Perfect summer

Today has been the most perfect day I've had in as long as I can remember. Good sleep, which for me is still and always rare enough to be remarkable when it happens. The house when I woke up was quiet, shady, breezy, green, flowers in all the rooms ... puttering around before breakfast, dogs dozing, the sound of sycamore leaves rustling in the wind, fresh laundry on the line, a yellow bowl of blueberries and a blue and white china cup of green tea. At about 10 o'clock Mr. A got home from a week away working nights, and I rubbed his hands and feet with lavender until he had to leave again at 11. For lunch, a bowl of steamed vegetables and a few flaxseed crackers with spicy hummus. The wind was still blowing, but it felt fresh and alive to me, not oppressive like usual. I sat in the adirondack chair in the giant green room under the sycamore tree reading a biography of Carl Jung and listening to the leaves until I got sleepy, then went in and took a long, luxurious nap. Woke up, ran a bath out on the patio, leaned back in warm water looking at colors of trees and flowers, listening to the wind ... Drove two flats of honey (bottled and labeled last night, finally) over to the community garden just as the last workers were leaving and spent a half hour or so walking the new paths in the early evening light. Shopped for groceries, drove home, made the dogs their dinner, ate mine, walked Tater down the road to see the new cows, hand-watered the salvias and geraniums on the front porch, lit a new grapefruit and lavender scented candle, and sat down to watch the Last Picture Show.

I've hardly spoken a word to anyone all day. The house has been silent except for the leaves, the wind, the sound of birds. Somehow it's so easy to feel happy, whole, and at peace on days like this. It reminds me of when I used to live alone; it reminds me why the hermit's life is still so appealing to me, even though I know it really isn't the way I want to live all the time. Time alone feels like forever when you know there's nobody coming home at the end of the week. When somebody is, it feels like magic.

This summer somehow feels to me like certain other summers I remember – 1982, 1983, 1985, 1990, 1997 ... Soft, warm days, cool nights, green trees, lots of time alone to ride my bike and walk and sleep and think and dream.

Walking up my road tonight I was struck again by how amazingly beautiful it is here. Every day it's like I notice it again for the first time. I don't think I'll ever get tired of it.

Happy birthday, dear pancreas

I spent my birthday riding my bike all over creation, sniffing beautiful flowers, opening sweet gifts, sharing lunch with friends, reading cute cards, and playing with a trio of French bulldog puppies a woman walked past our picnic table at the park. Oh – and working. Always working. But it's been a good day, a gloriously clear, warm, blue and gold summer day in Northern California, and it ain't over yet.

In the spirit of celebration, I've decided to move back over here and just continue writing where people know how to find me. I am leaving the archives unlinked for now, maybe just for a few more weeks ... Not for any especially compelling reason, except that I just feel like it, so I'm doing it.

One interesting thing about this whole mini-drama is that it's really highlighted for me how exhausting it is to hide. I guess I'd somehow never realized that before; it always just felt like the thing I had to do to feel safe, and feeling safe was such an overwhelming relief that I never noticed how tired I was.

Anyway. It feels good to be writing here again, and I've moved over the entries I wrote at the "secret" location, just so I'd still have everything all in one place.

As for my health issues, I think what might be happening is that I'm not eating enough carbohydrate, and my liver is trying to compensate by dumping glucose into my blood. It can do that, you know! Sugar gets into your blood not only from the food you eat, but also from your liver (which technically gets it from food, too, but let's not over-complicate things). It's a wonderful organ, the liver. Probably my favorite one, after the heart, brain, and of course (now) the pancreas. Love that pancreas!

In fact, I spent about a half hour today googling for pictures of the human pancreas .... looking for photographic images I could use in my meditations to support the poor little beleaguered thing. I didn't find much that was inspiring – most of them were of animal pancreases (pancreaii?), or human ones that looked pale, shabby, flabby and dilapidated, presumably from cadavers – not the radiantly healthy pink glistening pancreas I want to envision. So I'm just going to paint my own picture of it (with glitter!) and use that. At least now I know what it looks like!

