Reflections: We may never have this knowledge again

That's another reason I write, to continue to respond to the prompt of my most recent post. I know I will never see things this way again. I am groping my way forward in the tule fog, the dark, the blurry view of naivete. And I'd better call it like I see it now because I will never see it this way again. I know things will change, times will change, perspectives will change with experience and exposure to new ideas and people.

So does that leave me with nothing? We have a trope: When my husband and I ask one another, "Can I bring you anything?" the other occasionally responds, "I have nothing left to hope for." Which is from a sign in Asia's failed attempt at saying: "We leave you nothing else to be desired. All your needs will be fulfilled here." But truly, I am so filled with love and gratitude for this fragile state of joy and peace at those moments that I feel I lack nothing, I have nothing to hope for beyond this. So love is the wonder and the light in my life, which happens to be the response to the reverb10 prompt and a nice seed for thought.

And while we're on the topic of wonders, I have to give a big shout-out to music! I still think the lyric is a little cheesy but I agree with Michael Franti that everyone deserves music. And with Johnny Cash, when he sang, "Get rhythm when you get the blues. A jumpy rhythm makes you feel so fine, It'll shake all the trouble from your worried mind. Get rhythm when you get the blues." For me there is truth in that. A few years ago I wondered whether I was depressed, and I am wondering that lately. But I decided to exercise. I started going to the gym three times a week. I thought I would want to swim, but I have never bonded with swimming here in this pool. Maybe it was too cold for the first five years since our rec center was remodeled and I got turned off and I should try it again, but in the meantime I stumbled back into my dance class and discovered, in a room full of people who share my love and interest in movement and dance and joy and energy, what quickly became my primary source of balance.

Now I go four times a week to dance for 45-50 minutes and cool down for another few, and I find as long as I can dance every week I feel good. I stay sane and healthy. And my goodness, there's so much to learn about committing to a gesture or a movement or a pattern, to being ready to change direction on a dime, to moving together with a group and doing your own thing all at once, to learning to move within my own levels (my lesson for this week was anything at any time can take you back to level 1, and that is just fine).

As for things I've let go of this year, the final prompt for the moment: Being an editor for other people. I just keep getting rebuffed at a certain level. It works against human nature: People don't like to be told what to do. And I love editing but I suppose I'll just have to do it for myself for now. It's like painting my house: I care almost too much to do it for anyone but me, perhaps. But I think if I commit to myself, I can go far with it! So I know what is really at the top of my wish list: A package of 10 ISBN numbers. Woohoo!

Prompt of the day: What keeps me from writing?

I listen to Talk of the Nation on NPR a lot and today's, if you didn't already hear it, was about bullying. Lots of different people reported different things, one that someone had found him on facebook and apologized for long ago bullying, another who was on facebook and a bully got in touch and started bullying her all over again (horrors). One woman said she realized that she was so angry and scared all the time about being bullied that she had become a bully toward other people, always ready to go off if they didn't do what she expected. That resonated with me. And then the host read from someone's email, I think, and it described a person's path to better living after having survived the hell of bullying and the author was very apologetic for having taken all that anger and fear out on others for so long. I really felt a jolt of recognition then about things I've both struggled with and their costs, the tolls those misplaced emotions have taken in my life, on my friendships.

Another thought: I had a conversation with my mother not so very long ago, that set off such a series of ripples for her. It seemed like a trivial thing. I said, "Not everyone likes creamy food," when my mom was making something or talking about some kind of food my daughter was less than enthused about. My mother could hardly believe it! Someone who doesn't like creamy food? What? The very idea was unthinkable at first. We talked about it for days! And that conversation went on to reverberate for a while and later morphed into one about mind-reading. I said to my mother at one point, "I can't read your mind. You have to tell me what you want." And she just looked at me. Really? As if she'd never quite realized we were that different from one another, different enough to have separate perspectives on the same thing. I feel like there's something in having been habitually underestimated or underprotected as kids that makes us all so defensive and sometimes angry about not being understood, as if we feel it is part of a grand conspiracy and this present communication breakdown is further proof of our being at the ground zero of misunderstanding.

So I hope it makes sense when I say that fear of being misunderstood is a cause of procrastination for me, and yet is also one of my biggest motivators for writing down what I am thinking.

Shipbuilding

Today's #reverb10 prompt is to reflect on the past year, picking a single word to encapsulate it. I came up with shipbuilding, because it feels like I'm gearing up for the next phase.

Woohoo!

This just in: I didn't do Nanowrimo after all

But maybe there's a good reason I didn't leap into a new project just now.

After a couple of days, my high-concept story idea still felt like just a series of anecdotes and so I didn't push it but stuck it on the back burner to simmer (or leave the lid off the box and let the ants keep filing around -- choose your favorite metaphor). Not doing Nano this year was fine; this month I couldn't feel comfortable about making those 1,600 words a day a priority. I had other, more pressing issues: family business and starting to hunt for jobs again. So I let that idea sit, and there it is now, while my other book, the one I started last November and thought I'd finished in May but felt there was something missing, has started telling me more about its endings.

