Washington, Almost

2015 was the year we almost moved to Washington State, to a town near Seattle.  The beauty of that area--on a sunny day in February, cold and bright--has returned to my thoughts quite often this year.  I still peruse the real estate listings for that area.

The San Francisco Bay Area has far more sunny days, but the sunny days in Washington are more spectacular--and more precious, I'm sure, to the inhabitants of that region.  Could I withstand all the rain and gloom?  Or would I long for this drought-stricken, sun-soaked state?

I might never know.  But I do know that the idea of a couple of acres and a house with a view of Puget Sound (for half or a third of the price of houses around here) has a hold on my imagination.

Getting Back to It

I've been away from the actual crafting of stories for a long time now, two weeks...it's starting to get to me.

Yes, it's been busy.  Yes, my six-year-old son has been out of school since the 18th.  Yes, the Christmas shopping, and wrapping and planning and card-writing and social visits and all that.  But.

If I don't dive back into the writing I'm going to go nuts.

No More Sugar Blues

I've managed to kick the sugary-food habit for a little over a week.  I've kept to 20 grams of sugar or less per day since December 21st, and have stopped eating cookies, cake and chocolate.  (Okay I did eat a single Junior Mint a couple of times.  Nobody's perfect.)

It feels silly to write about this...but given my previous penchant for sugar indulgences of all kinds, I know why it's not so silly that I'm sticking to this diet.

Even better than the fact of staying low-sugar:  I no longer crave sugary foods as much as before.  I can think about cake, etc. without feeling an intense longing.

Enough talk about eating.  No more sugar blues, and no more blogging about it.

Six Years Old; Time to Start Looking

Suddenly, out of the blue as we were hiking to a local farm:  "I have something to tell you, Mommy.  When I'm a grownup, I'll have to find a mate."

Yesterday it was God and the universe, today, finding a mate...I can't wait for tomorrow's pronouncement.

The Universe and The Waltons

I don't know if there was a cause-effect relationship; I think it had more to do with my son being sick for the last four or five days, and being on vacation at the same time--thus he's spent a lot of time daydreaming recently.  But it might have had something to do, also, with the fact that we were watching The Waltons this evening.  It's a slow-paced TV show about life in the Great Depression for one rural Virginia family, in which a lot of big-picture questions come up, questions about right and wrong, life and death, truth and lies...my son suddenly asked, a propos of almost nothing:  "Mommy do you know who created the great orb called the Universe?  God?"  The next question out of his mouth was, "Mommy, do you know when the first humans came to Earth?"

I was stumped, both times...I guessed 3 million years ago, for the second question.  (Okay, now that I've looked it up:  the latest scientific research suggests that while the ancestors of homo sapiens have been around for at least 2 million years, homo sapiens itself has existed for about two hundred thousand years.)  I didn't have an answer for the first question.  Which proves, I guess, that I'm an agnostic.

My son is not.  I turned things around and asked him, "Who do you think created the universe?" and he said, very quickly, "God."

The thing to know here is that my son is a very cheerful guy, who doesn't spend his days lost in serious thought--in other words, he's a normal six-year-old.  But I do think that all six-year-olds, even normal ones, spend at least part of their time asking the big questions--they're not afraid of them, and aren't afraid of being criticized for the wrong answer.  Their thoughts are, therefore, far more interesting than the typical grad student's.

I remember asking the same kinds of questions when I was his age.  The big one for me was, when you travel all the way to the end of the universe, what do you see there?

Actually I posed this question to my son this evening, and he had another answer.  "White."

He could be right.  I hope he gets to find out.

Originality

The current Star Wars film has made so many people happy, including members of my extended family, because even if it lifted the plot almost wholesale from the first Star Wars film, "it has done it so well."

Isn't this still called plagiarism?  And beyond that...has our collective aesthetic sensibility dulled to such a degree that we believe a repetition of the same plot from the first Star Wars movie makes sense--as long as the new movie has good production values?  

I will have to see the movie to judge fairly...but I see this overt copying in an iconic movie franchise as another example of an originality deficit in this country, across many different genres.

One week left

I still want to finish the stories this year...but if I rush it at this point, it just won't be done right; that's almost guaranteed.

New, final deadline for getting them out is January 8th.

And now, off to watch a movie.  It is Christmas Eve after all.

Grumpiness

I've been grumpy these past few days...yes, just in time for Christmas...it's tied very much to the fact that I've had no time to write for more days than I can count (beyond this journal, that is).  This morning I was fit to be tied, as the old expression goes...jumping out of my own skin.  Everything irritated me, including, how very irritated I was about next to nothing.

At around 4:45, finally made it out the door for a jog.  It was getting dark already (it is the winter solstice after all), but I was determined to run for an hour or so.  Which I did...and it was exhilarating. Completely cured me of the grumps.  I feel so lucky to be healthy--much more healthy than this time last year--and so blessed to have a wonderful family, all of them in good health and reasonably happy.  Missing my parents quite a bit...but the pain of losing them, intense in 2006-2009, has subsided to a near-constant, low-pressure longing.

Sometimes the only cure for grumpiness is to smash it.

Silliness

My son giggled a lot watching one of the Peanuts TV specials today; I think it was called "It's Magic, Charlie Brown."  Today was his first time watching any Peanuts in video form (except for the excerpt of Snoopy fighting the Red Baron from the Christmas special).  I gave him a 3-DVD set of Peanuts as an early Christmas present.   He wasn't that impressed with "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown," nor "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown"--they are just a bit dated, I think in a charming way, but it's not enough action to hold my boy's interest.   However, "It's Magic" had him laughing hysterically.  All the goofy things Snoopy does--making Charlie Brown disappear, then putting a ghost costume and a tie on him--it's complete silliness, but that's just what made him laugh so hard.

I'm not going to launch into a big sermon about how much we need silliness in our lives...but we do. In contemporary U.S. culture, silliness has been replaced, to a large degree, by sarcasm and irony...that's why so few of us really know how to giggle like a six-year-old.  Myself included.

Scattered

No time today for anything but basic shopping and cleaning (did manage to get out the door for a 3-mile jog, thank goodness); yesterday, researched/bought Christmas presents online for the entire afternoon--so, feeling tremendously scattered, brainless and sleepy...and for the next three days we're either entertaining guests, including an overnight guest, or I'm driving to San Francisco with my son to meet a friend up there.  And I still have all the gifts to wrap, the house to clean more thoroughly, Christmas dinner to prepare etc. etc.

Trying not to be depressed about the fact that I've had no time to work on the stories since last Thursday (and that was only for a couple hours), and will have no time again until this coming Friday, at best.

Sugar Festival

Okay, today my anti-sugar regime collapsed--completely and spectacularly.  It all started with a sudden intense desire to bake brownies, ostensibly for my son, who devoured about five of them...at first I had one small morsel and told myself, "That's not really cheating"; then another, then an entire brownie (15 grams of sugar, wham), then it all came tumbling down.  And tonight I'm having hot chocolate AND pumpkin pie.

Will start over yet again--tomorrow.

William Carlos Williams and the Imagination

William Carlos Williams is one of my chief inspirations.  Poetry, prose, autobiography, essays...he did it all; and he was an innovator in every genre.  His credo:  the imagination, first and foremost.

Some of his efforts were less successful than others; in some works he seems to be foaming at the mouth rather than writing and/or his imagination just doesn't achieve lift-off.  But that's the exception rather than the rule.  More often than not his works sound fresh and original even today; and at every moment, one feels his excitement for the written word, for the act of slapping words down on the page even when one is dropping dead from exhaustion (he was a full-time pediatrician after all, with two sons).  Sometimes he scribbled down a poem on a prescription pad at 11 p.m. when the family had dropped off to sleep and he finally had a chance to be alone with his thoughts.  (My situation right now.)

How badly we need a William Carlos Williams today...or more precisely, how badly we need an efflorescence of imaginative art, similar to the one that occurred about a century ago.

Am I Like That

Extremely tired...my cat has developed an annoying habit of coming to me at 4 in the morning, meowing, and butting the back of my head with hers, then sacking out right there on my pillow, her back up against the back of my head.  Sometimes I've made it back to sleep, but even so...I wonder what I can do to break this new habit of hers.  My sanity might depend on it.

I recently came across a blog by a woman who writes and who also races in triathlons.  And I've rarely read anything so self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing.

And I'm wondering:  am I like that?

It's late--fell behind with everything these last two days, got very little done...need to go to sleep anyway, especially with that 4 a.m. wake-up call in my near-future.

Try Again (and Again and Again)

My son was sick the last two days--just a mild cold, but he was drippy and sneezy enough to stay home.  Of course he was as happy as a clam, and spent at least two hours each day playing one particular online naval battle game.  He also watched The Magic School Bus, a great education-and-adventure program for kids, with Lily Tomlin as the daffy and unflappable schoolteacher, Ms. Frizzle.  He did some writing each day, and a smattering of math, and we did quite a bit of reading; he also went to his programming class...overall, he was a very good boy during these two days...nevertheless, my morale is low today, because I lost two days of writing/editing time (except for brief snatches while he was doing the online game) and now I feel like I'm never going to finish and get the stories out.

I know that I shouldn't feel that way.  I have four hours to call my own today, another three hours tomorrow.

For some reason I haven't slept well all week, and that's probably the real reason morale is low.  Oh, and also--ate five cookies yesterday.

