Well, I made it through the week with mother in law staying with us. It was fun but I was getting tired of playing hostess. It was nice for my husband to see his family and for my son to get to know his other grandma and grandpa. And they are nice people. But still, 8 days is a long time to have houseguests. They were less than helpful with babysitting which was disappointing but I think they were afraid of stepping on my toes. I was getting annoyed though, just having them watch me work and not jumping in and playing with H a little more. They just sort of watched us do our thing most of the week. There were a few times during the week when I wished one of them would offer to entertain the kid for a few minutes so I could take a shower or get a few minutes to myself. I guess I could have been more assertive and asked for help too. Oh well, we got through it. I only had to go to midtown once. I'll have to remember never to go to Rockefeller center on the day after christmas ever ever again. What a nightmare. I did get to take them to the west village one day and just wander the streets. They couldn't believe that the streets were so quiet and peaceful. S and I said, yeah, that's why we usually stay below 14th st- well maybe below 30th- I do love the flower and garment district too. It's hard to convince people from out of town that there is life outside midtown and that all of nyc is not big and loud and obnoxious. Otherwise none of us would live here. We had some nice times on the island too. The tibetan museum is a lovely little place and they gave us a private tour which was unexpected. And the woman who gave us the tour lives down the street from us so it was nice to meet a new neighbor. Its funny how incredibly small town it is here. We did get the grandparents to babysit for us on New Years Eve so we went to two parties. The first was at our good friends house for a communal tamale making dinner. They live in a big old house with a chicken coop and a trapeze in the backyard and they rent out rooms and live in a generally communal atmosphere. One of their housemates is from Mexico so he was making mounds of tamales. But at the party was a guy we know who also happens to be friends with our next door neighbor as well as with friends of ours in the catskills and none of these other people really know each other. And I know his wife seperately from the yoga place down the street. Wierd connections. Then we went to our other party which was at the house of another couple we know. They bought and sold their last house after restoring it and now have a new old house that they are in the process of restoring. It is a beautiful old victorian mansion with turrets and they are restoring it to its original glory. So pretty. Fancy dress up party which was completely different from the first but fun too. I drank too much of course and was hurting really bad the next day. I was embarrassed to be sooooo hungover in front of the inlaws but they just teased me. It was pretty funny. We had one moment in the morning when my husband walked inside with dog poop all over his shoe. My son took one look at it and started gagging, and I started yelling, "don't throw up! If you throw up, then I'm going to throw up..." So he threw up all over the living room and I somehow managed to get the poopy shoe and the vomit covered kid all cleaned up without actually throwing up myself in front of everyone. Ahh, the holidays....

at the post office, the workers were all wearing Happy New Year hats. The two clerkswere wearing tiaras that said "Happy New Year" and the one man, a bald man who wears his cell phonestrapped to his wrist and who used to workat another post office but then couldn't get along with his supervisorand got transferredto the one I use, was wearing a blue paper hatwith the words "Happy New Year" in silver paper letters across it. (Later, I saw a vendor on Delancey Street sellingthose hats froma folding table)

I bought stamps for Books through Bars from the supervisor, who remembers when I used tocomein pregnant with dd. "She looks so big now," she marveled about Siu Loong. then she added, "you know those postcards you sentthe other day?" (I hadn't realized that she hadnoticed I had sent postcards. It was Wednesday and I was home all day with the plumbers. I caught up on all my prisoner mail, writing postcards and letters and felt good about having gotten it all done)

"You wrote your address on the bottomofthe card andthey were getting sent back," she continued."There's a machinethat scans for the addressand so it thought that wasthe address to send themto.So I crossed out your address and re-sent them."

My first thought was, "oh shit,they're notgoing to get into the prisons now.They need to have full return addresses or elsethe prisonmailroom won't let theinmatehavethem." but,thinkingabout it now,I'm touched that she looks out for meand my crazy mail; that when stuff starts bouncing back, she's willing to do an extra step to make sure it will get to its destination.

I also wonder about her noticing my mail. Does she think it's weird that I get so much mail from people in prison? What does she think of it? I know that one ofthe other postal clerks, a woman named M, has a brother in prison. She was talking to an older woman who was sending a big box to a relative in aprison upstate. m said that her brother was constantly in and out of prison; it was like a revolving door. You would think she would bemore sympathetic to the armloads of packages I bring all addressed to various prisons around the country.

No, she's not. she looksat the packages suspiciously and tells methat the post office x-rays them to make sure that they're really books. If not or if there's ANYTHING in the package that isn't a book, it gets sent back to me at my expense. You'd think that after a couple of encounters with me and my gazillion prison packages,she justwouldn't care.

So I wonder tonight about the supervisor. is she going the extra step becauseshe likes me and is used to me? Because she likes dd and has watched her grow over the years? (There was another clerk who used to work there,who always asked about Siu Loong. She has four kids,the youngest either a teenager or inhis early 20s--younger than me. She said she homeschooled him instead of sending him to kindergarten. I think she retired--I remember one of our last conversations being about retiring--she said she found out that she had to wait a couple more years to retire; federal and state retirement ages are differentand, had she stayed at her state job,she could have retired by then)

Does she have a family member or friend in prison? Is that what makes her sympathetic to me?

Funny, the little things that sometimes come up while doing little chores likebuying stamps.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

The kids were all supposed to go out to dinner with a friend tonight, but that's been cancelled. Bummer. I was looking forward to having a couple of hours alone with B. We get out alone a lot more often, now that the kids are older, but I still grab for it any chance I get.

Writing 1000 words a day for the novel is turning out to be pretty easy. I can do it in one or two short pulls, very nice. The trick is to get down in the chair, boot up the laptop, and actually do it. Once I get things started, no problemo. And I'm getting better about getting things started.

I made the caramels today, finally. I figured I'd better get a move on before the cream went sour. It was an easy batch, this time, and I'm pretty sure I didn't get them too hard, the usual curse of the caramels. I want to make pecan puffs later, although having exhausted all of my getting-things-done ability with the novel and the caramels, it will have to happen when B is good and ready to help. Pecan puffs. Mmmmmmmm.

The decision has been made and the equipment has been acquired; we will have cheese fondue and beef fondue for New Year's. We have invited K and her parents over to join us, which necessitated finding a cheese fondue recipe that did not involve wine or kirsch; K's mother is a recovered alcoholic. And I'm not going to put pressure on someone in that situation, or risk embarrassing her.

They won't stay late -- we're going to have dinner relatively early -- but we've invited K to stay the night. Carefully chaperoned, because there have been indications that K and P are somewhat interested in each other. Strictly platonic at the moment, but I know better than to assume that that state of things will endure forever. Besides, I know for sure that K's mother is taking a strict abstinence-only approach to sex, and I don't think she'll be prepared if something relatively innocent like a kiss happens. (Her mother, I kid you not, has told her that she shouldn't kiss until she's married. Yeah, right, like THAT is going to happen.)

I'm blathering. Time to go do something non-computer and see if I can get my brain back.

I'm hungry and starting to get sleepy. I had some mocha and the caffeine is ... putting me right to sleep. It does that. I've given all the kids warnings for tooth-brushing and bed. Soon after that I'm going to drag B to bed and go to sleep on him.

I blew my discipline today. Got up late and didn't write my thousand on the novel. I didn't write yesterday, but that's because we were out of the house all day on a field trip. I don't want to make myself crazy trying to write in the evening when I'm tired. Today I have no excuse. Have to do better tomorrow. There's no milk to have coffee in the morning, though -- how can I write without my coffee?

We got P a French press coffee pot for Christmas, and now he's been making lots of French press coffee. I have to drink it. It's hell, I tell you, hell. I've been drinking it and eating it with the hazelnut chocolate that B put in my stocking for Christmas. Chocolate. I can't seem to eat it without guilt, though. Every bite that goes in my mouth goes in with the thought, This isn't a good idea. You'll gain more weight and be fat and unhappy and unhealthy. Sheesh. If I could eat one or two bites without feeling unhappy about it, I might actually eat less of it. Not that I'm pigging on it; I'm just obsessed with guilt about it.

B and I took F out to do some shopping today. She picked paint and carpeting for her room. Pale yellow for the woodwork. Medium pale blue for three walls. Bright raspberry for the fourth wall. And pink carpeting. We've been really supportive about the kids picking colors they like, as long as they're not really *glaringly* horrid. If we ever sell the house we'll just repaint everything white. Painting over the raspberry in F's room and the bright purple in V's room should be fun.

We took her out this evening and found fondue pots for New Year's Eve so that we can carry on my family's tradition of fondue on New Year's. We're going to do cheese and beef, though, instead of just beef. We also got dessert. There's a patisserie run by the nuns of St. Rogers's that we were going past anyway, so we stopped and let F pick out something chocolate. She picked a St. Roger's cake, which is some kind of a chocolate mousse cake. We promised the kids some kind of chocolate dessert for New Years (since we're not doing a chocolate fondue, poor babies) and this seems to fill the bill.

We picked up the new glasses today. Mine aren't changed, just a new pair so that I don't destroy the old pair. Oooh, a pair and a spare. Now I can donate the old one that aren't really my prescription. Including the sunglasses. But because of the new frames, the focus is a little different, so there's just a bit of nausea and disorientation. I don't mind. It beats the shit out of trying to find my way around with my uncorrected vision.

I need to go to bed.

and just what this mama needs--a nice hot meal with leafy green veggies. Otherwise, it would have been wasabe chips and canned gluten from the Chinese supermarket.

Made myself go to the picket outside the Golden Bridge restaurant this morning. I got there more or less at the time the picket was supposed to start. There was no sign of a picket; I wondered if it had been called off or if the striking union members had been intimidated by whatever gang is "protecting" the restaurant. I decided to stand around and see if maybe the picketers were just running on activist time.

It turned out that there were. First, a young man with glasses--a stereotypical nerdy Chinese guy--showed up with a folding table. When he did, an older woman with a cane who had been sitting on the steps of the neighboring bank got up and joined him. He set up on the curb outside the restaurant and kept looking around as if wondering where everyone else was. I felt kind of bad for him--was this going to be a picket of only two people?

