All I had to do was take the farmer’s market spoils home and put them away, rescue the cream pan for Jeremy, find the girls’ swimming costumes and towels and pack everything for their swim lesson, change into a non-coffee besmirched sundress and find the matching cardigan so as to look kicky at the first New York-San Francisco International Childrens’ Film Festival. Matters were complicated somewhat by the breakfast things being left out, but this wasn’t insuperable. I shouldn’t have been so late and flustered by the time I got to the car that I slammed the car door into my face.

I really recommend not doing this.

The topology’s tricky, I admit. Imagine I am drawing diagrams for this bit: it only happened because Hedwig was parked on the steep hilly part of the next block of Eugenia, and because I was distractedly reading a chalk sign in front of some chairs out on a stoop (NOT FREE! PLEASE DO NOT TAKE!) Our neighbour kids must have been planning a sit out in the lovely sunshine, they sure do love their pavement chalk, their handwriting is improving every day: this all passed through my mind as I was glancing at the chairs and simultaneously pulling the car door open. It was as I glanced back that I saw the top corner of the door from VERY CLOSE UP, and then it hit me in my right nostril.

I didn’t see stars, as it turns out: everything just went white. Did I mention this is something you should not do? There was a lot of blood, and more pain. This all took place just after 11am, and it’s nearly 9pm and the whole lower right quadrant of my face still feels like, well, like I slammed a car door into it and got steel up my nose.

I had a lovely day otherwise.

…went almost two weeks without being in the same time zone for more than three hours.

That kinda blew.

All better now. He does snore a blue streak. It’s very soothing.

ETA:

J: If I reek of garlic it’s because I was making YOUR DINNER.

R: Slaving over a hot clove.

Schoolgirls

Originally uploaded by yatima

Seven hours and 38 minutes until I get home.

Actually three weeks ago but Jeremy only just uploaded it.

DSC_6134.JPG

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

The Four Immigrants Manga is an amazing thing, a window into the lives of four Japanese men living in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Rediscovered in the nineties and intelligently translated, it’s really unlike anything else, and joins A Streetcar to Subduction and The Golden Gate on my shelf of marvellously eccentric books about my city.

So does Nuclear Rites, which will be remembered as the book that got me interested in anthropology-about-humans (as opposed to A Primate’s Memoir, Gorillas in the Mist, The Third Chimpanzee, Our Inner Ape, Mother Nature, Songs of the Gorilla Nation and Reason for Hope, which got me interested in anthropology-about-other-apes-and-also-baboons.) Hugh Gusterson was an anti-nuke campaigner straight out of the pages of The Golden Gate when he decided to live among the nuclear scientists in Livermore. Set in the early nineties, his book is a nuanced and complex appreciation of how those scientists came to their various ethical accommodations with the weapons work they undertook. The rites of the title are the scientific coming-of-age represented by a weapons test; a genuinely compelling analogy. I picked up Cultures@Silicon Valley hoping for some comparable insights into the tech industry, but so far it hasn’t dug deep enough under the skin.

I’ve been on a bit of a Big House kick this year (when am I not?) I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle were middlingly-successful attempts to cash in on the breathless, stay-up-till-3am Gothic awfulness/awesomeness of The Little Stranger. I read the Dodie Smith in my Dalmations-completist phase when I was a kid, and oddly, or not, it is an entirely different book this time around, set in an entirely different place with different characters. The influence of Cold Comfort Farm is tangible. (Mashup idea of great brilliance: Cold Comfort Animal Farm. You’re welcome.) More successful at generating that elusive Gothic frisson were Anthony Blunt, Georgiana and Mad World. The British ton is genuinely creepy.

Jaran had my name written on it and should have worked for me – a romance, with kuhaylan Arabians, set in neo-Mongolia? Are you kidding me? WHERE DO I SIGN – but it was spoiled by its universally beloved, effortlessly polyglot Mary Sue. Actually the hero was kind of a douche as well. Whereas The Georges and the Jewels, despite Too Much Natural Horsemanship, had actual living horses and people in it, and I liked it a lot. Meanwhile My Dog Tulip had way, way too much detail on every kind of canine bodily excretion imaginable, and its notions of responsible animal husbandry are COUGH how shall I say VERY WRONG. And it is an awesome, awesome book.

Not surprisingly from the author of Hood, Inseparable is pretty much the hottest book of literary criticism I have ever read. I met Emma Donoghue in Dublin! She was very gracious. I was a babblin’ fule. I met Anne Enright too, and they have both been shortlisted for the Booker (Anne Enright won it, didn’t she?) and I haven’t. Never mind! With Country Driving Peter Hessler cements his position as the latest raven-haired, Oxbridge-educated sensitive world traveller to join Simon Schama and Rory Stewart among the ranks of my future imaginary husbands. Wait, Rory’s a Tory? Dude, what did I tell you? The British ton is genuinely creepy. I guess that makes him my future imaginary ex-husband. A girl’s got to have some standards.

