Screaming Lady

Top 10 Social Media WORST Practices

2010-03-11T19:30:00.001-08:00

It's called "social" for a reason. Social works when you listen well, give generously, and collaborate. Otherwise, you're standing on a soapbox in an empty room.

Top 10 Social Media WORST Practices

View more presentations from Chris Wallace.

The Uncertainty Principle of Modern Language

2010-02-24T19:22:00.000-08:00

Back for a quick visit to post this important message. It should be required viewing in high school English, to begin with.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Off the Ground and Into the Coop

2010-01-24T23:59:00.000-08:00

Like pastured chicken farms, these things grow organically.

Visit The Social Coop experiment. See you back here in a year.

Pecking new ground on the social media farm

2009-12-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

The Screaming Lady started off as a sort of private water cooler where I’d go with the ladies in the novel I am writing to take a work break. It was part of a deal my husband/editor/compass requested if I was to leave my communications consultancy and enter a two-year (he thought one) hermitage, knowing where the media world was headed and why I needed to keep in touch with it. Blogging was fits and starts of mostly ramblings on nature, travel, kids and served as a kind of reverse thermometer for the novel’s progress. That is, the more my three or four readers got from the blog, the less the novel was getting out of me. Extrapolate that to dabblings in Facebook and a community network I created, a few blogs whipped up for friends and family, video projects that made it all so much more fun, Flickr, Picassa, and LinkedIN, and well, you get it. Then, last February, when economic forces forced me out of creative self-indulgence, Screaming Lady the blog swapped sweat pants for slacks and set about morphing into a portfolio of health care writing. She quickly joined Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN accounts where all the other communications strategists already were social marketing away to their social networks in the social media space.

Screaming Lady has evolved again as the buds of business have begun to break, her boots are getting muddy, and tilling the social media soil calls for a more rugged pair of work pants. The metaphor trail intentionally veers to farming references here for a reason: At the beginning of 2010, the Lady begins a year-long social media science experiment taking a small pastured egg and chicken farm in Solano County, California, into marketing orbit. Soul Food Farms and I are working in trade: owner farmer Alexis Koefoed can begin marketing her pastured eggs and chickens, her community service agriculture program (CSA), and cooking school, and I get to tame the social media dervish to a local scale, where the analytics point directly to the communications efforts, and we can draw some straightforward ROI from it. Together with a few colleagues, advisers, and social media gurus (including aforementioned compass), we’ll start with the bare essentials, move to some simple basics, and expand to more creative tools and techniques. We’ll seek advice, try some moves, switch gears if they don’t work – all in a very public blog (a temporary detour from ScreamingLady) that will expose the challenges and test the promises we have all come to know as the holy grail of new media marketing.

We also hope to get some fresh and tasty eggs and chicken out of the deal.

First, Do No Spin

2009-11-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

When people talk about communications strategy or public relations, "spin" is a cheeky term many like to use to describe a handily-worded defense strategy. And they are correct on occasion. Thankfully, ninety nine percent of illuminating conversations don't cover the topic of public relations, so when the word "spin" comes into one, it's usually the ill-advised celebrity version often employed in high stakes crisis communications. Like when Wall Street banks are vilified for multi-million dollar bonuses during the economic wreckage and ruin of businesses, communities, and families. When sports heroes' mug shots are plastered across TV screens during news coverage of domestic violence cases. When quietly composed, ashen-faced wives conspire at the confessional stanchion to exonerate their philandering politician husbands.

The rest of the time, communications, messaging, and public relations is comparatively mundane: help companies identify and understand their target audience and articulate their product or service in terms that matter to said audience (sometimes contrary to what organizations think). To those of us in "the business," it's cool. But to businesses that count on us, it's like taking vitamins: good for them, but better taken once a day, trusting the benefits are quietly at work in the background.

When Graham Bowley, in a New York Times article on Wall Street spin, served up five pieces of low-spin, relatively folksy advise to Wall Street on the verge of reporting profits on track to exceed those at the height of the credit bubble, a lot of us flaks were grateful that for once a true picture of "the real communications department" came through. That is, most of the time, we simply recommend you use plain talk, speak the truth, and do good. No, seriously.

So, when the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, an independent health care agency highly respected for its dissociation from deep pockets and politics, neglected to explain to millions of alarmed women, doctors, and advocacy groups why they suddenly reversed breast cancer screening guidelines that kept most women feeling, well, safe from harm, we wish they'd read Bowley's piece first. Not that they tried to manipulate anyone nor that their findings were in any way disingenuous. They just didn't seem to think people would need more than a quick announcement. Curiously, women, doctors, and advocacy groups blasted the alarms, but by the time the USPSTF rushed to the talk shows to defend what turned out to be some well-researched, well-founded guidelines, the damage was done.

A cautionary tale is delivered by hindsight, so to put a spin on another profession's oath to place a priority on the client's best interests, we offer the following advice that Bowley quotes from Richard Edelman, a New York public relations executive:

"Show you create real products that benefit people.

. . . one of the best things Wall Street could do now is clearly “explain how you make your money and why your business model makes sense for a stakeholder society.”

If they can demonstrate in vivid terms the real role they play in the economy — by helping companies borrow money to grow and create jobs, for example — they might also justify their profits and pay."

In other words, whatever the occasion, but especially when the news is unwelcome, be up front. Commit to taking the time to talk it through. Explain how you solve a problem. Use practical, straightforward talk. In the end, you'll have to defend yourself a whole lot less than if all that gold you're spinning turns out a poor excuse for the emperors clothes.

In a word, the difference between fact and news

2009-11-22T16:44:00.000-08:00

In my strategic communications partnership, Left/Right Strategies, we promote documentaries. My business partner and I took on a daring independent film called The Living Matrix about a year ago. The Living Matrix puts a cerebral health and healing slant on a style the industry describes as, for lack of precedent, "What the Bleep Do We Know." A collection of interviews with scientists and researchers along with real stories of energy healings, it explores the science of bioenergetic health care in hopes of contributing to the discussion about what constitutes our health and wellbeing.

Huh?

We had to ask: "Explore?" "Contribute?" That's it? This is one of the biggest thrills we get in the communications biz. We get to tell important, gutsy entrepreneurs, "No, that's not what you do." And because entrepreneurs love a devil's advocate, they cut us some slack. That's when we get to say, "That's what you ARE. That's not what you do." And because they hired us to tell the difference, we impart two pieces of advice:

1. What you have to offer is a fact.
2. The problem you solve is news.

So, in the case of our documentary, we told the filmmakers that it is a fact, and a good one, that the film explores the science. But it is news because it challenges conventional medicine to revise its understanding of human biology. . . that scientific evidence shows energy and information are as critical as genetics in determining health and wellbeing." We love documentaries because they walk the talk with one foot in journalism and the other in advocacy. Our advocacy headline for The Living Matrix, eight months later, continues to shake it up on health and healing blogs and websites around the globe. Facebook fanship went from 2 to 2000 in six months. And 20,000 DVDs were sold in about that same time.

Interestingly, the second documentary we represented, another exploration into the science of consciousness and matter, came to us from a communications consultant who didn't have the bandwidth to continue the job. The news in her original press release pretty much stated a good solid fact: "New Documentary Reveals the Science Behind Psychic Phenomena." Good deal. But with a single word - again "challenge" came to mind - the news went from "here we are," to "we tap into the frustrations of people around the globe who want concrete evidence to explain paranormal and psychic experiences."

The real news, "New Documentary Challenges Science to Demystify Paranormal and Psychic Experience," hit this month, and the film has enjoyed a happy spike in DVD sales on the website. What a difference a word makes.

Rethinking the Mission Statement, part 1

2009-11-22T00:04:00.000-08:00

New celiac disorder research coincides with gluten-free food bounty

2009-10-27T12:34:00.001-07:00

Cameo Edwards, founder of Crave, a San Francisco Bakery, is one of many pastry chefs whose diagnosis of celiac disease led to entrepreneurial ventures in the gluten-free food market. Read about
new celiac disorder research that coincides with the Bay Area's gluten-free fo od bounty.

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Poetry in Search of Placebo

2009-08-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

Searching for scientific research on the placebo effect tonight generated two gems produced by the same source:

Healing Words website, a platform where medicine and poetry converge. Dr. David Watts of San Francisco is one of the site's producers.
I stumbled upon his commentary on the power of the placebo effect recorded by NPR in 2003.

Poetry. Science. New Thought.

Studies on science of prayer underscore Race for the Cure participant's mission

2009-08-27T19:10:00.001-07:00

Photo: Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies the relationship between consciousness and matter.

Last in a series that introduces SFKomen Race for the Cure participant Char Maassen and the science studies behind alternative healing she credits with her 10-year survival of two breast cancer diagnoses. In Part One, science reveals a correlation between support group participation and reduced stress, a factor in healing. In Part Two, science supports Maassen's claim that prayer influenced the success of hormone therapy, which ultimately eliminated lesions on her lungs. In this installment: the scientific studies that link prayer, intention, and compassion to health and healing.

Bay Area Breast Cancer Survivor Uses "Race for the Cure" to Highlight Healing Power of Prayer

2009-08-21T02:07:00.001-07:00

In Part 1, San Francisco Race for the Cure participant Char Maassen credited support groups with helping her survive two breast cancer diagnoses. In Part 2, she reveals how her increasing reliance on prayer correlated to some shocking test results that she can't explain but which scientists are beginning to support with empirical evidence.

Bay Area Breast Cancer Survivor Uses "Race for the Cure" to Highlight Healing Power of Prayer

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Local cancer survivor in SF Race for the Cure on 10-year milestone: part 1, support groups

2009-08-18T14:58:00.001-07:00

Meet Char Maassen, a double breast cancer survivor, and learn about the Bay Area support groups and community events like next month’s Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure that give patients strength that scientists say improves survival and long-term health.

Local cancer survivor in SF Race for the Cure on 10-year milestone: part 1, support groups

As health care investment, organic food advocates offer ideas to stay bountiful on a budget

2009-08-14T15:34:00.001-07:00

Lean economic times may tempt some consumers to steer their shopping carts past organic food choices and opt for lower-priced groceries even if it means increasing their exposure to toxic pesticides. But Bay Area organic food advocates urge shoppers to stay the course, offering a bounty of smart ideas to stretch their organic grocery dollar along with advice not to be misled by straight price comparisons. Read more on link below:

As health care investment, organic food advocates offer ideas to stay bountiful on a budget

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Pictured, Jessica Prentice, author of The Full Moon Feast, is a Bay Area chef and organic food advocate. Photo by Foster Wiley

Government-Run Health Care in the New-Age Economy: Hand-Outs More Okay; What Elephant?

2009-06-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling. Maybe you got laid off. Or your surviving parent needs to move in. Or, hey, let's say your health insurance plan's fine print just kicked in and your out-of-pocket just drained the retirement account. What do you do first? That feeling in your gut, the panic, gets you to cut back instantly, right? You cut coupons, buy generic and in bulk, take a bagged lunch, fill the jar with found coins. If it gets worse, maybe you have to let some bills slide. Depending on your situation, maybe you have to sell stuff; maybe even your house. That's the level of desperation that seems to have hit Americans facing health care reform. When the economy was good, most of us could shut the windows, turn on the AC, and avoid the alarms about rising health care costs. Someone who had constituents affected by the problem would take care of it eventually. But, once the jobless rate neared the 6 percent mark in the Indian summer of our economic turmoil, maybe the electric bill went unpaid, because suddenly everyone was opening the windows.

The problems of health insurance, access to care, and rising out-of-pocket costs used to stay tucked neatly out of public policy sight because, let's face it, it afflicted mostly immigrants right? And people who weren't ambitious enough to get a college degree and a reliable job or who made poor choices that landed them in trouble, right? But now that more and more of us near the proverbial "other side of the tracks" -if we haven't crossed already - suddenly it's about all of us, and the panic about access to and cost of health care seems to render banal other concerns like food on the table and meeting the mortgage payment. A look at today's New York Times poll on government-run health insurance reveals that suddenly almost three-quarters of the country supports a government-backed insurance plan and nearly sixty percent are willing to spread the wealth (and receive less luxurious care) to cover folks who are unable to afford it. Huh. Suddenly, it's okay for those less affected by these problems to make the sacrifices that will cover people now affected or threatened by them.

Let's clarify in terms of numbers: Health care spending in 2007 amounted to 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), up from 13 percent in 2000. Between 2006 and 2007, the increase of 6.1 percent in health care spending far outpaced the GDP, which grew by 4.8 percent in that same timeframe, according to the Commerce Department. We spent nearly $7500 per person on health care in 2007. It used to be statistics like these were concealed by stalled legislation and in the shadows of poll results for American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. Now, everyone suddenly seems to be aware that by 2018, nearly one-fifth of the nation's spending will go towards health care.

So today, according to the NYT poll conducted this month, we're more willing to pay higher taxes for a government plan (57%). Half of us -versus 30 percent in 2007 - think the government would better private insurers in providing medical coverage, and 59 percent versus 47 percent in 20007 believe it will hold down health care costs better than private insurers. That's a big change of heart in one year. Like some big ol' wind came blowing through all those open windows.

But in our panic to regroup and restructure to meet our newfound altruistic ideals, no one is acknowledging loudly enough the elephant in the room: The size and weight of a government-run plan could create similarly sizable cost burdens and bloat its bureaucracy, negating intended gains in effectiveness. People who remember when Medicare and Medicaid could produce new illnesses just by participating in the plan know about government-run health care. Veterans who received the 92 botched prostrate cancer treatments out of 116 performed in a span of six years at the Philadelphia Veterans Hospital know about government-run health care.

With most Americans now facing real threats to their ability to afford and receive decent health care, an overhaul of the system is, miraculously, near. But don't be fooled. This isn't going to get us much closer to a good night's sleep. In fact, it's going to throw off our whole circadian rhythm of entitlement. We'll pay, and pay a lot. And we'll have to get used to less. Less choice. Less efficiency. Less of the best. The, um, good news is that more of us will get it.

Let's try to do this without so much panic, though. That's never a good way to make the big decisions.

To Skin a Rattlesnake

2009-06-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

Twenty six years ago, I made my first trip to the Fuller family cabin in remote Gravelly Valley, California. East Coast girl's first pioneering adventure in the wild west. There I strolled with my mother in a field of dry grass, where we considered that more than a century earlier on that same plain, hardy ladies in white cotton dresses and bonnets danced to fiddle tunes with gentlemen in black trousers and suspenders. We walked by the swimming pool buried under the silt of the '64 flood waters that washed down the valley a whole compound of rustic cabins, stables, and dining hall along with all the creature comforts of society life delivered from San Francisco. We poked around some broken boards of a washed-out walkway that surrounded the pool when we heard an unsettling sound. We'd been instructed to run if we heard the rattlesnake's warning, so we did. The fellas -- Brian (now my husband), his father George, and brother Kirk -- asked if we might have mistaken a cicadas' pitch there in the June heat, but if there's anything you know better than any other North American if you're from the humid Eastern Seaboard, it's cicadas. We shot them our look, and they grabbed the trident and a shovel. According to the Gravelly rattlesnake code: take no chances where your babies sleep, we had to kill it. The photo above was taken just a moment before the look of horror that came to my face when the field mouse digesting inside that rattler dropped green and slimy out of the beheaded end.

Fast forward to last Saturday; same time of year, damned near same spot where those broken walkway boards lay scattered like bleached bones. This time, the pool is cleaned out, and our son Malcolm and his friend Remington were clearing the old drainage when a big ol' rattler caught their attention. Where Gravelly code trumps animal rights in our little neck of the wilderness, off came its head (but not without second thoughts about passing this legacy onto the kids in front of us). We bury the head to keep animals from chomping onto the venom pouches in its cheeks. As we all stood around marveling at the impulses continuing to make the headless body coil and slither, I suggested we go on in to get a closer look at the decentralized nervous system inside. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, the thrill of biology filled the air, and they knew: a field dissection would be taking place that afternoon. The boys and men gave me a strange look that suggested they were intrigued but had other things suddenly on their agendas.

Remington had a utility knife with a serrated edge on one blade and sharp straight edge on the other. With dramatic ceremony, I removed the rattle and handed the trophy over to him, as my father-in-law had done for my mother and me a quarter century earlier. It's a mistake to think the segments on a rattle indicate age like the rings in a tree trunk. They gain new segments each time they shed their skin, which can occur several times a year.

I carried the body back to the cabin grounds where I nailed it to a tree to drain. A few hours later, I secured it to a board and began the necropsy. The photo to the left shows the first cut, and the ones below show my laboratory, the midsection cut, and the skin drying on the board after I cleaned it in the creek. (Admittedly at that point it had become a badge of honor.)

I spare you the macro-lens close-ups I took of the various stages of dissection (but if you have the stomach for it, click on the links below), during which I learned:

The skin comes away quite easily from the flesh; only a thin membrane and some white fibers binds them.
The skin around the tail end is tougher and more tightly bound to the flesh.
A long silver cord extends from the neck and reminded me of a spinal cord without the vertebrae to protect it. This is the snake's trachea; it ends near the heart.
The main organs gather about three inches below the head. It's the only place the body bleeds.
Gas exchanges that occur near the lungs were still functioning after I cut; thin membranes filled up like bubbles.
Fat collected around the other end, over the kidneys, small intestine and colon.
You simply can't appreciate the intricate pattern on a snake skin until it lays flat.
Rattlesnakes have scent glands at their tail; I didn't see them.

