We walked along the beach again as we have done a thousand, ten thousand times. The grey sky glowered. Sand scrunched between my toes. Cold waves pushed up and over our feet, all salt and foam. Wave succeeded wave like shaken-out bolts of silk. We wandered back to the car, teasing and jeering, lost in the parking lot.

“Where is Claire?” he said. I looked up, startled. And suddenly it wasn’t Alain, my childhood’s constant companion. It was Jeremy, and I had forgotten the girls, and I was racing back to the rough water’s edge and praying “Please please please…”

My distress woke me up. I lay, heart hammering, in my quiet room beside my sleeping husband. The sky over Noe Valley was blushing indigo and orange.

The girls, I knew, were safe in their own beds.

I have made myself a responsible adult because I love my daughters as I love sunrise and the sea.

But some small part of my soul is still twelve, with my brother, on a beach.

The first entries in my delicious stream under the keywords “subprime” and “crash” are dated 21 August 2007. I’m not bragging, believe me. I saved those bookmarks because I’m kind of dumb about this stuff. Most of the time I am thinking about my kids, horses, books or food. But the shape of the mortgage crisis was obvious thirteen months ago even to a self-absorbed idiot like me.

Which means that anyone on Wall Street or Washington who says they didn’t see this coming is lying to you. Specifically, John McCain is lying to you; he’s been through this twice already, with Enron/Worldcom and before that, the Keating 5.

This is par for the course; and indeed the $700bn bailout is just the latest (and the most egregious and appalling) step in this Republican administration’s campaign to nationalize risk and privatize profit.

Let’s be clear: the real cost of the toxic mortgages is probably between $100-200bn. The other HALF TRILLION dollars covers the bankers who made the wrong bet on those mortgages. These are the bankers that took home $120bn in BONUSES over the last five years. (All numbers are from Devilstower on Daily Kos except for the $700bn, which the Fed pulled out of its ass.)

The history of the last eight years in this country has been a deliberate process of robbing the poor to buy private jets for the hyperrich.

It is unconscionable.

My advice: don’t bail them out. Restructure the mortgages for the homeowners who are facing foreclosure; we know that many (most?) of them were lied to by predatory lenders. Oh, and vote the GOP out of office.

Children learn from their mistakes by accepting the consequences. Why shouldn’t grown men?

There are shirtless water polo players frolicking in the hallways of my cheap-ass airport hotel.

I sorta finished a not-quite-so-embarrassing draft of “Everywhere” on the plane. Anyone wanna beta read my big gay Suez Canal historical love story murder mystery? Skud? Spike? Francis? Bueller?

Julia and I are having a love affair. She will gaze deeply into my eyes before declaring, “I LOVE you mama,” and kissing me on the lips.

The other day Blanca left when we were in the bath. Jules was disconsolate upon finding her gone. She said:

“I am sad because Blanca went home and I miss her.”

Are two year olds supposed to construct perfect sentences with two conditional subclauses? Just wondering.

Ike is the size of Texas. It is the Earth’s great white spot.

I’m always a bit emo when I have to get on a plane and leave the tiny smalls behind. (Claire is the same. Jeremy reports that tonight she was looking broodingly at the bookshelves and saying “All these books make me think about how I miss mummy.”) I flew out of San Francisco in one of those sort of robotic moods imposed where you try to cope with the indignity and discomfort of commercial travel by completely dissociating. “The toothpaste is too big? Okay.”

So when we came over a mountain range into Phoenix just before sunset and I saw a huge perfect fluffy white storm cell, I caught my breath; and when it lit up with lightning I put down my book. I leaned into the porthole and watched the pink bolts firing up and down the column of cloud, blazing on the outside and lighting up the inside. As we began our descent I watched the sun setting behind the storm in a band of red fire, and the huge cell turn steel grey and then black against the night sky.

I get superstitious when I am emo. Much of my adult life has been an excruciating process of learning detachment, of trying to let go. I’ve deliberately and consciously wanted very few things very fiercely over the last few years: for the girls and my parents to be healthy and safe, for one or two friends who had stopped talking to me to start again, for Jeremy to be near.