Jeremy is in Australia so I am spending the week cross and sad. Which is a bit ridick, because Saturday night was an especially fine Balsa Man (I made a fortress of solitude on the cliffs, and all my friends came and hung out there to watch the burn), Sunday I had a fun ride on Omni and Monday was pretty much the awesomest Glen Park picnic evar, with all-optimal people and bejewelled sunshine.

Still. Hmph.

On mornings when the timing works out – not all mornings, but definitely the best mornings – the whole family walks down Eugenia together, the girls in school uniforms and non-uniform tights and boots, their bright backpacks on their backs, and Jeremy and I in our serious grownup Linux hacker and industry analyst standard city equipment.

J and the girls take the bus south, I go north. The buses are frequent so there’s usually not enough time to wave, but one morning last week, Mission Street was empty for a while. I waved, the girls waved. I waved. They waved. I blew kisses, they blew kisses, I made heart shapes with my hands, they made strange squashy shapes with theirs.

Then we all paused. Still no bus. Awkward.

I made jazz hands. They made jazz hands.

All three of us started to dance.

We danced and danced. We boogied. We step-ball-changed. We twirled. Julia, especially, twirled.

For ten minutes, on two sides of Mission Street, we got our white girl funk on.

When my bus finally arrived I saw a woman on the other side of the street solemnly high-fiving Jeremy and the kids.

Driving to the barn first thing in the morning, red brake lights and the cars slowing up ahead, flares in the fast lane. We all eased down to a stately second gear and looked left to see what had happened:

A police car.

A woman with her hands over her mouth, staring in distress at:

A deer, sphinx-like in front of the woman’s little hatchback and looking around, its ears erect, its lovely legs folded badly.

The deer was not going to be okay.

The morning light slanted through the haze, and we all sped up and drove away.

Jesus, what is it about this time of year? My ghosts walk; the past comes squirming Buffy-like out of its grave. Hand me my shotgun and swear to me, if I become one of the evil undead, you will kill me.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

Eek!

Last night I dreamed Tony Abbott sat next to me on a train, maybe a Tangara. We were heading West. I don’t know why that was important. I do blame this hilariously homoerotic oped for disturbing my beauty sleep:

I could not fail to notice the walk – which with an obviously athletic body could only be described as unmistakably masculine. Indeed Tony must be the most masculine and athletic of Australia’s politicians, and not boringly so. I have often thought that had he been on the left he would be the media’s pin up boy.

My stars! Is it warm in here? Get a room, boys! The piece, disappointingly, does not continue with “…my heart palpated as he caught my eye. His eyes, twin flames under that stormy brow, burned as he huskily whispered my name…”

My dream also ended unsexily. I told Abbott off for his platforms and policies, although I did it a bit self-consciously, since most of what I object to in his position (he’s bad on gay marriage, immigration and the environment) is exactly the same as what I object to in that of his opponent. He’s a Catholic monarchist! She’s a centrist cipher! They fight (property) crime.

I have only theories about the right. Despite my decade-long flirtation with Christianity I always thought of myself as socialist, just a Fabian socialist. It was a shock to discover that my church was actually hard-right, anti-abortion, anti-feminist and come to that, anti-women and children, at least in practice.

More recently my theories have revolved around the Big Five personality traits – the idea that our personalities can be mapped along five independent vectors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This research made immediate sense to me when I first encountered it. It’s trivial to note, for example, that I score sky-high on Openness and Neuroticism, and that I am introverted as hell. In fact Julia’s the only Extravert in our little family – the only one who draws energy from company, as opposed to from solitude – and framing it in this way has helped me to accept her manic glee.

My theory is that conservative people do not score very high on Openness. Is that tautological? And it’s not even that, as a progressive, I think things are going to turn out well; it’s just that I know from bitter experience that whatever else happens, time will pass. Sometimes that’s a good thing – +1 to team White Blood Cells! go the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement! science yay science! – and sometimes it’s an awful thing – bring back the bookstores; boo to old age. But either way, there’s no point fussing about it.

I also, relatedly, subscribe to the notion that conservative religion is pretty much all about sublimating the fear of death. I know it was for me. And it would explain a lot about how conservative religious people behave; their nasty secret sins, and their otherwise weird and alien assumption that as long as their imaginary superhero in the sky “forgives” them, then despite all evidence to the contrary, no actual harm was done. They store up for themselves so many riches in heaven that they leave the earth a smoking crater. This life doesn’t matter! It’s just a starter life! Do-over! I’m not a fan. Can you tell?

