yes we did and also yes we are

photo lifted from the delightful site yes we can hold babies

First, AAAAAAAAAA! The joy of that moment, when the tv said Barack Obama Elected President...I've never felt/witnessed/shared in anything like it. Jumping up and down and sobbing and laughing and feeling like the sky broke open revealing some new better impossible beautiful sky. A giant world joy all at once, the whole world popping like champagne, like the Christmasiest Christmas Eve Christmas morning holy holy all over the Earth shared glory. Merry Christmas! You, boy! Run and fetch the fattest goose out of that shop! There's ten thousand dollars for you!

Yes. Afterglow. Fantastic. Marred by Prop 8 archaic bastards. God forbid evolution happen too fast in this country. Somebody has to do the job to hold us back. We loved our protruding foreheads! Standing erect is overrated. We were warmer when we had our own fur.

So. So I'm breaking my weird old long blog silence to tell you also* that I'm pregnant. Just 'bout 8 weeks. Yes! Yes, we did. Yes, we are. And I've had my hcg levels checked, and they're nice and high, and I had an ultrasound and that little baby was just the right size with just the right heartbeat. Poom poom poom, you could see it going there, right on the screen. Bap bap bap. Someone's in there, and someone's got it going on.

*Sarah Palin killed also. She shot it from a helicopter.

I was like, let's wait this time, Tina. Let's wait until 12 weeks to tell. But 12 weeks, schmelve schmeeks, I can't do it. I'm a VAULT that I held out this long. My old policy of glasnost or perestroika, whichever one is openness, that has to be reinstated. If things go well, I tell. If things go ill, I tell. I'm a teller! I'm a bank teller and you guys can have all the money out of the vault and you didn't even try and rob me. I'm that kind of teller. I'm a totally gung-ho pro-active co-operator.

Also: a drooler. And a gagger. A heaver. An up-chucker. A bloodhound who will need you to turn on the fan if you're planning on slicing that apple. A tired-unto-dying-of-Saltines-er. An I-got-a-craving-for-banana-cream-pie-five-minutes-later-who-the-fuck-had-the-stupid-idea-to-buy-a-pie-er. Because it can't have been me.

We are very excited and hopeful and nervous. We had barely barely made the decision to try again when some baby barreled in through a two-inch crack in the door. Ding dong, I wonder who's at the door, is it an encyclopedia salesman, let's see OH MY GOD THEY'RE* IN THE HOUSE AND THEY'RE DRAWING A BATH AND ORDERING A PIZZA HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT SO FAST?! Hey mom. Pass me that rubber duck. Thanks. And shut the door. Also I will need to borrow 20 bucks for the pizza.

*It isn't twins. But he or she is too unwieldy, and I'm not jinxing anything.

So, whoo! Baby born in an Obama/Biden world, phew. Now let's get our asses to the second trimester post haste. This trimester blows. It also blows a trumpet, because we're on our way to a Rowley quorum. (6/20/09, give or take a whatever.) But morning sickness just purely blows.

However, screw that. I end on a positive note. C major, mofos!

a quick one while the captor is away

Beginning a post at 3:15 in the morning is so crazy that it just might work. The captor is surely napping. How do I know? I feel open to using prepositions. That's how.

Let's do a grab bag as I don't have long before sleep comes for me. First, let's look in the bag, and then we'll pull things out.

Overhead bag view:

***********************************************
**Raja yoga*dining room table*Finn haircut********
**election*house putting together*baby wondering**
**not writing*relaxing about not writing************
***********************************************

Okay. Grab.

Finn's haircut: Jim Morrison has left the building, replaced by the president of the Young Democrats of Lake City. My son looks less dissolute (you know, for a two-year-old), more inquisitive. He looks older, taller and brighter. He's taking SHAPE on us.

Grab.

Dining room table: We have one now. It's wonderful. The soul of the house can now descend into place. A line runs through the great room from the fireplace through the dining table to the kitchen. Hearth, home, welcome, nourishment. I hope that many of you will come and sit at our dining room table with us and fulfill my dreams for this house. Photo to follow.

Grab.

Raja yoga: This is a twelve-week course I'm taking, heading into its fifth week. A Raja/Hatha yoga intenstive. Raja yoga. What be? (Uh-oh. Captor waking?) (The captor is waking, but I will fight to use the English language as it was meant to be used. I'm on to me. Whenever I want to tell you about something beautiful and difficult to describe, I want to revert to cave talk. I constantly feel too shy to attempt to describe things properly.) Oh, listen. Instead of trying to tell you what Raja yoga is, I'll give you a link to the class description. There. Now I can tell you what I really want to tell you, which is how the class feels.

Like home. Like the sun coming up. Like weightlessness. Like my mouth curling inadvertently into a smile like a small boat which is gently pushed off shore. The lake is infinitely wide, the destination is far away. The boat drifts slowly, the current is soft but sure. There is no hurry, not the slightest bit. It's early morning on the longest, best day of my life. By nightfall I will be at my destination. The day can be as long as it needs to be, but this is the day. I have finally left tomorrow back on shore. The boat can get tangled up in seaweed, and I can slowly disentangle it. No panic. I can drift in circles for a while, stop and float. I can eat some of my picnic. Muffins under the noonday sun. I can row until my arms are tired and I want to cry, and I can stop to cry. Very fine. All right. My face will dry, my nose will clear, equilibrium will return. I will keep rowing, and drifting, and rowing some more. Today is the day, however dull, however thrilling, however sweet or painful. Today can last a thousand years but this will still be the day.

So, it's a good class.

Grab.

Baby wondering: Sleep wants to come and rescue me from talking about this one. Cave talk also wants to kick in. Defense mechanisms. And also it's almost 4am. Let me pose this one as a question.

Is there a baby remaining out there in the ether that belongs to us? If so, please report not only to my womb, but please report to my heart and mind and launch a campaign to win them over again. My next birthday is my fortieth. This feels like a wall or a locked door. Will someone slip in before we are up against it?

Grab - wait. Guess what? I am not pulling everything out of the bag. No more writing about writing or not writing, for one thing, is my new motto. The dining room table is sufficient talk of the house. And as far as the election goes, IT IS NOVEMBER FIFTH AND OBAMA WON.

Good night and good morning.

my moonwalking bear

Watch the clip first, quickly. Go right in, don't think, just do it.

All right.

Today - after a goodly break - I was smacked in the gut with the understanding that I had a miscarriage, and what that means. A baby, a baby, our baby, the baby that we so wanted - it came and went. It, I guess, died. I guess it died. It had begun living. That's pregnancy, right? Living thing, right? Died, then. Stopped living.

I ran into a dear friend today who is teaching Pilates out of her home, and I told her that I'd love to take classes with her. Later I was telling Dave about it and I began to say casually, "I think Pilates would be great as a healing thing, with the miscarriage, to strengthen that-" and I was going to say "area" but that's when the gut punch came in and I began sobbing. I was talking so casually about healing, forgetting that it's actually really true that I need some.