Removing the skin

Main organs
Gallbladder
Kidney

The Sounds of Science, Part II

2009-05-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

Warning: the following story contains subject matter considered offensive to people who favor cute things. Scroll to the bottom for the happy ending. Hitchcock-lovers, read on.

Another hike, another bird. Probably on a first solo flight. It fluttered clumsily from its perch to a tree limb 12 or 15 feet away. The onomatopoetic sound of a gawky little Bewick's wren during a practice flight is as you'd expect, especially if it nearly stumbles into your left ear: Lots of spluttering flaps and flops.

But it was quite another sound of science nature's near-encounter called to mind for the remainder of the hike. It was a sound that occurred almost 14 years ago in the yard of a little cottage that we'd just moved into with our two toddlers. This 100-year-old summer retreat built as an escape from San Francisco's foggy season nests in a stand of redwoods at the foot of Mt. Tamalpais in the leafy little town of Larkspur. A postage-stamp-sized forest full of ferns, dogwood, magenta rhododendrons, and camellia trees, the yard was packed with bugs and birds and woodland creatures that enchanted the kids and me day and night. One spring morning, when I was weeding around a camellia tree, I heard the squeaky little squawks of newly hatched robins in a nest just a few feet above my head. I hustled the kids over to the tree for that up-close experience with outdoor biology at the heart of the reason we'd moved there. "Watch!" I whispered to convey appropriate awe. And just as they lifted their little chins to the sky, a stringy brown mass of mucous dropped from the nest, and before I could shield their eyes, caught by its malformed head in the Y of a branch where it hung lifeless and limp.

Obviously something went horribly wrong in that nest; very likely, one of the eggs was attacked by a Stellar's Jay or an aggressive sparrow who hadn't finished lunch before the mom returned. The sound in this science story? Let's just call it the "soundlessness of science." About three long minutes of it, accompanied by dropped jaws and bulging eyes. Then the kids took off crying while I stood frozen in the stunned mute numbness of my backyard biology lab. Still, ugly is part of nature's beauty, so if this story inspires anything, how about taking part in next year's backyard bird count?

In closing and by way of an up-note, here's a little something I made out of another backyard ornithological adventure.

Michael Pollan: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

2009-04-29T14:55:00.001-07:00

There are so many reasons to listen to this interview with Michael Pollan, journalism professor at UC Berkeley and author of books including "In Defense of Food" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma." If you care about the planet, community farms, local labor, your health, go for it. But, here's the journalism genius to this guy: count the sound bites. His talk is riddled with them. Genius PR comes from journalist turned accidental avocate.

Michael Pollan: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

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The Sounds of Science

2009-04-25T11:25:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, I climbed a giant fir tree to look inside the nest of a morning dove. What I remember most about the experience was the deep silence among the branches 50 feet off the ground, and the intensity of wildlife sounds set against that silence. The rush of wind through the branches. The sweet falsetto of the spring robin. Cicadas' squawks piercing the sky. From that perch, I heard in my backyard the sounds of the serenity my childhood lacked in other places, and that moment probably inspired for good a preference for the pleasures of outdoor science. Another inspiration came when I made the mistake of creeping far out on the limb where the nest perched, convinced the mother bird would sense my benevolent nature and welcome my approach dearly. Of course, her instinct to flee was ineluctable, and she took off, leaving two stone-white orbs to rot in her absence.

The lesson learned when the poetic yearnings of a country girl met the reality of science stuck. Distance is the only way to express one's intimacy out there.

This morning, I thought about that moment in the tree-top while hiking along a surprisingly silent Corte Madera ridge on Mt. Tamalpais, which rises up above my current backyard. For some reason, whether the breeze blew a certain direction or the cool air slowed the wakings of wildlife, the otherwise more subtle tones of nature were particularly magnified in that early hour. The rustle of drying overgrown grasses against my bare legs. The clicking jaws of munching caterpillars in the oaks overhead. The ghostly wail of a hungry hawk beyond the canopy. And bees. Where ever I went, the sound of bee swarms followed, as though this was a day of some great feeding frenzy on the nectar of new April blooms.

At one point on a narrow deer path, shrubs of Rock Rose and Pride of Madiera crowded the thoroughfare. I stopped when I realized they were alive with the urgent beating wings of bees hovering over the pistals of the blue and purple blossoms, and from the waist down, I stood in the middle of one of nature's most primal events. Bees, in their hysteria, darted on and off their flight paths, occasionally plunking loudly against my legs, and then hurling themselves back into the shrubs to join the others desperately drilling their proboscises deep into the flowers' styles to penetrate the nectar-filled ovaries. Considering their mission, it was easy to see why this was one time nature might overlook my presence so up close and personal. So I took advantage of the moment, letting the chainsaw sound of their spasms surround me and defying the potential danger of a sting or two.

Social Media Marketing Digestives from Seattle's Health Care Journalism Conference

2009-04-19T06:59:00.001-07:00

Jump on the social media bandwagon
Originally uploaded by Matt Hamm

Searching for an open coffee shop on an early Saturday morning in Seattle is like having to go out of your way to find a martini in San Francisco or file gumbo in New Orleans or taco trucks in Los Angeles. After a few visits, I'm learning and loving this town, but still figuring out whether its character is coming or going. More on that in Facebook.

At the Association of Health Care Journalists conference here, exploring the social media universe left the same impression. When Monica Guzman of SeattlePI.com (the digital leftovers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) reminded the audience of journalists, thank goodness, that it's social media, which invites writers to use an informal tone and not shy away from personal touches when posting on social media platforms, you could hear the mandibles clench. In healthcare, an informal tone is as elusive as this morning's first caffeine kick. And to journalists, getting personal is anathema to their "Hippocratic" oath. Both converged here to explain why so many people in the room resist social media as a platform for their work as well as self-marketing ideas like branding to help them compete. "I'm an investigative reporter! No way!" "I'm from the old school; advertising is still the dark side." "Twitter and Facebook are just a big waste of time."

I hope the humbling experiences bravely candidly shared by the new reluctant freelancers at this conference opened their minds because most of the folks I met were in or threatened by some sort of job transition. For the first time in my entire media relations career, the esteemed writers/reporters were questioning their place. Luckily, enough journalists had gracefully lept the social media divide and, while not all secure in their jobs, at least demonstrated the dignity and professionalism with which social media can be accomplished.

Alternative Medicine Even a Science Geek Can Embrace

2009-02-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

I was contracted recently to promote a new documentary called The Living Matrix, which will have its world premier at The Science of Healing Conference in London next month. Quite an assignment for a self-acclaimed science enthusiast: a film that challenges the conventional medical community to reconsider its understanding of human biology. Energy and information fields -- not genetics -- drive human physiology and biochemistry, the scientists and researchers in the film assert. Now, I'm no stranger to alternative health care. My kids have had engaged in energetic medicine for their food allergies, a sort of electrodermal screening of their energy fields and the ingestion of drops imprinted with healing information. For myself, I'm under the care of an integrative medicine practitioner MD who combines conventional and alternative care. I've also participated in energy healings, body work, homeopathy, yoga, and meditation. But the idea of redefining my beloved subject of biology to include energy and information fields was a stretch for me. Until I did the research for my writing assignments. Turns out, there's lots of science to back it up. Here's a sneak peak at one of the pieces I created for the documentary press kit:

What is bio-energetic medicine?

To understand bio-energetic medicine, you have to connect some dots that conventional medicine leaves unconnected. We know that all living things emit energy in the form of electromagnetic frequencies. We measure these frequencies in the heart with electrocardiographs (ECGs) and in the brain with electroencephalographs (EEGs). In fact, magneto encephalographs (MEGs) measure these frequencies in the brain without even touching the body, so we even acknowledge that these frequencies extend beyond the body; that they are being broadcast outside the physical structure. Next, when quantum physics was discovered 80 years ago, we all came to agree that matter, including the human body, is made up of subatomic particles that emit energy. And we know that these particles react with other particles to create more energy.

That’s a lot of energy moving through the human body, and thousands of years ago, these fields of energy were central to our understanding of health and wellness. That was when medical practitioners understood how these systems of energy interacted with the physical and chemical systems of the body to make us well, and how the disruption of these interactions made us ill. However, when scientists wanted to record the universe in measurable terms, they separated it into components that they could label: the mind from the body, people from each other, and space from time. Newton further defended the notion of the human body as a separate machine, the heart as a stand-alone mechanical pump, the brain as a distinct repository of information, and DNA as the only information the body needed to operate. Because the machines to measure and label energy were generations away, modern scientists defended the ultimate and most damaging separation of all: the separation of energy from biology. Eastern medicine continued to thrive on an understanding of the role of energy in human biology; Western medicine wanted evidence before it would reconsider.

Bio-energetic medicine brings back together the body’s energy systems with its chemical and physiological systems to reestablish a comprehensive understanding of human biology. And because we are all connected to and influenced by our environment, this energy exchange also includes the transfer of energy between the human body’s energy field and all other things around us that also emit energy. Because we now have ways to measure the human body’s energy fields and because scientists have studied and recorded evidence of energy healing, conventional medicine is more receptive to its effectiveness. It is called “bio” energy to reinforce its connection to not separation from biology.

Quantum physics. Newton. EEGs and ECGs. What more could a science geek ask for?

FOR Patients, Not TO Patients

2009-02-08T17:43:00.000-08:00

The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley did a darn good job presenting its third Business of Health Care conference yesterday. The business of health care being a titanic scheme, proportionately it was an intimate affair of about 250 attendees. But, the three keynotes all were relevant to the economic stimulus package and its three controversial health care components. In fact, Paul Keckley’s keynote was so timely, he had to cut it short to catch a plane to D.C., where, in his role as executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, he would advise senators in the final sprint towards their vote on Tuesday. The panels offered something for everyone, whether you wanted to spend the entire day bathing in health care reform, stick your heart in either the vice of global health or the vice of chronic disease management, or stir your entrepreneurial spirit in technology and innovation.

A few stand-outs:

In the proper system, we would do things for patients, not to patients. Doug Goodin, MD, Director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center, UCSF Medical Center.

65 percent of Californians are overweight. David Ormerod, MD, Regional Medical Director, Blue Shield
I looked up this fact, so shocking did it sound for a population obsessed with looks, fashion, and cosmetic surgery. According to various charts, he is in the right range. CalorieLabs’ chart says we are 59 percent overweight and 23 percent obese. The CDC has a scary animated map that shows how the country has gotten fatter year by year since 1985. In 1985, no state recorded obesity rates of more than 15 percent. In 1995, only half the states had obesity rates of less than 15 percent, and by 2008, only one state, Colorado, could make that claim. By 2008, between 25 and 29 percent of Americans were obese.

Health care will make up 32 percent of the Gross Domestic Product by 2037; 49 percent by 2062. Leonard Schaeffer, chairman and CEO of WellPoint.

125 million Americans have some chronic illness. 75 percent of the health care expenditures in the U.S. go towards chronic care. Steve Shortell, Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

In the current system, nobody has any incentive to manage health care. For chronic disease, for example, physicians get paid only to treat, not manage. So they tend to keep their distance once their job is done. Medicare pays only 60 days of home health. In one extreme example of incentive gone awry, cited in my lunch conversation with Duncan Ross, VP and General Manager of Blue Shield, at one time, stomach bypass surgeries were covered only if the patient was officially obese. Nearly obese folks who didn’t qualify started packing on the pounds if they wanted the surgery.

A universal voucher payment system: Consumers would receive vouchers that they could use with health care insurers. The voucher system would be funded by taxes imposed on items that are known to impair health, such as junk food, tobacco, alcohol. Omerond.
So, in theory, that extra 50 cents you pay on the big mac goes toward the insulin shot you might need in 10 years. Seems fair, except even teetotalers and athletes get sick.

45 percent of the treatment in the U.S. is not based on diagnosis. Schaeffer

“In looking at drugs that will cure neglected diseases in some of the poorest regions of the world, sometimes there isn’t a market.” Jana Armstrong, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.

“Unless costs are controlled, budget hawks will combine forces with national security experts to set health care policy by default.” Schaeffer.

The Case of Mushroom Soup and Medical Hoops

2009-01-18T15:21:00.001-08:00

Through all the years of economic development that turned my tiny hometown from dairy country into an overdeveloped bedroom community at the far end of the T-line that feeds commuters into Boston, the woods behind my grandparents' house miraculously remains untouched. It's our own little Kampong Buangkok, where time stands still. Where unripe wild blueberries iridesce in the green light of the sugar maple canopy, lady slippers nod ladylike among fragmented breezes, and intoxicating vapors of moist decay rise from the forest floor. Intoxicating, indeed. For its seemingly enchanting surroundings, it's one of the deadliest places on earth if we're talking mushrooms.

My grandmother loved that the woods gave her easy access to mushroom picking, just like her mother did in Italy when she was a little girl. She fit the profile of the picker most likely to misidentify mushrooms: people from Europe or Asia who go after look-alikes from their homeland. Mercifully, she didn't cook amanitas phalloides, or Death Caps, into a soup and feed them to her grandchildren like the 72-year-old woman from Ithaca, NY, did right here in Marin County the day after Christmas last year. According to my mycology-buff neighbor Dave, amanitas, one of the deadliest of mushrooms for its unstoppable and swift sabotage of the body's organs, does not grow back East but looks like edible varieties that do. On the other hand, a quick tour of mycology blogs and websites after the recent incident revealed a common code of survival for anyone who picks mushrooms anywhere other than the produce section of the local Safeway: don't ingest from a source you haven't picked before without having the fungi tested. You might as well play Russian roulette or chase funnel clouds with low gas tanks. Precise identification is to mushroom picking what mesh hoods are to bee keepers and gloves are to snake venom extractors. The problem, I learned from the blogs-o-sphere, is the only experts to identify your mistakes all are employed at poison control centers --the folks who only enter the picture when it's too late.

We read these stories in the local papers at least once a year. The most recent headlines featured death caps picked in Santa Cruz and on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. The families survived solely by luck and circumstance. And two small miracles: one at the FDA and one at the California Poison Control. The Santa Cruz Sentinal reported that a local doctor happened to attend a presentation at a European toxicology conference in Seville, Spain in which he learned about silybinin, a milk thistle extract. A German drug maker formulates silybinin into an intravenous preparation as a treatment for mushroom poisoning. After obtaining emergency FDA approval for a one-time use to save the Santa Cruz family in 2007, the doctor, Todd Mitchell, landed on the radar of the California Poison Control. This is an organization that stays on top of every development for every poison known to man and staffs a team to address hundreds of thousands of life-saving phone calls but, according to my friend, Patrick Finley, a psychopharmacologist at UCSF, has to appeal to the state for its funding every year. When the Ithaca grandmother and her grandchildren contacted Poison Control, it remembered Dr. Mitchell and called him to help contact the German company.

This is the part about jumping through medical hoops: It so happens that back in Seville, Mitchell met the toxicologist considered the worldwide authority on the medical implications of amatoxin poisoning -- who happened to live in Munich. They happened to email at least once in the past. So for case of the death cap soup, when Mitchell couldn't reach the German drug maker because it was closed for the holidays, and when he couldn't reach the Munich toxicologist, also likely on holiday, to help pave the way, that archived email just happened to contain the office phone number for a colleague who happened to be in his office after 6 p.m. in Munich during a time when all of Europe shuts down for two weeks. The colleague obtained the drug and arranged for Lufthansa to bump a wait-list passenger so that it could accommodate a courier delivering the silybinin. In the meantime, even though Mitchell could not use the same FDA emergency identification number for the Mt. Tamalpais case, the notoriously understaffed behemoth FDA managed nimbly to turn around a new number within an unprecedented few hours. The vials of silybinin arrived within 24 hours of Poison Control's first call to Mitchell, but fewer than expected. Because children have higher mortality rates to mushroom poisoning, Mitchell administered the proper doses to the children and what was left to the grandmother.

Historically in the U.S., only expensive and rare emergency liver transplants save the lives of people who mistake death caps for nostaligic fungii from other lands. Basically, unlikely survival. But the two families treated with silybinin made complete recoveries and went home with their own livers. It is a no-brainer, making such a drug easily available in the U.S., but according to the Santa Cruz Sentinal article, the FDA hasn't approved it because the costs -- for research and clinical trials -- is too high for the small market of mushroom poisoning here versus in Europe. A small market. Granted, it's all about funding and taxes and, eventually, the economy. But there's something about the "m" word that strikes a discordant note when it comes to simple plants that can save lives.

The Drying and Dying of Salmon Seeding

2009-01-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
– John Quincy Adams

Above, recent facts and evidence of the human impact on the salmon population -- ten water specimens taken from various collection sites in the Lagunitas watershed -- await transportation to a lab that will test them for impurities from homes and businesses along the waterway. Results will offer a small slice of understanding in the drastic decline of coho salmon, a problem Californians claim they are passionate to resolve.

One hundred years ago, 6000 coho salmon spawned in the Lagunitas watershed on the northwest side of Mount Tamalpais. So many so that recreational fishers scooped them up like pennies from the wishing well. This year, so few were counted, fisheries biologists can't bring themselves to utter the number. But if in 2008 they counted only 20 egg nests, I fear the term "extinction" will come tumbling out if they open their mouths at all.

