If you are legally able to vote in the United States and do not vote in this election I hope you have a good reason (in a coma?) or are not that interested in being my friend, because if you do not vote then we can't talk about politics for four years and I kind of like to talk about politics. Also I kind of like to talk to people I respect and not voting is stupider than not washing your hands after.

In order to vote this year, I had to call the county office a couple times, because apparently they'd unregistered me for some complicated reasons not my fault. They were extraordinarily decent about re-registering me by phone (possibly "Hello, I am calling from the Czech Republic" was effective) and e-mailed me a sample ballot, which they accepted as real when I mailed it in. I get really pissed off that my vote counts the same as that of a person who was dropped frequently as a baby, but I am so thrilled at the lengths that the county went to to make sure that I could vote, and that my vote would count, that maybe it all balances out in the end.

Voting is not effortless, and this vote was a little more complicated than usual, but like: the people at the other end worked harder, and they worked for me. So if you have to stand in line or whatever, remember that there's somebody who took the whole day to be there for you to stand in line, and you know: throw back your shoulders and be proud to vote. If it's raining, remember that in some countries you could wind up in a hail of bullets for voting, and stand up straight and vote. If if if — my point is, no matter where you are, if you haven't already voted like those of us overseas have, then PLEASE go vote today. Make time for it and go. And take a book just in case.

Squire and I are being more than a little in love with the Englishman in New York these days. For lots of reasons: Squire
mostly admires his unapologetic style; I'm mostly intrigued by his
clarity about adherence to manners being separate from adherence to
convention, because I find that an interesting place to put my brain.

"The essence of happiness is
its absoluteness. It is automatically the state of being of those who
live in the continuous present all over their bodies. No effort is
required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration
is needed to abandon everything else."

I don't know if happiness is the most important goal; I used to think it was because I believed it was impossible to be perfectly happy when another person suffered. I now think it is possible for many people to be happy while smack in the face of extraordinary
suffering and I've since modified my "most important goal" to "being
good" which is simultaneously very sticky and difficult to grasp, but
it keeps me busy doing and thinking and we like that much better than
brooding, not that I manage to entirely avoid that. In any case, I think Crisp was interested in being good more than in being happy, because I find
it too hard to believe that a self-aware human who wants to be happy
voluntarily picks up the phone whenever it rings. I think a person who
is AWESOME might do that, but I'm at babysteps right now: I'm working on not wanting to punch people. Abandoning the fear that people will be stupid or mean or whatever, and the resultant anger from that, is more concentration than I have; wanting to talk to them will clearly take a little more time.

In this metaphor we walk into a Denny's. It's the only town where we
can stop to get food; it's not even a town, just a gas station and a
Denny's. And it hasn't even always been a Denny's. There was a Burger
King and a McDonald's before this, the two in one building, and a long
time before that a kind of mom and pop diner. But it's a Denny's now,
and it's time to eat, and we can talk about what used to be here or
what we wish were here, but… for now, we're in a Denny's.

The Denny's menu, oh my. What's the Onion joke about a bucket of
eggs and pancakes and bacon and a funny name? Yeah, lots of that.
Breakfast served all day. The crazy amounts of coffee I drank at
Denny's in college because of the free refills, the bottomless cup of
toxic sludge. Now I just pray for one or two vegetarian options and
some tea.

Hey, and they have those vegetarian burgers! And they have side
salads without bacon bits! I'm pretty excited. But you're all sour. You
want sushi, you want Indian food, you want something really healthy
instead of something pretending to be healthy. And listen, I don't
disagree. I'd love that stuff; I'd love a menu where it takes me three
hours to choose because it all sounds so good. But this is Denny's. It
was made not to be the best possible food for everybody, but the food
most likely to appeal to the widest margin of people at the truck stop.

After eight years of greasy pork sandwiches served in a dirty ashtray,
the fact that BOCA burgers are owned by big tobacco becomes much less
of an issue for me. I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer a
morally-uncorrupted vegetarian meal loaded with flavor and vitamins and
no GM foods. I'm not saying I wouldn't be happier if there were an
independently-owned restaurant here instead of a Denny's. I'm just
saying: here we are, it's time to eat, this is a Denny's and this is
what's on the menu. You can refuse to order anything; you can get a cup of coffee and eat the
saltines and refuse to spend money on less than what you want. That's
the beauty of truck stops. Personally, I'm going to get the soy burger and
the salad and I'm going to be incredibly happy to have that option and
I'm going to celebrate that option in the hopes that maybe someday
Denny's will come around to an even better selection for me, or maybe there will even be a whole better restaurant. But in the
meantime, I'm eating the best thing on the menu, and I'm saying it's
the best thing on the menu; not because it's the actual best thing for
me, but because I'm hungry and the idea of eating something that isn't
going to make me puke is pretty exciting at this point.

