So the metaphor this week is definitely bees. Friar talks me to sleep every night about solitary bees, making home for bees, the wonder of it all. I shaved my head and thought maybe if I dyed my hair black and yellow like the guy from General Public I would seem like the kind of thing you want in your garden, but there is nothing mellifluous about me. I'm mostly bumping against glass next to the open window, dive bombing flower reflections in pools of water and drowning in my errors, and likely to sting anybody who tries to help.

Here are some photos.

This is kind of lame, but hey! Here is a list I wrote in January (It's nearly Earth Day! I'm all about reusing and recycling!)

1. I regularly crave vinegar and salt and will eat them by the
   spoonful if I can't think of something better to put them on.
2. I am disappointed in myself for not typing with a dvorak
   layout.
3. I cannot imagine not having a "wave" keyboard and
   would rather not type than use a regular keyboard.
4. I am so angry so often that it frightens me sometimes.
5. I hate talking to strangers.
6. I still think it's a big deal when someone compliments my
   Czech.
7. I had an iPod for a year before I figured out how to use it.
8. I am extremely uninterested in how things work.
9. I like learning about how people work, though.
10. I have the rocking chair that my mother rocked my sister in.
    It used to be orange.
11. I do addition on my fingers but I usually hide them in my
    lap so people can't tell.
12. I used to fingerspell out everything people said while they
    said it, and I still spell in my head sometimes. It helps me pay attention.
13. I like the Neutrogena face massaging anti-wrinkle thingie,
    not because I have wrinkles but because it makes me sneeze convulsively.
14. I am currently persuaded that I have had a headache for two
    weeks now. I anyway am pretty sure I have taken ibuprofen every day for two
    weeks.
15. I greatly dislike questions about "favorite"
    anything, though I sometimes ask them for lack of another topic.
16. I can't sing but I know all the words.
17. I can carry a grudge longer than anybody I know.
18. I paid off my college loans in one year by living in Japan
    and not buying anything except food and kerosene for that year.
19. I would rather go back to teaching than live in debt, but
    that is only because death is not an option.
20. I don't think I have made this many "I" statements
    before in my life and she thinks she should have done it in third person.
21. When I was little, my teeth were so crooked that I could put
    my thumb between my two front teeth.
22. At one point in a particularly dissociative insomniatic
    burst, I persuaded myself that all the people I "knew" on the
    internet were actually just this one person who was messing with me. Claudia,
    whose writing skills are such that she could probably pull it off.
23. I love the numbers 23, 42, and multiples of nine up to 90. I
    like the first two because they are heroes in books that I like, and the nines
    because of the fingertrick. Oh, and I like 6 because it's Bert's favorite
    number and 1x2x3 = 1+2+3.
24. My favorite game when I was little was to pretend I was on a
    train being pursued by…somebody… and people would come to the door of the
    carriage and I would have to disguise my appearance and voice using only the
    materials in the carriage and persuade them that I was not the person they were
    looking for. This was before Jedis.
25. Sometimes I am blown away by how old I am.

So many things. This alternating incredible irritation and then delight and joy and all things good.

How
one day can be thrown like bad dice because the weather is variable and
all I can do is lay on the floor trying not to sit up with my ambitions
because I will surely pass out, and the ambulance screams up the street
so I can't even count dust motes in peace, or the doorbell rings and
it's door-to-door sales instead of packages and I have the parquet
pressed in the side of my face, and then this simple translation that
I'd said I'd do as a favor turns out to be exactly the kind of writing
I hate to read, and why, why. I should have a cave somewhere.

And then how
I can be thrown into bliss because my friend sent me a funny e-mail in
the morning and work went well and the sun is still up at 6 pm and I go
to the wine bar to meet Friar while Squire is home writing a paper on
Einstein and Dusan comes in and says hey, and then this woman I know
b/c her daughter went to 1st grade with Squire and she buys a liter of
wine in the bottle of water I just watched her drink outside and we do
the smile nod where maybe she doesn't know where she knows me from,
quite. And then we go home and Friar makes fish and peppers and then we
play cards, and then board games.