This low-sugar diet is much harder for me than getting daily exercise...I hate saying it again, but I'll have to start all over.  Today is the first day (again) of the low-sugar diet.  No heavily sweetened foods for six months, no more than 20 grams of sugar a day (increasing the total amount just a bit), and no more than 10 grams at any one time.

The Element of Surprise

I want my stories to push past whatever parameters I set up for them.  I want the characters to take me beyond wherever I thought I was going, and I want the stories to ask questions I can't answer.  A story should shape itself, in a sense.  For that to happen, I have to shut off my conscious mind while I'm writing--or at least, lock it up in a closet somewhere in the back of my brain.

I think I was in that zone of semi-consciousness yesterday, when I rewrote (almost from scratch) one of my stories.  Whether the story is any good is a different question.  But often those are the stories I'm drawn to read and re-read after they're done, because they tend to have multiple layers, and continue to surprise me each time I read them.

DIY Triathlon? / New Goal for Stories

Follow-up on yesterday's post:  walking today for exercise, I started thinking about putting together my own triathlon:  I'd swim 60 laps at our local pool, heated to a lovely 80 degrees, while my son and husband watched my bike; then I'd change and hop on the bike, speeding through a 40-kilometer course I'd mapped out in advance; then I'd run a 10k.  All in the middle of the day, around 11 a.m. perhaps, not at 7 a.m. which is when the vast majority of triathlons are held.

I just don't care that much about the races, don't need them for validation; don't care to be elbowed by (or to accidently elbow) other competitors in the swim, don't like the automatic hyperventilation in those frigid waters and the ever-present, very real possibility of a heart attack...something I didn't fully understand until yesterday.

I love, with a passion, all three activities:  swimming, biking, jogging.  But I pretty much hate the way triathlons are organized (and the trend, in that respect, is downwards, with more crushing crowds of people as the sport grows ever more popular, and with gear that is way too expensive and has virtually no use outside of a triathlon--is designed to help you go one mile an hour faster on the bike or to get you through the transitions ten seconds faster--why on earth do they make the transitions part of the race, there are other ways to set it up).

I want to be fit.  I also want to have a life, not think about this sport too much, just have fun with it.

I learned, also, that at the HITS triathlon in Napa the water temperature is only 54 to 59 degrees--I thought Lake Berryessa was warmer than that, but apparently it's no warmer than the Pacific Ocean.  That's really too cold for me...

Right now there's no triathlon I'm eager to do, except the one that starts at my local pool and ends at my house.  Fitness, not fanaticism.

On a separate, but related note:  my son was sick today, which meant, very little time was spent working on the stories.  However, did manage to re-write, almost from scratch, one story that was really going nowhere, with an empty character and a very weak plot...it's pretty good now.  So that was one small victory...but I still have about thirty-eight stories to finish...oh well; revising my goal...I'm simply hoping to get the stories out before the end of the year.

Triathlon Blues

I read two things today about the Vineman Triathlon in Monte Rio that gave me pause (I had been thinking about signing up for that one--and soon, since it sells out quickly).

A woman died there a few years ago, during the swim portion of the 70.3 (half-Ironman).  I was planning to do the Olympic, not the 70.3; but still.  She was 50, and an experienced triathlete, with no preexisting heart condition as far as anyone knew.  According to what I read, she had not warmed up in the water before starting the swim portion of the race.

Reading about her death led me to read more about triathlons and deaths; there have been quite a few, around 53 total between 2007 and 2013, and most of them happened during the swim portion.  The shock of hitting cold water, then trying to swim as fast as you can--I experienced that a little bit in the Marin Triathlon.  The water wasn't even all that cold, maybe in the high 60s (I'm just guessing; it was far warmer than usual due to this year's El Nino conditions).  That's supposedly how warm the water is in the Russian River--or maybe it's even warmer in June, I don't really know.

At any rate, swimming in cold water (high 60s, while not as frigid as the Pacific Ocean, is still very cold), especially without warming up first, can be very dangerous, according to a few articles I read online this evening.

I didn't do a warm-up swim at the Marin Triathlon; nor did most of the swimmers participating as far as I could tell (although I didn't watch the competitors carefully before the race started, just was too focused on my own preparations).  After freezing and hyperventilating a bit during the swim, I can see very clearly why it would be important to warm up.  I don't understand why this isn't a requirement or at least, very strongly recommended at all triathlons.

Also, I read today that the Vineman has been taken over by Ironman, and at least one observer laments the fact, saying the marquee triathlon events are becoming too splashy, commercial and expensive, while the more modest, locally-run events that are much cheaper and user-friendly are being ignored by most triathletes, for no good reason:

http://www.outsideonline.com/2035616/rip-vineman-1990-2015

I am wondering, after reading these two articles, which triathlon I can pick that will have a low-key community feeling about it, not be too crowded, and not have absolutely frigid or otherwise terrible water conditions. The only two that come to mind are one of the HITS triathlons, or Marin.  I could also do one in San Diego or Hawaii, perhaps.

I'll have to do more research.

Above all, I want to remember:  the goal here is fitness, not fanaticism...I want to do a couple Olympic triathlons when I'm ready; but only when I'm good and ready.

Sugar Blues

I craved sugar today, all day...which is further proof that I really needed to go on this low-sugar diet...

When I say, "craved sugar," I mean, I craved heavy-duty sugar:  cookies, cake, ice cream.

Ended up eating pancakes with a little bit of syrup, then also having the low-sugar oatmeal, AND some low-sugar hot chocolate at noon...then, some low-sugar ice cream.  I'm sure I was at my 15-grams-of-sugar limit, or slightly over it, by 1 p.m.

On a more positive note:  I did manage to work on the stories today, even though it was Sunday.

The next two days will be all about the stories.

Putting the Blinders On

I need to get serious about finishing the short-short stories...it's time to get done with that.

It requires putting the blinders on and making that a high priority.

This blog will definitely take a back seat to the stories for a week or so, at least.

10K / Low-sugar diet (again)

Managed to complete a 10K today...the first one in about ten years.  The best part of that was, I felt almost no pain in my knee, and still don't, several hours later.  The second best part:  it wasn't too hard. I wasn't pushing myself in terms of pace, but I wasn't lollygagging, either.

I think I'll be ready for that 10K race in Fremont in January...at least, now I know I'll get through it. 

I'm also thinking about completing at least one Olympic triathlon next year.  The two races I have my eye on are the Monte Rio Triathlon in June, and perhaps the Santa Cruz Triathlon in September (but I hate freezing-cold ocean swims...will probably look for an alternative).   I'm pretty sure I could get through an Olympic triathlon even now...but the goal is to finish without being completely wiped out.

On another subject:  I completely bailed on the low-sugar diet yesterday, ate about five cookies. Today was better--so (sigh) December 11th is my new start date.

Euphoria

I've experienced a mild euphoria these past four days, based simply on the fact that (1) I don't feel nauseous, and (2) my cough is ten times better--I don't feel like coughing every second.  An added bonus:  my knee is hardly bothering me at all these days.  And, I'm still at my target weight (although I've added a couple pounds this past week--since I can't eat sugary foods I'm probably eating way too much of everything else that's bad).

The euphoria exhibits itself in a greater eagerness to interact with people, and in a pervasive feeling of contentment...I know, banal to the max...

So my body is feeling pretty good...and my brain?  I did work pretty well today on the stories; not as disgusted with them as I was yesterday.  I think I'll be completely done in about a week, if all goes well.  But where on Earth should I send them?

Death

How do we process the fact of death at age 6?  I know that my son tried to process it today, when I read him a children's book (The Forever Dog), about a boy whose dog dies suddenly of an illness.  The boy returns home from school and his mom tells him the dog is at the vet; the dog dies and never returns home. The mom tells her son that his dog will live forever in his heart; eventually, the boy is able to think about his dog and smile.

The story made tears roll down my son's face.  He didn't want to talk about it; he sat there looking sad for about five minutes.  I stayed next to him, dried his tears.  Then he picked up the book and read it again on his own.  I went to another room, as he seemed to want to sort out his own feelings.

It doesn't come up often--the fact that my husband and I are older parents.  We don't discuss it much with each other (not yet), and we haven't discussed it with our son.  But I do think about it a lot.  I feel an unspoken pressure to make sure our son reaches a certain high level of maturity by the time he's twenty.  How do you "make sure"?  It's not really possible to make sure.  But I try.

Right now he's getting ready to sleep by reading his book of Peanuts comics, and he's giggling up a storm, any thoughts of death very much in abeyance.  Thank goodness.

Cookie Fiend

I've always been a cookie fiend.  Before I began my low-sugar diet, hardly a day went by that I didn't scarf down at least three or four of them.  I'm finding that a particularly hard habit to break, as evidenced by the fact that even during this new low-sugar regimen, I've been finding ways to justify the consumption of at least one or two cookies a day.  "Oh it's just 3 grams of sugar, I don't have to be so rigid about things do I?"

Yes it's not that bad, and I've only had one or two small cookies.  But that's not the point.  I was going to stop eating cookies, cake, chocolate, and virtually all other sugar-laden foods, for at least six months, maybe a year...so every time I eat a cookie, even one with just two grams of sugar, I'm breaking the rules.  Need to stop.

Coding School for Every Child

Today--what a contrast to the art school; my son went to his first real lesson at a coding school...I know, it seems like we're pushing him too early for that sort of thing.  Trust me--we're not.  He's a natural and he loves it; he's been doing simple coding exercises at home for five months.  And he had a ball doing the same sort of thing with some one-on-one guidance at this school, which just started up in our area about two months ago.

