The boomerang is one of the coolest toys ever. Part of the reason that
the boomerang is a cool toy is that it wasn’t originally a toy but a tool.  Not a
tool like that guy you dated in college but a real tool, I mean one
that was good for something. A boomerang went out and killed your
dinner, which I have just confirmed is true because I looked it up. The
European ones apparently weren’t meant to come back to you which is
sort of not all that surprising but that’s not what I’m talking about.

So boomerangs are cool, they’re sort of exotic and foreign but not
entirely unfamiliar. They go and out do things for you. They can bring home
the bacon and they also, apparently, play music if you know how to hold
them right. They’re not exactly doing those things FOR YOU because
they’re not servants, you know. They do what they do because it’s their
nature. You send them out and they do what they were made to do and I
guess you could say that basketballs were made to go through hoops but
if you don’t think a boomerang is cooler than a basketball then I don’t
even know why we’re talking. A boomerang is a kerjillion times cooler
than any ball that you bounce, throw, or pass, and it’s even cooler
than a weapon that’s just a weapon because a knife only wants to cut
stuff including your fingers if you aren’t careful but a boomerang can
hang out in the field with you on a lazy windless day going out and
back, like a hawk without jesses.

I want to use words like elegant and sleek but in a way these fall
flat. Of course you can get some cheap plastic thing but we are people
of taste and plastic offends us so let’s talk about real boomerangs,
old school. They are so beautiful to touch, to run your finger along
that edge and know that this curve here, where all you want to do is
touch it, run your finger along how smooth it is and this thing that
you can barely stand to stop touching is the very thing that will make
it come back to you. I mean, if you throw it right.

And of course boomerangs come back if you throw them right, if you’re
not a big disgrace to the Aborigine race. The boomerang wants to come
back to you. It wants to rest in your hand again, to feel that it’s
gone forth and done what it was meant to do and now your lovely long
fingers are running along that curve again and that was so good, that
freedom going forth and that arc of longing and that return home.

But maybe you are too afraid the boomerang won’t come back. Maybe
you’re not ready for boomerangs. Maybe you should start with yo-yos,
you know. Something with strings attached.

Today I am thinking about public vs. private personality. In
particular, I am thinking about the difference between having a
voluntary or involuntary public persona, especially as it relates to
politics. How much we expect the families of politicians to step up and
work for them, campaign for them, smile endlessly and never even
scratch their noses. I think it’s unfair. I think it’s wrong. It is the
way it’s done, though, and I wish we could agree on some rules. I wish
for rules to protect the innocent, and I also wish for rules that will
make it possible for me to mock the ridiculous.

Though it seems unfair to me, I’ll concede that in order to
win, it is now necessary to haul your family along for the ride. You
can’t be a drug addict and your spouse can’t be either; also ideally
your kids will be reasonably respectable. Somewhere along the line we
started thinking the choices you made as a family member were the
choices you would make as the leader of a country, and while I think
that’s not accurate I understand it’s part of the mythos and okay: You
wanna be president, your family will have to be at your side. And they
will be judged for their behavior at your side. If you don’t like that,
you don’t get to be the boss of the country.

So: You’re a family member of a politician. You’re going to
be judged. I don’t think it’s fair to judge anybody for their personal
appearance unless they’re trading on that appearance or have altered
that appearance. Plastic surgery is always fair game. The big nose you
inherited from your grandfather is not. Tattoos can be mocked. Acne
cannot. Bad makeup, bad perm, bad haircolor, ill-fitting clothes, and
the inability to walk in high heels for any person who is both old
enough to know better and financially capable of rectifying errors? I
have made those mistakes and so half the time I’m laughing with, but
make no mistake: I’m laughing. But it is not fair to mock without
sympathy the cluelessly young, honestly poor, or hopelessly
ill-advised, and it is never okay to assume that appearance (the one
you’re born with, at least) is any reflection of character.