On Monday Squire got dressed in his winter coat and I said no maybe it
was time for a jacket so he put on his jacket but it was tight.
Sometimes I put on clothes from last year only to realize that My How
You've Grown continues even into your forties. His reaction was about
the same as mine: OH NOES. Then he started crying because he looked
like a "dork pencil". I remember the story about my cousin who didn't
want to go to school one day because he had a giant zit on the end of
his generous nose.I let Squire stay home.

I thought I wouldn't recognize puberty, that we would be too caught up
in everything else and that I might mistake the symptoms of one thing
for another, but if you are crying because you look like a dork pencil
then that is actually totally recognizable to me. All I can say is that
first of all, at least it is not pink satin Miss Piggy sneakers that
seemed so cool when you bought them, before they got spit on. And also:
screw them, you know? Those shoes were cool. Being awesome is
simultaneously tempered and built by people too stupid to understand
who you are.

And who you are, if you're lucky, will be a person whose greatest
irritations in life are people who don't know the difference between
"it's" and "its" and don't know why that's a good thing to know; and
whose greatest pleasures in life are watching people grow into adults,
and seventies television references, and the last cigarette before bed,
and more than can be summarized in words like these.

And then Saturday the little grocery store was in fact re-opened, with
eggplants so pretty they couldn't be real, and we bought some and
traded eggplant recipes, and also bought onions the size of your brain,
and some bizarre nut thingies from Israel. And she said she was
stocking up, that this time they're really going to have everything,
even the foul unfiltered things that Friar (she called him "your man")
smokes. So that's nice.

And we go to the video store and they say that they've ordered
Mission:Impossible because we asked for it, and we go to the wine store
and they're like heartbroken to be out of veltlin, but they have some
chardonnay that might do the fruity white thing right for me, because I
need wine that tastes like spring these days, and oh! I forgot to
mention that on the way out in the morning our next door neighbor was
telling about her son the doctor.

On the way home we walk past an old woman who is prone on the sidewalk
but there are three people around her already and one has a cell phone
so we just keep walking.

And at the pharmacy the Slovak pharmacist has the prescription ready,
and I want to tell him how I am much more foreign than him, and how
it's not his accent that trips me up, but my own stupidity, but I
decide to be happy he remembers us and give him The Big Smile and we
take the box and go.

I can't live in a village, really. I need movie theaters and a ballet
and a train station and an awareness, at the very least, that other
cultures exist. Yet what is most terrifying about a city is that the
anonymity becomes too much, that you feel swallowed. And in the winter
I maybe forgot that that there are people here who watch me because
they are watching out for me, just as I am for them. That I live in a
city that is just a collection of villages. That it is a privilege to
walk to the store to buy arugula and walk past the pizza shop, where I
don't know his name but we're practically ty-kating, and buy pizza with
"Indian chicken" that I can eat on the way home.

1. Possession of a musical instrument, no matter how beautiful and/or pricey the instrument, does not immediately convey upon one the
ability to make music with said instrument.

2. In the past
week, every time I've lost my temper it's been to do with somebody
getting all up in my space or even just threatening to. My hatred of
people is not to be underestimated. That said, I really do miss you
terribly.

3. The decision as a parent whether to arm your kids or let them learn
to fight their own battles barehanded is the hardest for me. What
metaphor, what myth, where in the past is this grounded and how can I
cut us free. Or maybe it's a good one to return to, a good wound to
lick.

4. Every time I think of the story it becomes more complicated, to the
point that I can't imagine I'll ever write it down without making it
simpler, except every complexity makes me love the story more, to the
point where it becomes cheating to leave anything out.

5. I hab a colb. I neeb somb tissues ad a nap.

I wake up abruptly having dreamt my hands are asleep and itchy with needles, but when I open my eyes into the darkness my hands are no more asleep than the rest of me, and we all get out of bed.

