half moon no sleep

There’s a half moon high up in the sky, saw its reflection in the melted snow on the back porch as I stood at the door waiting for the dogs to finish their business, Buddy playing in the snow like it wasn’t 3:45 in the dadblamed morning. He wound up Jake next door to barking then I heard the snowplow scraping and beeping down Elwood. Everything out there shrouded in fog and a strange warmth, the snow dirty and animal tracked and slushy and icy like it either needs refreshing or some air.

Seems I had a good run there of sleeping but I’m afraid it has reached its end. Since right after the new year, I’ve been sleeping ten-hour stretches with only brief interruptions to pee and let Nicodemus out. Now it feels like I’m full even when I’ve only eaten an orange and my boobs are so heavy when I lie down that I have to stick my fist in between them to hold the top one up on account of the side sleeping the books say you gotta do. I’m sick of side sleeping. I want to sleep in a pool with my head supported.

Two nights running awake at 3-something and I try to at least make it to 4 but if Buddy senses me stirring he starts kangaroo kicking and Maizie raises her head up from her cardboard box bed over by the window. Then it’s not too long before I hear Severn slump off the sofa, come in, and then she stands by me on the bed, staring and wagging her tail. If she sees my eyes open at all then she gives me the painful Severn paw pat and starts licking my arms and face.

The Christmas tree is still up and it’s February. I now understand how Aunt Lois’s stayed up until April every year.

Night before last I dreamed I was over at MP’s, burning cds or something, and I’d been there awhile before I realized there was a girl on the loveseat behind me. She was silent, in a trance but smiling. It was Nora B. from college and she was doing some kind of yoga and her legs were up over her head. I said, I didn’t know you knew Nora and he acted like he didn’t really know she was there either. I left his house out the back door which led to this series of alleys and an old forest, like a city and a forest completely smashed up against each other, and ran into all these postal carriers, one of whom was Emma. All these folks Emma’s age were delivering the mail like it was the cool new job. I said, Wow, just when the job’s about to become obsolete, but they were making their way in their uniforms through icy streets.

Last night I woke up to Nicodemus crying–normally he makes a sort of half meow but this sounded like a baby and it woke me up out of a dead sleep. After I got up I realized, wow, okay, that is a taste of what it’s gonna feel like for a while. My heart was beating fast because it took me a minute to realize that I was hearing what I was hearing, his cry sort of slinking into my sleep state. I remember that feeling when I kept Elijah and Sali Rae the one weekend when Mary and Philip went to Georgia. Elijah was two and that was when he got the trots from eating the plates of french fries at the Golden Corral. I don’t think I can ever set foot in that place again–the only reason we went then is because Sali Rae got a gift certificate from there for making good grades. Elijah’s particular kind of diarrhea was like a french fry gravy and, almost seven years later, it still gives me the shivers. That poor fella was so happy eating the fries at the place; he was so sad in the middle of the night covered in them.

Right, but it was his cries that I remember waking me up, felt like I was being beckoned from my crypt. And then later, after I’d hosed him down in the shower and Sali Rae had woken up, they wanted to sleep with me. He slept in the middle of us and flipped and whispered and tugged at the skin on my elbow and sat up in the middle of the dark room and grinned and I thought to myself, how do people do this, sleeping with kids? Every move he made jolted me and I had this strange mix of exhaustion, exasperation, and the giggles. That’s all I can muster, that babies and kids must work some kind of spell through their charms that keeps a person from putting them, like Nicodemus, out the back door at 3 o’clock in the morning.

We all officially woke JB–I was worried when I got up because Buddy was cutting flips for breakfast, the only way to get him to hush was just to feed him. He doesn’t quite understand the difference between 3am dark and 5am dark, or at least he pretends he doesn’t. Plus, then he voices a rude yawn right by his food bowl. Severn is polite and sticks her butt up in the air, front paws down, then lies in a straight line, waiting patiently.

my rifle, my pony and me

The snow’s still on the ground but the compost bucket sitting in the middle of the round table on the back porch is six inches lower. This early in the day, it’s mostly ice out there–I just watched Severn skate across the yard trying to find a place to poop. The moon was full night before last so it’s still lighting everything up right good. Somewhere outside Nicodemus roams in the cold–I let him out at 3:30 am. Lately he’s been hanging out in the yard backed up to ours, the construction project; some fella bought the rental house, starting fixing it up, put a fancy wood scroll screen door on the back, and then disappeared. Unlike the guy two houses down, the young guy, whose parents come down from Virginia seems like every week and they all work their tails off fixing the place up. The only thing I’ve managed to see in his house is a set of grow lights right by the front door, or what looks like them; perhaps it’s a neon sign.