Where has it been? Where has the grief been? That's what the clip up there is alluding to. The baby we lost is the moonwalking bear of my life. I can't see it every day. I see Finn and his needs, and I see our new house, and I see everything we need to do to settle in properly, and I see writing, and I see the present moment because I'm trying to see it - the present moment is like the team in white, passing the ball. It's my self-imposed assignment. It's a good assignment, seeing the present moment.

But where does the grief go? Where does it hide? Where was I stashing it? I honestly thought it had left. No. I still have some.

Maybe it reared up because we had been planning to try for another baby again in about a month, and I decided a couple of days ago - on my birthday, actually, which was a strange birthday* - good, ultimately - I decided that I am not ready to try again for another baby. I'm not feeling it. I'm just feeling the idea as pressure. The idea of letting go of another baby for the time being was so freeing, so appealing. What if we only ever had Finn? What would that be like? Oh, the places I'd go! As Finn gets more self-sufficient, I can go here and do that and take this class, and oh! The relative freedom! Sounds like riding in a convertible with the top down on a sunny day on a tv show in the 1970's, with my big shiny Breck hair flying behind me and a silk scarf fluttering around my neck and a handsome man in a white suit driving us to a cocktail party at a penthouse apartment with thick white carpeting and a view of Los Angeles.

I met a baby, today, too. A baby girl. Miss Nora Somerville Jorgenson. Approximately six months old. Soft and silky and smiley. Milky silky translucent skin. Little dimpled chin. It's not nothing to meet a baby girl, after all my Oona business, after all my imaginings. I met her at a reunion brunch for my old sketch comedy group, and I borrow and transpose a line from an old local news parody sketch of ours here for you, entertainment/human interest division:

Thanks, Ian! Ian, I am over here by this BABY and I have to tell you, this baby is shooting up FROM the floor, all the WAY up TO the ceiling, and it really is an amazing sight, just really something, and I think I can speak for everybody here near this THING, this BABY when I say that nobody here thinks that this is not nothing. Ian?

In the actual sketch, the baby was a wall.

But yes. To meet a beautiful little baby girl had to go shoveling into some of my deeply packed emotional soil and loosen it up a bit. That's a good thing. It's good. And it's nice - Finn and his rockin' wee friend Miles were digging in the garden with little shovels today at the brunch. Thanks, buddies. You were doing a little ritual for me just at the right moment, concretizing it all. It's good to get access to the grief. The not feeling of the grief felt eerie and also weirdly irresponsible. Like it's irresponsible not to be aware of and feeling the sorrow of your lost child, however briefly they were yours.

And I was really getting comfortable with the idea that maybe I didn't want another child. I thought maybe the miscarriage killed not only the little life form but also the wanting, like the wanting was an innocent bystander in a fatal drive-by shooting who was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead along with the intended victim. But maybe the machines are starting to beep and boop a little for the wanting.

We're in intensive care. We'll see what can be done. I don't know about heroic measures, but if there's life in the wanting, there might be other life that wants to follow it.

*I was going to have a small birthday party, and I invited people, but then I called everybody a couple of hours before it began and called it off. I'd been weeping all day with no rhyme or reason. And...thinking here...I post about being on edge and snapping and crying. Just how subterranean did I think this grief was? Just because it doesn't come ringing a bell that that has an "I WAS YOUR BABY" flag on it?! Moonwalking bear, all right. Now it's hard to miss. But you really can miss a lot if you set your mind to it.

about that thing i'm shy to talk about

I haven't really talked about spirituality on this blog, but I think I want that to change. I've talked about it a little bit on my other blog, Bloomerang, the blog that lives and dies and lives again and is in a dead period. Is between worlds. Is hopefully enjoying its little afterlife.

I rarely talk about spirituality here because I'm shy about it, my dears. But it's important to me, and I think I would like it to be even more important than it currently is. Yes, yes. I don't talk about it here, though, because I'm afraid of alienating people. I've given myself permission with Bloomerang because it's tucked away where nobody knows of its existence, whereas The Gallivanting Monkey hosts literally dozens of visitors a week! (I know, it's crowded here. Feels crowded. This place needs a door guy. So busy.)

I don't know who I think I'm going to alienate that I won't already have alienated, though. I have this cynical, skeptical reader in mind who thinks that spirituality is the lamest word alive and that anyone who uses it in earnest is a sappy featherhead. Something tells me that reader has other places to go on the web than this cheery little enclave. So I don't know exactly what I'm worried about.

It's residual, I think. I grew up in a sort of offbeat, spiritually inclined family, but none of my peers had the same kind of background. All of the kids I knew came from more traditional religious backgrounds. (Everyone in New York was either Jewish or Catholic, and in Seattle it branched out onto the Protestant scene.) My parents were Theosophists...which...I will either explain later or you can go ahead and google it because I ain't got the strength to lay it out for you now. I will say this - it's Eastern religion-friendly. My grandmother was clairvoyant, and wrote a few books stemming from her abilities: The Real World of Fairies, The Personal Aura, The Chakras and the Human Energy Fields. I grew up hearing a lot about Buddhism and Hinduism and different Eastern-flavored theories about the soul and its evolution, about karma and reincarnation and all of that stuff. I don't know. It's such a big question, what we're all doing here, and how you grow up with that question is so formative. I felt embarrassed that my backdrop looked so different from other people's backdrops. It lingers a little. There's my shyness.

But what a question, no? What the hell are we doing here? What is going on? What is the point of all this? I just don't think this is a skippable question, even if it seems farfetched that we're going to find the answer. I don't think that's a good enough reason to skip it. I want to try anyway. I think even just thinking about it, staring at the question with curiosity, is worth something.

I was walking through the parking lot of QFC today, and it struck me: where am I? Where am I, other than in the parking lot of this Quality Food Center in North Seattle? I don't quite know how to put the question that emerged. It was something like, where is this parking lot in relation to Reality? Oh, man. OH MY GOD SHY ATTACK. Shy attack.

But I go on.

Then, yesterday, I was outside a Barnes and Noble with a very fakey fake stone exterior, and I had a funny epiphany: I like places that are obvious in their fakeness. I really like, you know, faux-Roman this and fakey French that. I like it on a large scale. It makes me feel like the world is this big stage set, and makes me remember that this Tina is just a character, and that the actor deeper in me is very real. Something about the contrast of a sense of realness inside with the fauxness outside is satisfying. Feels like a wink. I like it.

And what's this God business? Who is that? Is there one? Divinity - I love that word. What is inside there? Something draws me on to look into this. I don't have devotion to some kind of singular, figureheady God. But the word divine...that pulls me along somewhere, hints at something gorgeous that I would like to know about.

So I would like to get a little serious about this, and since this is the place where I come to talk to the people, I will maybe be talking about this some more.

P.S. I want you to talk to me, too. I would love it extremely. What do you think we're doing here? What is your relationship to these things? Are you curious? Uninterested? Satisfied? Repulsed? Bored? Attracted? My ears, they are so open.

