fallingwater

We’re on the patio outside our cabin, listening to the rain on the sailcloth above us, and the Pacific Ocean crashing onto the beach.

It’s possible to hear all of this, now that Julia is asleep and no longer screaming like a deranged banshee.

at dicky beach

It took me a week to untangle from work, then I lost my glasses. It took me a few hours to figure out how to replace them in rural Queensland (a very fun road trip with my brother Alain, as it turned out) and then, because I was in rural Queensland trying to chillax, whatever the INS calls itself these days raised a question about my green card application.

Since there was exactly nothing I could do about it, I worked hard on being Zen; and the next time I checked my email my friends in the States had sorted everything, which makes me feel very loved.

Even with these transpacific stressors, the holiday is definitely working. I’m sleeping about ten hours a night and taking long naps in the afternoons, and behold, my cough has nearly cleared up. My sister was here for the weekend with her kids, making eleven of us altogether. Kelly and Ross were just delightful with my girls, very patient and playful and charming. It hurt to say goodbye.

Mum and Dad and Alain are still here, all camping on the same site. It’s beyond perfect. Our world is defined by the shops across the road – good cafes and restaurants, a butcher and a baker; the spectacular beach with its shipwreck; the creek that runs down to the beach; the playgrounds and the pool. The feel of everyday life is like Burning Man, oddly enough – walks and fun interspersed with socializing and tea.

I haven’t spent so much happy, unstructured time with my mum and dad and brother and sister since my wedding.

the sunshine coast

I was already feeling much better in Sydney, after going for a run through the rainforest gully behind Jeremy’s parents’ house, and being teased by my husband AND my brother about my Google hypochondria:

“Oh no! My hand has five fingers on it! What could this mean?”
“It must be… pentadactylism!”
“BILATERAL pentadactylism…”

Then we got on a plane (Julia already an old hand, outraged that there was no seat back video) and hired a car and drove through a no-visibility Queensland summer storm to the gloriously named Dicky Beach, where the tail end of a cyclone had whipped up the surf around the wreck of the Dicky.

We split a bottle of Wirra Wirra chardonnay with my mum and dad, and woke this morning to mackerel clouds and generous sunshine. There are five cafes, a pool, two playgrounds and a beach of awesome beauty, all within one minutes’ walk of our cabin.

My mood is much improved.

in sydney

Last week I took Bebe to her annual checkup and saw a new vet. I tried to explain about, you know, that cute little RENDING LIMB FROM LIMB thing that she does.

“So when does she bite?” asked the vet.

“When she’s not getting enough attention,” I said. “Or when she’s getting too much attention.”

I have a similar relationship with this blog. If I haven’t been updating it’s because I have been too happy, or not happy enough. Unfortunately lately it’s been the latter. Fascinating, if disturbing, to see myself fall into a bunch of familiar patterns from the days when I was a crazy miserable loon. There’s an important difference this time, though. Part of my mind is detached from the process: “Oh look, that was an irrational piece of depressive thinking. Hey, check it out, I’m evaluating everything in absolutes again!”

The timing was kinda lucky, if anything about having a broken brain can be lucky, in that it neatly aligned with one of my favourite strategies for coping with stress: fleeing the country. We had a startlingly pleasant sixteen hour flight with the short people – all hail Qantas, world’s most chillin’ airline – and now we’re all in Sydney, gorging on the in-season stone fruit and revelling in the warmth. Of course, it’s pouring, but that just makes the garden smell more Edenic.

Jack said something very melancholy the other day: that leaving your hometown, becoming an expatriate, is the ultimate admission of core loneliness. But the converse is also true. Coming home reminds me that I have many resources, many communities and many friends.

does this seem fair to you?




Bebe Personal Space Invasion Services

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens


small, good things

I would like to have an editor like Gordon Lish; only, instead of ruthlessly editing my stories, he would write them, then let me collect the accolades, royalties and hot poet wife. Takers?

Me to Julia, idly: Do you like cats?
Julia, intensely: I. Love. Cats.

