Winter Season has SO MUCH good stuff about gender as performance, a performance whose terms are set and whose execution is judged by the patriarchy and whose effect is to force women to compete for crumbs. So much! But I shall confine myself to quoting this bit:

About money: I really think we are the most ignorant paid people on earth. I’m sure we are constantly cheated and never complain. We are not trained to think financially. Money is only to pay for the apartment, to buy a fur coat and ballet clothes… When we have a need, we write a check. It’s the only way we know. All our excess money goes on clothes and bodily adornments. We live to adorn ourselves.

Oh and this bit:

My mother worries incessantly that I’m doing the wrong thing. Only those stage-door mothers who themselves dreamed of dancing professionally could forever continue to encourage their teary-eyed, injured, overworked little girls. Recently the mother of a young girl who was auditioning for the school took one look at the bleeding feet and gossiping children and ran out of the building with her daughter in tow. When I have a daughter, I too will keep her clear of competitive ballet schools.

I read Toni Bentley’s Winter Season on the advice of Lazy, Self-Indulgent Book Reviews, a Tumblr blog that basically makes me redundant as a human being (she has an unfinished novel in a drawer, an Appendix QH mare called Bella, and she steals all my jokes about books and also is Canadian which is like being Australian only credible.) ANYWAY. Winter Season was written exactly thirty years ago. John Lennon got shot. The Iranian hostages were released. Bentley was 22 years old and one of seventy women dancing with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet.

That was a great day, the day my future was decided. I probably had an ice cream. If I didn’t, I should have. I remember saying to myself, praying to myself, “If I can only get in, I’ll be happy, I’ll be satisfied. I’ll never ask for more.” I did not realize what a deeply sad day it actually was — the end of a dream and the beginning of reality.

I did ballet from age about five to twelve. I was dreadful at it. The girls love my stories about being the snowflake who always did the step half a beat behind all the other snowflakes (I was special and unique! and precociously offbeat!) My mother bit her tongue until I confessed that I hated it and she confessed that I was terrible and we all had a big laugh and I got to go and learn to ride horses instead. But the first school I went to was a Serious school. (Janice Green, its draconian head, is mysteriously unGoogleable now.) I was exposed to that world: sweaty tights and ballet shoes, itchy pink leotards, examiners flying out from the Royal Ballet. And the sneaking knowledge that no matter how hard I tried, I was always going to suck at this.

Bentley made it to the top seventy in the world, and no further. Can you imagine?! She watches from the wings as Suzanne Farrell and Darci Kistler dance. She is ravished by their art and knows she will never be as good. She worships Balanchine as a god (he was a god, actually, as much as any human can be: the god of 20th century ballet), and he passively-aggressively fights with the union in order to avoid paying his dancers a living wage. Bentley starves herself. Her feet bleed. She has a cat because dancers can’t talk to human beings. The ballet fans are boring and obsessive and the dancers have nothing in common with anyone else.

The book, in other words, is fantastic. No 22 year old should be allowed to write this well. There oughta be a law! If this insidery-gossipy thing is the kind of thing you’re into, you will also adore Altman’s perfect late film about the Joffrey Ballet, The Company. It obsessed toddler-Claire for months.

(There, that should prevent any NetNannyed corporate types from reading my blog.) Jeremy claims “Shit for Cunts” was the original title of the (slightly disappointing) Banksy documentary, now (slightly disappointingly) titled “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” And indeed, I was attempting to gift shop when I asked a couple of Borders employees where their science section was.

Me “I looked near Social Science and Philosophy and even Religion, but I couldn’t find it.”

Borders dude: “It’s on the top floor, right over in the back corner.”

Me: “I see. You couldn’t find anywhere more out-of-the-way?”

Borders lady, condescendingly: “Ma’am, it’s a big store.”

Me: “Sure, but there are three shelves of astrology right here. I’m just sayin’.”

Borders dude, seriously: “I am very sorry.”

He was nice, but I left anyway, and ordered the books I wanted off the Green Apple site instead.

I just realized a bunch of my summery clothes weren’t in any of the places I thought they were.

I investigated further and found a bag I hadn’t unpacked since we came back from Oz Farm.

Ambition to become absent-minded in my old age: amply fulfilled!

Bella is a bad horse! (1)

Bella is a very bad horse! (2)

She teleported sideways last night – alarmed by antics on the sidelines, not actually her fault and if I’d had a better seat, I might have stayed on. As it was I ended up flat on my back, looking up at her forelegs as she twisted in midair to avoid landing on my face.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t frightened at the time, and am not frightened in retrospect. If I’ve fallen off Bella twice it’s because I ride her more, trust her more and push myself harder on her.