P.P.S. This is a post I wrote a long time ago at Bloomerang about meditation.

fifty things, or, must water the blog

This isn't a meme. This is just...I have no direction. I want to talk to you but I don't have a nice crisp seed to grow into a recognizable post about a thing. So, then, fifty of them. Things.

1. I think I'm getting arthritis in my hands. I watered our lawn this morning and squeezing the nozzle of the hose made me feel like a troubled old lady in the before part of a pain relief commercial. Darn these hands. My begonias!
2. Briefly while I was watering the lawn I was able to not think at all for a few seconds here and there, and I was just watering the lawn. Sounds dull but it was sort of transcendent. Sunlight through the spray, the sound, the brightness, the force of the water, the goodness of the morning. No stupid chatter in my head. Just the thing happening in front of me.
3. Fifty things? I'll be lucky if I get to five. I have the baby monitor on and Finn is stirring a little.
4. Dave is working a lot more now, so I'm with Finn by myself in a much bigger way. It's good, it's beautiful, but I have no time to write, and all I want to do is write.
5. I don't even know what I want to write. I just want to.
6. I made it past five things! Maybe I will make it to fifty.
7. The beams across our living room ceiling, and the ceiling itself, are this honey-colored wood. The wood glows many different ways throughout the day and evening and night.
8. What the wood does, how it glows like that, is medicine for something in me.
9. I'm writing the event of my miscarriage to go into a movie a dear friend is making. I'm fictionalizing it. Does that sound -- oh, I'm not really asking. I'm glad I'm doing it.
10. What are these sounds Finn is making? Do you think he's going to wake up for real?
11. That I'm really asking.
12. I'm thinking a lot about George Harrison these days.
13. After George Harrison died, I had the strangest, most stunning dream with him in it. I was taken aback because I'd never been a notable fan one way or another. But he showed up in a dream a few days after his death, and we were kneeling on the floor in my old room, trying to decide if he was going to be my mentor. I will never be able to convey to you the amount of love that was there in that room, in that dream. Massive, piercing, all-encompassing love.
14. I had a dream like that about an acting teacher once. I was standing in front of him and I asked him, "Are you my teacher?" - I think I meant spiritual teacher - and then I was blown backwards in an explosion of light coming out of my heart as I heard the answer, "Yes."
15. So, two dreams like that in my life, with paradigm-blasting love in them, both about teacher/student relationships.
16. I don't know what those dreams meant, or if those two are or were my teachers, but all I know is when that much love shows up, even in a dream, that's got to be good for something. That counts for something.
17. But I don't know what. Life is a mystery.
18. And my mind wants to take life and hang it up like a pinata and smash it and get all the candy out. But instead of eating the candy, I just want to sit there and read the labels on the candy. WHAT KIND OF CANDY IS THIS?
19. It's better to just eat it.
20. Given the choice, always eat the candy instead of trying to figure the candy out.
21. Good luck to me, as I attempt to do both forever.
22. When I was watering the lawn, I was just eating the candy for a couple of seconds there.
23. The arthritis part wasn't the candy.
24. Dave and I were married in a little courthouse wedding on January 21st, 2005. I just read Pattie Boyd's memoir and learned that she and George Harrison were married in a little courthouse wedding on January 21st, 196...I'm going to say 6.
25. When I read that, I got goosebumps.
26. And then tried to eat the label of that small piece of candy.
27. Ever since I decided recently that I'd like to try to make a living as a writer, I have barely been able to write a word.
28. So that's promising.
29. A friend of mine has just fallen deeply in love. We were talking about this on the phone tonight, and it was a pleasure hearing about it. It reminded me so vividly of when Dave and I fell in love.
30. And then I remembered a night in Maui soon after Dave and I got together, when we were on that yoga retreat. We were all eating dinner on the porch of the house under the stars, but I couldn't eat and I couldn't speak. The love I was falling in was so busy transforming me...I could feel it, on a molecular level, right there at the picnic table. I felt like I was being reprogrammed to hum at a different level, like I was being refined. I couldn't do anything but sit there and change.
31. If we have another child, then I will really have to figure out how to carve some writing time for myself.
32. There's a thing, a concept out there. It's...babysitters. People can get them. Do you know about this? Babysitters? They're these people who come and sit with your babies while you do other things in other locations. My word! I never thought I'd live in such futuristic times! Have you ever tried out one of these babysitters? Are they like robots? Do they hover? Do they have antennae? They have a job for everything these days. Those French have a word for everything.
33. I never promised that every one of these fifty things would make sense.
34. But you can have your no dollars back if you want them.
35. Speaking of dollars back, we ordered in Indian food tonight, and paid cash - and the driver didn't have any change on him. Hi, accidental begrudged large tip.
36. I only ate one modest plateful! Of Indian food! A triumph of the human spirit.
37. We watched The Bachelorette while we ate. Then I called my mom and we compared notes on the bachelors and how their hometown dates went. I love this show, and all other shows that also suck.
38. Fifty things. Good crap. How'm I gonna....? Not like this. This can't be how. Talking about how hard it is.
39. I took Finn on a wild goose chase around Seattle on Sunday trying to find the gol dang MoveOn.org Obama bake sales. Gasworks Park? Not that I can see, but thanks for the walk in the park. Fremont? Um...I forgot the address and time, but let's try anyway. How...'bout...HERE! Nope. Well, then, how 'bout...HERE! Nope. Hey! Goods for the Planet! They're doing one of these bake sales! One last try.
40. Cupcakes for Obama for all of us.
41. Lemon bars for Obama for my mom and brother.
42. Molasses cookies for Obama for Finn.
43. Brownies for Obama for me.
44. Chocolate chip bars for Obama for also me.
45. Something baked for Obama should have been earmarked for Dave, but instead they got teethmarked and swallowed.
46. I am a bad wife.
47. I'm a wife who hogs the sweet things.
48. Thank goodness Dave prefers chips.
49. Else we'd be screwed.
50. Finn loves to have imaginary tea parties these days with a little silver teapot my mom gave him. So he was making 'tea' for me a couple of days ago and I was pretending to drink it, and I said, "Oh, Finn, this tea is so delicious. What kind of tea is it?" And he paused for a good while, stymied. And then came the reply, "........coffee."

why do i refuse to go to sleep?

It's 3:07 am. Honest to Christ. This is happening all the time. I blow past all my good intentions to get sleep. Why do I hate being rested? Isn't it nice? Is it? You tell me, because I forget.

And when I do go to bed, I'm so tired that my body freaks out about falling asleep. It's like, don't make me fall down there! It's many stories I will fall! I'm clinging to the ledge! My body resists it, garnering me even less sleep.

Do I really love snoodling around the internet that much? Because that's what I'm doing up at these hours. Pointless goobering around. But rest is important, and this is the pointless goobering that kills. Am I mad at myself?

It's 3:11 now. I'm making me go. I'm going to make me. Me and no army.

myanmar and china

I don't know what to say, but a space must at least be made here in which not to be able to say it. When a disaster gets too large, my mind just kicks it out of range instinctively. An effort must be made to reel it back in. Oh, damn. Damn. I have to correct myself. When a disaster is too large and too far away (read: in a non-Western country), that's when my mind seems willing to let it drift into outer space without more than perfunctory consideration. What a vapid and ugly fact. So then I have to find some part of myself that has a small pincer's grip on humanity and compassion and awakeness, and put it in charge.