And for Barack Obama to win this election. A few nights ago I dreamed I went on a blood-drenched Celtic-Wiccan passage through the underworld on his behalf, emerging like a muddy banshee from a church basement in Philadelphia. And as I watched this mighty electric storm over Arizona, I decided that if I saw another lightning flash out in the open, Obama would win.

I saw two.

I’m having a rather unexpectedly nice time here. I spent dinner chatting about haute cuisine, which I can do for days at a stretch, with Frank Artale who is part-owner of Lampreia in Seattle. He had me in stitches with scurrilous tales of Charles Simonyi’s engagement party and Melinda Gates’ aesthetician. Afterwards he introduced me to a woman who had three sugar gliders in her purse. I snuggled one of them and he purred! Who knew that sugar gliders purr?

All the while, lightning was firing the cloudy night above the golf course. So when I got back to my room I donated to Obama’s campaign.

The boy and I went to see Tropic Thunder last night. Just before the trailers started he reminded me that there were fictional trailers. I promptly assumed that Role Models, Lakeview Terrace and Max Payne were parodies. I laughed my head off at how well they mimicked the pomposity of the trailer genre, and admired the artistry that had gone into their assembly. The Max Payne trailer starts “In a world…” which had me in stitches.

Everyone up to and including the boy looked at me oddly, at which point it finally dawned on me.

“Real, huh?”

“Real.”

“Okay then.”

The real fictional trailers were a bit of a letdown after that.

The film made me laugh. I do enjoy Ben Stiller as an actor. There’s a lovely generosity to his comedy, here and in Zoolander. He’s unafraid to make himself look like a gigantic twat in order to let the rest of the ensemble glow, and he’s always with the big ensemble, bless. Steve Coogan was great, he always is, as the pompous Brit director in a Union Jack t-shirt. Jack Black was wonderfully manic as a sweaty junkie. Matthew McConaughy was surprisingly sweet in his role as Ben Stiller’s asshole-agent-with-a-heart-of-TiVo. Everything looked and sounded fantastic – great rainy and sometimes explodey jungle and excellent choice of Vietnam-cliche 60s songs. The whole thing was a very affectionate sendup of the genre.

I liked a bunch of the cameos – Toby Maguire and Lance Bass especially – but the big one everyone’s talking about left me cold. To me the big-name actor in question is the opposite of Ben Stiller. He sucks the air out of the room. He thinks he’s in on the joke but it’s clear we muggles are the butt of his joke. His massive self-regard is palpable and repulsive. I can live without being sniggered at by gajillionaires.

So, race! Downey’s metamorphosis from Osiris to Lazarus was especially funny for me because Lazarus was supposed to be Australian, a thinly veiled caricature in fact of Russell Crowe. (And maybe poor old Heath.) So the rattling off of Aussie cliches – Crocodile Dundee, a dingo ate my baby – was tiresome to me in much the same way that the black cliches were to the black character, Brandon Jackson’s Alpa Chino. I gotta say, though, I fretted about the portrayal of the Burmese-or-Laotians. The film’s moral hierarchy of race goes: white Americans, black Americans, Australian butt-monkeys, Asian drug kingpins.

And surprise, the film utterly fails the Bechdel test. Of three speaking roles we counted for women, two were cameos and the third was a receptionist. Mustn’t distract from the flow of the story! Where “the story” is defined as “things of interest to the straight white male protagonist”. Hollywood, I hate you.

Of our last five movies, Jeremy chose this, The Dark Knight (which I walked out of in tears) and Get Smart (which we both promptly forgot). I chose the Herzog Antarctica film and Up the Yangtze. Our findings: Up the Yangtze is the only one that passes the Bechdel test. And Jeremy should always let me choose the film.

Julia: Mummy’s mad at me!

Jeremy: D’you know why?

Julia: Yeah. I spat.

Jeremy: Should you go say sorry?

Julia: Yeah! I’ll be right back.