But you can judge people for their behavior, for sure. Any
family member over the age of let’s say 16 should show up, unless they
have the flu or homework. They should look happy to be there. This is
not because they have to actually be happy but because if a family
member is in politics, I expect that member to have good enough manners
to handle a peace summit and I expect the rest of the family to be able
to muster the manners to smile through a a political convention. It is
not harder than telling Aunt Agatha you love that handmade sweater, and
if you don’t have the stamina for that, your family will not survive in
politics.

I
also think if they volunteer to go beyond standing at your side and
smiling and waving, if they, say, want to start their own blog in which
their description of themselves includes their astrological sign…
well, that’s like shooting Playmates in a barrel, isn’t it? And people
who fall asleep in church while trying to make their spouse look
attentive to an issue deserve at the very least to be openly laughed
at, even if they didn’t actually drool or anything.
I’ve yet to find anything funny in dog torture or glocks on a plane,
but I’m sure it will come to me. And it’s fair game, don’t you think?

Possibly because it is right in front of you is why you didn’t see it.
Possibly it has been staring you in the face for so long that you got
used to overlooking its gaze. Possibly you didn’t want to see it but
that isn’t like you. And then also: Possibly it isn’t there at all and
you didn’t conjure it OUT of existence so much as you are conjuring it
INTO existence now.

So many things are possible.

And maybe it doesn’t come down to this one thing at all; maybe it’s a
bunch of little things adding into this tower of toppling horror. In
which case instead of standing there all bravely confronting what you
see, your time would be better spent taking apart the pieces, sorting
them into piles like you used to do with Legos. Not everybody has to be
a builder and especially you don’t have to build this up into a giant
scary thing. Sometimes it’s time to put the toys away; sometimes it’s
okay to say it’s this one little thing and that one little thing and
this thing and that thing and they don’t have to turn into something
bigger than you can solve.

There is not really a box big enough for all these things.

It is not good that this is happening but it is important to remember
that it is not happening to you just because you’re there for it. You
can realize it’s not about you. You can realize it’s not about anything
in fact. You can realize that flipping out was never your strong suit.
What are you good at? What are you good for? You can spend some time
reflecting on those strengths. What’s not up for debate is that you’ll
need them.

Christmas and I’m five, I think; this is a story I only know secondhand. My parents throw a party where they serve Scarlett O’Haras in tiny glasses because they don’t want people to underestimate the punch this punch packs, and apparently some people drink doubles in protest of my parents’ perceived cheapness, and I am doubtless wearing a cute velvet dress of some sort and carrying a tray of cocktails around to the grown-ups who give the cute little girl a sip of their presumably watered cranberry juice and southern comfort, except that my dad would never water a drink and later I am passed out on the coats with my cousin, who despite it being the 70s and the South knows he can’t drive home, so you can imagine how my brain spins in the coats, the fur scratching my cheeks.

And then it’s Christmas and I’m what, ten or eleven and my parents have made this weird modern arty kind of tree that you can buy in the store by 2002 but this is 1978 or so and such things are not in abundance; it’s homemade and a bit rickety. I am mildly sick as I always am on Christmas and am trying to hang the prettiest glass ornaments on our alt.tree, and one slips from my hand and falls and shatters. Shatter is an important word. My mother comes to scold me and realizes I’m running a fever and Christmas stress goes up three knots.

Or I’m seventeen and I’ve been out dancing and come home in something provocative and interesting, throw on a robe and run down the hall to shower off the smell of danger; it’s probably four or five in the morning and my grandfather is already awake, smoking in the living room, blowing the smoke up the chimney. "You shouldn’t smoke," I say automatically, pulling my robe closely over my dress and hoping he doesn’t see the glitter on my face, the cuts on my arms. "Why not?" he asks, and his eyebrows Spock at me, because he quit smoking years before only to be diagnosed with colon cancer. We get through Christmas without his saying anything to anyone or to me either. When he leaves he whispers in my ear to be careful if I can’t be good; this is the last time we talk before he dies.