Tomorrow marks eight weeks til due date. We’re excited–not really sure what to do so I just keep reading the comic book Bone and Cormac McCarthy books and watching documentaries and old westerns. Night before last we watched Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Dean Martin — also Walter Brennan from The Real McCoys — and Dean Martin really touched JB and me, his performance. Rio Bravo is strange in that it’s sort of lighthearted but also dark and lonesome, and at one point features Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan, who are keeping vigil in the Presidio County Jail in case of an ambush, all sing this mournful cowboy song, and then Walter Brennan (Stumpy) and Ricky Nelson (Colorado) do some kind of upbeat rock & roll number that wouldn’t have existed back then and that somehow Stumpy knows all the words to. I had seen this movie when I was little because I remember Dean Martin’s outfit he wears in the beginning and his sweaty face and beard coming in. Anyhow, he’s the town drunk which normally gets played comically in old pictures, but in this his character’s treated really sympathetically, and they show how hard it is with him trying to stay sober, they show d.t.’s and everything.

Other stuff I watched included Unmistaken Child, that documentary about the Buddhist monk who, after living in isolation with his master for twenty-one years and his master dies, goes searching for the master’s reincarnation. I love this picture. Also I watched Food, Inc., documentary with Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser et al. I thought I wouldn’t like this, thinking it was gonna be one of those pathos-heavy teach-ins in high def. But it was actually really great, especially the second half where the whole thing gets ethical and logical as hell and they focus a lot on workers in the meatpacking industry and farmers who are subcontracted by Tyson and Perdue and Monsanto’s investigation and prosecution of this old-time seed cleaner. One of the things I like about Michael Pollan is that, yeah, he encourages people to eat more healthfully, but his bigger argument focuses on the subsidization of corn and corn products and how poor people on limited budgets are often portrayed as people who make poor nutritional choices as opposed to being people caught up in an economic system and food industry that has made nutritionally barren food far cheaper than a head of broccoli. The family the movie focused on moved me to dadblamed tears not because it was presented in any kind of heartstrings way, it was simply the information, their discussion about health and diabetes, that got to me.

I’ve had a boatload of thank you notes I’ve been trying to finish writing — all the way back to the funeral. That’s how come all the picture shows playing but I think I watched more than wrote thank yous.

The house is stirring. Maizie’s clawing the spine of the sofa which she’s taken to doing lately. JB’s doing something in the other room that involves beeping. I need coffee.

“i hid under your porch because i love you”

Hello, morning. 34 degrees outside and it’s supposed to snow today so it’ll have to get colder if it’s gonna stick and it better stick because the county’s already gone and closed school three hours early.

So far, the things I’ve thought about since opening my eyes have included peeing, and peeing again, if Doug would want to meet the lady I used to volunteer for, how long the beeping will last outside now that it’s one long constant beep and not rhythmic, who to call about beeping from somewhere, how much water to add to the measuring cup and coffee grounds to fill up the extra wide mug, and the new picture Avatar cause JB wants to see it bad today and he hollered from the bedroom to turn on the kitchen radio to listen to the review. I would also like to see it but gestation makes it hard to sit somewhere unmoving for too long. Considering Mister Cameron hasn’t made a straight-up feature since Titanic I imagine this one’s a doozy where running time’s concerned.