Other people came--union members who had been denied jobs at the restaurant when it first opened because they had tried to unionize the restaurant which had been in that location a few years earlier and a couple of members of a support labor organization. They wore signs around their necks--some in English, most in Chinese. They set up a cardboard black coffin on the folding table and handed out fliers in English and Chinese. One of the picketers, an older man and the only one who wasn't wearing a sign, would occasionally yell something that sounded like "Boycott" (but wasn't) and the others would yell the answer in unison. The man at the other end played small hand cymbals.

I stayed long enough that the first young man approached me and asked, "Are you taking pictures for a newspaper?"

I explained to him that I had been asked for some photos of last week's transit strike. I was hoping to interest the editor in some photos of the Golden Bridge picket as well, to show that just because the transit strike was over didn't mean there weren't other labor battles to be fought in the City. I reiterated that I wasn't a staff member or even a regular contributor, so I couldn't guarantee that my photos would be published; I did offer to send copies of the photos to the group.

The man introduced me to all of the picketers--the older ones were union members, some of whom had worked in that location when it had been the Silver Palace and then (to avoid having to deal with a union) the New Silver Palace. The older man who occasionally yelled out a word had been a busboy; one woman had been a dim sum cart pusher. They--and the other workers on that line--had been blacklisted because of their union activity.

I shot almost an entire roll of film. The hour or so I was there, people--both Chinese and American--streamed in and out of the restaurant; it didn't seem that the picket affected anyone's decision to go there. At one point, I was taking pictures and I decided to stand in the doorway. If anyone gave me a hard time about needing to get through that particular door (instead of the three others), I would ask them why they wanted to patronize a place that engaged in unfair (and illegal) labor practices.

No one did.

Came back and developed that roll plus the one of the picketing transit workers. I set it in the cabinet to dry and started to cut up the 5 rolls I had developed yesterday. On one of them is a picture of my mama friend and her almost newborn son at the Code Pink anti-war vigil. I decided to print that plus yet another image of an abandoned house on Tap Mun. When my negatives dried, I cut them up and wrote down the numbers of the ones I want to print, both of the picketing transit workers and from today's picket outside the Golden Bridge. I set up a third enlarger so that I can print from both sets of negatives (and also from the HK ones that I still have earmarked for the grant); I love having a gang darkroom all to myself. I wonder if I can successfully sustain three enlargers or if this is going to turn into a logistical nightmare. Maybe I should grab the scrap piece of paper that's up here so that I can write things down next to each enlarger in case I start getting confused.

I'm done eating my rice. I'm feeling a little sleepy. Maybe I should see if the Chinese bakery is still open and grab a coffee for the long haul.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

and so I suppose I should continue with this train of thought.

I was reading an essay by a mama writer today about how she felt really unhip after becoming a mom. After reading it, I thought about how a few of the essays I read were in a similar vein--I used to do cool things, but, after becoming a mother, I feel as if I've become uncool. That all I worry about is spit-up on my shirt and whether my socks match.

I feel like I went through the opposite change. Sure, before I became a mother, my life (from an outsider's point of view) could be seen as exciting and cool: I did Food Not Bombs every week, I helped break into abandoned buildings and tried (unsuccessfully) to turn them into squats, I went to Chiapas for three months and witnessed what long-term revolution actually looks like, I was a fixture at all the cool benefit parties for radical projects...

But at the same time, I felt as if my life were in a rut, that I wasn't stretching out and doing new things, that I was somehow just a radical gruntworker.

I think that for me, being a mom, once I got out of the mentality that motherhood meant that I *couldn't* do the things that I normally did and that I *should* stay home with the baby and keep a clean house and cook and do those types of things and *not* go explore abandoned buildings, opened up my horizons. I started cultivating friendships with people who were supportive and caring, who took genuine delight in dd's antics and who understood if I couldn't always accompany them to do wild & crazy things with them; who valued an evening spent at home eating food and drinking wine (or tea) as much as a late night out at the bar or the party. If they couldn't be supportive or if they couldn't understand, if I realized that the person constantly took more than they gave, I started to create distance between us. I don't have time now for people who never give back to the people and the community that nurture them.

And I started to meet or get closer to other women who were also moms. Like I never would have met China had I not become a mother. I never would have gotten close to a bunch of my mama friends had I not had the starting point of being a mom. Last January, I started to make a list of all the amazing women I know and have gotten somewhat close to initially because we were both mothers. I don't know what happened to the list, but it was pretty amazing that our shared role was what spurred our friendship.

And it took me a year or so to get my bearings, but I learned (and keep reminding myself) that motherhood doesn't mean that I have to give up the rest of my life, that I have to confine my activities to more sedate and socially-approved things like volunteering for the PTA or going to library storytime. I can be a mom and still explore subway tunnels. I can be a mom and fly across the country to give a workshop on women in prison with a nursing toddler on my breast. I can be a mom and do prisoner support and bring my daughter into a prison to visit an inmate. I can be a mom and continue to photograph the things that catch my eye, inadvertently teach my daughter how to fall in love with photography and show her how to make photograms so that I can get some contact sheets made in the darkroom.

I can be a mom and go to the fishing villages in Hong Kong, take pictures, be amused when my daughter looks at a fish drying upside down and asks, "Why is he mad?" I can be a mom and still protest the Republican National Convention when it comes to town and then make two zines about the experience.

I guess when I think about it, motherhood hasn't really limited me to mom-type activities. I think it's opened everything up more--I do things because I want to do them, because I think it would be a good thing to do them. Sure, I don't have time to do everything I would ever want to do--sometimes having to care for a small person does take up time that I could spend doing something else. Like writing that grant narrative that I've been putting off for the past two weeks (well, okay, that's also my own dumb procrastination) or printing photographs (must remember not to drink too much tonight or else I will be slow and stupid tomorrow and not get much done at all in the darkroom, if I even make it over there)

There was more that I wanted to say when I read the piece earlier today, but now it's dark out and I need to brave not only rush hour, but last-minute holiday shopping of not only those-who-wait-till-the-last-minute but also those who couldn't because of the transit strike to go to the Apple STore and see if they sell refurbished machines and if they have the one I've been eyeing on-line. When I went to J&R to look at the keyboards on a 12 inch and 14-inch iBook, there was a man sitting in a wheelchair behind one of them. He looked as if he were simply testing it out, but seemed to be looking over my shoulder as I tried typing a few words out on the screen. I walked away from the display and another Asian woman came up to try out the iBook; she fiddled with a few of the programs, lifted up the thing a few times to see how heavy it was (and I realized that I should have done that). He kept trying to make idle conversation with her: "so you're good with Macs?"

"No, I've never used one."

A few minutes later, "So you're good with Macs?" I started to get the impression that he was just sitting there waiting for women to come by so he could strike up conversation with them.

She left and I went back to the smaller iBook, tested it again, lifted it.

"YOu look like you're good with computers," he said.

I asked if we could switch computers since he was sitting in front of the bigger laptop which I also wanted to try out. He agreed and then, as I was typing nonsensical sentences into the browser window because I couldn't figure out how to get into a word processing program, he asked me, "Are you good with Macs?"

"No," I replied. "But my boyfriend is tired of me using his laptop so I need to get my own."

I figured that would shut him up. It did for a little bit. I lifted the laptop to see how much heavier it was (I carry around a lot of stuff as is and don't want to break my back) and he said, "You look like you're really good with computers."

"My boyfriend's the one who's good with computers," I replied. "I just need to get one of my own."

You'd think the guy would get the hint and, if not go away, then at least shut up and wait for the next woman to come along to bother. Maybe I should have said, "Yeah, I'm just looking at them right now. When he gets out of Tae-Kwan Do class, he'll help me figure out exactly what to buy." But I didn't think of it and so I didn't.

Or maybe I should have told one of the employees that there was some creep sitting around trying to hit on the women who came to look at the iBooks and that, if they wanted women to stick around long enough to even *consider* purchasing one that day, they would need to make him go elsewhere.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

I'm! On! Va! Cation!

Whoopieeeeeeeeeeee!

"Do not forget. Remember and warn."
-- Plaque fixed to the hollow shell of Sarajevo's National Library

If I were well-behaved, I would let this wait until I complete the second half of my novel-writing self-assignment today. But I am not well-behaved; I am a good woman instead, and I will choose for myself, and not allow some inner critic to steer the boat.

While I was on the retreat this weekend, we did some odd breathing exercises. Apparently, when researchers were researching LSD, they noticed that people on trips breathed in some particular patterns. When the government decided to shut down LSD research, some of the researchers decide to explore what would happen if test subjects imitated the LSD breathing patterns without the LSD. Turns out some mighty interesting things can happen.

I got a full chorus as I started the breathing. The inner critic -- "You can't do this right anyway, so you're just going to be disappointed." The inner cynic -- "This is all a bunch of New Age bullshit and it's going to turn out just like all that Christian shit, with no results." The inner journalist, loudly and verbally cataloging everything to tell to someone else later. It was really noisy.

At some point during all this crap, my partner laid his hand across my forehead. I find it comforting to be touched over my "third eye," and I'd been worried I would be frightened, so I'd told him about that. I don't know what clued him in that I was getting, not frightened, but frustrated, but he put his hand across my forehead to comfort me.

I started contracting my forehead, and I thought, "That's a really weird reaction to having someone try to comfort me. What's my problem with my partner?" Then I realized that I was contracting my forehead, and the rest of my face, because I was annoyed. Not with my partner, but with all the inner voices who were interfering with what I was trying to do. And on two sequential outbreaths, I found myself gasping, "SHUT ... UP!" And then I sat there and shook.

As my partner said afterward, it isn't that I don't want those voices at all. They're a part of me, and they fulfill important functions. But sometimes I need to remind the crowd that I'm the one in the driver's seat, and that they need to back off and let me drive.

Nothing like a transit strike to pull one out of a spiraling descent of depression.

One of the other squatters told me about the 1980 transit strike. His father had driven a train and he vividly remembered going out to picket with his father. "The union was almost entirely Communist back then," he recalled. He remembered that his family had to go on emergency foodstamps because the strike had lasted a couple of weeks (according to NY1, it lasted 11 days, but how much exact detail can you expect from someone who was 7 at the time?), that the foodstamps had been like play money to him, and that they would get *real* money back when they bought something with foodstamps and he'd usually get a quarter to go play a video game at the arcade.