Twenty-one and living in Japan and my mother comes bustling over the ocean with Christmas gifts and cheer, but to no avail; I am more desperately lonely than I have ever been in my life and all my edges are so blurred there is no core. We listen to the bell ring three times three times nine times and I am as empty as I can be and still be full of sadness.

And then twenty-five, or maybe only twenty-four? The Christmas when I sat in a living room full of nutcrackers apologizing to the woman who would never be my mother-in-law for breaking the heart of her boy who had never loved me, then later filling his truck with my things and moving to a new life that was, in the end, even worse than the awful one I was leaving.

There have been good Christmases, for sure. But it is altogether not my favorite holiday. Imagine me, yesterday, engaged in a shouting match with Squire over the importance of vacuuming pine needles before the cat chokes on them, and he says, "Why are we jumping on each other’s ay-ess-ess-es? I’m happy to be home with you and I know you’re happy to be home with me," and I burst into laughter colored tears because I am again reminded that it is not all about the past, but about the present, which we write as we go along.

And so now Friar is making something tasty with fish and we are listening to Cechomor’s Christmas CD and the tree is lit and you know, I’m trying as hard as I can to be the person I want to be. Now and for next year. And I wish for anyone this contentment and this hope.

Three weeks ago, the internet company decided to upgrade me without my permission; the upgrade frightened my poor little modem to death and I was suddenly without internet. As a person who works, shops, and even socializes from home, this is probably my equivalent of suddenly lacking a car in a town without public transportation.

At first I raged, but they said they’d have a new powerful amazing modem delivered in two days so I decided I’d be fine. Not all editing requires internet access, so I did what I could, and it turns out that I am internet-reliant but not internet-dependent, jobwise. The hardest part was giving up the parts of internet access that are not strictly job-related: reading the news, catching up with friends, and “finding stuff out”.

So I muddled through the week with a dictionary and an encyclopedia during the day, and it was okay. In the evenings, instead of reading up on mysterious rashes, adaptations of “My Fair Lady” into foreign languages, and the number of calories you burn brushing your teeth, I worked on home projects. I re-organized the books. I put together a new CD shelf. I waxed the living room floor. I patched things. I made myself useful.

But I didn’t feel useful, because there’s a difference between what you can do and what you’re good at doing. I’m good at about two things: watching television and looking stuff up. Because watching television tends to turn me into a bit of a nutter, I restrict that, but I am in the habit of giving my research urges unrestricted access. And not being able to look stuff up nearly did me in, because I could go to my friend’s house up the street to download projects and upload completed work, but you don’t feel the same about spending time on somebody else’s computer searching for pictures of Franklin Pierce (which is something I did the day after I got access back: quite a handsome fellow).

After a week (which is Novera-speak for "two days"), I was back on line. And reflecting on this experience was… not good.

I have thought of myself as being a knowledgeable person. There’s knowledge you have and knowledge you know how to get, and I didn’t mind being poor in the first type because I believed I was richer than many others in the second type. It isn’t necessary to know how to spell well as long as you know that you can’t and you’re reconciled to the fact of looking words up often. This applies to nearly anything: if you’re able to find the answer, you don’t have to carry it around in your head. However, it’s quite a blow when your second brain is suddenly missing.

And last Monday, the telephone company started playing with the line, and I’ve been on and offline again all week. Last night I was sleeplessly cataloging the things that I am good at and not good at, and I’ve realized that all this being good at looking stuff up has made it possible for me to forget that being good at one thing does not necessarily mean that one is good at many things, and it certainly doesn’t mean that one is good. I rationalize that I can’t wax the floor because I am “busy” looking for recordings of Algonquin poets reading aloud (?don’t remember why). Without that excuse, I am forced to discover that waxing a floor does not require any particular degree of awesome, and that waxing the floor doesn’t make me personally more aesthetically pleasing. Making crappy craft knock-offs of more creative projects doesn’t make me artistic. The ability to alphabetize my CDs, no matter how efficiently and thoroughly I do so, doesn’t make me organized. And none of these things, neither the alphabetizing or the art projects or the floor waxing, or even the live poetry, actually me a better person, or even a more interesting person, and the fact that being good at looking stuff up has distracted me from this lack is merely a testament to the horror of it.
What I am left with, when left alone, is the ability to realize how thoroughly hateful it is to be alone with me. It’s been rather a rough week.

