The conversation with the principal about "Perhaps the school should alert parents to the fact that their kids are on facebook" did
not go quite as planned, since for example he did not know that his own
school has a facebook page. He thought I was warning him THERE IS PRON ON THE INTERNETS!! which I was actually on like, the fifth book in that series, but whatever: baby steps.

Last week there was also a conflict with the gym teacher; he apparently thought
that we were making fun of him with our very politely worded "Please excuse Squire from the whole-class detention" letter. The
guy has some respect issues, as do I, so we started at least with that
in common. I was kind of outraged about the whole situation; Friar seemed to be afraid I was going to go in and actually kick the
guy's teeth in. Apparently he didn't
understand that I have to get really angry as a form of girding. Maybe it's my Cold War upbringing but my thought is that I need
to be armed, not that I need to fire. Naturally when I went in there my
intention was to make sure that we're all on the side of getting my
child as well educated as possible. I was all California smiles and charm. My people skilz are unfathomable so now we're all best friends and stuff; I know
all about his daughters and his cottage and his 10 year break from
teaching and his blood pressure and alla that. And he has a better
understanding of Squire, and wheee, job well done awesome high five to
myself.

"Unemployment" (by which I mean: no longer collecting a steady predictable paycheck)
is not really all that bad; I've got enough work coming to keep my
devil's playthings busy. I do spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time looking up stupid crap that I have no actual interest in, and I watched the entire first season of GLEE in basically one sitting, but ehn, things are happening. The brain surgeons keep giving me work, and then fun little things along the way, like a job reading a book for a recording for blind people.

Yesterday
Squire and I cleaned his room. It's basically the first time I've set
foot in there since September (I call "goodnight" from the doorway,
because whoa! he is messy.) I generally
believe that you should be allowed to keep your own room, but like, not when you can barely open the door, so it was time for an intervention. FIVE HOURS, yo. Mostly
because the archaeological significance of many things had to be
appreciated for a few minutes, which my Pave The Earth housekeeping
style does not understand and so I had to have frequent breaks to keep from screaming. But anyway, it got done.

I am distressed by people who do not understand LOLCATS grammar and try
to make up their own, like they think it's just speaking English badly rather than any actual structure. Also
irritated all out of proportion by people who "loveeeeeeee" things. It
is a silent E; you are not emphasizing anything by typing it a dozen
times. Yeah, so I'm going to go to Prague for a bit and take care of an actual baby until I
can start thinking like a grown-up again. Wish for pretty weather for me! 

Hearty chortled greetings. How was your weekend? But first let me tell
you about mine. Friar had been having recurring nightmares about the
cottage. When I have nightmares about the cottage, I do not want to go
there in case they might be true. When he has nightmares about the
cottage, he has to go to be sure they are not true, so we bundled up
and went to the cottage this weekend.

I believe – no, I admit – that at some point Squire made a face about the trip, and I hissed in his ear that I did
not want to go, that I was going in order to be kind to Friar, that
periodically we do things we don't like in order to be kind, and that
the kindness is removed by our bitching about it, and I am going so
he's going and I don't want another word about it. I do understand that
my saying to him that I don't want to go is fundamentally no different
from his saying that he doesn't want to go. I'm balancing my hypocrisy
with a little self awareness. That could totally be my epitaph.

To be fair, the person who volunteered to be in charge of preparing
and packing the food failed to prepare anything for me other than
boiled eggs, which was a large factor in my dampened enthusiasm. Yes
okay also we brought bell peppers and tomatoes, but for protein: boiled
eggs. Mmmm, really, boiled eggs for lunch dinner and breakfast? That
causes brisk rubbing of the anticipatory hands! And heart attacks!

It was 20 degrees below. Celsius, but still: that is cold.
Fortunately we were bundled and had many, many pairs of extra socks.
Mostly the whole weekend I couldn't get warm. Even when the inside of
the cottage was a perfectly reasonable temperature I was generally
under a pile of sleeping bags and doing Inward Moaning. However, we
also played in the snow, which was very fluffy and unsuitable for
snowballs. It was, however, very nice to run in and also to fall down
in, which I did quite a bit. Squire made snow angels for his
grandmother, who had mentioned them (city snow is unsuitable, as it can
contain Surprises), and I took pictures. And that part was a lot of
fun, and coming back to the toasty cottage after that part was also a
lot of fun. And breaking out the wine and cigarettes and sitting down
to play games with a now-crackling fire at our backs, watching the
thermostat inside rise while the one outside fell, that was also also
fun.