Separately, I finally got a glimmer of understanding the libertarian point of view when I realized how historically late an invention the income tax is, and how little tax people used to pay:

Another income tax was implemented in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. Pitt’s new graduated income tax began at a levy of 2d in the pound (0.8333%) on incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200 (£170,542 in 2007).

Put like that, it’s obviously a shocking imposition, and I myself would far prefer not to be hurling a goodly fraction of my income at the US military establishment. But I don’t mind a bit paying for public schools; I would pay more; and I would prefer to pay for Medicare for All and a respectable public transportation infrastructure than to pay for my private health insurance or my car. My parents, you see, taught me that it is good and right to share. Because they’re pinkos.

So those are my theories: that conservatives want things to stay the same, and they don’t want to be made to share. When I think of it that way, you know, I can honestly sympathize. I don’t want to grow old and die, and I don’t like being made to do things either. But I am going to grow old and die, and I do have an awful lot of privilege while other people have far less, and it behooves me not to bogart the cash and the happiness and the, you know, access to clean water and antibiotics and so on. My ethical stance boils down to an ultra-streamlined Postel’s law: be kind and tolerant. Or even more simply, don’t be a dick (Cheney.)

Then there’s that whole weird thing about taking the Bible seriously. Or more precisely, taking extremely tiny morsels of the Bible, daisychained together with logical contortions and dubious interpretations, as an infallible guide to modern life that totally lets you off the hook for being a homophobic douchebag. I dunno. I find far more beauty and wonder and testament to the human spirit and the awesomeness of life in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But you knew that already.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

(At least you guys have preferential voting and won’t accidently Nader yourselves into a Bush administration, touch wood. But that is another ranty, for another time.)

Just because it hasn’t been all Bella, all the time around here doesn’t mean I am ever thinking about anything else. Oh, I know, I have children and a great job and, oh yeah, Optimal Husband, and the Legion of Optimal Friends Forever (LOFF), and yes I adore you all &c.

ANYWAY. I’ve been riding regular Sunday and Tuesdays with Hard Taskmistress Erin, who for example requires us to post to the trot with no stirrups, or transition between “crossrail two-point” and “five-foot-fence two-point”, or canter from two-point, or from the walk. God help you if you don’t have a secure lower leg, which I still don’t, despite all our hopes and prayers and wishes to the contrary.

In fact, and in keeping with my life’s generic conventions as post-slacker romcom (probably directed by Lisa Cholodenko and starring Tilda Swinton), my lower leg is now ironically inclined to be too far forward. More irony! I have a sudden and serious problem with tiny crossrails. I can jump a decent 2’6″ vertical in respectable form, and then I can drop Bella in a shocking spot in front of a jump she could step over.

This is the story arc this season. I worked on getting Bella into a more uphill canter by engaging my core muscles, and I ended up hunched and pumping with my shoulders. I wasn’t releasing over fences, and then I was throwing the contact away and leaning over her forehand. My two-point ended up all weird and crouchy. I finally figured what I was doing wrong through all of this. Dudes, I am trying too hard.

It was very clear this morning, when I was working really hard on my posting-trot-no-stirrups, and then my hip hurt so I tried to relax and just do it minimally, and Erin immediately said “That’s better.” And again, when she had us drop our stirrups at the canter, and as soon as we did, my leg was more secure. And again, when we were doing a canter pole to a vertical to a canter pole and then four strides to a crossrail, my distances and releases improved the moment I started counting strides aloud. The more I don’t do anything, the more I don’t think about it, the better it is.

I think I’m at the slightly dangerous point of having improved quite a lot, but not as much as I would like to have improved, so I am reaching for harder things and in doing so neglecting the fundamentals: breathe, sit up straight, keep still. It’s the paradox at the heart of riding – maybe anything difficult. You have to sweat to create the muscle memory, and then you have to distract yourself, meditate, transcend, absent your thinky monkey self so that the muscle memory can actually work. I get to control the direction and the pace, and then I have to let Bella handle the actual galloping and jumping over the fence. She’s much better at that part than I am.

And that’s the thing. If you drive stick, you can probably remember having to think about changing gear, and then not having to think about it, and then maybe driving along something like Highway One between Jenner and Point Arena and being the car; drinking the curves and feeling the suspension as your own spirit-level inner ear. Riding’s like that – your proprioception expanding to encompass another entity – with this exquisite refinement: you end up with two souls.

