These London Air T-Straps are kind of their sister sandal--they are also made by Cole Haan, also have the Nike Air Technology that theoretically makes a narrowly stacked three-and-three-quarter-inch heel feel like a running shoe, and they have the black-and-brown thing going on that means they match with pretty much everything and are more interesting than just black or just brown. Plus, the big buckle on the contrasting brown strap--which on the Sierra boots looks classy and equestrian--makes these sandals tough, but in a fancy way. DROOL.

Another garage sale Saturday

2009-06-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

Garage sales visited: 11

Miles driven: About 27

Items purchased: An old chinoise-style ricer/strainer that will come in handy when we're canning our tomatoes and making jam from our figs and raspberries; a vintage brass clinical-looking floor lamp to put in my treatment room; a steel table on wheels to hold my acupuncture supplies when I'm doing a community-style clinic; a cash box for the office; and a clipboard for doing intakes.

Total cost: $16.25

On a perfect day, so far

2009-06-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

This morning Jam Guy and I woke up and had a lazy morning before heading out in our new old truck to find a few garage sales and hit up our favorite secondhand store. We came home with a pair of nice, dark-wood framed mirrors to replace the fugly bathroom mirror in my office space, a large buffet that, once repainted, will work perfectly in the treatment room as a surface and storage space for acupuncture supplies, a cushy old chair upholstered in a pretty sage-and-peach faded stripe pattern that works perfectly on our sun porch, and a couple of fancy vintage speakers that Jam Guy is now happily tinkering with. On the way home, we stopped at a farm stand and bought a half-flat of freshly picked strawberries, which we set between us on the wide bench seat of the truck and ate an unbelievable quantity of on the way home, staining our mouths and hands red. The way home itself, scented with strawberries, was a lazy country road weaving between corrals of indifferent horses, rows of wine grapes, more yard sales and strawberry plants and fruit orchards.

Now that we're home, I'm getting ready to pick a bucketful of mint and brew some sweet mint tea, which might turn into mint juleps later if this warm summery air hangs around into the evening. While that simmers, I'm going to start mixing up some Early Bird Granola, for which I am indebted to Miss May in the Bay, who not only introduced me to this delicious treat from her current hometown of Brooklyn (shout-out to Brooklyn!) but also linked the recipe on her blog.

So much to be grateful for is not like too much candy; it's not something that tires your spirit or hurts your head as more and more waves of gratitude break over you. What it does is open your eyes wider and wider to all the pieces of your life that merit your thanksgiving, all the little and big pieces that you didn't see the day before or the day before that. Your eyes widen, become kaleidoscopic, turn multi-faceted like the eyes of bees, taking in all the contrast and the beauty that form the building blocks of your life. It is a small and an inside evolution, a survival mechanism, a breath-by-breath way to keep your heart from exploding with joy.

Random thoughts from this past week, wherein we got married, went on a honeymoon, and then spent a full weekend at home doing nothing together.

2009-06-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

I am pretty sure that these, right now, are The Good Old Days.

Our wedding was one of those giant labors of love that every so often makes you question your own desires and devotion to an amorphous aesthetic ideal. We had decided on a simple, laid-back garden party, but no matter how determined we were to take things easy, throwing a party for 100 dear friends and family while tying the knot is not a simple feat, particularly if, when it comes down to it, you are two people who both get a little crazy about realizing a vision. Apparently, even if your vision is "chill, fun, backyard barbeque with lots of pretty colors" but you are not remotely interested in even slightly compromising that vision, it is still a lot of work to pull off.

However, we are blessed to have wonderful friends and family--my sister, the organizational genius; May and Surfrunner, who reassured me countless times via email about my wedding attitudes and accoutrements, and who danced a hula with me that our lovely sister-in-spirit Mahina choreographed; Emily, who found my dress and my shoes, who hovered around us the week of the wedding and readily helped us with anything we needed, who acted as my hands and my sister's hands the day before the wedding when our own hands were covered in sticky black henna. A wonderful couple that knows Adam from Pennsylvania and now lives here in Santa Rosa came over on a sweltering Saturday a couple weeks before the wedding and repaired our gate, and then returned a week later with a beautiful, handmade redwood well cover to replace the ill-fitting steel plate we'd been using. Jam Guy's parents and many of our friends set up chairs, charmed my not-easy-to-charm father, kept our pets for the day for us, built a bridge for our guests to more safely cross from the creek trail to our back gate when they arrived by rickshaw. Another friend lent his beautiful artwork to decorate the garden. Yet another played her accordion for arriving guests and another gifted us with a spectacular bellydance. We had friends who made us a keg of beer; we've made friends with the lovely folks who catered the wedding and made our rings and took our pictures. We had friends pulling weeds and staining picture frames and setting up tables and folding origami favors. My father, who I had feared would hate the lack of tradition in our wedding and make a point of telling me so, only reiterated over and over that he wanted me to be happy and enjoy the day. It was exactly the wedding we both wanted, and it became this beautiful celebration of love--not just romantic love between new husband and new wife, but the deep, sustaining love of a funny, diverse, wonderful community that grants context and meaning to our marriage.

And this is not to say Jam Guy and I didn't work hard ourselves putting the wedding together. We did; in fact, I kept joking that it was boot camp for marriage. I hadn't doubted before that we make a good team, but I am more sure than ever that we make one of the best teams I've ever been part of. I was not one of those brides that plan the entire wedding myself and just get the groom to okay everything--I was matched and even exceeded in my efforts by my amazing guy. We had the vision in common: a fun, poppy-filled, lovey-but-not-barfy day, and we pulled each other toward it with a weirdly unwavering sureness of it being exactly the right wedding for us. And, thanks to each other, to our just incredible community, to our families and friends and the amazing Santa Rosa weather and the dirt in our backyard that gets things to grow like magic beanstalks, it really was just exactly right.

Now we are married and totally stoked about it.

We went on a honeymoon that was just a big pile of bliss, the bliss of not having to do anything at all but exercise options like living on mimosas or petting wandering neighbor dogs or lying on the couch and watching Quantum Leap or cooking ourselves in the hot tub underneath tall redwoods and rain clouds.

The first night of our honeymoon, we slept soundly for the first time in weeks, probably because we didn't have to-do lists running through our heads for the first time in weeks. But I dreamed a dream that frequently recurs: in the dream, I am back with my crazy, controlling ex-boyfriend, somehow talked into or passively fallen back into that poisonous relationship. Whenever I am in this dream I am agonizingly aware of how much happiness I am giving up to be with the scary ex, but the thought of mustering up all the strength it took to leave him the first time exhausts me. I keep trying to muster it, and I can't, and I am furious that I have trapped myself yet again even though I ought to know better.

In this dream that night, though, my sister and my mother were both living near me, and I kept lying and lying to them about how great my relationship with the scary ex was, because I was too ashamed to admit how enormously mistaken I'd been in returning to him. But in the way that the important women in your life know when you're with someone who's not good enough for you, I knew they knew, and they were just pretending to believe my lame deception. In the dream I was having lunch with my mom after a particularly difficult morning with the scary ex--one of those mornings we had so often, where he said and did a million brutally hurtful things but they were all so little, like papercuts, that I couldn't pick one out to use as a reason to leave--and, exhausted, I blurted out to my mom, "I have to leave him."

"Thank God," she responded, putting down her fork. "Yes, you do."

"But, Mom," I said, finally laying all my cards on the table, bursting into tears, putting my broken heart in her hands the way I wished I could do when I was leaving the scary ex in real life, "What do I do? I just don't know what to do, I don't know where to start, I don't know how to begin to leave."

And she said, with her eyes fixed very seriously and confidently on mine: "You just do."

It was like a huge, heavy cowl had been lifted off my shoulders and away from my eyes, like I hadn't been able to feel or see sunlight before she uttered those three words. There was so much relief in being told I could just walk away, that maybe my past could really just, simply, be left in my past.

When I woke up I felt happy and light. I stretched, I read comics in bed till Jam Guy woke, and then I took the delicious coffee he made me and sat out on the deck of our borrowed cabin.

It had rained a little the night before, and as I tried to count the different birds I was hearing in the riot of morning bird song, a monarch butterfly drifted across the driveway in front of me and then settled inches away from me, dead center in my field of vision, onto the sun-warmed asphalt drive. It settled there and slowly moved its wings, up and down, drying them from the rain.

I called Jam Guy to see. The butterfly stayed there for minutes, carefully warming its damp wings, before taking off and fluttering around us for a while and then disappearing into the redwoods.

Jam Guy and I have been gifted with animal totems in the significant moments of our lives intertwining: moments before he asked me to marry him, we saw a stag with a full rack of antlers pause just yards from us before leaping away in glorious, sunlit arcs; when we took a quiet, reflective walk along the creek path immediately after our wedding ceremony, we spotted a gleaming mallard duck paddling complacently down the creek with his brown-speckled mate right beside him, in what could have been a water-dwelling, feathered reflection of us. Now this butterfly perched before us shedding the rain that made its wings too heavy for easy flight, coming to us so quickly after a dream in which I was shown my own power to shed old, weighty grief. It was, is, a symbol of new life in all sorts of ways. Grateful and humbled, I am newly determined to see myself stepping into a new and beautiful phase of my life, one where I have both the power and the support to really and truly walk away from old, limiting patterns.

Last night I sat reading The Peaceable Kingdom by Jan de Hartog, a hefty historical novel about the roots of Quakerism. Jam Guy was in the kitchen making up a huge pot of Mahogany Beef Stew in order to not waste the opened jugs of red wine left over from the wedding; Toby was sleeping at my feet; Meimei was sleeping under the china cabinet--in short, we were all doing our favorite things, and our little house felt happy (and smelled amazing).

Today I went for a jog around the creek--my first jog since getting married, since our honeymoon was largely spent being gloriously and uncompromisingly lazy. I am thinking of my jogs now as blackberry-monitoring runs, because the wild blackberries growing by the creek are in that stage where half the bushes are still flowering but the other half are covered with little hard green bumpy berries that any day now will start ripening and tempting the hundreds of people that use the creek trail every day, and while I know I have all those other joggers and walkers and bikers, and birds and bugs and the occasional bramble-braving berry-loving dog, to share them with, it would be so lovely to eat a bursting pieful of them in our first full summer living along this creek in this home where I hope we grow old. When I was almost at the end of my run, I spotted one of our neighbors and stopped to chat with her. I stopped maybe a little too suddenly, though, felt woozy, and sat down, and somehow managed to drop my phone, which went all to pieces.

When I got home I handed the pieces of phone to Jam Guy, who promptly fixed it. I handed it to him not because I didn't know how to fix it--I do, and have (I drop my phone a lot) although Jam Guy did it about five times faster than I would have. I give him my broken gadgets to fix, and ask him questions that I know will be answered with "yes," like: will you clasp this necklace for me? will you help me drain the pasta? because hearing "yes" and being taken care of the way he takes care of me makes me feel drunk with luxury. Because I worked really hard, for reasons the grown-up me is not clear about, from an inappropriately early age to make myself look like someone who didn't need to be taken care of, to the point that everyone believed me at least to an extent and I managed to hurt myself by letting them. By the time I met Jam Guy, the part of me that is in everyone, the part that needs taking care of, was that kind of hungry where you're so hungry that you don't even know you're hungry, until someone like Jam Guy feeds you a little kindness and shows you he has just a whole huge kitchen full that he wants to share with you, and you realize you're starving. And so when I ask him to change a lightbulb when I used to make a point of changing them myself, or to talk me out of another bad dream, or to help me find the fennel seeds in the spice drawer, I am doing it with the decadent sense of incredulous privilege that a pauper might do when she suddenly finds herself mistaken for a princess.

