Dear U.S. Dollar,
Knock it off! I pay taxes on you in two countries. Pull your socks up, sir, or … or. Seriously, though.
With love, but just a little longer,

Dear Thanksgiving,
HAHAHAHAHA! Enjoy yourselves! The only turkey that will be consumed in this house tomorrow will be Wild. Otherwise, man, I’m saving all my love for the winter break, during which my goal is to fully indulge my inner bear and sleep and sleep and sleep. Eyes on the prize; we shall not be distracted by something that involves more cooking than eating.
Gobble!

Dear Internets,
I think you should be free like butterflies but I also cannot believe I
do not have to pay you for the very fabulous experience of
shoe-shopping with Squire and having him tell me which shoes rule and
which shoes suck. And then I crushed him under my foot and said Stupid
Boy Stupid Boy and then we collapsed in an agony of geek giggling.
I’m yrs, etc.,

So one of the things I was afraid of happening if I returned to
teaching? Happened. I was teaching a
lesson about politics, as one of the things the students are expected
to do is discuss the political systems of the US and UK and compare
them to the Czech Republic. Which I’m sure you agree is a perfectly
reasonable thing to expect 18 year old students to do in another
language. ANYWAY. So there we were, and this one girl is slouched back
in her chair so I went over to see if she was confused or what exactly,
and she asks, "How much longer are we going to do this?" Well, I say, I
thought we’d do it until it was finished. Why, do you have a hot date
or something? "No," she answers, "but this is boring."

Ah. So I say entirely pleasantly that I’m sorry she finds it so but it is a required
topic. Later in the class she was talking and the other students hissed
at her to be quiet but she wasn’t. Alrighty then. She had the quiet
attention, she had the peer attention, she apparently needed more. So,
you know, I gave her the full force of my level-eyed
disappointment. I’m unpleasant when I’m angry but I’m apparently
downright scary when I’m disappointed. She came up after class to
apologize. I’m sorry to have had to do it, but I’m glad I remembered
how. And that it’s done now, so I don’t have to dread it.

Over the weekend I turned out to not be quite so sick as I’d
expected, so I washed windows and sewed some new curtains for the
living room, and made some exceptionally pretty shelf coverings out of
this fabric I bought a year ago because it reminded me of Klimt, but it
was too stiff to work with as I’d wanted to. Friar hasn’t noticed any
of these things yet; another advantage to him is that all aesthetic
decisions are made to please me and possibly the young Squire. It’s
like living alone, except with a place to warm my feet at night.
Oh, I’m kidding, calm down.

Mistrust all institutions that require new clothing. I ordered a dress
from the internets because I had a craving for something pretty to wear
and couldn’t stomach going out to try things on; also the shipping
costs are blahblah– I don’t know, I bought a dress. I’m not gonna
apologize for my motives. I attempted to branch out colorwise and went
with "eggplant" instead of "burgandy" or "black". I expected a dark
bruise-y purple, but it turned out to be a purple I associate more with
Easter eggs than eggplants, very pale and ladylike. SIGH.  I know that
I am not yet ready to tackle sleeves, but think perhaps I will try to
make a skirt, since it cannot be that much harder than making curtains
and it cannot be a more bizarre-for-me color than this dress. A skirt
of leftover curtains, perhaps! Like Scarlett O’Hara only less so.

For a non-atheist to see and enjoy "The Golden Compass" is the same as
for a non-Christian to see and enjoy "The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe". The Chronicles of Narnia are tasty and His Dark Materials
are also delicious; beautiful movies are always worth seeing; also, and most
importantly,  ideas can’t hurt you*. Let’s hug it out, shall we?

*banned in my house: anything that features more cussing than
I can produce when I bang my head on a sharp corner; anything that
features more violence than I can produce in a chili-fueled nightmare;
anything that utterly lacks redemption.

Onward, then:

Squire said he felt crappy on Monday but
I persuaded him to go to school, because I thought he was actually
nervous that kids would tease him about his hair, which a couple kids did,
and which was not that big of a deal, since we’d discussed all manner
of potential insults and: whatever, he looks awesome. Tuesday they were
going to see a documentary about Nicholas Winton, which he wanted to
see, so even though he said he didn’t feel a scrap better, he went.
Wednesday morning his temp was 39.5 and so here we are, with a kid
parked on the couch. He’s fairly easy to take care of: he reads and
generally stays covered up and tries to drink delicious tea because he
is a good patient, and takes his temperature every 30 minutes that he’s
awake because he is my son.

So anyway, he’s home for a few days, delighting me to bits and also
probably getting me sick by means of being so sweetly warm and in need
of forehead kisses. We burrow under blankets and watch movies.
Yesterday we watched a movie in which a character evaluates a song by
saying, "Well… I’m tone deaf"; Squire nearly broke his head open
laughing, and then asked me quite seriously, "Wait, what’s tone deaf?"
which nearly broke my head open. Which is when I realized that I was
not feeling a hundred percent.