One of the things that caught my attention recently was listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast. The title and podcast intro prepares you for the onslaught of F-bombs and some crude humor, but those aside, Maron is a discerning and thoughtful interviewer, who clearly prepares but lets things go off script (unlike, say, someone like one of my interviewing heroes, Ira Glass, who when interviewed by Marc Maron in a rare turn on the other side of the table said he writes everything he says on This American Life). Maron is a Los Angeles stand-up comedian who loves to talk with comics and humorists and other folks he knows or wants to understand. He is probably most famous at this point for his interviews with comedian Carlos Mencia, who trails behind him a long train of detractors who swear he steals other comedians' jokes. So in a two-part interview, Maron sits down in his studio (aka his garage) and confronts Mencia with his reputation as a joke thief. He manages to do this in a respectful and curious way, with great tact; he says he basically wants to know not only what Carlos Mencia's own take is on his reputation but also how the guy sleeps at night.

Now, it turns out Maron has had his own personal point of contention with Mencia. Years earlier, Maron had been headlining an L.A. comedy club one weeknight when Mencia came in. Mencia said, "Just let me go on before you. I'll do five minutes." Mencia performed for over an hour, as Maron tells it. Maron was so furious at being bumped off his headlining gig that he left the club before Mencia got off the stage. Maron reminds Mencia of this incident in the interview and pretty much gets blown off. "An hour? Really? I'm sure it wasn't a whole hour!" Mencia protests. But then Maron thinks about this interview with Mencia and feels unsatisfied. He decides he can't just put it up on his site like it's a normal one-hour interview, because he's been steamrolled to some extent, not given anything real. So Maron does a second segment, and leads it off by talking to some other stand-ups who have been bumped off their stages by Mencia, or saw him rip off jokes, either theirs or someone else's. Then Maron goes back to Mencia with all of this evidence that he really does steal material and act like a dick, as if to say "What the fuck?" one more time until he gets some from-the-gut answers.

At first Mencia tries to stave him off with the same old soft focus, but Maron presses him to explain himself. Mencia finally says he does it to get ahead in the business. And you can see it: his are acts of aggression that say, "Look, I am more famous than you so I can do whatever I want and you can't do anything about it." Maron is an appealing master of ceremonies because you can feel him: his ethics are like racehorses ready to bust out of the gates, all pent up with nowhere to go around this guy. The interview becomes such a surprise because it is not the chip-on-the-shoulder rehash of old accusations but an existential frustration with a failure to comprehend another individual's motivations and choices, an inability to empathize with another comedian's decision-making processes.

This is high drama, with real stakes for both of them, and you do understand by the end of the interview why each one of them can sleep at night (they are wired differently, Maron a mensch, a stand-up guy, in the best-man sense, and Mencia because that's what he thinks he has to do to make it in this street-fight of a world). Maron never says, "This guy is a thief and a parasite," a conclusion most people listening to the interview would expect him to reach. Instead he concludes that Mencia is a performer, not a writer, and too bad the guy thinks of it as such a dog-eat-dog world that he has to go around acting like he's all that because he looks like a dick when he acts like that. As you can see, I highly recommend these interviews. Certainly, not all of them are as dramatic or compelling, but Maron usually tries to go somewhere interesting with each of his interviewees.

Short story long, listening to those interviews gave me loads of ideas for my story. Over the past couple of weeks I've been letting all these ideas cook and meld and they are starting to taste like something, and reveal these arcs that weren't there before, the texture and fun of the storytelling part. It's exciting to feel that way about it. Maybe I liked those Mencia interviews because I'm wrestling with the same thing every time I sit down to write jokes for the story, and I am finding I need lots of inspiration from other folks who do it well. Once you've borrowed inspiration by listening to a bunch of comics, who's to say you can write anything truly original? Your comedy will always be colored by what you hear and what you like and what's funny to you and what everyone around you thinks is funny.

I'm psyched both to be finishing this book now that I know how to revise it and looking for work. I have a lot to offer. Let's see what happens!

Oh, and I'm going to do this nifty, fun reflection/intention project called Reverb10. It might help with everything I want to do right now.

Quote of the day: We don't starve.

My children dictate my schedule--I have done vast amounts since they were born because they keep me from my desk and make me impatient to get back to it. I don't count words so much anymore, or note beginnings and endings. I work on several things at once, so there is always a file to open and no such thing as a blank page. I like working. What discipline I have comes from the fact that I don't do any of the other things I am supposed to do. Housework, personal administration--everything else goes to hell. My husband cooks. We don't starve.

--Anne Enright, in The Secret Miracle (a survey of writers' ideas and self-reported habits edited by Daniel Alarcon

File under This is going better than I expected

It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time and I'm so very far behind! By the end of today, if I don't write more today, I will be three days behind. But having allowed myself to give up on completing the writing of my novel this year, I reread what I had written so far and decided to sit down and work on it some more just now. If any of you who know me read it you would know exactly what it is about. I had told my sister about an idea I had for a novel's gimmick--not that novels need gimmicks, mind you, but this actually seemed like an idea that would test the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, which I always think is interesting. My sister liked the idea, too. But then I ended up doing it with material I wasn't expecting to work with, yet.