It feels like this small, not-insane part of myself is like a feeble subsitute teacher in a classroom full of hostile, apathetic high school students with ADD. The kids are just back from lunch and they're either stoned to the gills or zooming around on Red Bull. Plus, it's the substitute's first day ever on the job, and also the substitute has no lesson plan. The substitute is also physically unprepossessing and dressed unfashionably. Pale, a little sweaty. Hair unfortunate. Small voice. Not resonant. Also, the class is large. Fifty kids at a minimum.

Okay, the subject is massive human loss of life and also buried xenophobia. Hit it, sub.

Yeah, so that's what it feels like, and I don't even think the substitute is writing this post. I think at best we have a mildly sympathetic student in charge of this entry. Massive loss of life. Oh, yeah....that sucks. Totally, I bet it sucks. But, um, I have a magazine here on my desk, I want to read it. It's got, um, hairstyles in it. And famous people.

Hundreds of children crushed to death in a school. I don't want to understand. I don't want to understand. I don't want to understand. All Finns. All Finns. Everyone killed by the cyclone, no matter the age, all Finns. Everyone left alive. The old woman in Myanmar who was given a blanket for a photo op, only to have it taken away from her again when the cameras were gone. And then someone else tried to give her a blanket later and she was too afraid to accept it. She couldn't go through having it taken away again. An old, female Finn. Infinitely precious. Grief to infinity times so many thousands. Not vice versa. I want the picture of thousands of little dark silhouettes of people each alone under an enormous starry sky, facing infinity in the form of sorrow. I don't know what I'm saying and I don't care, I'm just trying to say something, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm not the teacher or the student, I have no plan. I'm just opening my mouth and making a sound.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know the good way to crack myself open for this.

A Drastic Remedy: The case for intervention in Burma

'No Hope' for Children Buried in Earthquake"

the eyes the eyes arrgh the eyes

If you suddenly switch places with Finn and find yourself my son all of a sudden, might I ask you please to please, for God's sake SUCCUMB TO THE NAP, PLEASE?

If you don't succumb to the nap, we will all die a little during the rest of the afternoon and evening. What will happen will be that you'll be working the premise that it's actually sort of cool and interesting to hit your uncle and your dad. And then I will have to leap at you all afternoon and pull you away and try to make eye contact with you and talk about how seriously against the rules it is to hit. And you'll be all ducking your head and wiggling out of the way and grunting, and my blood pressure will be all rising and shit like that.

No fair springing the pop discipline quiz on your unprepared parents like that, man. We don't know what the F we're doing. We're like, you hit your uncle?! OKAY I'M SUDDENLY GOING TO PUT AWAY ALL YOUR TOYS FOR AN UNDETERMINED AMOUNT OF TIME AND ACT VERY CRANKY! And then we're going to watch a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD and eat chocolate chip cookies. So, that'll learn you. That'll do it.

Also, you will need a little advice: all of the chocolate chip cookies I made are basically the same. To have a bite of one and then want to abandon it for a fresh one is, just, NOT. There's just no need, man. If you stay with the cookie you came in with, you will find the same cookie satisfaction through the rest of the cookie. Don't be having a midlife crisis with the cookie, like after one bite of the cookie the cookie is now your frumpy wife of twenty years. Don't be looking at the other cookies like they're your new trophy wives. You and the first cookie have a good thing going on. Don't throw it away. You're lucky, frankly, that you have that cookie, after your sleepless hitting spree. Seriously, man.

Some of you people out there have children who know how to go to sleep without the special Brigadoon magic of breastfeeding. That to me is beyond the beyond. It would be like if Finn suddenly revealed that he can drive an eighteen-wheeler and also do our taxes. Most days our clunky jalopy system of breastfeeding-to-sleep works, even if it means our hands are tied. But some days, the eyes just keep looking up at me unwaveringly. I breastfeed and wait for the eyelids to droop a little, wave the white flag a little. Then I know we're home free even if it's going to take a while. But when Finn keeps twitching his arm around and his eyes stay superthefuckopen like that, I know that I'm screwed. The eyes. THE EYES. It's like he armwrestles me with his eyes and he wins.

In case you have good advice for me about this, I'm going to have to pre-empt you and hang up the TOO CRANKY FOR ADVICE sign. You're going to have to try to get it to me telepathically. I'm the asshole who needs a nap.

P.S. But when he finally does go to sleep in my arms come evening, when he goes limp like a little soft moon and tumbles on to the bed...I am also screwed. Screwed, blued and tattooed. Finn 4 Ever. (I actually am considering getting a "Finn" tattoo. I have a big black heart on my left shoulder covering up an old, ill-advised Cat-In-The-Hat. Thinking about getting Dave and Finn under there. They're not going anywhere. I love them. Might as well tell the world via my left shoulder. My blog AND my left shoulder.)

P.P.S. It is ridiculous, ridiculous, frigging ridonkabagonkers how much sweetness and support you beauties who are reading this have given me in this last week. I feel like I'm recovering at an amazing rate, and I blame you guys. (Blame good nice love blame.) I believe in the power of words and the power of thought, and you guys are wielding your powerful power powerfully on my behalf. I'm deeply grateful. And we're doing really damn well, considering.

fingerprint

I said I'd deal with this openly here if it happened, and it has. Late Sunday/early Monday, soon after I put up the post about Finn's birthday, I had a miscarriage.

How much do I tell about it, and when do I tell what I will tell? How do I make that call? What do I factor in?

On the one hand I want to tell you everything, so that the record will exist properly. As I write this, I'm understanding why I, in fact, have to tell you everything. The only thing that would stop me is shame or embarrassment, and those things have no business hovering near me right now. I have to tell you everything so this child will exist as tangibly as possible in the world.

It doesn't matter how not far along I was. This is a life that began, and for me that means there is some soul connected to that grain of life, if not embedded within it. And that is the soul of my child.

While I was pregnant, I would be nursing Finn and I would feel so good as I thought to myself, "Look, I have both my children with me. I have both my children so close to me." This is a road where if you go down it an inch, there's no turning back. I don't regret going down that road. Absolutely not. I understand why some people will not allow themselves to go down that road. It's reasonable to gird yourself against grief. I don't mind the grief. I don't mind anything that acknowledges that this baby was real, really here, and I was the mother of it. I completely claim that.

I demand it.

I have to do something imperious with it. The powerlessness in the moment I realized I was bleeding (yes, I will be talking graphically about unbeautiful things) - how do I say what it was? It was like a person suddenly faced with an opponent, and the opponent is the ocean in all its size and force, or gravity itself, some law of nature at work. That's it. The opponent was Nature. So in that moment when I saw that I was bleeding, I was a mother holding a child and facing down Nature, who wanted my child from me.