I say, "What a contrast" because unlike the art school I described yesterday, my son was making a hundred decisions about what kind of shapes and characters and backgrounds to use, how he wanted his characters to move, what kind of story he wanted to tell.  It was a creative activity, moving at the speed of light--or more accurately, at the speed of 6-year-old, computer-savvy kids (which means,  fast).  

I never thought I'd say this, but coding school did more for my son's imagination than art school.  At least, this coding school did more than that particular art school.  I will keep searching for a good art class.

Art Schools for "Perfect" Children

Last week, my son did a trial lesson at a local art school.  My initial impression of this school was that all the kids--overwhelmingly girls--were sitting very quietly in front of their easels, and were remarkably well-behaved.  I thought, what a wonderful, calm environment.  And yes, it is wonderfully calm, but my son was terrifically bored, and I must say that I don't blame him.  He had to sit there for an hour copying a drawing of a robot's head--an activity that requires zero imagination.  The goal of the school is for a child to be able to copy as well as possible.  Even some of the best artwork that I saw at the school's web site virtually screams, "I am a copy; not a shred of original thought went into this."

For children that love to be perfect--to draw absolutely straight lines, to shade in colors precisely within a certain boundary, to transfer someone's else's ideas to a piece of paper--this class is great.  And there are a lot of kids like that.  For children that have at least a few ounces of imagination, and don't want cookie-cutter pictures that look like everyone else's--this class is horrible.  But this particular art school is fantastically popular in our community.

So many artistic activities for kids are designed these days on this cookie-cutter model.  The Suzuki Method is very much designed so that any kid can scrape out a few miserable notes on a violin, or pound them out on the piano.  Their parents are not demanding anything more.  I don't want my son to be perfect in the Suzuki sense, or in the way that this art school dictates.  I want him to experience art in a more visceral, exciting way than he does in these sorts of classes.

Sugar Adjustments

For the first time in ten days, felt almost normal today, health-wise, except for an occasional cough. Managed to do all the yoga, weight and knee exercises, plus jog nearly five miles. Helped my son get started with an assignment where he makes a poster describing his cultural heritage (he's not nearly done with it, but it's not due until December 16th).  We also went for a two-mile walk.  Yesterday we (my son, my husband and I) went hiking at a local farm, which was tranquil and free of crowds.   It feels wonderful to be healthy enough to engage in normal life again.

I made pancakes for everyone this morning...was mostly doing it to taste maple syrup!  I tried to limit myself to 2 teaspoons of syrup total, which is already about 7 grams of sugar, and almost succeeded...then had to scarf up my son's half of a leftover pancake which was drenched in maple syrup...oh well...

It's virtually impossible to eliminate sugar completely from one's diet.  So my new goal is to limit the sugar consumption on any given day to roughly 15 grams, total, and not exceed 8 grams at any given meal.  That's a more realistic goal than to say I'm never eating sugar again.

My savior where this whole no-sugar diet is concerned is Dreyer's Slow-Churn vanilla ice cream with Splenda.  It tastes like regular ice cream and has three grams of sugar per half-cup serving, and not that much fat either.  It's a miracle food as far as I'm concerned.  Another wonderful discovery:  Quaker Oats reduced-sugar instant oatmeal packets.  4 to 6 grams of sugar per serving, and it's still very sweet.

Back on the Wagon(s)

Somewhat better today.

Am going to have to re-commit myself to the exercise and no-sugar regimen, as I really fell off the wagon these last few days.  Managed to exercise yesterday, but the previous two days, because of sickness, did not; and, yesterday I gleefully consumed three-quarters of a PowerBar, about 19 grams of sugar.

I did manage to complete six months of not missing a single day of exercise, May 30th to November 29th.

So my new pledge is to abstain from any sugary food (including PowerBars) for the next six months, December 4th through June 3rd, and to exercise daily (at least 25 minutes of aerobics six days a week, plus one day of walking at least 45 minutes), and also, to complete, every day, my 20-minute yoga/weights/knee exercise routine.

Now, of course, I'm feeling tired again...

Will have to figure out how to balance it all.

Strange Bug

I was taken down these last couple of days by some kind of virus; was already suffering from a cold of sorts which manifested, for the most part, as a bad cough, then on Tuesday, was knocked out by an episode of vomiting.  Three different moms at my son's school have described something similar happening to their children in the past few weeks...so I am led to believe that there's some kind of weird bug floating around at my son's school.  Though it could have been food poisoning in any of those cases...who knows.

I remained wiped out on Wednesday (yesterday); it was hard to get out of bed and remain upright.   Didn't exercise; hardly ate.  Did manage to pick up my son from school, take him to his new coding class (which he loved) and cook some kind of dinner, then give him a bath--but was just barely getting through it all.  Didn't write in this journal; didn't do much of anything, outside of the usual parental duties.

I still feel like a zombie.  The bad cough is still there; I've had that many times before so at least I know what's going on with that.  I have had some sort of attack of deep coughing almost every fall or winter; some doctor years ago called it "bronchial spasms" but reading the Mayo Clinic web site, I think it could just as well be labelled acute bronchitis.

I had my yearly physical on Tuesday; was hopeful that the doctor would prescribe something, but she didn't, just said it would probably get better by Day 7, which is today...and yes, it is slightly better. But only slightly.  Hopefully, I'll be able to move out of zombie-mode tomorrow.

This Sugar Thing

My goal is not to eliminate all sugar from my diet; only the most sugar-laden substances.  (Eliminating all sugar from the typical Western diet is virtually impossible.)  All the foods I listed yesterday have to be off the list for the time being.

I'll still have toast with jam from time to time, or an apple or a banana or blueberries.  I'll still eat some pre-cooked meals (Amy's cheese tamale verde is a favorite) that have up to 10 grams of sugar.  Any meal that comes with more than 10 grams of sugar, though, is off-limits.  

Just twelve hours into this, however, I've already messed up twice.  I ate half an apricot-rasberry cookie early this morning--completely forgetting about my diet; but I remembered a second later and threw the rest of it away.  Later, however, I ate one and a half Pepperidge Farm Bourdeaux cookies...on purpose.  Okay, that's just 5 grams of sugar, total...but still.  How could I be so weak after just twelve hours?  

I'm that addicted, I guess.  

Goodbye Sugar

My last hurrah with sugar for at least six months, if not longer:  A chocolate Powerbar, Gatorade, chocolate cake, vanilla ice cream, chocolate with hazelnuts, Pepperidge Farm apricot-rasberry cookies.  All consumed today (the last item, the chocolate, just a few seconds ago).

Yes, way too much...but I had to go out in style.

No more sugary foods for the next six months at least.

The Mommy Function

Was sick last night and today--just a cold; but I had a miserable night; for some reason, was freezing cold at the start of the evening, and piled on the blankets, then woke up sweating; ended up getting very little sleep and had a splitting headache.

Went through the motions of cleaning and cooking and grocery shopping today, but none of it with much energy.  Did my daily exercises, did the laundry...flopped on the couch for an hour in the middle of the day watching talk show television excerpts (mostly Ricky Gervais on Jimmy Fallon) while my husband and son visited the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier in Alameda.  All in all, it was a decent day, and I'm not really all that sick, a mild cough, not even much congestion...but feel terrible, somehow, mentally/emotionally.  Very low energy and grumpy as hell.  

On days like these the "Mommy Function"--the caring, nurturing, worker-bee parts of my personality--is on a very low setting.  I still offer my son his breakfast and snacks, get his dinner on the table, listen (half-heartedly) to his pronouncements about a new warplane video game he wants to create, or look at what he's trying to do on Club Penguin...but deep down I just want to forget about everyone, soak in a bubble bath, then immerse myself in a stupid book or movie.  

And right now, I just want to sleep and forget about this sad sack of a day.

School as Poison

My son's school is not bad at all...but it suffers from the same problem of all "good schools" across America:  the element of surprise is almost absent.

Predictability can be a fine thing for young children--as long as it's not over-prescribed.  When it is, like all good medicines, it changes into a kind of poison.  That's true for adults as well, but it's especially true for kids, who desire new experiences and adventure as fervently as they desire pasta and cookies.

I am reminded of this every time my son laughs in a surprised way--which almost never happens at school.  It happened this evening when he was watching a "Magic School Bus" episode about digestion.  Ms. Frizzle's class went for a "field trip" inside a boy's digestive system.  It was hilarious to see the tiny school bus rocking back and forth on the boy's tongue, along with bits of cheese doodles and olive, or to see teeth as big as boulders crashing down as the boy masticated.  My son was entranced, and tickled to his core.

He is getting so much of value from his school; he's learning a lot about teamwork, how to be a friend, and how to work independently and take care of his own things (well, most of the time). And his teacher is one of the most caring and considerate souls I've ever met.

But what he might be losing underneath the flood of worksheets, and the grinding routine of his high-powered public school's curriculum--adventures, surprise, fun--those missing elements are hugely important in a child's life...there's no getting around it.  I'm not saying that this school is poisonous or that it's merely stamping out worker-drones...but sometimes I know, from the look on my son's face when I volunteer in class, that he's extremely bored...and that surprise and excitement are almost never part of his school day.

The Caine Mutiny

The three of us watched "The Caine Mutiny" yesterday and today (in two installments to accommodate my son's bedtime, and his attention span).  Of course, my son enjoyed the details of Navy life, and the short battle, and the typhoon; he left to play a video game once the courtroom scenes got underway.