On Friday, I was talking with M about the possibility of a transit strike. "I'm gonna go out and take pictures of what the city looks like during a transit strike," I commented, envisioning lines of people waiting for taxis, deserted bus stops, traffic everywhere.

M took my comment a different way, assuming that I was going to go down into the tunnels and take pictures.

Last night, when I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from her. "It looks like the strike is gonna happen," she chirped. "Call me and we'll go find a way into the tunnels."

I called her back somewhat half-heartedly. In my funk, I didn't really want to go out and take pictures. At the same time, I was kind of excited (and scared) about the prospect of going down into the tunnels. There were so many what-ifs--what if one of us hit the Third Rail and got electrocuted? What if we got caught and arrested? What if the strike happened and we got locked into the subway system until it was over? Or had to call for help and *then* got arrested?

Went out for dinner with Mopey Puppy and came home to find M waiting on my doorstep. We all went in and I made tea and she and I tried to figure out the best way to go about it. Mopey Puppy had a couple of observations, but wasn't interested in coming. He finished half his cup of tea, then picked up his bag and went home.

We followed half an hour later. I decided not to bring a bag of any sort, stuffing my pockets with rolls of film and sticking my point-and-shoot camera in my other pocket. I decided to wear the ugly tan winter jacket my cousin had given me to lessen the chance that I might get caught on something while trying to run from either a cop or an oncoming train. Later, I would kick myself, noticing that the lightness of the coat made me much more visible than M, who was, as always, wearing all black.

We checked out a couple of stations. In one, the only area we could think to get into was too open; we could (and probably would) be spotted too easily. In another, there were lots of workers wearing the orange vests that suggested they were construction workers and might be wandering down into the tracks. We got off at a third station and I suggested that we call someone and find out if the strike was indeed still happening since it was a little after midnight and the trains were obviously still running.

The station we got off at didn't seem to hold that many possibilities. For one, it was small and brightly lit; for another, there didn't seem to be any staircases other than the ones leading directly to the token booth clerk (who, after midnight, was not only still sitting in his booth, but selling Metrocards and watching people go through the turnstiles).

The punk who answered the phone turned on Fox News, which reported that there was still no strike. He did say though that when he tried to transfer from the G to the A line in Brooklyn, the A line was barricaded off and there were, in his words, "tons of police" to keep people off that particular platform. So something was starting; we just weren't sure what. Besides, you can't trust anything Fox News says anyway.

We went back down and I thought about suggesting that we call it a night and go home. I was tired, having woken up at 7 that morning after less than 6 hours of sleep and then had two meetings plus the stress of family misinformation. Then I realized that behind the wall was what looked like an abandoned set of tracks. If we could get to that side, we'd be set.

We had to wait till the trains came and the few straphangers got on and left the platform. Then we walked up and down the platform to go a quick check, went to the end of the platform, jumped down into the tracks and hurried across.

Then, we were across. We got onto the other platform which was deserted. There were two makeshift beds that suggested that homeless people had also found a way onto this platform, some newspaper smeared with shit that had obviously been used as toilet paper, but no one around. We walked to the end of the platform, looked at the two sets of tracks and chose the wider set, with wide wooden slats and no third rail. Obviously, this one hadn't been in use for quite some time.

We walked along, noticing the graffiti (there was a big SANE piece in yellow on one wall) and taking photos. At first I was a little nervous that the flash would attract attention even though no one had been on the platform a few minutes before. We darted between the two tracks, both of which had obviously not been in use for a while. We got to a more open space and realized that, if we kept going that way, even though we would still safely be out of the path of any oncoming train, we would be visible to anyone paying attention to the tracks. There was nowhere to hide. So we decided to turn back and explore the other direction.

At one point, I stopped to take a photo of a wide red sliding door that was padlocked. After the flash had gone off, M nudged me.

"There's a transit worker on the other track," she whispered.

Shit, had he seen the flash?

No, his back had been turned towards us. He had been looking at something else. We hid behind one of the many partition walls separating the two tracks and waited. Luckily, the man had a fat set of keys that jingled as he walked. We waited as the keys grew fainter and fainter. Then we went the other way.

At the station where we had started, we heard voices on the still-used platform. We took care to walk on the far side of the abandoned platform in the hopes of lessening any chance that we would be noticed. Then I saw the video camera. It was facing us.

I pointed it out to M. I'm sure she and I had similar panicky expressions. Then we realized that the camera, had it still been connected, would have captured us going into the tracks in the first place and someone would have come after us. But no one had. Plus, these tracks had been abandoned for who knows how long and homeless people were obviously using it as shelter.

We hopped back down onto the tracks and kept going. We found weird metal ties (railroad ties?) twisted into S-like shapes and railroad spikes. I tried to stuff a railroad spike into my jacket pocket, but there was already a flashlight in it and the only way I could get it to fit was to let the flashlight half-hang out, which I didn't want to do. If and when we did emerge onto a populated platform, I didn't want to call attention to the fact that we had been/had the intention of going into the tracks. M laughed and took the spike from me, sticking it into her bag along with the handful she had picked up to give to her punk friends as Xmas presents. "I was wondering what you were thinking," she said.

"Railroad spikes do *not* fit into jacket pockets," I replied.

The trains kept running. Each time we heard one rumbling, we stood behind the partition walls and waited. M tried to take a picture of one without using a flash. I liked that idea and, the next few times a train passed us, I pulled out my camera and tried, as quickly as possible, to turn off the flash so that I could take a picture. I'll have to remember to push those two rolls of film when I develop them tonight.

We emerged onto another deserted platform at the next station. At this one, the openings of the wall between that platform and the occupied one had been cinderblocked off. There were two staircases that *looked* as if they were still open, but neither of us was curious enough to climb off the tracks to see if they really were.

Then we heard voices. They were coming from inside a row of closed doors, a row probably present at every subway platform where transit workers take breaks or watch video monitoring or dispatch trains or whatever it is that transit workers actually do. We ducked so that, in the event that one walked out, he wouldn't immediately see the top of our heads. And we tried to run, as fast as one could while hunched over, into the safe darkness of the tunnel.

We got into the tunnel and heard a door swing open and louder voices. We ducked into a shadowy corner and waited, hoping that they weren't construction workers coming onto the tracks. At one point, the voices seemed to reverberate around the tunnel, seeming to come from the tunnel itself rather than the platform.

The tracks we were on merged with live tracks. But across those tracks was another set; neither of us were sure that they weren't live, but the ones we were on would make us too visible (and put us in a lot of danger should a train come), so we decided to check it out. I went first, hugging the wall and cautiously peering onto that set of tracks, half-afraid that there would be construction workers who would see my head and the jig would be up. (Of course, because the construction workers are *allowed* to be there, there is absolutely no reason for them to be as quiet as we were being. So we would have heard them waaay before actually being in their sightline)

there weren't and so we crossed over and kept going.

Three stations and three-and-a-half hours after we had started our journey, we decided to call it a night, climb back onto the platform and wait for the train to take us home. M's hands were filthy black from all the soot on the tracks; because I'd worn gloves the whole time, my hands were less so although both our faces were smudged as if we had been drunk on Ash Wednesday. We climbed onto the platform and took pictures of each other standing in front of the sign that warns, "Do not enter or cross tracks." And laughed and laughed.

We walked further up the platform. One man, wearing a dark blue uniform of sorts, was shouting that there was a transit strike. "The trains may or may not be coming!" He shouted something unintelligible about twenty bucks, so we assumed he was a wingnut and ignored him. Another man was smoking on the platform. "I wannna smoke too," M said. "Wanna split a cigarette with me?"

I didn't. Climbing around the tracks, even though the transit strike seemed to not be happening, is a much better emotional pick-me-up than smoking a cigarette. Plus, I'm sure I breathed in enough soot and dust and who-knows-what-else to equal a pack of cigarettes. M shook a cigarette out of her pack.

"you know they'll give you a ticket for smoking on the platform," shouted the other smoker. He ambled towards us, holding his still-lit cigarette in one hand and a copy of the DAILY NEWS in the other. M asked him for a light, which he gladly gave her.

"You guys are really dirty," he remarked. "How'd you get so dirty?"

"Costume party," M replied without hesitation.

"What did you go as? Bums? Homeless?"

"Newsies!" she exclaimed. When he gave her a blank look, she asked, "You ever see the movie NEWSIES?"

Yeah, yeah, yeah...he mumbled, probably having absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Then he started going on about how the transit workers don't really want to strike, how no one wants to get docked two days' pay for one day of striking...I rolled my eyes and decided to keep my mouth shut; it was 3:30 in the morning and I was tired and I just didn't feel like arguing with this guy. Plus, I realize when I don't know enough about an issue to really be able to say why something should be.

At one point, M sat down on the platform floor, leaning against a pole. The guy seemed to take the hint and left us alone. I took a photo of her sitting on the floor, her face blackened, smoking a cigarette.

A man on the other platform yelled over to us that there was a transit strike going on. "Trains aren't running!" he yelled.

"Since when?" I yelled back.

"Since midnight!"

"We've been seeing them go by all night!"

"I work for the TA! They're on strike!" But then a train pulled up and he added, "Limited service!" before jumping on what would be the last train for who knows how long.

A few minutes later, we heard a train on the track we had just been on. Then it stopped. We looked down the platform to see that it had stopped only a quarter way into the tracks and the front said "Out of service." The driver got out and told us that there was a strike, to get out of the train station. "If they've already locked the gates, just wait there and the police will let you out." Then he looked at me and M and said, "How'd your faces get so dirty?"

"Costume party," she chirped. Then we went up the stairs and got out, just before the van full of police officers arrived to flush out anyone hiding on the tracks.

Since we had to walk through Chinatown anyway, I suggested that we get food. The only place open was Wo-Hop; we entered and sat down. The waiter took one look at M and asked, "Who did that to you?" Then he noticed the black smudges her hand had left on the table and admonished, "You need to go wash up! You're going to make everything dirty!" So she went to the bathroom to wash up and took an inordinately long time.