Sidewalk Monkey and Jam Guy are married!

2009-06-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

Woo woo!

More soon.

I miss blogging here.

2009-05-15T23:02:00.001-07:00

I have been busy with trying to get married, and I keep starting posts--posts about the complex things my brain is doing while I am trying to get married, all sorts of things like reviewing my ideas about marriage and happiness and balance; and posts about gratitude for my amazing friends and family who are making this wedding turn into a community-supported event, an event binding and defining community in new and beautiful ways for me; and posts about little anxieties like getting all the RSVPs straight and will it rain and should I be skinnier and big anxieties like why do I deserve to be this happy and how do people live knowing that the most precious things in their worlds are temporary at best and what if I am doing something crazy. I keep starting these posts and then being distracted by the lists upon lists of little details in my head: rickshaws! parasols! poppies! mason jars! and then I leave the posts for another time.

Two weeks and a day to go, and then I can finally stop saying "my fiancé," like a goober.

I have every intention of coming back here, with more frequency, more clarity and fewer run-on sentences, after the wedding. Actually, no promises about the clarity and run-on sentences.

So. I have not been feeling very blogolicious

2009-04-08T22:44:00.000-07:00

and I don't know why. It's not that anything bad is going on; in fact, everything is going swimmingly. It's not that I haven't felt strong emotions, because I have; it's not that my gratitude about how loved I am and how tailored-to-me my life is starting to feel has diminished even a little. If anything, it keeps growing at the kind of alarming rate a puppy grows, and in leaps.

So I am just going to blog away, post this, and be happy I wrote something.

I finally got my real acupuncture license in the mail over the weekend, so today I went to see a possible space in which to start my practice, and I am really excited about it. It is the first space I've seen, but in the way that I went back to get the first set of bridal jewelry that I saw when shopping in L.A. with my sister, I am pretty sure this is it. There are pros and cons; the biggest con is that this is a second-floor space and there's no elevator, so if I have patients who can't manage stairs, which is possible, they won't be able to visit me. However, the pros are overwhelming: it comes with a built-in community in the form of a healing arts collective that appears to be really invested in the success of its members; I like the woman who runs the collective; it's on a fantastic downtown block, with lots of foot traffic that is just fun to be on. There is a skylight.

My sister wrote this amazing play and won this huge competition and the play was read in L.A. this past weekend. Jam Guy and I went, and I am so grateful that my sister is so talented; this play, besides just being a really fantastic work, makes me feel closer to our mother, and makes me feel like Jam Guy got to experience our mother just a little bit. That makes me feel closer to Jam Guy, like we know each other a little better now. It makes me in awe of my sister. In some ways we are so alike, and in some ways she is always/still this awe-inspiring big sister from a superior planet, or something.

The wedding is coming together--we have this kick-ass Polaroid photographer coming to take snapshots of everybody; we have friends providing produce from their farms and gardens and other friends ethically and sustainably raising a pig to roast at the celebration; we have our friends with a marriage that we deeply admire officiating.

So a lot of good things are happening. I called 2009 the Year of Abundance in January, a little bit because I really felt it, and a lot because I felt if I said it enough it would just be true. And I do feel like things are constantly evolving towards good, like while there are good days and days that are just OK the general trend is better and better. And I am learning that happiness is not a summit you achieve and then rest at and admire the view; it is a constant effort. It takes every-moment work on my insides. Not always hard work, but not always easy; certainly it is worth it. I imagine it is part of growing up.

And the big things, the important things, like the sincerity with which Jam Guy loves me, like how much I like coming home every day and how blessed I feel falling asleep and waking up in my life, those don't change, but I am newly amazed every day by their not changing.

Thinking about my new temp job, and why it's good that I'm going to be opening my own practice

2009-02-24T23:06:00.000-08:00

Sidewalk Monkey: Sometimes I feel like I just don't like working with other people on a project. I mean I like people, I just don't like working with a group of them towards, like, a goal. Does that mean I'm a snob? Or does it mean I'm elitist? Or does it mean I'm antisocial? I don't think I'm antisocial.

Jam Guy: No. It means most people are idiots.

I'm a Katharine!

2009-02-13T16:07:00.001-08:00

Thanks to May in the Bay for posting this...I took it as a time-waster, and somehow in just a couple of questions it came out pretty spot-on--how is that possible?--except for maybe a couple of things, which I bet you folks who know me well will be able to pick out.

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz...

You Are a Katharine!

You are a Katharine -- "I am happy and open to new things"

Katharines are energetic, lively, and optimistic. They want to contribute to the world.

How to Get Along with Me

* Give me companionship, affection, and freedom.

* Engage with me in stimulating conversation and laughter.

* Appreciate my grand visions and listen to my stories.

* Don't try to change my style. Accept me the way I am.

* Be responsible for youself. I dislike clingy or needy people.

* Don't tell me what to do.

What I Like About Being a Katharine

* being optimistic and not letting life's troubles get me down

* being spontaneous and free-spirited

* being outspoken and outrageous. It's part of the fun.

* being generous and trying to make the world a better place

* having the guts to take risks and to try exciting adventures

* having such varied interests and abilities

What's Hard About Being a Katharine

* not having enough time to do all the things I want

* not completing things I start

* not being able to profit from the benefits that come from specializing; not making a commitment to a career

* having a tendency to be ungrounded; getting lost in plans or fantasies

* feeling confined when I'm in a one-to-one relationship

Katharines as Children Often

* are action oriented and adventuresome

* drum up excitement

* prefer being with other children to being alone

* finesse their way around adults

* dream of the freedom they'll have when they grow up

Katharines as Parents

* are often enthusiastic and generous

* want their children to be exposed to many adventures in life

* may be too busy with their own activities to be attentive

Take Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz at HelloQuizzy

Last night I dreamed about my mother.

2009-02-11T08:43:00.001-08:00

In the dream, she was visiting Santa Rosa and planning all these fun touristy things with some girlfriends of hers that she hadn't seen in a long time. She was really excited, girlish about it, happy. It was nice to see.

She had let me know she was coming--I think she and I were attending a wedding that we'd both come to independently, and I had had to find her among the wedding guests. When I found her, she seemed pleased but not ecstatic to see me, and she was distracted, talking to this friend and the other about their sightseeing plans. I realized she hadn't planned any time to spend with me on her trip.

I asked where she was staying, and when I found out it was just blocks away from our house, I suggested she come and see the place. I really, really wanted her to see it, and to see how happy my life is now with Jam Guy in our sweet little home.

And she dithered about it, looking uncomfortable, explained she just couldn't make the time, and when I didn't buy that, she made it more or less clear that she didn't think it would be that much fun, that in fact it sounded boring, and she was not on this trip to endure boredom. She didn't want to see the place or spend time with me; she wanted to have fun with her friends and enjoy wine country. She didn't want to spend her vacation being a mother. She wanted to take a break and just be, uncomplicatedly, a woman.

In the dream my feelings were deeply hurt. When I woke up, though, I thought, doesn't everyone deserve a break from their responsibilities once in a while? A breather? I am not really sure what the answer to this is. Maybe we don't. Maybe some responsibilities are ours to carry 24/7 and lifelong, whether we chose them or not.

Maybe we only escape them when we leave our lives for good. Maybe that's what my dream was about--my mother is no longer someone that I can ask for a stamp of approval on things like my house, my fiance, my life. Now the responsibility for that, for deciding I'm allowed this luxury of joy, lies on me. And that even if it took me a lifetime and hard loss to learn this, maybe it is time to see that the responsibility for claiming my happiness was always mine and mine alone, never truly hers, never anyone else's.

Or maybe the dream was just about wishing so hard my mother could come and see how happy I am, finally, and share it with me.

Year of abundance

2009-02-10T08:29:00.000-08:00

Since about December 30th, I've been relentlessly insisting that 2009 will be "the year of abundance." So far, so very, very good: my genius sister placed first in a national playwriting competition, Jam Guy has with abundant energy replaced the roof on our greenhouse and built us a bed, Surfrunner welcomed a new baby nephew, I passed my boards and can start planning to start my practice. We are making new friends and enriching old friendships. Oh! And this afternoon, after like six months of applying to practically every single job I qualify for within a half-hour's drive because sitting at home not working is messing with my head, I started a part-time temp job at a county land preservation agency that's a ten-minute bike ride away--not a dream job, but exactly what I need in these months while I'm building a practice, and anyways in this economy a proffered job is a bird in the hand that I would be foolish to let go.

Meanwhile all the other manifestations of abundance that came into being in 2008 and in prior years are still novel to me: being engaged to someone so remarkable and kind and fun to hang out with, living in a home that is everything I want in a home, living in an area that is a phenomenal balance of rural and citified, landing in a career that makes me look forward to working.

In traditional Chinese medicine, all emotions taken to an extreme are pathological. It's easy to see how things like anger, grief, and anxiety can harm a person. But even joy is pathological when there is too much of it, when there is constant joy and no moments apart from it for quiet contemplation; joy as opposed to contentment, say, without a break from it, is not much to complain about but does overstimulate, exhaust. It is said to slow down the qi--a good example is the person who's constantly partying or seeking the next party, who however tends not to provide the most focused or logical conversation.

Again, it is not much to complain about, and I am not complaining. But in the last couple of years I've gone from a lot of despair to a lot of bliss , and there is a definite and necessary adjustment period. Adjusting to happiness is a very, very good situation to be in, even if it means I haven't slept well since getting my pass notice and have been all scatterbrained and underfocused. I am almost certain that this state of insomniac spaced-out-ness is a symptom of the deep, hard-to-reconcile contrast between my past and my present--the way that when you manage to stop a vehicle hurtling towards certain destruction, you get whiplash, but your gratitude at being alive at all makes the temporary ache so entirely bearable.

New Year's Day Dinner!

2009-01-26T21:59:00.001-08:00

Happy Chinese New Year!

Okay--I took one of these photos, Jam Guy took the rest. Guess which one I took.

The spread

Fried trout with black bean sauce and garden greens

Wontons, from our inexact family recipe

Changde Rice Noodles with Red-Braised Beef, from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province by Fuschia Dunlop

and the somewhat incongruous but super-festive and delicious Chocolate-Cherry Upside Down Cake, from Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family, by Norma Jean and Carol Darden.

I know. We used the same camera and everything.

RIP Stacey II.

2009-01-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Today we laid to rest a treasured member of our household, Stacey II, our betta fish.

Stacey II lived on the table in my San Diego apartment that served as a dining area, study zone, and entertainment center. I chatted with him every day that we lived there together. He was beautiful, with red and blue fins, and awfully assertive. He jumped for his food sometimes. He traveled to Santa Rosa with us in a Mason jar with holes in the lid, snuggled into the passenger-side cupholder, under a little awning of a Google Maps printout to protect him from the sun.