A series of dams built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the San Geronimo Valley, through which the Lagunitas waterway rambles, blocked about 50 percent of the coho population. Homes and roads built along the waterways damaged riparian habitat, creating further decline. That's a lot of disincentive for the female salmon that travel 33 miles from the Pacific Ocean though the San Geronomo Valley water system to lay their eggs in the same place they were born three years earlier. Add to that three years of drastically low rain levels, and you get a hostile ecosystem too dry and too dangerous for the fish to reach their spawning grounds.

In 2005, the coho were listed as an endangered species, and in that year, only 190 egg nests, or redds, were counted in the Lagunitas watershed. In 2007, 148 redds were counted. That doesn't look like a big drop unless you know that in 2006, 338 redds were created by the females born in 2003, when 383 redds were counted, but the 190 redds counted in 2007 came from a population of 496 redds. It doesn't take a math whiz to calculate the inevitable for the 20 redds counted this year. Whatever may be our wishes for the coho recovery -- and the recovery of salmon population throughout California -- the facts and evidence suggest recent low rain levels fail to balance the compromised flow of dammed waterways already hindered by stripped riparian habitats, and spawning will deteriorate to the point of no return if left to nature alone.

The Lagunitas watershed is considered the keystone watershed along the coast because A) it has supported the largest wild run of salmon left in the state, historically about 10 percent of California's coho population, and B) fisheries agencies look to Lagunitas to seed neighboring watersheds in their recovery efforts. But with so little rain the last three years, the number of redds in the watershed this year represents an alarming 89 percent drop in the number of returning offspring. The dams aren't going away and no amount of wishing will recalibrate the climate shifts that reduce rain levels and dry up what little water has collected in the watershed in the past four dry years. What's a watershed to do? For one thing, organizations like Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) and The Marin Municipal Water District rescue trapped juvenile salmon as waterways dry up. Since 1996, SPAWN (and more recently, MMWD) has been restoring habitat and monitoring the creeks. SPAWN also supports land acquisition, and educates the community.

As a result, the community support is overwhelming. During the first day of a six-week field study testing water quality in the watershed, neighbors around several of the specimen collection sites in town came out of their houses and shops to inquire, report, or worry about low or no fish sitings. Several offered to help in the effort, even if it was to show off their riparian repair efforts along the creeks running through their back yards or to direct us to fuller collection pools. In the more remote areas, people pulled over to the side of the road to come watch the collection and measurement efforts. And to inquire, report, or worry about low or no fish sitings. The study will measure the impact at the half-way point of a two-year county ordinance banning new construction inside the county's mandated Stream Conservation Area within the San Germonimo Valley, which seems to have enthusiastic community support. One of the collection volunteers who learned she could not build a ground base station for a solar-panel installation shrugged her tolerance.

As passionate as we seem to resolve the decline in the salmon population, its impact on the state's fishing industry, and the repercussions to human health, these efforts are a spit in the sea compared to the enormity of the problem statewide. Laudable and necessary, that goes without saying, especially given the dire need for human activism to reconcile its own impairments. With little hope of any significant reversal in global warming this year, however, we'll need something immediate on the order of a 40-days-and-40-nights miracle to restore hope for this spawning season. If you know any rain dances, send instructions soon.

A Surgeon General for the Masses

2009-01-09T09:04:00.000-08:00

President-elect Barack Obama appointed Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, and the pundit caterwaul has begun. Amusing and ironic, isn't it, that the voyernalists who've turned outcry into a form of news delivery are screeching over a fellow screecher's qualifications to communicate to the masses? The truth of the matter is that Gupta, like any other choice for this position, possesses some of the right qualifications and lacks others. But the surgeon general's job is to communicate best practices in health care to the American people. And if you've been paying attention, overwhelming evidence indicates that folks haven’t been inspired by past surgeons general: they are smoking more, drinking more, eating more, and risking more and varied drugs behaviors. CDC statistics bear this out, especially among 18 to 34 years olds. And people older than 34 are either increasing, staying the same, or decreasing minimially the risky behaviors that have turned the nation's health care delivery and insurance systems into medical and fiscal wrecking yards.

Let’s face it, we are, by and large (no pun intended), a digital nation that sources most of its health information from sensationalist television, followed closely by Internet search engines, blogs and headlines that twist context for entertainment value. Obama’s no idiot; he and his people are so good at reaching and convincing Americans, they can turn red into blue. It’s all well and good if you have appointees with gravitas, expertise, experience, and accolades; it does nothing if nobody listens. Gupta has all of the above plus he can inspire an entertainment hungry nation to action. Look at the guy: he's fit and trim, thinks fast on his feet, possesses the equinimity of a monk while juggling duties in several high-stress positions, and has great teeth. He could be riddled with all sorts of cancers, infections, and communicable diseases and nobody would really care because we like to eat dinner in front of the evening news. So, yeah, there are probably thousands of people more qualified to take the job, but if you want results, and especially if you need them fast, you have to get your audience 1) to listen and 2) behave. If a handsome, charming, erudite television surgeon gets our celebrity-obsessed nation to change its woeful ways, why complain?

(Even if takes sexy photos of well cut leaders emerging from exotic waters, if the subliminal messaging works, why mess with it?)

Hope for Learners Left Behind

2009-01-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

As I was testing perfect salad firmness of avocados in the organic section of the market last weekend, an old friend drew up next to me to squeeze oranges for ripeness. By “old” friend, I mean one of those mothers who vectored off into other circles when the kids hit middle school and stopped depending on us for play dates. As members of the work-at-home crowd of parents who showed up for all the volunteer jobs at the elementary school, we saw each other almost every day serving hot lunch or arguing construction budgets at school committee meetings or organizing foundation fundraising events. After I declined to run for the school committee, she won the seat and did a much better job than I could have, having just started a new job and spending three hours a night helping our son navigate the labyrinth of mainstream homework with learning disabilities. Squeezing fruit and vegetables somehow created a safe bridge for my old friend to confess the same frustrations of public school for her youngest child’s learning disabilities. There we were, two public school champions, taking the first step in the 12-step process of defecting to private schools: admitting the public schools failed for our children. The guilt was as pungent as the bin of brown bananas nearby.

When it became clear that not only would our son meet his academic potential in a private school setting but that he could do it without the struggle that strangled his self-confidence and made, by his own account, “every day an embarrassment” for him, choosing private over public school was easy. But our public school comrades hummed agreement in that curt way that makes their disapproval obvious. This is Marin, after all, so of course it looked to many of our modestly-comfortable or not-obscenely-wealthy friends like the privileged motivation of the typical indulged Marin family. There’s no reasoning with privileged people who compete for reverse status, especially when their children sail through the best public schools in the state without a hitch. So the transition to a private school in San Francisco wasn’t difficult. Not a day goes by, though, when I don’t think about privilege. We could never have chosen private school without investing a good chunk of our retirement savings in the years of tuition ahead of us. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about all the kids who need something more suited to their learning styles than the assembly-line, learn-to-the test version of education but whose families don’t have the savings accounts to afford it: The fifty percent of “juvenile delinquents tested and found to have undetected learning disabilities” (National Center for State Courts and Educations Testing Services); the more than sixty percent of adolescents in treatment for substance abuse who were found to have learning disabilities. (Hazeldon Foundation, Minnesota 1992). Not only can’t these kids pay for the education they need, there's no way they can buy the testing that reveals they learn differently -- not combatively or lazily or stupidly. Or the chelation therapies that will drain the heavy metals from their blood and ease the stranglehold on their brains. Or the diet and nutrition guidance that discovers allergies that give them brain fog. Or the MRIs that determine the precise attention deficit disorder and corresponding precise medication and therapy. To name a scant few.

We began our journey to determine our son’s learning differences just before President Bush promised no child would be left behind. But like all the rest that came before him since the post-industrial institutionalization of public school education, he was thinking to fix a broken system by means of that broken system. Think about it: learning support, IEPs, 501Ks, teachers’ aides, to name a few of the fixes available to children for whom the typical classroom fails to teach are just that --fixes like patches on worn elbows or seams taken in or let out of an ill fitting shirt. Unfortunately, the shirt and the pants and the jacket are all part of the emperor’s wardrobe. Public school is a system designed to meet the needs of only about half the students (if that) it serves – kids who can sit still in straight lines for hours on end staring at the lines in a book or lines of words on a distant chalkboard, and listen while taking more lines of notes in perfect outline format. Kids who can hold the question until the end of the lecture, remember it, and use the answer to verify the assignment that he completed in the meantime anyway. Who can divert spit balls and bird calls and pins dropping and the genius jumping ahead to the next problem all at the same time without losing her train of thought. Who learn by reading the text and succeed by acing the test. The other half of the student population has to figure out how to compromise their untapped intelligence, drop out, or go someplace where the shoes and the shirt fit. (Or where if they don’t, you can get in without them.) All for the price of a private four-year college education, which hopefully comes next by the way.

In the next four to eight years, we are hoping for the change we need in the way our government doles out health care and insurance, rethinks unemployment support, and reengineers the financial, automotive and environmental industries. It’s going to take a stab at education too, but like those other programs, the new emperor mustn’t try to fit into the old emperor’s clothes. The system must be designed from the ground up to teach all learners, not just the smart and easy ones. In the words of one private school's mission to meet the needs of all learning styles, the right system will ask "not how smart is the child, but how is the child smart?"

My friend was all smiles as she told me with breathy relief about finally, after several years and countless doctors and specialists and educational alternatives, finding her son the right learning environment. Her story resonated both joyfully and painfully. Her boy, who has a mild autism disorder and visual and auditory disabilities, goes to a private school half the time and sees a tutor the other half. “The brutality is over,” she said, referring to his (and ultimately their) struggle to learn in public school. “But the financial bleeding has just begun.” He’s lucky, that one, to be among the few children who actually need the privilege and get it. Oftentimes in a privileged environment, the ones who least need it get most of it and do less with it. Here’s hoping for change that meets the needs of students with different learning styles who will show meaningful results with a little more advantage.

Plumbed?

2008-12-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

Attended a dinner party a few weeks ago that turned out to be a gathering of writers and aspiring writers. The hostess, Anna Del Rosario, has made a fine art out of staging these sorts of salon-style groups around a table lavish with continental fare and the eclat of her renown hospitality. I sat next to Bruce Henderson, prolific author of non-fiction, admiring his gracious generosity in answering, at the expense of his melting desert, the flurry of questions about publishing. Earlier in the evening, I had cornered Bruce in the kitchen to ask him about his report from the trenches that fiction is dead. "They're stacking up on agents' shelves. Nobody's reading them."

The next day, guest columnist Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times

"The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet? I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate."

You must Read the rest to grasp what's going through the minds of the unpublished.

Hustle Kid

2008-12-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

Parents feels so much more enlightened these days. We can't help but invest all that evolved parenting know-how in orchestrating success for the kids. We pull in the guard rails, measure the stepping stones, and engineer downtime. Or not if we know what's really good for them. Sometimes you just gotta step out of the way and let them fall out of the tree, catch head-to-toe poison oak, endure a little bullying, or cold-cock the bully when the inertia breaks. (All of which our resident specimen kid has done.) My good friend Benji wrote about the pleasures of an untethered boyhood in The Last Kid Picked. Sorry Benji, but the marketing strategy for this book was all wrong; today's mothers of boys need this book even more than they need Sheridan, Hobart, or Murkhoff/Eisenberg/Hathaway. I laughed. I cried. I learned to better understand how men work by learning how they play (outside of the play-date or organized league sports) as boys, and if more women read this book, they'd relax more around their sons and give their lovers/partners/husbands a lot more slack.

And so it is with the number one son. When he pitches from one stepping stone to the next in his dream to work in the recording industry/music business, you wanna just lay it all out for him. "Look, kid, it's a dying, if not dead, industry. And there's a protocol to the way it works. And, no, you can't just email the station manager and get them to play your music." But he believes. So you go "Give it a shot." And you hold your breath and wince for the tree limb to break.

The rising star over our friend, Pete Walsh, an 18-year-old talent who was born with a guitar extended off one hand and a capo off the other, along with Neil Young-like vocal chords, has captured Malcolm's imagination in a way like nothing else related to music or his entrepreneurial bent. By recent accounts, on his way to his father's downtown office, where he spends many of his afternoons, Malcolm walked into 55 Hawthorne Lane, the home of several radio stations owned by Cumulus Broadcasting. He signed in, went upstairs to 107.7 "The Bone," and hit up the music director. Yep, post-9/11 world and all. He got in even though he didn’t have an appointment. He popped open his laptop and played a Pete Walsh mp3 for the guy, who apparently liked the song. Wrong audience, though, for Pete's fluid mystical tones. Malcolm walked away with the music director's business card and some bumper stickers.

The playgrounds of today may be safer, more stylish, and parent-approved, but the boys play the same when you get out of the way.

The Olive in the Bay

2008-12-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

Let's raise our glasses to the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. Yep, that would be today according to a main headline above the fold in this morning's Chronicle. So, meet me at the 21st Amendment on 2nd and De Boom St., but get there before the parade ends because we'll never get a seat at the bar otherwise. And if you're not from around here, you won't get it. Not the way San Francisco gets it. Is there anywhere else in the U.S. staging a parade today? My scientific research (the first page of a Google search) indicates not, and it's been my understanding since I first visited this city in April 1981 that the "there" here isn't a big red bridge, or an old-money industrial legacy built out of fire and gold, or legendary baseball. It's the Irish Coffee, the Gimlet, the Mai Tai, of course the Martini straight up with olives, and now wine, wine, wine and wine. It's about the woe-be-gone days of three martini lunches, of after-hours house parties where someone's always playing Gershwin at the piano and someone else is pouring cold viscous fluids through a coil strainer into chilled glasses, of Gin Fizz brunches with the ghosts of discourse and fine manners at the WashBag. And while that may answer frightening questions for some, it intoxicates others with a sense of conviviality and community carried on a spirit of accomplishment and economic optimism (or denial) in this city, this only city by a bay with an olive in it. I wonder if Brown and Forman have a float in the parade.

Call It a Night

2008-12-02T20:28:00.000-08:00

My grandmother had big hands. Peasant-worker hands with thick, short fingers. They were great for kneading bread dough, knitting weighty afghans, and pulling root vegetables out of the dirt. I got my grandmother's hands. Work today felt like I was plucking my eyelashes out one by one with them. Clumsy, thick-moving, and p-a-i-n-f-u-l. The cold virus I've been deflecting like bumpers do to pinballs scored the big, bell-ringing, neon-flashing prize on me today. Prose, in a word, sucked. Days like this need to end with a spit-polish over the resume. Crap, wrong economy for that. Gram liked to bake. Her sturdy hands cut apples the perfect size for pie and her solid fingers fit the crust up against the bottom and side of the pie plate with not a smidge' of room for air to bubble. On a day like this, Gram would show up out of the blue with an apple pie. Like she knew. Follow that with a little bourbon and honey, call it a night.

Watch Your Step

2008-11-26T14:49:00.001-08:00

A bit of paranoia starts to set in when one month a black widow shows up on your back step and the next a scorpion appears poised to wipe its eight feet on the mat of your front step. I said I like bugs; I didn't say come for cocktails! But word seems to have spread, and on a recent morning I stumbled over this millipede all curled up like a bum sleeping on my stoop. He stayed for a cup of coffee, we talked about the weather and set off on our respective days. I told him the neighbors serve Peets with a shot of whiskey, if he wants to wake up over there tomorrow.

*sent from a foreign computer. hope it works!

Hawk Watch

2008-11-24T13:02:00.000-08:00

This morning broke with the urgent, incessant, and mournful calling of a hawk rising out of the thick fog that erased the small valley beyond the back yard. Rising out of that fog (and the middle of a spectacular view on a clear day), a lone extra-wide redwood tree provided a place to rest. Through my binoculars, I could see it was a fully mature red-tail. I could also see it was uneasy. Its head scanned all about. It shifted on its talons with a yearning to take off again, but
something impeded its mission. The fog perhaps? It called and it called, its lonesome screech stretching out over the fog line and disappearing into the mist somewhere in San Rafael. It would take off from the tree top, soar across the fog bank towards Mill Valley, then back across again towards the bay. It would return, rest, and call some more. Finally, around 8:30, it took off for the last time. It headed towards Mill Valley, but this time, when it returned, it was followed by another hawk, one about two-thirds its size and with the pale gray and white markings of a juvenile red-tail. I don't know if adults accompany juveniles along their coastal migration; I'll have to look it up. I couldn't help but be reminded of a recent tough-love talk I had with Maggie about why she shouldn't return from her travels in Europe with only pub-crawls to account for. Our wayward wanderer, wildflower in the wind.

Who Can Kill the Combustion Engine?

