Flutters and Flurries

It's been a whirlwind week of activities for my son's school...the volunteer load, so far this year, has increased relative to last year.  Which is not a good trend.

On the other hand--after the week to come, the amount of time I need to spend on those school activities will decrease dramatically.  Which means, finally, finally...my other life--what I can hopefully call a "career" in about three months--will take off.  Or at least, flutter its wings.

Running into Old Age

I don't feel old.  That's the simple truth.  I'm almost 52, but I'm running races and doing it faster than ever...I have a 7-year-old boy, and therefore find myself hanging out with 30 and 40-year-old women (other moms of 7-year-olds), and don't feel like I'm looking conspicuously haggard compared to them...sometimes I catch my reflection in a window and think, "Boy that person needs more sleep," but I feel like I'm holding my own, as a woman moving well beyond 50 years of age.

However--I do feel like time is passing by very quickly now.  When I think about what I still hope to accomplish in life--yes, there's not that much time left.

On the other hand...we've fallen into a good rhythm as a family, these days...which feels good.  For the 2nd year in a row, we all participated in a 5K where I ran the distance and my son and husband did the trail walk.  Jesse happily announced at the end, "Mommy, you'll be proud of me because I walked the whole distance without stopping."  And I was--because my son's favorite thing to do when we're out hiking is to stop after 20 minutes or so and have a snack.

And I managed to run much faster than I've ever run 5 kilometers before.  It's about six hours after the race, and it still feels damn good...I'll probably have this feeling of post-race euphoria for the next day or so.

Of course, there were ten and eleven-year-old children out there, running the whole 5 kilometers faster than I did.  And, there was one 60-year-old woman running it in less than 20 minutes.

There will always be faster people--that's one thing road racing teaches you.  And it's true in every field of endeavor--there will always be faster, smarter, better people.

The trick is to enjoy the hell out of the fact that you, yourself, are right now better than you've ever been.  And as I start to slow down (as I inevitably will, as I get older), I'll have to enjoy the fact that I'm doing better at 57, 58 or 62 years of age, than I ever dreamed I could.

Cool Gray City of Love (and Lunacy)

As I read Gary Kamiya's Cool Gray City of Love, I'm reminded of my experience as a new mom, exploring the hidden corners of San Francisco with my baby boy napping in a stroller.  (I wrote about many of those explorations in the 2009-2010 posts for this blog.)  I do miss those days.  And yet--do I really wish to return to my old life in San Francisco?

Yes and no.  I will always hold a soft spot in my heart for The City.  Ever since I took Caltrain up from Palo Alto at age seventeen, then rode the 30 Stockton up to North Beach--feeling a tremor of excitement race through me as the bus passed the Jack London birthplace plaque, on the wall of a Well Fargo Bank on 3rd Street; ever since I discovered City Lights (best bookstore ever) and Cafe Puccini (best cappuccinos ever); ever since I moved to a little efficiency apartment at Bush and Jones (on the edge of the Tenderloin or the base of Nob Hill, depending how you looked at it) at age 18, then spent most of the next ten years moving from one rental situation to another, one cafe to another, one poetry reading and bookstore to another.

Kamiya writes about San Francisco with the same enthusiasm I felt in those days and which I still feel to some extent.  He turns something of a blind eye to the noise and dirt, the junkies and the schizophrenics, the filthy rich in their SUVs cruising to the opera, to the latest "hot" bar or restaurant, or to one of their absurdly expensive private schools.  Some would say that those extremes--the homeless and the extravagantly wealthy--are always present in any big city; but in San Francisco in the first part of the new millenium, the extremes are ever more observable, and problematic.  Dozens of homeless sleeping in the Powell Street BART station every night; women in neon-glow evening gowns taking their poodles to the Opera...pedestrians getting rammed by bicyclists, people shouting obscenities as they walk down the street...it gets old.

However--I do understand Kamiya's undying love for San Francisco...and share it, though in my case it's a love tempered with a fair measure of disgust and caution.

Revving Up While Slowing Down

So much happening right now...hard to know where to begin.  But continuing with the theme of countercultural activities for a moment...

Fishing is one way to slow down, enjoy the beauty of nature, and keep my son focused on something BESIDES video games.  Last Sunday at Santa Cruz Pier was part of that low-technology campaign.  And it will continue this weekend, as I've signed us up to participate in Coastal Cleanup Day at Half Moon Bay; we might take advantage of that trip to get in some more fishing, probably at Pillar Point Harbor.

Another activity that my son will start to pursue this year is 4-H, which has a great chapter in Cupertino.  I've got Jesse signed up for the rabbit project, which meets once a month, starting in October, and basically covers all aspects of rabbit care.  We don't even have a rabbit; but we've held them many times on "Bunny Day" at the local pet store, and Jesse gets so much pleasure from that--his whole system seems to slow down and a special, quiet smile spreads across his face when he's holding a bunny--that I'm pretty sure he'll enjoy being a part of the 4-H rabbit group, for the next year at least.  And who knows, it could inspire him to get involved with animal care in a more significant way.

Last Saturday we took a tour of the 4-H farm at McClellan Ranch in Cupertino.  Two boys, about eleven years old and as excitable and awkward and wonderful as eleven-year-old boys can be, took us past the goat, mini-horse and chicken enclosures; with pride in their eyes, they held up a couple of beautiful chickens and let us stroke their feathers.  They'd raised them from when they were tiny chicks to their present, full-grown splendor.  It was, again, a pause and a step away from the computer and video-oriented world my son is steeped in, and I'm very grateful that he can have that experience once in a while.

My husband and I periodically dream of stepping away from Silicon Valley for good, buying a little house out in the middle of Montana or Washington State...the chances of that seem to be fading at the moment, for a variety of reasons.  But even as I start revving up for a series of fall activities, I'm enjoying these little moments to slow down, breathe more deeply, and just shed myself of all the trappings of contemporary, Silicon Valley life.  It makes a big difference.

Fishing at the Triathlon

This weekend, headed to Santa Cruz with husband, son and brother, for a little fishing at the Santa Cruz Pier.  To my surprise the Santa Cruz Ironman Triathlon (70.3) was happening as we drove up; exhausted people in wet suits were lumbering out of the water right next to the pier as we drove by.  The swimming portion is just the first leg of the event, but several of the competitors looked like they were already ready to quit, and at least one woman was being helped out of the water by race authorities, so she was definitely done.

My husband and brother set up the fishing gear while Jesse and I went down to the beach to get a bucket of water.  I watched more of the Ironman.  I'm all but 100% sure that I will never, ever subject myself to that much coldness and misery.   Okay, yes, I have set myself the goal of completing an olympic triathlon next year, sometime in the spring or summer...but I'll do it in a place where the water temperature is at least 64 degrees, not the frigid 55 degrees or less of Monterey Bay or the Pacific Ocean.  (Even 64 degrees scares me...but we'll see.)

We went back to the pier, where my brother and husband had already caught a couple anchovies and thrown them back.  My husband caught another and handed the rod to our son before it had been reeled in; "You caught a fish!" we both exclaimed to Jesse, who looked proud; but then about twenty minutes later, he caught a fish all by himself with his own cast, and said to us, "Wow, the first fish I really caught by myself."  Which teaches my husband and me a lesson about trying to fool a seven-year-old.

The atmosphere on the Santa Cruz Pier, even in the middle of a triathlon on a Sunday morning, is "totally chill," to use the popular lingo...you cast, sit back in your portable chair, and take in the seagulls and sea lions, or grab a cup of coffee and a pastry from one of the many restaurants and cafes on the other side of the pier.  We released all of our anchovies back into the water when we were done, just dumped them out of our bucket (I hope they survived the fall), and the man fishing next to us shouted, "Free Willy!" and commented, "They're gonna tell their friends how they were just abducted by aliens."  Most of the people fishing were men and boys.  It was Jesse's first fishing trip where he learned to cast the line himself (our previous fishing trip, on Lake Almanor, was completely controlled by the fishing guide, with his deluxe boat, fish finder and four fishing rods set up at each corner of the boat--not very hands-on for our son, and we only caught one tiny fish even with all that gear and expertise).

What a different cultural experience fishing is, compared to a triathlon...compared to most things in our extreme-fun, hurry-up-and-relax culture.  I don't necessarily love fishing myself, but I can understand the allure (pathetic pun intended).  To feel that wiggle at the end of your line--suddenly your life and that fish's life are completely bound together.  Whereas, in a triathlon, you're pushing yourself through the water like a machine, hopefully not smashing your arm against the body of the nearest competitor, trying not to think about how much pain you're in or how difficult it is to catch your breath...you're not connected to the ocean in any way, you're just trying to get past it and onto your bike.  I had a few moments of euphoria during the sprint triathlon I did last year, but they didn't come during the swim in San Francisco Bay; they came when I was zooming through the last part of the bike leg of the race and realized "Hey, I can do this."  But they were fleeting, and had nothing to do with the beauty of my surroundings or the wildlife in the vicinity.