Speaking of pictures, and good ones, we watched Up last night. I loved most everything about this movie. It’s sad — I kept wondering if little people, even the little twenty-two year olds I work with, would really grasp the whole passage of time/aging/regret. My buddy Claudia wrote about this movie twice in her blog — the first was after she and Jane went to see it and how much they adored it. She told her parents to go see it and they did. Then Claudia’s mom died suddenly, several weeks before my dad died, and she and Jane were down in Ecuador. They came back to be with Claudia’s dad and to help prepare a memorial service, clean up the house, etc. She wrote about cleaning out her mom’s pocket book and finding the 3-D glasses from Up. Like when Mary and Philip went to take Sali and Elijah to see Where the Wild Things Are, she said she and Philip wept and this confused Elijah. She said Sali Rae got it because of their own recent tensions and then later said in the car, That wasn’t exactly a movie for kids. Elijah liked the muppet monsters.

Gotta figure out whether to go to work today or not. Friday consists of a half day and I’ve got comp time to use up — do I save it for after the New Year or just celebrate the possibility of anywhere from nothing to seven inches of snowflakes. I do not know, Maynard.

the noise/the crawl

The noise conditions of the house this morning are of the kind that have, in the past, convinced me to forgo writing in the wee hours. But JB’s up this morning, tackling portfolios in his office. The odd, old Frank DeFord’s on the radio (and four radios are on: the stereo and three clock radios) and almost every light in the house is lit although I’ve been slowly turning them off behind him. This is how he WAKES UP, yep, which is entirely different from how I wake up which is to watch the dark sky get light and not have the radio on til later (they repeat this mess every hour so there’s no chance of missing anything) — I like to hear the train, the dogs cleaning themselves, even that strange giant alarm clock beeping that’s still going off somewhere beyond Elwood Street that now sounds like it could be coming from Freeman Mill or as far as the interstate. However, I’m trying to practice; I mean, just as baby girl probably won’t be too fond of epic samurai movies, she may like to be a noisemaker herself in the morning. I don’t know. Making coffee, I thought of MP telling me about the time he went to the writer’s retreat in Montana and almost lost his mind, said it was too quiet, that he needed the sound of the si-reens traveling up and down Aycock Street and Emma asking him a question every ten minutes.

I do come bearing this tidbit: the City Council voted yes last night to build that dadblamed multi-million dollar swim center. Also: Ed Asner’s gonna be around these parts to shoot a movie.

Strange dreams all night so I reckon it was Philip’s chili. Also, baby cut flips hourly, felt like a foot was up near my jejunum. Dreamed I was at Meagan’s new apartment on Mendenhall Street, and she lived above a bar, and I had two beers before remembering I was pregnant and felt terrible. I walked home cause somehow Meagan disappeared and the walk home was full of strange evil in the air — nothing happened, I could just feel presences or something all around. Then I dreamed that there was some sort of hybrid May Day/Easter festival (egg rolling, Maypole, lots of white clothes) at a park owned by the college; I was crawling on the ground, on my hands and knees, making faces at kittens and babies when an old student from a couple years ago came and climbed on my back, laid down like a monkey, and rode around with me. I just kept crawling. It was a vaguely sexy dream even though there was no sex, just the crawling, but that was enough. I felt sorta weird when I woke up, like I’d been two-timing, but then decided that was just plain silly. Nobody knows where they’re gonna go when they dream and, besides, the books tell me that the sexy parts of my endocrine system are amped up right now. I usually see said student at free lunch Wednesdays so I’m just hoping I don’t blush today — I mean, in the dream, he did stick his thumb in my mouth.

Maizie’s taken to sitting by the Christmas tree but neither she nor Demus are Christmas tree attackers, I reckon because they got a whole neighborhood of trees. Last year, I did find the same wooden soldier clothespin ornament on the ground every morning so I figured it was in batting range.