• Last night she fell asleep with a book open in front of her, again.
• She can recognize her own name written down.
• This morning as we were getting on the bus, she touched my hair. “Your hair is wet?” “Yeah, from the shower.” She grinned all over and stroked my face so gently. “You all clean!”
• She’s an unbelievably tender kid, always stroking your arm or face or tracing flower patterns on your skin.
• When we were in the emergency room for Claire’s cut head, she sat quietly next to me and kissed my belly. She knew it was a difficult situation, and wanted to help but not be in the way.
• She has taught me that two-year-olds can be tactful.
• I can never do enough good in my life to deserve this blessing.
• It’s all about the possessives. “My mummy!” “My friend Claire!” “My prilly dress! Right? Okay!”
• A recent song:
  

  “My friend Daddy, my friend Daddy, we’re going to Rainbow!
  “My friend Daddy, my friend Daddy, he’s mummy’s, I know.”

• She gives the best kisses.
• She likes soup. “Yay! Soup!”
• Underestimate her at your peril. Her superpowers include mightiness, a will of iron and extreme volume.
• Bebe the hellspawned cat genuinely likes her.
• It’s as if the white lights of Burning Man and Mardi Gras had become a small girl, and walked among us.

I come home from a run to find an audience of toys on the sofa. I join them for the cabaret!

Miss Claire Fitzhardinge, “I like to laugh”

I like to laugh, I like to laugh
because I am a kookaburra!
If you see a laughing bird, that is a kookaburra!
If you see a laughing jaguar, that is a kookaburra jaguar!
If you see a laughing person, that is a person who is funny sometimes.
If you see a laughing oyster, that is a kookaburra oyster!
If you see a flying jaguar, that is an eagle jaguar!
If you see a flying cat, that is an eagle cat!

Miss Julia Fitzhardinge, “I am a princess”

(Sweetly) I am a princess
That is all.

Mr Jeremy Fitzhardinge, “Slugs and winter”

Slugs hate the winter because they get frozen.

(Claire: Not slugs and winter. Sleds and winter.

Jeremy: Oh!)

Mr Jeremy Fitzhardinge, “Sleds and winter”

Sleds don’t like the winter because they have to do all the work.
They like the summer because then they can sit in the shed and think
Mmm, it’s warm!
And when a man gets old and remembers his sled, he says
“Rosebud!”

Entire cast, “Sleds and winter” reprise

Rosebud!
Ro-o-ose bu-u-u-d!
Rose BUUUUUUD!

Curtain.

I was driving to Salome’s place in the Bakery Lofts when I heard Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech on NPR. I had to pull over and cry. It was a bad time, then, to be a progressive in America, and of course things have gotten much worse since. But I read and very much liked Obama’s book a couple of years later, and had the feeling I usually have about candidates I like; if I like them that much, they must be unelectable.

I had the same feeling about Hillary. Around the same time I read Obama’s book, the end of ’06, I shared a taxi from Manhattan to JFK with a very nice man, a fellow Democrat. We chatted about the candidates; I said I loved Hillary and thought she would make a great president, but I didn’t think the country was ready for a woman president. He said (and he really was very nice, so I feel guilty relaying this piece of thoughtlessness on his part): “Oh! I didn’t even think about the fact that she was a woman. I guess I’m a better feminist than you are!”

And that’s been kind of the theme of the last few weeks; lots and lots of advice, much of it from very nice and well-meaning men, on how to be a better feminist. I watched Michelle Obama’s and Hillary’s speeches avidly, and I kinda skipped the others. I’m pretty sure none of them would have passed the Bechdel test. It turns out I really do want to see women in positions of power. I’m not the only one, either. Driving to Santa Cruz:

C: Who is the mayor?

R: Gavin Newsom.

C: Is Gavin a boy’s name?

R: Yes.

C (sigh): Girls can never be mayor.

So to be perfectly honest with you, McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate this morning felt like a knife in the gut. I know he’s pandering. I know she’s pro-gun, anti-choice, inexperienced and corrupt. She stands for the opposite of everything I hold dear, and I wouldn’t vote with my poontang even if I could vote. But I do want to see a woman president of the United States. Not Sarah Palin. But someone.

In fact, how about we get the next 43, and you guys sit out a couple of centuries? Wouldn’t that be cool? No? Why?