So I got back on! As they say! The rest of the lesson was fun.

(1) Bella is a good horse.

(2) Bella may be the best horse in the world. Research is ongoing.

I had to go to the Department of Homeland Security to get a stamp in my passport. It was one of those bitter cold rainy days. The security guard wouldn’t let me in until the family ahead of me was through the metal detector; then when he did let me in, he and his colleague laughed about the family and ostentatiously sprayed air freshener where they had been.

I said nothing. I shrank into myself and didn’t make eye contact.

I remember when the DHS logo was introduced, so it still looks fictional to me:

It scares me all the same.

A week later we had a work meeting about our health care options. There’s a Bush-era plan that lets young, rich and healthy people opt out of the general pool of employees, thus lowering their own health care costs at everyone else’s expense.

I was listening to the agent explain the plan, but I was also listening to the Republican talking points he had complacently absorbed, very much against his own self-interest; and I was simultaneously translating those Republican talking points into my own Marxist deconstruction of them.

I’ve been doing this a lot lately. It’s exhausting and disturbing. I lost my temper and walked out.

My difficulty with authority is that the older I get and the more experience I have with it, the harder it is to ignore the essential violence of the plutocratic state.

Work dinner with people Jeremy knows. You know how terrified I am of other chimpanzees – you may even have seen me bare my teeth at them in an abject signal of submission. But Konrad and Alyssa are extremely nice and funny. They have an excellent joke about a Rabbi Weasel, and they laughed when I described the Apple Newton: “Of course, this was years before you were born.” Alyssa took Claire and I took Julia and we had piggyback races down the hill. As Claire was falling asleep, she said: “I loved it when Alyssa gave me a piggyback.”

I read Cryoburn, which was okay, and then I went back and reread Cordelia’s Honor, which is by far my favourite of the Vorkosigan novels, because Cordelia is my favourite character. I like what Aral says about her: that honor pours out of her like a fountain; but even more, I like that whenever she faces a dilemma, she always chooses the most generous option.

“I’ve always thought—tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” said Vortala.

“Yes,” said Vorkosigan.

“I’ve always felt that theists were more ruthless than atheists,” said Ezar Vorbarra.

“If you think it’s really wrong,” said Cordelia to Vorkosigan, “that’s one thing. Maybe that’s the test. But if it’s only fear of failure—you have not the right to refuse the gift for that.”

“It’s an impossible job.”

“That happens, sometimes.”

I mention this because people have been firing similar observations at me for weeks, which is both irritating and awesome. My self-deprecating schtick has reached the end of its useful life, and circumstances require me to want more, to be greedy, to be ambitious. It’s part of what’s been going wrong with my riding. So Dez had me riding perfect Bella on Thursday night, and she got me tilting my chin up to look ahead over fences, and suddenly I could count the strides in and see how to keep my balance on the landing.

And then today I was on Manny, and Erin had us warm up and nothing went wrong, and then I jumped a crossrail and rolled back and jumped it the other way and nothing went wrong, and then she had us do the same exercise over a huge vertical. Which was clearly impossible, on the hardest horse I have ever ridden, in the depth of a slump, with the fence at the upper limit of what I’m capable of.

So I stuck my chin in the air and jammed my heels down and counted my strides and did it four times.

I was so relieved! I said to Erin: “Can I quit on that?” Erin grinned and said: “No.” She added the skinny hay bale and another rollback to the wall, and Manny of his own cognizance added some huge spooks in the far corner. We jumped around it twice. It wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t fall off. Erin said: “You’re an educated rider now. You can’t go on thinking that you’re just lucky, that you just had a good day. You have to ride like you mean it.”

But I am never sincere about anything, ever! But I have carefully schooled myself to only want things I know I can have! But I don’t take emotional risks!

To refuse the test is to refuse the gift.

Erin is leaving to take a fantastic job in Florida. Florida’s damn lucky to get her.

Remember that awesomely righteous lady who confronted the flasher dude on the New York subway? Yeah? Guess what she teaches. (Also: the hair! The pearls! I LOFF HER.)

Got back to the studio after weeks out and all my joints click. Not a cheery click but a cartilage-over-bone click. To which I say: whuh? This late-thirties thing has its bogus moments, and makes me look sideways at my impending fortiness. What, though, are my choices? Anyway other aspects of late-thirtiness, like being Sane and Solvent and Happy, rock the known world. So it goes.