What I hate most about running is that I end up warm and energized, able to breathe more easily and calmer about whatever is worrying me. It’s so unfair. The odds are totally stacked in its favour. Exercise cheats.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco Ballet, storefronts around Union Square have the original, embroidered and jewelled tutus on display. The effect is to make the expensive clothes that are for sale seem drab and dowdy.

Claire: This is my unicorn. These are its legs. And this is its metal claw, for killing.

some notes from edward tufte

“A good diagram isn’t necessarily meant to be taken in at a glance. We should read a good diagram as seriously as we might read two or three paragraphs or even a couple of thousand words of text.”

“It starts with Patient One, and that gives insiders some important information; because of course these charts usually start with Patient Zero. What happened was, the Chinese government suppressed information, so Patient Zero can’t be traced. So the chart pointedly starts with Patient One in Hong Kong.

“An important principle is not just to concentrate on descriptions but also their relationships. Show causality.

“We have evidence at the molecular level, the clinical level, the human level, the patient level, because of the detective work. Finally there’s some public health information. The evidence exists at multiple levels. And that’s one of the important principles of evidence: whatever it takes.

“Most people show material that they’re good at, that happens to be convenient, that happens to be inexpensive… but the evidence should be at multiple levels. From molecules up to the nation state. Whatever it takes.

“Notice that the linking lines are annotated. Look at an organization chart with a few names at the top and an increasing number in the mighty pyramid. The nouns are quite important, but the linking lines – I can’t believe it! – are all the same. Think what that says: that every pairwise relationship in this organization is exactly the same as every other. That simply cannot be the case.

“So how can we give those linking lines some texture? Put some words on them. Put some numbers on them. We have intense specificity in the nouns. Let’s add some specificity to the linking lines. Look at Patient 2C. That’s probably how the virus got to Vietnam. That’s the mechanism. Or look at 2E. Travel to Singapore. Or Patient 2D. Travel to Canada. Instead of just information that tries to tell us the bad news about the epidemic, this shows the flow of causation. So tha we can try to intervene.

“This texture of annotation on the linking lines and on the nouns helps the credibility of this diagram a great deal. It shows off the hard work of the investigators. This stuff is not overload or clutter. In general, there is no such thing as information overload. There is only bad design. Don’t blame the victim. Don’t blame the audience for being stupid. Blame the design.

“We don’t go around a city complaining about information overload, and that’s because we have a very powerful perceptual system. We perceive in 16-bit colour, three dimensions, all day every day. That’s massive bitflow. One of the things we are trying to do with information design, here, is to bring it up to the routine capacity of the human perceptual system!”

Twenty minutes in and I am IN LOVE.

Read more…

*cough*

I have always had this cold. I will always have this cold.

This cold has overflowed my five-year-old’s memory buffer.

Claire: Mama, you always cough and sneeze.

only fifteen years late

“Tobias Smollet thus became Europe’s tubercule; the infectious agent coursing the continental arteries.”

This, in case you were wondering, was the money shot for an essay I wrote for my English honours exams in 1992. My brain finally presented it, thus polished… this morning.

freeway, flames

Yesterday morning I picked up a colleague and drove down 101 to San Jose for a series of meetings. It was foggy as we came up the hill towards Third Street, and the flames were the only bright colour I could see. Bright red and orange like blossoms appearing out of nowhere, above the grey freeway, under the grey sky.

“Ohmigod ohmigod what happened?” I yelled, gripping the wheel like a life preserver.

“The truck clipped that bike,” said my colleague.

Until he said that I couldn’t resolve the details: the black motorbike itself skidding on its side between two lanes of traffic; the black SUV pulling into the center divider; fifty yards behind it the bike’s rider, in black leathers, getting up and dusting himself off.

The bike must have been a write-off but the rider walked away. Hell of a thing. Hell of a way to start the day.

soft exposed underbelly

While Jeremy and I lay on the sofa watching Deadwood, Bebe the Appalling Cat lay on top of me on her back, paws in the air, completely crashed out and relaxed.