• Just as I was thinking how much I dislike the morning scramble to school – shades of the prison house beginning to close around the growing mom, and all that – Claire said “When I am in second grade, I’ll be able to catch the bus to school on my own! Right, mom?” “Maybe third grade,” I said, but she has a point.
• Kiva released part-paid-back loans today, giving me a wholly unexpected infusion of credit that I immediately plowed back into new loans. This new move is likely to change the dynamic over there. I (and I think other lenders too) had been preferring shorter-term loans of three to six months, because I could turn them around quicker, but if my capital gets freed up anyway there’s no reason not to fund longer-term projects.
• Claire came home with a folder of her first week’s Kindergarten work, including – I can’t believe this – a page on which she had laboriously copied out “Mi primera semana de Kinder” in her own big spiky hand. There’s also a photo in which she is grinning ear to ear, and maps of Claire Town and Claire City, and it’s all been put together with such care and love that I want to take cookies to her teachers IMMEDIATELY.
• The girls are playing sweetly as I write this, and making each other giggle.
• I just started following the Mars Rovers on Twitter. Opportunity’s nickname is Oppy! How cute is that?

Claire started school today. Claire started school! She is exactly five years and eight months old. She looked heartbreakingly young in her school uniform. In spite of our extensive discussions before the fact, she was a bit taken aback by the fact that the teachers spoke only Spanish. “But I could work out what they meant, from the pictures,” she explained.

She didn’t immediately make a lifelong friend, which has cast me into massive disarray. What if she ends up a lonely, friendless loser like me? THE SKY WILL FALL. It’s interesting (in a sick way) to notice how deep the roots of my neurosis run. Twenty-three years since I started therapy, five years since I went on the meds and it still only takes a whiff of schoolyard drama to leave me moaning in a fetal position.

Claire, of course, is completely unperturbed.

So much of good parenting involves concealing your baggage under nearby furniture while adopting a fixed grin. Oh! It’s just like voting!

Claire and I were in Santa Cruz, on the beach, reading books. We didn’t think of you once.

I find that if reading has become heavy and difficult for me there are a few ways I can kickstart it: old favourites; new books from old favourite authors; fantasy; mystery; horse books. Things have been sticky enough that I have just had to read all of the above.

The old favourite was National Velvet, and if you are rolling your eyes and thinking of that appalling film with Liz Taylor and Mickey Rooney, you don’t know what you’re missing. Enid Bagnold’s original is every bit as much a crazy forgotten classic as I Capture The Castle. Such dialog! And the single most convincing toddler in all fiction. And the bedrock heroine of the piece is a fat mother of five. Come on, people!

I managed a small theme by reading some Dick Francis and KM Peyton; lots of National Hunt racing and two more attempts on the Grand National. Francis lost his wife Mary a few years ago and retired from writing. His son Felix persuaded him to revisit everyone’s favourite Dick Francis character, the one-handed ex-jockey Sid Halley. Heartbreakingly it seems Mary really was the brains of the outfit. Either Sid has become eighty percent less smart then he used to be, or I have become a much more critical reader –

Oh. Anyway the Peyton books were better; Blind Beauty was rollicking fun. Free Rein completes the Jonathan Meredith trilogy that I read the first two of in real time, back in the eighties. It’s actually great. Not sure why I didn’t read it then. It has everything I ever loved about Peyton – wholly convincing horse, complicated and believable people and plot. There’s a whole nother blogpost about 20thC British horse lit and how profoundly it influenced my view of the world, and how shamingly recently – like, on this Cambridge trip – it was that I figured out English riding traces its heritage, inevitably, to foxhunting. And what that means about the intersection of horses and teen girl sexuality and class, and money. How these books propagated those memes through the Anglosphere. Pony Club as, like Scouts, a vector of Empire and privilege.

But this isn’t that blogpost. Relieved are you? Or disappointed? The horsy theme came to a crunching halt with Sarah Gruen’s Riding Lessons. What really pissed me off about this book is that Gruen can actually write; her sentences are reasonably fluent, her eye isn’t bad, she has a sense of humour. Why then oh why? Gods, why is her protagonist so painfully, unbearably stupid? Why is she so selfish and self-absorbed? Why does she treat her mother and father and husband and child and ex-boyfriend with such cavalier disregard? WHY? Am I actually supposed to relate to this woman and wish her well because she has blonde hair or something?