My only memory of the movie, which I watched as a young adult, was Humphrey Bogart cracking up in the courtroom, pulling out those little metal balls, putting his paranoia on full display...the most famous scene.  I was surprised at how well-done the entire movie is from start to finish, how well-written and well-acted.  Van Johnson is perhaps the biggest surprise; his character serves as the fulcrum of the entire drama, and he handles the role beautifully.  

It deepened my appreciation of the armed forces to watch this again.  They deal with a lot more besides the stress of battle.  There's the stress of boredom, of strange environments, of superiors who are slightly (or more than slightly) cracked, in one way or another.  Add to that a war, or bad weather, and it's one hell of a mess.

This has nothing to do with my son, my writing or my little exercising/dieting triumphs, but...I feel pretty bad, suddenly, that I've never donated to an armed services support group.  Even if I don't agree with a fair number of the missions they undertake.  They are putting their lives on the line, and often, living in horrible circumstances while doing so.

On this Thanksgiving Day--time to rectify this and find a good group that needs my support.

The Ultimate Feast

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, my son was on vacation, and extremely happy about that.  We actually managed to read three books together; he also played with a math app on the iPad, and did some Tynker programming on the computer.  The rest of the time he did little or nothing--with a big grin on his face.

He loves his down time, and I don't blame him.  He often comes to tell me stories he's just made up about his favorite characters from books, iPad apps or video games...I know there's a whole universe being dreamed up in his head when he's just sitting there, staring into space.  So I try to give him plenty of time to do that.  (I know that I've also been saying he's spends too much time on the iPad and computer...well, that's true as well; but I've just signed him up for two after-school classes and there will be a third one soon, which should help with that particular problem.)

I managed to clean up two more stories.  I realize that I've been whining an awful lot lately about how the stories aren't done, I'm so behind, etc. etc....who cares?  I'm getting it done, and it just takes time--a little more time than I thought it would, but that's okay.  I've got sixty more stories to plow through.  If it takes fifty more days, that's not the end of the world.  (Though I hope I can get it done in two weeks.)

Also ran--not at a blistering pace by any means; but the remarkable thing is, suddenly I'm running four or five miles and feeling good the whole time.  A huge change from the beginning of the summer.  I don't have the well-toned quads of the truly dedicated distance runner...but who cares about that, either.

Also today, indulged in my ultimate guilty pleasures--nachos, a margarita, and chocolate.  I've been dreaming about a meal like that since before the triathlon; glad that it finally happened...now that that's done, I'll try to get a little serious about improving my diet.

Disappointment

I haven't been lazy these past few weeks since the triathlon; I've exercised every day, even vigorously at times.  But my body is saying, "It's cold; let's add some fat layers."  Or at least that's what it feels like.  Hopped on the scale today and saw that my weight has gone up by at least a couple pounds in the last four or five days.  I know that I was abnormally skinny during the period right before and right after the triathlon.  But for heaven's sakes--I don't want to shoot past my pre-pregnancy weight, after all the effort it took to shed those four or five pounds.

I haven't been lazy about the editing either; yet I'm still only on story number forty-seven.  Still have sixty-two left to look at.  Am getting tired of the whole process.  There's no way I'm going to finish by the end of this month.

Eat Some Sugar and Relax

It will be tough to break my sugar habit.  I understand intellectually why it's necessary--I'm a slave to cookies, chocolate, and cake; it's rare that a day goes by without the consumption of at least one of these items.

And the reason for this is pretty simple:  I associate the consumption of a sugary food with all of life's high or low moments.  A bad day?  Eat something sweet, and the world isn't such a gloomy place.  A great day?  Eat some chocolate to celebrate!  And it goes beyond that...put a piece of cake in front of me and I feel like I can relax, whether I'm having a bad day or a good one.

Sugar has served me well in the high moments, in the low moments, and in just about every moment in between...except that it could be killing me slowly.  Various studies have shown a relationship between sugar and almost every horrible disease there is.

It'll be tough, but not impossible, to break this habit, if I find other, better ways to relax, to celebrate, and to get over the rough patches.

I probably need to drink more tea, for one thing--and maybe take up a few new hobbies to get myself out of the old "eat some sugar and feel better" mindset.  Anything:  knitting, solitaire, baking bread, making birdhouses. Why not?  Whatever it takes to break this habit for good.

Not So Hot

I must have irritated my husband today when he suggested taking our son to the beach and I kept repeating that it was a crazy idea, it was too cold, etc.  Our son loves to jump in the waves, on any beach, at any time of the year.

The water, even with El Nino warming it, was fifty-eight degrees today in the Half Moon Bay area.  (I looked it up.)  Luckily the air temperature wasn't bad, in the high sixties or even low seventies...but I was still worried.  In the end, though, they went, and our son had a terrific time for an hour in those frigid waters...my husband reported that people stared at the little boy in astonishment.  "The only people in the water were the surfers, and him," he said.  And the little guy came home still bouncing with energy.  

While they were gone I devoted myself to cleaning the house and buying Christmas gifts online.  Got bogged down in the latter task for about two hours, so didn't get far with the cleaning/tidying project; still have piles and piles of paperwork to sort through upstairs.  Have to get it done by the end of the year.

If that makes me sound like a neat freak--I'm definitely not.  I've had too much junk lying around in the upstairs bedrooms for months now.  

Made absolutely no progress with the writing today, needless to say.  

Was feeling massively discouraged this afternoon, about the writing, mostly; just had a feeling that it was all worthless, no one was going to read anything I wrote, I might as well throw in the towel as a writer, etc...went for a long jog, over five miles, which was surprisingly easy.  These days my body seems to have more confidence in me than my brain does.  

Getting It Done

Spent about four hours polishing/rewriting stories today.  It has been months, maybe years, since I've spent that much time writing/editing on a Saturday...I usually have way too much to do with/for my family on any given Saturday to carve out even two hours for writing.  But my husband took our son hiking for a couple hours, and when they got home, they did a video game together and I kept right on going for another hour and a half.

I always feel guilty when I let my son play video games on the iPad or on the computer for more than an hour.  He loves it, of course...that's usually what he's doing, any time I'm not there to coax him to read a book or do some math or writing or an art project.

Some parents don't allow any video-game playing during the week; our son is spending up to three hours on the iPad or the computer these days--almost every day.  It's gone way too far.  Maybe we'll have to cut it down to about one hour a day, Monday through Thursday, then two hours a day on the weekend...even that liberal amount would be a tragedy for him, but I think it's high time we established that rule--and got him going with extracurricular activities at the same time (I'd held back on those because the start of the school year, and the instigation of homework, is usually stressful for him...but we're way past the start of the school year, and he has very little homework).

Mainly what I want for him, is to start using his "Getting It Done" muscle--I want him to start setting difficult goals for himself and achieving them.

On that subject:  I've reached the final edit of #37; one-third done.  If I can muscle through 9 stories a day, I could be done by the end of the month.  

Metaphor Frenzy

It seems to me that many new fiction writers these days are participating in a sort of metaphor frenzy; every paragraph (or even, every other sentence) has to include at least one stunning metaphor or they feel they're not doing their job as writers.  And even when they restrain themselves and just shoot for, oh, a pretty-good metaphor every page or so, many contemporary writers' metaphors feel overwrought, forced, like the kind of thing you'd use if you're trying too hard to impress your creative writing instructor, not a literary device that helps build a story or a particular character.

It might be original to say, "a tree branch shaped like a stork," and it might be related in some way to the main character's desolate childhood in a coastal town in northern Maine.  But don't just fling metaphors and similes around all over the place...use them sparingly, then weave them skillfully into  the fabric of the story, so they're not just sticking up, calling attention to themselves, like colorful bits of yarn sticking straight out of a sweater.

I attribute the current metaphor frenzy to the popularity of writing workshops and creative writing MFA programs, as well as the lack of good judgment in literary reviews and in publishing houses.  This metaphor frenzy needs to die down.  I'm not calling for a Hemingway-esque return to simplicity (actually Hemingway does use metaphors, contrary to popular belief, and he uses them well).  I'm calling for a return to intelligent writing.

Can good writing be learned in writing workshops and MFA programs?  The jury is still out on that.

Eric Clarkson

Finishing my first sprint triathlon was a big deal for absolutely no one but myself.  But for me, it was huge, because it proved that my knee was doing much better, and could carry me through more than one hour of physical stress without suffering any ill effects.  I can't help but feel good about how far I've come since May 30th of this year, when I was doing absolutely no regular exercise, and still feeling so much knee pain that every trip up and down the stairs of our house made me wince, and I avoided running and hiking altogether.  And I feel immense gratitude that my body has made it through these five months of gradually more intense training, and I can now run five miles or more without noticing pain (other than occasional minor twinges).

I might pursue this crazy sport for a couple more years.  But whatever I do with it--I have this new body, and a new, rejuvenated outlook for all the other pursuits in my life.  The value of that is truly beyond measure.

While I was preparing for my first triathlon, one triathlete's blog in particular held my interest because of its modest, thoughtful tone.  Some triathletes are obviously blogging just to celebrate themselves, the great times they are achieving in races, how tough they are, and so on.  Eric Clarkson writes with obvious love for the sport and with immense gratitude for the experience itself, and his fellow triathletes--not with his ego front and center.  