Yesterday Jam Guy and I noticed Stacey II--who was named after Stacey the First, a betta fish I loved and lost and deeply mourned when I was in second grade--was not acting himself. An internet search revealed that he most likely had "swim bladder disorder" and needed to fast for three days and then be fed a mashed up, peeled, thawed pea. We changed his water and made sure not to feed him, and by last night we were hopeful he was getting better. Today, though, he was clearly in bad shape, and he passed away this afternoon.

Jam Guy dug a hole in the garden, and we each said a few words for Stacey II. His little body will nourish our vegetables in this new year, and wherever he is, he is at peace and in a better place.

We will miss you, Stacey II. You were a good fish and a good friend.

This brings up strong and conflicting emotions for me.

2008-12-22T21:18:00.000-08:00

Last week I dreamed

2008-12-15T17:46:00.000-08:00

that I was back at Camp Timberline in Mokuleia, Hawai'i, where I'd spent at least one weekend a year at chorus rehearsal camp from sixth grade till I went to college, plus here and there a second or even third weekend in a year for some school event or another. I dreamed that I was there as the adult I am now, with a lot of the other alumnae of the chorus. But my sister was also there, and some other non-alumni of the choir and friends I'd met as an adult; none of them had been to the camp before. I couldn't wait to show them this place that held so many of my memories.

The first place I wanted to take them was the mess hall, which I remembered being up a small flight of stairs. But the stairs were gone, apparently succumbed to neglect and covered with dirt. In their place was a steep hill, which I thought I could run up if I was quick enough. I tried, but found myself on my hands and knees, grasping handfuls of dirt, making slow and clumsy progress--while some of my fellow alumnae ran lightly past me, and quickly out of my field of vision.

Eventually I found the old staircase, which was so much steeper than I remembered that I found myself trying to climb it like a ladder. But the wood was rotten and crumbled away in my hands as I grabbed it. I was already halfway up the hill, which seemed to be getting taller and taller, and I didn't want to fall. I found myself in a race against the crumbling wood, hoping I could grab it and pull myself upwards in the split-second between when I touched the ladder and when it disintegrated. It wasn't working, but it slowed my descent from a free fall into a slow, scrambling sink.

I sank down the hillside with my hands full of dirt and rotten wood, slowly, in spite of all my flailing, getting further and further away from the place I'd hoped to revisit some of my happier childhood memories.

It has been a difficult couple of weeks for me, recovering slowly from my trip to Tampa and the flu I seem to have brought home with me. In Tampa, my sister and I went through what felt like a million old photo albums that my father and his new wife did not want to store any more, filled with pictures of my parents as a young couple and the two of us as children. We mailed them to ourselves. We were presented with my mother's jewelry, most of which we vividly remember her wearing; we held her wedding ring set and wondered about another mysterious wedding ring set which we'd never seen her wear. We don't know anyone to ask about it. We divided the jewelry and brought it back to our respective homes.

Home, I held the pieces of jewelry in my hands. I pored over the photographs of my mother as a teenager, as a young woman, as a new mother, as a mother to two young women as emotionally fragile as she herself was, and I tried to find answers to questions I can't ask her anymore. I tried on her wedding ring set and found she had the same, tiny, difficult-to-find ring size as I do.
It is not enough.

I have spent the last two weeks mostly watching reruns of The Wonder Years, which I remembered after I started watching it is a show my mother loved. I haven't watched it since it originally aired starting twenty years ago. I didn't remember more than the very basic elements of its plot. But amazingly, as the episodes rolled forward, I remembered exactly the spots where she'd burst into laughter. I could almost hear her. I heard, certainly, the absence of her laughter in the spots where I hadn't realized I was expecting it until it wasn't there. I remembered, with cold-water clarity, her voice, which is the part of her, more than any other, I always fear I am forgetting, and the sound of her laughter, which I always fear I didn't hear enough.

I think I know what my dream was about. It was my subconscious poking at me, reminding me of the impossibility of regaining my childhood. It was telling me that no matter how many afternoons I spent staring at old photos or how many baubles I tried on, my past is at the top of a steep and unclimbable hill, something I can try to examine in a limited, distant way, but never re-enter. Trying to come back under its cover is futile, unproductive, messy, exhausting. Nothing there can be changed or kept. It is time to come all the way back into the present.

Last night I dreamed

2008-12-06T11:01:00.000-08:00

that my good friend D., whom I originally met in New York but got to know well in San Diego, was housesitting this amazing place in Hawai'i or the Caribbean, or somewhere sort of tropical. It was a beautiful, slightly ominous mansion--more like a castle or a palace, all white marble, overlooking cliffs where huge waves crashed under dark roiling clouds. It wasn't really beach weather, which is probably why the people who owned the house weren't there.

So D.'s job in this house was to feed their collection of this exotic, red crustacean. Sounds simple, except that these crustaceans lived in this very deep, narrow pool that occupied its own room of the house--a pool with a very small circumference that went down maybe 20 yards--like a well. The little crabs or crayfish or whatever they were couldn't swim and couldn't breathe above water; they just all clung to the sides of the pool, so that its entire inner surface except for the very bottom was plastered with their small, hard, burn-colored shells.

Apparently the only way to feed the crustaceans was for a reasonably strong, experienced swimmer to dive straight to the bottom of the well, place the food there at the bottom (I guess it was some sort of weighted packet that gradually dispersed food upwards) and then ascend straight upwards. The key was to not touch any of the little crustacean bodies on the way up--because apparently these crustaceans, while not aggressive, would lash out and bite if touched, and their bite was fatally venomous. All of this made feeding them a very stressful undertaking.

Nervously, I watched D. feed the crustaceans. When he came up not dead, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then he asked me if I'd feed them while he went out of town over the next couple of days. I thought, No way, while hearing myself say "Okay, sure."

I dreamed of peering into the well the next day, reminding myself that I am a pretty decent swimmer, though not by any means an expert diver. I drew a deep breath and dove in headfirst, letting out my breath as I descended in a straight line, clutching the food packet, somehow managing not to touch any of the deadly little shells surrounding me. I thought about how much I was risking, how no one besides D., who was out of town, knew I was doing this. I thought, I just have to get through the next few seconds and I will be fine--just put the food down, turn around, swim straight back up, pull yourself out. One step at a time. Then I thought, How am I going to turn around?

I put the food down and then curled myself double somehow, touching my toes, and, in the improbable kind of thing we do in dreams, somehow snaked myself right-side-up and held myself rigidly straight as I floated to the surface.

When I was safely out of the water, I decided I would never, ever, ever again agree to feed someone's pet deadly-poisonous crustaceans at the bottom of a well. Shaken, I started to walk--I don't know where--home?

In dreams, I am almost always somewhere that I don't live--on vacation, or on a business trip, or at camp, or fleeing a war zone. I am often some kind of fugitive, or on some kind of mission, or both. Rarely in a dream do I sigh and think, well, my errands for the day are done; I'll just go home.

But in this dream, after successfully feeding the toxic crustaceans*, I was walking along one of those outdoor hallways that apartment buildings in warm climates tend to have. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement, and when I turned, I saw Miss Laura Van Holt (of The Famous Chronicles) whom I know via my dear friend Mayumi, washing the outside wall of her 30th-floor apartment. She was standing on one of those ladders like they have outside water towers, comprised entirely of metal rungs stuck into the side of the building. I called to her, "Laura! Honey, what are you doing?" (It is only in dreams, mostly in dreams that occur after I visit places like Tampa, that I ever call people "Honey" in a Southern accent.)

"Washing my wall," Laura said. "I figured, why pay someone to do something I could do myself?"

"But you don't have a harness, or a net, or anything!"

"Well," she pointed out, "that's only a problem if I let go of the ladder."

I considered calling Mayumi to tell her that her friend was acting crazy, but then I wondered if maybe it was me being crazy, or paranoid, or hypervigilant. After all, I'd just voluntarily slipped underwater into a narrow space filled with deadly shrimps, or something, after watching my friend do exactly the same thing. Maybe, I pondered in my dream, that is just what life is--all of it is always at stake, everything is loaded with risk, every step you take is as precarious as the steps my friend balanced on thirty stories above the ground; every breath you take is as crucial, as potentially ultimate, as the one I took before diving into the well.

*Band name!

Day 4 in a small town near Tampa, FL: No therapy like completely immature humor

2008-11-30T16:51:00.000-08:00

Seen on the drive back from the Wagon Wheel Flea Market to the new home that my dad and his wife recently purchased:

Ha ha.

We also passed a business whose sign read "Quaker Steak and Lube." My sister and I are mystified. While pondering that, we passed a restaurant apparently named "HISPANIC RESTAURANT." Don't know where to start with that one.

One more day plus a few more hours, and I'll be on my way home to Jam Guy, Toby, Meimei, our garden, and lube-free steak.

(Hey! I survived NaBloPoMo! Somebody give me a monkey sticker!)

Aaaand...heard tonight from person who shall remain nameless

2008-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

"You know, like, when there are natural disasters? Those people in third-world countries really have an advantage over us, because they know how to survive on sand and bugs and stuff."

Heard tonight from person who shall remain nameless

2008-11-28T21:03:00.001-08:00

"The thing about shopping in India is, it's really hard, because people just keep coming up to you to ask for money. I mean, so many people keep asking you for money that you can't even buy stuff."

People in airports

2008-11-27T20:07:00.000-08:00

are almost always a mess, yours truly included. I don't just mean a literal mess, although that happens too--airplane air is not kind to your hairdo; you have circles under your eyes from time changes; your clothes are rumpled--but everyone's emotions are closer to the surface. Mothers that probably don't snap at their kids all the time snap left and right, probably because they are tired and feeling extra-protective far from the safe confines of home. Impatient guys in sharp suits and ties get on their cell phones and you can hear their impatience rampage out of control in their prickly, jagged voices; they punch at their blackberries like they're trying to displace someone's ribs. Couples bicker and sigh loudly at one another, or else make out or lay all over each other on the airport carpet, while normally mild germophobes eye them with overt disgust and outrage and something like fear. How it manifests in me? I, normally a bit soft-hearted, cry at the slightest thought of anything remotely sad. Or happy, for that matter. Once, watching Lilo and Stitch on a flight to Hawai'i, I literally sobbed--sobbed--for five minutes straight. It was embarrassing.

Today they played Wall-E on the plane. I was so distraught and brought so close to tears at all the touching/suspenseful/wistful scenes that I had to keep taking my headphones off and switching back to reading my book. Then my book, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, would get touching or suspenseful or wistful, and I would have to switch back to Wall-E. Then I would have to switch again, and again. Then I would get stressed out and try to study instead of reading or watching the movie. Then I would miss Jam Guy and the way he nobly motivates me to study, which would make me think about how thankful I am for his presence in my life, which would make me distraught and close to tears again. In the end I wept helplessly over all three love stories.

Tonight I am a jangly bundle of nerves

2008-11-26T22:20:00.000-08:00

I am apprehensive about a family Thanksgiving visit coming up tomorrow, with all of the emotional twistiness that such visits entail, and I am disproportionately sad about leaving Jam Guy for the five days that I'll be away on this trip, probably because the time we have been having these past few months, finally living in the same town, in the same house, has been so sweet, and spending five nights away from him feels like taking a risk that I will wake and find it has all been a nice dream.