Oh, I want to do a whole thing about how the cottage was totally
neglected for 8 years, and so if anybody had thought we were going to
make it better instantly then that person was crazy, but I'll tell you
that even though the neighbors are surely frustrated that we haven't
gotten ourselves all up to snuff yet, we've focused on domestic issues
and the improvement to the land itself is dramatic, albeit subtle. It
was A METAPHOR, because everything is a metaphor. I might write it
someday before November, but not today.

Last weekend we went to the cottage (!I know!) and Squire was being
impossible, totally disinclined to work. At all. You'd open your mouth
to some sentence about the chainsaw and he was too absorbed in
re-reading a book to even notice you were talking. It was irritating.
Then I realized it could be fun. I dubbed it "Proust Weekend" and I
think everybody deserves one once in a while. We propped him up with
pillows and sleeping bags that I declared were furs, and we fed him tea
and gave him snacks and inquired after his general health and his
digestive system every couple hours. Friar said we should get a
four-part novel out of it, and perhaps someday we will, but the point
was: you make it a game, and then it is one. Proust weekend is not
remotely irritating; it is fun and it is funny!

Squire started school again Monday, so I think a Proust Weekend was a
well-deserved sort of mental bachelor party. School persists in being
stupid. They've changed their idea over the summer that he should take
Some Other Language and decided that he should take English classes. So
yeah, the native-English-speaking kid will be learning "eeeeet eeees
ayyy dog!" yay. I went and met with the English teacher, and suggested
that she let him read (English) books during classtime or that perhaps
she use him to help the strugglers or something. She mainly seemed
interested in if she could give him the same tests she gives the other
students. I have lost the battle over how this is stupid, and am now
girding up for the battle over whether "How come" is correct English
(or whether "Do you have" is the same as "Have you got" or whatever
idiomatic and correct English he'll be using and be corrected for
using). Le sigh.

I could make a list for you over battles lost and battles won and you
would be horrified. Not least because I tend to change allegiance: take
the swimming battle for example. Sometimes it's hard to care enough to
fight from where the sun now stands.

Also on Monday, for SPICY, my computer died. I don't even want to hear
about it. My grandmother had serious trouble keeping pictures in frames
and my parents have a recurring problem with the front door of their
home and I cannot, CANNOT, manage to keep a system that backs up what I
said. I have lost journals to rainstorms and apparently I can knock out
a computer by sneezing.

And that's us: an unexplored metaphor, a proust weekend, school is
stupid, my computer died. It's September, and I wish you the best,
because we all deserve it.

I got nothing, friends.

Well, wait: I've got some photos. Friar and Squire built a new compost
bin cause we outgrew the little one, and we expected to just turn the
compost into a larger container but no, in six months we've gone from
"hehn, I dunno, toss it on the compost with the rest of the shit" for
egg cartons, vegetable peels, weeds, etc., to the blackest loamiest
lushest soil I could have imagined. Like, people would pay for compost
of this quality, really. I
don't know if anybody's interested in that sort of thing but I feel
really like superwoman about it, because a job that does itself is the
best job of all. Plus there is nothing more fun than fitting "shit"
into conversations like "we moved some shit from one place to another"
or "we turned that shit around" or "I was up to my knees in shit this
weekend" etc. For your viewing, I've only posted pics of the bin construction, cause some people are afraid of dirt (?).

Oh, and also some good, non-composty shit: My sister came to visit and
it was incredible. It was basically like a
year's worth of crashing walls and ensuing revelations condensed into
10 days of awesome. I feel really clear on some things and I feel
pretty good about others. Also I feel really lucky to have such a cool
sister, which I always feel that way but now even more so. It was the
first time she's hung with Friar, and the longest time she's hung with
Squire like since he was born, and it meant the world.

At her suggestion, I moved my desk into the living room in the hopes of
separating work
from the central hub of the house, which is the kitchen, because it was
messing me up to work when I wanted to eat and to be thinking about
work when I wanted to be socializing. The central hub of activity now
seems to be moving into the living room, which is funny. However, my
keyboard doesn't smell like cooking oil so much, so there's that.

In other news, and there will not be photos, I'm signed up
for a belly dancing class with my friend who runs the school where the
class is, because they need students. I am curious.

My sister is visiting and she is smart and beautiful and wonderful and all the good adjectives you can think of, basically. Shortly before she left, the woman compressed and fractured her vertebrae falling off a swingset
that her husband built for her to scale (pause for a moment and think about how cool that swingset is), and I was afraid she wouldn't make it, but she's standing in the
kitchen making banana bread with my son right now. Eventually I may get around to posting stories and pictures but at the moment I am theoretically working so that later we can head out to the beer garden. I am having too much fun.

I am recycling an old idea I once had about visiting all the restaurants that have their menus in English and offering to edit the menus in exchange for a few free meals.