We played every game in the cottage at least once, dried our socks
over the stove, and Squire and I started reading "A String in the Harp"
(1970s Newbery book), which is very promising. I have some ideas about
the 70s and children's literature in the 70s in particular, and the
contrast between what Newbery winners reflect and what bestsellers
reflect… but I'm really not probably qualified to expound on it
without at least a bottle of wine tucked under my belt.

Anyway. How was your weekend? I hope it was also good.

Dear Boys Across the Street,

Well, not boys. I assume that since you're living just two of you in those big rooms that you have incomes, and incomes usually mean jobs, and jobs mean some kind of grown-upedness, but now I am an old woman and any male this much younger than me is a boy. Anyway, dear boys:

Thank you so much for moving in. Thank you for being home pretty much whenever I am looking out the window in the evening. Thank you for dressing up to go out, or for staying home to have parties. Thank you for knowing that towels don't get you as dry as the air does. Thank you for having parties with beautiful girls, drunk already at 6 and everybody laughing to show all their teeth. Thank you for going out dancing. Thank you for dressing sharp. Thank you for not having curtains.

Love,
What I Am Becoming

COOKING:

Rice does not need to be washed or toasted before it is cooked.
Meat can be cooked in a tablespoon or less of oil.
Rinsing cooked pasta, especially in cold water, is a sin.
Toast should be brown but never black.
Sugar is not an appropriate second ingredient in any savory food.
Most vegetables taste better raw.
Potatoes do not count as "vegetables".
A meal should not take longer than 1 hour to prepare.

WASHING DISHES:
The person who cooks is ideally excused from doing dishes.
When washing dishes, it is important to wash at least all the tableware.
Sometimes this involves two loads, but it is part of "doing the dishes".
It is okay to soak pots overnight.
Dishes that are soaking should soak in the sink.
Emptying the dish drainer is part of washing the dishes.
Putting away the dishes is the last step in doing them.

Oh, hey! Hi! I'm so scattered I make the leaves look organized. I'm
actually getting a lot done, via plate juggling. On Monday, I went to a
concert and quilt show with my new dance partner, who is two years old,
because dating the inappropriately young is the new cocktail hat. He
was an extremely attractive conversation piece, which I appreciate in a
date, and he also clutched his sweet pudgy fingers around my neck,
which I enjoyed very much, as certain people in this house are Too Old
for cuddling. The music was good if you like hearing people sing folk
songs in not-their-native language, which I very much do. The quilts
were pretty much My First Real Quilt; not badly done but kinda boring.
When we left I was reintroduced to how awesome it is when people give
you their seats on the tram and so altogether it was a fine night.

On
Tuesday, Mr. H came and painted the bathroom. I have liked him since he
first laughed at one of my jokes 8 years ago instead of correcting my
Czech (My desire to anthropomorphize objects does not always
translate). We are mutually delighted by each other, and it is a
pleasure to see him now, eight years wider, with hearing aids and a
little slower on the stairs than before, but still so good at straight
lines it's like a superpower. Rulerfinger! I used to paint everything
myself but now I would rather have Mr. H come and show me pictures of
his grandchildren, thus saving my energy for the clean up afterwards.

Squire
came home Wednesday singing Lady Gaga's hit song, "Mah-mah-mah
pockmarked face, mah-mah pockmarked face" and that was pretty funny.
And then later he told me there was a Lidl store opening up down the
street and it took me like an hour to understand that it was the
supermarket chain Lidl, and not a leetle store, which explains his
weird accent. It's two blocks away so I imagine we'll be having this
problem for a while to come.

Today I am going to meet another
baby! It is good research and I appreciate all my friends having babies
at varying ages so that I don't have to. I smell their sweet heads and
read them educational articles from the paper and teach them some dance
moves and laugh at their jokes as many times as they want to tell them
and then hand them back to their moms when they start to smell funny.
I'm like a Victorian daddy. (I actually can change a diaper and like to
think of myself as somewhat useful but I like also this idea of me in a
morning coat; don't you?).

And that's it. I'm finishing up my
job at the educational web site in a week or so, following which I plan
to take a long bath in apple cider vodka,
and then fully devote myself to babies and brains (the separate study
of both, not the eating of either, although nomnom) for a year,
whereupon I shall either emerge entirely brilliant or pretty much the
same as always. SAME THING I KNOW.