I learned a lot about how to approach races, and life, from reading his blog, and for that, I am grateful to him.  He announced in his blog recently that he's retiring as a professional triathlete.  I wish him the best; he's only in his mid-thirties so whatever he takes up, I'm sure we'll be hearing more about him soon.

Hot

I recently started reading Mark Hertsgaard's book, Hot: The Next Fifty Years on Earth, which is so frightening and depressing I can hardly keep going with it...but like Bill McKibben's Eaarth, it also seems like the only book I should be reading at the moment.

Why aren't we all campaigning for intelligent climate legislation?  Why haven't I joined the Citizen's Climate Lobby yet?  Why, for the sake of my six-year-old son, aren't I doing more about climate change?  

Because I feel powerless?  

That's not a good enough reason.  

Stop Everything

My son has come down with what looks and acts very much like norovirus.  He threw up four times in the last two and a half hours.  Right now he's doing better.

Norovirus is such a horrible illness.  It takes over, completely, like someone coming into your life and saying, "Stop everything!  I'm in control now."  You feel like throwing up fifty percent of the time for several hours, or even, for a couple days.  You feel so wiped out you can hardly move from your bed, except to hurl yourself into the bathroom, then...hurl.  Then you feel better, but extremely tired and it's hard to eat much--and anyway, you aren't supposed to go anywhere for another 48 hours after you stop throwing up because just a few cells of the virus are enough to make others violently ill.

I read that they were on the trail of a vaccine in 2012...haven't heard what the latest developments are, but I know that several million people in this country will be standing up and cheering when they actually come up with something for this horrible beast of a sickness.

I think I have a pretty good chance of getting it since it's highly contagious and I'm not exactly avoiding my son right now.  I'm being very careful, using a bleach/water solution to clean any surface that might have been touched by the virus, washing his bedding and clothes, and mine, with bleach; but that's no guarantee.

[Evening update:  my son threw up four more times, but it tapered off at around 3 p.m.  Seems like it wasn't as violent an attack as the previous time he had it, for which I'm very grateful.]

Sugarholic

The good thing about doing a triathlon is that it's made me ambitious to improve my life in other ways.

I think I need to lick this sugar habit I've had practically all my life.  I need to cut out all those cookies, cakes, chocolate bars, etc. etc. etc. that I indulge in all the time.

I'm going to start this at the end of the month...partly because it's the six-month anniversary of when I started exercising daily, May 30th.  It will be an easy date to remember.

As of November 30th--no foods that have more sugar than a croissant or 6 ounces of a typical fruit smoothie, or toast with a thin layer of jam.  No more cookies, cakes, ice cream, and so forth, for at least a year.  After that, only on special occasions--once a month at the most.

I did this once before, about ten years ago.  And the funny thing was, once I got going with it, it wasn't all that hard.  It just became a habit like any other.

I have to hope that it will be as easy a transition this time.  Anyway, I know it's one I desperately need to make.

Tragedies Big and Small

There are the immense tragedies, like the bomb attacks in Beirut and Paris...then there are the smaller-scale tragedies--like what happened to this mom in New York:

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/a-baby-dies-at-day-care-and-a-mother-asks-why-she-had-to-leave-him-so-soon/?mtrref=parenting.blogs.nytimes.com

Both tragedies are linked to societal problems so overwhelming that we feel powerless to solve them.  And both problems have to do with people feeling threatened.  The mom felt that she would not be able to get another job if she did not keep this one; and perhaps she chose an unlicensed facility (the article does not make this clear), for financial/locational reasons.  Whatever the details of her decision are, the fact remains that she felt backed into a corner--something a lot of new moms are feeling in our economy.

We must make quality, licensed childcare available to all children under the age of 3 years old, shut down all unlicensed facilities, and make maternity leave available to mothers--at larger companies at least--until their babies are at least 6 months old.  This maternity leave could be unpaid after six weeks; a majority of moms would jump at the chance to be with their babies full-time for at least that long.

How are the terrorists backed into a corner?  I feel no sympathy for these large-scale thugs.  At the same time, we have to understand the appeal of joining the Islamic State for many young immigrant men in France and other parts of the world.  As Peter Neumann discussed on NPR today, we have to understand how isolated the immigrant communities are in France--how impoverished and distanced from mainstream French society.  Young men in these communities feel useless, rejected by French society, without a future...then they look at the "heroes" in Syria and think, why not?  Because that's what testosterone-fueled, despairing young men tend to think a lot of the time--young men without hope and without a lot of prefrontal cortex development, and with just the right amount of indoctrination.

As for the problem in Syria, we are not going to solve it simply by dropping bombs.  We will create many more jihadists if that's our only solution.  We need to know what we're going to do next if we succeed at eliminating the Islamic State as a political entity and a fighting force, because something else will pop up in its place if we don't have a really good plan (and work very closely with our Middle Eastern allies)...we've already been playing whack-a-mole in the region for decades; it doesn't work very well.

Disoriented

I don't have much to say tonight.  Stayed up too late last night reading accounts of the horror in Paris...my thoughts keep returning to the simple fact that these were people relaxing at the end of the work week, going to a soccer match, gathering for quiet meals or for a concert by a seventies blues-rock band (not a death-metal band, the name was some kind of strange joke).  They were just relaxing, bothering no one.

Anyone can relate, in any city; we all do these kinds of things.  Thus the attacks are all the more chilling.

But even if they are chilling--we cannot simply recoil in horror.  First, we must go out and celebrate our lives, every day, on restaurant terraces and in concert halls and soccer stadiums.  The terrorists are like bullies everywhere--they thrive on attention, on alarm, on sensationalistic stories about them.  They do not thrive if people are simply enjoying their lives.

I still feel disoriented about what happened yesterday, in spite of my remarks here...not just disoriented, I feel sick about it.

But life goes on.

Rue de Charonne

Horrible news from Paris today.  I lived for about three months on the Rue de Lappe, just a stone's throw from the small bar/cafe where one of the attacks occurred, La Belle Equipe on the Rue de Charonne.  I remember walking almost daily from the Bastille metro station to my little room on the Rue de Lappe; I always took the Rue de Charonne to get to my street, and both of those streets together form a vivid image in my mind:  Rue de Charonne was the more sophisticated street, with its more expensive (yet still modest) restaurants, but there was something intimate and old-Parisian about both locales, while both were also lively and bustling and full of young hip artist-types looking to make things happen in one of the most colorful cities on the planet.

Rue de Charonne...I remember one of the first times I ventured into one of its little bar/cafes to have something simple and cheap for lunch, probably a sandwich and an espresso.  I was drawn in by the clientele, French for the most part, laughing and lively, not a single tourist in their midst, or so it seemed when I glanced inside. The Rue de Charonne wasn't far from the Place de la Bastille, yet it felt like the part of Paris that wasn't putting on a show for tourists, that was effortlessly sophisticated yet casual, both intellectual and working-class (bobo, I guess the term is--"bohemian bourgeois"), and enjoying itself immensely.  I was intimidated yet fascinated; I ate and drank and read my book and surreptitiously snuck glances at everyone.

And today, nineteen people were slaughtered at one of those bars on the Rue de Charonne, as well as at six other locations in Paris.

I am a bit too sad to write any more about this tonight.

Marginal

It's weird to lead a housewifely existence, then leap into an activity like the triathlon.  Weird, but in a good way.  It's also weird to leap into creative writing after a long day of errands and domestic chores; but it's also deeply satisfying.  I'm leading a marginal, uneventful existence but because of that, because I'm close to the margins, it's easy to leap into completely uncharted territory.

This might be the answer to the dilemma I'm facing in one of my stories.  I'm once again stuck on one particular story, in which the central character completely up-ends his life for a seemingly trivial reason.

Maybe he's lived on the margins for so long, the only thing left for him is to take one step even further out.

No Heat, No Light

I've read more than fifty pages of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See (as mentioned somewhere else, I usually give a novel fifty pages no matter how bad it is...)

I just don't get it; the book was on the New York Times Book Review's top ten list for 2014, and many critics use words like "luminous" and "gripping" and "heartbreaking" to describe it.  Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.

There are so many metaphors, or groups of metaphors, that strive to be poetic but are just--empty.  "Rumors circulate through the Paris museum, moving fast, as quick and brightly colored as scarves." (page 50)  Rumors can be quick and brightly colored (exaggerated, colorful) but why "scarves"?  It just falls flat.  "Out of the loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God." (page 63) The Reich is a tree and then its branches are the lips of God...the tree metaphor was a good one, so why throw lips into it?  I love absudist/surrealist imagery as much as the next person--probably more than the next person.  But I don't want to get stuck on the Dali-esque image of lips on a tree here, in this novel.  And the author obviously didn't intend for that to happen...it's just clumsy writing.

Doerr uses the word "purl" on page 60 ("All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens") and again on page 69 ("Rainwater purls from cloud to roof to eave").  I had to look it up.  "Purl" can mean, to knit with a particular kind of stitch, the purl stitch, but it can also mean, to move in eddies and swirls.  Okay, nice word; I like it in the first sentence; but when it comes back just nine pages later, it doesn't make a lot of sense--does rain really "swirl" from cloud to roof to eave?--and because "purl" already calls so much attention to itself, why did he have to use it again?