This is a point where I stop and ask myself, do I go on, do I tell more? Is it seemly? And again, I don't fucking care. I hope if you're reading this and you're wondering if I'm going to be unseemly you will jump ship immediately and consider, in fact, not returning. That seems clear. I feel clear then that I'm going to go on.

I did feel like an animal at this point, when it became clear what was happening. Pacing in the small bathroom. Having to make my fearful sounds quietly so I wouldn't wake Finn in the next room. I felt like I was obligated to fight, but I didn't have the sophisticated weaponry or elegant strategy to defeat my opponent. I felt clumsy. Animal brain, animal body, registering a problem, pacing around, too obtuse to solve it.

I'm glad I'm writing about this. I couldn't defeat the opponent in the moment this happened, but now I can capture the moment and kill it, dissect it, own it, take charge of it. I can feel my posture improving as I type.

My brother was up, and heard me. Then my mom came out, and then Dave. Finn kept sleeping, which was wonderful, so I could have the response I needed to have. Dave and my brother and I talked a while about what was happening, wondered about this person who had come to be with us and then left so quickly. Was this person really gone? The physical element of this person was leaving or had left or was packing. But we all agreed that the essence of this person had not gone anywhere, seemed to still be with us in the room. And I felt furthermore that this person was not intending to leave us, that this wasn't it for us. We entered into a contract when we invited this person to come here and this person accepted, is what it feels like. The contract is binding, I think. I think that on both ends, the terms of the contract are in fact still embraced. I think there is still the intention to fulfill the contract, with this same person.

Dave had the analogy of a plane coming in for a landing and having to pull up before hitting the runway for safety reasons. The plane has to circle the airport and try again. The plane doesn't go, fuck it, I guess we're not going to London. That's how I feel here. We're not done with this child.

There's a feeling of peace in here that has planted a flag. There is still grief, because there's been a death. But I don't feel like Nature is my opponent any more. Nature knows what it's doing, my body knows what it's doing, neither of them failed me or are against me. I respect the both of them, and give them the nod.

It's been a roller coaster. In the span of a month, we've made the decision to try and conceive, we've joyfully done the work to make it happen, we've waited impatiently for the results, we've succeeded, we've been growing a person, and then now we've lost the person, or at least their form. My body and mind are exhausted. Yesterday was horrible, today was better. I'm alternating between real grief, real peace and a calm feeling of unreality, like the pregnancy was a dream. I've been to the doctor and she confirmed both the pregnancy and the loss.

When I wake up tomorrow, Dave is going to give me the morning to be sweet to myself. I'm going to lie in bed and watch a movie, I think. I'm going to have to take a shower first. I realized tonight that I hadn't showered since this happened, and that subconsciously I was avoiding it because I didn't want to lose the last physical traces of this child. I have to do it, I can't never shower again. I don't want to do it, but it will feel good to be clean.

That's enough for now. I'll want to tell you more about this person, how she affected me, and I will, until I've told everything That's the last thing right there, my saying "she". That's the last bit of truth for the evening. I can drop the pretense of saying "this person". For me, she was a she. It doesn't matter whether or not that would have been true. For me it was true. I made a playlist of songs on my iPod to welcome her into my mind and body, and one of them was Stevie Wonder singing I Was Made to Love Her. Oh, there's more I can tell you, and I will. Later.

Sheila E - THE BELLE OF ST.MARK

this one's for the trees

The good Scott Chicken is looking out for my election-obsessed ass, and has passed this meme my way. Shut up, I know I just did one. Shut up, I don't care. Can't fill a whole year up with solid gold, people. And this comes just in time because today I believe I have "crossed a threshold"...into election-related high blood pressure. I felt it today right there in my chest. Heart all squeezey whilst reading about the politics. And then when I took a stroll in the Arboretum with a dear friend out in the drizzle and trees and fresh air and floral breezes...heart not squeezey any more.

So I'm meming it, as yet another form of escape. You're welcome, Clinton campaign. My can of whoop-ass* will remain shelved.

*Whup-ass? Whoop-ass? Whooping ass. "My child has come down with a horrible case of whooping ass."

Here's the meme at hand:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it at page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase.
4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.
6. Pass it forward to six friends

All right, I swear that this is the nearest book. I've never heard of it and don't know how it got into the house. (Dave? This you?) The book is Little Saint by Hannah Green. It's a "meditation on the millennia-long life of a French child martyr."

The road runs right through it, and the part of the wood to the south is a perfect rectangle, and the part to the north is larger, longer and hexagonal, the shape of the old hexagonal reliquaries in the Treasure with their patches of Merovingian glasswork and their gemstones glowing and their windows of ancient glass, so that entering into the fragrant twilight of the fir wood, where quiet is defined by birdsong, we feel we are in a holy grove, protected, like spirit bones within a reliquary. The trees in perfect rows form long corridors that open at the end into the pale north sky, and the sun in the needles above us is silvery and refracted like a star.

Okay. That's more than four phrases and less than four sentences and seemed like the correct chunk. Hmm. It's very tree-y. Like an ARBORETUM. Man, I love things like that. Tiny synchronicities. On the subject of trees, I just want to give a shout-out to the Chinese red birches I saw at the Arboretum today. They may be the most beautiful trees I've ever seen in my life. They're looked like the trees that would be on Venus if Venus were acting like a metaphor and not like whatever gaseous reality it is. (I just looked up some facts about Venus. The cloud cover is super dense and a day on Venus lasts 234 Earth days! And yet there still may not be enough days in a year for Venusians to get their shit done. Am I right or am I right? Who's busy out there? Oh, Lord. I swear.) I gave one of those birches a good pet on the trunk, and it felt so lovely. I could have stood there for days. Venus days.

I pass this meme on to the six of you who want to do it, but come back and tell me that you did so I can go look and then tell everybody that you did it.

red carpet feelings

We must hurry. There is much to discuss and darkness will fall soon. The cattle will have to be called home and the jam will have to be set for the winter. For the summer. Spring is next? Whatever, I'm not a farmer. Let us make haste and distribute compliments and ridicule.



Renee Zellweger! To start with you is a lesson in cognitive dissonance. You trouble me, Renee. Your face, which you can do nothing about, about which you are innocent, troubles me. Is it attractive or not? Which is it?! No one knows. As soon as we become certain one way, a photo surfaces that confirms the opposite. It's also important for you to know, Renee, that I saw a few minutes of Miss Potter. WHY? WHY SO...WHY WERE YOU LIKE THAT? But you can dress. I'll give you that. You always look great on the red carpet. This silver number is very the-name-on-everbody's-lips-is-gonna-be--ROXIE!...in a good way. Congratulations. Please go figure out if you're attractive and also whether you're a good actress or not. I will go and try to figure out the same thing for myself. Maybe we can be pen pals.



Keri Russell. I have no feelings about you. I only feel that it's important to wear colors that don't wash you out. You apparently feel differently.



Laura Linney, I like you. You're a fantastic actress. So I feel bad that I have to say bad things about your hair. Why so much volume at the crown? Why so much and also not enough? Why so neither here nor there regarding your volume at the crown? Also, it's time to not wear those sorts of necklaces on the red carpet any more for a few years. For a decade. In ten years it will be all right again. Much about this look is too stiff. But your face is purty and who can fault your dress? And the sides of your hair look very nice. When is your next movie? I'd like to see it.