Riding and taiji are at some weird level almost exactly the same thing. Still not sure how to unblock myself, except by noting that I am blocked. Come, my chi, flow, and make a badass outta me!

So Tangled, the movie, is frankly pretty adorable and – better still! – it has respectable worldbuilding! It always drives Claire mad when we stay to watch the credits (“MAMA! I want to LEAVE NOW!”), but people, there was a map! An accurate map, of the fairy kingdom! It was epically cool. Also the heroine getting a (spoiler!) cute short haircut was a key plot point. Also there was a charismatic horse. So I was mostly very happy.

Only mostly, though, because we saw it immediately after I read Emma Donoghue’s Booker-longlisted novel Room, which is based in part on the Fritzl and Dugard kidnappings. Donoghue’s first novel is the exquisite Hood, and I met her a million years ago in Dublin and she was very nice. Like me, she seems to have read every single thing published about Elisabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard. Those kidnappings are at once your worst nightmare and weirdly compelling, because at least the bad man didn’t kill you, right? At least you escaped? But after how much suffering and loss. Here’s a thought to keep you up at night: how many more prisoners are there out there, that we haven’t rescued yet?

The book is beautifully written but I almost couldn’t read it, so fast was I turning the pages to make sure they escaped. It made me claustrophobic. My pulse is racing just thinking about it.

And so to Tangled, where Rapunzel is locked in a tower for eighteen years. My issues with this, where to begin. Note that the bad man has become a Goth woman! And that the kidnapping is not for sex but because of this woman’s vanity! Oh vain women, you are so totally worse than the patriarchy, Disney is kind enough to point out. Note also that Rapunzel’s mother and father never even get to speak, and that the only rescue strategy we see is them flying lanterns every year on her birthday – completely charming, even if appropriated from Thailand and Taiwan, but not exactly thorough.

Rapunzel’s mother and father do not, for example, take the kingdom apart stone by stone with their bare hands.

Dear Goddess in whom I only secretly believe, help me teach my daughters to tear down walls.

Little red mare gives me my confidence back. She’s not called Bella for nothing.

I had a second disastrous lesson on Omni, so I am now officially In A Slump, which is great because it takes the pressure off for next time. I don’t like riding in the indoor arena and I keep nearly crashing into the other riders. That makes me tense up, and then Omni tenses up, and then we go backwards or up, or sometimes backwards AND up, which is Not Recommended.

Still, there was funny stuff. Colin had noticed me putting Omni’s polo wraps on before the ride. Afterwards, he was walking through the barn and said to a kid: “You looked good out there!” He saw me and said something like: “Bit rough today, eh?” I said: “At least the polo wraps stayed on.” Colin said: “Oh yeah. THEY looked good.”

Of course it makes me question what the hell I am doing. I will never be a professional. I may never be any good. I don’t ride often enough to improve rapidly. I tried riding more often, and it played hell with work and family time and then I got sick. What I am mostly doing is arresting the decline in my riding that took place in the years and years I didn’t ride: with the goal, I suppose, of one day being able to ride every day, at which point I might not suck.

It’s my retirement savings!

I skived a little this morning and took the Mister to the peerless Sandbox Bakery before work. That end of Cortland Street is a reliable source of street crazy.

Very Well Dressed Woman: Is that your boyfriend?

Me: This? Um.

VWDW: Is he your boyfriend?

Me: We’ve been married for eleven years.

VWDW: Do you have a family? Do you have children?

Jeremy: Yes.

Me: Two girls.

VWDW: Having any more?

Me and Jeremy, in unison: No.

VWDW: God came into this world as a child. God came into this world as a consuming fire.

Me: …there is that.

VWDW: I don’t know about families.

And then she walked away.

Me: You know, technically I think she’s right.

Jeremy: Yes, you do.

Last night before we went to sleep we piled all her presents on the end of her bed.

I am not a fan of mornings. But if you have to wake up, it might as well be to the sound of your big daughter saying, “Wow! Cool!” and your little daughter squealing: “This is the BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.”

Later there was dim sum, and later still cupcakes; but me, I am still grinning like fule over that squeal.

And then the riding. As you may have surmised, it has somewhat sucked of late because of the Virus That Will Not Go Away. This was extra frustrating on all levels: I had booked extra lessons through October. There’s a new horse in the barn, Manny, an ultra dark bay with a golden muzzle like a giant Dartmoor pony. Riding him was like being given the keys to a Ferrari. “HOLY SHI…!”

I asked Erin: “Is this what all fancy horses are like?” She said “Are you kidding me? This is where they START.”