If you are ever inclined to fill out an "ideal partner" form, in which you are given choices like "good looking" or "sense of humor" or
"likes to dance" or whatever, I will tell you that you need to
have one box checked and that box is: can take care of me when I am
sick. Because I’m telling you, you can get your sense of humor ticket
punched in a dozen places and your non-dancing partner is not going to
mind your going out dancing with your easy-to-find dancing friends, but
it’s hard to find a friend who will come over and make you chicken soup
or bring over a giant packet of soft tissue paper for you or stock up
on spices to help you breathe again and stuff, much less one who will
live with you while you are miserable and ugly. "Sense of humor", HA.

One time in Southern California I got the ‘flu so bad that my
mother actually flew down to take care of me and we still didn’t
realize I should have dumped that guy.

Anyway, my point was
going to be that last night Squire was having a feverish bout of guilt
that I might get sick from caring for him, and I told him that was okay
because it was my duty and privilege etc to take care of him and this
is parenting and it’s actually fun to take care of him because he gets
sick so rarely etc and that anyway if I got sick Friar would totally
take care of me. Which he will. Which is something I’m not used to
knowing, and so even though our relationship was pretty much cemented 5
years ago when he made me four different dishes to tempt me after a
particularly nasty stomach… thing… still, it surprises and delights
me to find that I am cared for, and even more so that I am becoming
accustomed to being cared for.

I know: Awww.

Anyway. A bit woozy. Probably no cottage this weekend; probably movies
that I’ll get to pick, and possibly I’ll even be read to. Sweet!

So the teaching one class a week at the art high school? Okay: the students are lovely, the work is not impossibly hard, and I’m over my terror
of teaching. Yay.

However, should I agree to take a teaching job ever
again, I would like you to handcuff me to a drainpipe and rub my face
with a pumice stone, because doing this so as to get good intel for
Squire is one thing, but under no circumstances should I get confused
and think I’m doing this because I love it more than I hate getting
dressed nice, putting on shoes, standing in line at the photocopy
store, and waiting for trams in the freezing rain.

My first day teaching at the high school went pretty well. I liked the
kids a lot.

Although I do not have the magical head-tingling feeling I once
had as a teacher, it appears that I do remember the basics of getting
through a class. Also, some key points were recently refreshed by
Squire’s previous teacher, such as: 1) making eye contact with the
students is a good thing; 2) smiling periodically is a good thing; 3)
wearing clothes that cover your body is a good thing; 4) telling people
that they are doing well tends to make them do better. So I’m already
ahead of the game, what with my pretty blue eyes and my magical molars
and my muu-muus and my tendency to blush-inducing praise.

Squire has been fantabulous this past few weeks, funny and
sweet and incredibly easy to live with. Partly this is the new teacher,
who is not a twelve year old eedjit; partly this is two years of
extensive training in the effectiveness of "so?" as a response to any
stupid commentary; partly this is just growing up. I don’t mean we’ve
taken up living at Unicorn Junction– the darkness surrounds us, as
always. But it was never the dark that was scary, but ever what was
hidden in it, and this seems more manageable lately for him.

We have mice at the cottage. This would bother me except that
they are so courteous, the way they open up the carton of cigarettes
for you and pull out a pack and then tenderly open that as well,
dragging out and destroying the first cigarette so you don’t have that
"20 wedged in a pack" problem, and then they scurry around leaving
little nicotine-addled poops! Adorable.

Friar is cracking me up nearly daily, too, which makes me
think there’s magic in our water or something. What’s with all the
smiling around here?

Perplexed by Clarence Thomas, by the left
leg in Ingres’ Odalisque (seriously, what IS that?), by adults who
still choose books by genre, and the other usual suspects, but
generally I’m doing well. And you?

PERSON 1: Heyy….. are you drinking?
PERSON 2: Well. Yes. A glass of wine. Why?
1: I think that’s more than a glass I’m hearing.
2: What, am I all slurry?
1: No, I can just tell. It’s like how if I were Norwegian, I could detect your Swedish accent.

2: Ooh, am I doing that e.nun.ci.ate thing?
1: A bit. That was so not one glass of wine.
2: It was!
1: What, a water glass?
2: Well… yeah.

some photos from the cotthut last weekend are up.

"Great tits!" he said. I was standing at the bar waiting to pay for my
liter and half of wine, this is the bar down the street where they have
it on tap and you bring in your empty water bottle and they fill it up.
I wanted a bottle of red, and the tap had run out so the bartender was
in the back hooking up another keg or whatever. A cask, maybe.