The other thing that seems to be happening is that I'm not eating enough calories. That's an amazing thing for me, the person who just a few months ago was always ravenous, and had been for years. Not that that's really changed – I'm still hungry all the time. It's just that I never really feel like eating anything. Or maybe it's more that the things I would usually eat when I felt really hungry are more or less off limits to me now forever, and thinking up new things to eat seems like more of a bother than it's worth. But I now know that that's not a good enough reason to Not Eat when I'm starting to crash. So I'm putting together a schedule – eating times, menu items, exercise times, testing times .... This is where my boring tendency to establish and maintain routines (some might call them ruts) will serve me very well, I think.

My horoscope has had this to say lately:

Last week: How well are you capitalizing on this year's unique opportunities, Cancerian? Now that we're almost halfway through 2007, let's take an inventory. I'm hoping that six months from now, you'll look back and make the following declaration: "I can't believe I'm saying this, but this year I realized in many colorful ways that limitations are my friends. The obstructions I faced eventually forced me to become far more resourceful than I'd ever been before. The wastefulness I uncovered showed me how important it is to shed my trivial wishes and focus intensely on my top priority desires. The confusions I encountered taught me valuable secrets about how to master my emotions and dissolve my superstitious fears."

This week: Welcome to Part Two of your outlook for the second half of 2007, Cancerian. We're checking up on how you're progressing with the long-term tasks you were assigned six months ago. I hope that by now you're better organized and more disciplined than you've ever been in your life. The astrological omens suggest that the year's best rewards will come if you're relentless in clearing out clutter, working with maximum efficiency, and having precise and well-formulated plans. If done right, your intense attention to detail will help win you access to profound new levels of inner peace.

So yeah! I'm liking the focus on efficienty, precision, planning ahead, attention to detail, and especially that last bit about profound new levels of inner peace. I'm looking forward to that.

Bitch & moan, ad nauseum

I am now officially sick of being diabetic (or have I already said that?). By the end of the first month it seemed like everything was going so great, and now it's like everything's falling apart again. I'm stressing out about it – a lot – which only makes the numbers go even higher.

It's so frustrating to try to sort out all the information that's available. There are so many different components to keep track of. There's diet, exercise, and all the various kinds of stress – physical, emotional, environmental, chemical, heat, cold, noise, traffic, clutter, interpersonal conflicts, barking dogs, scary nightmares, broken bike racks, the past, the present, the future, people getting trampled while waiting in line for an iPhone (as was just predicted on the 11 o'clock news) ....

Right now, for example, at this very moment, a noisy tractor is making its way up and down the rows of the vineyard across the road from my house, spraying whatever it is they spray in early summer – sulfur, probably, since it's that time of year and it's an organic vineyard. Sulfur is relatively safe and non-toxic, and they only apply it at night when the wind is low and the chemical is less likely to drift. So it's supposedly no big deal, or is it? For the last few mornings my fasting blood glucose has been way higher than usual – this morning it was 40 points higher than it has been in weeks! Is this related to the spraying? Or is it because of other stresses I'm dealing with right now? Is it just a weird fluke, a natural variation? Or is it a trend? Should I worry? Should I wait and see? Should I try to find out what they're spraying? Should I demand they stop? Should I go stay with friends for a few nights? Should I not be living in an agricultural area at all?

And in more general (or specific) terms, what should I be eating? Should I exercise more? Or less? Harder? Gentler? How long? What time? Should I eat before I run? After? How much? What food?

I feel like my eating, in particular, is totally screwed up right now. I'm eating very few carbs, probably less than 80 carbs a day on most days, and probably not enough calories either. But I'm too scared to eat anything, because whereas awhile ago it seemed like I could easily control my blood glucose by watching the carbs, now it seems to be creeping up again no matter what I eat. Last week I had one quarter of a small French roll, just as an experiment, and my glucose shot up from 104 to 202 in less than an hour. Today I had basically no carbs at all, and in two hours just sitting at my desk working it went from 118 to 182. My liver is totally freaking out.