Of course when she realized that we had seen her in this vulnerable state, she attacked the collar of my robe.

While I was wearing it.

circling back

Seth points out that the dances-on-fabric are an established circus art called aerial tissu, or silks.

Lilysea and her partner have two daughters through domestic adoption. Not surprisingly, her perspective on Juno is a lot deeper than mine.

sacrilege!

My cold has been gaining ground day by day, and today I was particularly sore-throaty and unthinking. I decided to make mulled wine. I was a bit surprised at how hard it was to get the cork out of the cheap Spanish red, but I finally did it, and dumped half the bottle into a saucepan with water and sugar and cinnamon and lemons and oranges.

Then I realized I had not opened the Protocolo but the 1996 St Henri Shiraz that Peter and Lucy Chubb gave us as a wedding gift, with instructions to open it on our tenth anniversary. The one I have been warning our cat-sitters away from, lo these many years.

Oh.

My.

God.

It does marry beautifully with lamb, it turns out. Jeremy had made a gorgeous shepherd’s pie, and Jack made salad. Even mulled, the St Henri was sensational.

I am the world’s biggest dork.

Obligatory happy ending: I found a vintage wine store in Boston that had a few bottles left and ordered them for our actual tenth anniversary. But it will be hard to beat the anecdotal value of this particular bottle. Thanks, Peter and Lucy! It was a brilliant evening (and my sore throat is greatly soothed.)

habitat

We scrambled the kids and the Moores and Rose and Byron to the Mission Dance Theatre to see the last night of Habitat, a show by a new circus company called Sweet Can Productions. It has been getting amazing word of mouth, most recently from Seth, but nothing prepared me for how terrific it actually was. There are six performers, three men and three women, all acrobat-dancer-actors; but their wowsome feats were in the service of a very sweet, funny and earnest story of life in the big city. One of my favourite scenes was of all six waiting for a train, making and avoiding eye contact, falling into the unconscious echoes and rhythms of urbanity.

My absolute favourite scenes were sort of rope dances up and down bolts of fabric suspended from the ceiling, and representing sheets. One dance was a woman thrashing around in bed, unable to sleep, absolutely evocative of that particular yearning misery. The other was two new lovers, and without being at all explicit the scene had the exact joyous intensity of the first time you go to bed with someone with whom you are head-over-heels (haha!) in love.

And there was an adorable juggler who used his *elbows*, and a completely incredible slack-rope walk, and a huge wheel, and and and… So yeah, this is an entirely pointless review because the run is over, but next time Sweet Can puts on a show? You must obtain tickets. By any means necessary.

squee!




dsc_2550.jpg

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens


city girl




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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens


claire’s fifth birthday




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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens


mercurial

Disney phone: Hi! I’m Ariel! You’re my first human friend!

Julia (delighted): Hi Ariel!

Disney phone: Hi! I’m Ariel! You’re my first human friend!

Julia (disgusted): No! Stop it! (Tosses phone aside, moves on.)

dawn chorus

Big-girl-bed girl thunders into the room and climbs with some difficulty onto our bed:

“EHN! EHN! EHN!”

The entire bed bounces up and down like a trampoline.

“Julia JUMP! Julia JUMP! Julia JUMP!”

Parents reluctantly concede that further sleeping-in is unlikely.

twelfth night

And another thing I liked about Juno; it would have been so easy to make the cheerleader character a caricature, like Reese Witherspoon in Election, but they didn’t go there. And ANOTHER thing. Her parents were so right-on in the scene where she told them – so right on that I clutched Jeremy’s hand and hoped to God I would be that cool in that situation.

We got the tree undecorated at the appropriate time. Jonathan, Salome, Robert and Gayatri and the relevant children arrived, exchanged presents and made cookies, I am told; I fled to the comforting steam of Kabuki, where Re-cheng and I compared notes and were pummeled. Sweet.