2008-11-21T07:33:00.000-08:00

There's a giant California wave undulating through the crowd of "change" fans with Henry Waxman the latest change agent to rise out of his seat with his arms in the air. We Californians are a rowdy bunch, and we like our transformations impolite, immoderate, sweeping. Fed up with an ineffective legislature, we got this wave going years ago with first a governor and now ordinary citizens turning state-wide propositions into the rule rather than the exception on the ballot. I'm not saying it's a good thing to have the temps running the office while the staff is playing finger flick football in the conference room, but you gotta love our pluck. Twenty percent of energy's power from renewable resources by 2010? Go for it! Reliable, high-speed public transit between San Francisco and L.A.? Bring it, baby! Help people acquire more alternative-fuel vehicles and fund research for renewable energy. Huzzah! Sure, only Prop 1A providing 10 billion dollars to plan the high-speed rail actually passed, but damn we're saucy (as well as sly for pinning Pickens' greed and sick of picking the scabs of our '00/'01 energy crisis. Make no mistake though, Props 7 and 10 will be back.) You can't help but wonder how deeply even California's nervy nature can penetrate the sludge that fuels the combustion engine of Washington, but it feels right that the state sueing the government to allow stricter greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles is the one to lead the way. So, the question is how, and this is where California needs to walk the talk to make Washington make change real. The internal combustion engine was the main driver of the industrial revotuion, yet no one can argue that it is the Frankenstein of progress. Revolution implies making something new out of something old, a retread, if you will. We all know it's not a new set of tires we need, but something on the order of discovering the wheel. It's got to be altogether other, and we're thinking the "Eureka!" state is the place to birth such innovation, am I right? It doesn't escape notice that it was the California Energy Commission who killed the electric car, but that was before we took matters into our own hands. Reading the morning's news accounts of Waxman's victory, a Californian can't help but shed a hopeful little tear of joy imagining the resurrection of the electric car (this time fueled by alternative renewable energy sources and who knows what better) and other utopia-mobiles (are you thinking of the Jetson space-car too?), hopefully building a whole new auto industry that will transform the economy with mass employment and wealth and well being for all. Indeed, sipping a latte before we head out to the Prius to get to yoga class, we're all dreaming of the new California power in Washington turning our freeways into paths of enlightenment where lightweight vehicles made of organic materials safely drive zen-like speeds of 40 miles-an-hour purring oceanscape music out of their tailpipes.

Auto-industry lobbyists might see Waxman's victory as bad news for Detroit, but they don't need to be such downers. If we get this right, the auto-industry will not only recover, it will be stronger, leaner, and healthier (kind of like it got a blue algae "seachange" spa treatment). It's the wave, the new wave, if you will, and you don't have to take my word for it. Even Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez saw it in describing the democratic party caucus decision: "You could almost feel the votes move in the room." Peace out.

Treading Water and Ding Dongs

2008-11-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

I am always uncomfortable with those books that writers write about writing. Annie Dillard's A Writer's Life, Anne Lamot's Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. I read them years ago, and they each left me feeling like the guy who reads about weightlifting while eating a package of Ding Dongs or those people who take photos in museums and videos of aquariums. Writing this blog requires a good dose of humility. I think the assignment was to write about writing or to offer some insight into this luxurious form of on-the-job training. Part of my deal with the devil to lead a writer's life, it is his way of keeping me fit by making me tred water even though I'm exhausted from all the laps in the literary pool. But blogs need purpose, a niche, and here the Lady just wanders and thinks about things often unrelated to writing. I've always kept journals not because, like most people I want to record the moments that add up to a life that one day will unveil its meaning. I write them because I have a lousy memory and a very hard time processing my thoughts for speech. It now goes by the label Attention Deficit Disorder, which makes people like me and Malcolm and so many others for whom I now have great emphathy hate talking on the phone and cocktail parties and stay out of jobs like teaching, sales, and motivational speaking. All I knew when I started writing journals, and still know to this day, is that I have to wrestle every moment with my concentration, to filter through distractions while aligning my thoughts into a sequence that produces a coherent idea that never comes out right anyway when I say it. The process of thinking just takes too damn long. But with writing, I can take all the time I need to process the thought (and as an English major, it helped to have long stretches of time to reread or rewrite the line, the paragraph, the page.) It occurs to me that the Lady needs to stop wandering and find a niche. Except for the obvious and cheeky, I'm open to suggestions.

There. I forced myself to write about writing today and now I have a craving for chocolate.

Pour, Baby, Pour

2008-11-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

David Benjamin, author of The Joy of Sumo and The Last Kid Picked (and other sure-to-be-discovered novels) and his better half, Junko Yoshida, E-in-C of EETimes print, made an overnight pit-stop here on their way from NewYorstraliapanadarisconsin. Benji was unusually quiet (Benji is NEVER quiet), but we assumed it was the globe trotting. Turns out, it was a touch of food poisoning from some old sushi. One wonders whether the same gurgly stomach and disquieting mood lingers after revealing in his weekly screed that a friend of a friend's daughter, "age 19, up and decided to write a book, went ahead and wrote it, and got published the first time out, just as easy as pissing down his leg." Now I know how food poisoning feels! Benji, who just finished the first edit of The Fenwick Wonder Boys, "believes that when one writer succeeds, even an upstart who's never paid his dues and has no idea of the real ordeal of writing and isn't even old enough to drink much less drink himself to death like Somerset Maugham or F. Scott Fitzgerald, all writers succeed." To Benji: please pass the bourbon, don't bother rinsing out the glass, and keep pouring til I have to take a piss.

Progress and a Prayer

2008-11-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

Progress: Update on the tether and Malcolm's sense of stewardship: He's looking for community service projects. Whaaaat?

Prayer: he picked up all 347 pages of my manuscript, considered the plop factor, and said, "You know, if you shrink this down and bind it, you could call it a day!" (Please, please learn the value of "beginning, middle, and end." Before I die.)

Abstinence-Only Education: How's that Going for Ya?

2008-11-08T10:22:00.001-08:00

(More posts to the ol' flog than usual while I conduct some research to fill in a vacuum created by a touch of writer's block.)

One thing about having kids well into your 40s, a friend recently confessed, is that those estrogen surges that keep you up at night coincide conveniently with 2 a.m. feedings, frequent visits from the night-terrored toddler, and childhood illnesses for which the wee hours favor fever, pus, and poop. For those of us who started families much earlier, we are grateful for these extra hours to catch up on our reading. More specifically, reading defined as a crash-course on the recent history of the world our late-parenthood peers optimized with advanced degrees, entrepreneurial pursuits, travel (that would be Jennifer), and career superhighways. When Mother Goose and Harry Potter displace literature, PTA meetings replace social-political discourse, homework supervision becomes your higher education, and harnessing the adolescent mind your only outlet for critical thinking, that's two decades of serious ground to cover. And so it was, between the hours of 2 and 5 this morning, I endeavored to bring myself up to date on an issue surprisingly relevant to this very topic: abstinence-only education. (You snicker, but just wait.) The recent issue of the New Yorker features an article by Margaret Talbot on the outcome of the red-state Christian paradigm to engender their youth with conservative attitudes towards sex and sexuality. In Red Sex, Blue Sex, Talbot does a thorough job of exposing the abstinence-only education myth. I have nothing to add. I'm recommending it here as one of the best cautionary tales of all time.

In those states populated by Christian evangelicals who teach abstinence-only education, the lesson appears lost on their daughters. Presumably to ennoble their heirs with the the promise of secure marriages, large families, and happy futures, abstinence-only educators inform the sexuality of their youth with messages of shame, sin, and foreboding. Consider the consequences once those young couples bring that particular brand of sexuality to the marriage bed. You got it: high divorce rates. Some of the highest in the land. (Ironically, teenagers who live with both parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not, the article reports. Can you say legacy?) It appears, unsurprisingly, that few evangelical teens get to realize the virginal marriage, though they do bring along their ill-informed attitudes (and presumably end up passing them on to their own sons and daughters.)

Consider some of Talbot's points (some written verbatim, some edited for space) based on findings in a government study of adolescent health known as Add Health, national studies, and interviews with family-law scholars and sociologists -- all cited correctly in the article:

*On average, white evangelical Protestants make their sexual debut shortly after turning sixteen.
*Evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less like to use contraception
*Only half of sexually active teenagers who say they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time.
*By contrast, sixty-nine percent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or other trusted adult consistently use protection.
*More than half of those who take a pledge of celibacy before marriage end up having sex before marriage, not usually with a future spouse.
*Communities with high pledge rates also have high rates of STDs
*In some schools where celibacy pledge rates exceed thirty percent, the special identity is lost and the formula collapses.
*Red-states populated by social conservatives have the highest rates of divorce and teen-pregnancy, while blue states had the lowest rates. Red states had lowest media age of marriage; blue states had highest. People in red states tend to marry earlier - in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than seeking an abortion. Yet nationally, women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later.
*The paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in her life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing. (Couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including education -- There's that pre-40/post-40 parenthood thing.)

You get the picture. One of the most fascinating parts of the article is an examination of the new middle-class morality. According to Talbot, middle-class moral teenagers"see abstinence as unrealistic and are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage, they just tend not to practice it because it puts too much at stake. They are tolerant of contraception and abortion but are more cautious about premarital sex. They want to remain free from the burden of pregnancy and the embarrassments of STD. They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about their nascent sexuality." Evangelicals might want to check that out.

Talbot goes on to review the drawbacks of both red-state and blue-state sexual attitudes and behaviors, and then she offers some well sourced recommendations. A must read for parents just beginning their families or those sending theirs off to face these issues on their own. Thankfully for them, I'm learning as I catch up on the culture, that the Internet, celebrity sex scandals, all-sex-all-the-time-TV, and sex-driven commercialism hasn't completely destroyed it while I took the stroller for a walk around the block.

Sunrise Yellow Noise

2008-11-06T08:07:00.000-08:00

I have never been able to memorize a single poem either, except this one, which stuck the first time I read it decades ago:

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait 'til judgement break
excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
interrupt this ground.

Emily Dickinson

Post script: where ever it was I first read "Ample Make this Bed" (Sunrise Yellow Noise seemed a catchier blog title), the last line read: "break this hallowed ground." That's how I memorized it and recited it all these years. In fact-checking my punctuation, the version I looked up along with every other source I went to after that, uses what reads less ironic (or balanced, if you like) in comparison.

Raptor-otica

2008-11-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

Unless you're an avid birder or in kindergarten, the whole migration thing isn't exactly an academic turn-on. Ah, but then you've probably never been to Hawk Hill this time of year. And if you're still not interested, you're probably not a raptor geek. If you are, Hawk Hill is the most erotic biology field trip you'll ever take. Hawk Hill is the raptor geeks' porno convention, where we raptor groupies go to see Red-Tails, Coopers, Sharp-Shinned, Swainsons, Red-Shouldered, Broad-Winged, Kestrals, Peregrines, Merlins, and even Ferruginous Hawks, Rough-Legged Hawks, and the Golden Eagle, if we get lucky. Hawk Hill is the eastern facing promontory in the Marin Headlands at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It offers a panoramic view of the Pacific, the Golden Gate, San Francisco Bay, and the Richardson Bay all the way over towards Berkeley and Oakland. It's where the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory conducts its raptor watch every year. For everyday raptor buffs with the right pair of binoculars, raptor-watch is a veritable skin-flick of raptor migratory behaviors. For the hundreds of volunteers who work in two-hour shifts counting the population of the raptor species that find their way to Hawk Hill, however, it is a serious empirical exercise. Raptors are a bellweather species. Since they are at the top of the food chain in their ecosystem, declines in their numbers can indicate problems within that ecosystem. What makes Marin the go-to peep-show for raptor counting?

By the time many raptors reach the Golden Gate Bridge, some of them have flown from as far as Alaska and Greenland, Tennessee and Virginia (banding programs tell us). Once they arrive, they suddenly stop at the Golden Gate and linger for long periods of time like tourists in the 70s who discovered our sensuous temperate weather and penchant for hot-tubs. But instead of hot-tubs, the warm thermals and updrafts on the wind-facing hills entice these birds of prey to join the big raptor orgy. Well, it may look that way, but something more amazing (and scientific) actually is going on. Embedded in North American raptors' genetic code is not only the instinct to migrate to the southern hemisphere, but an orientation for the only two ways to get there if they've never been before: the coasts. Juvenile raptors have no imprinted route south. But they know if they get to the coasts, it will lead them to where they need to go. Now, birds prefer to fly over land, which they can do most of the way. Problem is that little gap between Marin and San Francisco counties. That they don't like. So, it's not actually an orgy among the raptors at Hawk Hill; they're all hanging out on the thermals playing truth-or-dare to see who takes the leap over the gap. Most do, though some don't.

Next year, I get to join the banding program for the raptor observatory. But for now, because I'm not allowed to deflect my attentions outside the writing discipline, I am enjoying my own little hawk hill peep-show right here on the Corte Madera ridge. Today, I spotted two red-tailed hawks, a juvenile red-tail, and a cooper's hawk. Talk about a turn-on!

Before I Wake

2008-10-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

Dear, innocent Malcolm asked me recently where I wanted to be buried. ("God help me, what's he up to now," I had to ask myself. "Planning portfolio strategies already? Good luck weasel, it's all soundly invested in your name in a little place called the Drew School where you are having the time of your life right now.") So, I said, "For lord's sake, don't bury me! I love bugs, and I'd hate to think of them making a meal out of me after all I've done for them."

"Like what?" he asked, dubiously. "The pest guy comes every few months to keep the spiders and scorpions out of my room, right? How is that eco-friendly, Mom?" (. . .sarcasm oozing out his ears and onto the cell phone text pad from which he has not lifted his eyes for the last hour.)

"Rosemary and thyme pellets, dear heart. They sprinkle rosemary and thyme pellets that create a barrier. Them herbs don't kill." (Say "them herbs" out loud; odd.)

"Yeah, right Mom. That stuff doesn't work. No way they do that!" (tap tap tap tap tappity tap tap)

Surprise, surprise. Yet another denial (lick index finger, tick off imaginary check box) crowding out some really fine attempts by us and an eager set of young, idealistic teachers to wedge service learning into his rock 'n roll psyche. California's looming drought? "Mom, it rained today." The economy? "A Mac Book would be really cool for my birthday." Improvement in John McCain's poll numbers? "If you paint a little fuzz under his nose, he looks like Hitler." Starving children in Myanmar? "We saw a picture of kids who look pregnant!" "What's it going to take," I ask myself fretfully. It's not like we don't model the social consciousness and encourage him to join. We do this all the time, but if it doesn't come in the form of hella' lyrics with a nimble guitar stream and a muscular bassline, it ain't happening. Actually, that's not entirely true. I give him points for taking a side in the discussion. Heck just observing his surroundings is a sign he's pointed in the right direction. What's really going on? I've noticed more and more socially and politically impassioned kids these days who feel empowered to get involved. God love 'em (and their heart-swelling headlines in the local paper.) Other kids, however, take longer. My guess: The sensitive ones, the ones who took great offense when contractions woke them out of a warm, oceanic slumber and started pumelling them through the birth canal, are not entirely convinced of their ability to protect themselves if, God forbid, something bad happens to mom and dad, more narrowly defined in their eyes as "tour guides to my freakin' future." Boys are especially vulnerable. Right from the get-go they learn, "we like you better when you mask your fear and keep your feelings to yourself" and "don't worry, you'll grow up to be a soldier and learn to shoot a gun, and we'll all be safe." You gotta wonder. . . are we scaring them shitless? Remember the nuclear attack test sirens that sent us under the desks? Ever notice how much faster the boys contorted themselves into those tight little spaces?

I think Malcolm, who's a pretty anxious kid to begin with, when he sees the hurricane a comin', checks, checks, and rechecks the health of the tether that holds him fast to the steady stake we've secured to this uncertain world. Nothing new; lots of parents do it. What to do for the ones who need more convincing? My scheme: show Malcolm a few photos of his tether (me) in some of the places I love in hopes he might be compelled someday to ensure their longevity. (Mwa ha ha!) And if that fails, at least he'll know where to scatter me when the time comes:

Yosemite Valley,

the creek at the cabin, just below the water barrel where nature hospitably toppled a Ponderosa pine to fashion the world's best foot bridge.

and Blue Slides, where I can hang out with some of my favorite people.

Idaho

2008-10-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Idaho is one of those vast lands dotted with grand features of endless farms next to coniferous mountain ranges all laid out under an eternal sky that, when not heartbreakingly blue, struts its weather like no other. Rain clouds gather with the breathtaking grace Audrey Hepburn used to command the billowy skirts of her gown on the red carpet. Winds searing through the enduring prairies stir the soul like the long slow moan of a new lover across the light and shadow of spent bed sheets. And rain falls with the purr of a sleeping newborn, pure and clean and forgiving. I spent a few days in Idaho to visit my brother and in that short time, I was greeted by a little bit of all of that. Especially memorable was a long hike up to Stevens Lakes on the western side of the Bitterroot Mountains. Eric is a rugged, impatient kind of guy who ironically spends hours upon hours of his spare time photographing the minute and beautiful details of nature. We knelt at fungal altars of several brilliant mushroom species. We magnified with his macro lens the crystallized riddle of frost on fall leaves. We bushwacked our way to uncharted vistas that only poets and painters could replicate. There’s a sense of the wild still left in that corner of the west, plenty of room to distance yourself from civilization, even if it’s the Starbucks look-alike five miles from the nearest residence or the near empty parking lot at the mall. It’s that frontier essence that makes Eric ache when he sees densely packed developments spread their commercial loins across unspoiled territory. But enough remains of the vastness, so go, if you can, and soon. It may take a few more decades before it looks more like Los Angeles, but according to Eric, a little piece of its heart gets ripped out when another farm gets sold.