Claire and I had a sleepover at the Cal Academy on Friday night, which was completely brilliant. “Can I eat whatever I want?” “Knock yourself out, kid.” We staked out the absolute primo position – under the tree in the African Hall – and woke up to birdsong, and the shadow of a leopard. We had watched “Night at the Museum” to get into the spirit of things. “It’s going to be SO AWESOME,” I kept saying: “the penguins and the butterflies and the alligators are going to COME TO LIFE.” To which she replied only: “MA-ma.” No one does disdain like your seven-year-old daughter.

Saturday was nuts: we were out of the museum by 8; Claire made it to wushu, and Salome and I made it to the Farmer’s Market, but only after being distracted by two of more than sixty simultaneous garage sales on the hill. Next year we will plan accordingly. She got a lamp and a very nice grey sweater vest. I got a pink bag I am not sure about, and Mary Janes and a cardigan and a brocade cushion cover that I am perfectly sure about, all for $8.

After the market we went to Julia’s! Kinder! Barbeque! Then Claire and I battled traffic to the Container Store, where I got baskets for the shopping bags and shoes that otherwise litter our entry hall. The baskets are a perfect fit! I am enamoured of my new, clutter-free entry hall. Jan, who arrived while the girls were at swim class, only asked “Why do you have so many shoes anyway?” I came late to the stereotypical shoe love, but I am making up for lost time. The girls were beside themselves with delight at seeing Jan.

Yesterday I rode Bella over fences, and we did a big course, and rode it better than we’ve ever done before, so that was insanely great. Then Danny and Liz and Ada came over and we had roast chicken with two kinds of yams and potatoes and carrots and a salad with spinach and yellow cherry tomatoes and squash blossoms. And it was very delicious.

Danny is thinking of buying Albion Castle in the Bayview and making it his supervillain lair. I pointed out that it would be almost unworkably far away from Mission burritos, and he said that tapping the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel could be his first crime.

This morning Julia started kindergarten. She was radiantly brave, and gave me a huge grin and a thumbs-up as she marched into her classroom. I got something in my eye. I have two schoolgirls now, and no more little kids.

Who said it: Krugman or Kunstler?

“Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?”

“The lights are going out all over America — literally.”

“Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century.”

“…a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself…”

“America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters.”

“Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward. ”

“In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality.”

“The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

“So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.”

When you can no longer tell the paranoid blogger from the Nobel prize-winning economist at the newspaper of record, something somewhere has gone very wrong.

Massive props to my bff Skud!

I’m thinking. I’m thinking about women. I’m thinking about my body, about beauty, about politics, about my daughters, about the war. I am thinking about the books I want to write. I am thinking about the weekend. I am thinking about my childhood, and my Daddy, and the future. I am listening to a lot of music.

Tyrannosaurus!
Tyrannosaurus Rex!
He was the king!
But then he had a breast.

Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A meteor!
Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A leaf-eator!

Milo: I think that I will never ever write another song.

Me: Because this one is so perfect?

Milo: Yes.

You need some back story, an essential piece of family lore which I have mysteriously never blogged. Once when Claire was very small, we made one of our regular visits to (be still my heart) the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A docent was introducing her granddaughter to the Pacific Giant Octopus. When the docent ran her finger in a squiggly pattern against the glass, the octopus followed her with a tentacle. In a voice aching with affection, the docent said: “He loves to interact.”

Now you are ready for my story. I have called my husband on the telephone. This is what ensues.

R: Can you stuff the girls’ sleeping bags into the big IKEA bag? And pyjamas for each of them? And a change of clothes for tomorrow?

J: Sure.

R: …with a pickle?

J: You don’t like pickles.

R: Hate ’em.

J: The girls don’t like pickles. NO ONE LIKES PICKLES.

R: Someone must like pickles.

J: Because they exist?

R: …yes, that was going to be my supporting evidence.

J: So someone likes neutrinos?

R: Not very often. And only in caves, far beneath Antarctica.

J: They like them. They just don’t like to interact.

Item the first: When I fell off Bella I landed on the point of my hip. I was kinda stiff for a few days but mostly okay, and even had a riding lesson in the midst of it; but then I had an evening lesson with Dez and Dez was eeeeville; no-stirrups, trot over a crossbar and canter out from it evil. I could not do it. I can half-ass most things on a horse, but this felt like there was a pointy bit of metal jammed into my hip joint, so I had to opt out. Mehness, and likewise mehitude! I was actively limping all weekend, which suhuhuhucked, because that weekend we went to China Camp with the camping gang, who are all great fun and who love to hike. My hip was so hurty Saturday night that it took me forever to get to sleep, even in our lovely tent under the lovely trees.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?