Something’s gotta happen. I mean, this can’t keep up, right? But I’m sitting here thinking that when I came here it was 32 kc to the dollar and 8 Kc for a beer, and I was making Czech crowns and paying off dollar debts; now it’s 14.5 Kc to the dollar and at least 25 Kc for a beer, and I’m making dollars, and I can’t even begin to explain how incapable I am of writing math problems sufficiently intricate to reflect my frustration with this particular state of affairs.

I think I could probably do something with this, though. Do you think they’d feed me? Better yet, would I get some free beer out of it? Right before my eyeses?

Greece persists in being very hot and beautiful. We saw giant turtles
being chased like they were starlets without panties. We played games
until we had adopted each other’s playing style. We stayed in the water
until we got burn lines where the salt had buoyed us up; water lines
are the new bathing suit lines. We ate feta a hundred different ways,
including on fire; elopement with various dishes was proposed and then
of course I had to bring in the possibility of spouse-swapping down the
road to keep things interesting and then there was that awkward silence
like when you realize you’re the last guest at the party. We observed
all manner of dress and undress. It is hard to be a parent and persuade
your child of the virtues of
dressing for dinner when the woman next to you is wearing a hotel
towel. We had garbage thrown at us while we were collecting trash on
the beach (to compensate for being human, but then maybe we aren’t the
humans you need to watch out for). The things people will leave on a
beach would not amaze you. I fell off of a raft because everybody likes
to see a pratfall. We finished reading Tom Sawyer and had to get a book
on Greek myths to determine how many pomegranate seeds Persephone ate.
I won every game except the ones I lost. It is possible that between us
we caught a frisbee more than twice. We explored the uses of yogurt and
aloe vera and finally slept until it didn’t hurt anymore. Then we came home. Pictures start here.

Squire finished breakdance classes for the year. The final performance was very sweet, though I only cried a couple times (I cry at children's performances the way some people cry at weddings).

Last night there were storms of such intensity that for a while, sitting in my friend's upstairs apartment, which has quite a view, I managed to persuade myself that it was actually a post-modern fireworks show, and different parts of the city were illuminated in turn, each beautiful and strange and eerie for just a second.

At the cottage this weekend we wound up going to a bonfire at the neighbors', where my extreme discomfort at finding myself in mullet-ville, where jokes about Asians are punctuated by pulling your eyes slant and talking funny, was nearly balanced by the facts that I did not have to play Voice Of America and that nobody acted insulted that I didn't want a big chunk of meat. Squire had kids to play with and that was nice.

I am not in the best of all places, marriage-wise. I told Friar that there was not a thing I could say that he wouldn't see the downside to, and it's starting to make me not want to plan anything or even talk about anything with him. I told him I could buy him a lifetime supply of his favorite cigarettes and he wouldn't be pleased by the idea. And he was like, "Something could get damp, and the tobacco could get moldy, and then of course where would I store them… no, no, it's not a good idea." and I bit a hole in my tongue and went back to thinking my own thoughts in my head.

We saw the first fireflies of the summer last week.

I have a lot of trouble with physical interaction lately, I mean my interaction with the physical world. Everything seems like a line and you have to decide whether you're crossing over it. Like even patterns on clothing are starting to bother me. You get stripes, then you can't get polka dots. Why would you limit yourself like that? So I'm all in solid black again, basically, because then I'm ready for anything.

Also, I went to town with the clippers yesterday, because hair also seems like a decision that means you have to make other decisions. My hair is currently shorter than an inch at its longest, with the exception of the braid, to which I have grown rather attached.

We had a great pizza after Family Therapy the other day, and the waitress realized I was foreign but thought I was the only one who spoke Czech and so addressed all interaction to me. It was adorable. Also when I tipped her she thought it was too much (15%, which is kind of high here, but she had given me a free glass of wine), and so concluded it was a language problem and brought it back to me and carefully put it in my hand. Small things keep my hope for humanity afloat.

Uh, Squire and I going to Greece next week. If you want a postcard, send me your address.

conversations I did not expect to have more than once, bathroom edition:

• This is a laundry basket. The dirty clothes go IN the basket: not next to, not on top of, not near: IN.
• This is my comb. That is your comb. I do not like to share combs, which is why you have your very own.
• This is a toothbrush stand. The toothbrush lives there. Please put the toothbrush back after you have brushed your teeth.
• Fairies do not replace toiletries. A real live human must be alerted in
  order for your toiletries to be replaced.
• The shower is not self-cleaning. If there is anything on the walls when
  you are done with your shower, please rinse it off.
• This is a bath mat.
  The bath mat lives on the side of the tub. Please return the bath mat
  to its home after you have had your shower.
• This is a toilet. Again, the preposition is IN. Not ON or NEAR or NEXT TO: IN.
• This is a sink. It is for washing your hands. Wash your hands before you leave the bathroom.
• This is a towel. It is for drying things, including hands. Dry your hands after you wash them and before you leave the bathroom.
• This is a cat box. The cat needs access to it. Please do not close the door all the way before you go to sleep at night.