Lifeboat

2008-09-26T12:36:00.001-07:00

Posted on my other blog: languageandarchitecture.blogspot.com

A Perfect Day

2008-09-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Jack London wrote 1000 words a day. Once he was done, he entertained guests, worked on his farm, invented cool stuff, soaked in whatever exotic locale he visited. Today, I attempted the same. I think I managed 1000 words, give or take, in about seven hours. I think Jack London had a lot more free time in his day than I did today. But, still. . . once I reached my allotment, I came back to life. The other life, which, if we get really creative, has it's exotic moments: Pick up Malcolm at the ferry. Drop books off at the library. Prepare dinner. Clean kitchen. Refill hummingbird feeder. Mix a margarita (they're back!). Return some phone calls. Not bad, in a day. But the highlight was the first hour of writing. I hike the fire roads on the ridges of Mt. Tamalpais, and for that first hour, I create the scenarios that will fill my pages later. Notebook in hand, I traipsed the trails. During that first hour today, I had the pleasure of hearing:

Wild turkey (gobble gobble gobble)
Two hawks (Screeeeeech! Screeeeeech)
Numerous hummingbirds (zzzft zzzft zzzft)
Stellar's Jays (one that cawed, another I swear mocked the call of a hawk)
Woodpecker (tatatatatatatatatat)
Nuthatches (tswit tswit tswit)
At least three deer loping through the leaves
Countless lizards scurrying through the leaves
A snake's slither through the leaves
(Each leaf dweller has it's own cadence)
Squirrels rustling among the oak branches
Countless unidentifiable song birds
My breath in between.

A simple day, uncluttered in its own way, yet lush in another way. Tomorrow, I spend the entire day at the new California Academy of Sciences. I've been waiting a long long time for this day. I invited no one. I plan to linger and absorb. My dream job is to write for the California Academy of Sciences publications. Science nerd, yup.

Summer's End

2008-09-15T17:29:00.000-07:00

Brought Maggie to the airport this morning. International terminal, United Flight 954. Everything felt the season turn. Brian and Malcolm bid teary farewells by 7 and left the house without their usual banter, carrying more on their shoulders than backpacks. At 7:45, Kirk tipped back a last cup of coffee and departed for Ukiah. Their goodbye hug stretched well past where they normally leave off. It'll be a month til we see him again, which feels as long as the shadows stretching past the oaks near the driveway, but a blink compared to the three months she'll be gone. Did I mention the cat puked on the new doormat? And the dog snuck up on the couch? I didn't care; I could have used a good wretch and a soft spot to ease the emptying of what was a full and frantic summer. In the hour before we left, I showered and dressed as Maggie sipped her tea and read the comics, packed a few last minute items, put on her make-up, fashioned a couple of earrings out of bottle caps and wire, collected her stack of library book returns, arrayed dirty laundry and wardrobe rejects over her bedroom furniture and floor, printed out some sheet music, and emailed a few friends. That's Maggie; that's the tambourine she taps against her jeans as she moves through our lives. Hours have passed since I walked back into the house, which is now a cavern. The only sound I've heard all day is the occasional acorn plunk against the roof. Plunk! Plunk-plunk. Roll-roll-roll. And at the rooftop's edge, nobody hears my heartbeat stop. It is the sound of summer's end. Of children reaching the rooftop's edge. Of others fleeing to far-away-lands to find their way. Their acorns litter my sloping hillside. I've lost count. The temperature drops. The sun tilts back. And the treetops slouch against the fog's sigh.

Blog This!

2008-09-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Blog-worthy things that have crossed my path lately:

At Scala's Bistro on Union Square, our party of three entered the bar. No tables were available. Suddenly, my attention was caught by a kind-faced man waving at us. "Shouldn't waste a whole table on just one. I'll sit at the bar," he said as he scooped up his martini and cocktail napkin and took the seat at the end of the line. As a writer, I want to build my character by telling you this man was rather short, bald, and somewhat portly. But such descriptives fail me the most beautiful creature in sight. It wasn't that our dogs were tired or we were dying of thirst; we could have headed over to the Saint Francis for our booze. It was this: he was a good neighbor in a world that has lost touch with the concept. My friends are from a few neighborhoods over, a place called Reston, Virginia. I lifted my shoulders in pride at how grand, how escquisite my city looked under the tweed vest and wool trousers of this gentleman. This San Franciscan. Pay it forward.

The Hawks are coming! A red-tail's screech woke me out of my decadent Saturday morning slumber. I nearly tripped on the bed sheets as I leaped into my slippers and ran out to the street. There on the top of a lone redwood, a broad-shouldered commander surveyed the morning's smorgasbord of mice and moles below. It turned its head in my direction, and as if to say "you think this is swell. . . " lifted off and soared over the tree tops. Coming home from Muir woods the day before, just before we reached four corners, I spotted its cousin on a tall pine. "George, stop!" I yelled to my Reston-friend. And as he did, the raptor spread its majestic wings across the entire view of the distant foothills.

Speaking of birds, Jinx caught a hummingbird and ate it for lunch. Isn't that some kind of sin? Some sort of line crossed for which she is heading to cat hell? I wasn't home, but the sin is probably mine. I have pots full of trumpet-shaped flowers and a hummingbird feeder that lure them to our deck so that I can relish their luminescent beauty as I sip my morning coffee. One of these visitors, after gorging on the hibiscus, turned left instead of right and got trapped inside the house. Jinx made a meal of it and Malcolm hurried upstairs with the vacuum, following the trail of feathers before his mom got home. He knew. Cat hell, fraught with licking, scratching, feral felines, here I come.

Come a little closer, girlie!

2008-09-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

When I first saw her, I thought she looked familiar. With the naked eye (and my glasses) and at a safe distance, though, I didn't see any markings. Whew! A black widow would really throw off my day. Ah, but this beauty is such a gorgeous specimen. So still, so sleek, so peaceful. She'd make an easy close-up nature photo for the blog. I grabbed the camera and took a macro photo. You know, way up close. Nose to nose with nature. Only when I magnified it on the image viewer did I spy the red hourglass on her belly. Talk about a close call!

Girlfriend Interrupted

2008-08-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

While hiking recently, a good friend and I were talking about high school. Her son is going through what I did. I shared a story about junior high when my mother made me tell you we couldn't be friends anymore. (Mom was afraid of all the "different" things you were doing. They were all afraid, weren't they?) I told her how I was instructed to say the words directly to you. I was so obedient, I actually did it! Concerned for her son, my hiking pal asked what it was like to lose my best friend. I said it unhinged me from being certain about what I loved. Going to the commons with you, to that portal in the brush, where we found a big empty space and sat on the dirt to eat cucumber sandwiches. The hippie hang-out we made in the cellar of my house (to your taste because you had more of it). The plays we wrote and performed (you mostly, you were more creative). Snowball fights, girls against boys. You painted your bedroom walls red, white, and blue and had a candle in the shape of Spiro Agnew’s name when I didn't know who he was. For a couple of summers, we swam in your family's pool, which was the coolest thing going in that neighborhood. And you showed me how to smoke cigarettes behind the pool fence. These things were certain in girlhood; absolute, eternal, and easy to love. They made me certain I was going to be cool like you. But then I said those words to you, and I knew I was giving up my right to choose for myself, and I knew that was not cool. I remember that day, the jeans and flannel shirt you wore over your dark tee. The home-made, kelly-green kettle cloth dress I wore. The cirrus clouds in the painfully blue October sky. The dying grass on the side of the school building where we stood. I remember because I was so ashamed.

After that, school was filled with uncertainty, especially in the conflict between my family’s athletic ambitions and my passion for creative writing. When high school ended, I achieved neither because I couldn’t choose when I was given the chance. I went away, and I would have gone farther if the Pacific Ocean didn’t stop me. I started from day one making very deliberate choices, each one a celebration of abandoning fearful obedience and restoring certainty. Mom feared there were too many "Mexicans" in California; I moved in with a Latina, a black ROTC student, a Japanese "study abroad" student, and a really wild red head! I switched my major from kinesiology for a future in sports medicine to English for the pleasure of creative writing. And shortly after arriving in California, I promised: no more dieting. Take me or leave me. In my family, women struggled with weight. I was initiated into dieting at age twelve (normal weight) and ended up thirty pounds overweight by the time I left for college. But at UCLA, where I chose to attend over my mother’s protestations, where I chose to risk her disapproval by staying fat, soon I was fifteen pounds lighter. And soon after that, another fifteen. Forever. That was cool.

But I’m still not. In fact, I laugh with my family at how fearlessly uncool I am. I don't swear. Never did drugs (after trying once or twice). Have no adventure stories. Except I married a guy who did all of the above. Mom didn’t like him at first, but I knew what I was doing. Now he walks on water in her eyes, while we live adventurously by a different set of rules. One of them is to keep the kids safe, while letting them take risks and choose for themselves. Because in high school, I let others choose for me, while I watched you become an artist. I admired your uninhibited expression and the brashness it sometimes took you to break through. I watched you and learned that by choosing for yourself, even if it was risky, you got something I want for them: Authenticy.

Life is getting short. I'd ask you to forgive me, but I'd rather you just know that our girlhood friendship supported me even after I abandoned it. Authentic friendships do that, don't they? It has always meant more to me than you knew. If that means anything to you.

P.S. I kept two things you made me while we were still pals. A tag from a birthday gift on which you wrote a (kind) limerick about me. And a little card you made with your picture. They are in a box with things like poems my father wrote before he died, a bracelet he made me when he was in the hospital, a balsa wood satchel that smells like the woods behind my grandmother's house, and a broken MIA bracelet. In other words, irreplaceable treasures.

Rhythm and Muse

2008-08-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Beverly Egan is a nursing student at UCLA. One of my daughter's best friends. Bev is the first outside contributor to Language & Architecture, a poetry blog I started for my own work. I revamped it to include other voices because it had gone dry. The novel is my master.

Bev might actually be writing lyrics, I'll have to ask her. If not, though, it's certainly lyrical.

Enjoy. www.languageandarchitecture.blogspot.com

Screaming

2008-08-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

I spent two days revising chapter eight. Last night, eager to mix Friday margaritas, I inadvertently saved chapter five over chapter eight. First, I did it on my computer's hard drive. Oblivious to my stupidity, I did it again on my external hard drive. Two days of work. I'm officially swearing off margaritas until this is over.

P.S. Luckily, I have an unrevised copy of chapter eight on a flash disk. Guess how I'm spending the weekend?

Meet Ed

2008-07-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed a week's worth of memories in two days at the ol' Fuller cabin. That's what happens when you find yourself in the middle of a gravelly sage-filled valley surrounded by fir-covered mountains that release ribbons of somniferous creeks and dusty corduroy trails onto your doorstep. You let it go. All of it. That first fresh morning when you push back the tent flap and thrust your face into the honeyed light that comes at 2000 feet, whatever you left behind is forgotten. Lots of blog material.

In this installment, I'd like you to meet Ed. (Click on photos to enlarge.) Ed is the kind of guy you've gotta meet before you die. A classic in the true sense of the word, and if I haven't emphasized it enough, they don't make them like Ed anymore. But they should. Ed is a friend of John and Eileen Fuller, who with their adventuresome son Johnny and delightfully poised daughter Dana, joined us for the last weekend of Camp Gravelly. How Ed ended up at the cabin, I'm not sure. Something to do with picking up Savannah, aptly nicknamed Savi and sweet as peach pie, who also joined us that weekend. Ed flies a de Havillan Beaver sea plane. He's been at it since 1964. Ed was on his way home to Canada from a two-month job in southern California. Somehow, John (the Dad) got Ed to fly double-dutch with Johnny (the son) to pick up Savi in Ukiah and land at the airstrip next to Lake Pillsbury; a mile or so from the cabin. Since it was on the way to Canada, I guess. Doesn't really matter. What's important is that we got Ed for two days.

The first thing you need to know about Ed is that he's recently recovered from a broken neck which he sustained while turning a back flip on a trampoline. The second thing you need to know is that Ed is 65. He's pretty darned fit and trim for a guy his age who's been through something like that. But he's practically Superman for the other thing he's been through: his son's long, traumatic recovery from a brain tumor. We learned that when Ed was telling us about the marijuana plants they grow. But stuff like that, in fact everything we learned about Ed, it wasn't designed to impress or boast. Stories of his adventures sort of tumbled out of him almost involuntarily into conversations that he didn't initiate. He'd walk up to you in his pressed olive drab shirt tucked into a neatly belted pair of cargo pants looking like a park ranger, and usually ask a question about the place. Or the surroundings. Or the history. He was curious. Then something you'd say would trigger a story from Ed's memory. He told Brian "the one" about pissing while piloting. (Brian asked.) Evidentally, his secretary nagged him into taking her up. She put coffee in a thermos, and after they'd finished it, he had to get rid of some. So, he set his gauges, told her not to touch a thing, and went in the back of the plane to relieve himself into the empty thermos. I guess he dumped it, and when he got back that day, he washed it out real good. Next day, the secretary brings in the thermos of coffee, pours herself a cup, takes a sip, and cries "this coffee tastes like piss!" Brian figures it's a bit fantastical, the story. But that's the point. That's Ed. Ed enjoyed our campfire coffee; it's course enough to strip tooth enamel. And he enjoyed the cocktails. Especially, Ed liked his beer. But never before flying. When we were on the lake, he was drinking water and examining flight maps. Soon, he learned through radio communications that the northern California coast was fogged in and smoke from the wildfires nearby rendered him flightless for another night. So, he asked how the jetski works, got a quick lesson from Johnny, then took off to buy a few sixes, which he shared with the other beach bums. No fuss. No bother. Just another chance to live it up another day. At the end of the day, shootin' the shit, sitting in a misfit collection of folding chairs on the back porch, facing the mountains in the orange glow of kerosene lanterns, finishing off a few bottles of California red. . . it's your place, but you get the feeling you're in Ed's element.

The morning he left for home, Ed doffed his cap, bowed, and said "I thank you for your hospitality." We escorted him out to the air strip, where I asked if I could sit in the Beaver. I have a fear of heights, so no way I'm gonna ever fly in the thing, but I wanted to play with the toys. Saying our goodbyes, Ed invited Kirk and Brian to go fishing with him at his place in Canada. He didn't describe a picturesque house-on-the-lake kind of setting, but he tossed in a fish story that made you picture it anyway. As he hoisted himself into his seat, he said "yep, fishin' out the front door." And off he went with his maps, overnight bag, and thermos.

Ooh La La Twighlight Vixens!

2008-07-15T09:22:00.001-07:00

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Brian Fuller Day, our 23rd wedding anniversary, and Bastille Day, last night we dined at the Left Bank in Larkspur. It's my all-time favorite restaurant, and not just for the food, although I could order the Salade Nicoise every day of the week. The Left Bank blends "neighborhood hangout" with cozy brasserie elegance. It's where the locals go when they want to dress up and still hang loose. It encourages chatty bar crowds and large tables around live entertainment, while tucking the romantic diners into secluded little corners with low light and quiet. The Left Bank keeps things entertaining by promoting the heck out of its French connection. Last night, they honored Bastille Day with burlesque dancers. Sexy, skirt twirlers in fish net stockings and ruffled underpants doing semi-striptease acts on chairs, daring upside-down leg-splits in the air, and feather festooned fan dancing. Oh, the fan dancing! It wasn't Paris' Crazy Horse, but it was a wonderful reminder. Vive la difference! Vive les Vixens! http://www.twilightvixen.com/

P.S. Happy 20th Anniversary of Brian Fuller Day

2008-07-14T10:37:00.001-07:00

On July 14, 1988, we were seven months pregnant with Maggie. We owned our first house in a "transitional" (giggle) neighborhood called Fox Pointe, in Providence, Rhode Island. We furnished it with hand-me-down furniture, an IBM 386, and a shelf of VHS tapes that were later stolen in one of many burglaries in that neighborhood. So, twenty years ago today, then-Governor Ed DiPrete declared "Brian Fuller Day." That's him with the Guv in the photo. Really! He's probably reading the fine print on the declaration, which DiPrete personally delivered to the UPI bureau in the basement of the state house. Now why would the busy governor go out of his way to lavish such time and attention on a young up-and-coming journalist? Such a busy, busy statesman, who ten years later pleaded guilty to state charges of bribery, extortion, and racketeering? My brain was drowning in hormones at the time, I don't recall the reason. Please have mercy and remind me. In the meantime, we celebrate Brian Fuller Day every year, and I'm sure Brian would be happy if y'all used the same excuse to lift a glass of your favorite spirits tonight.

Diary Excerpt

2008-07-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Brian went to the cabin with Malcolm. After a few days of no phone calls, I missed talking. Brian's got a great ear; he'll listen to anything and no matter how mundane, he'll respond as if it makes a difference to him. I love that, and take advantage of his goodwill as much as I can. Especially since I started writing the book and go days sometimes without leaving the house. I was beginning to tremble the way Buddy the Dog does whenever the cat crosses his path. The cat he can't chase or he'll get the $@*% kicked out of him. So I began a little diary that week. I didn't blog because I'm not kidding, this stuff was as interesting as chicken bouillon. But I needed a blog posting. I took an entry from one day in the diary in which I waxed on writing. (in my head, that came out "waxed on whiting"). I give you, July 10th:

July 10: No hike today. Lazy. Woke up to a crisis: no high test coffee beans and no cat food. (Actually, ran out of the cat food last night, but I just left her outside to fill up on moles and mice.) Zoom zoomed off in the Mini at 8 a.m. to avert the crisis, and an hour and a half later came home with an extra large Americano and Iams. Aaaaaaand a new skin care regime (adios, Mr. Franklin), eggs, zip lock bags, Burts Bees lip balm (not the kind that turns your lips white), cilantro, sun block, and seltzer water. I wish I had a dime for every hour I waste shopping for cheaper face products that will reverse the signs of aging. I wish someone had told us way back to invest in cosmetic companies. Sipping my luke warm Americano, the rest of the day, I updated my reverse outline. Can I tell you a secret? I don't have an outline for the book. I was too antsy to get going, and outlines only work if you know what you're doing. But to keep track of themes and conflicts and notes for revisions, I backfill an outline. I had three chapters to backfill, but as a result, I saw so many mistakes. I want to go back and fix them, but Sooz sez "Plow ahead. You can go back." I want to say, "but I've got ADD. I'll forget it all in 10 minutes." But she assures me that I could come up with a different edit for the same sentence each and every day. So, I could go back every day, or I can wait til the revision. She promises that no matter what, I'll have an edit for it, even if it's not the same one I had today. I will trust. But I did go through a bunch of chapters and write notes in margins. For the whole day. Except the hour I talked to Mary. I was so happy to see her name on my caller ID. She just got back from Bali (and a retreat before that.) Mary and I have an understanding: we rarely talk because we know we'll never get off the phone. And we both have our art to be selfish about. But as I said earlier, I was just backfilling the outline and it was MARY. Mary and I talk about great stuff. Inside stuff that can reinflate the soul. We did try to limit it. She started off by saying, "Can you talk or are you working?" I said, "I've got five minutes, but then I've got to get back." I don't ever have to explain to Mary. We might have stopped after, hmmm, 45 minutes? An hour? When we got going, my soul realized how thirsty it was, and it wanted to swim across the Bay in a conversation with Mary. By the way, I don't think chapter nine works. I think I have to rewrite it. I know. I know. Deadline. . .