But beyond these clumsy moments, and there are many, many similar ones, I keep waiting for real characters to emerge from Doerr's swirling phrases (his purling phrases), his endless descriptions of minute phenomena...the two central characters have little or no life to them.  I don't feel that I've even begun to know them; one is blind, the other fixes radios.  War is descending on both of them so I am supposed to feel bad for them, but as of page 70 they are still puppets, in service of Doerr's poetic flights of fancy; they are not people experiencing a war.  They are not even people experiencing a life.

I don't like to write this; I don't like negative reviews.  Life it too short to focus on the negative.  I feel compelled to do it this one time, because it's such an amazingly popular book and people seem to be deeply moved by it.  Why are these kinds of books held up, more and more, as the gold standard of contemporary fiction?  I just don't understand.

Undoubtedly, many Americans wish to understand World War II and the other horrific events of the twentieth century better than they do now (myself included).  The popularity of this book perhaps reflects this desire...but in my view, the convoluted language of the book takes us further away from World War II, not closer to it.  We get lost in Doerr's overheated phrases and overworked images.

My sad conclusion about this book's popularity is that people want very badly to believe it's a profound book, and indeed it has all the earmarks of profundity:  weighty subject, tragic characters in a tragic situation, philosophical observations and vaguely poetic images...

Enough already.  It's cold, it's late, I need to sleep...since the weekend it's gotten steadily colder, and tonight is perhaps the coldest it's been since early last spring.  Tomorrow I finally have another four hours or so to myself...let's see if I'm capable of producing something that isn't overheated and overworked.

Art and the Hi-tech Boy

Volunteered today for an art-and-music lesson in my son's class, taught by volunteer parents.  It's a once-a-month lesson, and the music portion is extremely limited and not terribly interesting; but the art project (pasting different colored bits of paper to a template based on four characters from "The Nutcracker," including a ballerina, the Mouse King and the Nutcracker himself) proved to be very enjoyable for the students, and taught them something about how creative they could be with texture and color--all within a forty-minute art session.  It was a pleasure to watch them work.  Some were methodical and exacting with their paper and color placement, others (like my son) were more slapdash about it, but managed to be creative in their own way.

My big fear with these art projects is that my son (with his great interest in computers and complete lack of interest in drawing, writing and other fine-motor activities) will not hold his own.  To my surprise and delight, he did fine.  I hovered over him a bit, worried that if he didn't get his template and bits of paper early, he wouldn't be able to complete the project as successfully as the others...I shouldn't have worried so much.  His paper placement was among the least careful of all the students; his ballerina was a bit on the Cubist side of things; but it was still a ballerina in the end, with a variety of well-chosen colors.  

Then he came home and spent about four hours doing simple programming exercises, making a helicopter drone fly in various directions while directing a ball below it to roll through an obstacle course.   He keeps talking about designing his own video game; this has been his big dream for at least three months.  He goes into great detail when he describes the features he wants his game to have.

Dare I say it?  Perhaps his work with computers and iPads has actually stimulated and encouraged his artistic growth.  

How do children become more creative?  That's the basic question perhaps...and I'm pretty sure the Internet generation will find new ways to answer it.  

Geared Up

It's a bit hard to downshift, so to speak, after the triathlon.  My mind is still wrapped around the event.  On the other hand...just going for a leisurely walk today, I felt terrific--still a bit sore from the event on Saturday, but nothing intolerable.

Got back (finally) to the work on the short-short stories today, and it felt great to return to that.  

The next few weeks will be dismal in terms of the amount of time I'll have for any of my projects...Veteran's Day is a holiday, plus there's another early dismissal day tomorrow (and I'm volunteering for most of the morning); then the following week is parent-teacher conference week (which means my son is out of school at 11:30, much earlier than usual), and then it's Thanksgiving week (my son is out of school for three days that week).

I wanted to send out all the short-shorts by my 51st birthday...that's probably not going to happen. Maybe by December 10th.

Definitely by December 10th.

Post-Triathlon

The race results were posted this afternoon...not going to say what my specific time was (to maintain privacy, and because it seems silly to focus on that).  Slower on the bike than expected, by about two minutes (forgot to start my stopwatch at the beginning of the bike ride, which in hindsight was a big mistake), and my swim was about two minutes slower than it usually is.  But that's okay.  I raced pretty well; there's room for growth.  I wasn't in it for the competition with others as much as, to meet the fitness goal I'd set for myself.  That goal was accomplished.

Started the post-race celebration this morning by buying kouign amanns (a very sweet and buttery French pastry) for my husband and myself, and a chocolate truffle for my son.  Plus a cappuccino.   The celebration will continue all week--with different treats each day.   Why not?  I don't become a 50-year-old triathlete every day. 

But now it's time to stop yapping about this and move on to more interesting topics.

Triathlon...or Rock and Roll

Did the sprint triathlon today, my first...kind of neutral about the whole experience.  Not terrible; not glorious either.

The open-water swim was the hardest part.  The water was colder than I expected; it had cooled down a lot since my practice swim in that same part of San Francisco Bay a few weeks ago.  I had a little trouble breathing, it was so cold.  Also, the waves were whipped up by a brisk breeze.  And the water is so murky, the only way to make sure you're going in the right direction is to lift your head way out of the water, above the waves--it forced me to do the breast stroke for a few seconds more than once. It's nearly impossible to see anything out there, including the other human beings in the water; I bumped into swimmers (lightly) a few times.  As a result of all these complications, my best swimming form was just not there during most of the swim, and my time was pretty slow.

The bike and run portions were without mishaps for the most part, except for the fact that my feet were so cold I couldn't feel the front part of them during the first fifteen minutes of the run.  It was like running on stumps.   Needless to say, I didn't have my best form during the run, either.

It took several seconds longer than it should have to get my bike shoes on because of the snug fit of the shoes I'd just bought--wasn't used to them.  Also, I missed the metal grips in the pedal the first time I mounted my bike.  A rookie mistake, which cost another eight seconds or so.  And lacing up the running shoes really does take an extra ten seconds at least...all those things add up.

However, and this is the best part: I felt amazingly good during the last half of the bike portion and for almost the entire run portion.  It was some sort of endorphin blast, allowing me to go fast at the end of the bike ride, and during the last part of the run.  This caught me by surprise.  Does it mean that I didn't push hard enough in the middle part of both races?  Perhaps.  At any rate, it felt wonderful.

My son and husband were a fantastic support team, getting up at 5:20 and getting out the door without hesitation or grumbling.  (I won't subject them to that again; if there is another triathlon in my future, I'll buy a bike rack and get there by myself.)

And now it's done, thank goodness...did I enjoy it?  Would I want to do it again?

I still think that triathlons are very expensive, white-upper-middle-class-oriented affairs, and there's too much danger involved in the bike part of the race.  Those two factors, and the unpleasantness of being very cold at the start of the race--oh, and the pointlessness of making the transitions an actual part of the race--are not attractive aspects of the sport for me.

On the plus side:  I still love those three activities--biking, running, swimming.  A lot.  The triathlon hasn't spoiled that for me.

So I will probably do a few more, then stop...and take up the electric bass.

Day Before

About ten different things to do right now (in the next two hours, before my son gets out of school--Fridays are early-release days) so I'll be brief.

Tomorrow morning at this time I'll be in pain...no other way to put it.  But maybe there will be some sort of endorphin-fueled rush involved as well...tomorrow at around 10:30 I'll be finishing up (hopefully) my first sprint triathlon.  Hope to do it in one hour fifteen minutes or less.  But I'll try to be happy with any time whatsoever--any proof that I did it.  I'm going to try to remember Joe Friel's advice for first-time triathlon racers:  "Your only goal is to finish with a smile."

My son has been playing an iPad game involving the characters from the "Minions" movie; I've heard the music from that game a thousand times, so that's the (crazy, manic) music that will probably be playing in my head for at least part of the race.  Not entirely inappropriate.  All of us triathletes are minions for the American semi-elitist, upper-middle-class lifestyle...in that respect I'm not taking this race all that seriously.

I just want to get out of it with my body and sanity intact, and a smile on my face.

(And finish in less than 1:15.)

This Is What Raw Feels Like

Just realized why I'm feeling so weird right now...

I'm doing two or three things at the same time that make me feel raw and vulnerable in various, quite different ways.  I'm about to do a triathlon, and I'm about to send out my stories.  And, my profile is rising at my son's school due to various volunteering responsibilities.  All of that combined leaves me feeling more raw and exposed than I've felt in a long time.

With the triathlon--I feel physically vulnerable.  The swim in the frigid, murky, at least semi-polluted waters of San Francisco Bay; and the bike ride, pedaling fast down a narrow road with several hundred other bikers--then the run when I'm already bone-tired, and could possibly mess up my knee more severely than it was already messed up this past winter and spring.

With the stories:  what if a whole cadre of critics and casual readers line up against me, saying the stories are worthless?  They could crush my career before it even gets started.

A lot of people won't like my work; I can accept that.  But what if...what if no one does?

"What if?" is easily one of the most depressing questions in the world.  I shouldn't ask it.

The best approach in these situations is--handle it gracefully, but don't take any of it too seriously.

Today at the second "mom's coffee" with a group of four moms from my son's school, all of us doing that outrageous thing--relaxing and having coffee together on a Thursday morning--a mom spoke of her nervousness about attending a PTA meeting.  It would be her first meeting, and she felt like the parents who were already attending were such a tight-knit group.  "I feel like I won't know anyone." I promised to go with her (I'd been thinking of attending my first PTA meeting anyway).  I really appreciated her honesty about being nervous.  And that's what started me thinking about my own feelings of nervousness and vulnerability.