I guess I have some qualms about the whole triathlon experience...then again, fishing is pretty nasty for the fish.  Let's face it:  neither of them are activities I want to pursue on a regular basis.

10K Without Tears

Well, it's done.  Woke up at 4:30 this morning, wide awake.  Just started reading a book and tried not to let it bother me that I'd only gotten five hours' sleep; jazzed up about the race I suppose.  After stretching and a cereal bar, made it out to the car at 6:20, happy to be on schedule.  Turned on the engine, and a "Check Tire Pressure!" notice appeared, which hasn't popped up in, well, years.  I checked all the tires; they were at 25 psi.  Low, but not ridiculously low; decided to risk it.

Two friendly teenage girls waved me into the parking lot with big red flags.  It was the overflow lot; "the other one is probably full," they said.  It wasn't too much of a walk.  The race was well-organized, not too crowded, and low-key overall, which is just what I wanted; and it was almost entirely flat.

I started pretty fast, for me, then after a quarter-mile, realized what I was doing and slowed down.  After one mile a big, ridiculous grin attached itself to my face.  The effort of slogging through 10 kilometers soon got rid of it; but the same thought kept coming back to me:  "I'm so happy to be in decent enough shape that I can do this race, at this speed, without killing myself!"  Good health--maintaining it, celebrating it--is the reason I do these races; and I was enjoying mine enormously for those first few miles of the race.

Things got harder at around Mile 4, but not drastically so.  I was about 80 percent sure that I could make it to the end without slowing down.  The nihilistic thought crossed my mind:  "Why on earth are you even doing this?  What's the point?"  But I chased it away and breathed in the crisp, early-morning air, thought about the cappuccino I would enjoy after the race, but mostly just stayed focused on the present moment, my body and my breath.

I have to admit:  for me, the best part of any race is after it's done...but in some crazy way, this race was almost fun.

10K or not 10K

My first 10K tomorrow...it's going to be hard because I'm trying to do it in under an hour.  (I know...really easy for most runners; hard for this mediocre runner.)  I'm not super-excited.  Plus it's at 8 a.m. on a Sunday.

But the knowledge that I had this race coming up pushed me to run 7 or 8 miles, several times this summer.  Pushed me to put in some interval training when a nice slow run would've felt much better. Pushed me to get out there and run, swim or bike, almost every day.

We need these self-imposed deadlines, sometimes...

But right now my only true motivation to run is the feeling I get when it's over and I know I can grab a cappuccino, go home, take a bubble bath and curl up with a good book.

Busy Week / Dull Week

It's been a bad week for the writing...I just haven't been doing it much.
It's been a good week for just about everything else.  Family is well; school is going remarkably well for Jesse; my biggest volunteer activity at the school has gotten off to an excellent start; I'm exercising.
But somehow...life loses its pizzazz, its tough, beating heart, without the writing.

How Much Is Too Much?--Is Not Always the Right Question

Jesse really balked about checking off the 100 things to get his "prize."  My husband (who is no softie) said it was too overwhelming; and, looking at it again, I had to agree.

We had a serious talk with Jesse, after his mini-tantrum a couple days ago, about the fact that we can't keep buying new video games for him every week; especially, not ones that cost $29.99.  He doesn't understand money yet; but I think he understands why we're trying to limit his video game-playing.  And he agreed that he shouldn't play video games more than about two hours a day (which is already a lot).

He will wait until this Sunday for the new video game; and, he was fine about working more on his writing, reading, math, and basic life-skills; and on following our directions.

I think it helped him that I spoke calmly and respectfully, and listened to his point of view--which is that he did, indeed, feel overwhelmed about checking off 100 items to win something.  The check-off system might work for some kids, but my son just really hates it.  And that doesn't make him a bad kid.

How much is too much (of anything)

Jesse is a big-time video gamer, like a lot of kids his age.  The games are not too violent, and his favorite right now is Minecraft, which is actually somewhat creative.  But--he spends too much time on them.

Yesterday he asked for a new game, which costs $29.99.  He fell in love with it through the videos of a man who has made tutorials for about ten different games.  Jesse absolutely adores these videos; he finds them amusing and very informative.  So of course, he falls in love with all the games this man introduces to him.  And wants them, badly.

I told him that he can get this new game if he does ten things that he doesn't enjoy doing, but needs to be doing every day or almost every day, like brushing his teeth in the morning, clearing the table, and reading/writing/doing math, 15 minutes each every day.  (The school year just started and he's only in 2nd grade, so the teacher hasn't assigned homework yet.)  I told him that he needs to do each of ten different things at least ten times for this new game.  If he does them once each over ten days, he will get the game.

He's so frustrated by this turn of events, and the fact that he's not getting his video game when he wants it (now), that there's a big crisis happening upstairs right at the moment.

Part of me wonders if I overdid it with the "Check off 100 things and you'll get the game" idea.  But I think one way or another, he has to learn that he's not going to get everything he wants without some work.  Especially expensive video games.

On the other hand--I haven't used the check-off strategy very often, and he really, really hates it.  He is generally a good boy, who will do things that we ask him to do...but maybe for him this feels like I'm dumping too much on him all at once.

Lovely Days

What a much-better day...at age 51 (almost 52) I'm learning how to appreciate the days where almost nothing happens, where one's mind has time to drift and to dream, where, yes, there are a lot of housewifely chores, but none of them are too onerous...where the son is mostly doing his own thing (and this mostly involves computer games or Magic Treehouse videos, but this makes him very happy)...where no one in one's little family group is injured or harrassed or especially troubled about anything.

The only thing I did with Jesse is take him to downtown Los Altos, our favorite downtown in Silicon Valley (and the only one, as far as I've seen, which makes a conscious effort to cater to kids) where we visited a pet store with a huge macaw, where he bought the Minecraft Redstone handbook and where he ate a chocolate ice cream cone at the local Baskin-Robbins.

Nearly perfect day in other words...easy for both of us and just what we needed.

Not Great

What a not-great day...

Many things went wrong but the most important thing was Jesse falling off his bike on the way to school--falling hard onto the pavement so that he badly skinned his left leg.  We made it to school and got some help with his injury in the office.

My son will be all right.  But he fell in the street--near the sidewalk, and thankfully, there were no cars coming, but it could have been worse.

I am going to rethink the whole biking-to-school part of the day.  Either he goes very slowly and stays mostly on the sidewalk, or we give up the whole bike-to-school project.  The traffic in this part of Silicon Valley is just a bit too intense.

Beyond Tragedy (a kind of light?)

Yesterday, shopping for a secondhand bike, I met a woman whose son was severely injured playing high school football.  He's in a wheelchair, perhaps permanently.

They live just a mile away; I met her briefly yesterday, standing and talking on her front steps, and might never see her again.  She spoke matter-of-factly about the injury; I made feeble noises of sympathy.

Coming home later, I could hardly breathe.

American football is insane, and we are a mentally ill country to be so fascinated by it.  A country that (like the ancient Romans) likes to see beautiful young men destroyed before their eyes.  Why?  Why on earth?

I think we can do better.  Flag football is a wonderful game; my brother and his friends played it a lot in the streets when we were growing up.

This woman, going through such a horrible experience, seemed utterly calm.  Not joyful, but calm.  Her quiet expression was filled with a kind of light--maybe I'm seeing it through the lens of my emotions at that moment, but I don't think so.  I think she's experienced just about every kind of hell a mother can experience, but has come through it with a sense of purpose.  I took a lot of inspiration from her in those five minutes I spent with her, talking mostly about her son's bike.

Late-night Blather

It's 11:30 and I'm still up which is a tragedy...

Have gotten seven hours' sleep a night two out of the last three nights, which is something of a record for recent weeks--usually the average is down to about six hours a night these days.  For no one good reason, more like, a combination of stupid ones.

This post will be lightning-quick.

The school year has started really well...for one thing, Jesse biked to school every day last week, which he hasn't done since kindergarten; but it was a short week, just three days.  This week will be the real test.  Can he adjust to the entire school routine, including the twice-a-day bike ride (four miles total) without burnout?

I think it'll have the opposite effect...that is, after a mile-long bike ride, he'll actually be settled enough, mentally, to start learning right away.  We'll see.