I
took a step back and moved my arms out, palms out. "They’re not even
tits, really," he continued. "They’re breasts. Full, round, round
breasts. They’re perfect." I hate this, I hate this so much. I want the
quick retort, the one word. The one that shrivels him, and all I can
think is phrases in English. Spoken like a true gentleman, I
have, and a few sailor’s greetings, but I can’t twist the idioms into
Czech somehow. Come on brain, move. "Of course partly it’s probably
your bra, but it’s also just that you have such big tits. I mean
breasts." I start wanting him to make a move to touch me; the people
around us are starting to watch and I want it to be clear that he went
to touch me and that’s why I had to hit him. I’m looking at a picture
to the right, one of those old cigarette ads, maybe from the 1940s or
maybe made to look that way. It’s framed and I can see his reflection
in it. He’s a lot taller than me, which means I’d have to get him on
the ground before i could smash his head, which is what I want to do,
but he’s drunk enough it wouldn’t even occur to him to block a solid
punch in the belly, and I’ve got rings on.

The bartender comes
back in, sees me being towered over, yells SIT and the man sits down
like the slobbering dog he is and we all turn leisurely away. I pay
four dollars for the wine and go.

It takes every bit of my
effort to focus on the bartender, to focus on the parallel between a
drunk man and a misbehaving dog, both needing to be trained. I do not
believe that in spite of everything people are good at heart but I know
that I am already wildly disinclined to leave the house and that if I
think about any part of this story other than the bits that are funny I
will entirely shut down. Later that night over the wine I explain to
Marcela about space, the assertion of, and detach from the story enough
to tell it.  Laughing because he was, after all, right, although
completely unpoetic and rather smelly besides. And this is how we
re-enter the world.

Who should set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who intend to get up at 6 a.m.

Who should not set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who sleep next to insomniacs who are low on sleep to begin with; people who are able to merge the annoying howl of their alarm clocks with a dream about pretty birds for a solid minute; people who are not getting, and have not ever gotten out of bed before 7.
Bonus: people who can’t remember how to turn off the alarm without turning on a light and looking at it even though the clock is some 5 years old. I am looking at you, and this is why you are not allowed to play with my shiny new camera.

I’m in New York hanging with my friend G while Squire Tuck is off doing some grandparent/child bonding thing upstate. I assume our young Squire is having a good time, but I suspect I’m having a better time. During the day, G’s in school and I work on his adorable little laptop (how DO people work on laptops? I feel like I’m used to being the captain of a starship with my giant desk and my wave keyboard and suddenly I’m like trapped in some bitty shuttle craft), which is not a blast, BUT in the evening we whirlwindily do New York Stuff. We walked through Central Park, we went to the Met and looked at marble dudes, we watched a sunset off a pier, we saw Xanadu!, we had very schmancy drinks in an unmarked bar, I smoked a cigarette on a stoop, and I’m not telling you the half of it. I got Squire a t-shirt from the Natural History Museum. I think we’ll keep the fact that I went to the circus just between ourselves, though, okay, or he’ll never let me out of his sight again. I have FUN when I travel, I’m saying.

We were in Washington D.C. for a few days, hanging with family and making sure my tear ducts are fully functional. They are! In addition to Standard Familial Strife, things that made me cry were: watching Barbara Morgan on the live feed, Mr. Rogers’ red sweater, seeing the ghost dance dresses, that giant Calder mobile, and the fact that the Smithsonian is free. Best and worst of America, all right there. I wanted to kiss a flag and burn it at the same time, and even that conflict made me feel more American than I have in a long time, and more at peace with it.

The day before I left I found out somebody had been copying my writing here and passing them off as her own. This caused me quite a bit of –I don’t want to say I was angry, but I certainly was confused. Why would you want to pretend to be someone else, have someone else’s life, in an online journal? It is ever so strange. And it stirred up some stuff for me, like Why Do I Write and What Is This Thing Called Blog and so on. But then I had a plane to catch so I couldn’t really work it out.

Anyway, that’s how we roll. Hope you’re having fun where you are, too.

things I know more about now than I did two weeks ago:

greek almond milkshakes, greek arugula, greek assumptions, greek
balconies, greek boat rides, greek bus rides, greek chinese massages, greek
coffee, greek dances, greek delight, greek dolmades, greek earplugs, greek feta,
greek frolicking and cavorting, greek karaoke hell, greek long island ice teas,
greek monastery, greek naps, greek octopus, greek ouzo, greek passport control,
greek pizza, greek roadside memorials, greek ruins, greek sand, greek second, greek
shade of blue, greek slurpees with alcohol, greek stuffed peppers, greek
sunburn, greek swallows’ nests, greek swimming, greek volcano, greek water, greek
waves, greek wind, greek wine, greek women (old), greek yogurt, greeks singing
se agapo…