standing under the eaves in the rain, smoking
sitting inside watching the snow fall and drift into piles
walking down the middle of the street in the dark

What you want is not what you get. What you get is what you get. You
can feel as good or bad about it as you want to feel, but it will most
likely not change what you get.

You can embrace what you have,
what you got, what you will get. You can shout from rooftops or perhaps
websites about your lucky draw and your happy hands and your pretty,
pretty life.

Or you can alternately mourn what you do not have, have not
gotten, will never. Keen and wail over it or suffer semi-stoically,
baby martyr. Did dur baby have its feewings hurted. Whoa is you indeed.

The thing about martyrs is that they’re only impressive to the
people who believe what they believe. To everybody else they are
terrorists, windmill tilters, demanding nonsensical whiners. In no case
are they people who appreciated what they had. In no case are they people
who get what they want. And the longing and the whining and the
violence, the glass thrown across the room the plate smashed hair from
the roots white gasp and the seam of blood dissolving in tears or
flames temper temper takes from what you have, and what you have is
consumed in the yearning for what you did not get.

Want what you get. For starters, it’s easier.

I’m not talking about the haircuts where you think that when you get
your hair cut like Brad Pitt you’re going to come out of it looking
like Brad Pitt. I’m talking about the haircuts where your total
inability to articulate what you want and/or the hairdresser’s total
inability to understand you ends up with you crying.
And how in the first case (Brad Pitt’s hair) you are just being really
silly, but in the second case the problem rests in the disconnect between
what you want and your ability to express it so that other people will
do it, and that disconnect is what makes you cry as much as the bad hair.

People
have been trying to give me long fringey bangs and cute little side
fringey things ever since I came into my face. It’s a big face, like
I’m coming at you through a peephole, and some softness around the
edges would probably make it less whoa, but the thing is I hate having
stuff touching my face and ears, and I’m the one who lives with it. So
lots of "soft little fringe" experiences in high school wound up with
me coming home making cat splutters and (because i could never cut a
straight line) eventually doing something with my mother’s pinking
shears. Sorry about that, Mom.
But if people had just done what I said, instead of what they thought would be best for me, tips would have flowed instead of tears.

Once I wanted my hair like a cross between Alannah Currie and
the Heat Miser, bald on the sides and dramatic chunks standing up on
the top; it was long and there was a perm growing out on the top,
perfect, and I cut the sides up very short myself but was perplexed by
the back. I went to a proper hairdresser who "shaped" it, oh my heavens
no. My boyfriend at the time came home to me crying hysterically
because there was nothing I could do to fix it. He took me to a barber
and the barber shaved it all off,  and vacuumed up all the stray hairs
with a wall mounted vacuum, which was a hundred kinds of awesome and cost about a tenth of the proper hairdresser.  Still, I didn’t get what I wanted and  I was so close, and I know that haircut would have been so embarrassing to look back at now, and I mourn it.

In Japan I went with my terribly well groomed and fluent
friend to get a haircut- I’d been cutting my own hair there, because
it’s superfine hair and my Japanese was atrocious and I was scared of what might happen, but I was getting
seriously tired of sweeping hair out of the tatami and ready to take a
risk. "She wants it exactly the same, but about 2 cm shorter" he told
them. They cut it 2 cm shorter than his. I even got
a nice shave for my gaijin sideburns. Yay.