My mom has this whole new social life which is excellent for her but makes the holiday this year a little bit lonesome. I don’t know why. I think I’m just missing my dad asking for coffee, cider, sweets, help switching the channel to the 24/7 Christmas songs. Last week, I was in the cafeteria at school and went to drink my milk, thought to myself, I wonder if we’re gonna ride over to the country store this year, looked through the bottom of my glass, realized he’s not here — the whole thing happened in, like, four seconds but my eyes filled up and my heart raced. Mott’s hanging out with all her lady friends, going to the Living Christmas Tree, to the wassail tea thing at somebody’s country club, luncheons, Christmas parties, and this Saturday she leaves for the beach with her friend Margie and Margie’s daughter, Kathy. She hasn’t decided whether she’ll come back before or after Christmas. Either way, I won’t see her again until the 28th — which, yeah, for most people who don’t live near their folks is no big thing but it’s weird if you do — I feel like a baby for even writing this, like a foot-stomper and that’s not how I mean it. JB and I watched that picture Away We Go, the Dave Eggers vehicle with Office Jim and the lady from SNL and C.J. and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and it wasn’t a great movie but the beginning I liked a lot, like the first twenty minutes before they away we go. She (SNL lady) and Office Jim are pregnant and there’s a scene at his parents’ house and his parents announce their plans to move to Belgium for two years. Office Jim’s reaction killed me. I feel late to the game in my family having a baby — not his fault but my dad couldn’t remember, before he fell and broke his hip, that I was even pregnant, and my mom is excited but she’s going through something entirely new for her, a freedom that she’s never experienced. My sister, she loves babies, but she’s going through a lot with Sali Rae and she’s in school at community college and she’s having health problems — three surgeries in three months and possibly more to come. I’m not close to Mark and Monty is far away in snowy, twenty below Montana. What I need to do is pull my head outta my ass because the truth is I’m just adjusting to my dad being gone and somebody else arriving. It’s kind of scary, the in-between, but it’s good and will be alright.

What I need is another cup of coffee, my limit for the day, and I need to read some Mark Twain because he helps. And tonight after work I think I’ll watch the repeat Frontline that JB recorded last night, From Jesus to Christ, about the early Christians. It’s so dadblamed good, yep.

the single effect

Sleep was better last night than the night before — not that sleeping was better or worse, I guess, but waking. Last night dreamed about The Seven Samurai which I dedicated three hours and forty-eight minutes to yesterday (including the intermission which I couldn’t fast forward through or advance, but had to listen to the overture), broken up into two sittings, one pre-advent and one post-advent. I was up until eleven! Haven’t seen eleven too often since June except for when my dad was in the hospital and we saw 11, midnight, 1 then shift change, or 3, 4, 5. Somehow I’d never seen this picture before even though I’ve seen boatloads of Kurosawa movies. Probably always the 3:48 running time got me. But it’s also like I think La Dolce Vita was one of the last Fellini pictures I saw — I had even watched the one with the clowns before seeing it. I’m trying to get some epic stuff in before baby girl arrives — can’t imagine babies are really into epics. Tried to get Infinite Jest read but those three months of nausea pretty much ended that project. I figure I might be sixty before — if ever — I make it through that book.

Night before last, I dreamed I had a baby boy with fuzzy hair and even though he wasn’t born yet, the doctor said I could take him out for an hour or two here or there. He was fun, all spastic arms and drool. At one point, me and him were sitting in a lawyer’s office, a waiting room, and he saw a sticker of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and he said, “I love Charlie Brown. I need him.” I was all, mankind, how the heck do you know who Charlie Brown is and you’re not even born yet? Then somehow the dream shifted and the lawyer who was now a doctor told me the baby didn’t make it and they gave me a dot-matrix print out of him smiling in utero. I cried and cried and when I woke myself up I could feel that my throat had been constricting from the dream crying.

This dream was the culmination of a day of freaking out. I’d seen a girl at the grocery store who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten and there was something strangely sexual about the way she carried herself — not like she was wearing hoochie clothes, just a self-awareness that disturbed the crap outta me. The same feeling I got one time when I was with my sister and Sali Rae and her friend down in South Carolina at the beach — Sali Rae and friend were ten and we were somewhere where there was the possibility of males even though I saw none in the immediate vicinity. Sali’s friend ate a candy bar — a small corner of it but it took her half an hour — in a way that really freaked me out. I can’t describe it because I don’t want to relive it that much but maybe you’ve seen it in the movies or on music videos usually involving lollipops. But lollipops have almost crossed over into the comical, can’t-take-it-seriously-anymore realm. This wasn’t comical. The whole thing gave me the shivers. So then after grocery store girl, I had a mild panic attack in the parking lot — throughout the day, kept resurfacing, and I was all ten years gone into this child-rearing thing, not even gotten through my third trimester yet, Maynard.