Fear Itself

2008-07-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

What if we all stopped caring about what everyone thinks? What if we just blurted out the truth? All of it. Our secrets, lies, hidden truths, peccadillos, what shames us, what hurts us. At the moment, we know truth can hurt. But if we all stopped caring what everyone/anyone thinks, it wouldn't hurt. "Who cares?" we'd chime and proceed to talk about lawn care products. Wouldn't that burst a few venom balloons! My wish, my most earnest deep-gut desire, is to speak (write) without worrying about how "Nails" is going to respond. "Nails" is skilled with venom balloons. When were were growing up, "Nails'" existence edited everything until we couldn't open our mouths or take a step out of the house without pausing to consider how "Nails" could construe it into . . . well, anything more would be amo for "Nails." One day. One day I'm going to write without fear of "Nails." And it's either going to be the day I say "Screw Nails!" or the day "Nails" isn't around any more. Thing is, it's not so much "Nails;" it's the people who care about "Nails'" influence. Simplest solution: let's all stop caring about what "Nails" thinks. Has "Nails" earned our care? Do we owe "Nails" something? Say it with me, people: "Free Screaminglady! SCREW NAILS!"

Fear itself

2008-06-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

Previous post deleted.

Wildlife Fix

2008-06-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

It wasn't much. A rustle in the bushes got me to turn on my path. Then a leap. A blur. A shot across the pale dusty gravel behind me. The stretched canter of a cat. A bobbed yellowish-white tale on a beefy set of tawny haunches, black feet. Then more rustling as it entered the chaparral on the downside of the ridge. The last time I saw a bobcat on Mt. Tam, it was about five years ago. Two of them, actually, sat stoically on the branch of an oak tree as I passed under. I didn't notice them until they were straight over my head. I walked on, keeping my quiet truce with Mother Nature. Today, I kept it -- not so quietly -- by calling Buddy (my Jack Russell Terror-ier) off his shit-disturbing chase. I wish I had more time to go out and watch for wildlife. As it is, I combine it with my one-hour daily hike to the top of the Corte Madera ridge. Many times, I'm hoofing it up, head bent over my stride, when I hear something I've come to learn is more than just a lizard or a field mouse darting into the dry grasses. Usually it is a hawk above or a deer ahead. Or, if I'm lucky, the more rare Peregrine Falcon, coyote, or wild turkey. Alarmed by my intrusive presence, they are usually heading in the other direction before I get a good long look. I haven't had a lot of sightings over the last six years on this particular hike or the previous six years on other Mt. Tam trails, but that's probably because I'm on trails. It's wildlife; it knows what the trails are for. It doesn't matter. What I've seen so far, it's enough for me. Heck, an unusual mound of scat is enough wildlife for me.

My So-Called Writing Life

2008-02-19T13:39:00.001-08:00

Most of my written words are going into the novel these days. Other things have entered my life that take some time from my so-called work day. One day at a time, right? Today, as part of my research, I'm watching the Roman Catholic Mass in Latin! Who'dathunkit? Sunday we drove up to the cabin to see some of the bulldozer work on the property. Here's what I found on the side of the road on the way up:

Postcard from Honduras

2008-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

Friends are asking about the wayward Fuller in Honduras, so I thought I'd be lazy with this week's blog posting and use her material instead. The photo to the left is not one of hers but it is the reason she went there.

Hi guys!

I didn´t really think I´d get to email you for the restof the trip, but we ended up hanging out in a town for a while and I have time to kill.

I am literally having the time of my life. I miss you guys, but I wish we could extend our stay a few months... we have almost finished building the house here. I´ve become a master mason and have been spending all day in the hot hot sun (it hasn´t rained during work day yet) laying mortar and bricks. Let me tell you, it is amazing. there are these awesome little kids who hang around the worksite. I love them all so much. I have so many pictures of them messing around and I know I´m going to miss them like woah.

On our off days we go site-seeing. One day we went zip-lining over a waterfall and then hiked under it (remember when Laurel and I went canyoning? like that, only without safety gear... way more hardcore.) the food is pretty good. The hotel food is varied, and not always authentic or good. but the portions are HUGE! every day for lunch we go to the house of a family who has a habitat house and they cook us these AMAZING meals. Today was one little girl´s birthday so there was food, decorations, dancing and a piñata. so much fun.

I´m taking plenty of pictures, so don´t worry. I can´t wait for a hot shower (ours are cold...) and a hot bowl of pasta e fagioli when I get home. (I´m thinking I may drive home on Friday night, even if it´s really late. Is that okay if I get home at like midnight? I really just want to crash at home with you guys and detox for a few days.) I miss you guys!

did you ever pay my PGE bill or get my ring from laurel? I really miss that ring.

lots of love,
Maggie

Families Served Current FY: 222
Total Houses Constructed: 5,634
House Sponsorship Cost (USD): $4,370

Wait For It

2008-01-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

In East Greenwich, RI, last Saturday night, we warmed our backsides against the earth-friendly burn of enviro-logs crinkling in the copper fire bowl on John and Deb Walsh's patio. As John and Brian conferred over the state of the globe, Deb and I took note of leafless maples, birch, and willow in her backyard. She said, "Sometimes I sit up in the cupola (it's a seaside town), waiting. I look out at all this loss, this emptiness, and I know something's coming. I never know what, of course. Just knowing something is coming is what makes this so beautiful." I wanted to ask if she'd read my last posting of similar theme, but I didn't want to retreat to the literal too quickly. So without speaking, for a few moments we waited together. It was uncharacteristically balmy for a December night. The radiating bowl was enough to warm our chilled parts. The moon lit the sky with a pastel teal that reminded me of the northern lights I once saw in Denali, Alaska. The twigs and twisted barren branches we admired cast a filigree of shadows that levitated lively over the matted patches of grass and frozen dirt. Ordinary objects ordinarily overlooked commanded the landscape: a red wooden storage shed placed catercorner on the grounds, the weathered wooden fence, the telephone wires segmenting the sky scape, the row of rectangular houses lined up like yellowed dominoes. I was taking it all in, this mild expression of the season. I knew the real thing, the abominable part I remembered loving as a kid and hating as a young adult was just days away. We were heading back to Marin in two days. Turns out, we escaped a blizzard by mere hours.

It's easy to take in the beauty in the spareness of the season back in the temperate Bay Area; all you need is an extra layer and a fashionable scarf. It's a short wait, though, before the magnolias and acacias start to bloom. But in New England and other regions where real winter happens and happens and happens, they take it like a beating and sport the wear and tear like prizefighters. When it's over, they will tell you it was worth the wait. And not just for what comes next.

The Light I Love

2007-12-21T23:03:00.001-08:00

Days are cold, and I'm not adverse to hiking later in the morning. Today, it was 3 in the afternoon before I quit the keyboard, laced up the trail shoes, and led Buddy up the ridge. It's good to look at things from a different angle, even if it's simply the angle of day light. Three in the afternoon doesn't sound so late, but on the shortest day of the year, it's evening. This is the light I love. All the shadows have moved around to the other side of things; what usually goes unnoticed in the background now takes center stage. Dry leaves that disappear among dusty detritus now pop off the trail's moist dark soil. Silvery lichen lights up the naked oaks in neon green. Mushrooms that demure in their dark dens kick up a chorus line of bleached ivory stems. The florest floor, filled with fallen leaves, shimmers like wet copper. What scarce light makes it through the canopy scatters like diamonds across the whole dank muddy mess. It's brisk. I need gloves for the first time this season. I think of the trees, having shed all those leaves. Trillions upon trillions composting under my feet. One single leaf, sure, it's light. But imagine the weight of them all at once. Imagine the relief of winter. The rest. This is the light I love.

What Goes Around Goes Around Without Belt Loops

2007-11-19T20:09:00.001-08:00

One of the biggest mistakes my mother ever made was not letting me wear jeans in high school. (Perspective is a big deal in high school.) THE most important thing to a teenager is fitting in. Somewhere. Anywhere. Even if you don't want to fit in, you want to fit in with the kids who don't want to fit in. Am I right? God forbid you're the one left standing after the musical chairs of middle school is over. I ventured into the public school system in junior high school. My chances of being the last one standing were astronomically high. I already had three strikes against me. One: my mother was an English teacher in that school. They called her "the terror of the top floor." Two: six years in Catholic school not only arrests any development of a fashion sense that doesn't have to do with plaid skirts and girl bow ties, but it eliminates your chances of knowing anything about popular culture. And three: on the first day of seventh grade, I sat in my home-made sailor dress next to my best friend Kelly Shea, who was wearing white hot pants and white go-go boots. And maybe even a halter top, but I could be exaggerating. First thing I learned in public school? I needed some store-bought clothes. I went to my mother, whose beautiful hands sewed that dress and three others during the entire sticky month of August, to ask about store bought clothes. Normally, you didn't ask my mother for something unless you were bleeding from a major artery and needed a tourniquet to keep from dripping blood on the shag carpeting. There were five of us. And she was a single parent. But that first day of junior high, I knew I was going to die if I didn't have some store-bought clothes. Astoundingly, she agreed, and she took me to Marshall's, the new discount store in town, to buy me some pants. But not jeans. No jeans. That was her rule. And you didn't question her rules. We learned that when we were younger after a few encounters with the belt (Sometimes we were lucky when we encountered the belt and didn't have to remove our pants and, under them, every pair of underwear you could find in your drawer and in the hamper.)

At Marshall's, Mom found some wonderful (her description) Danskin stretch polyester bell-bottom pants. Who was I to argue? I came from Catholic school. There was a whole bin full of these Danskin pants, and I got two pair. One brown and one purple. They had elastic waist bands. But no pockets. Later I became aware of the fact that they also had no cool visible stitching and little grommets. No button flies. No belt loops. I suppose she meant well. She probably thought they'd let me move free and unencumbered. She probably thought I'd look graceful and refined. Like a dancer. But this was 1972. Dancers were dorkey. And after observing my fellow classmates and their clothing, I came to realize that elastic waistbands were dorkey. Umbrellas in a torrential rain were dorkey. Anything not denim was dorkey. Those pants were dorkey. They lasted through seventh and eighth grades and were still in pretty good shape the summer before high school. By then it was 1974. I was doomed. That summer though, my brothers and I managed to talk Mom into taking us to a groovy clothing store on Cape Cod called "Head and Foot." It sold only hip clothes and leather accessories like pocketbooks, pony tail holders and belts. It smelled of musk incense. I knew if I was allowed to buy anything in "Head and Foot," I would be safe. Thank God corduroy became popular that year. Mom was good with corduroy. I picked out a pair of burgundy hip hugger corduroys and a long sleeved, collared shirt, boy's style, white with a thin burgundy stripe. Mom even let me buy a leather belt to string through the loops on my new corduroy hip huggers. Oh joy, oh loops!

If you grew up back East, you know that the first week of school, everyone expects it to be cool and crisp. Great sweater weather. Perfect for corduroys too. But we always forget about Indian summer, which usually hits about that time of year. I didn't care. It was either corduroys or the Danskins. I had my dignity to recover. Then, over the course of the next few months, I managed to acquire a healthy set of hips and thighs, and along with them, a few new pairs of pants for school. The Danskins had run their course once Mom realized how they showed off my new curves. Still, there was the no-jeans code.

I realize what she was hoping to accomplish with the code. Jeans, for Mom, meant hippies. And hippies stood for who-knows-what. Mom didn't feel comfortable with who-knows-what as an outcome for her children. There was only one outcome for our high school years, and that was a smoke-free, drug-free, heterosexually-oriented, abstinence-only, athletically-successful experience. In fact, there were a few girls in the grade above me who managed to project just this wholesome high school happiness, and Mom did all she could to encourage me to watch and learn. How many times did I hear "Robin So-and-So doesn't wear jeans, and she's captain of the cheerleading squad?" and "Be bubbly. Robin So-and- So is bubbly." Indeed, I enjoyed the cheerleading thing in junior high, but in high school, I was finding my darker, dramatic artist self and had no interest in cheer leading, cheer following, or cheery anything. But Robin So-and-So haunted me with her Tinkerbell nose and her bouncy walk and her perky no-jeans outfits until she graduated and I ballooned to something like 155 pounds my senior year.

I never got to wear jeans in high school. But I wore them every single day throughout college. Then I got a job and started wearing panty-hose. Then I started freelancing, and sweats became as popular in my wardrobe as jeans. I think of this story now, at age 47, because I know two things about jeans that I didn't know in high school. One: they are not always comfortable. Especially if I'm battling a few extra pounds or a little bloating. And two: Robin So-and-So was a dork. (I have no trouble with that connection, do you?) Also, as a working mother, I'm back in uniform. It includes Nylon-spandex blend, boot-cut yoga pants. Danskins. I have two pair. One in black and one in brown.

Dying of Thirst Answer

2007-11-18T17:44:00.001-08:00

A few people got it. A few did not. Malcolm had to explain it to me (see previous post, Reflect on This.) What he meant by "we'd all die of thirst" is that water is a reflective surface.

Photos by Malcolm
Yosemite, September 2007

Reflect On This

2007-11-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

From time to time, the stress of raising an ADHD child caves in on me. Pity. I pity him. I pity me. Grief. For what should have been. What could have been. I don't believe in fairness. It doesn't exist and never was part of the intelligent design. In fact, the opposite of fairness (unfairness?) likely was the main idea in the big plan. That's a post for another day. But, I can't help but wonder what part of the "intelligence" justifies "giftedness" that fills the sails of one childhood with a strong, steady wind but offers another only a restless wind inside a letter box? That's alright. I know the answer. But from time to time, it just caves.

And sometimes, it soars. This week, I was driving Malcolm to school and I threw out a topic, as I manage to do on a good morning. "What if there were no mirrors? Wouldn't that change our whole concept of beauty in the world? What if there were no reflective surfaces?" Malcolm's instant response was: "We'd all die of thirst."

Let me know how long it takes you.

Bugs and Other Beauties

2007-11-13T20:31:00.000-08:00

An artist found my blog recently so I visited hers. That's what it's all about, right? The serendipity about this unexpected encounter is that she loves bugs too! Bugs and bees and plants and trees! Her eye is spiritual, and if you want a few nature hallelujahs, enjoy The Nature Art and Photography of Carolyn Hietala from Richmond, Virginia. That's the name of her website. Whew! Be patient. Scroll down. Don't miss the salamander on the fall leaves. Or the moth pupa paintings. She has a few other blogs I haven't looked at yet. I'll be taking my time with this one for a while.

Speaking of art, I had a joyful lunch at Mary's house last week and finally had the pleasure of eying her water paintings in person. These works are beautifully depicted on her blog, a testament to the wonders of digital photography and backlit computer monitors. But I have to say, seeing them up close and personal surpassed my expectations. Who doesn't relate to water? It's what we are. And there's an immediate connection to these works, a drawing in, a pull to touch. Mary's also done some beautiful charcoal sketches of the tides which I thought were ancient Japanese prints. And an early attempt at a surf painting in the bathroom illustrates the trick-the-eye effect that painting requires to represent the real thing. Mary's works always strike me with awe in that way: up close suggesting the subtle techniques that miraculously a step back appear as exact as nature itself. It is a privileged experience to feel that intimate with her work. Pay close attention to her recent post (Oct. 26) and the way two separate pieces on the top form a continuous vision in different shades. The dichotomy of the respect for natural beauty in its simulation.

Look at me. All this aht (as my people pronounce it). Speaking of aht and the Boston accent, I'd like to say that I've seen Lisa Strout's latest mosaics, but she's in Portland now. I haven't seen her in more than a year. She's updated her website (tilefishart.com) and it's obvious she's been hahd at werk, right Lisa? Do NOT miss the no calorie chocolates and the mosaic pillows. Lisa is a natural artist, someone who can't contain her creativity, has to act on most of her artistic impulses, and definitely does things her own way. She's a rolling stone, who in school was probably the kind of kid your mothers told you to avoid. Lucky the ones who didn't listen to their moms. All that self expression, and believe me, Lisa never lets convention get in the way of self expression. Or a good time. You'll see it. I haven't caught up with Lisa in a while. We're supposed to talk a little more about the four chapters I sent her, but we're so singularly sucked in, we artists. Aren't we?