Making Good Choices

Seeing the Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte flail in front of the television cameras--or Donald Trump for that matter (he's raised flailing and buffoonery to a kind of art)...and, on the other hand, seeing others from the Olympics shine, or once in a blue moon, someone in politics do something heroic, it's hard not to think, "What did your parents teach you about life that perhaps helped you fall/rise to such a level?"

I read Barack Obama's first autobiography, and what stood out was his mother waking him up at 4:30 in the morning to make him study, as well as the fact of his father's very brief appearance on the scene, after his parents' divorce when he was very young.  The absentee dad from Kenya walked into his life again for just one week when he was around 10, and gave him a basketball.  Both parents, in their very disparate ways, pushed him to excel--his mother in a day-to-day, slogging-through-the-trenches manner (at least for the early part of his upbringing--his grandparents mostly took over while he was living in Hawaii) and his father, by having created an almost mythical aura around himself through his absence.  Apparently Obama suffered an identity crisis in his teens, which isn't surprising...but he weathered it with remarkable grace, and a remarkable certainty about his future as a global change maker.

What we do every day as parents really matters...but sometimes our absence from our children's lives is just as influential on their development as our presence...I can't pretend to read Lochte's psyche but it's pretty clear that he was ignored by someone; Trump as well.

I don't ignore my son, but perhaps I commit the opposite sin--perhaps I listen and support him too much...he probably could use a mother who makes a little more room for other influences in his life, including all the not-completely-positive ones.  Then he can learn to make good choices, when confronted with less than stellar individuals like, perhaps, a low-grade Lochte or a Trump.

Why Do This

What is the purpose of this blog?   I've written about that before--but here's a review of that, one more time:

--I'm writing it mostly for myself--to check in and help myself switch gears every day from my "Mommy" life to my life as a writer.

--I'm writing it to record my day-to-day experience as an older mom working to find her way towards a career as a writer and videographer.

--I'm writing it to amuse my son when he's older, and to preserve certain memories of his younger years.

--I'm writing it so my son will understand his mom better.

There's a possibility--slim, I will admit--that my musings about life as an older mother will make their way into a book that I will attempt to publish.  But we'll see--that's not the main goal here.

Sleep is Everything

Second day of the "new schedule," and my brain feels like tiny people are using it for a trampoline...five and a half hours of sleep last night.  I woke up at 4:45 in the morning, dismally wide awake for no good reason.  But what can I do?  Carry on as if everything is normal...

I finished the one hundred short-short stories sometime this spring...then got caught up in school volunteering, then a trip to Hawaii, then...it was June.  Past the deadline for spring submissions for most literary magazines.  Most will accept submissions again starting around September 1st or 15th.

Missing that June 1st deadline put a hole in my stomach that hasn't really gone away, but...once again, no point in lingering on that.  It's time, absolutely time to grab hold of whatever writing talent I have, and run with it.

First Day for Both

My son's first day of second grade today.  My first day back on this blog, and first day back in my writing life.

By the way, I'm getting tired of calling him "my son" here, i.e. not using a name, though I want to retain our anonymity...so I'm going to call him Jesse.  It's the name of the main character in Minecraft Story Mode (which he adores).

The summer was excellent for both of us, although in terms of work on anything to do with writing, it was nearly hopeless.  I was a full-time mom every day, with the exception of about nine days when "Jesse" was in half-day or full-day summer camps.  Then towards the end of the summer I was scrambling to put together an event at Jesse's school, which takes place in less than two weeks.

On a brighter note, I managed to restart the exercise routine, and am in reasonably good shape...right now I'm scheduled to run a 10K in early September, a half-marathon in November and an olympic triathlon next May and July...that's the plan anyway.  Just doing these races to encourage myself to improve physically and because, well, they're a kick sometimes.  I don't have any dream of winning or getting on a podium for my age group.  After the triathlons next year, I'll probably stop doing them for the most part, and do more hiking.

To take on any of that physical stuff, one thing I must do is improve my sleep habits...have gotten only about six hours a night for the past several nights.  I've heard that poor sleep patterns often occur when one is perimenopausal.  It also happens when you have a cat who sometimes meows for attention at midnight or two or five a.m.  But I simply MUST start turning out the lights no later than 10:45 p.m., if I'm going to function at any sort of decent level--mentally, emotionally, physically.

The send-off to second grade went reasonably well.  It will be something of a shock for him, being back in a classroom; his summer was very relaxed.  I'm not the kind of mom who believes in eight weeks of summer camp and umpteen projects during the summer months; everyone needs a break.   He only did one week of half-day camp and one week of full-day camp, plus sixteen swimming lessons...an easy schedule.  We also had play dates, a trip to Washington state, bike rides and hikes, trips to the library; we played badminton and swam in our backyard; he played Minecraft, and other similar games on his computer.  It was all very low-key...but now, second grade, and a much more challenging schedule.

Trying to Roll with It

Back from Arnold, California, one of our less-than-ideal vacation experiences.  The vacation cabin we rented had not been cleaned up after the previous guests left--towels piled up in bathrooms, beds unmade, crumbs everywhere...we immediately called the owner, who apologized and said he would summon the housekeeper, but we thought for a minute and asked him if we could just have a refund.  He graciously accepted.

Found a hotel in town...unfortunately it was in one of the busiest sections of downtown Arnold; plus the first night it snowed which meant, at 5 a.m. the next morning the snowplows were at work, which in and of itself might not have awakened us, but the snowplow operators kept shouting at each other across the street...

Another unpleasant moment of this trip was during our short hike that first afternoon in town, when the skies threatened rain or snow and it was already getting dark.  We stopped at White Pines Lake, then hiked a small portion of the Arnold Rim Trail.  About ten minutes into the hike, when my husband had gone on ahead because our son was going too slowly for him, a medium-sized brown dog with a big muzzle came up to us and snarled at my son, who instinctively hid behind me.  The owner, an older woman, apologized and said, "He's not good around children"; even after that it took her a long time to catch her dog.  But either he got out of her grasp or she released him soon after, because we were continuing up the trail when the dog suddenly came chasing after us again, the woman far behind him.  

He gets to within five feet of us and is snarling and barking excitedly while making movements as if to attack.  I pick up a large stick and wave it toward the dog.  The woman catches up with her dog a second time, but she does not succeed at corralling it.  My son and I continue down the trail (I'm still clutching the stick), and luckily the dog seems to have lost interest in tearing us limb from limb.  

We woke up after the first night to a winter wonderland.  It was still snowing, so we stayed indoors until around noon.  Had lunch in a kitschy western-themed cafe (ominous cow skulls balanced on copper milk jugs in front of the fire, poster of John Wayne over the mantel).  The proprietor, a potbellied man with a hard stare that softened up only a little when he smiled, served up some tasty scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast.  At one point my son looked up at a sign and said, "That sign doesn't make any sense."  The sign said, "WHEN YOU'RE HERE YOU'RE FAMILY."  What can I say, my son is a literalist.

We ended up eating dinner twice at a spacious and inviting family restaurant called the Snowshoe Pub.  The service was great, especially since the waitresses were being run off their feet by the crowds that piled in each night.  

That second afternoon we found a decent spot at a turnoff (Black Springs, I think it was called) for my son to go sledding for the second time in his life.  (The first time was in Klamath Falls, Oregon when he was 3 years old.)  The first slope we tried was too steep for him.  I found myself idiotically yelling instructions at him which he wouldn't follow simply because it was too much to take in. Why on earth did I start yelling?  Not one of my stellar moments as a mother.

The whole experience turned around when we tried a smaller slope which he mastered quickly.  Then a group of about ten children (ages 2 to 15) and one man (the most good-natured man ever, which was necessary considering the army of excited kids he was leading) stopped at the same spot and started blasting down the really steep slope, tumbling into the snow several times and almost breaking their necks, but laughing and having a great time.  They soon found a better place after that, a rock about four feet high covered in snow in front of a medium-steep hillside.  We followed them to their new spot, and then my son truly mastered the art of sledding, going farther once than any of the other kids (was I proud?  Yes, of course).  "You get extra points for hitting a kid," the man joked, when my son almost started down the hill with a kid still in his path.  

That sledding experience was the highlight of the trip.  We also visited Bear Valley Cross Country center, where they had three beautiful slopes for sledding, and not much of a crowd even during the President's Day ski week, and my son had fun, but it was somehow not quite as enjoyable as our semi-private sledding adventure.

I also had a mishap at Bear Valley, which might have influenced my opinion somewhat:  walking back to the car to get my husband's cell phone, I took a "shortcut" off the ski tracks and my foot sank three feet into a hole, which quickly filled up with water.  I could only pull my foot out without the snow boot; then, after a minute of struggle, I finally managed to extricate the soaking-wet boot.  Trudged back to the car, I dried my foot off as well as I could with one of my son's socks, and put on my rain boots (thank heavens I'd brought them) and lumbered back to the sledding slopes, where my son was having a blast.  Yes, it was well worth it, freezing wet foot and all.