When she came back, it was my turn. I tried to wash all the soot and grime from my hands, but the light in the bathroom was dim, making my face look gray (I'm pretty sure my *entire* face wasn't gray from the dirt, just parts of it) and so I didn't do such a great job. When I got back to the table, M pointed out that I still had a black smudge under my chin.

We had mushroom fried rice without eggs or meat and bean curd and vegetables; I thought aloud about staying up another hour or two (I was going on 22 hours straight of being awake by that point) and taking photos of rush hour when none of the commuters had trains or buses they could take. But after the walk home and a shower, it was 6 am and I was exhausted. AFter giving M a sheet and a couple of blankets for the guest loft, I crawled into my own bed and promptly passed out.

At 9 in the morning, my upstairs neighbor called to tell me that there was a transit strike and the plumbers weren't coming to install the heat distribution pipes in my space today.

"I know," I croaked, then went back to sleep.

Spent the morning looking at footage of the anti-WTO protests in Hong Kong, looking at photos taken by an activist I know, a fellow ABC fromQueens who is obviously over there and covering the protests. And I think, Damn, I should be there. That's *my* stomping grounds. And,from the photos, it didn't seem like the usual anti-globalization suspects, but more Asian and South Asian folks, men and women being directly affected by the WTO's decisions. Shit, I should have been there, I am thinking as I scroll down news updates and articles and photos.

Instead, on the day of the big march from Victoria Park, I was trying to play gracious hostess at dd's birthday party. I am going about my day-to-day grind of going to work, picking dd up from school, idling away lots of timechecking my e-mail, starting and stopping too many projects at once and lettingthemall pile up on my kitchen table, gnashing my teeth about the state of my house.

I know, it's easier for childless people to just pick up and go to these things. but c'mon, it's Hong Kong. I could have gone, could have left dd with my cousins or my aunt and uncle if the situation looked as if it would escalate (although, not knowing what the signals are, would I have known that they would have escalated as fast as they did? I see a photo of police spraying teargas and pepperspray; there are thick lines of the stuff crisscrossing the image, reminding me of streams of water from a high-powered hose.)

I wonder though if my relatives would have tried to keep me in the house, or at least out of the danger zone. Probably. It would have been a constant battle about where I should and could go, a battle that would be stressful on both sides, especially given that they still view me as a little girl. and that my family has no history of protest or resistance--they just pick up and relocate when the going gets rough.

Last night, while I was spending $40 on Chinese vegetarian groceries at the Hong Kong supermarket in Flushing, there was the People's Camp on Food Sovereignty: Asian Workshop on TRIPS: Defending Farmers’ Rights against Patents on Life and a separate action against genetically-modified rice and yet another workshop entitled the Impact of AFTA on Food Security in Asian Countries. I wonder what language(s) the workshops were conducted in, how much I would have been able to participate even without the constraints of a small child and family fears. I envy my ABC friend, not only for being there but for ostensibly being fluent enough to talk to various organizers and write about it for the various Asian indy news websites.

Today, according to the TargetWTO website,the WTO has ended, but hundreds are still in jail. The Korean farmersvow to stay and protest in HK till everyone is released.

Today, I am at home, surfing the news websites while dd is coloring after unsuccessfully cajoling me to color with her. I look at the schedule of events and recognize the names of places I've been to, the names of places I will be in soon enough, and feel wistful. I should have beenthere. I should have rearranged my lifeso that I *could* be there, a witness and observer at the very least even if I'm no longer in a position where I can be an active participant.

Today, I have five hours to kill before going on to my own activist project and responsibility. Last night, I thought briefly of calling Titi to see if she wanted to eat at the panAsian restaurant uptown where she said that the veggie roast pork was much better than the actual roast pork. Then I remembered that there will be no more late Sunday brunches with her. We will never stop at her door and ring the doorbell and have her open it with a gleeful "Hi guys!"

I realized that and I cried, quiet little sobs. I wonder when this reality will stop hurting so much, when it will stop smacking me in the face each time I remember.

Trying to explain what the WTO is and why 200 Korean farmersjumped into the filthy Hong Kong harbor to swim to the Convention Center and why the WTO is bad to dd. I need to read more about these things, really have the analysis downbecause I feel that,in my simplification of it to my 5-year-old, I am getting some of it wrong or leaving out a Big Important Part of the picture. I really should take the timeto read someof these (to me) dry, boring analyses of these things. Of course, to make thetime,I would have to cut something out of my life and I'mnot sure what that something would be.

Time to figure out what to do with my afternoon besides doodling around on-line. Maybe that's what I should cut out--or at least try to moderate. Like instead of checking my e-mail a dozen times an hour, I should make a list of things that I need to knowmore about (the WTO or pedro Albizu Campos, for instance) and look those up instead.

After much ado, little Riley Elizabeth finally joined us on November 5. She waited until one day past her brother's sixth birthday to make her grand entrance. Her official due date was October 27. One week after the due date, I had a non stress test and ultrasound to check the amniotic fluid level. Everything looked very good. She was healthy, had plenty of room in my uterus and a lot of amniotic fluid. However, the tech measured her at 11 pounds, 8 ounces. Due to this, a high risk OB was called in to speak with me, a doctor I had never seen or spoken to before, a stranger to my baby and me. He told me the baby was too big to be delivered vaginally because her shoulders would get stuck and she would have irrepairable nerve damage. He continued with the statement that my uterus was overextended by this big baby girl and it was not working properly and that is why I hadn't gone into labor yet. He wanted me to agree to a c-section right there. At first I was stunned, then angry, then I cried. I couldn't help it, I hate when doctors tell you that your body is broken, that it can't do something it was made to do. He acted like he didn't even hear me when I told him I had a 10 pound, 15 ounce baby at home with no drugs, no tearing and no problems. Since I was already at the hospital I called LV on my cell phone and since I was crying, he left the surgery he was in to find me and calm me. I hate acting like that, but dammit, I just couldn't help it. We discussed everything the OB (later to be called Dr. C-section)had said, and decided to dismiss it all. I had an appointment with my midwife that afternoon, and she left the decision up to me if I wanted to be induced later in the week, or go on my own. I decided not to do anything besides herbs, sex, and walking. I was very tense about having Riley on Ben's birthday, and warned him the day before that sharing his birthday was a possibility and he said he thought it would be neat to share. Luckily, the baby waited so both kids could have their own special day. We had Ben's party, everyone except me went to bed since my gerd was bothering me. I finally fell into bed at 1 or 2 only to be awakened at 5 with a huge slightly painful contraction when I rolled over. I waited half an hour to make sure this was it before waking LV. The contractions ranged between 5 and 10 minutes apart, so we went straight to the hospital instead of laboring at home.

Reading the website for Unicor right now. It's not really on my list of things to do, but it's good background info for a chapter I'm working on. Of course, all of their propaganda assumes and implies that all federal inmates are men. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am a bit disappointed.

So I'm reading and I discover that FDR took a special interest in the setting up of Unicor in 1934. He called in the leader of the American Federation of Labor, which, as a union, was understandably against the setting up of a corporation which would solely employ prison labor. He sorted through the labor leader's objections and the AFL ended up withdrawing its opposition to the plans to create Unicor. And this was during the Depression--when people on the outside were desperate for work! Little tidbit that's definitely not mentioned in high school American history textbooks alongside the creation of, say, the WPA.

In 1937, Unicor had more than $570,000 in profits, from gross sales of more than $3.7 million. And this was in the middle of the Depression! Some things are just astounding.

I had breakfast a couple of hours ago and am hungry again. My mom hasn't e-mailed me about meeting for dinner tonight; I wonder if she's miffed that dd has, once again, decided that she doesn't want to go to my mom's house or if she stayed home because of the threatened (but yet-to-materialize) transit strike. So I'm wondering if I should get myself a big vegetable combo from the Pakistani take-out place (which will last me for both lunch and dinner) or if I should aim for something smaller so that I don't end up wasting it like I did the other night when I got a veggie combo and then ended up going out to dinner and throwing half of it away.

Okay, enough procrastinating and staring at the split ends in my hair (which really does need to be washed. It's just so cold and the prospect of walking around with three feet of wet hair in an unheated apartment is *not* appealing at all. My mother would say it's a good argument for getting it cut short, but I took her advice once before and really hated myself for listening to her against my better instincts for months after that). This is what I will do with the four childfree, task-free hours I have left in the office (which actually has its heat on today, which makes motivation less of an issue):

*finish reading Community Assessment
*read through print-outs in box behind me
*try to organize papers sitting to the right of my mouse which seem to get more unwieldy each day (probably because I keep piling stuff on top of it)
*go through notes on Native activism and find specific pages I'm supposed to be looking up in the 2 books at the far end of my desk (there is a pretty big threat of them being lost in my piles if I don't deal with them soon)

but we've just spent over half an hour unsuccessfully trying to make a button. What does it say that I am stumped by a toy that is supposedly for ages 6 and up? (And I seem to recall that the adult button maker that one of my activist groups has doesn't seem to present any issues for the adults who use it)

On my first day, I seem to have been promoted from "literary editor" for a new book project to the group's "editorial director." it's all semantics, really, but it doesn't change the fact that I have a sizeable advance to work off in the coming month. Still, it's fun work and, if this space bar worked even reasonably well, I would be working now while dd draws designs for buttons that we can't make (this doesn't seem to faze her as much as it does me. Maybe it's the ego blow of being defeated by a 6-year-old's toy) but the space bar and other keys on this board require me to hit hard to get them to work and it's toomuch of a battle to type something well (Hi, I'm the new editorial director and I don't evenknow how to space my sentences. Ilook forwardto working with you.) and dd is yelling "Rudolph the Rednose reindeer" and I'm suddenly tired, so I think it's timetocall it a night and brave thecoldand go home.

So, even though I got no writing work done for myself, it was a relatively productive day considering I had a grand total of three hours to myself between the morning Policy Council meeitng that dragged ontill afternoon and thentaking dd to the rheumatologist. I've got enough of a start that I can hopefully jump right in tomorrow (after dropping dd off at school) and write the two writers whose pieces I've gone through and then wait, with not-quite-bated breaths, for their responses.