So. We'll see. Will I have some big writing days and catch up in time to write the thing this month? I think of someone I know in Tennessee who writes 25,000 words in a day and wonder, who am I kidding? Will this take longer to work out than this month? I'm not sure it matters; I can't just put the story aside quite yet, now that I've opened the lid of the box a crack. The ideas in it are already busy like ants; I just have to watch them and see where they go. As I told my BFF, what am I going to say? "No, thanks, come again next year"? I don't think so.

Motto

These days, I'd have to say my motto (and six-word bio) would be:

Getting sweaty is not a crime.

I would throw it on the floor!

Since I quote this fairly regularly now, I'll just put it on my blog. It's from a Larry King Live interview with Julia Child that aired on August 15, 2002.

KING: I ... hate broccoli, hate it, wouldn't go near it, wouldn't touch it, what do you hate?

CHILD: I don't like cilantro.

KING: What is that?

CHILD: It's an herb that it has a kind of a taste that I don't like.

KING: Is there an everyday food you hate, like broccoli?

CHILD: No, I don't think so. I mean, if it's properly cooked and properly served, I can't think of anything I hate.

KING: So you'll eat...

CHILD: Except cilantro and arugula I don't like at all.

KING: Arugula?

CHILD: They're both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.

KING: So you would never order it.

CHILD: Never, I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.

How about you? Would you eat them, or throw them on the floor?

Adjustments for sea-level bread recipes

I keep these guidelines posted so I can see them when I open the cupboard door to get baking powder and/or baking soda.

Adjustments for bread recipes at 5,000 feet/1524 meters

• Reduce yeast or other leavening by 50 percent.
• For each cup of liquid, add another 3 tablespoons of the same liquid, or water, milk. You can add another egg if you are making a tender dough, such as a challah, brioche, or sweet roll. (The alternative is a chewy dough with a substantial crust, as with the marvelously easy-to-make Speedy No-Knead Bread recipe.)
• Decrease baking temperature by 25° F (13° C).*

Here's the link to my 20-slide "deck" from my IgniteBoulder presentation. Wow, was that some fun.

Adjustments for sea-level cake recipes at 5,000 feet

Adjustments for sea-level cake recipes at 5,000 feet/1524 meters

• Reduce baking powder, baking soda by 50 percent.
• Reduce sugar by 2-1/2 tablespoons per cup.
• For each cup of liquid, add another 3 tablespoons of liquid (or an egg)
• Increase flour by 2 tablespoons
• Increase baking temperature by 15° F (10° C).*

Source: The High Altitude Cookbook by Beverly Anderson Nemiro and Donna Miller Hamilton, 1969

* Other sources say a rule of thumb is to increase the temperature by up to 10 percent (so a recipe calling for baking at 350° F would be adjusted to about 385° F). Remember to check the oven a little earlier than the recipe specifies whenever you increase baking temperatures.

Here's the link to my slides for my IgniteBoulder presentation on this topic.

Hey, kids! Let's put on a show!

In a recent piece of writing, I wrote about the skepticism I grew up with and how over time I came to see things that had no explanations: communication between humans and animals, being able to see things in the future, and working affirmations. Tonight, as I pictured myself calmly fielding heckling from the audience with a smooth, "You don't need any more leavening, do you, dear?" I realized I was no longer petrified about the talk I am giving tomorrow night in front of a bigger audience than I've ever put myself in front of before. I had stopped saying, "Holy sh*t, Batman!" before each iteration of "I'm speaking at IgniteBoulder!" I'd finally started affirming it: "I'm speaking." And it became so. Well, is still becoming, technically, but if everything goes according to plan, I'm going to saunter up the hill on my bike and meet everyone up there and help put on a show!

My, how things change

Our child bounded into the room after her first day of school and announced, Mom, today I learned how they took these groups of people, Group One and Group Two, and before a test, they told everyone in Group One, "You're really smart," and in Group Two they told everyone, "If you work really hard, you can do well on this test." Guess who did better? Group Two did! Everyone in Group One said, "I don't have to try so hard," and they didn't do as well on the test as the Group Two people.

I was delighted. I had heard the same thing, I told her. I had just read about the same study. And if she learned just that fact in school today, that was pretty good, I thought.

I didn't say this then but this study, which I read about in Daniel Pink's book Drive, felt like the nail in the coffin of the "self-esteem movement," really a giant social experiment perpetrated on youth back in the big-haired/tight-pantsed end of the millenium.