All
things considered, my trip to the hairdresser today was not the worst
thing that has happened to my hair, but man. I came home today looking
like a mushroom. A mushroom that cries. I told her "cut it jagged"
which every hairdresser here has understood, and she gave me some
ass-symmetrical emo thing. We are not emo, although I was beside myself
with unhappiness for a full 20 minutes over a
haircut which is the stupidest thing ever. I tried to explain
it to her again, but she was all huffity "I don’t know what you want" and I
thought I might take her stupid straight scissors and poke her in the
eye so bah, I left and cried a bit on the way home and then did it
myself. I got out the clippers and stuck my fingers in and sort of
jabbed at all the bits that stuck up, only grazing my knuckles a few
times. I look fine. Mainly it’s not around my eyes or my ears or
touching the back of my neck anymore.

The thing that comes to me this time is that it’s not just the haircut.
It ties in to my hesitation to ask for things from others that I can do
for myself, and my utter fury when it doesn’t go well, because I feel
like partly it goes wrong because the other person screwed up, but
partly it goes wrong because I explained it badly and shouldn’t have
delegated and paid for what I’m perfectly capable of doing anyway. It’s
a whole life lesson or something. I’ll work on it once I’m done
sweeping up all the hair bits.

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and
sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the
country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving
on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near
the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and
be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what
else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of
does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the
back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the
cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do
what I had wanted to, except I think I don’t want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I
wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don’t
feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an
editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I
had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the
dream I wanted was the same.

To
me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice
makes others possible. I don’t see it as having a choice, and that
choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines
can loop back; I don’t see Billy Pilgrim’s centipedes exactly either,
where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don’t
see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you
are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how
entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you’ve
become with the person I thought you were. I can’t see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop
willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as
you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I’ve made smaller choices
slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively
changing me and it’s me who’s different and you’re moving on a consistent path.
I don’t know. I do know that it’s strange to look across a table and
see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don’t really understand;
the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I’d hear, not while
sitting with you.

I recently was led to the statistic that 15% of Americans
self-declare as atheist or "no god" or "agnostic". FIFTEEN. That’s
huge. And while I realize that religion is a choice, whereas other
groupings (race, sex, sexual preference) are not, still, 15% is a sizable minority. And I found myself picturing a future in which…

Atheist Eye for the Christian Guy…Five
fabulous atheists, experts in the fields of logic, debate, reasoning
and skepticism, are unleashed upon a
Christian whose friends or loved ones believe he needs to be a bit
less… righteous. The guy is trained to think for himself, gets a good
set of
books to read, and acquires a sense of humor! Note: He’s still going to
be a Christian, he’s just not going to be annoying!

The Compounds is an animated situation comedy focusing on the
lives of the Freethink family. Elementary-school aged atheist brothers
Sartre and Atticus Freethink have been moved by their Granddad Robert
from their university town in the northest to the quiet, almost
completely Christian suburb of Woodcrest, Alabama. Less controversial than the comic strip that inspired it, the Compounds nevertheless raises some hackles… and some laughter!!

The A Word
is a television drama series on Showtime that portrays the apathy,
ambivalence, and anger of a group of atheist and agnostic people and
their acquaintances in Austin.

Like any other minority group, atheists will also be given token
roles on
major television shows, providing comic relief for the most part, but
also providing touching insights into the subtle (and not-so-subtle!)
challenges faced by atheists. In one particularly memorable episode,
the atheist doctor on whatever the hit medical drama is will reveal to
the other doctors that in fact it is offensive to atheists when doctors
talk about heaven, and maybe he’ll even add that this is why he became
a doctor, because seeing the poor little atheist kids grow up without
the false promise of an afterlife has something something something.
Still hammering out the details. In real life, the actor who portrays
the atheist will have "candid" pictures of himself taken going in and
out of some place of worship or another. Alternately, the atheist
character will be played by an atheist, who will then be assumed to
speak for all atheists everywhere whenever she opens her mouth. There
will be a big fuss about how she was hired entirely for her acting
ability and not to fill some "quota", which will be entirely true since
there is no quota to ensure that what you see on your screen bears any
relationship to the world you actually live in.