Marion Cotillard! Vous etes completement la cutie patouttie! How adorable were you when you won, saying how Los Angeles really has angels in it?! Le super adorable. Your movie looks very good! And your dress is gorgeous and you look flawless. You are sans flaw! You are inflawABle!



I am happy for you, Nicole Kidman, that you are having a baby. I think that maybe I'm happy for you about how interesting your necklace is but I think I'm not happy about how it interacts with your dress, and I know I'm happy for you about the simple elegance of said dress but I'm also unhappy that your hem was not three inches longer. But I understand that it's very important you don't trip on it and smush the baby. Please continue inside to a comfortable seat. P.S. Little side bun = cute!



Penelope Cruz: Please see me after class. The drape in front of your dress is confusing and obscures your point. Also, I believe I had assigned no feathers at the top of your bodice. I want you and Laura Linney to get together and write a paper about the problems associated with looking too stiff on the red carpet. You're headed down a bad road. I want you to succeed.

Look, I don't want to talk smack about Sarah Larson. I imagine she's got to be a groovy person in the extreme to have caused love to erupt in the coolest motherfucker alive. And I want George Clooney to invite me to dinner with Barack Obama and Al Gore and Walter Cronkite at his house in Lake Como. So...I won't. I won't talk smack. Congratulations, lady. I mean it.



It's going to happen like this:

That industrial I just got cast in? Where I'm going to be playing a doctor? Someone is going to see that and see how good I am on film. This will lead to a significant role in a serious film where I play a doctor who does battle with internal and external forces of some sort, who succeeds or fails compellingly and Academy Award winningly or at least nominatedly. Then I will do a Jedi mind trick on everyone wherein they permanently forget that Helen Mirren wore this dress and then I will wear it.



And during the week leading up to MY Oscars, I will wake up at night in a tepid sweat after having dreamed I wore this dress that Hilary Swank is wearing, and that I wore my hair like that to the Oscars. Note that it's a tepid sweat. I realize that it's not THAT bad. It's not a cold sweat. But it's not what I want for myself in my moment of triumph. Uptight Grandma on the make. No!



Jennifer Garner, please talk to Laura Linney and Penelop Cruz about your assignment. And then go kiss your adorable baby and great husband! You know, your hair helps offset the stiffness. I'm not mad at you. I like you.

Katherine Heigl, please turn down the color on your set and then carry on. And don't let the turkeys get you down about how nervous you were presenting that one award! It was really sweet and sincere and made you very likeable! C'mere. Oh, my eyes. So bright. Yi yi. But so cute, this look.

In fact, Katherine Heigl, you could have just split the brightness difference with ol' Amy Adams here and you both would have looked like a million dollars. I like this look but the color is just a little bit dull, methinks. Amy Adams, your purse with nothing in it is weird and pretty.



Anne Hathaway, you look almost as good as Kate Winslet looked in her great red number from a few years back. All in all, you get an "A" because we're not grading on a curve that includes looks from previous years. Please continue inside to your seat and enjoy the show.



Cameron Diaz, why are you here at the Oscars? Oh, I don't know what to do with you. I generally like how you dress. This color is sort of lame. And you could have ironed your gown, I guess. I don't know. Go inside.

Hi, Cate. Love you, love everything all the time, etc. See Jessica Alba underneath you? She's got a bun in the oven, too. And she's not afraid of tripping on her dress. Just a few inches longer is all I needed from you. I guess your maternal instincts were just too strong. I can respect that. The scarf-ish feeling at the neckline makes this dress feel a little on the casual side for the Oscars. I'm telling you, the longer hem would have helped. Ah, well. On the whole, I dig it.

Hi, Jessica Alba. I like this better on tv than I do in this photo. But I think you look nice. I like your braid-y, milkmaid-y hairdo. I even don't mind the feathers atop your bodice. You weren't given the same no-feathers dictate I'd given Penelope Cruz. The color of your dress is yummy, flattering and unusual. You're like a big, cascading, boysenberry waterfall. Kudos, mommy!

That's it. I can't go on. More people were there, but I just cannot talk about them all. I'm just one woman! Tilda Swinton, you run free. That's right. Run! Run away in your weird, one-sleeved gown and no makeup, with all of your indie integrity and huge, weird talent. Run, with your heavy Oscar that looks like your agent! I loved you in Michael Clayton, so you just run, now. There's a hole in that fence. You can sneak through it.

return of the night commuter

I'm thankful I didn't learn about this until the good news came in, and I'm sorry that I didn't learn about this beforehand, also.

Thousands and thousands of children in Uganda were leaving their beds at night to walk and walk and hide for fear of being abducted and forced to join a rebel army where they would be made to beat and kill civilians and abduct other children whom they would then have to beat or trample to death if they tried to escape. 30,000 children have been abducted since 1986.

40,000 empty beds any given night. 40,000 frightened, exhausted little wanderers.

Since 1986! For more than twenty years! How many nights is that? I was graduating from high school when it began. Barely more than a child myself.

How do you wrap your mind around these things?

I just learned about this tonight. I think of Finn sprawled on our bed with his beautiful toddler mouth hanging open, and then I picture him a few years older - or first I picture night, the absence of him, the bed and the sheets calling for him. Then I backtrack and see him at dusk, resigned, or not resigned, and getting ready to set out. What he'd be wearing for warmth. And then I make myself try and see him out on a road in the dark, away from me. I can't make myself see much. A bit of his imagined leg. The curve of his head next to the curve of some little unknown compatriot's head. I can't make myself look into his imagined heart out there, I can't make myself guess his feelings.

A permanent ceasefire has been called in Northern Uganda.

I don't know how to resolve all of the feelings I have. This is a sudden burst of grief and joy all at once. I wish I were there to get all of their beds ready.

oscar dress review delay

Because I tired. So tired. Hilary Swank, may I say you're lucky I'm not in the mood. And that's all I'll say about that. Except ARE YOU SEVENTY? Are you a seventy-year-old who feels she's looking spicy? I can't put my finger on it. It's just wrong.

Take comfort, Hilary Swank. I, too, have been given an unsolicited bad sartorial review. When I was working at a daycare back in my early 20's, I wore a big, baggy, purple ankle-length dress with a square neck to work one day. One of the Pre-K girls, Hannah, marched up to me and said, "You look ugly. That's a fat dress and I can see your neck." This from a girl wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, a miniskirt and pants. Know, Hilary Swank, that I know that I'm the girl in the skirt and pants as I'm armchair-quarterbacking your look. I wouldn't benefit from a surprise visit from the paparazzi tonight or any night...

...but your hair! It's like uptight Grandma hair! You're like an uptight Grandma halfway on the loose on a singles cruise.

I'm wearing my very cutest sweatpants as I type this.

All right. I have a bunch of Oscar frock pictures saved on the computer but I just can't do it tonight. They're there, though, ready. Tomorrow I do it.