I am trying to stay positive and light and have faith in the process of walking my path. One foot in front of the other has gotten me to this place of incredulous joy; I have no reason to stop trusting in forward motion. And I am going to try my best to believe that visiting my dad will not be a departure from the kind of happiness that I experience here in our little house, but a way to move even further into it, to broaden it and enrich it. I am going to try to trust, to fall without a parachute, to erect boundaries that are flexible and grounded in compassion and love and a history of real affection, to avoid crouching fearfully behind a poky cement rampart and peering from a great distance at someone I have never not loved and always hoped to truly know.

I am going to remember to give thanks, over and over again, for all of the things that are not obvious, along with the things that are.

I went to a yoga class tonight

2008-11-25T21:31:00.000-08:00

and it felt SO GOOD. I haven't taken a class since I moved up here to Santa Rosa in August. I was invited by a good friend of Jam Guy's, and it was a small and intimate class of just six women, which was lovely. I can't wait till next week's class, and I think I will really need it after Thanksgiving. Yay for Downward Dog!

Correction to post below

2008-11-24T09:53:00.000-08:00

Where I said that the song below was "kind of cheesy"? I just read the lyrics again in the cooler light of morning, and I have to correct: They are really, really cheesy. Cheesy like Chester the Chee-toh Cheetah. Cheesy like the mysterious orange sauce that is produced from those blue mac and cheese mix boxes. Cheesy like it ain't easy. Not good, tasteful cheesy, like Camembert and Stilton and Taleggio. Velveeta cheesy.

I still like it, though. A lot. I like the idea of heartbreak after heartbreak serving as stepping stones to joy. I like the idea of a greater plan; I like that I found Jam Guy because, not in spite of, the often-bumpy, muddy, wildly-circuitous path I took on my way here.

But. I am no longer considering it for our first dance at the wedding, because everybody we know will laugh us out of our own damn backyard, and they won't be wrong to do it, either.

Lately I have been liking country music, unapologetically

2008-11-23T20:12:00.000-08:00

My weekly drive to and from Berkeley for a review class is pretty much the only time I listen to the radio. You know that Sublime song, "Boss DJ"? Where he goes, "Nowadays the songs on the radio all, all drive me crazy"? That's kind of how I feel lately, tuning in to the top 40. Maybe I'm getting crotchedy and un-hip now that I've hit 30. There are a few songs I like, but they are so few and far between, and the majority are (to me) SO BAD that they actually make me cranky.

So--and yes, maybe this is evidence that I'm getting soft in my old age--lately I've been tuning into the country station. I'm finding that a lot of country songs, which I busily discounted as a teen and twentysomething without really listening to them, sound to my unexposed-to-country-music-ear fresh, unpretentious and pretty. Many of them are just telling stories with pretty melodies: not a whole lot to not like.

Today as I was just starting home I heard this song, with lyrics that sounded so much like me talking to/thinking about Jam Guy that it made me cry nearly all the way to Petaluma. Granted, I don't use the term "God" so much (preferring "God or the Universe or Fate or the Dao or the Jedi Force or whoever or whatever is running things") but if you switched out "God" for my more ungainly terminology, it would sound pretty much just like me.

I googled it as soon as I got home; it's called "Bless the Broken Road" and it's by Rascal Flatts.

I set out on a narrow way many years ago
Hoping I would find true love along the broken road
But I got lost a time or two
Wiped my brow and kept pushing through
I couldn't see how every sign pointed straight to you

Every long lost dream led me to where you are
Others who broke my heart they were like Northern stars
Pointing me on my way into your loving arms
This much I know is true
That God blessed the broken road
That led me straight to you

I think about the years I spent just passing through
I'd like to have the time I lost and give it back to you
But you just smile and take my hand
You've been there you understand
It's all part of a grander plan that is coming true

Every long lost dream led me to where you are
Others who broke my heart they were like Northern stars
Pointing me on my way into your loving arms
This much I know is true
That God blessed the broken road
That led me straight to you

Now I'm just rolling home
Into my lover's arms
This much I know is true
That God blessed the broken road
That led me straight to you

That God blessed the broken road
That led me straight to you.

-----
It is kind of cheesy, but then so am I, often, when it comes to Jam Guy.

Sidewalk Monkey to Jam Guy, while enthusing about how much she likes venison

2008-11-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

"I could probably really get into deer hunting, if I weren't so scared of guns. And also of killing deer."

Jam Guy and Sidewalk Monkey watch an episode of 30 Rock, and interact with it

2008-11-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

Scott Adsit, as Pete: I just got a memo saying that every floor in the building has to designate a floor emergency marshal...I can’t do it, because my head is too big for the helmet.

Sidewalk Monkey, to Jam Guy: Hey! That's you!

Minutes pass.

Tina Fey, as Liz: I only took that napkin because I wrapped chicken in it!

Sidewalk Monkey: Hey! That's me!

It occured to me today that I live in heaven

2008-11-20T18:52:00.000-08:00

during the time that I walked to the raspberry patch, picked a gleaming red handful of raspberries, walked back to the picnic table at which Jam Guy was sitting, and presented them to him like they were exotic, priceless jewels. Which they kind of are.

Dinner tonight is

2008-11-19T22:40:00.000-08:00

pork loin, bok choy and mizuna, which I adapted from Ray Lee's Chicken and Choy Sum recipe in Breath of a Wok, by Grace Young.

Finished product:

Yum.

Tonight's dinner

2008-11-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

cooked by Jam Guy, the source of most of our dinners:

It's the Steak with Butter and Ginger Sauce recipe, from Simple to Spectacular, by Jean-Georges Vongericheten and Mark Bittman. Jam Guy served it with steamed jasmine rice and with a salad assembled entirely from ingredients picked this evening from our garden. (My sole contribution to dinner: I picked the veggies!) The salad, of mixed greens, radishes and sungold tomatoes, was very simply dressed with walnut oil, sherry vinegar, salt, pepper, and the tiniest pinch of sugar.

Note my half-full (Sidewalk Monkey, perpetual optimist, nice to meetcha) Negroni in the right upper corner, one of my favorite cocktails--I know it's meant as an aperitif, but it's a strong one, and I'm a lightweight, so I usually end up nursing it into dinner. In fact I'm still a wee bit tipsy, and dinner was like an hour ago. It's a 1:1:1 ratio of gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, though Jam Guy, through patient experimentation, found that I prefer it with half sweet and half dry vermouth, to bring out the bitterness of the Campari. I love bitter flavors. Plus a Negroni is the most beautiful shade of almost neon red.

Here is what Toby does the entire time that Jam Guy is carving the steaks:

"Dropthesteakdropthesteakdropthesteakdropthesteak." Hope springs eternal.

Why it is sometimes hard to garden with a dog around

2008-11-17T22:10:00.000-08:00

What Toby does while I am raking the yard (which, for what it's worth, is a days-long project: I spent nearly 5 hours on it today and got maybe a tenth of the way done): follows close beside me, often getting in between me and the rake; glares suspiciously at the rake, which he has apparently decided is a gravely dangerous enemy that he must herd me away from; inevitably walks directly into my rake, even when I'm standing still to scroll about on the iPod, and then cries loudly and reproachfully enough that the entire neighborhood must think I'm actually beating him with said rake. Also: if I stop to dig for the roots of an interesting-looking tuber-y type thing, in hopes that it is an abandoned sweet potato or garlic plant that I can replant in the vegetable garden or present to Jam Guy to supplement dinner with some night, he stands right over whatever spot I am trying to dig in, or better yet, sits on it. It is not efficient, and often annoying. But I love him. How could I not?

(photo by Jam Guy)

Reminder: Do more stuff outside

2008-11-16T19:37:00.000-08:00

The uncomfortably accurate Randall Munroe strikes again, on xkcd.com:

Actually, this cartoon makes me feel relatively accomplished, in that I usually get out from under the covers and pour some of the coffee Jam Guy has made for me before gluing myself to my laptop. I need my email/facebook/bloggy fixes before facing the wide, uneditable world.

Doing NaBloPoMo

2008-11-15T22:07:00.000-08:00

So I have this thing where if I make some sort of a pledge to do a thing, I have a hard time backing out. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was voted to be one of the class Peer Leaders--this group of students that was supposed to be all exemplary and counsel our fellow students and what not. We all had to sign a pledge that included not touching drugs or alcohol till we graduated. I'd had a few goofball drinking sessions in ninth grade with friends, but totally, earnestly gave it all up. Staying sober while in high school is not a bad thing, of course, but I remember it being harder than I thought it would be. But I had promised, so I stayed the course all virtuous and what not. (Of course, when Senior Prom and all the graduation parties rolled around, I learned that most of the other Peer Leaders had not been nearly so committed--but I was still glad, if only for my own sense of integrity or whatever, that I had stuck to my promise.)

So I signed up all excited for NaBloPoMo this month, and it really isn't as easy as I thought to think of something to blog about every day. Moreover, I realized that November includes Thanksgiving and the few days before and after it, during which time I'll be in Florida spending T-day with my dad and his new wife. I don't know if I'll be able to get any computer time during those days. It might be another, probably important, lesson in commitment. It might be a lesson about standing up for some of my own rules while spending time with my dad, which would be a new and probably timely thing. Or it might be a lesson in self-forgiveness. We will see.

Winter garden, year 1

2008-11-14T21:23:00.000-08:00

In mid-October, we had a lovely visit from Jam Guy's mom and dad. His dad helped put in a winter garden for us, showed me how to plant seeds in rows, and gave me lots of excellent instructions for caring for the garden. The first day I saw specks of green, I was so excited that I took a cell phone picture and texted it to Jam Guy right away.

Because we had some real rain after a dry spell a few weeks ago, the specks of green turned into real plants practically overnight. Happy with the gorgeous soil created by 30 years of farming by the family who lived here before us and quenched after a long dry spell, our veggies immediately exploded into all sorts of fantastic verdancy. However, the weeds appreciated the rain and gorgeous soil too, and while they are very pretty--forming this lacy, jade-green carpet all around our vegetables--for a little while it was hard to tell what was weed and what was baby veggie. (Metaphor: it takes practiced discernment and patience to learn to identify what's good for you and what is just competing with what's good for you.)

But I've spent the last few days assiduously weeding, especially since alot of the veggies are ready or close to ready to harvest. The weeds are still thriving, but they're a bit more under control. I've been doing all this assiduous weeding in either a tube top or a sarong, hoping to fade some of the wifebeater tanlines I've accumulated running along the creek. I'm a productive multitasker. Don't hate.

And dinner tonight is featuring a salad made from our first harvest from this garden (of various baby lettuces, French breakfast radishes, and baby beet greens that were thinned out today) so I thought I'd get some pictures before we started picking. Here they are!

Bok choy (and indigo radicchio to its left):

Spinach:

Radish tops:

Swiss chard and purple kohlrabi:

Mesclun mix:

"Kitchen sink" lettuce mix:

French breakfast radishes, ready to go:

Beets:

Lots of lettuce!:

And even more lettuce:

And here's a picture of the dinner Jam Guy made tonight--potatoes sent to us from Jam Guy's parents, needing nothing more than a quick boil and a touch of butter and salt; rare porterhouse steak topped with Point Reyes blue cheese; and our fancy from-the-garden salad with a simple vinaigrette.