I also resubmitted oneof my pieces from the APOCbook for an upcoming book/zine on anarchist women ofcolor. The editor/producer (an anarchist man of color) seemed to like that piece morethan my one on parenting, race and the anarchist scene. I haven't read either ina while, so I don't know if one piece *is* really strongerthan the other or if it's just the preference of this particular editor (who,asfar as I can tell, hasno kids and mightnot ever really be around them).

dd's class is now a peanut-free classroom,meaning that there are no peanuts allowed. not even inher lunch, which limits what I can send her sinceshe doesn'tlike smart meats and I'm sure she'll eventually get sick of hummus every day. "you could pack just jelly," she suggested.

"No.I'm not giving you *just* jelly. That's too sugary," I told her.

dd just picked up a wallet that shegot for her birthday. "This is a wallet," she said.

"Yep, this isa wallet, not a gun," I replied without really thinking, suddenly rememberingwhen the cops who shot Amadou Diallo were acquitted and the mass march that convened and went downtown and the cry, "Police training, 101! This is awallet, not a gun!" and hundredsof wallets being thrust into the air to illustrate the point. thinking back, that might have made a great photo: all those multicolored hands holding up identical black wallets. But I didn't take any photos like that. the only oneI printed was of the police grabbing at a black man, pinning his arms behind his back and wrapping an arm around his neck.

I don't know whathappened tothatman. His friends were shaken; I remember O, a scruffy white man, tried to grab him back fromthe police. They didn't go after him; they seemedintent on focusing solely on the large black man who haddone nothing other than participate inthe march. I gave his friends the # of the National Lawyers Guild but had neglected to give themmy # as a witness or to use whatever photographs I had been able to take. (I had shot and a cop had thrownme into the bushes. I had ogtten upand plunged into the fray again, only to be thrown out of the ring they had formed aroundthe man. I had tried to crawl through onecop's legs,but he pinned them tight. They sure as hell weren't going to make iteasy for me to get any shots of what they were doingto the guy, but, for some reason, didn't think it was worth their while to arrest me.)

dd doesn't get the point: "This is a wallet,not a gun."She tells methat of course it's notagun. It doesn't have a "button."

"trigger," I corrected her.

"Well,no one inmy family even *uses* guns," she went on,ignoring my distinction. "Don't you know that no oneinmy family even uses guns?"

Timeto get offthe computer,go homeand sleep.Maybe it's because this cold season tea has somevalerianroot in it.

i've been sort of grappling with things to say this past week. i am completely exhausted. last week i was so sick. i just feel utterly worn out. i have three weeks ahead of me before school starts up again, and it seems like i won't have a moment to breathe. but i will. i'm just fighting that old battle with the overwhelming dread i get around christmas.
it's under semi-control this year. partly cause i'm feeling like i don't give a shit anymore. i am sending cards in batches, and no more long letters for each recipient. i can't. i just do a dozen seal em and send em. and leave it be till i get around to the next round.
i've been effectively avoiding studying for tuesdays religious studies midterm. but everything else is done.
i got 86% on my pixote essay. i seem to be really good at getting 86% on stuff. it's one percent under an A. which pisses me off a tad. but it's still very good.
i'm certain i aced my latin american film final. no doubts. i knew the stuff an wasn't tripped up by any of the questions. so i'm happy about that.
handed in my philosophy project, which ended up being a slideshow with spoken word. i wrote all over myself...with help. i worked really hard on it and feel really proud of it, the mark is almost beside the point. that's kind of a nice feeling. i mean, i know that i passed the class. so...
wrote my pop culture final last wednesday, totally drugged (legally) but i'm sure i did fine on that one too. i'd like to know my actual mark, so i'll probably email tap and ask.
other than that it was cold, then hot, then cold and snowy, then melty and warm, then nice but chilly with a drift of snow. i'm so done with the fucking weather.
i have too many things on my mind tonite at 3 am.
things to do tommorrow. more financial aid bull shit. they reassessed my loan and uped the amount but did not adjust the canada study grant. i'm really pissed. so off to the uni again tommorrow, and i need to apply for the supplementary bursaries as well. and get tickets for danny michel while i'm there, for monday.
we had a midnight staff screening of 'junebug' which is very good. but sad. i have many thoughts about it. it was very human and i dunno.
too much to say. too much.

out of scrap paper. But since I haven't bought a datebook for myself for next year (I refuse to buy a Slingshot since there is absolutely no room to write more than one thing per day and Bluestockings didn't have anything small and handy that I was willing to pay lots of money for) and I'm going through museum propaganda and seeing things that I'd be interested in either taking dd to (Peking Opera at the Brooklyn Kids' Museum!) or photographing on my own (Three Kings' parade in Harlem), I needed someplace to write these all down and keep them straight.

And maybe starting to plan my next year will kick me in the ass to do something with my remaining weeks this year.

I've done no writing work at all this week. None whatsoever. All the energy and excitement of going back and forth about syntax and storylines with China on Friday came to naught this weekend. And then again this week. The past two days, I got a late start and so I assumed that getting an earlier start today would get me going again. I seem to work best if I start in the morning and then work all through the day. Or, even if I don't work all through the day, at least I've gotten something done in the morning.

Not today. today, I reread "Fragments of Friendship" and looked for news of the fishing village riot (it was in China, not in Hong Kong, although I'm wondering if it might be worth it to hop across the border and go to that village when we're there in January) and checked my e-mail way too often and went to lunch with the Board Prez. I e-mailed a former professor of mine, one who'd very enthusiastically written letters of recommendation for me in the past for (failed) proposals for photo funding. I feel a little disingenuous contacting her out of the blue, but I'm thinking that I may end up asking her to be a reference for this grant if I ever get my shit together to get a good narrative proposal and portfolio together before the deadline. Besides, I suck at keeping in touch with people; I often let people fall off my radar if they're not involved in any of my immediate issues or projects.

Memorial service in a couple of hours. I should actually get out of here a little early and stop by one of the 99 cent stores, get a big value pack of tissues in case I start bawling. I hope not. It's supposed to be a celebration of Titi's life, not a mourning, but still...VeganBoy e-mailed and said he might try to stop by and my first thought, which I said aloud, was, "Why the fuck would you go to a memorial service for someone you don't know?" I mean, I avoid these things usually. I didn't go to D the Yippie's memorial even though I'd known him, had contributed money to the various bail funds he was collecting for friends, went to different demonstrations and protests with him, sat and shot the shit with him and listened to his wacky protest stories countless times.

But I didn't go to his memorial. I hate these things. I mean, maybe for beloved activists they're different. Maybe they're wonderful occasions to tell stories and remember them. Whatever. I still wouldn't go to one unless I felt that I actually *had* to. Which is the case tonight.

Two mothers are annoyed that they were not invited to dd's birthday party. One mother is from dd's new school; dd hadn't said that she wanted to invite her daughter and so she didn't get an invitation. Maybe that is a huge faux pas once school begins and kids have birthday parties and maybe if you invite one or two girls from the class, one should invite *all* the girls from the class (there are only 6), but it didn't occur to me to do that.

She went up to ddd the other morning and said, "We didn't get our invitation." I find that a little unsettling that someone would put another person in the awkward social situation of saying "Well, we didn't send you one." ddd just said, "Well, her mom was mailing out the invitations." Great...

I wouldn't be so unnerved by it had I not been helping her the day before at school. We had been putting up bid sheets for the silent auction the next day. dd had been running around with her daughter and obviously having a good time; as we were leaving, she asked if she could have a playdate with the other girl at some point. But it didn't occur to either of us to extend an invitation to the girl (not that she would have come because I'm sure her mom would have been busy with the silent auction the next day as well).

This morning, I ran into the mom of another kid, one who had come to the party but with his dad. We had deliberately only invited the parents who had their kids that day--not out of malice for the other parent but just because, well, it was a kid's birthday party (or at least partially a kid's birthday party) and so for dd's part, only those with children were invited. Anyone who didn't have a kid had to suck it up to L to get on her guestlist.

This mom was annoyed that she hadn't been invited, said that the scene doesn't support its women but supports its men and their new relationships. I tried to explain, perhaps very badly, that she wasn't deliberately left out, that ddd didn't invite her ex but that we had asked which parent had the child and, since her ex did that afternoon, he got the invitation. She didn't want to accept that, seeming to take it as a personal affront that she wasn't invited. She also seemed to want to blame ddd, although she was ranting about it to me and the person I was standing with (who probably either had no idea why she was so upset or thought I was a big asshole for excluding her). Then, when the train doors opened, she said, "I'm going to the front of the train" and huffed off.

It made me remember one of my last conversations with Titi. She had seen me the day I had come from the doctor's office; I was crossing the street and had passed her office. She had seen me through the plateglass window, but I had kept going, not wanting to stop in and get her sick. (Sometimes I wonder if sitting with her at the wedding had gotten her sick, if she might not have died had she not been sitting with someone getting over a virus. It's something that I try not to beat myself up over because she's gone and there's no point to it now, but the question does nag me.)

A couple of days later we talked. She told me that she'd been noticing the way people appeared lately and that the afternoon she saw me, I seemed to glow. Conversely, every time she saw the other mother, she seemed dark, twisted, ugly. Like she was really not doing well and it was showing in her face and gestures and appearance. I didn't think much of this observation, knowing that Titi had a lot less patience for certain people than I do.

Today, I see what she meant. It makes me wish that she were still around, that I could call her and say, "You're right. I see what you mean. But she's also doing it to herself. She's feeling isolated and abandoned because she didn't get invited to this thing or that but her ex did. But then she gets weird and confrontational about it, making people not really want to be around her and not want to include her in their activities either."

I can see why Titi wanted to keep a distance from her after a while, why she more actively tried to keep her at arm's length, not going to her events or trying to cut her visits short.

I shouldn't spin my wheels about this too much. People are weird and I guess things like birthday parties bring out some of these social complexities that, being an introvert and social misfit, I'd never had to deal with before. Hell, when I was a kid, I had the opposite problem; almost no one wanted to come to my parties. Now that I have a kid, it seems people get miffed if they don't get an invite.