It's ok, too. I'm working through them as though just knowing she read them inspired improvements.

Not on Strike

2007-11-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

I didn't instigate the writer's strike, honest. It doesn't look like I'm writing, but blogging takes time away from the real deal, and my deadline is looming. Feb. 1st. More than a month past my return from Italy, and I'm just getting back my stride. That's stride, not strike. Not that I want to work for Hollywood, but it would be a dream to have the kind of steady in a writing career for which a strike validates it as a real job. I'm working on borrowed time, as you know, so I'll keep this brief. I'm on chapter 8, though it's still slow. Italy set me back weeks before I left, and I was a slug afterwards. Couldn't get back into my rhythm. Lots of household and family management details to attend to. (I'm still a mom.) I couldn't find the groove, plus, I'm not the kind of gal that can sit still for very long. Thoughts don't come flooding out of my head; they drip. Yep, I'm more like a leaky faucet kind of writer. I sit down. I get up. I go to the fridge. Sit back down. Get up. Check for the mail. Put in a load of laundry. Fix a few sentences. Check email. Think. Think. Think. Write and then find a drawer full of empty change that needs to be collected. See? Today, it's the blog. Crap. Back to the bucket.

Miss Otus Regrets

2007-09-07T11:51:00.001-07:00

I'm heading off to Italy with my mom on Monday. We start in Milan, head to Lago di Garda, fitting in a few day trips to Venice and Padova. Then we'll take a train to Ravenna for a few days, then to Sienna -- with a day trip to Florence from there -- and finally to Cinque Terre. Mom has decided to start her diet in Milan. I'm ending mine there. So, while I regret she'll be sitting across the table, unable to lunch on anything other than Balance Bars, that won't stop me from smacking my lips over Ligurian seafood, Tuscan meat dishes, pizza in Sienna, sauces from Emilia-Romania, and succulent wines from everywhere. (The photo is from Maggie's stop in Cinque Terre last summer with Carla and Laurel.)

I'm taking a few writing tools: a pad of graph paper (I love those tiny boxes!), some mechanical pencils, refills on lead and erasers, my writing journals and an old travel journal that I used when I went on a bike tour of Alaska with Mama Mia in 2000. Whatfor all these writing utensils? I'm afraid I'm forced to finally outline the novel. Yep, I admit it. Up until now, it's been seat-of-the-pants all the way. That's what writing on a laptop does to me: I can't resist the random, chaotic, organic-ness of composing on a computer. I LOVE it, and I'll miss it. But, I guess If I'm going to have to lollygag on trains from Lombardy to Liguria for two weeks, I might as well use the time semi-wisely.

Ciao!

Crisping Towards the Shadowlands

2007-08-27T11:07:00.001-07:00

On the way up to the cabin this last weekend of summer, Brian and I had a chance to drive alone in "the living room" (the Tundra), while all five kids accompanying us squeezed into the 4-Runner, which happens to have no air conditioning. Five teenagers. 91 degrees. No air conditioning.

On the way up, Brian waxed nostalgic about the fact that Maggie and her Cal friends are performing the same ritual we practiced with our UCLA pals twenty some odd years ago. And there it was. The geezer factor. In that one careless, wistful observation, the older generation zeroed in, locked on, plucked us out of our delusions of youth, and enfolded us into its ranks. All those years stealthily ducking it since the kids made us parents, admittance came sooner and more nimbly into our partnership than I planned. Sighing heavily, I stared out the window as we passed over John Day's Hill leading into the Coastal Range. Within moments, I began to notice the flora and fauna passing by fading ever so slightly into soft sepia shades of light and shadow. A faint crisping sounded in my ear, as though pine needles, oak leaves, manzanita, mountain thistle, fennel, grasses and weeds lining that road, in one united sigh of their own, surrendered to autumn sooner than they expected.

We did a lot of water skiing Saturday. I had a brief run, but it was the run of my life. I leaned back, weightless, and sailed intrepidly back and forth across the wake. In the end, though, I paid dearly for that fearless flight. Oh, did I pay! That night, vertigo packed a punch that kept me wrestling with a spinning tent and sleeplessness. For some reason, I remained uncharacteristically calm in my solitude through that Gravelly night. Through the fine tent mesh overhead, I watched the gun-metal gray sky darken to black as the waxing gibbous moon dropped out of sight. Stars popped brilliantly against the infinite blackness. A barn owl screeched in a nearby tree. A great-horned neighbor's hollowed answers echoed back. Drying leaves rustled overhead. No creek sounds this late in a drought year. I dropped in and out of sleep until one last waking, I witnessed with relief the steel blue light of dawn. I dropped into two delicious hours of still sleep. After rising, I sat in one of the worn wicker chairs out in the field, drinking coffee with Brian. The mid morning sun warmed our backs as we stared out at over the grasses, crusty and pale.

A few hours later, the kids awoke, one by one, zipped open tents, and lumbered towards the cabin, shedding their slumber over the dusty footpaths. A dozen scrambled eggs, a dart game, and some slapdash packing, and off they set for the three-hour drive home. Five teenagers. No air conditioning. But a mere 78 degrees at that point. Carla from Milan, in the U.S. scoping out grad schools, had to catch her flight to New York that night. Malcolm planned to meet a friend at the ferry building in the city. Maggie, Kay, and Andre still had to buy their books for classes the next day. Brian and I found ourselves in a refreshingly bizarre situation: no plans ahead.

Without words to mark this alien occasion, we set about breaking camp. In silence, I disassembled tents, collected the kerosene lanterns, carried chairs back into the cabin, stuffed sleeping bags, repacked food bags and cooler, and secured the wool blankets back into their mothball-filled metal lockbox. After that, while Brian neatened the fencing over the grapevines, checked the water pipes, and cleaned the cabin, I sat on the tailgate munching granola. Buddy's ears perked, alerting me to the sight of a goldfinch fidgeting on a lantern hook. The blue jay's nest sagged out of the bat box, its fledglings long decamped from its twiggy womb. At the far edge of the field, from out of the creek alders, two grazing deer signaled a tentative moment of harmony with the wilds of nature beyond.

Fresh from the shower, Brian shuttered the cabin, packed the trash in the truck bed, closed up the tailgate, shut the truck's back doors, and settled into the seat beside me. He popped a breath mint, kissed me on the lips, and started up the engine for the drive home. As we pulled out of the gravelly driveway, I tuned the iPod to John Mellancamp, leaned back and looked out across the valley. It had been a great summer.

Baby, won't you buy my car? (And other questions)

2007-08-22T19:37:00.001-07:00

A very nice couple from San Rafael bought my Volvo yesterday. (I now drive the darling pictured at left.) Besides the required DMV forms, we discussed some mutual interests like garden pots, beer making, and writing. When the gentleman asked me the purpose of my blog, the thing that had been nagging at writing nerve most recently assaulted me like a chubby middle-schooler screaming "duh" into my face. (Not that the buyer was any of those things.) What is the purpose of this blog? It doesn't have one, really. It's a bit of a navel gazing exercise to narrate my writing life. But, who the hell cares about that. I'm off to find new purpose for this screaming lady. Stay tuned.

Dammed Waters

2007-08-14T10:56:00.001-07:00

Got pre-workshop feedback on chapter four from my writing instructor. He suggested a major edit that I liked, and so, instead of my wild ride on the waters of creativity towards chapter five, I'm revising right now. It's Tuesday and I think I'll be done by this afternoon. In the meantime, to keep myself from getting impatient, instead of my wild ride imagery, I chose the serenity of the little fountain in our zen-ified garden.

Racing with Minnows

2007-08-11T16:04:00.000-07:00

This is me a few weeks ago, the ride that likely caused the vertigo. This is also me in the week ahead. Only instead of water, picture creative genius. Instead of a tow rope, picture my words. And instead of the ceiling spinning overhead as a result, picture the outcome of my next wild ride the spinning out of another chapter. Note look of imperturbable concentration. Off I go.

Chapter Four

2007-08-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

It's taken me all summer, so far, but chapter four is finally finished. Rough rough draft, of course. (She said, hording excuses.) I have five chapters written now. (A later chapter, not yet numbered, I drafted for a writing class last winter.) A whole summer practically, but if anyone's kept up with this blog, the excuses are innumerable. Also, to get this chapter in shape, I read three books -- one a girl's diary of growing up in the 70s and two on abortion history. I also watched two documentaries on women's achievements in history. Four parts narrated by Donna Mills, that icon of women's intellectual, political and social progress. Inspiring. I've got a boat-load of people coming next weekend. My goal is to write chapter five this week. I will not be blogging, for sure.

Vertigo

2007-08-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

After a wild ride of a weekend water skiing at Lake Pillsbury, I opened my eyes last Monday morning at 5:45 to the ceiling spinning. This was not some blurry aftermath of a vacation bender. I don't drink all that much anymore. Besides, the room spun when my eyes were OPEN! Long story short, I had Vertigo. I wobbled and swayed my way to the doctor's, got some blood tests and other nuisances, and never found out a cause. For a week, a thick, oozy, dark cloud settled over my brain, keeping me from connecting all the wires to the right places. I was able to write a little, not much, and for the most part, it's gone. Back to the well for some creativity. Now, where's my bucket?

Gone Bonding

2007-07-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

Off to the cabana for three days with my boys. I've had a week to myself to accomplish lots of words, and I've taken full advantage. My research stuffs my Book Passage shoulder bag to capacity, lots of pens and pencils and a notebook. Writing class last night launched a weekly routine of workshops through til spring. I'm giddy. Mary said she looks for my blog updates; I'm so flattered. Sheepish, though, about not keeping it up as frequently as I hoped. I told her if I'm not posting, it's because the book has me captivated. Hope that helps. Thanks for reading!!!

Convinced?

2007-07-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

The boys are off to the cabin til Monday. By the time they got out the door and I got Sarah back to the city, I was left, for the first time this summer, with time - and nothing to slot into it - ahead of me. I grabbed my notebook, laced my hiking shoes, and headed to the hills. The notes flew onto the page as soon as I was out the front gate. Yesterday I felt almost hopeless about the significance of the story I was weaving with the loose threads of my embryonic talent. Today, the threads began to plait up almost by themselves. Need more convincing evidence that character A feels powerless? By golly, she needs to wretch at the distaste of that powerlessness. Her daughters have to sock it to her with their heedless decisions, the way they talk over her opinions, accentuate her inabilities. Worse, they decide to ignore her. Okay, now we have something! Need convincing evidence that things aren't what they seem with our protagonist? Time the mysterious snow to occur just as the others discover she's been holding out on them. Shock 'em. No time to explain.

Plot tension

2007-07-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

I'm off for a hike. I am a tad stuck. I've finished four chapters, and I'm afraid that between 1 and 3, there's not much plot tension. Just one of the things that haunts me day to day. Do I go back and revise now? Or wait til I've produced more? Off to the trails . . .

How long before you leave again?

2007-07-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

Brian needs to get a job. Really, enough sharing already! I haven't had a good long stretch of writing unbroken by his enthusiasm since he ended his career with EETimes and entered a month-long hiatus. It's not that he keeps interrupting me, although he does. It's that annoying jolly step, as he tramps through the house from one busy project to the next. It's 15 years of deferred to-dos unleashed. But even when he's not moving around, from behind my office door, his silence is probably most distracting. It's his prolonged presence in the kitchen, for example; I ache to know what he's getting into. No, FEAR what he's getting into! He also keeps asking me how the writing is going. More than once a day. I think we need some ground rules.

Scream, Already!

2007-07-05T08:26:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Lisa, for that kick in the butt. To the screaming:

You were somewhat correct in that when I took the time to write in the past few weeks, it was to catch up on the book at the easy expense of the blog. You gave me too much credit, however, in assuming I was producing much at all. If I were one of those writers who figures out how to put writing above nutrition and hygene on my daily to-do list, I'd be up every morning at 4:00 or 5:00, produce two to three hours of great literature before the rest of the house begins to wipe the crust from their eyes and stretch their rigid limbs across the crumpled sheets. I haven't figured that out yet. It's on my to-do list.

I'm sitting at Martha & Bros. on the corner of Divisidero and California, 8:35 a.m., Thursday July 5. Coffee shop with FREE high-speed internet access. I've spent the last five days in Heidi-land. You might have been there once yourself: expecting overnight guests, you attack all the little chores that nobody ever gets to until guests are about to come around. A two-day frenzy of shopping, cleaning, patching, deconstructing and reconstructing. Like, putting the door knob back on the pantry door after 2 years; framing and/or hanging pictures on the bare walls they've been resting against since the walls were painted; changing the moldy shower curtain. Then, stashing the unaccomplished ugliest in closets and under beds 15 minutes before guests arrive.

We entertained our long-lost Rhode Island buddies, Deb and John, and their happy band of offspring, Pete, Evan, and Juliana. It wasn't the typical visit where the adults go to one end of the house and the kids to another and meet back at the end of the visit. The children's companionship satisfied as much as the adults', moreso, even, by the sheer surprise of it. Performing on our musical instruments partly because they couldn't help themselves, and partly to entertain, not show off. Conversing like ambassadors of nations. And being kids like you just don't see kids anymore these days: authentically excited about the newness of a place; playing hand-slap and dance games in public; posing for goofy touristy photos because IT'S FUN. Three days. Not nearly long enough to reclaim all the time and events lost to the 3000 miles and years that have separated us.

In the hour I've been writing, sipping coffeee, moving my seat, here at Martha & Bros., I've wiped from the corners of my brain a few of the cobwebs that quickly formed while away from writing. My vocabulary is flabby and my attention is weak. I'm fighting to return to the writer within. I feel so distant from her, spoiled by the undisciplined flow of an active social life. The sights outside the window in front of me delight and easily distract me; the wonderful diversity of city people. Earnest, freshly showered morning people dashing to the bus. Weary, red-eyed July-4th revelers shuffling into the cafe, desperate and repentant. Oh, here's a woman in black capris pants, black heeled pumps, a pretty white blouse under a shapely tan and black striped fitted jacket, black hair pulled back in a stylist pony tail, one hand steadying the distressed brown leather bag hanging off her shoulder, other hand suspending her cuppa away from her outfit. This is the SF look. We've mastered the art of making casual attire still mean business. There's a dad taking his son to day-care (I'm assuming, at this early hour). He must be six-nine and weigh 145 pounds. Stylishly short dreadlocks and thick-rimmed glasses, gray t-shirt and black jeans. His son barely tops at at Dad's mid-calf. But their arms are long enough to reach each other. Bike riders, seriously on their way to work, jeans and a jacket; not weekend show-offs in neon colored spandex. A mom in flip flops and workout pants pushing well-used stroller, walking dog. Lady in jeans and navy blazer, long red hair, no make-up. That one across the street must be a good lawyer; I can tell by her gray-and-black streaked page-boy cut, ill-fitting, no-nonsense black suit and beige, over-stuffed canvas carry-all. Waiting for the bus. Public defender. You, there. Are you a yoga teacher with all your gear stuffed into that Whole-foods sack? And you, nice powder blue and black Timbuk2 bag. Gotta class? Guy in crisp ironed shirt and khakis coolly defying the 3 seconds left on the walk signal. No worries. Chinese couple just now sit at cafe tables outside my window perch. Coffee? No thanks, just resting. Whoa, girl, a little too much gut squishing up over your belt. Believe me, that's eye-catching in the worst way. God, I'm way too distracted. Off to my library office.

P.S. Working at the library for an hour is not working. Can't. . . focus. . . my. . . thoughts.

A New Office, A New Day

2007-06-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new office: the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Aware that my location impresses no one in the blog-o-sphere, I am nonetheless giddy at the idea that I will be writing my novel in a library. It's a funky old building on Clay and Baker streets, yellow-bricked with long, slow stone steps and concrete columns flanking its massive oak doors. The main room, high-ceilinged, arched-windowed, oak-paneled, has that delicious mysterious scent of aged paper, opened to the damp air then closed to mold and then dry who knows how many times. Ah, the smell of book worship. This place, it's classic. Still, something sort of retrofit in feel makes me less a believer. Maybe it's the fluorescent lights set into the ornate ceiling mouldings or the 70s-era arm chairs, low slung and angular with brown Naugahyde upholstery. Maybe it's the pressed plywood bookshelves pretending to blend in with the old stacks. There's a sure sense of posing about this place. Like a town whose industry has shipped overseas but whose residents keep showing up at the factory punch-clock every morning. It has high-speed wireless Internet, though. This is where I will be most days writing the novel, now that Malcolm has started at Drew High School, beginning with a freshman transition program this summer. I'm having a little difficulty concentrating today, distracted by a startlingly diverse array of personalities among the library patrons and the way some said patrons keep looking over their shoulders at other said personalities who enter their personal space. Often. There's also the diminutive white-haired and -mustacheoed librarian who smiles too often and wrings his hands when he talks ("Be sure we get a copy of the book; children's is it?") He talks on the phone a lot, sweetly and with service in his heart, but casually too loud for a librarian's sensibilities. I wonder if I should be more wary than I am, so eager to establish familiarity in my new surroundings, talking so soon to this stranger. I had the same feeling this morning when I entered into two, count 'em two!, conversations with strangers at the Starbucks on Sutter and Broderick. You can take the girl outta New England. . . I thought it would be nice simply to enjoy the encounters, but something in the back of my Salem-haunted brain said "they're never what they seem." I may need to take my work downstairs to the Russian and Chinese literature room. I'm thinking distractions in another language might be less distracting.