We came home a day early because the hotel room, though pleasant enough, just wasn't very restful; the second night some noisy neighbors stomped into their rooms at midnight, talking loudly and laughing, waking up my husband and me (my son sleeps the very sound sleep of a six-year-old).

So the "ski vacation" became a mostly-enjoyable sledding vacation...which was just fine with all of us.   

  

Ski Day

Our "ski week" will probably be a ski day...but it'll be the first day in my son's life...if he makes it to the ski slopes, that is.

We're going to a small town near the base of the Sierras called Arnold, then making quick excursions further up the highway to Bear Valley for the skiing.  Except that there's supposed to be a rain and snowstorm tomorrow, into the next day.  That will be wonderful for my son to experience, of course--the very first falling snow of his life--but it will impede any skiing we were intending to do. However, we still have Friday and Saturday to give it a try; we'll see.

Parks Near You

One of my favorite things to do is to discover something that feels off the beaten path, yet is less than a fifteen-minute drive from our house.  That's what I found yesterday, a park near San Francisco Bay that includes at least two miles of trails, marsh areas that look fairly clean, large green fields, and a few play structures.  Someone has done a lot of work on this place.  And my son and I enjoyed it with just a sprinkling of other people, maybe fifteen total.  Our first sight, when we left the car, was a huge heron, probably a great blue, passing over our heads.  The way it moved, so slowly and majestically, and with a great sense of purpose--made me feel, somehow, that my life mattered, that we all fit into the pattern of things...

On another topic (I'm tired, need to make this brutally short)--I can't believe I forgot to post anything for two days in a row.  But I suppose the world isn't going to stop spinning because of that.

Routine and Chaos

I have a love-hate relationship with both.  I recognize that they play off of each other, are sometimes two sides of the same coin.  No routine without occasional, minute injections of chaos (otherwise how do you keep from going insane?).  No chaos without the comforting return to some sort of routine.

However, lately I've swung over to the "chaos" side of things and have had no luck achieving and maintaining a routine.  And -- I blame the stories.  As well as the five different volunteer assignments I've taken on at school.

With the stories, it's not about the work itself, it's the fact that I'm so sick of having them around; they're like friends who've stayed waaaay past the end of a party and seem to have forgotten how to go home.  You sit there smiling and stifling a yawn, but inside, you feel like strangling them.

At any rate--I finally finished editing, but still have to input the changes for those same 25 stories.  Could get it done in two hours.  Hope to finish by Sunday night.  Then the hunt for magazines starts in earnest.

81

As in, I'm on #81 and still have 25 to finish...could get there tomorrow with a little concentrated effort.  I'm so sick of all the stories, every last one of them.  I know that some of them are pretty good...but, it's been so many years now...and just in the last several months, I've read all of them at least five, some of them forty-five times...I am really at the limit.

Inching Along

All my posts sound alike these days...but, I'm about two-thirds of the way through the LAST, god-awful proofreading of all the short-short stories.  To say that I'm sick of them doesn't begin to describe it.  But I still find glaring typos and other ridiculous errors in them.  Got to finish...and get them out...three more days and I'm really, really done.

Babysitting is Damn Hard Work

Today I babysat one of my son's classmates, just for two and a half hours, right after school...I was exhausted after it was done...which had to do with the fact that I didn't get enough sleep last night, but also with the fact that I'd decided the kids had to have a cookie-baking session and a treasure hunt--one that included finding three clues and solving three problems (math, French and spelling-related. It had nothing to do with the girl I was babysitting; I adore her and she was very sweet and cooperative throughout the play date; my son, on the other hand, was terribly jealous and not very polite.  He was supremely disappointed not to be the one to discover the treasure, but as the girl so rightly pointed out, he discovered the hidden location of the treasure map so they were virtually tied...and what does it matter?

The real problem, of course, is that my son is so used to having me 110% to himself.  I had a talk with him after the play date, about taking care of people when they come to our house, making them feel welcome, and why there was no reason to feel jealous of all the attention I was paying to his friend.  I emphasized the fact that no one is more important to me than he is, that I will always love him more than any other child.

That's definitely true...but every now and then, a little girl following the rules can be awfully nice to have around.

Checking In

Still fighting the over-arching sense of depression that has plagued me for a couple months now.  Still worried about a number of things.  Today I managed to clean all three of our bathrooms, for the first time in at least a month...it took two dismal hours.  We have about 2100 square feet and it seems like most of that is bathroom space.  Also spent a lot of time with the boy (it's Sunday), reading, doing a writing exercise, taking him to the library, getting started with multiplication tables (just for fun...he was really excited about that).  Yet, felt guilty because we didn't get to go boating; by the time I called our local (very small) lake, they were almost ready to shut down for the day.  I told him, for sure we'd go next weekend.  I hope to be there next Saturday (or even Friday afternoon?) right when they open.

The depression has to do with the very big feeling of being LATE for every single aspect of my life: the writing, getting my son signed up for after-school classes, getting ready for a triathlon, getting back into French and Japanese, reading the classics, fixing up the house so that I'm never ashamed to have guests over, studying cooking recipes, the video work.

But this is so silly, and I know it.  Why am I guilt-tripping about all this?  I'm barely keeping up with housework and my son's daily needs and my school volunteering and some sort of exercise regimen...and the work on those damn stories.  BUT, I'm doing it.

It just really doesn't feel like enough.

Doing Something New--2

The other aspect of these short-shorts that is not new, but not done much these days:  I've opted for plain speech that is, for the most part, not snarky and not pretending to be omniscient.  I think we have too much of that in contemporary American writing, and in the culture in general, a sort of empty smartness...

"No, it's not empty smartness, it's just trying for something original and interesting," I hear someone reply.  Maybe so.  But I'm still trying for simplicity.

Doing Something New

One of the stories I reviewed today is about two women who are trying to write.  They met in a grad school English program; one went on to teach at the university level, and is discouraged about her dissertation thesis, thinking it's not worthy of publication; the other ended up working in a preschool and writing stories that attempt to use language in new ways.  "I don't think it's worth it to write anything unless you're trying to do something new," the short-story writer says to the woman who is a university professor.  The professor thinks:  yeah, but what if you're just trying to pay the bills?

I see both points of view; one of the reasons I wrote the story, obviously.  But I side mostly with the short-story writer.  It's too depressing to write unless something about what you're doing is completely new.

Are my short-short stories new?  Just in the sense that I'm trying to write stories that talk about people's lives in a deep way, in a thousand words or less.  But in terms of language, the stories aren't all that innovative.  Also, their structure isn't all that exciting.

One thing that appears necessary, however, when you're writing a very short story, is to have extremely good beginnings and endings.  The opening has to set the scene very quickly and pull you into that character's life in one or two sentences.  The closing has to resonate, like a bell that's struck and makes your whole body hum.  It has to open up the characters--expose secret passageways into their souls, and by extension, into yours.  Maybe, as the writer, I'm not going to guide the reader through every secret passageway (in fact it's impossible to do so), but, I must show the reader where they are, and let them imagine what the path looks like.  Some of the characters are depressed or shut down in some way; in that case, I lead the reader to that secret path, only to have it disappear under brambles and thorns; no way through.

I'm a bit depressed myself, about several different things; but at the same time, I have a stronger sense, as I work my way through the stories one more time, that most of them--maybe eighty percent?--deserve to be published.  In some ways, I feel like my stories are more myself than I am, right now...they're my better self.

In the next batch of short-shorts (if I ever get to the next batch) I will experiment more with new styles and forms.  It just feels like the direction in which I'm headed.

Sleep Is the Best Drug

I was just drifting off to sleep when I remembered...this.  So, short and sweet.  Today was not at all terrible in spite of the fact (because of the fact) that I was hanging out with my son all day, unexpectedly, because he was sick, with that same bad cough that has been plaguing him frequently, since around mid-December.  Tonight he's sleeping quietly, thank goodness...I'm exhausted, so that's it for now.

10 urgent little things

I had coffee with my mother's group...we run away for coffee in the middle of morning once every month or so.  And of course, we talk about kids, summer camp, school issues, etc. etc.  It was an enjoyable time, for sure, but it was also like being in an echo chamber--all of us hyper-concerned about what summer camp to choose for our kids, what swim school, whether to sign up our kids for 4H, Little League, and so on and so forth.

But what I really wanted to say:  I arrived at the coffee about ten minutes late, explaining that my day was jam-packed.  "You know one of those days when you have about ten different urgent things to take care of, and none of them by themselves amount to much, but they all pretty much have to get done that day?  That's the kind of day I'm having," I told them.  Which was true enough.