Not to bore you with all the mind-numbing details. I guess I'm just feeling angry and frustrated, and also realizing (by reading, I'm still reading as much as I can) that all these health issues I'm starting to see now have roots that go much deeper than I ever used to think even just a month ago – which is scary, which stresses me out, which makes my glucose go even higher, and on and on.

For instance, I've been reading up on endocrine disorders and cross-referencing what I'm learning with some things I already know from my own record-keeping over the last 25 years, and have realized that if I'd been able to connect the dots a lot earlier, or ever had a relationship longer than about two or three years with any doctor who was paying attention, I might have been able to do something to protect my poor pancreas, or at least maybe postpone the inevitable, or make it less bad than it is.

Before I was even out of high school, I was plucking little beard hairs out of my chin in the bathroom mirror of the t-shirt shop where I worked after school. That was before I got fat – back when I weighed barely a hundred pounds. I was hairy enough that my electrologist sent me to have an ultrasound, to make sure I didn't have some kind of hair-causing tumor (I didn't). I've always had weird ovulation and heavy, irregular periods – my average cycle since my late teens has been between 35 and 40 days. In my early 20s I had cystic acne bad enough to merit a prescription for Acutane, which was another whole mess I don't even want to go into (but which did clear up my skin and save me from scars). Anxiety disorder, depression, insulin resistance, exhaustion, weight gain, polycystic ovary syndrome (maybe it's not such a surprise I never had kids) .... I'm still researching all the ways my constellation of symptoms might be related, but from everything I've found out so far it seems pretty clear that something's been going more and more wrong with me for a really long time.

And I guess it's good to know that, and to start figuring out what's going on so that I can know what to do to take care of myself better now. No point in obsessing about the past, right?

All the same, I just keep thinking about my poor pancreas, my dying pancreas, and it just makes me sad to know that it's been struggling all these years, and I never knew it, and never did anything to help.

And I'm afraid for my heart now, too, since my heart attack risk is now supposedly equal to a non-diabetic person who's already had one heart attack. Great!

Well, grr. I guess what it really comes down to is that all this new information is making me afraid that I'm going to die, and I just really hate to think about that, but how can I not think about it, when I'm seeing numbers on my glucometer that show my very own personal capillaries and internal organs are sustaining irreparable damage Right This Very Minute?

And how the hell am I ever going to handle the stress of going to grad school if I can't even handle the stress of asking the guy across the street what he's doing in the vineyard?

Another funny thing – despite growing evidence to the contrary, I always have and still do think of myself as a very healthy person. It's just that now, I'm a very healthy person who also happens to have all these syndromes and diseases and disorders. So maybe part of why I'm feeling anxious and depressed is because my identity as a gloriously healthy person is being challenged ... and my ego doesn't like that.

I don't want to start seeing myself as a hypochondriac, or a sickly person, or one of those people who only wants to talk about how crappy they feel all the time, or how worried they are about their health. Someone kick me if I start doing that, okay? Or is it already too late?

I really need to just calm down and stop whipping myself up into a frenzy over this. I just started a weekend retreat series with Pema Chödrön and this week she was talking about the five Skandhas, or aggregates that constitute individual experience (form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness), and the various ways we get hung up in our own lives by always insisting on attaching a storyline to everything that happens ... It reminded me of what I've recently realized about drama, and the habit I have of indulging in exclamation points when most of the time a simple period would do, and be more accurate.

Anyway. Just a few things I'm thinking about. Mr. A is away again this week, and will be for awhile, so I have more time to just sit and stew than I usually do. Not necessarily such a good thing, perhaps.

I'm sure I will figure this out and get my attitude back where I like it before too long. In the meantime, riding my bike an hour or more every day continues to be a major saving grace, not to mention a huge pleasure. It's a whole hour every day when I know for sure I'm going to feel good.