We found a sleeping hedgehog at the cottage. It was not hibernating,
just napping under some leaves. We wanted to plant some things in that
particular place, so we moved the hedgehog who totally didn't fool us
playing dead.

Narcissus bulbs are not a kind of lighting that makes you look particularly good.

Also,
there is a difference between bulbs and tubers, which it will be
possible to explain once I understand that you are not saying bulbous
tumors.

So, happy anniversary Berlin. The Berlin Wall came down the same
month that I moved to Japan, and I remember that as usual I made the
whole trip much more fraught than it already was, having my wallet stolen and my passport,
and let's see, trying to replace it at
the embassy in San Francisco, which had just gone through a little bit
of an earthquake. Good times. On the airplane, shiny new passport
firmly in hand, I read about the Berlin Wall, and about the Velvet
Revolution, and having just "discovered" Milan Kundera I had the odd
conviction that my plane was going in the wrong direction. It took me
another five years to get here, but the trip probably started then.

And happy birthday to Sesame Street. I do not remember a world
without Sesame Street, though I understand they didn't start
broadcasting until I was old enough to get some of it. Did you know
that Jim Henson was the coconut cream piiiiiies guy? I do not remember
or care where I was when I heard that Michael Jackson died, but when I
heard that Jim Henson died I was sitting at the round table in the
lobby of the language school where I was teaching in Kitakyushu, and I
put my head on the cold formica table, ostensibly to keep it together,
but then I wept and wept anyway. He taught me when I was little, he
entertained me when I was older, and that he would not be around to
quirkily illustrate my adulthood seemed really unfair. And I cried for
the people who had worked with him, and for his children, because if he
had influenced me so, what must he have been to them?

Yeah, I got nothing. Little bitlets. Leaves in gorgeous reds and
yellows, making the world look like a Carcassonne board for a minute,
beautiful, and then soggily carpeting the sidewalks after the too
persistent and early rain. We are good; we are well.

Each apartment in our building has its own little cellar space, about a 10×10 space with an infinite capacity for cobweb storage, and possibly also mouse habitation. Friday night we cleaned out the cellar. Well, sort of we did. We started cleaning it and then Squire shut the door with the keys inside, and so then we spent some time breaking down the door, and then we cleaned it some more, and then I realized I was sweeping a dirt floor, so we stopped. It was a whole-building thing, all of us down there in our grubbiest clothes, some wearing babushka headscarves (ala Russia, not ala Kate Bush) and groaning at the smell and the dust and the only-blame-yourself human habit of saving things we don't love until they are moldy and horrid. It was quite an evening. Some other cellar owners had piled their stuff right outside our door, so we couldn't actually take most of our stuff out of our room; we just stacked it neatly inside the door. The truck came today to pick it all up, and it was a moment of liberating excitement for me – soon, all this crap will be gone! – but then the truck got full before the movers got as far as our cellar. So we have neatly stacked piles of mouldering cardboard boxes and stuff now, yay.

I look very enticing with cobwebs in my hair, I have to say. And I think Friar REALLY enjoyed tearing the old wardrobe apart with basically a hammer and his bare hands (all our larger tools are at the cotthut). It turns out it wasn't the worst way to spend a Friday night, destruction and clearing away rubbish. I am comfortably sore today, the way you are when you strain your muscles doing Something Useful, like helping a friend move or waxing a floor or anything like that. It would have been better if we had actually had the stuff taken away, of course, but that part almost wasn't surprising. I haven't gotten that optimistic about life in the last week or anything. And I did the parts that I could do, which is perfectly fine.

And so it is like this: 4:30 in the morning and I have shoved at insomnia
for an hour before admitting it won. Lying in the dark, trying not to
toss and turn, playing the trick my grandmother taught me of counting
all the body parts and how they were sleepy, unable to focus on a
single muscle without also cataloging every injury, every insult.

Your toes are sleepy, I tell myself. Toes, you are very sleepy! And
also he had no business telling me I was irresponsible for not
finishing the project; we were moving across the country the next week
and I think it was unreasonable to expect a seventh grader to make up
sentences for 20 vocabulary words when her family is nearly off its
hinges.

Insteps, you are sleepy; stay still and stop twitching. Think long
relaxing thoughts! And Dennis standing at the foot of the bed and he's
going to fucking kill me, rip me apart, and so again
I am sleeping on the couch in the office where I work.

Heels, to heel. And the place where I passed out on the floor of
the bathroom, cracking my head against the tiles, and they told me it
couldn't be a gas leak because gas smells bad.