But it dawned on me later:  that's the day every mom has almost every day.  That's the kind of day I've been having, every day since my son was born.  There are always at least 10 urgent little things to do.
But today, this week, it's even more that way than usual, somehow.

Inundated

Somehow I'm swamped again this week with tasks for both home and school...it's a bad week, that's all I can say.  Today we had drywall workers here until 2 p.m., making a hell of a racket (this after the plumbers were here all day Thursday and Friday, installing new copper pipes for our kitchen sink...it's a long and uninteresting story, the saga of the kitchen pipes, so I'll just stop there).  I had to take my cat to the vet in the middle of all that, a trip which took up most of the morning.

The only bright spot of the day:  my son prepared a nice booklet of all the writing projects he's done at home in the last week and a half to improve his writing skills; every day we look up a new animal on Wikipedia and he writes about it.  We assembled these "reports" into a booklet and we'll present it to his teacher tomorrow.

That was the big depressing thing I refused to mention a couple weeks ago:  my teacher reported to me that my son is struggling at school with his writing and with more complex reading (reading to follow a complicated plot).  But when I say, "struggling," I wonder how much of it is truly a struggle for him?  Because at home, he seems to be doing pretty well.  Anyway, he's now working hard on the writing, and somewhat on the reading.  We'll see.

And tomorrow--if I don't get in some decent jogging and three hours on the stories...inundated or not, it's got to be done.

Social Life

Spent the morning preparing for then hosting a brunch, just for a couple family members...very low-key, but somehow, it managed to stress me out...also, looking at the next few days, they are remarkably busy with school and social engagements, also, taking the cat to the vet for a nail trim and rabies shot, etc. etc.

Trying not to freak out about all that...but it does mean, I'll only have brief snatches of time to work on the stories.

I'm going to try to appreciate the fact that I have some kind of social life, and, find a way to carve out at least three hours a day for the stories...no matter what.

Now aiming for February 14th (Valentine's Day) for a final completion date.

All But Done

Made it through all of the stories; 104 total.  They are cleaned up and ready to go, finally.  Except.

I do feel the need to read through all of them one last time.  I'm sure I missed a typo here and there. And maybe a few of them just don't deserve to see the light of day.  And I probably used too many inactive verbs.  Maybe three or four of the stories are just dumb, or implausible...

Okay.  One more time.  But this time, it'll be quick.  Two days, tops.

Back to Work (Finally)

Finished editing one more story today, just one...but the last five stories are all further from completion than the others.  The work today was like chipping away at a statue where you know that many parts of it aren't quite right, but as soon as you remove a bit from the hand, the lower back suddenly looks funny...laborious, in other words.  But now I have just four more stories left.  Must get them done pronto.

Unbelievable

It's terrible that I didn't get to the writing today.  And yet...

It was my husband's birthday.  We had a nice celebration; my husband loved his presents, and enjoyed the cake, and our son had fun unwrapping the presents, lighting the candles with me, and helping my husband blow them out.  It was a simple event, yet meaningful.

I had a good run.  I still haven't checked to see how far I went.  Felt strong twinges of pain in my knee at the start, but kept on running, and those twinges vanished and I ran slowly but steadily...and the absence of pain made it all feel extra good.

I cleaned the kitchen and straightened out papers, something I've needed to do for at least a month now...I had to do it because the plumber is coming tomorrow to redo the kitchen pipes.  Now the kitchen looks presentable--not completely chaotic--which is a big mood-booster somehow.

I thought more about moving to Washington...which won't happen any time soon, certainly not this year and probably not next...but I have a stronger and stronger feeling that it's in the cards for, perhaps, four years from now; perhaps six.  And my husband feels the same way.  Somehow, that makes us both feel pretty good.  We feel like we're headed towards a more balanced, less frenetic life.

And, speaking of frenetic, I have a meeting at my son's school tomorrow, to talk about parent drivers who are breaking safety rules for drop-off and pickup times; I've done my utmost to notify all the people that should be there about this meeting...and they're all coming.  Mission accomplished.

So things are good...in every area except the writing.  Which feels bad.  But tomorrow--after the meeting--will charge ahead.

I give myself eight days to finish the whole damn thing.

Day by Day

Things still not rosy...but not bleak either.

Still just coping, in some ways...and yes, this was another day away from the writing.

I had a garden lesson to teach this morning for my son's class, and in many ways that was the highlight of the day.  We looked at earthworms and potato bugs (I grew up calling them potato bugs; "roly-poly" seems to be the most popular word for them nowadays but they'll always be potato bugs to me), and conducted two experiments.  I tried to teach the kids how to be scientists:  observe closely and record your observations, make a hypothesis, conduct the experiment, write down the results. The potato bugs didn't seem to want to be the subjects of a science experiment; they curled up into their delightful little balls and threatened to stay that way throughout.  But finally, they uncurled themselves and meandered over to one of the two dirt piles.  I was trying to show that potato bugs prefer moist soil over dry soil, but of course, one potato bug wandered over to the dry soil just for the hell of it.  I think most of the kids doing the potato bug experiment wished they had chosen the earthworm experiment instead (which was, "can earthworms smell"--one dirt pile had vinegar in it, which those wriggly creatures avoided like the plague in favor of the non-vinegar pile).  However--I'm trying to think of the whole thing as a success...and really, for the most part it was.

Other than that...shopping, basic cleaning and organizing, a little bit of vacation planning, exercising, taking the kid to his coding lesson, going to the pet store for cat treats, watching excerpts of various Star Wars movies with my son (he can only watch certain scenes--he self-censors to avoid the "really scary parts"), helping with his writing homework, cooking, and doing some reading with him...took up the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, finally, I have around three hours to spend on the writing...holy cow it's been a long time.

Better?

I've just barely made it through the exercise regimen these last five or six days...all the language work, the reading, the organizing, have fallen by the wayside.  Not to mention, the stories.

But--I do feel slightly better today.  More hopeful.  That will not be my life, the dull routine I described yesterday...

Went ice skating with my son today, and yes, that was another much-needed change of pace.  The fascination with which he watched snow falling from high overhead (they have an artificial snow machine), during the last few minutes of the skating session...that alone was worth the trip to the rink.

The Flip Side of Fun

Okay, so I had the exciting lunch date yesterday...today it was, help little guy with homework, do the dishes, vacuum, get little guy out of the house for some exercise, send an email (requiring an hour of thought) regarding one of my volunteer duties at school, cook lunch, read with little guy, jog, cook dinner, wash dishes...

And suddenly, after not feeling so bad all day, I'm feeling bad.  Just down in the dumps.

"It's just insane!" one of the digital video program friends I met yesterday was saying, referring to her new life with two young kids.  "I'm soooo tired."  She has a three-year-old and a six-month-old, and anyone with kids knows how tired she must be, even if her daughters are angels.  At the same time, she's thinking about applying for a job at a sound studio...she's the kind of woman who will make it happen one way or another; I definitely believe that.  If not this sound studio job, something else equally interesting...she just has that solidity about her; she's both extremely dynamic and extremely practical, which are two qualities that don't usually merge in one human.  She can move mountains.

So what about me?  I can move piles of junk around in my house so they don't look quite so awful.

Did I mention that I feel down in the dumps?

What's in a Lunch

Spent time today with special friends I made nine years ago, while taking the Digital Video Intensive course at San Francisco State.  Nine years--good grief.  I've only been in semi-regular touch with one of those people and after the lunch today I'm really thinking, why on earth did I let those terrific relationships fade?

The eight of us bonded as a group, very quickly, and had loads of fun during the 16 weeks of all-day training.  They taught us every aspect of making digital videos (not that all of it can be taught in 16 weeks--but they did a great job at covering each aspect of making a film--if not in exhaustive thoroughness, at least, in a fair amount of depth.  And at the same time we learned (at least I learned, or had the message brought home to me once again) that "intensive" is the best way to approach any new field of study.  Just go all out.  Eat and drink the stuff, day and night, whatever it is.  Try to learn everything there is to learn in 16 weeks...then keep doing it for another 16, and another...

If you don't approach something with that degree of devotion and passion, you're not likely to make your mark in that chosen field.  That is--if you don't approach it that way for a good four or five years (not just 16 weeks).  Four years, times 3,650 hours (assuming you've worked 10 hours a day) is about what it takes.  Just to start doing something interesting.

But yes...we all need a balanced life...

I say that with a fair degree of irony of course.  Because a BIG part of me would have loved to have spent the last eight or nine years immersed in filmmaking and writing (I see them as part of the same whole).  Let's throw in some music-making for good measure...A big part of me would have loved to have spent the last nine years immersed in crafting good stories, whether in documentary videos, in writing, or in music.