In the meantime, behold this charming bit of Oscar-ness!

This is from my dear old friend Kris's blog, Complain-O Peeps. Linus is Kris's three-year-old son and he is an extreme awesomehead:

The Oscars are a mystery

This is what watching the Oscars with Linus is like:

Linus: What's this?
Me: The Oscars, honey.
Linus: The what?
Me: The Oscars. The Academy Awards. It's an award show for movies.
Linus: For scary movies?!
Me: For all movies.
Linus: Who's that guy?
Me: That's John Stewart, he's the host.
Linus: The what?
Me: The host. Ummm. He's in charge of the show.
Linus: What's that?
Me: That's a clip from a movie. Uh, they're showing part of one of the movies.
Linus: A clip?
Me: Yeah.
Linus: What's that?
Me: That's a clip from another movie.
Linus: What's that?
Me: That's a cl - Honey, they're going to be showing clips from a lot of movies, so you don't need to ask every time, ok?
Linus: Is that a clip?
Me: Yes.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: That's the host.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: That's one of the people presenting an award.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: That's Javier Bardem, he just won an award.
Linus: Why are the people clapping?
Me: They're clapping for the guy who just won.
Linus: Who? Who just won?
Me: That guy, Javier Bardem.
Linus: Did he win a prize?
Me: Yes. An Oscar.
Linus: An Oscar?! Is that a good prize? Is it like a treat?
Me: Yes, I think he's happy he won this prize.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: Another presenter.
Linus: What's he talking about?
Me: About who might win the next prize.
Linus: What's that?
Me: More movie clips.
Linus: Is it a scary movie? Does it have bad parts I can't watch?
Me: No, not these clips. They're short.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: That's the host, honey, remember?
(I bleep bloop through some boring crap)
Linus: Why are you skipping?
Me: Because it's not interesting. Just a bunch more clips.
Linus: Is it bad stuff for me not to see??
Me: No, just not very interesting.
Linus: What are they doing?
Me: They're singing one of the songs that might get an award.
Linus: (Lifts up his hands mimicking the people on stage) Why are they doing that?
Me: I don't know. It's part of the performance.
Linus: Who's that?
Me: That's another presenter.
Linus: Is that another clip?
Me: Yep.
Linus: Is that another clip?
Me: Yes, please don't ask every time, ok?
Linus: Who's that guy?
Me: I think it's time for your bath.

there will be ratatouille, or, george clooney for best actress

Oh, Oscars. Why do you keep happening while I have a tiny child and see no movies? I am forced to root exclusively for Michael Clayton and Ratatouille.

Damn it. But tomorrow I will be here with my Oscar Lady Outfit Review.

P.S. to Ralph Nader: Listen, you big doughnut. If you're so aflame with desire to make third parties viable in this country, you might consider popping up during some off years and helping Green party candidates get elected at local levels. Like, you know, build a foundation. Instead of trying to suddenly erect a giant skyscraper atop a small pile of cookie dough every four years. Also, I'd love to hear what you imagine you'd accomplish if you were magically deposited into the Oval Office next January, what with your pockets simply overflowing with political capital like they are. Hello, young chap! You look bright-eyed! Fetch me the biggest goose in yon shop there and I'll give you twenty-five shiny pieces of political capital!* Because I'm in a good mood and I can!

*I just like saying political capital. I think it makes me sound smart.**

**And this makes me sound self-aware!***

***That goes double for this!

please everyone be right tonight because i need the sleep

This is why I am so tired, you see. (I tip the hat to Mike Daisey's blog, where I found this cartoon which explained it.)

the rally

Dave and I went to Key Arena for the Obama rally last Friday. It was the windup...the pitch...the baseball metaphor to the crazy exhilaration home run of the caucuses the next day. We're so glad we went, and we're so glad we didn't take Finn because the outing was long and it was cold and, weirdly enough, the rally was not geared for toddlers. W-e-i-r-d. He would have been out of his mind and we would have had to leave long before Barack Obama reached the stage. Probably during the "Fired Up, Ready To Go" video. Yeah. That would have been when.

But yes! We went, and we even experienced a little drama. Drama! Conflict! Man vs. Nature! Man vs. Man! Man vs. Too Many Men! Man vs. Door! Man vs. Personnel!

Man vs. Nature = I said it was cold out, already, right? It was. It was cold. Super cold. And windy. Wind chill. Cold, brrr, windy. (Everybody who's moving to St. Paul: Stop laughing.)

Man vs. Man = So we parked our car, and then we walked to the Seattle Center to find the line, and found that we might as well have just stood outside of our car and waited for the line to come to us. We had to weave around and chase the end of the line because, as Dave noted, it was getting longer so very fast that it was like dominoes falling. That quickly. Vwoooooooooozh. This section should actually be called Man vs. Line. But that wasn't going to sound good up there after Nature.

But here's a new category!

Man vs. Time = See, all of this was taking place at about 10:45. The door was going to open at 11:00. We should have been there at 8:00.

Man vs. Too Many Men = The line started moving and we got very close to the Key Arena and then an announcement came over a loudspeaker that the event was at capacity. No more us go in.

NO! NO!

Tears truly came to my eyes. You may have noticed that I'm an Obama supporter. But also Dave and I got out of the house without Finn and it took a lot of doing to do it and this was going to be kind of a great date for us. We'd be getting to enjoy the event in carefree style, out of toddler managment mode. A big deal. And Dave's very much in favor of Obama himself. So we were bummed out in the extreme.

Man vs. Door = We just couldn't leave yet. We hovered around one the doors to Key Arena with a largish group of people who also couldn't quite give up the dream. We had our noses to the glass. A disappointed lady from the King County Council was lurking around in our vicinity. She had Obama's astrological chart in her pocket. We had nothing in our pocket for Barack Obama but love*. Everyone near the door was trying to figure out some kind of angle to get in. Nobody had anything.

*Perhaps a banana. Perhaps we were happy to see him.

Man vs. Personnel: A put-upon looking older security fella from Key Arena cracked open the door and squashed our hopes. Go away, people. No dice. You can listen to the speech on a loudspeaker outside**. Hope squasher! You are anathema to the whole Obama campaign, don't you realize it?! You have worked at Key Arena so long that the hope has been boiled out of you. That's it, isn't it? That's it. You're a Key Arena insider, all inside it, while we're not.

**See Man vs. Nature.

You may notice that I'm all out of Man Versuses. This is because the tides were soon to turn! Dave and I wandered away from the Door of Futility and remembered that Obama often comes out and greets the people who couldn't make it in to his events. We tried to figure out where we thought that might be. There were some people bunched up on a line across from where we were, down and then up some stairs. We headed down the stairs EVEN THOUGH WE COULD SEE THAT THERE WAS A METAL BARRICADE BETWEEN US AND THE PEOPLE OVER THERE. It was as though somebody had suddenly set us on 'random'. Hey, there are some people over there! Let's, uh, go into this bush and then try to, uh, jump up on the roof from across the street. And then we'll...we'll...tie our shoes!