So, here I am. Writing again. Working on the video was a rewarding creative experience, with a finished product in short time. But it was like a relative who comes for a week and stays three. I just couldn't seem to find a polite way of saying "enough!" After it was over, I had to attend to all of the minutia of life and family that I'd put aside to work on the project, and soon, I was a month behind in my writing. I think to myself, what would Mary Wagstaff do after drifting away from her painting for a month? Is it the same creature she left when she headed off to that surfing retreat in Costa Rica? How could it be? She's not the same person who left it. Every day makes a person new. Thirty days, a new life, it seems, in the world of creativity. Does Mary alter old brush strokes? Does Mary mix new shades? Does Mary make drastic changes to all that work already on the canvas?

My work this week, I've planned, will consist of rereading the finished chapters to orient myself. Next, I'll type up notes. My notes are more ephemeral in nature than the chapter work and therefore easier to forget. There's a lot of direction and decision in those notes, though, and this is a good time to tap it; see what ideas last stormed my brain.

Back to work, now. . .

Hello, Ladies

2007-06-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

So much has happened since I last posted. We produced a 30 minute movie for Malcolm's 8th grade graduation, refined it ad nauseum and then edited it to 20 minutes. I discovered my passion for editing isn't restricted to words. I loved the work. Brian suggests we enter it into some indy video awards programs. I think he's serious. Landscaping started on the side yard. I did not yet sell my Volvo. Maggie returned home, having completed her final exams at Cal. Her presence quickly reminded us why we had hired a cleaning lady. Malcolm acquired his first suit and looks 17 years old in it. Maggie and I cried while watching him get fittted in the "funhouse" mirrors. Maggie postponed her trip back east to attend his graduation. So I get another 10 days of a messy house and her sweet, spirited companionship. Totally worth it. On Friday, she moved into a house in Berkeley with five of her 8th floor dorm-mates from this year; two girls and three guys. We hosted them and a few other friends for steak and risotto last night; it was grand. Their energy was nothing short of what you'd expect from kids living the fully-funded, unsupervised, independent lifestyle (from the Zits cartoon).

The ladies in my novel have been, well, ladylike in their patience to have me return to their stories. I've missed them and continued to let them evolve in my notes. We meet up again tomorrow, and I promised them no more detours til we get the thing done.

Creative Diversion

2007-05-19T07:06:00.001-07:00

I'm producing a video project for Malcolm's school's graduation this week. Back to work next week. I miss my ladies.

Language and Architecture

2007-05-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

Started last Friday, an hour's architecture this morning, a work in progress: Language and Architecture.

Sneak Peek

2007-05-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Usually when the front door opens at this time of year, the cold sneaks through the entry and lingers at the kitchen entrance like a vagrant outside a downtown shop. This time, the bum carried a sullen mood, and Nonna braced for Gabby to follow. On cue, a long fushia wool coat with its brown mink collar and matching mink pillbox hat turned the corner. The mood didn’t have a chance. Gabby jumped back and shrieked in an unearthly pitch and volume otherwise unthinkable for her slight form in dressmaker clothes. Her expression, contorted, and the scream, more biological than emotional, rooted down through Nonna’s being and located a fright so primal it erupted through her intestines. She screamed back, and in an instant Gabby’s expression turned to recognition, which just caused her to yelled out again. This one sounded more familiar, more fear than terror. Instantly, Nonna regretted her decision to surprise the girls.

I had the choice to create for my blog or create for the novel. If Brian comes looking for a blog entry, he'll get it, but this definitely cheats. A paragraph that needs more time in the cooker, but I like its potential.

Back on Track

2007-05-09T19:32:00.000-07:00

If you read his comment on my "Bad Day" post, you caught the gentle ass-kicking my employer gave me after he came out of the mountains and had a chance to check in on my work. "Stop it with the Stegner whining". . . or something like that. "The guy didn't his his stride until he was in his 50s." (That puts me on track, as a sidenote.) He's right. I did manage to get Stegner's prose out of my head; it was just after I watched "Bull Durham" the other night: "Annie? Who's this Annie? Get her out of your head, meat. Don't think, meat." You know what I mean if you've seen it. So, I got him out of my head and had a pretty compositional afternoon. It was one of those writing sessions that feels like I have swum miles out into the ocean, and I'm bobbing in the middle of purple green swells that promise doom in their depths, nothing around me but their glassy mountains and an open sky above. Nothing changes but the rhythm in my body. To keep afloat, I have to swim a little, float a little, tred water some, then swim some more. I get into a character's head, then back out, move to the setting, describe an object, get bored, swim around it, and start writing from the other side. Never leaving the open sea. It wasn't but a few hours, but I could have stayed out there til my skin got so pruney, I'd require a day on intravenous fluids for anyone to recognize me.

I'm happy in my hermitage, to answer the few inquirers about my social needs. I'm suited to it; the signs have always been there.

A Bad Day

2007-05-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, I hope I don't have many more days like today. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the inkling of brilliant summer days full of possibilities. Maybe I just wanted to go to the beach. My writing today bored me. I caught myself yawning several times. Honestly. I think I need to stop reading Wallace Stegner. My work isn't nearly so literary, although I hoped it would be. He simply awes me, the way he originates, makes the ordinary extraordinary, collects the ingredients of a remarkable moment and then articulates it in the fewest possible words. I'd be like blah blah blahbbing on and on, insisting on a description so intensely, I end up overwriting it. A few hours on the books today. Lousy. Blah!

I'd like to say some other things: about a long-overdue phone call with Deb, my bon(ne) vivant(e) girlfriend from Rhode Island, falling in love with her all over again, with her exuberance and lusty spirit; about Winnie coming home from New Mexico with shrunken and/or missing tumors, praying for some cooperation from American doctors and higher red and white blood cell counts (bubbles, bubbles, bubbles swarming all around her); about the utterly delicious feeling of holding a watering can over potted plants. But I'm too afraid to let today's clutsy wordsmithing ruin the moment. Maybe another day, huh?

Everyone in the Pool

2007-04-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

Concept for chapter three finalized on the hike. Nice long hike. I started the journey thinking I was going to write about one thing and ended up with another that became an interim chapter, which will be chapter three and chapter three now will be chapter four. One thing I've learned about this process is that it never stops being a process. When I first jumped into the pool and committed to the novel this time around, I literally went into a pool. A warm soaking pool in Sonoma. I was sent there by Brian to write for four days. I made a ritual of inviting my characters into the pool with me, one at a time, to get to know them better. Over the four days, I talked to them, asked them questions, learned about their lives. They spoke back. One character, for example, is 80 years old, and I had this grandmotherly persona all set for her. Easy. Then, in the pool one day, she told me she had been raped when she was 17. It shocked me, but you know, it worked. The plot tensed up, which is what it needed. The story instantly became richer, deeper, more textured. Today, on my hike, she told me she assisted girls who needed abortions before they were legal. Suddenly, she was another person altogether, and did that ever thicken the plot! I'm much more open to things changing like this now, whereas before the chaos of their organic nature terrified me. The basic plot remains the same, but I'm relieved that the creative process can be continuously creative, not just creative at the beginning and mechanical upon implementation.

Mom, my journal's open on the kitchen table, and I'm going out

2007-04-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

I was thinking this morning how journals used to be private places. Does anyone keep a private journal anymore? I think my kids believe their Facebook's are private. Well, maybe on the one hand: they are just private to "us." On the other hand, they are electronic billboards broadcasting reflections of themselves into outer space. A writer I know found a researcher who decribes teen electronic activity as a means of self-validation. They spend too much time observing their own thoughts. Used to be, they just mumbled and moved on. Did I just imply I miss the mumbling? Blogs have changed though. They might be better described as blobs. . . boundless, shapeless, transparent ooze of thoughts and ideas. Social networks, text messaging, I-Ming, blogs, wikis. Sharing. So much sharing.

I have to admit, I like knowing people are reading this blog. At least two, apparently. This morning I thought it would be nice if my mother read it once in a while. I thought, when I was a kid, she might have wanted to read my journal to learn why I was acting so strangely. And now, maybe she'd want to read my blog to find out why I'm acting so strangely. Maybe at this point she doesn't want to know.

Morning Terrors

2007-04-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Do other writers wake up experiencing a flash panic that their novel is stupid? Going nowhere? Fast? I'm not even far enough into it yet to warrant that kind of wake-up call, but there it was, exploding in my chest the minute I opened my eyes. Most mornings these days, I wake up thinking about the current happening in the book. Does that phrase make sense for that character? Is that action appropriate for the time period? Is there enough plot tension coming through? I spend about five minutes musing, welcome a word-boosting cuppa from my beloved, and sit up for 10 minutes directing my thoughts to the next page or two that I want to produce that day. Except today. Here's where one turns to Annie Lamott or Natalie Goldberg. Erma Bombeck even, the 70s and 80s female version of Dr. Phil, who basically told writers to stop their cry-babying and write. Write whatever, just write the damned words. Times like these, I begin to notice all the clutter in the house, little tasks piling up in my to-do basket, appointments I should make for the family. Must resist the urge.

Mirror, Mirror on The Monitor

2007-04-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last week was one of the most delicious weeks of my life. I wrote every day for at least four hours a day, a few five, and one six. On Sunday, Brian reviewed my Chapter One rewrite and agreed I could move on. But this week, I'm finding more obstacles in my writing brain. I can't sink my teeth into Chapter Two; it's meat that hasn't yet formed on the bones of the Angus. So, yesterday, Monday, I read Wallace Stegner, my literary hero, for inspiration, and reviewed notes in my hiking journal. When I hike, I keep a small notebook, slightly larger than my palm, in a fanny pack. Moving unlocks my mind, so an hour's hike can produce a load of material. The ideas just ooze out of my head, and if I stick the journal under my chin, I can capture them all on its pages before they fall under my trail-ripping treads. I used to unzip the fanny pack and pull out the journal, jot a few words down, then tuck it back in my pouch. Nowadays, I keep it in my hand. I got tired of all that zipping and unzipping. Part of my problem this week is that I hurt my back. I can't move.

I'm still trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with all this blogging. I feel like I just spent 30 minutes looking at myself in the mirror. I'm not comfortable with that. Are you?

Toast and Coffee

2007-04-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

Again, see Language and Architecture over there to the right. My chores are done; now to the good stuff.

Godspeed, Mr. Librescu

2007-04-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

I was going to post about the logistical quicksand of kids' schedules sucking all my time and energy yesterday, leaving me without a word written. But then I read the front page stories. Memo to self: count your blessings. I intended to remain informed but avoid the excessive news coverage, the TV and Internet voyernalism. I tried to look away when greedy, gold-digging newscasters mined for the raw, fragile emotions of petrified Virgina Tech students. I picked out one each of the thousands of stories on the countless angles they could come up with to cover this story, read the article, and collected my thoughts. I refused to buy into the same old manipulative excess dished out by voyernalism. Asking question after question until the student could no longer hold back his tears (and hold onto his dignity). Presenting more and more shocking cell-phone video so unreal it becomes macabre in its similarity to current Hollywood releases. But, unlike other unspeakable tragedies of the past, the voyernalists couldn't keep up with this pyschopath. It seems every hour, yet another one of his premeditations breaks news.

I worry that the gunman is getting too much attention from the press, encouraging other would-be psychotic attention seekers. I worry that young college students will never sleep soundly in their dorm beds again. I want my daughter to come home from Cal so that I can hold her in my lap and stroke her sweet-smelling hair.

There are stories of heroism and compassion that help redeem humanity from the far-reaching effects of one man's inhumanity. I make sure to read every one of those. One story in particular brings unexpected joy in the midst of unimaginable grief. Out of this obscenely evil act, beauty rose and his name is Liviu Librescu. An authentic humanitarian, Liviu Librescu faced evil before, faced his death at the hands of another grotesque beast during the Holocaust. Yet he managed to hold it off for a time when it would give life back to others. I can't imagine his family's wretching pain, yet I find comfort in New York City councilman (and, according to Newsday, a frequent spokesman for the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn) Dov Hikind's words: "We all know in our community that to save one life is to save the world. Look at the final act of Professor Librescu."

When having to work with unpleasant people in my former PR days, my boss (and now dear friend) Winnie Shows taught me "if you find you can't love someone, learn from them." A gunman introduced us to Mr. Librescu; we could consider that a learning opportunity. In this case, however, I choose to learn from the man in whom I find the love. Godspeed, Mr. Librescu.

A Good Day

2007-04-18T06:57:00.001-07:00

See Languages and Architecture link over there in the I Digress list. Have a good day!

Blogging Towards Fitness

2007-04-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

This blog posting is beginning to feel a little like getting back into an exercise routine after a long haitus. The first few days are exhilarating and fun, but then the muscles begin to stiffen and ache from the new workout. I read that writing is all about fitness; the well practiced writing mind. I wrote five hours yesterday and slept like I'd been drugged. Back to the workout. No wonder Jane Fonda produced so many books.

Panties vs. Thongs

2007-04-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, all you need is a catchy headline. I really want to get into this issue at the risk of typecasting my intentions out of the starting gate. I have my opinions and some really funny stories. But, posting takes a lot of time, and I have to start my new job today, and I'm already late. If you got to the Oprah archive page recommended on the previous post, you might have seen the little window shade panty ad. It shows a small pair of white panties (is it panties or panty?), and each side of the backside of the panty has a little window shade pull attached to it. The flash player sends the shades up and down to demonstrate what happens to ill-fitting panties. What is it about underwear humor? I feel like I'm in middle school, but that ad's humor really sticks with me, unlike some of the best engineered panties at prices that rival designer sunglasses. But rather that than a thong that intends to go places most women try to keep their panties from going. Nuff said on this topic. Off to work. It's my first day; I hope they don't make me make the coffee.

Origami Bras and Oprahs Jeans

2007-04-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

By virture of the fact that I'm not supposed to be procrastinating, I bring you one of the most brilliant forms of procrastination: Internet advertising. Next to shopping for e-cards, it's hella distracting. The Barely There bra ad is the new tops on my list. First of all, I love it when the advertising world takes its collective heads out of you-know-where and clues into what's really going on in the world rather than what they and their clients fantacize is going on in the world. Like Cover Girl choosing Drew Barrymore as the next "it" girl. Yes! Hero is the woman who doesn't need the mirror or the media to tell her she's beautiful. She just knows it. No regrets, man. And no stinkin' critics with their stinkin' Hollywood formulas for success. Victoria Secret, on the other hand: it ain't bras they're selling and it ain't women they're selling to.

Well, The Martin Agency nailed it with the Barely There Bra ads. You can see for yourself on the Barely There website (I tried to make a link out of the photo to the left, but it didn't work. Just as well. We'd be an altogether different kind of website, having you point your cursor to the pepper stems and such.) My favorite implementation of the ad is on an archive page of Oprah's website (Finger on the pulse, baby. Finger on the pulse.)

According to Reveries Magazine (which believes in parentheses, apparently) "The campaign sends its message using a “before-and-after” construct, “with two bras side-by-side that illustrate the result of an ill-chosen bra. On the left is a bra that is bumpy or misshapen (labeled ‘There’). On the right, a bra with a monochromatic background (”Barely There.”) The ‘There’ bras are adorned with objects that signify bumps, ridges and other bra-related problems. (The objects the Martin Agency … dreamed up include headlights, Jiffy Pop, pine cones and pointy pink-drink umbrellas).”

Anyway, on the Oprah site, you get to see some of the better iterations of the bra that aren't on the company's website. Like snow falling on pinecone cups. Or my favorite, the origami bra. (You might have to click the refresh button on Oprah's site a few times, but eventually the origami bra pops up, if you will.) The origami bra's cups are made of kootie catchers -those little paper puzzles we made as kids. You know, the ones where you stick your fingers in the points of the puzzle, open and close it to a rhyme that reveals a color, then a number, then eventually some folk wisdom, a fortune, or juvenile namecalling on the inner folds? The ad uses a flash player to manipulate the puzzle, but again, different website genre. Let's continue.

Jeans, Jeans, They're Good for Your Arse

Speaking of Oprah's website (Really, finger on the pulse): if you seriously need more excuses to procrastinate, you'll feel almost productive (if you are a girl) when you check this link out. Oprah found someone who expertly helps you pick out the best jean for your body type. It's on my bookmark list. Confession: I care and I shop. As you probably have guessed, being a screaming lady means show, don't tell. Bookmark This! is a feature on my blog where I show (and in cases like this, confess) my bookmarks, a collection of the many ways I've found to procrastinate all these years. Join me, won't you? You have to promise not to judge, but if you do, at least have the decency to comment on my blog. I'll want to bookmark it.

Meet My Scream

2007-04-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

"Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off til day-after-tomorrow just as well." Mark Twain

Dear Mr. Twain,

Tomorrow is my 47th birthday. The day after tomorrow, we'll be parting ways. When I turned 30, I got this brainstorm idea for a novel. Excuse me, but I'm in the middle of the American Dream here! Budding a corporate career. Pioneering my way in California. Starting an adorable family. So I had another kid instead. One thing led to another and after 17 years, four houses, several construction projects, a consulting business, boot camp and other fitness pursuits, a kajillion school volunteer hours, and a helluva lot of laughs, I made a deal with the devil (Brian), and signed a contract to produce my novel in seven months. I asked for a year, but he knows me better. I've taken your advice too long. See you in seven months.