P.S. I just smelled something sweet and juicy and delicious, and now I see that that Tater has brought in the first fallen apple of the summer, and is lying on the couch next to me holding it between his front paws, gnawing on it and licking up the juice. It's so adorable to me that he loves apples so much. He's a sweet darling little 75-lb. apple himself, to me.

Animal/bike aventures

1. Last Friday morning, about halfway down our road on my way to work, a small bird flew smack into the side of my helmet. I felt a flurry of feathers next to my ear and saw it, out of the corner of my eye, shoot straight up into the air behind me before recovering itself and flying back into the trees.

2. Monday morning at about the same place a young rabbit ran out of the bushes and started running along ahead of me, in the grassy space between the side of the road and the low stacked-stone wall around a Chardonnay vineyard. I kept thinking it would just jump over the wall as soon as it had the opportunity, but either the wall was too tall or the rabbit was too nervous or inexperienced to think of it, so it ended up running a full quarter of a mile right along the base of the wall until it finally came to a low utility box, hopped on top, and vaulted over. As soon as it hit the ground on the other side I saw it stop and sort of lean up against the inside of the wall, catching its breath.

3. Yesterday I came within about six feet of broadsiding a deer that came crashing out of the trees in front of me – same spot on the road. It was young, too. Not a fawn, but still soft and fuzzy and obviously totally freaked out by the bike. There was another one right behind it; I stopped to make sure there wasn't going to be more, then rode on.

4. Tonight about 30 black calves (newly arrived from the livestock auction, apparently) froze in their tracks when I rode by and stared at me without moving the entire time it took me to pass their field. I guess they had not seen a bike before, either. The adult cows in the group didn't give me a second glance, just kept eating.

Strange animal behavior aside, I've been having a lot of fun riding my bike lately. Instead of just going straight to work and back I've been leaving early enough to explore new routes and neighborhoods, run errands, or just ride around looking at things and experimenting. Tonight, for example, I rode past my house and up to the bend in the road, then coasted back. Then I was curious: could I coast all the way to my house from the END of the road? So I road past the bend and all the way up to the horse pasture, and sure enough – I could get all the way back home without pedaling. Then I wondered if I could coast the entire length of the road – more than a mile – so I rode all the way back to the end, then coasted all the way to the main road, then turned around and rode back home.

Until I started riding a bike, I always thought this road was flat. My first time riding home, I realized it was not – that last half-mile kicked my ass for half a year until I got used to it, and I kicked my own ass emotionally all during that time, berating myself for having gotten so weak that an invisible incline was enough to make me red in the face. Now I can ride it at regular speed without breaking a sweat, and now today, realizing that the grade is steep enough that I can coast at about 15 miles an hour for a whole mile – that makes me realize, maybe I could've given myself a little more credit in the beginning. It's also gratifying to be able to enjoy riding up and down the entire road several times in a row, just for fun. Sure, it's no Iron Man, but it's progress all the same.

Today I'm feeling pretty good. Last week I set a secret good deed in motion, and it made me happy all week, thinking about it and knowing that it was going to be happening and that the person had no idea at all that it was going to happen ... I have realized recently that doing nice things for other people is approximatley a hundred million times more satisfying than doing them for myself, so I'll be doing more of that. Also, I lost two more pounds and my sugar is coming down again, so that's a relief (though I'm still really tired of having my fingers constantly riddled with tiny little wounds).

Another thing that's making me happy: I'm sort of slowly coming to a decision to go back to school, probably starting in the fall of 2008. I've been wanting to do this for the longest time, but never seemed to be able to decide what I wanted to do. Art school always came to mind ... but making art is not the same as making a living making art, and I don't like business and commerce unless it's for fun. That's something I hate about what I do now – it's all commercial, all about promoting consumption ... So I've been thinking about health education – maybe diabetes education, maybe something else – and am starting to look into programs for a Masters of Social Work. There are several I could do without having to move, and I could be done in two years if I can figure out how to go to school full time. Which I'm pretty sure I can.