Yesterday, I tried to reign it in. Made gingerbread cookies and biscotti with JB, did laundry, hung paper snowflakes we cut out at last advent in the windows, watched the samurai help the peasants defend their village and their barley from the bandits. The sound of the horses in that movie, holy crap. Not to mention, the battle between the village and the bandits is almost an hour and a half long which sounds too long but it’s gripping as hell, broken up by nighttime, some respite. One of the very first lines (a subtitle actually) in the movie is about how the villagers lived in fear of the sound of hooves and I thought about Poe’s single effect because, until those bandits show up two-thirds into the picture, you’ve almost forgot if you ever paid attention to that subtitle to begin with. When I finally went to bed, I thought about when the second LOTR picture came out and everybody complained about how long the battle scene was. I actually liked the scene but I think all these new period piece movies mostly feel romantic, like a scene has been set. It’s all grandiosity and sweeping shots from cranes or helicopters. Whereas this movie actually feels like the product of an older time, much older than the ’50s, but there aren’t sweeping shots — occasionally you’ll see the fields of barley fill up the whole screen and the wind blowing through the fields and it’s beautiful, but the camera is still. I don’t know, there’s something so claustrophobic about how you can’t see the landscape clearly, from dipping helicopters, that really gets out how vulnerable the villagers felt at the mercy of the bandits. And then just how this old way is dying, on many levels, and the modern world is coming fast. But it’s all in the small details, as it should be and is. Like the bicycle leaning against the tree in Things Fall Apart.

Alright, it’s cold in this house. Something has been beeping across the backyard and alleyway over on Elwood for three days now. I hear the train and a little while ago when I let the dogs out, everything was still covered in fog. It’s warm enough to go out in it — I will now make coffee and go sit.

no good sleep/bellyache

Mostly nonsense dreams: in a house with a chef who was making salads from ideas we put together (why we weren’t just making them, I dunno) and he kept passive-aggressively making snide comments about them under his breath. I just wanted to make my own and be done with it. Sick with a stomach ache in the night, I’m pretty sure from the work Christmas party treats.  I think I dreamed about babies but since I was up and down, can’t recall too much.

Woke up thinking about Sali Rae, worried about her. She dropped out of school almost two months ago, I guess, she’s been court-ordered to a wilderness program but it’s taking so long to get the Medicaid thing approved, she keeps getting into trouble in the mean time. Or taking off — slept in the woods in a tent night before last, which is alright, but the only reason my sister knows that is because she came back, was planning to hit the road but it was 25 degrees.

Out back with the dogs a little while ago, I heard this beeping, like a giant alarm clock going off in somebody’s yard. The sound even stopped Buddy Black. When he hears alarm clocks, it means somebody’s fixing to give him breakfast.

What I need is some lettuce, roasted sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts, gallons of water. And some bananas. No more Christmas cookies.

last stop: ugh city

Beneath my scapula(s?), I can feel how much I don’t want to be at work.  Feels like out there in the world, all the important stuff is happening.  Little critter, new to the world, I can’t wait to meet and smell and hang out with.  An undecorated, unlit tree leaning on our back porch.  Aunt and cousin in Galax I’d like to spend some time with.  Instead, here I sit in the dingdang library, waiting for some asshole with a crisis.  Plus class tonight and they’re all so bored.  This Monday today is full of good times.

The other night I dreamed Buddy Black chewed the fur off his paws and underneath he had baby hands.  I said, Buddy, I never knew your paws looked like that.  He just stared at me, wondering if I was gonna give him a snack.

Last night, Mott and I went to the hospice candlelighting service at the church downtown across from the courthouse.  The church is round and made of wood and brick and all the windows are ornate stained glass.  The First Korean Presbyterian Men’s Choir sang a song that sounded like the Mills Brothers and I grinned through the whole thing because it was so good — they even had a shaker thing for percussion.  The Episcopal priest made me cry what he said about losing all the significant men in his life by the time he was seventeen years old.  The Market Street bell ringers played an out of tune rendition of “Carol of the Bells” and I liked it more because it was out of tune.  There was some other stuff but I forgot it all because everybody sat in the dark with lit candles.