But what I was reminded of, today at lunch with my old buddies, is what it feels like to hang out with others who share the same sort of dreams...and, damn it, what it feels like to dream.  I'd lost that for a little while.

Even More So

It has not been a good week.  It doesn't feel right to go into details, not yet at least...need to spend some time with the problems first.  I don't think they're insurmountable, but they aren't trivial either.

Yes, I've had to fake it today like a maniac...and right now I'm just extremely tired.

At the same time...I think things are getting into better focus, and that's good.

And, at least no one is terribly ill at the moment.

Faking It

Finally today, my son returned to school; he'd been out the previous two days.  This morning he woke up and didn't cough for the first forty minutes or so, but that was a bit deceptive.  He had a vigorous attack of coughing, suddenly, and then I was so much on the fence about school, that I ended up keeping him home until 10 a.m.  He happily sat down at the picnic tables to eat his snack, after saying goodbye, so I thought he'd be fine...but at pickup he mentioned that something a bit traumatic had happened during the day; at one point during the Mad Science presentation they'd had in class, the smoke from an experiment had blown into his face and, according to him, caused him to cough, and he couldn't stop coughing for a long time.  I will have to ask his teacher for more details...I'm not a huge fan of what I've seen of Mad Science, an outfit that organizes "wild" science parties and things like that, all over the Bay Area...but my son was also eager to try one of the science experiments they demonstrated, so maybe it wasn't all bad.

Am so incredibly tired right now, as I write this (couldn't sleep more than three hours last night)...and, yes, still depressed.  Though it isn't hitting me like a sledgehammer today, as it did yesterday.  These days I'm just going through the motions of living--faking it, in other words--but sometimes that's enough to, well, lift morale a bit.  The faking went successfully in other words.

I know that things will settle down, eventually; that I'll finish the stories and send them out...but he's been out of school for two and a half days; I've been far too busy with school chores since winter break ended; and he'll have a three-day weekend again this weekend; and then there's another vacation week, February 15th through the 19th...I've got to finish the stories before then.

The only really nice thing that happened today (besides my son's very beautiful smile--not stemming from anything I did or said, just, his normal beatific smile, stemming from his exuberant, peaceful spirit), and a few wonderful things he said--besides my son, the only really nice thing that happened today, was a 4.2-mile jog (finally, after three days stuck at home, I could go jogging), on a new route, one that seems more peaceful and promising than the other two jogging routes I've usually used.  I didn't jog fast at all, but it didn't really matter.  And my depression definitely shifted after that. Instead of a 50-pound anvil it's maybe a 20-pounder now.

The Depressive Theory of Creativity

I subscribe somewhat to what I'll call the "depressive theory" of creativity.  I do believe that some artists can reach new creative heights after suffering depressive episodes...the dark episode, in some unknown way, unleashes the creativity.  Maybe because, after an attack of serious depression, the brain is more quiet than usual--allowing new thoughts to enter.

Of course, the key word there is "after."

It's not a scientific theory; it's just based on my own experience.  It depends partly on the degree of depression--too intense and it just muddles the brain.

I seem to be going through one of those bleak periods...so I'm hoping for great things in, say, two weeks?  Either that, or complete burnout.

It's partly due to fatigue.  Have not gotten enough sleep for weeks on end.  In fact, my sleep has been similar to the stock market's performance for the last several months.

It also has to do with a complete stagnation on the writing front (yes, due in part to tending to a sick child--who's much better today thank goodness--but more to the fact that I've had so many other pressing mom-related chores to accomplish in recent days).  I've only got five stories left to finish.  So completely desperate to get to them.

Health

My son is sick yet again, a bad cough, again.

I think this coughing "thing" is going around, a cold that starts with the cough, unlike most colds...but I haven't compared notes with enough local moms to know for sure...anyway, my son had a cough for three weeks in December/early January (just in time for Winter Break), and now it's already back.  Rather concerned.  This blog seems so trivial compared to my son's health, so I'm going to stop there for now.

Oh Well

I wasn't very successful at getting things done, again today...but I wasn't completely pathetic either. A few chores took up an inordinate amount of time.  I decided today that the Number One priority had to be, transplanting all the potted plants and seedlings that needed transplanting in the front and back yards...some of those poor plants were obviously desperate to get out of their confined spaces.  I also managed to do some cleaning (though very little), and got on my exercise bike for 35 minutes (not the outdoor bike which has been languishing in my garage since the rains finally returned to California over a month ago).  Went shopping for basic stuff.  That's about it...

But I forgot to mention...the cat woke up both my husband and me at 3 a.m. with her "Let's play!" meow, so soft and cute (and SO annoying)...then, a minute later, my son stumbled into our bedroom announcing that one of his front teeth had just come out, and I had to help him rinse out his mouth and stash the tooth in a safe spot so the tooth fairy could do her job...I could NOT get back to sleep until around 5:00 or 5:30.  And that was after at least three nights in a row of slightly less-than-adequate sleep, partly because my son seems to be coming down with something.  So my having accomplished "precious little" is a-okay.  After all--my sanity is still intact.

Going Down in the Snack Aisle

Today was such a low-energy day it's hardly even worth it to write.  I could have committed hara-kiri in the snack aisle of our local Safeway, I was so bored at that particular moment and had so many groceries to buy...managed to run three miles, but at a slower pace than I'd wanted...it's raining a lot these days, which is wonderful, but adds to the feeling that seems to have overtaken the whole family, this long weekend, to whit:  let's all just be lazy, and do exactly what we want.  My son is coughing again (again!) so it makes it easy (again) to indulge him a little...he's gotten a lot of computer time this weekend, though he did get out for a short hike today with his dad.

I'm looking at cabins in the Sierras, not because we are seriously thinking about buying at the moment, but because it serves as a mini-escape...and my husband is reading books about World War II.  That has been our weekend, so far...tomorrow though, determined to take my son ice skating, edit two stories (am down to the last five), clean the house more seriously than I've cleaned it for a while, and (if the rain lets up tomorrow) get on my bike, even for a short ride.

Coding at Six

My son is crazy about coding.  I'm glad that he is developing a skill, but it's so much about designing violent video games (knights' battles with ghosts and skeletons for instance) that I have to wonder:  what overall effect does this have on his imagination?  To tell the truth, I'm worried.

He's been learning simple coding skills for about eight months now, and has made terrific progress...but I feel that it might be at the expense of so many other things:  developing a strong body, improving his gross motor skills by learning a few different sports, going for a medium-length (3 miles?) hike or 7-mile bike ride at least twice a week, learning snorkeling so he can do that in Hawaii (which we plan to visit in the next year or so), improving his fine-motor skills through art class and just sitting down with a pen and writing something, reading chapter books with ease and understanding more complex stories, playing an instrument, learning martial arts, joining the Cub Scouts or 4H so that he improves his social skills and learns about other things besides software...and so forth.

I need to make more progress with signing him up for some of the aforementioned activities...I've been slow about that, partly because I've been busy, but perhaps in large part because I know he'll be reluctant to try anything except coding classes, which he's already taking...but that's all the more reason to do it.

And even if I do sign him up for various things...we need to set a harder limit on the time he spends in front of a computer.  Too strict a limit and he'll hanker for it...but he simply needs a more balanced life.

Gardeners and Crossing Guards

People think that suburbia is boring, and yes, it is...which used to drive me crazy when I was a teenager.  But there are people here quietly doing difficult work that must get done...people who should be recognized and amply rewarded for what they do.  Instead they're ignored most of the time, and not paid much at all.

We gave our gardener a Christmas bonus, but are we really paying him enough?  He is so conscientious about gathering the leaves from our lawns, driveway and patio; and these are sizeable areas.  Plus we've had so much wind lately that the volume of leaves is at least three times what it normally is.  But he gathered them all this morning (he must have been here for an hour) without any complaints, and without cutting corners.  He's getting a raise; that's all there is to it.

I just spoke with one of the crossing guards at my son's school.  He's worked that same intersection at the school for 11 years, and in that whole time, the salaries have never increased.  He's in a step pay system, and is now on the highest level--but even that level is still only a few dollars above minimum wage.  They should raise the salaries of every step of that difficult, stressful job, for crying out loud.  Like they do for any other city employee.

Eleven years of protecting kids and their parents, at an intersection that must see about four or five hundred cars go through during the dropoff, and again at pickup.  And he's just about the nicest guy around, though he sees people behaving like jerks at that intersection, all the time.  They're having trouble hiring enough people for the crossing guard positions in this town.  Is it any wonder, when they putting their lives in danger every day, and get paid so little for it?