Writing a story, any story, is such a naked thing.  Yes, it's not like playing the piano or stand-up comedy--you're not actually physically there--yet your story is standing up there, your characters.  And your brain is being judged.

"Stay in the moment" is what all the triathlon coaches seem to advise about running the actual race.  Don't project ahead and imagine worst-case scenarios.  That probably holds true for any of the moments of our lives when we're feeling vulnerable.   Stay in the moment.  Yes, my stories will be judged, yes I might fail in the triathlon, yes I might mess up when speaking in front of the school. That's life.  I should listen and learn, and not take any of it too seriously.

Two More Days

It's 10 p.m. and I should be sleeping...the triathlon is in a little over 48 hours.

Did a short and mildly intense workout, following Joe Friel's advice...went out on my bike for 20 minutes (with 90-second race-pace intervals), then jogged for 10 (with similar bursts).  "Tapering," it's called.  A bug hit my face during the bike ride, just above my mouth; it really smacked into my face.  Biking is weird in that sense.  You never know what is going to happen and it usually happens at pretty high speeds.  It's not really a sport for sane people.

I am still not quite myself (see post from a couple days ago), but I also feel stupid talking about it.  I'm not looking forward to the triathlon, mostly because of the logistical complications, but also because of the one hour and twenty minutes of physical pain...But I'm trying not to think about that.

I'm trying to tell myself:  no matter what happens, feel good that you're at this point in your physical fitness.  That's what counts.

Toxic algae blooms in the Bay...shark sitings...

I'm trying not to think, period.

Hope #2

To return to the topic of hope--the story about the black man in jail isn't first rate, I realize that.  At the same time, for some reason, I have to put it out there.  For the simple reason that it's a story that needs to be told.  And I have to tell it as a white suburban mom, without any hip-hop stylings, because that's who I am.  This man is losing hope; here's what he grabs onto:  one happy memory, then another.  And one person in his life who made a difference--the only one.  Grabbing onto those tenuous threads, he weaves a rope, the only rope he's got, and he starts climbing.

"Only connect," E.M. Forster said.  But sometimes we have to connect to ourselves first.

Down

A bit down today...

It might have been the intense one-hour workout yesterday; also, last week was a whirlwind.  And I'm biting my nails about this Saturday (the triathlon).  And, I feel as if the stories are not good, most of them...

And on top of all that, these problems sound so trivial.

You know you're depressed when you start getting depressed about the quality of your depression.

Hope

I rewrote the story that was giving me problems--tweaked it more than rewrote it; the bones of it were okay, I think; I just removed some of the excess verbiage.

The main thing that bothers me about the story is not so much, at this point, the central character--I think he's okay (not great, just okay).  It's the overall subject matter:  the story looks at a black man suffering in jail, and what he does to lift himself up.  Do I have any right to discuss that topic?  It's so far from my daily life.  Also, isn't that a stereotype?  If I'm going to write about a black man, why does he have to be in jail?

But the problem is...the stereotype is also a truth, and it's a truth that a lot of white people want to ignore..."maybe if we don't look at it the problem will just go away."  But we can't just ignore the fact that a lot of injustices have been committed against black people, and especially black men, in the name of "criminal justice."  And those injustices have been committed by white people, at least 99 percent of the time.

I still don't know if I have a right, though, to tell the story about a black man in jail.  I do know that I wanted to write the story because of the black children I worked with at an elementary school in San Francisco.  They were wonderful kids, bursting with life and enthusiasm.  I was there (as a teaching assistant) about thirty years ago.  I often wonder what they are doing now.  I wonder how many of the boys made it into successful careers, good family lives. Some of them were the children of drug addicts or prostitutes.  They started with the deck heavily stacked against them. So the chances are pretty good that some of them just didn't make it.

I wanted to imagine one of them in jail, making a decision right there, at the worst moment of his life, to turn everything around...I know that sounds Pollyanna-ish.  Or just impossible.  But hopefully the story will reach someone, some day, who is actually suffering in jail--a good person who has given up.

Our country is so hard on children who are poor, black or Hispanic (or American Indian or south Asian) and living in a horrible neighborhood.  Part of me still lives with those children at that ugly, windswept elementary school in San Francisco's Ingleside District. Part of me still wants to protect them.  Or at least offer them some kind of hope.

Cat Mom

Yesterday, took my cat in for her annual exam.  She was due for "blood work"--such a strange way to describe it, both ghoulish and sanitized at the same time.  Her panicked cries of pain when they were drawing blood, and when they were giving her a feline leukemia shot--I don't know what to say about it except that it was grim.  I sat with my arms wrapped around my middle, as if they were doing it to me.  She has been subdued for the last day or so, but she's also followed me around most of the time, rubbed against me for treats, played "catch the belt of the robe" from under the bed--in other words, her affection and joie de vivre seem not the least diminished by the cruel ordeal she has been through, which makes me feel even more culpable.

What do cats give us?  My cat has never been all that demonstrative; but in her subtle way, she lets me know that I'm important to her.  And she has become an indispensable part of my life, and my son's.  It's not so much what she does as what she is.

Her two modes of being:  watchful stillness, and play.  If we could, as adults, try to function in those two modes a bit more often...the world would be a more interesting place, let's put it that way.

Zombie Mom

Any mom of younger kids who takes Halloween even semi-seriously--and that's probably 75 per cent of moms in America--is tired right now.  So, the night before Halloween, there might be at least hundred and fifty million zombie-moms walking around in this country, just barely keeping their eyes open, having finished up last-minute Halloween costumes, having volunteered for school Halloween parties and festivals, having raced to the grocery store for last-minute Halloween candy, having carved their damn pumpkins (I still haven't done the latter--tomorrow morning's project), having trundled their kids off to bed after they stayed up way too late dreaming about their trick-or-treat adventures.

Zombie Moms should have an agreed-upon universal signal to tell each other who they are.  Arms lifted at a ninety degree angle combined with dropped jaws?

Lucky for us, there's always the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays coming up--in which to kick back and relax while our husbands do all the heavy lifting.

Did I mention that I have a vivid imagination?

One of Those Guys

Jerry Seinfeld said that from a young age, he wanted to be a comedian.  He wanted to be "one of those guys."  He was obsessed with it.

I haven't followed a writing career nearly as obsessively as Seinfeld followed his passion; however, I do feel an intense desire to be "one of those guys," a writer.  And have felt it (off and on) since the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

I think I'm getting closer to achieving the goal of getting published in more than a few little poetry magazines.  I feel confident that my stories could make it into print, at least five or six of them if not a whole pack of them.

Today was difficult, however.  I spent about fifteen minutes (all the time I had for anything but my son, and related activities) revising an already much-revised story.  Yet the story feels completely half-baked.  It's one of the weakest stories of the bunch.

One of my chief criteria for a good story (two-thirds of Hollywood movies do not succeed at this) is, the main characters have to come alive.  I think this is where this story falls apart.  The main character is almost a caricature.  I have to add more details--rich, significant details that tell us exactly who this guy is.

Somehow, getting this one story right seems very important.  That's because most of the story works so damn well.  But the part that doesn't work pretty much kills the rest of it.

If I want to be "one of those guys," I have to cut out the bad stories, just get rid of them.  That much I know.

Hang On

This was one of those days, not a "Human Pinball" day, more like a "Hang On, the Ride's Starting" kind of day.

It started with a four-hour field trip for my son's class, to a marine science center.  Actually it started with my cat snoring at 5 a.m., waking me up.  Fell back asleep at around 6.  Then, at 7:30, raced to Starbucks because there was no bread for sandwiches, and little else that I could easily pack into a brown bag for a field trip; bought two bagels from the superhuman morning baristas at my local cafe, working their way through lines of fifteen people (or more) as if they were nothing.

When we got to school the teacher told me she'd emailed me to say there were enough drivers; I never got the email.  I stupidly said twice, "So you don't need me?"  She didn't want to say it, so she hemmed and hawed; I stood there trying to figure out what to do.  Finally I decided I would just accompany my son outside, to whichever car he was going in; but when the parent driving that car said "Why don't you just come along?" I thought, yes, why not.  It turned out to be a fantastic field trip, the kind my son will probably remember for the rest of his life, or at least, the part where the class pulled fish out of the bay with a huge net then they let him transfer one fish to a clear bucket with his cupped hands--or the part where he got to touch a leopard shark, in spite of his fear that it would bite his hand off.

After the field trip the kids returned for one hour of class time, and so I went running in spite of a huge headache; the run (a moderately-paced one; I'm "tapering" as they say in the racing world--yes I'm a true triathlon geek now) helped me shake the headache, amazingly enough.  I picked up my son; we watered the classroom garden, which looked as dry as a bone; I did some basic chores at home, then we went to a fundraising dinner for the school at a local "fresh-Mex" restaurant.  Then back at home, I worked on my son's ghost costume (to be worn on Halloween and at the school Halloween parade the day before) until 10 p.m.  Until just now in fact.

Now that the costume is done (just before the deadline), I feel so much better.  In fact, I feel like Supermom today...able to cruise through long field trips and never-before-attempted costume construction in a single day...tomorrow though I've got to carve out a little time for myself, or I'll find myself falling into that cruel vortex of perfect-Mommy madness that so many women have disappeared into, never to be seen again.

Being Six Years Old...

...is not that easy.