I’d rather think about Christmas lights and take my camera over to the neighborhood with all the balls of chicken wire covered in lights hanging from the tree branches.  That seems infinitely more important in the scheme of things than sullen James and the beotchy lady who just blames blames blames, all the time blames.  I’m stuck in Ugh City.  I want to be in your town.

saint of the 4th of december/saint of kids

A little while ago I heard Nicodemus howling, sounded like he was climbing the screen door like he enjoys doing in the mornings but I didn’t get up right then. Had I known it was raining (again), I would have gotten up and let him in, the poor fella.

I don’t recall enough of my dreams to make them worth documenting — a mixture of making refrigerator rolls, putting up a tent in the snow, and Andrew from Dawn Chorus driving stakes in the ground and hanging Christmas lights.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Moravian candle tea. Mott was supposed to go with me but she fell asleep in her easy chair and when she woke up it was getting close to when Aunt Becky and Uncle Dewey would arrive for date night. They all still do Friday date night even though PNW has gone. Sometimes the night includes barbecue, other times the fish house, and other times entertainment by Elijah.

I believe the last candle tea I attended must have been with Angie, maybe in Asheville or Winston-Salem almost twenty years ago. What I remembered from then, and from when I was little, consisted of a quieter gathering. This was loud, with lots of kids who could give a crap about 26-point stars and beeswax candles and teacake, save for the fact that they could shove the sweet stuff in their mouths. The bright part came in the sanctuary with the tiny kids from the Suzuki music school plucking “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on violins. The older ones had bows, but the whole lot of them out of tune and completely into it. Watching them made me excited to have a little critter.

The whole day turned out to be full of things that made me excited about this. Not that I’m not excited — it’s that I’m often wary. I don’t expect it to be miraculous and I often imagine it to be really hard. This is how I approach most situations in which I don’t know the outcome. Some might call it negative thinking but it’s different than that. Take Christmas, for example. I have the regular excitement that other folks have but if I only feel that then I start to feel outta sorts, like I’m being hurled toward this one day and then afterwards comes the 26th of December. I started doing this when I was little, thinking about other stuff besides the thing that excites me. It’s also if I spend too long in the happy then I feel unbalanced, like I don’t know how to navigate the days. I’m sure all this is rooted in some pretty deep memories of really hard times around holidays — like the time my dad’s friend John showed up on Christmas Eve with the big jar of moonshine and the two of them got plastered and, later in the night, I woke up to Mott crying and my dad and brother, also drunk from his own night out, screaming at each other downstairs. Anyhow, the same is true for too much thinking only about dark things — that’s worse. Then I forget about all the things I love — I forget about Buck Owens and Otis Redding, cutting and gluing paper, words, tree frogs, walks with dogs in the woods. So I’m saying there’s got to be a balance to all these things and then I feel alright.

The thing I fear most about having a kid is somehow ending up with somebody who’s just mean, not in a rough-and-tumble way, but a snooty way, who gossips and laughs at other kids. This is my nightmare scenario. Some extreme narcissism or something, scares the crap outta me. She could emerge with six fingers like great-grandmother Addie Duckworth and I wouldn’t blink as long as she was good to others. And considerate. And didn’t value herself over everybody else.

But anyhow. Yesterday. At the bakery, the hardware store owner came in with her granddaughter, who looked to be about three, and the little girl had one of those side-to-side arm pump runs that makes it seem like if she was running in a straight, narrow corridor, she’d hit the wall not too long into it. She also had a messed up ponytail sticking off the side of her head and some godawful lavender sweatpants covered in cracker crumbs. At the counter, she asked if they had strudel but they were out. Besides all these things I liked about her, I especially liked how she just asked for two cookies and a muffin — she wasn’t trying to be older than she was and she most certainly wasn’t doing baby talk; she just straight up had some questions and so she asked them. All I could think was, you go, strudel-loving, crooked-running three-year-old.