My co-self-defense instructor, Raquel, who went to Stanford, knew this when we coached the tween and teen girls at their yells and self-defense moves back then. Raquel probably knew it from being coached on the sports field, an experience I completely missed the value of at the time. (Nor would my parents have tolerated the costs -- social or financial -- of joining a team in our nonconformist family. It is still a marvel to me that my father was on a football team -- I have never known him as a team player. You should have seen my parents' faces when I begged for the money for a cheerleading outfit so I could try out for the cheerleading team. (In retrospect: Way to separate the haves from the haves-not, junior high football cheerleading squad!) I gave up on that fantasy within a day or two, and now you know something about the kinds of short-lived passions that have fallen by the wayside along with the long-lived ones I have nurtured.)

Raquel in those classes was able to find the vein of toughness in those girls quickly, in a way that I had no idea how to do, given my own dysfunctional background and social conditioning. Despite having recently completed a ten-week self-defense class and having just trained to teach self defense with the Stanford teaching/training group, I still knew so little about being strong, still lugged around plenty of the dysfunctional, codependent (another 1990s watchword that has fallen from favor) behavior that had compelled me to seek out self-defense training. I needed to find some ease in the world and to some extent I did.

Writing this is making me want to get out my training materials and make a class for local kids and families. Put all that training to use. It has helped me so many times, in so many ways, not just in deflecting unwanted attentions but also in sorting out what has something to do with me and what doesn't.

At the same time, I confess I've felt just a wee bit fired up about the coming change of season. Back-to-school time always affects me this way. September and February are the months when I have to take care to not take on too many projects. "So much depends upon the weather." It's weird because it feels great: All systems feel like they are firing and I am coming up with all kinds of fine ideas (a baking at altitude app, and a cookbook app to sell as a school fundraiser are the latest ones), but they are ideas that I would have trouble carrying out if there were three of me, given all the projects I'm already juggling at this moment. I had a good summer, organizationally speaking, but am not quite managing everything on my own personal list, like the household stuff. I haven't cleaned my daughter's desk or emptied out that one closet, or washed the windows (and I am wondering why? because these projects are no fun).

The best thing I did today was to take my research-fried brain to my writer's group meeting and announce I couldn't complete the task I had taken on, that I was the wrong person for the job. I was seeing too many options, and finding no effective ways to weed out what wasn't appropriate, and the task was overloading my circuitry. Before I had said much, one of the group said, "Do you need to not do this? It seems like you might be a little frazzled by it." I looked at her, felt a wash of relief but held back tears. "Thank you for hearing me," I said and then I couldn't help spilling a few of those tears. Later I said, "I feel like I am always coming to this group begging for understanding!" Another group member gave me a generous hug and said, "That you can have, in abundance!" And suddenly it's Oooeeee, I see abundance everywhere!

So I came home and instead of diving back into the intellectual puzzle that is Cloud Atlas I read the first pages of two other books I like so far (Jodi Picoult's House Rules and a collection of the kind of confessional essays I am a sucker for called The Bitch in the House. I'm trying to slow myself down, but still get a lot done. Make sense? I know. I'm not sure it does to me, either.

Life used to be so hard

I let my child come up with the idea of the cats being her siblings, which she did in time, but I've never called them my offspring. I thought it was weird when people said, “This is Smiley. He's 15, and he's my only child,” which was often followed by a chin-scratch of the pet in question and an “Aren'tcha, my boy?” But we're all guilty of anthropomorphizing around here, I know. We are always asking our daughter to back off on certain behaviors because “He doesn't like that,” or we simply know things from experience: “Cats like to chase a toy you move just out of sight. They don't like it when you run at them with the toy.”

And our youngster insists that our tolerant boy-cat, who, like the cat in the new children's classic, Olivia, by Ian Falconer

"When she got up, she moved the cat
And moved the cat
And brushed her teeth"

just lets her ferry him from floor to lap to couch. The other day I had to tell her again she can't ride him. He's a scant 15 pounds; she's 50. Plus, it's inappropriate.

But our dear gorgeous gray cat loves us all and lets us be who we are, enthusiastically accompanying us on our bumblings through daily life and love. He has a fragile peace with our ancient crone of a kitty, the true alpha kitty, that little black scaredy-cat who seemed so fragile but grew into the hardiest of the bunch, now about 100 in people years. She is the grande dame, reigning over our bedroom. She sleeps in the trench between us on top of the bed (snug but still scaredy), while the gray boy sometimes sleeps where he can see who's in the yard, or sometimes joins us all, sleeping in his spot at the foot of the bed, or yowls at critters or longings only he hears at those hours.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(That last was an accidental but appropriate insertion while I was petting the gray cat, and made me laugh so much I left it in there.)

You put de lime in de coconut

My, but I'm a good cook. I don't like to brag, but I made something good today.

Tonight we had leftovers for dinner (my sweetie's been cooking a lot, too, which is super), and I devoted my energies to dessert. We'd had Key Lime pie in Florida and I had been wanting to experiment. I thought: what about using coconut milk? I went hunting for recipes but wasn't finding what I wanted. So I figured I'd build the pie I wanted. Then I stumbled into a recipe that I adapted to get coconut into the crust and was ready to go.