I told Jam Guy the other day--while I was tugging weeds away from baby lettuces--that when I was a little kid growing up in the suburbs, the words "vegetable garden" had conjured for me thoughts of Peter Rabbit--basically that they were places meant to be invaded by talking rabbits, places that existed in a make-believe world. Tidy rows of fat green edibles flourished in fairy tales, not in my life. Here is one more way that my life with Jam Guy has, to my absolute joy and incredulous relief, proven me wrong.

And now it's time for an upper

2008-11-13T23:13:00.001-08:00

Two words: Puppy Cam.

A slightly less-garbled edit of something I wrote in the middle of the night several years ago,

2008-11-13T22:23:00.000-08:00

when in a not-so-happy place, when with a person I was beginning to suspect I deserved better than. I found it fairly recently on a water-stained, wrinkled chunk of legal pad that had made it from the East Village through Brooklyn and San Diego to my life now, and sort of liked it, and messed around a bit with it to neaten it.

I do remember writing this, now that I see it again on its jagged piece of yellow pad. I remember getting up in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep because I couldn't get comfortable because I felt afraid to move away from said ex-person in case he interpreted that movement as some sort of evidence of infidelity. I remember I was sad; he had probably said some unkind words and while I still struggled to understand them he had fallen soundly asleep, as though lulled by the knowledge that my heart was more broken, again. I remember falling restlessly into half-sleeps and dreaming, or thinking, or both, of my mother, and of how her family fled China. I don't actually know how old she was when they left her home, but I know she was young enough to be a child who went where her family went and old enough to remember. I remember finally giving up on sleep and climbing as quietly as I could out of the loft bed that we shared, the bed that his rage eventually broke one day towards the end of us, and writing because I couldn't think of any other way to feel less lonesome.

dragon dream

the man who sleeps there at my side
breathes like a dragon while he sleeps.
i lie, the dragon's dog, and try to keep
as still as will allow this night:

this night, full of dreams, like:
my mother, twelve years old, ready to drown
in honest grief for scores of pretty gowns
that must be left behind.

soldiers, faces indifferent as plates
will cut the gowns into useful squares.

man sails into the stratosphere
but i, seated tight on center-Earth
cheated of a place of birth
i am the only dragon here.

Reading that today, I am so grateful for the happiness in my life, for the changes that have come about, for the people that helped me on my path to this place, for the lessons I have learned. Never again will I take for granted self-sovereignty, strength, an easy day, the kind of love that redeems and cradles you. Thank God or whomever it is running things that I have landed back in myself and have, again, the chance to turn to the cool side of the pillow, one night at a time.

This is about the human heart.

2008-11-13T08:35:00.001-08:00

This economy sucks.

2008-11-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

We are all feeling it: either we don't have a job, or our partner doesn't have a job and so we're subsisting on one income in a culture where you really need two incomes, or everybody has a job but nobody can afford gas to get there, or something. I have high hopes that this is going to get better as President Obama takes office in 2009. In the meantime, to cheer ourselves up, let's watch this video of cats on treadmills.

Some analysis: what I like best about this video is that the white cat, who looks a lot like my cat, lies down the instant she is placed on the moving treadmill. And when she is denied in her attempts to lie down, she inexplicably plants her head down onto the track, as though in a passive but deeply committed protest.

I love these, even if I can't think where or with what to wear them.

2008-11-11T11:04:00.001-08:00

The best part of the description for this Nisadora (for Guess by Marciano) is:

The 1/4" platform makes the 3 1/4" heel feel like 3".

Well, that should help. Now they're practically sneakers.

I am always really drawn to multicolored shoes, particularly when one of those colors is red, and even more when another one of the colors is yellow. But then I never know what to do with them.

Oy, my tum, take two.

2008-11-10T22:03:00.000-08:00

I don't know why my stomach has been getting so upset lately. It concerns me for a variety of reasons, not least among those that the last time I had such a sensitive GI was when I was a little kid. And I was one stressed-out little kid.

So since I'm in an unprecedentedly happy place in my life, why am I so queasy all the time? (No, I'm not pregnant.) It makes me wonder about what's going on in my subconscious sometimes, and at other times it makes me wonder about what's going on in those taco trucks we frequent and love so well.

Holy moly, our house smells good

2008-11-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

While I was working at the winery yesterday, Jam Guy walked to Treehorn Books and bought a used copy of The Complete Meat Cookbook, by Bruce Aidell and Denis Kelly.

I am always excited when he brings home a new used cookbook, especially one from Treehorn, whose small, cozy used-cookbook section we've been spending happy afternoons in pretty much since the moment we met. The first time I celebrated a birthday with Jam Guy he presented me with three cookbooks from there, all rice-themed, all still among my favorites. When I spotted Julia Child's "My Life in France," looking all well-read and antiqued even though it was published in 2006, I bought it to surprise Jam Guy with. When,while browsing there one day a year and a half or so ago, he spotted a copy of "Pass the Polenta" by Teresa Lust--a warm, evocative collection of short stories and recipes that I had rapturously extolled and pressed him to borrow--he called me in New York to tell me how much it made him miss me. We buy each other new old cookbooks from the cookbook nook sort of on the regular, and we're both always stoked to unwrap them.

Anyways. Tonight Jam Guy is making Pork Braised in Milk and Capers from his new old cookbook, along with some mashed roasted garlic and potatoes to pour the lovely milk sauce over, and a tomato-mint salad from our hyperactively, determinedly-producing EarthBoxes. Nobody has told these plants that it's freaking November. Ssshhh.

More thoughts on Prop 8, these from the very smart Josh Scheer,

2008-11-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

who posted them in the note "Confused Gay Man, 11/5/08" on Facebook. Excerpts:

..."'(P)rotecting the sanctity of marriage' is not a valid argument. If protecting the sanctity of marriage is of such concern, why do half of marriages end in divorce? Where is the government regulation there? Isn't adultery a crime? If it is, then prosecute! We must protect the sanctity of marriage!

The laws of our land cannot be based on people maybe being uncomfortable because there might be a gay couple in their neighborhood. The fact is, there is no inherit danger or threat to society caused by same-sex couples marrying.I've heard people say it 'threatens the moral fibers of our country.' Does it really? More so than bigotry?

Gay people who love one another and want the same marriage rights and privledges as heterosexuals are not a threat to our country's morality. Bigotry, on the other hand, most certainly is.

This was an election that was won on the idea of 'change'...how could the voices of so many voters have been so progressively forward and flagrantly bigoted in the same song?"

Today I took a break from fretting

2008-11-07T17:58:00.000-08:00

and spent a few hours pulling weeds in the backyard.

I was very happy when it rained last weekend, because I knew we needed it; however, the quarter-acre of weeds that immediately surfaced are clearly happy about it too. Moreover, pulling baby weeds out of our baby vegetable garden proved to be a task a bit over-advanced for my baby-gardener-level skills: I am pretty sure that some would-be mesclun ended up in the yard waste, and I am pretty sure we are going to end up with some weeds in our salad bowls.

While I weeded I pondered the decision Jam Guy and I had made to not be legally married until everyone could be legally married--that we would go ahead with the wedding anyways, but not sign a license. My sister, ever the rational and wise one of the pair of us, pointed out that this plan does not actually advance "the cause" in any way, but rather is a statement "precluding (my) own happiness." I feel wrong entering an institution that not everyone can enter--that my own sister and many of my friends can't enter--but I do see her point.

But I have the choice to make, and at bottom I don't want to live in a place where some of us have a choice that others don't. But here we are.

My sister suggested I think of doing something more proactive, which is part of why I am blogging about Proposition 8 so obsessively--not so much because I think that my blogging is particularly proactive, but because in searching for proactive steps I can take to aid in the effort to repeal Prop 8, I've had it on my mind a lot these last few days.

For starters, something we can all do today that is proactive--thanks to Jam Guy for forwarding me this link--is to sign the Courage Campaign's petition, found here:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/RepealProp8

Oy, my tum.

2008-11-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

Last night I may have eaten some bad cambozola. All mold, Sidewalk Monkey learns the hard way time and time again, is not the delicious kind.

At least that's my best explanation for why I've had this upset stomach since then that gets worse every time I eat something. Maybe eating half an al pastor superburrito and washing it down with a beer and some atole wasn't the wisest choice for dinner tonight. There are other reasons, too, that I am now curled up around a tepid glass of Pelligrino and moaning into the bubbles.

Tonight I am a bit in the doldrums. I have spent the day fretting over other people's marriages being rendered invalid by Proposition 8 and then also over my own wedding gown, and I am not unaware of the unjust imbalance there, and I fretted over that imbalance and injustice too. I fretted over how happy to be about getting married, I fretted over wanting to go to the march in San Francisco tomorrow and whether my stomach would be well enough that I wouldn't have to map out every porta-potty on the parade route. I fretted about being an insensitive person and a selfish, self-centered bride because I was fretting so much about my own wedding, which feels somehow grotesquely and fatly privileged now because it is a heterosexual and thereby potentially legal affair. Because I can sign a marriage license with the person I love and have all the excitement and drama that comes with it, because other people can't, because I didn't do anything different than the people who cannot do this and yet I have this privilege. Because 40 years ago Jam Guy and I could not have gotten married. Because what is happening now to the LGBT community is really not that different, and because our children will look back at this vote and see how backwards and small-minded the majority of voters were on Tuesday.

I fretted all day, and now I am certain that 1) my fretting served to exacerbate my digestive woes and 2) other than that, my fretting accomplished nothing at all. Nothing that served the cause for equal rights for all people, certainly; nothing that got me closer to making positive change; nothing that earned a dollar or pulled a weed or fed a starving family or lobbied for fair legislation or even took a proper bust measurement. It was not productive. It generated stomach acid.

I did post on another blog in response to the author writing about how she felt that opponents of Proposition 8 were not showing enough tolerance and understanding to the supporters of Proposition 8--that we are not showing the tolerance that we ask them for, basically, and that we are wrong for criticizing the belief systems that led those voters to support Proposition 8. She wrote that we should all just be happy for how far the country has come--because we have a black President, which "would have been UNTHINKABLE 20 years ago!," because just 40 years ago the DSM categorized homosexuality as a mental illness, because Christianity is opposed to homosexuality and so we have to be patient about undoing 2000 years of homophobia...and so rather than being angry, we should constructively channel our rage into something positive and have a little respect for other people's views and beliefs.

My response was:

I have to politely disagree with you: It is one thing to disagree with the idea that all people have the right to marry. It is another thing to take action to revoke that right. Contrary to the Yes on 8 propaganda, this is not a moral issue or an issue about beliefs; this is a civil rights issue.

This country has come a long way on its perception of gay people specifically and on civil rights in general. I agree with you there. It has not, however, come far enough. The fact that racism is no longer legally tolerated in the workplace or socially acceptable does not make me less angry when I encounter racist ideology; the fact that we have elected a black President thrills me, but we heard a lot of racist commentary about him during the campaign process.

I respect the rights of people to attend a church that does not recognize gay marriage. I respect everyone's freedom of belief. I do not like it, but I acknowledge that it is important to respect people's right to say that they feel creeped-out about gay couples. What I cannot accept is those people voting on a measure that blatantly defines some people as less equal than others.