The other thing that got me yesterday was Elijah’s ceramic turkey gravy boat, his strange man made out of a box, paper plates, cardboard tinfoil innards, and styrofoam blocks, and! his paper-maché volcano. Also, also I had told my sister about the movie Jason & the Argonauts, the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation/live action picture from the 60s, how much I loved that, and Clash of the Titans, when I was little. She got it for him and she said he sat with his bowl of popcorn and didn’t move the whole time it was on. So yesterday he drew picture after picture of scenes from the movie, kept bringing them in to Mott’s apartment. He was full of questions about stop-motion animation. I love when the New Yorker arrives in the mail and he sits on his knees on the stool at the kitchen bar counter thing and reads all the cartoons out loud and, if he gets to one he doesn’t understand, he asks who’s ever there, to explain it.

Lastly, JB and I went to the grocery store late last night and ran into Emily and Claire. Claire’s now in 10th grade at Grimsley, had Mary last year, and she talked about how much she misses her. She said, It was hard but I liked having to stay up til 4 in the morning working on a project for her. We also talked about that song from the Hotel Chevalier short, the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited, “Where Do You Go to, My Lovely?” by the French singer who’s name I can never remember.

Somehow the time has moved from 6:40am to 8:08am and I need coffee and to call in the cats who are most likely hiding in their cave under the house.

meet on the ledge

4:06 am and I finally think that the eye twitch in my belly must be the little critter kicking. I’ve been feeling this off and on for a couple weeks but it was so subtle I wasn’t sure. So I’m up and JB’s trying to sleep but we think he might have a broken toe. He doesn’t want to go to the doctor cause it’s so close to Christmas and he wants to spend his money otherwise. Maybe insurance will cover at least part of broke toes?

Also I was having dreams. In one, my cousin Pat (California Pat) had a job helping another cousin (a dream cousin) bathe and get dressed and such but she ended up pooping all in the shower and I was cleaning it up. This looked a lot like the time Elijah ate the plates of french fries at Golden Corral and then woke me up with diarrhea in the middle of the night and I had to hose him off in the tub. Later, I felt something on my ear and I’d gotten diarrhea on the back of my head, all in my hair, I guess from his hands. I mean, he was only two — the stuff was daggum everywhere. Anyhow, in the dream, Aunt Lois comes in to the bathroom — which is like a fancy hotel bathroom, about the size of our entire house — and starts singing “Side by Side” and wants me to join in except I’ve got all this poop to clean up. But I sing because I haven’t seen her since she had the stroke.

Another part of the dream — before or after this, not sure which — Mary and I are on some mountain road that I’ve dreamed about before, seems like not too long ago. We’re in the middle of a rainstorm and driveway roads are mud slicks and part of our job is to post signs warning folks of this.

When I actually was waking up, to the belly eye twitch, I was thinking about RIP, how I like Rest in Peace, but how I haven’t dreamed about my dad in a while and in some ways I’m glad because I wasn’t sleeping before. But that’s because I kept dreaming nightmares, him and the sheet and not being able to understand my questions.

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At work, I’ve been trying to settle my innards down, because my annoyance is up and tolerance for foolishness down. But then yesterday something happened with a lady I’ve been trying to help and it hurt my feelings a lot. In theory, I know you can’t please everybody and you’re gonna have conflicts, even things you didn’t know were gonna be conflicts (like in this situation), but when they happen, they feel like shit anyway. Doug talked to me and told me about this student several years ago who hated him and he had no idea why. She talked junk about him to other students, to the English department, all over. He said he tried not to worry about her but, in truth, the situation with her bothered him on and off for about a year until he slowly let things go.

I think where I ended up yesterday (or maybe today, at 5:10am) was I don’t need to think either way about this — there are times when I’m grumpy or get mad and I do things and I know I’ve not been so good to people and I try to be aware and apologize (like with Elijah the other day, I was grumpy and he was in a robot mood and I felt like I was snapping at him — even though later when I told him I was sorry I was grumpy he said he didn’t notice — doesn’t matter because I noticed). But this is a situation where I could search and search and try to figure out where things went wrong but unless she wants to actually communicate with me, I don’t really know. Everybody has had conflicts with her and I know that she has trouble with lots of people — teachers, other students, her family — but I like her and I thought things were going well. What I mean about thinking either way about this is I can feel bad but I don’t want to turn it in to more than that because that would be letting my ego get the better of me. And I don’t care to hate her or myself, thank you very much. It just is what it is. Human beings go through this, Maynard. Maybe squirrels do too.