In the morning I make coffee out of habit and then decide to drink it when I feel like I really need, rather than want it, and by the afternoon there are three cups of cold coffee in a soldierly row on my desk. I want everything to be what I want and balk at need and there is no faster way to make me give something up than to tell me I can't walk away.

Lately I've been considering the degree to which my stubborn self has put its queer shoulder to the wheel in the interest of getting me somewhere I did not necessarily want to go. If someone had told me I couldn't be a scientist because I am a woman, I would be wearing a white coat right now and I would know a lot more than you do, but I'm glad nobody told me that because few things interest me less than test tubes. I did make a mess of choices because I was told I couldn't, one way or the other, and some of those choices I really, really regret now. Still, I guess I mostly did okay.

There is still a typo on the White House web site, and it's messing with my ability to be purely delighted with it. I WROTE TO THEM about it, says Crotchety McEditpants, but apparently they think they have other, more demanding things to do or something.

I can't go to sleep at night because I need to get to the end of the chapter and then I need just a little taste of the next chapter which I then need to get to the end of, and I am torn between being distressed at my lack of self-control, which feeds me more vinegar and keeps me awake until 2 a.m. and shouldn't have said that, and my spontaneous nature, which loves the quench of hunger and the next chapter and anything revealing.

Then I fall asleep with the book under my head and when I wake up the bookmark's shape is pressed into my cheek, and I make a pot of coffee.

How did it start? Uhm we were talking about tattoos and how it seems a
waste to bury or cremate a body all covered in tattoos, all that art going to waste, and I remembered
how a hundred years ago reading the RE/SEARCH about body modification
and wasn't there some guy who collected yakuza skins and wouldn't that
be awesome art or even better if it could be of use. It would be better
than prayer beads from nun knuckles to have a yakuza skin something. A jacket?

Yakuza lampshade! It's the name of Mig's next band,
which is one of a dozen reasons I like Mig so much. It's just an
extension of the idea that a tough guy goes through exquisite pain to
get a flower put on his back, anyway: and after he shuffles off his life of shadow, he's shedding
light on some living room. It's all about being absurd. And it's not
like I'd be all "It puts the lotion in the basket" about it; the guy
would die a natural death first. Or he could go out in some mafia
shootout thingie but I mean it's not like I'd pull the trigger. And
beforehand I'd take him out for karaoke and sing "You Light Up My Life"
or something.

But really. It's just recycling. Repurposing. It's no less icky than
burial, is it. Maybe it is. I will admit it's a little morbid (though
like I say I wouldn't kill anybody so maybe it's co-morbid, ahaha so
funny).

Listen, I've got entertaining company. You can't expect me to be 100%
on track. And it was this or telling you how I lost the battle of who
gets the armrest on the bus ride to Prague on Tuesday, and really: yawn.

In better news, I found my camera! Pictures next week! Really!

I was off baby-wrangling again and totally forgot to write anything.

HAPPY HROMNICE! Happy so I've heard the sun might come back someday, that's nice.

Uhm. It's Squire's birthday today. We're all very excited as he hasn't canceled it yet. There used to be a story around here somewhere about how he canceled his sixth birthday, but that sort of went away in the Great Blog Tragedy of 2006 (because I was writing this thing back in 2003, my friend, back when we kept blogs on typewriters) and so you'll just have to trust me that it's a really good story. But anyway he hasn't canceled this one, so apparently Friar and I are hosting a mess of boys (that's the collective noun, right?) at a bowling alley. We rented the whole bowling alley! Your 12th birthday was never so good, was it.

The funniest thing that happened in my brain this week was trying to theoretically explain Alanis Morisette's cover of "My Humps" to someone who has never heard the song or heard of Alanis Morisette; the Obvious Logical Comparison was "It's like if Sylvia Plath wrote a version of 'Hills Like White Elephants.'" It would be full of bloody clumps of hair and tissue and you would feel somewhat soiled after you read it.

I think I have time to shave my head before the party. The hair (though not in bloody clumps) is getting Really Long, like possibly even 2 inches, and it looks ridiculous when I take off my hat. Am I more likely to scare the kiddies if I'm bald, or if I have hat head? These are the times that try my soul. I won't speak for the rest of humanity.