It is unfair, it is mean-spirited, it is small-minded, and it should not be accepted, any more than any other civil rights violation should be accepted.

I don't actually know if she reads her comments, or if it made any difference, or anything. I think what I need to do now is channel my anger not into understanding Proposition 8 supporters, but into making change happen. I have done a lot of sitting around clamoring that change needs to happen with other people that already agree with me. I don't know exactly how and where to reach the 52% of people I need to talk with--or heck, just like 3% that might be on the fence would make the difference!--but I know I need to start somewhere, because sitting around being mad about it is literally making me ill.

That and the cambozola.

But action, Joan Baez says, is the antidote to despair. And the change is already underway.

Thoughts on Proposition 8

2008-11-05T12:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a small majority of voters in California elected to approve a constitutional amendment that starts with the words "Eliminates Right."

At the same time, an enormous national majority voted the first African-American president into office.

I am thrilled at Barack Obama's victory for all sorts of reasons--he opposes the war, he understands the perspective of working families, his speeches made me feel hopeful in a way that the last eight years nearly erased. He was the right candidate and finally the right candidate won; the country has shown that it finally believes intent and capability are more important than skin color. But for all that, I am not able to celebrate.

It is a weird feeling. On the one hand, this is a huge victory for the civil rights movement started half a century ago. On the other hand, huge civil rights are being taken away from an entire segment of the population. I am holding onto hope that Obama, who said he opposed Prop 8 but also said that he opposed gay marriage, only said the latter so that he could get into office and is now going to make some changes that actually enable equal rights for everyone.

So a small majority (last time I checked, a 4% spread) can actually amend our constitution and eliminate a right. What does this mean for the protection of our civil rights in a very general sense? Could we further amend the constitution to take away other rights? Are we that vulnerable to the transparent bigotry of one evangelical vehicle that campaigned with television spots blatantly designed to engender fear of gay people? Is it possible that with enough funding and heavy-handed, proselytizing commercials, we could get a majority to vote to amend nearly every clause of the constitution that protects our rights?

I would like to think it won't happen, because our rights are important and protected. But today California (and Arizona and Florida, and in a more specious and less direct way, Arkansas) said that our rights are important and protected--unless you're gay. In which case you should be happy with a lesser set of rights. Equal rights for everyone except some folks IS NOT EQUAL RIGHTS, and is in absolute opposition to the ideals that this country is supposed to represent.

And--do people who voted for Prop 8 actually know any gay people? How can people today vote to make anyone's marriage less valid? How does that happen? How can you see two people in love and transformed by the joy of making their love official in front of their community and then vote that joy away from them?

I am trying to keep in mind that this is one step in a long, difficult battle that started a long time ago and will probably continue beyond my lifetime. I am seeing that complacency no longer has a place in our country's politics, that I can't throw my hands up and start planning move to Canada anymore. After the last presidential election, I really felt ready to leave; this time--maybe because of the hope I feel from the right candidate winning--I feel that it is my job to stay here and stay in the fight to make this country a place in which I am proud to live.

One important message of the Proposition 8 vote, I believe, is that we need to be vigilant, more than ever, in protecting our civil rights. I was born here and have been guilty of being a complacent citizen who takes her rights for granted, but today I see that we are still very much in an era where people let fear of the unknown translate into legislating inequality. We are not yet far enough removed from Roe vs. Wade, from Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, from Stonewall to turn our backs to the battle.

I truly never thought

2008-11-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

that a person of color would be elected President in my lifetime. Tonight I am overwhelmed with happiness. My children will have a kind of hope that I imagined and believed in but never really possessed until today. Tonight I feel that voters voted for their ideals and for just that kind of hope--that we have a president now that we can respect, that we can feel truly has the best interest of citizens at heart, that wants to change the world in a real and positive way.

I might become a parent during this presidential term. Thank God or whoever it is running things that I can be an idealist again in time to be a parent, which is pretty much just in time.

Today is the birthday of my absolute favorite triple Scorpio--Jam Guy

2008-11-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

In the late morning I built a sort of epic muffaletta. I left it on the butcher block, briefly, for Jam Guy to wrap up--he is better at wrapping things than I am. Five minutes later, Jam Guy walked in on Meimei perched on the edge of the butcher block, her tiny pink tongue tentatively pressed against a corner of mortadella.

Meimei safely shoo'ed away from our picnic pièce de résistance, Jam Guy wrapped it soundly and packed some of our dried plums, a couple of beers for me and a couple of Cokes for him in a cooler, which rested on top of the muffaletta on our drive up to Blind Beach.

The drive is a long, winding road through deep redwood forests, along the Russian River, past mountaintop pastures with sleepy-looking sheep watching our car. Today we pulled away from home in a drizzle and by the time we crossed the top of the mountain we were surrounded by a full-out storm, with horizontal gales of pelting rain and the world ending in a wall of mist twenty yards in any direction from our car. No sheep were out. Redwood branches slouched where they had been blown in the middle of the road and the live oaks stood like weird druids with trembling, dripping fingertips.

We pulled up to the beach and Jam Guy hopped out into the downpour and was immediately drenched. I let Toby out to pee, and watched the turning ocean in awe, and even water-loving Toby was ready to get back into the car after he'd done his thing. We decided to eat our picnic in the car. After two big slices of muffaletta each and candy-sweet dried plums for dessert, Toby and I hopped out of the car again to make sure he'd have enough leg stretching for such a long drive, since we didn't get to play fetch with him like we usually do at the beach, and because I wanted to check out those crazy roiling waves again and peer over boulders at the seagulls coasting with their improbable indifference on the flailing ocean. As soon as I stepped out with Toby, he trotted off to splash in a puddle and a gust of wind snatched a napkin out of my pocket. I went chasing after the napkin, and when I had snatched it and turned, I saw a thrilled Toby chasing after me with a big grin on his face. So Toby and I played tag in the tempest, running back and forth through the wet sand and gravel, splashing the hardest through the deepest puddles of saltwater spray and rain, grinning and squealing at each other with our two open mouths dripping with rain. I don't know which one of us had more fun, but Toby was ready to get back in the car a few seconds before I think I would have been.

Thanks to the waterproofness of my jacket and boots and the whole layering thing, I didn't realize how soggy I'd gotten till I was back in the car. My pants were literally dripping rain--but happily, my thermal long johns, which are designed for skiing or something, were pretty dry, so I rode the rest of the way home in those. On the way back Jam Guy stopped at a little saltwater taffy shack--I didn't want to go in because I was wearing, you know, long underwear--and came back with a bright sack of taffy, and we rode home littering the car with wax-paper wrappers and guessing about which flavors went with which colors and getting kind of sick from so much sugar.

What I am doing now is smelling the perfumey richness of a homemade macaroni and cheese and a sour cherry pie, both which are in the oven at this moment. Jam Guy, on his birthday, has insisted on making us dinner. That absolute prince among birthday celebrants has fixed us a couple of hot rum toddies to take the chill off while we wait for dinner. It is a good day.

(Happy birthday, honey!)

Three ways to know you are loved, in case you ever doubt it

2008-11-02T20:36:00.000-08:00

1) Because somebody brings you a bowl of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with freshly-grated cinnamon while you sit on the couch under a blanket and clap your hands in anticipation and then in delighted appreciation.

2) Because said somebody has digital pictures of you all over all of his electronic stuff--phone, home desktop, work laptop.

3) Because, after said somebody has mostly fallen asleep, he wakes suddenly and mumbles, all sleep-addled but in utterly sincere tones, "You hypnotize me," before falling back into almost-sleep.

Today it is pouring rain

2008-11-01T11:43:00.001-07:00

It's the first real rain of our rainy season here, which we need because the creek is so low you can hardly see it unless you are nearly down into it and our friend who farms in Rincon Valley told us last week that his watering hose was spurting gravel from the dusty bottom of his well. The pattering sound on the roof keeps changing as the rain slows and speeds and as the wind moves the water in circles and lines. The garden looks greener already; the tiny broccoli seedlings getting started in their baking dish flooded immediately and had to be moved to the drier plain of the picnic table.

Jam Guy and I and Toby and Meimei are spending our first rainy Saturday tucked into our living room, with our little house wrapped around us keeping us from getting wet. That is enough to be grateful for.

Droolio

2008-10-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

This is the Adonia by RSVP, and this
is the Fleur, also by RSVP.

Both of these shoes come with a nifty hot-pinkish-reddish metallic lining and--it gets better--something called Footpetals, which according to their listings at Zappos are "inserts at the heel and forefront" which "stop your feet from sliding forward, while heel cushions help absorb shock to heels, legs, and the lower back. Footpetals™ also protects bones and tissue while offering superior overall comfort."

And they're pretty!

I like the red ones especially because they're classically shaped, and would be fine for work or for going out. The black ones are trendier and therefore kind of less appealing to me--but couldn't you see rocking those out with a tulle minidress?

Rather impressively offensive cake-topper company

2008-10-29T19:58:00.001-07:00

So I am just going to post images from the site, as well as the actual names the company gives each cake-topper. I don't think you really need my commentary here.

Here is "Bride and Groom with Lace Dress":

Here is "Ethnic Bride and Groom Couple":

Here is "A Sexy Couple":

And here is "A Sexy Ethnic Couple":

Here is "Cute Asian Couple":

I mean I couldn't make this stuff up.

And here is "Chinese Couple," I effing kid you not:

The description from the site for this little pair of figurines reads: "This hopeful young couple, dressed in the beautiful traditional costume worn by the Chinese on their wedding day, look with wide, eager eyes toward their future together. "

What the fuck.

Moving on: There is a Homosexual Cake-Topper section (that's what the link says: "Homosexual," not "Gay" or "LGBT" or anything sort of friendlier-sounding). Now, one would think that in the Homosexual Cake-Topper section, one would find figurines with two brides together, or two grooms together. Right? Or a woman in a tux and another in a wedding gown? Something along those lines?

There are TWO figurines available for sale in the Homosexual Cake-Topper Section. They are both men, and they are both alone. And they are both the same figurine, but one is painted brown. Here are all two of your choices, should you decide to decorate a Homosexual Wedding Cake:

"Macho Man":
and "Ethnic Macho Man":

whose mouth IS PAINTED RED, people. How is this okay in present-day America?

The "sports" cake-topper section only has groom figures. There are no brides engaging in sports; sporting about on wedding cakes, apparently, is a male-only activity. The grooms on this site do include Golf Fanatic Groom:

and Golf Fanatic Groom Ethnic:

Golf Fanatic Groom Ethnic is pictured walking away from Exasperated Bride Ethnic, whom you can purchase separately for $22.95. Because this is how you want people to think of you on your wedding day--pissed-off, cross-armed, mouth hanging open, getting left behind by your watch-checking groom.

You can peruse this site yourself: it's justcaketoppers.com. Jam Guy and I are skipping the toppers, and probably just serving pie.

Shoe lust time.

2008-10-27T16:17:00.001-07:00

The Body Parts Pump from the John Fluevog Signature Collection. Drool.

Do I love it so much because of the phallic heel?

Um. Does it matter?

Robert Rodriguez

2008-10-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

is the name of the designer of the mystery dress!

Thank you SO much, Craigslist poster and Rodriguez fan who identified the dress as one of his.