Coconut-Lime Pie

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Lightly butter a 9" pie plate.

Separate 5 eggs, putting the five yolks in a small bowl and three of the egg whites in a medium-sized bowl (save the remaining egg whites if you will use them for something else; they'll keep for up to a week in the fridge).

For the coconut meringue crust:
3 egg whites
1 tablespoon sugar
8 cookies (ginger snaps, graham crackers, animal crackers, gluten-free if desired)
1/4 cup toasted almonds
3 tablespoons softened or melted butter
1/4 cup toasted shredded coconut (sweetened or unsweetened)

Beat the 3 egg whites with the sugar until the meringue forms soft peaks when you stop the beaters and lift them out of the bowl.

Process or blend the cookies, almonds, butter, and toasted coconut until the crumbs resemble coarse sand. Fold this mixture into the meringue. Spread the folded meringue mixture quickly and gently into the pie plate and up the sides. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the meringue crust is just starting to turn golden.

While baking the crust, prepare the filling:

Beat together or blend in a blender:
1/2 of a 14-oz. can sweetened, condensed milk
1/2 of a 14-oz. can coconut milk (Note: NOT sweetened cream of coconut)
5 egg yolks
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup lime juice
finely grated zest of 1 lime

Pour the filling into the hot meringue shell and bake the pie at 350 for about 25 minutes or until tiny bubbles pop on the surface.

Cool long enough for the pie to set (2 hours is best) if you can stand to wait that long before you eat it. (I couldn't. And then I tried some later, after it had set. It was even better.)

By the way, I froze everything I did not use except the egg whites. I froze the 1/2 can each of coconut milk and the sweetened, condensed milk; and I poured the remaining lime juice into an ice-cube tray to freeze for future uses. What if I put all of those things in the food processor with some avocado and some agave syrup? Hmmmm. Sounds like a good ice cream recipe, no?

Here you are

Hi everyone, from the here and now.



One thing I've been meaning to write about is having recently received a request for participation in a geolocation-based social network, which I ignored for a whole mess of reasons, all peculiar to me. But the fact is, I like being where I am, but not necessarily telling the world where I am. Sometimes you can figure out exactly where I am. If I'm tweeting airport codes, it's usually because I am going from that airport to another airport any second. Usually, however, I rarely want to say where I am until I've already left. It was just a matter of time before someone aggregated all those geolocating foursquare updates as they did on PleaseRobMe.com and used them for ill. I have felt concerned from my first tweet onward about embracing a behavior that would enable such abuse.

Yet I know I delude myself if I think I'm invisible online, if I think my online persona is fully compartmentalized, discrete, from my IRL (in-real-life) persona.

But what must we shield to protect ourselves from that most insidious and hideous theft: the one that can turn a whole life around and throw it on the ground -- and stomp on it? What can and can't I say here? Am I taking a huge risk by saying anything at all? Finding balance is tricky for me in this area; I was trained to fly low, stay under the radar, be invisible, adaptable, take care of things instead of complaining about them. My instinct now is to pull back and clam up tight.

Yet. Another impulse I hardly understand rises up, rears its scaled, reptilian head and says I have to tell everyone about what the world looks like to someone who experienced all I did as a kid. So many people still can't believe it. Here is a memory of my dear old father: we went to see movies sometimes, and this time it was the double feature of Convoy, followed by Deliverance, Deliverance then repeated. I watched, with my father in the next seat and no one else in the car, the dreadful suspense, that terrible squealing scene, everything. Twice. And now I have to tell you because I can't stand having to keep that kind of stuff to myself any more. That's what I mean when I say "living out loud."

For years, I didn't believe that was the kind of thing anyone would call abuse. But when I was supposed to be feeling free and confident as a newly minted and educated adult, I couldn't understand why I felt so bad and carried around so much hurt, nor why all that codependent stuff I was doing -- the leaping to help, assuming responsibility where I had none -- just wasn't working for me anymore. Now I see why that wasn't working: I no longer had those dysfunctional people all around to jump in and mop up after. But I felt ashamed of myself for having that background, and all the deficits that entailed. I felt it just showed up how out of whack things were in my world, and I took that personally for a while.

Major edit, 24 June:
Rereading this post as I originally wrote it I think, My, what an internal argument I have going ("Say it! Say it loud!" "Shush!" etc.)! At first I felt embarrassed for airing this emotional response to a recent memory. But this is sort of the crux of my blog, isn't it? Why say it if I'm not going to say all of it? If some of it's going to be off-limits? Isn't that letting myself censor me before I've had the opportunity to state my piece? Or should I have just edited that second half into a separate post?

How about this: You be the judge! And the best comment wins a (smallish) Gomez t-shirt once worn by yours truly (but since laundered)!