Made a copy of "Fragments of Friendship" last night to send to a zine library. Since I forgot to grab the handful of zines at home that I also need to include in the packet, I'm spending my time simply rereading it instead of doing any of the more productive writing (and other) work I told myself I should do today. But at least yesterday, I was able to check off most of the things on the short to-do list I made: answer prisoner letters (well, I did two of those); buy stamps (check); mail zine packets (mailed two out of three); call someone with my vax questions (check); read first chapter of Hong Kong book (only thing I hadn't done at all). That last reminds me that I was told last night (after I was home and without 'net access to confirm this for myself) that there were riots either in or about HK's fishing villages recently, perhaps in connection to the WTO happening there now. So I should look that up today in whatever indy/alternative media (hell, maybe the mainstream media has some coverage of it although it's doubtful) and see if that really happened or not and, if so, why it did.

My Mondays are so much better when I wake up and the house is already clean. Today, the house is already clean. And there is 10 inches of snow on the ground outside. And a roaring fire in my little stove inside. And I had a hot cup of French breakfast tea that my friend brought me back from Paris. There is something haunting about this tea – it tastes ever so slightly of vanilla. I love it. And I savor it because I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get anymore once it’s gone. And I had some cinnamon toast made with Saigon cinnamon, which I’m not even sure is so amazing, but I just like saying it – Saigon Cinnamon. Sounds like a good name for a stripper. I lit some incense – Nag Champa. Yes, I use that scent. Even after my friend came over and said, “What’s that smell? It reminds me of when I used to be a Hari Krishna!� I use Nag Champa incense and Mrs. Meyer’s Lavender scented candles. That’s what my house smells like. Well, that and dog. And sometimes wet basement. And wood smoke.

I had a dream about my grandmother last night (Seth from the OC somehow figured into this dream as well – but that’s neither here nor there). She comes back to me in my dreams a lot – her and my grandpa, too. And their old house. Which, ironically wasn’t actually an old house – it was very modern. My grandmother didn’t like old houses. Or antiques. She felt she could never get old things totally clean. It must have driven her crazy to have the daughter and granddaughters she ended up with. Anyway, I dreamt about her last night and then this morning while I was waking up The Boy (who is crazy hard to wake up in the mornings) I started telling him about her. About how she had a swing that was set over this hill so that when you used it you felt like you were flying over a cliff. And how there was one tree on her property we called The Dragon Tree because it had a branch that looked exactly like the head and the long body and tail of a Chinese Dragon and you could sit on that branch and it would bounce and you could ride the dragon. And how we always made cookies at her house – that’s where I learned to make chocolate chip and raisin and oatmeal cookies. And how she painted botanicals – I actually led him into my bedroom after he finished brushing his teeth and showed him some of her paintings. And he was so interested. It made me sad in any number of ways. I mean, it made me feel good to be talking about her – she died in 97 – long before The Boy was around – and I like that I can tell him some stories so she’ll be alive in his memory, too. But it made me sad, because of course, he’ll never get to meet her or my grandpa. And the house that we spent so much time in, and which they took such pride in, has been sold and resold and changed any number of times now. And it made me sad because my child will never have the same kind of relationship with his grandparents that I was lucky enough to have with mine. My grandma only lived an hour and a half up I-5 and we visited her all the time. From the time we were tiny my parents would plunk a bunch of us kids on the greyhound and send us to visit for long weekends or a week or two during the summer. We went there for Christmas. We went there for Thanksgiving. I spent a huge portion of my young life at her home. The Boy is 3000 miles away from all his grandparents and is lucky if he gets to see them each once or twice a year. It’s such a different thing. One good thing was that R got to meet my grandma and stay at that house just before we got married. She sold the house and moved into assisted living the year after we got married. But at least he had that one experience with her and her home. At least he can access what I’m talking about when I talk about her.

My paternal grandmother lived a long time, but she came down with Alzheimer’s when I was still very young, so I have very few memories of her before she lost her memory. From what I am told, she was the warmest and sweetest lady. Not like my paternal grandfather who was pretty intense – brilliant, and moving in his dedication to his wife, but deeply Roman Catholic and conservative. My father and he spent a large part of every visit arguing politics and morals. The thing about my paternal grandmother – Anne was her name – was that she actually went to Normal school in New Paltz. She was on her summer break in Lake George when she met my grandfather, who was playing saxophone with a dance band at the resort she was working at. He was a law student and making his summer money. But I didn’t know that she went to school here until we moved here and my father mentioned it. And it makes me happy to think of her here – to think that I walk the same streets she did when she was a young woman. I like to think how the line continues. How we come back to our families even when we don’t know we are doing so.

I was at my maternal grandmother’s bedside when she died. She had a heart attack and we had to make the decision to take her off life support. My mother was there. And my sisters. I held my littlest sister – who only about three years old at the time- in my arms – she was asleep – as the nurse disconnected the respirator. My grandmother’s breathing was labored – it sounded like she was sucking through a straw – and it was hard to hear at first. Her eyes flew open a crack – and we all doubted the decision we had made. It was a terrible moment. But then suddenly, something switched, and the breath of the baby in my arms and the breath of the dying old woman in the bed and my own breathing all started coming in unison. We were all taking the same breath. And I felt like I was being given this gift – this realization of the connection between my grandmother and my mother and sisters and myself – how we all were of each other. How, even though my grandmother was dying – would soon be dead – she was still there in my arms in the form of my little sister. She was still there in me. In my mom… It was a life changing experience. To be able to see the inter-connection so clearly. It made the death we had to go through so much more bearable.

I’m glad I dream of her as often as I do. I’m glad she comes back to me in that way. I never feel haunted by her – just visited. I hope that The Boy will somehow be able to forge a connection like that with his grandparents, too.

Nothing is real until it is recorded.
-Virginia Woolf

My daughter turned 5 yesterday. She is making abstractions of things with the modeling clay (one package of it has *glitter*) that her American cousins sent her. I am drinking coffee and surfing the Internet and slowly gathering my thoughts and wishing that I didn't have to hit the space bar so hard to get it to work. She just made the Empire State Building (well, not really, like I said,they're abstractions) with her pink and peach-colored clay.

Big birthday bash today which means I'll get no writing done. got none done yesterday--we got dd a digital camera for her birthday (bought on the cheap off eBay, but it turned out the flash didn't work) and went to her school to help set up for today's holiday fair,which we're going to make an appearance at but will mostly miss. Then we picked up her cake, a 2-layered peach princess cake, and went to eat eastern European food on Second Avenue. Afterwards, because we had 2 hours to kill before going to see the Chinese acrobats, ddd suggested taking her to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. I said sure, why not and that turned out to be a big mistake. I keep forgetting how much I hate midtown until I get there, how much I can't stand all the crowds and clueless tourists and people who stand inthe middle ofthe sidewalk and who don't watch where they're going. Being in that kind of situation brings out the homicidal tendencies in me and I start thinking of walking around with a razor and slashing random people as I stalk down 47th Street. Not a healthy feeling to have and so I generally avoid the area like the plague. the only time I've ever *not* had the feeling was one rainy Monday evening a year or so back when the Crush was visiting and wanted to see Times Square. It was virtually deserted and he was disappointed by it. "it's not a square!" he exclaimed over & over.

Maybe, if the kids are amusing themselves and I feel up to it, I'll go around collecting little stories for my next zine project. I was going to start this past Wednesday, but the lack of heat in the office turned my scratchy throat into a full-fledged cold and so I spent an hour just huddled by the space heater too miserable to talk with anyone. I still have the sniffles and the thought of going & playing with chemicals is unappealing; last night, the secondhand smoke from passing cigarettes & cigars seemed to waft up my nose and stay there, really making me feel ill.

dd keeps talking to me. I told her that I want some me-time. I like to wake up in the morning & have a little timeto do my own thing before plunging into the responsibility of mothering or house stuff or working or whatever task I've taken on for the day. Some days she either gets it or is enthralled with something else & leaves me alone. Other days, she keeps asking me to look at what she's doing, asks lots of questions, disturbs that early morning (well,midmorning at this point) time. I just asked her again to let me have some quiet time or else I would have to go elsewhere to find it. today, especially, with a big birthday party and the prospect of 30 guests, I think I need that first half hour or hour to just *not* be responsible.

The friends who have agreed to hostthe party calledand said that 2 kids came yesterday, their parents having gotten the day mixed up. they clarified the date and agreed to come back today, but she said one of them burst into tears when she found out.

Okay, time to fix dd's oatmeal.

I am returning from immersed drama--depression, no motivation, lack of desire in anything. I started seeing a therapist, in the process of considering medication in addition to transitioning to a part-time working mother.

My blog was getting rusty so I had to go on there and spill news--raw and all. Shamelessly sharing my episodes with depression, a crazy situation with a psychiatrist and an intern and paradoxically anti-psychiatry thoughts following; fearless yet scared about the details. I'm for anti-depressants, though I'm very aware of the lack of cultural competency in social delivery models in the mental health field. But when it comes down to it, if it is too difficult to deal with my thoughts, I'm cutting through the, to me, racist very linear field and try out a pill. Because at times, it has become very difficult to cope with mundane and simple life acts so for the sake of getting better quick I would have to curtail my anti-psychiatry moments and culturally sensitive practice searches.

I'm back--and continuing to write on my blog. I believe a young Latina woman, that is also a mother, and her experiences with depression should have a space in the blogosphere even if it is infrequently heard: women should write: mothers too, and women of color as well: I fit all three and think my voice is as important as the handful other great writers I always read about on their daily blogging rants. We should all share our stories--but this thought is rare when I'm depressed, it is common to think the following: should I even write--for whom, for what, why and what is derived from my personal views? I’m reassured today—depression takes that away though, and I drop what I do because of it.

It is life, the dramatic and the peaceful motions, living through the too difficult to think constructively and get acting, writing, healing--but I'm realistic and know the ride depression takes me on--and consequently detour completely at the costs of abandoning my interests while I take care of the necessary.

I'm grumpy. It may be a bad sign; I don't know. We're coming into the very darkest part of winter, and I've slid into bad depressions in the dark months before. I also want to get the *hell* out of the house, but I've had an incipient cold nagging at me, and it seems to get worse when I'm out in the cold. I don't want B to travel this weekend, and I'm not sure I want to travel next weekend. Even though it should be a fun weekend, I'm anxious about the flight, renting the car, and finding my way to the retreat center. Plus, the worst depression I've ever had started when I went traveling in early December.