I'm not up to
my knees, I'm not even at the fidgety parts yet, and why do I store so
much that makes me sad, and what is it that wakes me at three in the
morning and says let's think about all the bad places you've left instead of let's think of all the good places you went to.

Listen, I keep everything. I remember everything. On good days I am
able to say that I got to live with a beautiful woman who made paper by
hand and who had all of Leonard Cohen's recordings on reel-to-reel
tapes that were copies of copies and scratchy from being loved so much;
that my boss went out and got me McDonald's for breakfast and told me I
was radiant even with office couch creases on my cheeks; that
California turned out pretty well. But this month has been a month of
sleeplessness, and remembering all the bad places I've slept is not the
worst catalog I've got, but none of my catalogs are all roses either.
Be patient with me. I know good things and I'll tell you them soon.

I started off the morning crying, as one does when one works from home
and does not need to explain anything to anybody in a neighboring
cubicle. I also wear sweatpants! and a flannel cardigan with two
buttons missing, upon which I wiped my poor leaky eyes. Get this: last
night I was explaining to my friend over I think the eleventyth glass
of wine that one of my many superpowers is the ability to make my
friends cry. And then this morning I made mySELF cry! Truly we have
traveled down a road and back again.

Then I got a letter from the translator that I did the Castles book
with, back in the day, and he told me how I was awesome, and then my
day brightened considerably. Mood swing dancing: It is not for the
faint-hearted.

I
listened to 80s radio today while I did all the clever things that fill
my day. I don't usually listen to the radio because it is very
difficult to cut a dangling modifier free when one is pondering the depths of
Bronski Beat at top volume, but today I decided I deserved it. While I
don't want to crow "those were the days, back when lyrics meant
something" in the key of my dad, when I realize perfectly well that I
come from the decade that brought you "mama say mama sa mama koosa"
(though, to be fair, even that MEANT SOMETHING), I nevertheless feel
like my attempts to enjoy the music of Kids These Days are sort of
falling flat: I always go back to the Music of My Youth because I think
it's objectively better. Hey that was a long sentence. I'm just talking
about radio music, here, in case that's not obvious.

I finished Kavalier & Clay, much to the relief of everybody around
me. Man, I hated that book. I want somebody to explain to me how it got
such accolades, and I also want to never talk about it again.

Squire is back in school and it's going okay so far. He's also
restarting his Christian youth group and oh yeah that's another way I'm
awesome. I kind of want to talk about it but I feel like it's a whole
Parenting Philosophy thing and it just becomes exhausting to think
about. My day is considerably better than how it started, but I'm
nowhere near being ready to write something thoughtful. I've got a good thing on the burner, though.

Ducklings, I am sorry, I fully intend to write something marvelous every day but then I don't.

1. My grandmother could never keep pictures in frames. My parents have never in my memory had a front door that just opened. I've been trying to figure out what my perpetual house flaw is, since I am so nearly perfect in all ways. I have finally realized it, and it is tragic and obvious: I cannot get curtains that close all the way over the window. Think of the metaphorical implications I KNOW. Imagine the stress of trying to choose window dressings for the cotthut, nearing completion and currently draped in ripped bedclothes. Blinds? Curtains? What am I less likely to mess up? It was a feast of quandariness. I finally picked orange blinds. I will take pictures even if they don't fit.

2. By "nearing completion" I mean most of the walls are done. Not the electricity or the exterior or the painting or anything like that. Just: After 3 years, we have a roof and three walls. Woot. Come visit.

3. I have an odd affection that I only realized last year for putting pictures of things next to things that are related. To wit: I have a picture of a man smoking beside the door leading to the balcony where we smoke; I have a picture of water next to the plants (remember to water them, get it?), I actually have a picture of a door next to a door. So I really wanted to get a great picture to put beside the bed, because, well. When I saw these pictures I couldn't even narrow it down, because I loved them all and they were all perfect (the unlikely friendship between the winged whale and the octopus was particularly appealing) but then… skeletons! It was too good. And then about 3 nights after we hung it up I was Tired Beyond Reason and Inexplicably Sad as befits my advancing age and Friar leaned over me and brushed my hair back and talked and talked and talked to me, telling me stories intricate, and I fell asleep to the sound of his velvet radio voice and a centipede curled around my neck and I thought: good choice.

4. Also, I cut my thumb. I took a picture of it some 4 days after, so it is not THAT dramatic but I still get to invoke Sylvia Plath if I want to. So there.