UGH!

I think I am not the demographic. Also, the plot was dire, relying on (at a minimum) Contrived Coincidence, Abovementioned Idiotic Protagonist, A Stupid Plan, A Still More Stupid Backup Plan, Mother And Daughter Failing To Exchange Necessary Information (two pairs)… wibble. Let us never speak of it again. Next! Tithe, which I picked up because author Holly Black just got a gig on my beloved Shadow Unit. It was okay. Next!

I read Tamora Pierce on the recommendation of Liz’s Milo. The Protector of the Small quartet was great. It has a likeable and unusual protagonist – a thickset, not very articulate girl. Nice thing is the stories show, don’t tell, how this kid gets to be remarkable. We go through her training regime. We see her learn lessons and then apply them! There’s a rather unfortunate digression into Prophecy and Chosen Oneness towards the end, but our heroine Keladry is refreshingly dismissive about it. “I’d never have called myself anything so silly,” she snorts at the title “Protector of the Small”.

There’s one brilliant scene in, I think, the third book, where Kel violently objects to a piece of injustice and takes her case to the King. The King is frankly sympathetic, agrees to take up her cause and explains rapidly the compromises that will have to be reached in order to accomplish the change of legislation in the context of larger reforms. Kel walks out reeling, realizing that even well-meaning grownups can’t fix the world by fiat. It’s an unexpected and quite lovely moment. I described this series to Jeremy as “Harry Potter done right.” Imagine my disappointment at reaching back to Pierce’s first book and finding that the Keladry quartet is essentially her effort to rewrite those 25yo originals.

Well, times change. It was very odd reading Melusine between and around the Pierce books. They share a lot of stock European fantasy tropes and themes, and there’s even some overlap in the namespace. Where Keladry’s values are basically decent and wholesome, though, the narrators of Melusine are a clever but socially inferior thief and a psychotic wizard. There is teh gaysex and it is all very dark. My opinion of Felix remained low throughout the (long) novel, but I did come to love Mildmay the thief.

Pick of the bunch, though, was Naomi Novik’s Victory of Eagles. Temeraire POV! Lawrence angst! Subversive dragon independence movements! Transportation! ALL SO VERY GOOD.

Sunshine, high clouds, another gorgeous lazy day in Bernal. I was strolling back from Charlie’s Cafe to Precita Playground with a couple of cafe lattes when I realized it was *Claire* making all that noise. Liz popped up in my field of view to remind me that scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but I was already accelerating toward my screaming kid. Jeremy lifted the blood-stained paper napkin off her head. I took one look at the gaping wound and said “Hospital.”

I lifted her as if she weighed nothing and swept her to the car, Jeremy and Julia scrambling in my wake, saying our hasty goodbyes to Liz, Danny and Ada. We drove the five blocks to St Lukes with Claire howling and my hands white-knuckled on the wheel.

If you have to go to an ER south of Market you should go to St Luke’s; we waited five minutes for the nurse, who rushed us in to see a doctor. I suppose it helps if your five year old girl is awash in her own blood. The doctor was fantastic, very patient with Claire, explaining things to her so she would understand them. He checked her thoroughly for concussion – “Touch your nose. No, not with my hand, with *your* hand!” – and put local anaesthetic on the cut.

Jeremy took Julia home for her nap while Claire and I waited for the anaesthetic to work. We did addition and subtraction and ventured into negative numbers. I told her the story of when I broke my ankle. We played Rock Paper Scissors for a while, then when we got bored added new game options: Dynamite, Cannon, Meteor, Nova, Supernova. What beats Supernova?

Doctor Bell came back and put three neat staples in Claire’s scalp. I looked into her eyes as he was doing it. She was so scared and she had to go through it alone, even if I was there holding her hands. And she faced it, and came through.

“I know what beats supernovas,” I said. “You do.”

And then we went to the library.

I have picked Claire up from the Y. We’re waiting for the 14 Mission bus. Claire is limpeted onto me; her hair keeps blowing up my nose.

Me: Let’s keep loving each other for ever!

Claire (laughing): We’re already doing that!