At any rate, I hope this is just a passing thing. It's been so nice to be stable recently; I don't want it to end.

S came out to visit on Thursday; we invited him to stay overnight and have pancakes Friday morning, because the snow was getting deeper and we figured he'd rather find his way home through just the snow, rather than through driving snow and darkness. It's always fun to have S come out, and the children adore him.

Yesterday I was out of sorts all day, and grumpy in the evening again. I barely got any writing at all done; I dragged out about 800 words, which I guess actually is pretty close to 1000, but it felt like pulling teeth. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever get this book done.

Definitely feeling the Glooms today. I want so badly to cut off all my hair rather than waiting some more for it to get as long as I'd like it to be. I've been waiting for two years -- I'm tired of waiting. I want to go back to my crew cut. The only thing stopping me is that I know I started growing it out because I was tired of the crew cut. Go back to the crew cut and I'll just get frustrated again. But I still want to cut it. I suppose I could try sweeping it up on top of my head and making a small pony tail, but I'm afraid, with some justification, that I'd just end up looking like Pebbles Flintstone. Never one of my ambitions.

I should go out to the bookstore this afternoon and have a cup of coffee. I should sit around and read a book. Among other things, it would be good for me to have something stimulating to read while I'm at Shalom. I'll be off-line for the weekend, which is a good thing (although I may take the laptop so that I can continue journaling on it,) and something to fill in the corners might be a good idea.

I can hear B marshalling the kiddies to do chores. They're all exercising their senses of humor today, and I wish they wouldn't. They're driving me crazy at a long distance, and I can tell they're driving B even crazier at a short distance.

I feel. I feel. Along with feeling grouchy, I feel distinctly unattractive. Not a good feeling. I feel as though there ought to be something simple I can do to get rid of this grubby inside-and-out, mentally and physically feeling, but if there is I can't think of it. Except maybe to go out and get coffee and petite cookies. And a book. Or three. If I have the money.

I think I may have a polygamist on my hands. The last time he left, he was gone for a couple of months and then all of a sudden turned up like nothing had happened. This morning he ran out the door into the snow and I didn't really think he'd leave. I thought he'd walk out into the cold and then he'd turn around and come back in. But he didn't. And now I'm worried. I keep going outside and calling for him but so far there is no answer. I wonder if he has another home somewhere else and they have been wondering where he has been for the last month. The damn cat, as my husband says. Sirloin, my new little wandering boyfriend. I don't know what it is about me and black cats, but they always just appear and come live with me. Sirloin is the 5th I think. Tbone is our other one. They are so named because we figured that's what the dogs think they are. My first was when I was a kid, her name was Midnight. Then later when I was a teenager I had Lucifer. Funny to go out onto the porch and holler, "Lucifer, Lucifer"... Lucifer finally got run over. Then my greatest love, Newton. Newton appeared one day in my kitchen. He was a huge tomcat who loved me more than anything. We could just lie around and make out all day. When I left for college my mom moved into a new house and Newton didn't. He just kept running away and going back to the old house. Probably looking for me. I went to visit him one time and he had new people who called him Merlin. And then there was Satancat who doesn't really count because he was totally feral and hid out in our ceiling for a week peeing down upon us and spitting, until S put on his leather welding gloves and jacket and chased him out with a broom. Then Tbone. That was when we lived in Brooklyn and the rats were taking over our loft. One of the bikers across the street kept all the ferals in the neighborhood in his basement during winter. So we went to him one day and said we needed a kitten. He reached down into the cellar door and fished around in the dark for a minute and came up with a tiny little black cat. S put her into his jacket pocket and she has been with us ever since. And now Sirloin. He reminds me of Newton. And he loves only me. At least in this house. I'm not sure how many other gals he strings around in the neighborhood...

after pondering all night, i feel compelled to add that every year i get a manicure set or a shopper's drug mart make up kit. every year.
i'm wondering who will get me such a gift this year. are they trying to tell me something?
the fact of the matter is, i feel quite comfortable in my skin. and becoming a mother was the transition from ambiguous ambivalent feministy confused girl to critical thinking kick ass feminist mama. and my body has a hell of a lot to do with that.
before becoming pregnant, i went through many phases of trying to control the way my body looked by diet, exercise. then in mania i didn't care so much about my body. i was far from grounded but finally grounded in my sexuality. sort of.
i was comfortable demanding good sex. i broke up with the boy how never 'heard' me when i whinced and cried NO. i refused pain. if i was going to put my body in a compromising situation, i was the one in the pilot seat.
then i got pregnant. my body changed, i ate whatever the hell i wanted. i grew harper on big mac's, bacon and chocolate mousse cake.
after i birthed her, which was a situation i felt less than in control of, vulnerable. disciplined. powerless. docile.
but i birthed my daughter and i gave birth to a righteous strong mama. a new empowered part of myself. my life has changed alot.
breastfeeding gave me confidence in my ability to mother, and taught me to trust and love my body.
with every day, month, year i become confident in my sexuality, grounded in my body.
i engage aspects of myself in identity politics to bring the issues to the foreground that i feel compelled to, that i feel willed to do.
i name myself Other mother, bad mama. i deny the good mother and take back, reclaim the right to parent the way i need to. and i feel strong for it.
i have a strong well thought rhetoric, to back up my ideals.
i just wanted to add that so i don't forget tomorrow when i continue work on my project. it's due on monday, but have to remember that being a mother is a huge part of my experience i need to incorporate. and that also has everything to do with my body.

Snow on the ground. It’s early this year. I mean, we usually get a little snow by Thanksgiving, but nothing that sticks and stays. This is sticking and staying. There was another 3-6 inch storm predicted last night, so I went to bed thinking that we’d have a snow day today – that it would be a quiet day at home and I would clean up the house, and make a pot of chili and enjoy The Boy running in and out in his snow clothes. But when I woke up this morning? No new snow. I was seriously bummed. So bummed, in fact, that I actually decided to let The Boy sleep in and come to school with me at noon when I was due to show up and be a lunch mom. This plan did not work very well since he only slept in by about 45 minutes and then was terribly cranky all morning. Then I was lunch mom. Then my big sister called and we chatted the rest of my afternoon away because we haven’t talked for ages and had a lot to catch up on, then it was time to pick up The Boy again. The Anti Snow Day, actually.

I am thinking about my writing again. Is it bad that I keep coming up with new projects? I was thinking about writing something about my house – a little memoir maybe? Something about the life I have here? Just a thought… I really need to pick something and god damn stick to it. I really need to just fucking write SOMETHING. Argh. Find some arc to the running narrative in my head.

Play date tomorrow. With someone who could care less whether or not my house is clean. But I’ll clean it anyway. Hoping that R will work from home because I have a feeling that my car is about to get a flat tire. Judging from the sound it was making – like something was caught in the tire and then suddenly flew out. Never a good sound to hear. I really need to learn to change a tire. I’ve been shown a couple of times – but I need to actually do it so that I know I can if I have to. All the way home today listening to that sound I was just praying, “don’t go flat before I get home! Don’t go flat until I get home!� And I didn’t. But I am guessing I’m going to walk out and see it that way tomorrow morning. Yay.

Two days later - - never finished the above 300 Words. Waiting on another snow day. This one seems like it’s really going to happen. They’re predicting anywhere from 10 to 12 inches, supposed to start falling very early in the morning tomorrow and continue on until the late afternoon. It’s weird to have serious snow this early in the year. Anyway, this time I’m preparing for a real snow day. R is working from home tomorrow, I’m sure The Boy won’t have school. I went to the market this afternoon and loaded up on things to roast. I love roasting things in my new oven – convection is awesome. I finally made that pot of chili this evening. Tonight I will get the house really really clean before I go to bed so we can just relax tomorrow and enjoy the snow coming down. I love waking up to a spanking clean house and since I know I get to sleep in tomorrow morning, I don’t mind staying up to clean. The Boy and I just finished watching a marathon viewing of The Barefoot Contessa (the cooking show, not the Ava Gardner movie). He was very interested in how she made tuna tartar. He thought I should make some, though he declared he would NEVER EVER eat it. But he thought maybe his dad and I would like it. He’s right. We probably would. Ina Garten is someone who has grown on me a lot in the last year or so. I had one of her cookbooks for a long time – I bought it and read it and felt disappointed – everything seemed kind of plain and simple (and not in a good way) on the page – so I didn’t actually cook anything from it for a long time. Then I tried one thing, and another, and another and everything I made was really easy and delicious. So I got another of her cookbooks, and started watching her show. Before I knew it, I had ALL of her cookbooks and The Boy and I watch marathon showings. I like that she’s fat and beautiful – she has that gorgeous skin and I always wonder what the hell she uses on her hair to make it look so shiny and healthy. I also think there’s something kind of sad about her aspect – like she seems a little lonely to me even though she’s got all these fantastic good looking gay men around her doing her table settings, and a brilliant academic husband who shows up every weekend for his roast chicken. Maybe because she used to work for Nixon? (Oh yes she did! She and her husband!). Maybe because she doesn’t have kids – though that’s totally conjecture on my part. I mean, not everyone wants kids. I get that. But she seems kind of into kids… so I wonder. Anyway, yeah – it’s funny how she’s sort of captured my imagination. And I’m not the only one – my sister and I had like an hour long conversation about her the other night. And not just about how much butter she uses in everything. She and Nigella Lawson (a widow – another incredibly beautiful and rather plump woman who makes her living in food. Her last cookbook had a chapter about funeral feasts – I thought that was brilliant – I have so much to say about the necessity of food when it comes to grief ) – they both fascinate me in a way that Jennifer Aniston never will. They are women who aren’t afraid of pleasure. I mean, most American women look to celebrities for role models – they want to be that thin, that rich, that “perfect�. But I think there is something so much more satisfying about these women who have obviously embraced pleasure – in food, in the abundance of their lives, in their figures, - that’s who I want to be. The woman who never looks like she denies herself pleasure. I don’t want rock hard thighs. I don’t want a macrobiotic diet. I don’t want to obsessively exercise. I don’t want to date actors. I want skin and hair that looks like I eat a lot of olive oil. I want a big group of lovely funny friends. I want long walks in the woods. I want a beautiful place to live. I want to know how to make guests in my home feel comfortable. I want an overflowing rose garden. I want a lot of sex. I want lots and lots of dessert. Good bread toasted and slathered with butter and jam for breakfast. I want foamy steaming cups of chai tea. I don’t want 365 days of 75 degree weather. I want the seasons. I want snow days. I want wine with my dinner. I want two cosmopolitans before dinner, damn it! I want my silvered stretch marks. I want my laugh lines. I want time to read books. Soft, runny cheeses. I want my bed piled up with down and cotton. My warm good husband. My delightful, funny child. I want my three crazy dogs, my three cozy cats. My oversized chair. Overflowing book shelves. More music than we could listen to in a year. I want to know how to comfort someone with a bowl of homemade soup. I want my flickering little fire. Why do we envy the women who deny themselves? Who diet down to disappearing? Who take up no room? Who look so fragile? Who can’t have a piece of bread? Why in the world do we want that for ourselves? No, I’ll look to the cooks for my role models.