Good dog

When I look back on that time, I wonder how, and why, did we of all people have a dog? I was six and we had just moved into a communal household in Boulder. A couple of months earlier my sister had died. We were figuring out how to get along in this new town, so different from the northern California commune we'd just come from. Our eventful three years in California had all but wiped clean any memories I had of living in Denver three years before that. My father, mother, and I now lived in a three-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot house that already had three college students living in it. There was a hanging wicker swinging chair in the living room that I liked to sit in when I listened to my favorite records, by the Beatles and The Band.

Our dog's name was Pig. Pig was a barky, scruffy mutt, and a joy to be with. Pig was also a compulsive gnawer who left no shoe unchewed, which made our family unpopular with our housemates sometimes. In a black-and-white photograph from that time, I am playing in the backyard with the dog. My hair is in loose braids and I am wearing my brown dress trimmed with white rick-rack and the fringe on my Billy the Kid leather jacket is flying. I remember my dog and me smiling and free.

But I also remember how my father would find Pig in his way and kick her so hard she yelped with pain and surprise. She skulked after him, trying to win him over the way she had me, but he never liked her. He didn't see the sweet innocence that shone through her eyes. To him she was just a victim, a dog who was already as low as it could go and thus invited kicking, as in that awful saying about kicking a dog when it's down.

Which of course made me love Pig even more than I already did. But this made me scared to love her, too.

People we lived with learned about my father. They found out that he could kick a dog in front of a child, that he could and would yell at, threaten, or hit a woman. Soon we lived by ourselves, in a tiny, freestanding cottage we rented next to the owners' house. They were a family of seven: two Catholic parents and five kids, one my age, with a big color TV right in the living room and a cupboard full of sweet, crunchy cereals. You can imagine where I liked to pretend I lived when I didn't feel like going home. Some nights, the mom would knock on our door and threaten to call the police when she heard my father yelling, my mother screaming, or glass breaking. Usually my father would talk her down, but a couple of times the police did come to our door. Today, animal control and social services would be called in. Back then, my father just got warnings.

By the time we lived in the tiny house by ourselves, with only a rotating cast of cats for my father to kick around, we didn't have Pig anymore. I like to think one of our college-student roommates adopted our silly, sweet dog, someone like Spritz, who ferried me on his motorcycle (with my parents' blessing) to his family's house in St. Louis, dropping me into the midst of his siblings and parents, perhaps the sweetest, most wholesome family I'd ever met, for two blissful weeks of eating midwestern meals like hot dogs and macaroni and jello salads, riding bikes to the city pool, and watching horror movies all gathered around that big color TV in their family room -- their house was so big they had a family room! But I digress. Somewhere along the way Pig disappeared, and I still hold out a hope it was someone like Spritz who saw what was happening and rescued her from a worse fate.

Recently my mother brought up the subject of our dog Pig, inspired by my recent project of disinterring some of the storied bones of my past. She said I always had a strong code of ethics. She said: “Your father would kick the dog, or the cats, but you never did.” And it was true. I was their friend. I would let them sleep on my bed. I wanted to comfort my pets when my father had been cruel to them, and often felt paralyzed with the fear of what would happen if I were kind to them when he was angry.

Today I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about violence toward animals. The author, Charles Siebert, cited a veterinary forensics expert who asserted that animal abuse can represent “the tip of the iceberg” in a household, an indicator of an individual who doesn't respect spouses' or children's boundaries, either. I felt so sad reading that, for us and all the abuse we saw, and for all the pets I thought just wandered off or had been “taken to the pound” to be adopted out again by some other family who could take care of a pet because, somehow my father always turned it all back against us, the women and girls, and insisted we were the ones who had failed our pets and now had to suffer their loss. Now I wonder what really happened to them. As I unpacked more gnarly boxes of memories, I asked about our pets, and my mother confirmed that my father had “disappeared” some of them. I can't be sure what happened to them but I remember sweet Martha the calico kitty, who had her babies and vanished soon after that, and the burly gray beauty Billy Kitty, who “must have wandered off and gotten lost.” My mother told me a horrific story about a capuchin monkey he had brought home as a pet when I was very young and my sister was even younger.

A couple of years ago, on a vacation to the Mayan Riviera in Mexico with my family, I arranged for us to visit a little place in the jungle between Akumal and Tulum where they rescue monkeys that have been adopted as pets and abused or abandoned. They allowed us to go in a cage with the monkeys. They are amazing creatures, full of energy and childlike curiosity. When I first snorkeled, I feared I'd feel I did not belong in the undersea world, which instead was what I experienced with the monkeys. They couldn't just accept me and keep going about their day. They had to test me and mess with me and one of them leaped into the arms of my husband and launched into sweet talk for the next five or six minutes. Another soon had to be dissuaded from chewing on my toes and ankles. My daughter refused to go in the cage with them. I didn't blame her at all, but I was a lot bigger than the monkeys so was only a bit nervous, but not frightened. Later, we were walking under one monkey who felt slighted when I didn't give him, the alpha dude, the attention I had showed to his roommate; he grabbed onto my hair when I got near and would not let go. Ouch! My scalp stung for hours after, and the episode badly frightened my daughter. Suddenly I understood firsthand why the rescue people said they segregate the new monkeys for a long time before they allow them to mix with the established monkey population.