Does anyone know who makes this dress?

2008-10-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

I saw it on a blog in which the author said she'd found it on the Saks website; I looked on the Saks website and didn't find it; I emailed the blog author who unfortunately couldn't recall the designer; I emailed Saks customer service, who apologized for being unable to help me and suggested I call a local store; I visited an Off 5th outlet--in the hopes that since it's from a previous season, it may have passed through there--and showed this picture to a salesperson, who admired it but couldn't place it.

Please give me a shoutout if you know (or even think you might know) the designer for this dress, or where I could purchase it, or any clues to this long-enduring mystery.

No on 8, obviously

2008-10-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Ariel at Offbeat Bride for embedding this video, for always supporting marriage rights for everyone, and for her excellent work bringing the importance of voting No on 8 to the trillions of people that read her super-excellent blog.

Yay. I like this one too.

May in the Bay is brilliant.

2008-10-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

"Women are supposed to be 'equal citizens' in this day and age . . . but would Roe v. Wade even be an issue if white men could get pregnant from 'oopses' and rapes?"

Amen.

I...just...don't know how to feel about this.

2008-10-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I have so many reactions, all at once. Here's the link; you tell me how it makes you feel.

It's too much to process by myself.

OK: The Page 56 Meme

2008-10-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Via May in the Bay from Adrienne @ Oh the Joys of Being a Female Playwright . . .

* Grab the nearest book.

* Open the book to page 56.

* Find the fifth sentence.

* Post the text of the next sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"He put his ear to the floor and fell asleep listening to the house."
--Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry, 1999

Hey, that one turned out kind of nice. I sort of wished I'd had my textbooks nearby so I could look all serious and science-y, but this is the one I fell asleep at the table reading last night.

V? Surfrunner? Now you do it!

Roast chicken for dinner

2008-10-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

I just put into the oven a chicken on a bed of quartered yukon potatoes, big carrots cut into chunks, rosemary and sage clipped from the backyard, and several cloves of garlic. I have some chard set aside to sautee with it. So life, at this moment, is very good.

Sometimes Jam Guy and I have days where it feels like we're shouting at each other through a brick wall, in separate, exotic languages, both wanting so badly to be heard and understood that it makes us angry and despairing. Some days it is like that. Other days we bang our heads together in our anxiousness to show our love. Still other whole days we spend apart, still, even when we are in the same room, working or playing through our separate lives.

But if you asked me right now to take the whole sum of the happiness and unhappiness of my life right now, I would hardly be able to breathe for all the joy and gratitude that would pour out of my mouth. I would spill out sappy songs like an old people's radio station; I would rave like a whole coven of chattering holy women; I would reach for Jam Guy and wait for you to see the kind of light he carries so that you could understand why I am so happy. I would wait for you to see the way he and I each light the other, the way we go through our easy days and our difficult days blazing because we are next to each other, explosively incandescing paths that no one knew were there before. Just because we are next to each other.

That is how I know I am done looking for a partner.

If I had known that my life would turn this bright I might have gone through my past shuttered and afraid of all the changes I would need to make and endure in order to reach now. At least I would have been afraid to stand here and look back into the kind of shadow I used to think I would learn to adjust to, to see through. I see now how bright my life can be and should be, which makes me grieve the smaller me that thought I should live in darkness. I squint all day long now, incredulous.

More food stuff.

2008-10-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

What Jam Guy made last night for dinner: Nyonya-spiced fried chicken with a chili-lime-worchestershire dipping sauce, along with a rice-vinegar-based cabbage slaw and steamed jasmine rice (Jam Guy: "What do you think of this rice?" Sidewalk Monkey: "It's good." JG: "Good, because I bought a 25-pound bag of it today." SM: "Niiiiiiiiice.").

The fried chicken and dipping sauce recipes came from the Cradle of Flavor cookbook, but I found the recipe posted on this site.

I contributed to the dinner prep mostly by periodically wandering into the kitchen and raving about how good it smelled, and sitting at the table whining about how hungry I was, until this plate appeared in front of me.

Oh, and here's the dipping sauce:

So we pretty much cannot say enough good things about this recipe. It was so delicious. Our entire dinner conversation was about how tasty the chicken was, and how the dipping sauce complemented it so well, and how it wasn't super-difficult to make, and when should we make it again, plus a little bit of complaining about how insipid Heroes has gotten and what a letdown that was after the very smart first season. But mostly we just talked about the chicken.

Jam Guy is a really talented boy, and I am such a lucky girl.

Did I mention he made five kinds of pizza for a dinner party we threw this weekend while his parents were in town? One was pesto and tomato, one was sausage and pepperoni, one was shiitake mushroom and caramelized onion, one was fig, bleu cheese and bacon, and I can't remember the other one. Ham and gruyere? He served them as courses, one after the other. By the time pizzas four and five came out of the oven, we were all pretty stuffed. but it was so much fun to keep tasting the different pizzas that we kept going. Then he brought out this stellar apple-ginger pie, which I could only manage a bite of from his plate; we also had these delicious apricot bars that his parents' friends had brought over. This was all after our good friends brought flatbreads and pickled green beans from their garden over for appetizers, which we served with a cheese and pate plate and figs and pears that our friends from the orchard (where we got engaged) brought over.

And it was such a lovely group of people. I really enjoyed spending the weekend with his parents--they just seem to like each other so much, and they think the world of Jam Guy, which is nice, since I do too. I finally got to meet the friends of theirs that Jam Guy grew up with but that now live in Oakland, and bringing our friends together with his parents and their friends turned out to be this really smooth, easy, happy gathering, where everyone connected as though they'd totally hung out together before. It was great. There was a lot of wonderful conversation, a lot of wonderful food, a lot of wine and beer flowing and a lot of really full people before the night was out. It was like Thanksgiving, but with pizza. Which is not a bad thing at all. I have a lot to give thanks for.

For every day that I question my choices

2008-10-06T14:34:00.000-07:00

and distrust my happy new day-to-day life, there is an evening like last Friday night, when Jam Guy and I went to eat a late dinner at one of our favorite bistros, where we sat at the same seats at the bar that we always do, and perused the menu and considered the specials before ordering medium-rare burgers and fries and beers like we do every time. After ordering, we started to ask the bartender for a side of mayo and a bottle of tabasco, to dip our fries in like we always do, remembering it and speaking at the same time, both stopping, waiting for the other to speak, starting to speak at the same time again. Then, feeling happy and close to each other because we have this habit together, we each leaned in to the other for a cuddle and thereby managed to bang our heads together. Ears ringing, I laughed and laughed and Jam Guy smiled and shook his head.

The night before that dinner I had had a dream that Jam Guy and I were walking hand-in-hand in a strange town. We decided to take a short cut through an alley, and were suddenly accosted by a man wearing nothing but a loincloth and a terrifying, oversized mask. We knew that the man had to be disturbed if only because no one who was not disturbed would feel comfortable putting such a frightening face over their own face, and Jam Guy, sounding like a terrified person trying to sound calm, said "I think we should run." I looked at the mask and we ran, and the man in the mask ran after us, and completely panicked, I screamed. I could feel that Jam Guy was terrified also, and that we were each more frightened because of the fright of the other. We ran as fast as we could, chased by this inscrutable, laughing monster, but we never stopped holding hands.

And the night before that I dreamed that Jam Guy and I were in a hotel room, surrounded by motion-sensor-triggered rifles that would fire if we tried to leave. We had to come up with $300,000 to turn over to some kind of mob--I don't know why--and we had twenty-four hours to do it and couldn't leave the room in the meantime. We figured out ways around the rifles and schemed and schemed together. It was him and me against some humongous violent conglomerate.

Saturday night I dreamed that Jam Guy was drafted into the military; we had bickered and he had gone to the recruiters to spite me, but had never intended to go through with it. Once there, though, he couldn't get out of it; he was in a production line of men getting drafted; he stepped up to a desk and when he came out of it they had put chalky foundation all over his face. They were doing that to all of the men; they were making them all look the same, erasing their identities. I was terrified; I ran up to him and begged him to forget it all and come home, and an officer pulled me away and told me not to talk to him, that there was a draft on and they were taking every able-bodied man whether they supported the war or not. They weren't drafting women, but were taking them on a volunteer basis. Jam Guy in his progressively-less-recognizable face drifted away from me down the production line, and I immediately volunteered for the military so that I could stay with him. They told me I would lose my name, my past, and everything about me that identifies me as me. I knew that if I could be with Jam Guy I would be with someone who knows who I really am, so all that mattered was that I registered in time to be shipped off to Lord-knows-where on the same ship as the one that shipped him.

Three nights in a row I had dreams that were all about Jam Guy and me facing down unbearable circumstances by staying together. This is us, up against it: up against the anxiety of being new homeowners in a time when people are losing their homes and our government throws money at an industry that only pretends to help those people, up against the angry voices that rail in my head and tell me what I do and do not deserve, up against small things like the neighbors that don't like our new fence and big things like money and time and history and career. This is us, one pair of tiny fish swimming in the current of the stunning and beautiful improbabilities of geography and circumstance that drew us, inevitably but just barely, together. This is us facing how close we each came to being without the other, and finding evidence therein that the universe must conspire in our favor, and so in all the chaos and precariousness, we must be, we are, just safe enough in our own small path, which is to say, infinitely safe, indefinitely here.

I am so not cool

2008-10-01T18:51:00.001-07:00

So the other day I am riding my bike back from the grocery store, feeling oh-so-much-hipper-than-thou: I am not burning fossil fuels on my shopping trip, my vintage Schwinn is killer evidence of my low-consumerism lifestyle, a lot of the ingredients for dinner are going to be coming out of our garden or our friends' gardens and thereby leaving a very small carbon footprint. Even the bottle of red wine snuggled into the repurposed Ikea storage basket that Jam Guy nicely wired onto the rear rack of the bike was vinted from sustainably-grown local grapes. Damn, I'm thinking: I should have a freaking halo floating above me. I am so northern Cali, so helping my planet, so down with the 'aina.

All of a sudden this very big yellow jacket loops in a funny, lazy pattern in front of me, then lands on the front of my shirt. Stay cool, I tell myself in my best Wild-Kingdom-narrator voice. I keep pedaling and kind of fluff the front of my shirt with one hand, which is usually all the encouragement a yellow jacket needs to be on its way. I am proud of myself for the progress I have made with yellow jackets since moving here; basically, I no longer run away screaming when one buzzes past me. But this yellow jacket doesn't go anywhere. After a few seconds with it still on my shirt, my bugphobia starts to get the better of me. I am talking out loud now, basically things like "Stay calm. You are ok. It is just a little bee. He doesn't want to bother you." I stop the bike and stand over the crossbar, pull my t-shirt out a little and peer down at the persistent bugger.

And I see that it is not a yellow jacket after all. IT IS A HUGE FREAKING SPIDER. The fact that a huge spider should be no scarier than a yellow jacket doesn't matter; I just haven't gotten to that point in my anti-bugphobia practice yet.