And finally, I'm trying to plan a trip to Portland for about a month from now. I always cringe to invite myself to stay with friends, but I do have several friends there who have repeatedly invited me to come, so I'm gonna try to make it happen.

Everyone loves a fresh start

Last night I read something in the July Shambhala Sun that struck a chord with me:

... 2. Longing To Be Somewhere Else Is A Virtue. The longing for a fresh start is an ancient and basic feature of consciousness. All art and work of the imagination is touched by it and depends on it. Taking it seriously is a step to finding a new way of being.

3. Mind Is Your Friend. Skepticism is real too, and you might as well embrace it. Doubt seems to have an element of longing mixed with disillusionment. However, if you look into doubt closely, it might be your friend. It might lead you to disbelieve the thoughts that keep your reality in place, which might be a good thing.

4. Go Ahead, Get Elightened. It really is possible for people to make fresh starts, complete turnovers in their way of being. This is not a delusional event and has nothing to dow ith believing in something. It is a natural human capacity for transforming consciousness...

So! My burning desire of late to be somewhere else, anywhere else, is maybe not such a terrible character flaw after all. Maybe it's actually taking me in the direction of art and work of the imagination!

I will admit to feeling sort of disappointed when I saw that this month was the "Annual All Buddhist Teachings Issue," expecting it to be full of dry boring scriptural citations and commentary, sort of like some of the religious magazines I grew up with. But no. I've been enjoying it so much I stayed up reading half the night, and again this morning in the shady reading area Mr. A set up for me under the walnut tree. Its branches hang all the way to the ground, like heavy curtains, and inside it's like a little green room. We have three chairs, a couple of tables, a rug, and some potted plants in there ... it's one of my favorite places to sit at the moment.

Here's something else I read, in a piece by Zen teacher Darlene Cohen titled "The Scenery of Cancer." She's talking about acceptance, and the practice of nonpreference – in which you make a point of not picking the thing you want. "Most of our preferences don't make much difference, like whether to choose chocolate or orange. But if you always go with your preference in every matter, then it's harder when it does matter – like preferring health to cancer. The statistical weight of your always choosing what you prefer becomes enormous, and your flexibility sags under it."

I could say the same for my experience with diabetes. If anyone had asked, I would have told them I'd most definitely prefer to NOT have diabetes. In the last week or so I've been regressing a bit, I guess – sagging under the weight of my wish to be totally healthy when I'm now permanently less than totally healthy. Finally feeling some of the sadness and despair I hadn't been allowing myself to feel in the first weeks, when I was so busy trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing that I didn't have the energy to pay too much attention to what I was feeling. I cried the day I was diagnosed, and the day after, and haven't shed a single tear since then, but this week I can feel there's a big cry coming on. Maybe just from the stress, certainly from PMS (which seems to be getting more and more intense as I get older), and also because after a month and a half or so of steady progress it seems like now suddenly I'm not losing any more weight, and my blood glucose numbers seem to have stalled at an average of more than 15 points above where I want them to be (though still much better than where I started).

This morning I dreamed a new variation on my "trying to get home" dream, the one where I'm about to miss my plane. Usually when I have that dream, I'm on my way to the airport at the end of a vacation in some city, when I realize that I'm way too late to catch my plane on time. This time, I couldn't even remember where I was trying to go. I found myself in all the houses I've lived in over the last 20 years, as well as the dream houses that always show up in my dream life – but I knew I'd already moved out of them. So it wasn't like I knew where home was, but just couldn't get there – it was more like I couldn't even get a picture in my mind of where I was supposed to be going. I was crying, and asking my sister, "Can you tell me, do you remember? Where do I live?" Then I was alone in the kitchen, and it started to rain, and I ran to make a cup of asian pear green tea, thinking "It will be so beautiful to sit out under the porch roof, drinking tea in the rain. I hope it keeps raining all day."