Then the virus turned me into a crone and I kept having to drop out of lessons half way through because: exhausted. And then the rains came and lessons moved indoors and both Manny and Omni find the indoor arena VERY VERY EXCITING, and I kept nearly falling off. And my confidence took a massive hit, and I didn’t feel like jumping.

Until yesterday! When I got on Omni and Dez was teaching and made me trot, trot, circle, hold the outside rein, vibrate the inside rein, bend him around my leg. And he softened and his back got swingy and he started to come through. I used to think of Omni as The Professor, because if I touched him with my heel he would stop and put his head down and pigroot, sometimes with a little girly squeal. Basically exactly what Jean-Paul Descoeudres used to do to a first-year archaeology student who used Encyclopaedia Britannica as a source. (Not me, but I watched and had the fear of God put in me.)

Like all the horses that come into the McIntosh program, Omni has blossomed. It’s remarkable what top-quality hay and regular exercise will do to a horse. Bella has turned out nice; Omni is turning out super-fancy, and hot! He needs the strong warmup to get him forward and listening and using all his energy for good; otherwise, if you try to bottle him up, he will fizz and pop. (Remind you of anyone OH HELLO MISTER NOAH?) He’d been doing a lot of up and backwards lately. He’s not mean at all, just full of bean. The challenge is to channel it forwards.

But I did it! I got some very nice round softness out of him, and I started to fix my tension over fences, and best of all I kept up the good riding for a whole hour. I remembered that I am not just a passenger, that I am not (yet) an old lady, that I can ride. Massive relief.

I didn’t come anywhere close to achieving my riding goals for the year (Anne Kursinski clinic, comfortable at 2’9″.) But I did fix some other things: my lower leg isn’t swinging so much. Um. That’s it, really, and a big part of that was raising my stirrups a hole. I get discouraged if I let myself think about it too much; except that, though I am not progressing very fast (at all?), I am not actually regressing, which I did every year that I wasn’t riding. Still sucking at harder things, on better horses.

September was so overscheduled I kept singing Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (although technically, it was Dean Gray’s mashup, since I’ve never heard the original.) That left me complacent and unprepared for the rigours of October, which turned out to be a Terrible Mistake. We all returned from Oz slightly under the weather, and four weeks later, I’m still not better: very sore throat, sinus headache, aptitude to fall asleep in the afternoon even more pronounced than usual. It was in this sleepwalky phase that I came home from a Seattle trip at, like, midnight. I paid for the airport parking, put my wallet on top of my briefcase and thought, “If I don’t tuck that into a pocket, I will drop it in the street.”

And sure enough. It’s the second time this year I’ve lost my wallet, so I had the routine down, and nearly everything cancelled and reordered in 48 hours. Someone mailed the notes from the kids through the mailslot, which was …weird. They were the only really irreplaceable things, though, declarations of love in toddler handwriting on post-it-notes. I made a police report at the Ingleside station – a very odd place, in Balboa Park under the freeway, with bulletproof windows; I kept thinking about the Frenchs Forest police station so clean and open, with tropical fish in an aquarium. The officer made a funny joke about me ending up in Guantanamo, which earned him my best Look Of Death. He was extremely nice, though.

I spent a horrible few days thinking I wouldn’t be able to travel, but my fantastic attorney Minette Saved Christmas. I have an existential horror of being undocumented. I couldn’t sleep and I kept having panic attacks. I fetishize the documents themselves, as if they are my identity, as if my green card were issued through a clerical error that will be corrected as soon as someone realizes (doesn’t help that it’s dated April 1st.) Having noticed that, I overcame it a bit; as the Mister keeps pointing out, my permanent resident status exists separately from the green card, and the green card is in the process of being replaced.

Of course the very night I’d come to terms with all this, the homeless man who had found my wallet, and who had mailed the kids’ notes back, brought the rest back as well. So that’s nice. He would have brought the rest back earlier but he was picked up by the police and placed on 72-hour psychiatric hold. “I live a troubled life,” he said. Another lesson in how lucky I am, and how much I owe to other people, who aren’t so lucky.

You can be
whatever you want to be
for Halloween!
Oh that’s just a zombie!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It’s just a kid, it’s just a kid,
A kid a kid a kid a kid a kid a kid
I know it is!
Let’s go and check.
Oops!
It’s just a kid.
It’s my little brother.
Let’s go away!

When will
the sun
shine through the year?
The bright sunny days
I love them
I love the sun
I love my mother
coming with me

The sun bright shining
The sun bright shine in the world