You're not really a big kid but no longer all that little...you're asked to do a lot more by yourself but you miss Mommy's attentions; whether or not you can zip your jacket or tie your shoelaces, just having her there helping you all the time, you miss that...you're out on the big playground at school, with the 9 and 10-year-olds, but you have no idea how to negotiate all that play space...if a kid starts picking on you, how do you cope?  If the boys' bathroom is dirty and intimidating, and the classroom toilets are way too small (this is the case in my son's classroom), when do you go to the bathroom?

In kindergarten there was a lot of coloring and drawing; now it's all about spelling, math, writing long sentences with capitals and punctuation.  There's a lot of sitting around while the teacher explains things.  You're expected to do reports!  Long reports that need to be researched.

It's just not that easy.

Yesterday I volunteered in the classroom again, reading a book about how to handle teasing--the book was Simon's Hook and I think the majority of the kids understood the central message, "Don't take the bait"; if a kid is teasing you, employ various tactics like ignoring, making a joke, changing the subject, or walking away rather than getting angry and shouting at them.  Seeing all the kids eagerly participate in the somewhat feeble activity we'd brought for them (a "fishing pole" I'd made out of my cat's feather toy and a garden stake, with a cardboard "fish" at the end and a teasing message attached to it; they had to read the message and think of a good response), I was reminded of what a beautiful age it really is, six going on seven years old...so much is happening, and they are so vulnerable, yet they are (most of them) so eager for adventure, excitement, everything.  Being a six-year-old is one of the hardest jobs in the world and one of the most rewarding.  Being a mom or a teacher of a six-year-old, ditto.

100--done?

With one more rewrite of a half-dead story, I think I've actually, finally made it to 100 decent short-short stories, each of which meets the criteria I set for myself when I started this project.  (Ugh, I'm so tired of that term, "short-short story."  It really needs a better name.)

The criteria were, in a nutshell:  write short-short stories which are 500 to 1000 words in length (I won't reveal the subject matter yet); write the story in sentences that do not call attention to themselves with flowery words and ornate phrasing, but at the same time, use memorable images or metaphors in each story, and interesting connective ideas. 

I don't know if I succeeded too well with the last two criteria, "memorable images and metaphors" and "interesting connective ideas."  Also, the structure--I worked on the last story today because I sensed that it went emotionally dead towards the middle, and was also suffering from a faulty structure (the two problems were intertwined).  But have I really thought through the structure of all of these pieces?  

So now the question is:  should I read through all of them one more time?

The thought of doing that is a bit painful...but I might.  

Swim Secrets

For the first time during a swim workout, I applied the pull technique outlined in Sheila Taormina's book, Swim Speed Secrets.  After a slow-paced 250-meter warmup to practice the technique, I did two 100-meter splits which were not impressive, just one or two seconds faster than before.  Then I tried a 500-meter, telling myself "Don't push too hard, you don't want to get injured."  I swam much less than all-out, yet still managed to shave twenty-one seconds off my previous 500-meter time.  Right now the muscles in my forearms and my upper back near the shoulder blades (posterior deltoids?) are a bit sore, but just a bit.

I've been swimming laps for twenty-six years, and this is the first time that I've learned a technique that improved my swimming speed.  As I was swimming today I couldn't help thinking:  "This is so obvious.  Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?"

I won't try to explain the technique in detail--read the book for that.  It basically involves keeping the elbows up during the first third of the stroke and pushing back with the hand and forearm acting as one, like a paddle, and only then, in the second two-thirds of the stroke, bringing the forearm down and the hand more towards the middle of the body, in a diagonal sweep.  It means that the arm and hand are pushing water backwards during the entire stroke, or at least eighty percent of it; much more so than if the arms are nearly kept straight like windmill blades (which was how I used to do it).  Taormina shows underwater photos of some of the greatest swimmers, and they all use this technique.

I'm a convert, without a doubt.  And now I'm officially becoming a triathlon geek, since I'm so excited about this one improvement in my swimming.

The Art of...

I think Jerry Seinfeld is right.  Standup comedy is an art.  And so is his Internet creation, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."

Art is shaping something beautiful and unique out of nothing.  Art has an identifiable form, a shape, that feels right, for various, often inexplicable reasons.  Every episode--well, very nearly every episode of "Comedians"--has a marvelous shape to it.  Seinfeld understands editing.  The music, the cars, the details of the cars, the phone call to the guest, the greeting at the door, the drive to the coffee shop, the entrance, the conversation--it has an identifiable, well-plotted pace and structure, like the finest jazz riffs, like any good poem or story.

"You've finally made a show about nothing," Larry David says to Jerry, and it's true--but the show is about everything, too, in the same way that conversations with our best friends are about everything--life, death, misery, happiness, work, marriage, sex, politics, comedy, music, cars, donuts, drugs, etc. etc.  In the same way that a good joke can have a lot of pain and sadness stashed in it, Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," this unassuming little chat show, has a lot of life and art running through it.

So Weak

Yesterday's post was silly...who needs to know what my indulgences are (especially when they are so tame)?  But I'll come clean here and say, I bought Sees chocolates yesterday, not long after the post, and ate two pieces yesterday, one today.  It only takes the suggestion of Sees chocolates to make me want some, badly.  Same goes for chocolate cake.  (It's almost 10 p.m. yet I can see myself heading to the grocery store to buy some cake right now.  Plus a little vanilla ice cream.  All true sugarholics can relate I suppose.)

I bought, for my book club, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See; while waiting for the book to arrive, read the first five or so pages online; was not impressed.  But as I've said, I usually give an author fifty pages or so before expressing any kind of real judgment, and will do so with this book.  What does it say about me that I'm more excited to read Sheila Taormina's Swim Speed Secrets than this very popular piece of fiction?  Have I become trivial through and through, yuppified beyond recall?

Life seems so short; I don't really have the patience any more to slog through mediocre pieces of literature...I feel so much more alive writing, running, swimming, biking, even watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, than I do reading most fiction.  And by "most fiction" I mean, everything except fantastic, Tolstoy-level fiction, or more lighthearted yet imaginative and genuinely funny stuff.  There isn't much out there that qualifies as Tolstoy-level, nowadays...nor as terrific trash fiction.  The cake-and-ice-cream stuff.  But we genuinely need both in our lives.

Treats

I plan to incorporate a number of "treats" into the next few weeks.  By that I mean, rewards for having pushed myself hard lately, physically and mentally.

The biggest treat:  going to my favorite spa, a few days after the triathlon.  Already can't wait for that one.

Second treat:  buying a few new outfits (reward for having reached, after seven years of trying, my pre-pregnancy weight).

Third:  lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant.

Fourth:  About six pieces of my favorite See's chocolates.  Eaten over the course of three days, if I'm being good (but I doubt I'll be good).  Maybe an old fashioned donut too.  Will wait until after the triathlon for these rewards.  I hope.

Fifth:  When all the stories are out, I will plan something really special--haven't yet figured that one out.  Maybe, reading in bed Sunday morning, followed by a three-hour hike AND a trip to the spa, then dinner at the Chinese restaurant; followed by See's chocolates.  And someone else besides me taking care of the boy AND cleaning the house from top to bottom.

Sometimes it doesn't hurt to dream.

Fantasy

My son, like many kids his age, has an active fantasy life, although I think it's much too heavily influenced by the colorful, fast, but not terribly imaginative worlds created by Club Penguin (a play environment for the computer created by Disney) and certain kids' movies, as well as books like the Geronimo Stilton series...and, definitely, the countless battle games, available on the iPad--dragon battles, monster battles, airplane battles, tank battles, and now thanks to an outfit called Gluten Free Games, animals battling each other.  

On the more positive side:  he will read books about animals.  He's doing a report on rockhopper penguins for school, and we're reading books about these amazing creatures.  We watched a video showing rockhopper penguins coming home to a windswept island somewhere in the Atlantic; after spending five months at sea, they come home to mate and raise their young...just watching this three-minute video where they have to leap up onto the rocks, then get battered and tossed back into the ocean by huge waves, then leap up again, and again...was so much better than hours of any of his fantasy games...how can I convey this to him?  Reality has so much fantasy in it.  

Works in Progress

Was moderately productive on all fronts today.  Feeling insecure about everything, the writing, the triathlon, my son's progress at school...but I think everything is going reasonably well.

I swam hard but not at race pace, and still managed to do 500 meters in 10 minutes.  Then jogged--not terribly fast, but my knee wasn't feeling all that great; will do double workouts today and tomorrow, then take it easy the following couple of days.  That's straight from Joe Friel's playbook for the final three weeks before a triathlon.

As for the writing--I have 100 completed short-short stories (winnowed down from 109).  I did the edits by hand; still have to type them into the computer.  A lot of secretarial work to plow through.  Hope to be 100% finished and ready to send things out by November 4th at the latest (just before the triathlon)...that's a tight schedule, but not crazy-tight.  

A little depressed when I remember that I started writing these short-shorts in 2010, maybe even 2009. What can I do about that, though?  Just get them out there and start the next thing, that's what.

As for my son and his schoolwork--what can I say?  I don't want to talk too much about him in this blog, to protect his privacy; let's just say, I often have major anxieties about his progress, whether he's "keeping up," whether I'm too easy on him (it was a topic here a few weeks ago, I believe).  But again, what can I say?  I try to balance the pressure to finish school projects, to take French and music and art and tennis lessons, with, "Let's make brownies" or "Let's make some Shrinky-Dinks in the toaster oven."  And if we don't have time for those "useless" activities, then I know I'm really doing something wrong.