We were going to go to the cottage last weekend but then I had this
dream about squatters and I couldn't face them so we didn't go. I
wanted to make a Productive Weekend to compensate, so we stayed home
and did Important Things like figure out why my pretty iPod hates me
and I closed out all the 2008 paperwork.

And I cleaned out the closet. I am ratty girl who works in her ratty jammies and that's how it is.
But sometimes I start thinking maybe all my clothes don't have to
be so ripped punk rock and I go on a rampage. Such it was this weekend. And when I
had a bag full of horrific nasties I gave them to Squire to take down
to the trash.

Wow, this is kind of harder to tell than I thought. Okay so the way
trash goes here is you obviously take your plastic, glass, and paper to
the recycling. Then you put IN the trash can the things that are trash.
You put NEXT TO or ON TOP OF the trash can the things that are trash
for you but might be treasures for others. I have a certain amount of
pleasure in running stuff down to the NEXT TO trash and then waiting to
see how long it takes to disappear. In particular outgrown clothes are
fun to watch: when you have a kid, they outgrow shoes at an amazing
rate, and since I don't feel like dealing with second-hand stores we
just put the shoes by the trash and pouf! Gone!

But these clothes were not for anybody but the trash man. I mean: who wants toeless socks? So Squire went down to the trash cans but they were full. So he came
back up with the bag of clothes. And I said: just stuff it on top. But
he misunderstood, I guess, and so he placed the bag on top of the trash
can.

And this morning I woke up to watch the trash men take things away and
there were my rip torn underpants all draped all over. Like somebody
went through this bag of old socks, torn sweats, and nasty old
underpants and draped them out nicely for the next customer.

I don't even know if I can show my face in the neighborhood again. That is all.

Basically it's been a whirlwind. On Wednesday and Thursday I visited my
new favorite baby (…next to yours, of course), who is very beautiful
and smart. She is beautiful because she is two months old and she is
smart because when I read her the New Yorker article about Gary Snyder
she was very raptly attentive to his outdoor wilderness retreat
lifestyle, but when I tried to read her an actual poem by Snyder she
burst into tears, which is about how I feel about him.

Then I came home and had a day of relative normalcy, and then a series
of events got me really, really upset and at some point I decided I
wanted a divorce or at least A Break because I am Not Appreciated and
Not Cared For and Oh, Man, the Weeping, and the house was so cold and
then I realized that I had a fever. Yeah. Sunday I barely left the
couch, and was brought tea and soup and tempting bitlets and
alternately read to or left to watch television and basically I just
drifted in and out of a fever haze, and Friar put a clean shirt on the
heater so when I woke covered in sweat I just changed into a warm, dry
shirt. Generally I felt like a tool but I kept taking everything
anyway, because hey. Sunday night I wrote bad poetry to amuse myself
which is how I knew I was getting better. Here is one:

I wonder what Mr. Rogers would do
if Mr. Rogers had the 'flu.
I like to think he'd quietly lie
against his pillows, fluffed quite high

by his wife, at whom he'd smile.
And she would read to him a while
and maybe even kiss his head
or touch him gently as she read.

His son would bring tea on a tray,
and Fred would blow his nose and say
his gratitude was really boundless,
though with this throat, it's kind of soundless.

And so far things here are also good,
in mine as in his neighborhood,
I'm sick, and gladly taken care of
Though I am also most aware of

the fact that I am not the good guy
(despite all attempts to be such)– I
have merely surrounded myself with
sweetly loving kin and kith.

and now it is Tuesday, and other than the fact that I think I may quit
smoking since it's been a week and I dunno, it just doesn't sound that
good, well, things are back to normal. Going out tonight to celebrate
OUR NEW PRESIDENT OH YEAH!

And you?

So: a Muslim, an atheist, a homosexual in a committed relationship, and
an unmarried person are all running for U.S. president. Who wins? If
you get this solved too quickly, you can make one or more of them female. If that's still
too easy to figure, make one or more of them Republican.