A sad and lonely dream, but hopeful. I might not feel very grounded in my life right now, but I can still see the beauty in it, and enjoy it and feel grateful for it.

Well, this is my fresh start. I don't know if I'll stay here or not; I kind of liked my old site, but I feel weird knowing that people from work were (and maybe still are) reading it, or trying to.

For the curious, here's what happened. My boss asked me into a meeting, in which she reminded me that blogging is specifically NOT an allowed use of company computers, and that I had been observed blogging at work and that I should stop doing it. That's basically it – nobody yelled or threatened or was mean or scary. The most mortifying part was when she opened a manilla folder to show me a few pages she'd printed from the old blog, topped with the ginormous picture of the pink sewing machine – which was embarrassing not because I'd been "caught" but because I felt like that particular post highlighted my frivolousness and shallowness and insecurity in such an especially humiliating way. I guess for me, it's one thing if I reveal my silliness and self-absorption to kind-hearted friends and strangers, but when uninvited colleagues discover me congratulating myself on my strange esoteric style, for example ... well, that's embarrassing.

One bright spot in all this is that at least I had the good sense and self-restraint to NOT write about anything work-related, except in the most general and non-inflammatory way. Actually, there are some things in there – for example, about wanting to quit and go back to work for myself someday, or go back to school – that might cause certain eyebrows to fly up in alarm ... but it's never been a secret that I've had my own clients the whole time I've worked there, and I would never leave them in the lurch or do any other damaging thing to them if I did quit. Besides which, I've never named the organization I work for, or anyone I work with, or even the exact town I live in ... so I'm not worried about any repercussions from that.

As for blogging at work, it did cross my mind to point out that many of the posts that were timestamped during "at work" hours were actually written at home and only posted from work, because the upload is so much faster there – and that I rarely spent more than 10 to 15 minutes writing when I did write at work, because I didn't want to waste any more time than was legally allotted to me as "mandatory break time." In fact, I'd been part of a conversation just a few weeks ago in which my boss and another employee and I talked about the internet-use habits of someone else we work with, who was spending entire days doing basically nothing but playing games online ... So I already knew the company was keeping an eye on "excessive" use of company computers for personal pursuits. I guess I just didn't (and still don't) think my own use ever really fell into the category of "excessive."

But whatever – the company obviously did think so, and so I didn't make any excuses or try to explain. I just apologized and told them it wouldn't happen again, and it hasn't, and it won't. End of story.

Except that now that domain name is kind of ruined for me, at least for awhile. So I'm writing here instead.

Hello!

I call it the Pink Pearl

Ooh, isn't it cute? And at my age – 41, soon to be 42 – having spent so many years choosing always the black one, or the brown one, or the green one (of anything, everything) – is it endearing or embarrassing that I am somehow now irresistibly, inexplicably, inexorably drawn to the pink one? This pink one, I mean. The pearlescent pink Kenmore Mini Ultra 3/4 Size Sewing Machine, from Sears.

My birthday is coming up in a few weeks and I've been thinking about what I might like to spend my birthday money on. I always pick something that feels like a gift, something I wouldn't normally buy for myself because it's too expensive, fancy or frivolous. This year the decision coincides with the apparent demise of my first sewing machine, which was a present to me from my mother on my 20th birthday. It succumbed to a mysterious paralysis almost two months ago and I've been missing it, missing it! Now that summer is here there are so many projects I want to start, and while there are a couple of items on my list that wouldn't be so hard to sew by hand, that isn't really how I want to spend my entire summer.

I still have hopes that my original machine may be fixable, if I can find someone who's willing to work on it. But so far everyone seems to think it will cost more to repair it than to get a new one, and that I'd be better off junking it and treating myself to a new one with blinky lights, a computer, a little LED display and thousands of fancy stitches. The problem with that is, I still like my old sewing machine! If it can be fixed, I'd be happy to just keep using it forever. The new ones I've seen are almost all plastic, and ugly, and way too complicated while at the same time appearing to be not very well made or durable. My original machine is lovely, in two different shades of pale grayish-green. It's small, all metal, and does (did) everything I need it to do without mucking up my life with a lot of superfluous parts and features.