So I was taught some kind of lesson, got my monkey smackdown. But even after that painful experience, I wouldn't have dreamed of hurting one of them. (Nor would I be deluded enough to want to adopt one, thank you very much.)

On my last visit to my mother's, I watched episodes of The Dog Whisperer, which, like Law & Order, seems to be on most hours of the day. I immediately saw why she loves the show. Cesar Millan, the dog behavior specialist who is the show's star, understands the dog's mentality: he understands the need for order within the pack. So Millan goes around and rehabilitates dogs, and trains people, as his motto goes. Always, he seeks one thing from dogs: a calm and submissive state. The thing about Cesar is that he will outwait and outwit a dog to achieve that state. He will do anything it takes, and with some dogs it takes a lot. A few even get through his skin and unsettle him and he has to step back and start all over with that dog when his energy is back. As soon as I read that book by the real horse whisperer, about how you can turn away and let a horse know you trust it, to win the horse's trust, I knew it was true, and I've seen it since many times over since I read it. And while that piece of advice made horses more comprehensible for me, I admit to being nipped by the 12-year-old appaloosa mare my daughter was riding a couple of summers ago for not paying proper attention to her one day. To my credit, that horse's owner was also impressed when I noticed Shoshoni flinch when I touched one of her flanks when brushing her; it turned out she'd been bitten there by another horse a couple of days earlier.

With every passing moment I feel I learn a little more about true compassion from being with my cats, being around friends' dogs, and seeing my child adore animals – although sometimes her love is so smothery that I feel I have to protect the poor pets from her overbearing attentions. Whether the satisfying symbiosis of my relationship with pets is due to the increased flow of the “trust hormone” oxytocin, or a parasite some say cats infect us with that will ultimately compel us to let our cats eat our brains, either way, we seem to be stuck with one another. I find one of the best things about living without abuse is being able to love my people and animals as much as I want to, which turns out to be constantly, tenderly, freely, and deeply.

The coinci dance

When we chose our daughter's middle name, which I choose not to reveal here for the sake of our family's privacy, I liked the idea of picking a name that had been in my family for several generations. The middle name we picked was the middle name of my cousin, my aunt, my father's mother, and her mother; my mother's grandmother even had a variant of the same name. It seemed like a lovely thing to give my daughter something that identified her as the fifth generation to share something in my family; for once, some continuity would originate in my side of the family, I felt.

Now I notice an odd little coincidence here: I know two people from outside this country with this name. A couple of years ago, I joined a writing group, and in this group is a woman from an Asian country. She has a lovely name that her parents gave her, but the name I learned first for her is the name she had picked as her "English name" because she thought it was pretty and would be easier for Americans to remember. This this name turns out to be the same name we picked for our daughter's middle name.

It strikes me as funny that I know two people, neither one born in this country, who have this name as their English names. Maybe there are many, many more than I realize, and this is a popular name among immigrants from other countries as well, but I prefer to feel lucky to have noticed this bit of happenstance.

Funny feelings about finishing my first draft

I finally finished one! It was a surprise to me that it would come this quickly -- I had set a deadline of a couple of weeks from now, but I got to what felt like the end of my novel yesterday. Ever since then, I've been mentally standing on a hilltop and shouting/singing for joy (which right now is taking the form of an Ok Go song: "Every day is the same, we're praying for rain." Ironic, in this coldest spring almost ever in these parts). I even did something funny and clever to end the story, and I was able to let go of putting all the comedy in to "git er dun," as the Florida handyman's truck boasts.

It feels amazing, and not amazing at all. Now that I've reached an ending (I'm not going to say THE end yet), I am trying to catch all the things I said I was putting in (foreshadowings, habits like doodling daisy chains, etc.), fix all the holes, weave the characters throughout, and so forth. I started all kinds of things, but none but her story got very far. But it's also a third-person limited perspective story; if my emcee can't see or perceive it, it's not in there. So I just have to take a whole bunch of these descriptions and fill them with dialogue and description instead of exposition. And I want to see her play with those good characters again -- she started some nice friendships with people who all come around for her big moments. But like thinning plants -- pulling out flourishing sprouts just so some of the other sprouts can turn into big, productive plants -- it feels odd to stop her story there when there's so much more that would happen for this person. Which could mean it's a series, but maybe not. I still have two other novels and a memoir to finish once I'm done with this one!


So to write this I have had to retreat, hole up and find my own story. Now, to flesh it out, I must get out there to live and listen, tune into what I hear in my head, and bring the story up to that standard. But it's good to know what it is like to finish a first draft! Hooray! And on with the second!