In other news, I got a raise which means about a hundred extra dollars a month, hallelujah.

J.Ortega came in to work the other day and she was talking about when she was pregnant how she felt this secret thing, like the baby was hers and only hers while it was in her belly. She said, I was huge! And I kept swirling my hands around my huge globe! and she did this thing where she grinned and rubbed her phantom stomach. I love working with her. She made me a strawberry pie last year.

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When I watch old episodes of The French Chef, I love how Julia Child makes messes — I mean she flat out destroys that kitchen — and how she sweats and keeps wiping her face with dishtowels. The French Chef vs. Big Head/Big Hands de Laurentis = The French Chef slaughters all the food porn. I haven’t seen the Julie/Julia movie so I don’t know if all of Julia Child’s mannerisms are picked up by Meryl Streep and I may be talking about something that everybody already knows. My friend Tammy who runs a patisserie up in Ithaca told me about the time she was in French pastry school in Brooklyn and Julia Child dropped by one day. Tammy said she was so nervous with Julia Child in the kitchen that her hands shook so bad she had to stop what she was doing.

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I don’t know whether the rain has stopped but I hear the wind blowing the chimney cap. The temperature’s back up — about an hour ago, the thermometer read 52 degrees and that was around 4:30 this morning. So it doesn’t matter that I left my coat at work. Nope.

rain/tuesday/december

I’ve had that old Linda Ronstadt (when she was with Stone Ponys) song “A Different Drum” stuck in my head for days. Good gosh, I do love it. It’s one of the few songs that I know the melody and the lyrics simultaneously — usually I have to learn the lyrics unless it’s something obvious like the chorus or I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. Even though I ended up not using “A Different Drum” it was my jump off song to finally make the mix for this Mouse Deer cd exchange I’m a part of — my contribution is about three months overdue. But so are other folks so I’m not too worried. One woman handstitched all the cd covers and hers was a 3-volume set to make up for not contributing in the first two rounds of Mouse Deer. So I’ve made the cd in terms of the playlist; I figure in a couple months I’ll get around to burning and making covers.

So, it’s raining again. We’re now part of the Seattle-Eugene corridor. I’ve always read those statistics about how North Carolina gets as much rainfall as Oregon but ours is spread out over the year and includes thunderstorms as opposed to a wet/dry season. When I first moved to Seattle in January 1991, I believe my feet stayed damp until June. The only shoes I had were a pair of Converse and a pair of those Chinese shoes. Both smelled. I went to the picture show with my sister and her old boyfriend David and I’d gotten so used to the stink of my own feet that I didn’t notice, had them propped on the seat in front of me. Mary picked them up and put them on the floor and said, Those shoes are going in the trash when we get home.

In the middle of my upper back, feels like a fireball sitting along my spine, especially from 3pm on. I believe it’s a combination of lack of patience with students these days and their inability to do much of anything for themselves and full breasticles. Those suckers hurt, man. Can’t imagine three months from now. Those are my updates from the complaint department. It’s like I hate feeling like that but sometimes that fireball is so persistent and aching, I have trouble shaking it and thinking about anything else.

Last night when I got home from work, I watched the rest of Sense and Sensibility, that Ang Lee Jane Austen adaptation from the mid-90s. Holy crap, I love Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. And even Hugh Laurie, pre-obnoxious House doctor star. Anyhow, Emma Thompson plays it so quiet and bound up throughout the whole picture that, at the end, there’s this part where she literally weeps — not regular old movie crying that’s pretty — I mean, full on weeping. It killed me, how painful it sounded and how she looked away from the camera. Later, when JB got home, I told him about it and he’d seen that movie almost fifteen years ago and he said he still remembered that part, that it tore him up.

The dogs are sleeping beside me on the sofa. Buddy’s damp from his jaunt around the yard which was to convince JB that he went to the bathroom but I have a feeling he didn’t. He came back too fast. Severn is always a good girl and does all of what she’s supposed to do. We always say she’s such a good student. If Buddy could chew bubble gum, he’d stick it under his desk.