Very Close

I'm so close to finishing the stories that I can almost taste it...but...

I've got to read them through one more time before sending them out.  I want to punch up the language in places...take out boring "is" sentences, find better verbs and better ways to describe things...take out absolutely all the deadwood; and perhaps cut out the four or five worst stories, the ones where the central character is a dull schmuck or the story just doesn't flow well.

Can I stand to postpone finishing for yet one more week??

Yes.  I must.

The Tuxedo Cat and Guerrilla Warfare

Our crazy cat, when feeling frisky, bites my feet or lower leg or whatever part of me she can access; five times out of six, it's a sneak attack.

It just happened.  It often happens at around this time, 9 p.m....which is the "top of the morning" for cats.  I was exercising with 8-pound weights and so, was irritated that she lunged for my foot at that precise moment, when I might have dropped the weights on her by accident.  And, it hurt.   I bent down to where she was hiding, under the bed, clamped my hand on her back, and held her there for about five seconds.

I felt bad afterwards for this gesture.  It just wasn't all that fair; she had no way to know how to interpret my actions.  I'd intended to convey a simple message to behave, but I think the message probably got lost in translation.

That's the problem with being stronger than anyone...those intentions to "gently instruct" often get lost in translation, too, on any level--personal, local, international; they sometimes devolve into actions of brute force, without anyone wishing for that to happen.  Obama bragging about the U.S. being far stronger than any other nation, yesterday in his State of the Union--I know that he was just telling the Republican candidates to stop yammering about how weak and vulnerable we are.  I don't blame him for this message.  I'm just not as comfortable with America being the super-duper power of the world, as he seems to be.

The Mysteries of Editing

A busy day...this and that; chores for my son's school took up most of the day, but did manage to squeeze in about two hours on the stories...a bit frustrated with the amount of rewriting some of them seem to demand, but I know that's pretty normal.  Chris Rock put it the most eloquently perhaps; you start out with a first draft and everything sucking, and it takes a long time "to get past the suck."  I think I've gotten past it with some of the stories, maybe even, the majority of them...but how many of them are really going to spread their wings and fly onto the pages of some magazine, or get published in a book?

How the hell should I know?  I'm just sweeping out the garbage.

Alviso

I've always wanted to visit the tiny town of Alviso, perched at the bottom tip of San Francisco Bay...because I grew up not too far from there, and it hovered for decades on the periphery of my consciousness as a geographically important yet demographically insignificant part of the Bay Area.   It used to be a dump, literally; at least, there used to be a huge dump there, and if anyone was talking about the place, they were usually talking about the dump.  It used to be smelly, and it often floods, so I wondered why anyone would want to live there.

Now, there's a 19-acre wildlife refuge and county park; people go duck hunting, and there are several miles of hiking trails, on levees that lead out through Alviso Slough and into the bay.  It's not exactly gorgeous, but in its emptiness and its air of seclusion, it's a good place to stroll or jog, or think about life, or watch a wide variety of shorebirds.  (It wouldn't be my first choice on a summer afternoon, however, as there's not a spot of shade.)  Yesterday we walked for about an hour and a half, the stillness of the scene around us punctuated from time to time by the roar of jets leaving San Jose Airport.   At one point we encountered a white heron, as tall as my very tall six-year-old; at about the same time we spotted six or seven white pelicans, taking up most of the space on an island the size of a large closet. Two trains went by--first a freight train, then an Amtrak passenger train which was (in keeping with the lonely atmosphere of our surroundings) nearly empty.

The town of Alviso has experienced more than its share of upheavals and transformations.  A major Bay Area port in the 1850s, the importance of the city faded quickly when the railroad system was created that linked San Jose and San Francisco, starting around 1864.  After his canning factory was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, Sai Yin Chew moved his canning operation from San Francisco to Alviso (an extremely dilapidated hulk of a building, with the words "Bayside Canning Company" proudly inscribed in old-fashioned lettering on its facade, still sits there near the waterfront, along with some colorful old Victorian houses and a few more modern dwellings.  For a while, that canning operation was the third-largest in the United States.  Alviso was a popular place for gambling and bootleg whiskey in the Depression, and became a popular boat-building center in the 1960s and 70s; it was a disaster site in the early 1980s when floods devastated the entire town.  In 1968, it was quietly incorporated into the city of San Jose--but it still looks and feels like a place apart.  The population is recorded at around 2,100 these days, although when we visited, we didn't see a single man or beast walking its streets--though we weren't there very long.

The wetlands areas are fighting to recover from the degradation caused by a century and a half of neglect and outright abuse; yet there are plenty of signs that it's now a functioning, if not thriving, ecosystem.  The county park was created a mere six years ago.  Maybe in another sixty, I wouldn't even recognize the place.

Nothing to Envy

Just finished reading another book about North Koreans, written by Barbara Demick, a Los Angeles Times reporter.  The book, entitled Nothing to Envy:  the Lives of Ordinary North Koreans, focuses on the stories of six defectors from the same North Korean city, Chongjin, the 3rd largest city in North Korea.  It's based on her interviews with these six defectors as well as supporting material from about 100 other defectors she interviewed in Seoul, while based there, for a series of Los Angeles Times articles.

What a book.  I don't want to wander over into hyperbole, but I've rarely read any piece of reportage that impressed and moved me as much as this one.  I feel that I've gotten a very truthful glimpse into an extraordinarily closed, dangerous, completely Orwellian world.  And more than is the case with In Order to Live, the book has uplifting moments, as the defectors find various ingenious ways to improve their lives within that horribly repressive regime, then shift gears completely and attempt to thrive in ultra-modern, ultra-capitalist South Korea.

I can't recommend the book highly enough.

Grin and Bear It, Phase 2

I feel horribly "behind" in every aspect of my life.  Housewifely duties, motherly duties, writing, exercise, everything.

I'm going to have to just accept that this is where I am right now.  And make it better.

End of story.

In Order to Live

Usually in this blog, I write about "freedom" as time away from my duties as a housewife and mother.  When I know that in reality, I'm lucky to have the freedom to have chosen those roles. Beyond the fact that I'm free from persecution, I'm free from my former jobs as a secretary, administrator, and badly paid college lecturer.  (At least for the time being.)  And with only one child, and my husband working successfully in the tech industry so that I don't have to go back to work just yet, I really have an enormous amount of freedom.

The lack of freedom Yeonmi Kim, the author of the memoir In Order to Live, has experienced in her life so far, is almost too monumental to comprehend...but it's important to make an effort--to try to understand North Korea, and how badly its 25 million people are suffering.

As a child, Kim was frequently starving and doing without the most basic necessities, including, in one harrowing passage, the necessity of having one's parents at one's side (at the age of eight, she lived alone with her only slightly older sister in their very poorly heated home in North Korea for weeks, waiting for their mother, who was in another city looking for their imprisoned father.  They were alone, freezing, and had almost nothing to eat).  Not only was her family stripped of everything because of the difficulty of making a living, but they were simultaneously forced (like everyone else) to believe that their rulers were nothing short of gods, even though those same rulers were killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of their own people.

Then, as a refugee in China, she and her mother were treated worse than farm animals--raped, beaten, sold as sex slaves.  In another horrible moment shortly before leaving North Korea, she had her appendix removed and then, while recovering at the hospital, had to walk past dead, decaying, rat-infested corpses stacked up outside, just to use an outdoor latrine.

She quotes Joan Didion in the title of her book:  "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."  I feel that way sometimes--that if I don't tell stories, I might as well be dead.  But for Kim this statement has a much more important meaning.  There are people being cruelly tortured and treated like animals right now in North Korea and the part of China that borders it, and they are essentially voiceless.   She is speaking for all of them.

I am afraid for her; she talks about her post-traumatic stress, as well as the difficulties of fitting into both South Korean society and Western society; also, there is the simple fact that she is considered a despicable person now by the North Korean government.  But she has an incredible fighting spirit.  Looking at the trajectory of her life so far, I have to believe that she'll survive everything life throws at her, and will continue to be an admirable spokesperson for her people.

Given the disparity between how she speaks in live interviews and the smooth-flowing English in which the book is written (it was written "with" another writer, Maryanne Vollers), I feel somewhat cheated; that's my only slight criticism of the book.  I want to hear it in Kim's own words, directly; it's her story, her very personal story, and I want to know exactly how she described it before the professional writer made it sound more beautiful.  My mother was also from another country, and spoke English badly; I could never write a story about my mother unless I included her grammar and usage mistakes.  Those flaws in her English tell a story, too...of how hard it was for her in America, and how she was always painfully straddling two very different identities.