Still, if it can't be fixed, I will have to move on. And if I do, this pink one may fit the bill. It isn't very fancy, either. It only does six stitches – but that's four more than I ever used on my current machine. And I assume from the picture that it is plastic, but it comes with a 25 year warranty, which I assume means it can't be ALL that crappy. It also comes in mint green, which I haven't seen but have a feeling I would not like, and white.

Another option is this. It's heavy duty, and costs three times as much as the pink one. I like its apparent durability, industrial-strength good looks and basic, no-nonsense feature set. It looks like the kind of sewing machine someone might take with them into exile in Siberia, or Detroit, or some other equally remote, hard-sewing, worker-oriented kind of place. I could probably use it to make shoes out of dead reindeer or used tires, if I ever wanted to. But can it sew a quarter-inch strap on a piece of half-thrifted, reconstructed silk lingerie?

The most exciting project I have in mind at the moment could probably be accomplished with either machine. Remember how I was bragging that I had repaired the worn-out crotches of my favorite old baggy linen pants, and wasn't going to have to do any more summer shopping this year? Well, the combination of lots and lots of time in the saddle (of my bike) and the resultant weight loss has undone all my good work, and it's looking like now I am going to be needing some new pants this summer, after all. The worn-out ones are still together enough to use as a pattern, if I'm careful ripping them apart, and I had this great idea, inspired by my current favorite pants, that if I'm going to be sewing up some new ones I might as well redesign the pattern to my own specifications – so I'm going to be making some giant-legged super-pants, the kind where each leg is almost as big as a skirt, to wear with small summer tops and swirl around in while dancing in the moonlight and preparing my daily lox omelette and breezing along the bike path on my way to work each day.

I know pants like these aren't fashionable, but that has never stopped me before.

They're going to have HUGE pockets, too. I can't wait!

So he reads to usfrom something called Ulysses

Many's the moment I spent pondering this mysterious phrase, sitting cross-legged with my back up against the stretched-out gold and brown fabric covering the speakers on my parents' curvy maple stereo cabinet. The record I was listening to is familiar to countless folks around my age and featured on the cover a photograph of a laughing, fat-faced fellow in horn-rimmed spectacles, up to his chin in walnuts. If you're on a PC, you can listen to the actual song here; it's number seven*. (I also recommend "Rat Fink" – not the hit single, but still my personal favorite on the whole album. See how precocious I was in my taste for the esoteric?)

Aaaaanyway. This song has been rolling around in my head again ever since I laid out an announcement for our local Irish Pub's upcoming celebration of Bloomsday, which is happening this year on June 19. Every year I seem to hear about this event only after it's already happened, and then I make a note to myself that by next year's Bloomsday, I will have read Ulysses – for sure this time! And then I promptly forget all about my vow until the next day-after-Bloomsday.

But not this year! This year I finally remembered in time to do it, though I will admit I haven't given myself much time. My copy of the infamous tome is over 1000 pages long, which means I'll have to read 76 pages a day to finish it before the Bloomsday-a-thon. Normally that would be no sweat for me, because I'm a very fast and motivated reader. This is not fast reading, though.

Still, after six weeks of fretting and fussing over my health, I'm looking forward to a new challenge. I invite anyone who's interested to join me – 76 pages a day or bust! Let the reading begin!

* The full quote goes like this (it's a humorous song on the theme of "a letter from camp"): "And the head coach [pause] wants no sissies [pause] so he reads to us from something called Ulysses." As a kid, I thought he was saying, "So he reads to us from (something) All You Lissies." I had no idea what a "lissy" was ... and I still don't know how reading Ulysses would prevent a kid from turning into a sissy. Though based on what little of it I have read, I think I get the general idea.