So I totally lose my shit. I leap off the bike, shrieking; the bike goes crashing down, the wine bottle and organic produce roll out of their reusable grocery bag and into the dusty trail. The spider is apparently unperturbed; either that or he's paralyzed with terror and wondering why he had to pick this noisy, jumpy tree to build his new web in. I dance around. I don't want to touch the spider, or hurt him, but I don't want him on my shirt either. I jump, squat, flail, stomp around, squeaking and hollering the whole time--he just hangs out. Finally I kneel on the ground and shake the fabric of my shirt, and he decides he's had enough and makes a little hop onto the ground (which, illogically, makes me scream more) and scuttles off into the brush.

Somehow my wine bottle wasn't broken, and everything else is washable. But as I'm picking up bike and groceries off the creek trail, it occurs to me for the first time to check if anyone else is around--mostly on the trail I'm alone, but I do pass folks here and there.

And as a matter of fact, there is a guy sitting not ten feet away. He is facing towards the creek, politely ignoring me.

So Much Happiness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

2008-09-30T19:42:00.001-07:00

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

More talk story about food, and community, and do-gooderness

2008-09-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

I forgot to take a picture of our dinner last night, which is a bummer, but it was pretty. And a very collaborative effort.

We had some very nice trout that the nice man building our fence brought us from his weekend fishing trip--whole, cleaned and gutted. We more or less followed this recipe; I stuffed and wrapped, Jam Guy grilled. I sliced up another one of the heirloom tomatoes from our friend's garden and Jam Guy dressed it with nice olive oil and sea salt and pepper, and then while I had my trout with rice, Jam Guy had his with slices of campagne bread from a loaf that Della Fattoria gave us while we were eating lunch there recently.

It was delicious, and it makes me happy to eat the tomatoes our friend grew, the trout our new friend the fence guy caught, the sage from our own garden, the bread from one of our favorite bakeries that just sort of hands out bread to its customers when closing time is approaching because they don't want to serve day-old bread tomorrow but they can't bring themselves to waste either. It was lovely.

Speaking of community efforts: we are thinking of switching our phone service to Credo Mobile, who donates one percent of its customer charges to causes like Planned Parenthood and America's Second Harvest, and bills itself as "the only pro-choice phone company, as well as America’s greenest phone company," which by itself is enough to make me want to switch. Also, they'll buy out your current phone contract, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to do the right thing.

The thing that is stopping us is that it'll cost more for us to get the same amount of minutes and data transmission we get right now with Helio. While we want to do the right thing, we are wannabe-do-righters on a new-homeowner/recent-graduate budget. It's rare that the right thing is the easiest thing too. This is something to think about.

Smitten, full, grateful, sleepy

2008-09-27T23:24:00.000-07:00

Last night for dinner Jam Guy and I went to Stark's, an unexpectedly fantastic steakhouse just a few blocks from our house. We were walking back from meeting some friends at a wine bar nearby, and I was giddy from having walked around all day talking to hotels about block rates for our wedding guests--my first sort of official action as a bride-to-be--and we were hungry. I mentioned the dubious-looking old dive I'd seen while jogging around the neighborhood; I really like dive bars, and I figured it was worth a try since it was so nearby. There are a few old, incongruous businesses in the residential area just across the creek from us; I figured the dive was from that era--kind of one of those ugly-but-neat spots that stays because of its history and entrenchment in the community.

Turns out Stark's is not a dubious old dive; rather, it is a fancy fine-dining restaurant constructed to LOOK like a dubious old dive, opened just this year by a team that's opened a few other successful restaurants in the area. This sounds just too cheesy to be any good, I know, but the menu sounded awfully appealing, and we were starving.

Inside felt like a speakeasy from an old movie. There were like a million whiskey bottles on the lighted shelves behind the bar, cushy leather chairs, a whole menu of classic cocktails like the Vieux Carré--a mixture of rye whiskey, cognac, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, Peychaud's and Angostura bitters, one of which pretty much knocked me into idiotville--and a Moscow Mule, made somewhat atraditionally with vodka, ginger syrup and lime. Jam Guy had two of those and was very happy; it's nice to be able to walk home.

The specialty at Stark's Steakhouse is, of course, the steak, which is dry-aged and has topper options like roasted bone marrow and a truffled egg--and while we will remember those next time we want big slabs of meat (which is not infrequently), we were more interested in making up our own little tasting menu and sharing a bunch of small plates. We got a half dozen lovely oysters on the half-shell, a plate of steak tartare which I'd never had before but I now LOVE and have been thinking about all day, a crabcake because the waitress said it was the best she'd ever had (and it was very good), a butter lettuce salad, and these crazy-good chicken-fried onion rings, with which we ordered black truffle aioli and also an herbed boursin sauce for dipping them in. Man it was good.

Then we decided we were stuffed, until the waitress brought the dessert menu. The entire menu looked good, but we decided on a butterscotch creme brulée that was kind of geniusly paired with kettle corn. Kettle corn in my teeth makes me fretful, but it was worth it.

I can't wait to go back for lunch, when they have what looks like a fantastic burger menu.

Today we went to a wedding at a beautiful winery near Sacramento where during the ceremony I was a total useless weepy soggy mess, with nothing but a couple of quickly-disintegrated Whole Foods napkins in my purse. It was a beautiful ceremony and fun reception; I drank too much wine and we giggled most of the way home, and now I am very sleepy. I am excited to get married.

DO THIS.

2008-09-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html

I like the man building our fence.

2008-09-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

He just gave me a peach-blueberry turnover and told me that he'd bring us fresh trout on Monday. Mr. Fence Man, it is enough that you and your crew are building us a fence at rock-bottom prices and that you brought your puppies over to play with Toby yesterday. It is wonderful that you talked about how you wanted to go and help rebuild fences on Kauai after Hurricane Iniki and how you built a fence around a macadamia nut farm on Kona as a barter for airfare and lodging. We like you already. But we will not object to being fed.

Mr. Fence Man goes on my People to Make Pie For list.

Dinner last night

2008-09-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Totally inspired by Surfrunner, I'm posting pics of the dinner I made last night, and sort-of recipes, as best as I remember them.

I made beef short ribs over mashed potatoes and parsnips with an heirloom tomato salad. It was good, if kind of heavy--we were both stuffed. The great thing about short ribs is you can start them like 3 hours or more before you want to eat them, and do other things in the meantime. And they're so yummy.

I started by frying some coarsely chopped onion and bacon in a big enameled cast-iron oval dutch oven. Then I seared the ribs on each side in the same pot, deglazed with some shiraz, added some bay leaves and parsley and a bunch more shiraz and some chopped carrots, covered up the pot, and put it in the oven at 350. I left it there for about 4 hours, checking it occasionally and adding liquid whenever it looked in danger of burning, and ladling the liquid over the ribs a couple of times.

About an hour before we wanted to eat, I chopped up five parsnips and five baby Yukon potatoes, peeled five cloves of garlic, cut a big hunk of butter into little bits, and put all those in a smaller enameled cast-iron oval pot, topped off with a lot of rosemary branches. That went into the oven next to the ribs pot.

About an hour later when the parsnips were soft and roasty-looking, I took the pot out, added more butter and a little cream and some fresh chopped parsley, and mashed everything up with a potato masher, which is easily one of my favorite kitchen tools.

Our friends from whom we got the giant mystery squash (which actually turned out to be a mutant ginormous zucchini) kindly gave us a whole bunch of beautiful heirloom tomatoes that they are growing in their (clearly thriving) garden this summer. I sliced up some of those, poured a bit of olive oil over them, and scattered torn basil leaves around the plate:

and served us each a big rib on top of a pile of parsleyed parsnip-potato puree, which I tried to get Jam Guy to say five times fast, but he didn't want to:

That rib had a bay leaf sort of glazed onto it. I thought that was neat. Hard to get a picture of, also because I was rushing to take the pic before our food got cold.

It was super-yummy, and Toby enjoyed eating the bones. The tomatoes were, as tomatoes continue to be for me lately, an absolute revelation in how good and how diverse tomatoes can be. The deep red-and-orange one was big, fleshy, and very sweet, almost cloyingly sweet but not quite--almost obscene in its juicy meatiness. The little green-yellow ones were crisper and kind of lemony-tart, and so the two types balanced each other really well. I'm excited to grow all kinds of tomatoes here next summer.

Fences and neighbors

2008-09-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

We are putting up a tall fence. One of our neighbors, a lovely elderly woman who likes to stop and chat over the 4-foot fence we are replacing, reportedly commented to the fence-building crew that our planned fence is "unfriendly."

We are not TRYING to be unfriendly, but we are definitely building the fence with privacy as a big priority (another big priority being that Toby's Houdini-like escape adventures be permanently and categorically thwarted, and a smaller priority being that random folks quit hopping our fence and crossing our yard to get to and from the creek trail behind us). I am a little fretful about facing opposition from this neighbor, and sort of fretting about whether to invite neighbors that aren't actually also our friends to the wedding, since it's going to be in our backyard and sort of obvious, although less obvious with our new fence. There are so many truly important friends that I want at the wedding, and the necessity to keep the guest list small is so real and concrete, but I also want to maintain good neighbor relations in our little neighborhood. This is hard. I think for starters I need to bring the chatty neighbor a pie, but after that my diplomatic strategy runs out.

Sigh.

2008-09-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a post about how much skinnier the cast of the new "90210" is than the cast of the original; something about how even though I wasn't allowed to watch the original show when it was running (from when I was entering seventh grade to when I was graduating from high school) I wanted so much to look like Kelly and Brenda. I knew I wouldn't ever, but I dieted my booty off (literally) trying to get thin and cute like they were. Today, looking back at pictures of my high school self, I want to holler at that girl: YOU ARE SO FREAKING HOT! LOOK HOW SKINNY YOU ARE! YOU WOULD BE EVEN HOTTER WITH ANOTHER FIVE OR TEN POUNDS ON YOU! EAT SOMETHING! EAT THAT SPAM MUSUBI I KNOW YOU WANT! And while we're chatting, JUST DATE THE DRAMA CLUB/MARCHING BAND/CHESS CLUB/MATH TEAM GEEKS YOU HAVE ALL THOSE CRUSHES ON, AND FUCK WHAT YOUR GIRLFRIENDS WILL THINK!

Anyhoo, it worries me what students today are going to think they need to look like, when I compare the Kelly-and-Brenda bodies I was aspiring to look like back in my literally lean years

with the body of Shenae Grimes, who plays the "new" Brenda character:

Anyways, that was the post I was going to write. But then while looking for those images to use to illustrate my point, I kept finding all these mean blogs that basically reamed out the actors in the original 90210 for getting older and not looking like teenagers anymore--even though any present-day picture I found of the two actress I wanted so much to look like showed that they're totally grownup hotties now. I thought about how hard we can be on ourselves and on our idols; how little I appreciated my face and my body in high school and how I worry about laugh lines now and how I might look back in another fifteen years and wish my thirty-year-old-self thought more highly of her appearance, just as today I wish my fifteen-year-old self did.

And then I just felt sort of bad for picking on Ms. Grimes for being so skinny, because she is after all just a nineteen-year-old--a tough age to be, and in a tough business, and she probably wants to eat whatever the Canadian version of a Spam musubi is, but it might be a career risk for her.

I wish for her that she enjoys being nineteen and lovely, and that it feels like a gift and not like a burden.

And I'm glad I don't have a TV, because things like this clearly get me too worked up. I am off to play in the dirt instead.