But that's a minor quibble with what is otherwise a very moving book, well worth reading.

Grin and Bear It

I worked well this week... I always have interruptions to deal with...basic housewifely chores to complete...but I think I worked at least three hours every day, Monday through Thursday.  Friday is a short day for my son so I know I'll only have about two hours tomorrow, since I have some other urgent work to do for his school...that will mean, about fourteen hours I've spent on the stories this week.  

But I can't feel good about this at all.  It feels, constantly, like it's not enough time.  And like I'm horribly behind.

Blending Together

Certainly I question, sometimes, the worth of any of these stories I'm writing.  Don't they all sound alike?  Aren't they all just the same?  And, aren't they all equally boring?

I've edited the stories now for months, and they're all blending together in some sinister way...I've got to finish this project soon because I can't really tell any more if the stories are good; I've gone over them too many times.

The truly distressing part of it is--I keep finding dozens of things to correct in them.  No matter how many times I've already cleaned them up.

I've really got to finish this project and move on.

When...

When, Oh, When Will It Be Done?  That's just about the only thing on my mind right now.

The house is a mess, papers and books strewn everywhere...upstairs, downstairs.

I have about five overdue tasks to take care of related to my son.  Signing up for art class, swimming and/or gymnastics and/or or martial arts...plus volunteer duties at his school (at least four major tasks to start this week).

I edited about five stories today; so, making progress.  But everything else in my life has been shoved aside.  Everything, that is, except the activities on my new daily schedule:  Japanese and French (30 minutes a day), piano (at least 15 minutes), reading a "Great Book" and studying art (at least 30 minutes/20 pages), yoga and knee and weight exercises plus aerobics (45 minutes)...plus this blog.

For the next week and a half...I'll have to focus a little less on the editing; there are just too many motherly chores to attend to.

But I've got to carve out at least four hours a day for the editing.  So hungry to get it done, once and for all.

The Shock of Drop-Off

My son returned to school after winter break today; it was perhaps more of a shock for me than for him.  Somehow, the little three-minute chat session with various parents before school starts, and again before the kids are released in the afternoon, is always both a mildly pleasurable and mildly uncomfortable experience.  No one knows what to say, and therefore we all launch into inane remarks about the weather, about what we did during the break, about this and that...today, I felt both genuine happiness at seeing other adults again besides my husband, and genuine discomfort...I know that other parents experience these feelings--and many of the ones who are chatting away with ease are actually thinking, "why do I have to submit to the chit-chat routine?  Can't I just sit in a corner of the waiting area, drink my coffee and check emails on my smart phone?"

In spite of it all, I often end up engaging in fairly substantive conversations with the other parents, in spite of their brevity, and in spite of the somewhat forced (involuntary) quality of our connection ...however, if it's pickup time, my son usually pulls on my arm to steer me toward the car just at the point when the conversation with the other parent is getting interesting.  For which behavior, I don't really blame him.  Who wants to stand there, right after school, while his mom blabs away with another mom?

I've never been good at being natural during any sort of transition moment.  But I've got at least another couple years of this dropoff-and-pickup routine...better start doing it more gracefully, if possible.

Editing at a Snail's Pace

During my son's entire winter break, I only managed to finish editing three stories...a very pitiful level of productiveness.  But tomorrow, finally, he's back in school.  I have thirty stories out of one hundred left to complete.  It's not that much...and now, finally, I have about four hours a day for the next four days to spend on them.  I should be able to finish, let's say, the lion's share of them by the end of this week--and all of them by the fifteenth of this month.

I really need to get it done and send them out...it's been about six years now that I've been mucking around with these stories.  Time to move on to something else.

So Far So Good / Montara State Beach and Environs

I managed to do everything on the list, yesterday and today, except paper organizing.  The "writing" I did was actually editing, but until the short-short stories are finished, that's probably the way it has to be.

Getting back to the piano felt great.  So did (to a lesser extent) studying Japanese and French.  I devoted a large portion of my life to those three activities...pursuing them now feels like exercising three very underused and flabby muscles; but, with any luck, in four or five years, I might be able to get them close to the level they were at when I pushed them aside for everything else--caregiving, video production, writing.

We went to Montara State Beach today (since we were visiting someone in San Francisco and we all felt like taking a hike); it was high tide, and about ten minutes into our walk in Gray Whale Cove, my son was "attacked" by a rogue wave--he only got his pants and socks and shoes wet, so it wasn't a complete disaster, and I had stuffed (just a few minutes before our departure) an extra pair of pants for him, and two pairs of socks, into the backpack I took along for the trip.  After changing him while he balanced on a log above the sand (supported from behind by my husband), I suggested we hike the Gray Whale Cove trail, which skirts the edge of the cliffs above the beach.  The trail only lasted about a quarter mile; we walked past a restaurant (La Costanera, it's called), then found another trail on the other side of Highway 1 and off 2nd Street.  We soon found ourselves walking through some of the only surviving wetlands marshes in all of San Mateo County, through a working horse farm, and beyond that, partway up Montara Mountain.  My son's energy flagged pretty quickly, though we did manage to get a pretty good view of the entire cove before he had to turn around and go back to the car.  My husband and I would like to hike to the top of the mountain the next time we return (probably without the little guy, for the time being).

Both my husband and I were cheered by the discovery of this set of trails--new to us--that meander through the parcels of land east of Montara and its beaches--once privately held, now (since the 1980s) open to the public.  We were also discouraged to see how short a distance our son is capable of hiking these days (we only hiked for thirty minutes and he was already complaining of fatigue)...though it's true that he's had a very decent cough since a few days before Christmas, which has undoubtedly affected his stamina to some degree.

At any rate, it's the beginning of a new year, he's six years old, and I told him we're going to go hiking at least twice a week...increasing the distance little by little, until, hopefully, he can manage a five-mile hike with very few problems.

New Year, Manic Me

I was experiencing some kind of end-of-the-year temporary depression, these last several days.  Once again, running has pulled me out of it; I managed a 7.2 mile run today.  It's probably the longest I've ever run so it feels good; and my mood has lifted.

Aside from daily exercise, the new diet, and daily blogging, and despite the very great possibility that this will make me sound like a manic, obsessive idiot--here are the other things I want to do just about every day this year:

--touch the piano at least once for around twenty minutes on average, leading to at least one or two afternoons playing a Schubert Piano Trio or the Brahms Horn Trio or similar with a group of old musician-friends.

--have a mid-afternoon tea or hot cocoa break.  Partly because I feel I should drink more tea, partly because it sounds like such a relaxing thing to do.  I don't have enough relaxing moments incorporated into my day.  (And that ten-minute break cannot include checking emails, paying bills or any other particularly useful activity; that would defeat the purpose.)

--check emails less; instead, set aside just a few minutes in the early morning, and ten minutes after dinner, to handle all emails.

--read and speak French and Japanese for at least 30 minutes (not at the same time, ha).  I've lost most of my fluency with both languages these past eight or nine years; time to reclaim it.

--play outdoors with my son every day:  basketball, soccer, tennis, biking, walking, whatever.

--write or draw or complete science projects or carpentry projects or board games with my son (even ten minutes is far better than nothing).

--write a minimum of 30 minutes a day (new stuff, not editing).

--watch or read something funny, keep fully abreast of the news, and learn something significant about history, every day.

--read twenty or more pages of one classic work a day (I have a goal of reading about 100 "great books" in the next few years).

--start playing the electric bass (I have one, given to me a few years ago by a friend, but I've never tried to play it).  Maybe try the guitar too.

--read once a day with my son.  (I'm setting the bar kind of high as a mom this year--but why not?)

--work every day to become a published writer, either by sending works out, developing a web site, finding and reading good magazines, etc. etc.

--spend about ten minutes a day, perhaps right before the afternoon tea, organizing papers (otherwise I'll keep falling behind with that).

--watch fifteen to thirty minutes of my art history or science dvds right before or after dinner (the two "Great Courses" I've meant to complete for about seven years); take an extension course on astronomy.

--make time to cook a special dish, maybe twice a week a completely new dish (I want to improve my cooking, make it more nutritionally balanced and more creative at the same time) or an old dish, prepared in a careful way.

--make time to email and call old friends (not every day, but at least once a week).

--garden at least once a week; start a composting program at home.

--go hiking or walking somewhere special at least once a week.

--meditate at least once a week for twenty minutes.

--advance the video career with at least five hours of effort a week.  More once the stories are out (ten hours a week minimum).

Am hoping, with this slightly over-the-top micro-managing of my own life, to break the habit of letting too many things slide.  I'm applying here the same technique I used in 2015 for diet and exercise, which is simply:  do it, whatever "it" is, every single day.

So, time to get started.