A thing worth doing poorly at first is a thing worth doing

I heard a good piece of advice about writing I want to hand along. It goes against what all our parents said to us, which was: "A job worth doing is worth doing well." That advice certainly helped me become more thorough about some of the tasks I took on. But in writing, that pressure to achieve early perfection may be misplaced. One writer says instead: A job worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. Think about it. This turns around the willingness to look silly or bad or make something unusable/unsalable/unpalatable at first. I can tell when I reread my writing that I made myself sit down and write some days, despite not feeling any clarity about where I was headed. Sometimes it works and sometimes it fails. But next to all the other successful and semisuccessful attempts, which can be improved in the editing, the failures stand out in relief and can be edited out.

It's a great power we have: the ability to edit. We all do it, all the time, whether we think of it as "editing" or not. Look out a window. What do you see? What do you include and what do you leave out when you describe your view from the window (such as power lines, signs, vehicles)? Look at yourself in the mirror. Stand there and look for an entire minute, without looking away. What do you see that you don't usually see? The ways in which we edit our worlds absolutely affect how we respond to them. Just like the bumper sticker says: "Don't believe everything you think."

Thinkering Institute: Beyond Newtonian laws

Here a glimpse of what's cooking here at my one-woman think tank.

Isn't that word Geronimo! about that jumping-off, what you say when you let go of the rope or run and leap past the edge, when there's no going back and you're in free-fall for what seems like an flash and a roaring eternity? That is how I'm feeling about the book I'm working on right now. I printed out all 61,000 words of it and read it in one sitting yesterday. It made me happy -- the story and the fact that it occupies a place in the world now. Sure, I see problems all over it, but they're all solvable; there's a whole and a reason for being and a bunch of interesting scenes and people to weave together, and a main character I am rooting for and hope you will too. It's all very exciting and there's still a lot to do. I figure I need about 10-20 more writing days to get to the end of the plot (and I may need an epilogue as well). I was just reading an interesting piece about how Joseph Campbell arrived at the idea of "bliss" (it's not quite what I'd thought: it's more like that Geronimo! moment). My friend Gever may have started me thinking about this when he recently posted about leaping off cliffs on his Tinkering School blog.

The jumping-off part of this project is my attempt to answer violence with nonviolence. My protagonist is still vibrating from the effects of living with the constant, continuous threat of violence, and it takes her a while to be able to conceive of any other way. But once she does, she never wants to go back to the other mode: it feels wrong and bad and soul-destroying. So she has to find a path, to learn to be more creative than everyone around her who just wants to get to the end of the story, to end the bad guy's story, an eye for an eye, tit-for-tat. I still am not sure how I will solve this riddle. There's a Newtonian action-reaction balance I am looking hard at. Is that equilibrium truly necessary or even desirable in this universe?

This led to thoughts of how we collectively value things, which of course made me think of Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: A Comedy of Values, which is one of those books I think should be required reading for anyone who lives in a society and is capable of reading it. Because it's about living in society, I might not choose this as desert-island reading (I like Chesterson's response when asked what book he would take if stranded on a desert island: The Art of Shipbuilding). But I am living in a society that is having to think hard about individual and group values at this moment of economic recalibration, and violence is one of the things groups collectively condone or resist. Not only do we see a lot of violence in our media but many of us are also exposed to acts of violence in our private lives, whether being bullied at school or work, or suffering physical or emotional abuse at home. There's a certain amount of tolerance for violence and bullying, a sense that it can't be stopped. This is backwards I think, and also goes to the heart of our financial crisis. We've come to value some things that intrinsically have no value. We've colluded in endowing them with their power, and now we must dismantle this big facade and rebuild something more sustainable, supportive, and enduring.

Capitalists like to say we saw the collapse of communism a few years ago, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. I'm sure there are Marxists out there right now crowing about the crumbling edifices of capitalism, too. What I see is the end of an era of valuing money and might in the abstract and the specific. To survive the next era we are going to need to adapt and value other things even more highly: creativity, connection, love, innovation. More money and growth for their own sakes simply aren't sustainable values, in and of themselves. For example, I find it interesting that this country has corporate laws enforcing a growth-at-all-costs belief system that prohibit targets of corporate takeovers from resisting a merger, even if the merger would clearly weaken or destroy the target company's production or business.

I am doing a lot of reading at the same time as all this cogitating and writing the ending of my novel. One topic I am reading about is nonviolence. I have found some interesting things already, having just scratched the surface. I never knew this, but Gandhi said that he learned the path to nonviolence from his wife, whom early in their marriage he had first tried to bully into submission. It wasn't working, he said, and she showed him the path to nonviolence by teaching him that no differences between them made her deserving of how he was treating her. Then I read about how if one person is a tyrant but everyone agrees that person is a tyrant, there is no need to subdue that person because all of society can turn away from the tyrant. I see parallels in the degrees to which we as a society are willing to accept money and might as ideals and to look the other way as despotic rulers looting and pillaging the very things that gave them their strengths. Can't we all just turn away from those outmoded definitions of power and influence and turn instead to the power each of us has within us to do good in the world, to be of service to others and our own truths. What if we weren't all competing to be first to use up the last of the resources and instead were each of us supporting and encouraging the other in engaging with our communities and our very own selves?