Speaking of which, it’s time for dinner.

Nothing is real until it is recorded.
-Virginia Woolf

whenever i go to a big city, namely new york, i just have to go to sephora's. i'm drawn there. i don't know why. i don't even wear make up. i don't shave or even spend money on tampons, the last thing on my mind is finding that perfect shade of lip gloss that promises to smell of rose gardens but is named after some famous dead drug addict. it's all very strange to me.
i used to wear make up in junior high school. 14 and 15 years old, black eyeliner, thick, deep blood red lipstick with a coat of black over top, contrasting against my ultra white complexion. i had severe anemia from undiagnosed crohn's disease. i was china white. it was very stark. it wasn't the way i knew i was 'supposed' to wear make up.
when i went to theatre school i learned how to apply thick layers of ben nye's grease paint. that also was not the way to wear it for everyday.
occasionally i wear some make up, no doubt purchased in a moment of flustery commodity fetishism and convinced of my (false) needs. eyeliner, mascara, one of those 'curlers' that looks like an eyeball slicing device, some lip gloss and maybe some foundation or powder. you know to cover that acne i've been battling ever since i gave birth.
so i have this secret little stash of makeup for dressups. it's funny to admit that when i was seriously manic i spent alot of money on nail polish. i have at least 30 bottles of 6 year old varnish in every color imaginable. and a few black just in case. but make up, never had much time for that.
so on occasion i'll have somewhere to go. and when i am waiting. waiting for guests to arrive, waiting for my ride, waiting. i get really anxious. first i start messing with my hair, bad idea. i get out the curling iron which i most certainly not equipped for its use. hair spray gives me migraines and all that. it's best avoided. just shower, towel dry and comb it. ta da.
well, not when i get all flustered about waiting. soon my head is sporting barets, hair bands, elastics, curls, kinks and spray. and i'm general displeased with the results and end up dunking my head and starting fresh.
then i start changing my outfit. i usually start out in jeans and a tshirt, then move to a nicer shirt and jeans, then a top and a skirt, then a skirt and tshirt and finally back to jeans and a tshirt, and my trusty black converse sneakers. (although i admit i generally end up in a different bra than the one i started out in, and a different shirt...same jeans though).
i find it completely impossible to achieve that look that isn't dressy. i can't do an inbetween casual make up/day wear whatever you call it. when i try to just add some eyeliner, it's all down hill from there.
by the time i get home i can't wait to get it all off my face, get in my pjs and hang out. even when i host parties, i may start out with some make up and wearing a decent shirt, maybe even a skirt...if i nair'd my legs that month.
-side note: i don't shave, nor have i shaved since i was pregnant in 2000/1 but on occassion i do nair my legs. my hair is black and thicker than jared's. i still vividly remember the day i was 12 and i wore shorts in the spring and a boy in my class said "eewwwww why are your legs so hairy? don't you shave them?" i hadn't even gotten my period yet. i had no breasts. but i had black black thick leg hair and i was mortified. i asked my mom if i could shave and i remember the look on her face when i rolled up the cuff of my pants to show her the hair she didn't know was there. yes, she told me i was allowed to.
so if i've nair'd then i may wear a skirt or a dress, but only with my big boots. i don't wear or even own any high heels. the three days of my life i was the most fancy for was 12th grade graduation, and i had a migraine from all the hairspray. my wedding, i wore my hair down and minimal makeup that i had professionals apply. and every christmas.
every christmas i wear this red silk taffeta skirt, it's floor length with black tassles all over it. it was my grandmother's and she was given it as a gift from my great grandfather in 1951, the year my father was born. now i wear the skirt. i feel like a cupie doll in it. i kind of like it though cause everyone else looks terribly uncomfortable in thier pantyhose (of which i own NONE) and their christmas sweaters and slacks. i look vintage. i like it.
i wear my fancy vintage glasses to go with the skirt and i look like a very fancy librarian.
i don't think so much about my gender in terms of how i dress or 'fix' myself. how i prepare daily. i generally take pride in going out with the dudes (all my friends are dudes) and wearing jeans and sneakers just like them...cept' they say i am the hot dude. they would probably laugh at me if i dressed up.
i know the other day jared thought it was rather ridiculous of me to put on make up just to go for dinner. and i felt weird like i was being seen. walking through the restaurant to the washroom, i was ultra aware of my gender and my sexed body. woman/female.
it feels safer being the hot dude. invisible. no fuss no muss.

If the heat is on in this office, I sure can't feel it. I think it wouldn't be so bad if I had a sweater on between my turtleneck and my jacket, but I don't.

And I have a cold. So between my numb fingers and the constant chill in my legs (I have dd's thick blanket over my lap right now) and my stuffy head, I just know that I'm not gonna get anything done.

Good start this morning before the cold (both of them) kicked in. Woke up and, in that state between being fully awake and active and wanting to go back to sleep, started formulating part of that grant proposal that I've been struggling with for the past couple of days. Wrote it down, came to work, typed it up.

Addressed some letters to women in prison which I'd been meaning to do for a while. Now all I need to do is write my return address on them, stamp them and send them out. I should go to the post office today to buy some media mail stamps, but it's cold and that chill in my legs is only gonna get worse in biting wind. I'm not looking forward to the walk home; maybe I'll pick dd up, take her to the community center where she can get her meds and hustle her out early enough that we can transfer to a bus (if one comes, that is) and not have to walk all 12 long blocks in the biting, freezing, fucking cold.

My house is gonna be cold, cold, cold...Will have to blast the space heater and maybe make us some chai or hot chocolate to warm us up once we get home. I really just want to snuggle under all the blankets and shut the rest of the world out, but I don't think dd will let me do that. Maybe she'll decide that *she* wants to go to bed early too and we'll just call it a night by 7.

I wonder if I doze off now if I'll wake up in time to pick up dd from school or if I run the risk of oversleeping.

I completed T's gift last night. Bought the last item, checked everything for incriminating price tags, wrote the letter, and dumped it all in a basket for B to pack and ship at work today.

I took V out with me to shop for the lotion, and we stopped at Starbucks afterward for some coffee and talk. And petite cookies, too, of course. Funny, when I tell V that the next stop is a super-secret mystery stop, she just giggles with delight and we go. When I tell F something like that, she immediately starts guessing. She's pretty good at guessing, too; not that there are many places to choose from. My mind always runs to coffee.

Today, V and P are out sledding with friends for most of the afternoon, so I took F out to buy cookie ingredients. Shockingly, we bought ready-made cookie dough, but that's not for the house. Their youth-group study thingy is having a cookie baking event tonight, and they need to bring, variously, cookie dough and decorating stuff. I would have mixed up a batch of sugar cookie dough and sent it along, but I feel like making chocolate chip cookies with F instead. Besides, I don't have a good sugar cookie recipe. I finally remembered to e-mail my mother for her sand tart recipe today, but there is no way she'll get back to me in time for tonight.

I had such a good time taking F out today. She's still young enough that the idea of shopping for groceries with Mama is still exciting. Since we were only getting a few things, she asked if we could get one of the shopping baskets instead of a cart, and then she carried it enthusiastically. I let her pick the decorator sugars and jimmies for tonight and for making cookies later, and of course she took forever. There were, what, maybe eight choices? or less, and she needed to pick three. She stood there forever, picking up first one, then the other, and asking me questions about what we would use them for and what the different ones were like. Meanwhile I wandered up and down the baking aisle finding nuts and chocolate chips and powdered sugar. Powdered sugar proved to be too far away (everything else was right next to the decorator stuff) and she came wandering down to see what I was doing.

There were no petite cookies out at Starbucks, unfortunately. I thought about asking if they had them (since they're featuring them for the holidays) but by the time I'd made up my mind to ask, F had already decided on a matched set of pumpkin latte and pumpkin scone. When it's V, she likes to spend time talking to me while we have our drinks (although she's as likely to want to come home and hole up in my room on the big bed to do it.) F isn't nearly as introspective, and she's a lot younger, so she likes to bring everything home and sit down and eat, then play. Mama optional. Which is fine with me. I need to take time to sit down and write, and I slept in too late this morning to get anything done before the kids left for sledding, and after that I needed to get the shopping done before they came back.

I've been aiming for at least 1000 words a day since finishing with NaNoWriMo. I was right about one thing: it's an easy goal after doing 2000 words a day all through November. I was right about something else, too: I wondered if I would feel as though I was underachieving, writing only 1000 words a day, and sure enough, I do. I'm working on being pleased, instead. 1000 words doesn't take me long, it advances the story nicely in a work session, and I'm getting it done with extra every day. NaNoWriMo seems to have instilled in me the habit of working daily on something serious, which after all was what I was hoping when I started, much more than that I would get something useable out of the business. Every day I have at least 1000 words to point to and say, "I accomplished this." So it's all good.

my pixote essay is done. all 12 pages of it. jared said it's actually readable, as in, i must have fixed my brain.
i woke up sick this morning. it's been a completely fruitless day. i was supposed to go to study group this evening for pop culture/feminism. i think i'm on the up and up with my a