But do you know who set us on random? It was angels. Angels set us on random. Or our dead fathers. Dave's dad and my dad. We decided we wanted to give them credit for this. And I'm getting chills as I type this! All right. That's it. The dead fathers are totally getting all the credit for this. Everybody who's like, Tina, dead people are dead and they don't get you into Obama rallies can sit and spin for a minute.

Down at the bottom of the stairs there were a couple of young dudes trying to jimmy a door open. It wasn't working. Dave and I turned to each other to try and figure out our next move when we looked over at the guys again and, instead of them, we saw a girl inside the arena holding the door open for us and giving us the hurry-wave in. Come on, come on!

Woohoo!! We were in! Dave yelled, "Yes, we can!" and we ran inside laughing.

We were just mouths agape at the good fortune. And it was so much cooler than if we'd just strolled in in the first place because we were so exhilarated. Man, I felt like Marcia Brady sneaking into Davy Jones's hotel room in a room service outfit. We ran to the closest, least crowded-looking aisle and headed in. We found a great spot just to the side of the top of the stairs, where we could totally see the stage below us. The stage was facing away from us, but we knew we'd be fine because he always turns around and talks to everyone at these rallies.

Man vs. Nothing! Man vs. Motherflipping Nothing!

We had to be the happiest people at Key Arena. And then, for the sweet little cherry on top, a girl waved up to us and pointed out a couple of empty seats in front of her. Her sister and a couple of friends didn't make it in, so there was no point in saving their seats anymore.

Beneficiaries vs. Further Awesomeness!

Here is where we were.

This, I have determined, is us there in that red circle that doesn't have Obama in it. It just has to be, and is. Tall person next to short person in white shirts standing in the right aisle at the right level in the right area.

We settled into our seats and waited. It was Good Mood Central at Key Arena! Everybody looked so happy, everyone smiling at everyone else. People kept doing the Wave. I love humanity's commitment to the Wave, even when it's minimal. You have to do the Wave, we all seem to agree. You don't have to do it well. You just have to get your arms up there. You can bring it if you feel like it. You can phone it in. Whatever. But very few people reject an incoming Wave out of hand. It'd be like not calling 911 at the scene of an accident, or not doing CPR when you know how when someone needs it*.

*It's not like that at all.

We checked out the crowd. Down on the floor in front of the stage...I saw...a hat on a head. A fuzzy, colorful, familiar hat...on a familiar head...our friend Morgan was down there! With our friend Deb! We stood up and started waving, and she saw us and was as surprised as we were and we laughed and mouthed things to each other and waved and blew kisses and made surprised and happy faces and "call me" phone ear hand things.

Tina, for God's sake, how was Obama! Come on! Shut up! This whole mise-en-scene business is so vastly more interesting to you than it is to us! What else did you do? Take off your coats? Have a sip of water? Shut up! Go on! Tell the part we care about.

Once Obama came out, which was four million years and three trips to the bathroom after we came in, I have to say that I was already sort of sugar-crashing from the exhilaration. He was good. I was tired. I was happy to be there. It was loud. I couldn't hear everything he said over the cheering. There were a lot of flash bulbs going off all over the arena. It was a stump speech that I'd heard most of already, sort of word for word. But it was cool to see the man in person. And there was a girl sitting next to us who was 17 and who'd skipped school with her parents' permission to be there, and she was saying she was going to call in sick to work the next day so she could caucus, since she'd be 18 by November. She didn't seem like some kind of politically active student-body-president type. She just seemed like a regular cool kid who cared. There were young people like that everywhere, and it made me really happy.

The whole day, just being with 21,000 (18,000 inside, 3,000 outside) other people all united for the same thing, felt magical and historical and cool.

i'm eating these guys for dinner

You have probably already seen this. But you know you want to see it again.

self portrait with dysfunctional mouse: pregnant with better self

My pictures keep coming out smaller than I want. C'mon, man.

Note: This is not an announcement of an actual pregnancy. I am just carrying a metaphor at the moment.

anniversary

Three years ago today my dad died. We're not having a bad anniversary. We're doing fine over here, all of us. We're having a much better day today than we did on this day in 2005, and we're appreciating that.

They have these cheap Valentine's cakes in the stores these days, single-layer cakes in plastic heart-shaped trays. I bought one of them in a stupor on the day my dad died, and stabbed at it halfheartedly with a fork right out of its tray. You can buy and eat anything you like however you like on the day somebody dies, with no shame. It's a small perk. I saw one of those cakes today but I didn't need to buy one.

Going through my folder of stuff for my show, I found this. I want to post it today even if I still use it:

When my father died, right afterwards, like in the following two or three days, I was tearing my hair out at night trying to figure out where he was. Where is he? Where is he?

I was angry that I didn't know. I was angry that we hadn't been given this information. Just for two or three days I felt this caged rage, like I had to do something, see somebody about this - not here, like a therapist, but you know, Up There. The Management.

Like, some customer service here, motherfuckers.

And I felt at night,
those two or three nights, in bed,
like a child. Like a real child.
How you don't know how it works.
How amazing it is that your mother or father can drive a car.
How they know how to get somewhere that's half an hour away.
How they know where to go on the freeway, when I can't even see all the way out of the side window of the back seat. I'm too short.
How they can get the car all the way to the airport with me in the back seat lying down looking up at the perforations in the leather on the roof the car. The ceiling of the car.
They didn't need anything from me, I had nothing to give,
no knowledge was required of me.
Squired from point A to point B.

I felt that way when my father died, in my bed those nights,
like I had just been squired from point A to point B
but this time I didn't know who was driving
or what point B was other than backwards to where I didn't know anything at all.

I could see the ceiling of my room, and the red walls leading up to the ceiling, and the white moulding along the length of the ceiling, and then it was just ceiling and all I knew was that my father was somewhere on the other side of the ceiling.
But on which side? To the left or to the right?
When I address him, which way should I look?
Up, right? But up and over?
Straight up? Up and to the left?
How many feet? A hundred feet? Four feet?
Fifteen feet up and four feet to the left, but just out of this world?

And after those two or three days passed I was an adult again and I wasn't interested in where he was. Just how he was.

self portrait: practicing not thinking so much

hasty self portrait in before midnight...

...which looks more like Leslie Caron but whatever. I posted!

of late i am cranky

I don't know who or what is retrograde where but whatever you say to me, whoever you may be, I am liable to take it wrong and stew about it and make up imaginary scenarios that take it one step further and get all worked up - until I catch myself. And then I practice this idea I've been reading about and say to myself, I'm not angry. My mind is angry. Look at my mind. Look at that. It's angry. Hmm. Hmmm. I see. I see it.

And then I'm able to understand that the person crossing in the crosswalk who has a walk sign but who's crossing when I'm waiting to turn left over that crosswalk, that person isn't fucking with me. That person is all right. Free to go. And so are you, whoever you are. You're free to go, too, you person who accidentally with your mouth stepped on a landmine in my head.

But I'm a teeny tiny cranky time bomb/minefield of late. Go figure.