I got memed!

It’s never happened before. I confess I am blushing just the littlest bit ... like I just got invited to sit at the popular girls’ table.
Just to draw out the pleasure a bit, and because I’m totally overscheduled these days, I think I’m going to answer the questions one at a time.

1. Since we’re both fans of “Freaks and Geeks,” I’d love to know which character on the show you most relate to and why? Also, for bonus points: In your considered opinion, what is the single most cringe-worthy scene in the whole series?

That would have to be Lindsay. I underwent a similar transformation at about the same time in my high school life, and the people in my life responded to it in similar ways. Old friends were confused and concerned, my parents acted like I’d flown the coop ... whereas I felt like I was finally expressing my real self for the first time in my life. The reasons were similar too, now that I think of it – didn’t Lindsay’s changes begin when her grandfather died, way back in the pilot episode? In my case it wasn’t a relative who died, but a very close friend – someone I knew had suppressed a lot of her Self trying to be “good,” because she believed it would all lead to even greater rewards later in life. When she died, it suddenly made no sense to Not at least investigate everything I really wanted to do, because what if I died too, and never got to experience any of the things that interested me the most? I quit cheerleading (which had turned out to be the biggest disappointment of my life up to that point), traded in my feathers for a pseudo-punk hairdo (or so I thought of it at the time), picked up some new/old clothes at the thrift store, and started hanging out with questionable characters at the college radio station. One bright spot was that I also had a couple of great teachers who supported and encouraged me that year, like Lindsay does in the show, because they could see that I was just exploring and not really running amuck, as certain other people seemed to think. It meant a lot to me to know they still had faith in my good judgment.

As for the most cringe-worthy scene, the first one that comes to mind is when Nick auditions to be a drummer for some older guys’ rock band. He’s obsessed with drumming, and when he practices alone at home in his basement, with Rush blasting on his stereo, he really believes he has what it takes to be a professional musician – in his heart, he already IS a rock star. It’s so heartbreaking to see him totally floundering in front of these guys, and to know that no matter how much he loves music and no matter how hard he’s willing to practice, his dream of rock & roll stardom is just never going to happen for him. The death of youthful ideals, and the heaviness that settles in when you start to realize that your life might not turn out to be everything you ever dreamed of ... maybe “cringe-worthy” isn’t the right word for these moments. “Compassion-inducing?” Isn’t that sort of the same thing?

2. What was the last really good movie you saw (either in a theater, on DVD, or video) and why did you like it so much?

I just went through my Netflix history to see what might jump out at me, and even after that review I’m still going to go with the first one I thought of – Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. It’s a documentary hosted (very loosely speaking) by Jim White as he travels through the deep South, talking to people and listening to their music, which is homemade (see #3 below), heartfelt and highly evocative of ... something .... sort of feral and haunted, and beautiful and strange. The whole movie feels like that. Like visiting a dream planet where people speak the same language I do, but somehow after listening to them talk for awhile I realize I haven’t understood a word they said. All that’s left is a feeling I can’t put a name to. Except to say that I like it.

3. What’s your favorite musical instrument or combination of musical instruments?

I love scratchy old-timey homemade music, so my first thought is to mention instruments like the kazoo, the accordion and the banjo. They seem so ...proletarian! I like that. My grandfather was a banjo player. I also really love the cello and the piano. And wooden flutes. I have several different sizes of recorders that I’ve been neglecting ever since I met Mr. A. I need to get those out and start playing again.

4. More than a year ago, you mentioned that you were going to blog about your “Grizzly Man” obsession (with tangents about Chris McCandless and Everett Reuss)? How about blogging about that now?

I might have to come back to this one, because it still merits a whole entry in itself. But briefly, I’ve always been sort of fascinated with this type of character – the hermit. A person who withdraws from human society and goes off to live in a remote place populated only by plants and non-human animals, and finds some kind of peace there. The fact that these three people all died during their adventures doesn’t really factor into their appeal; I’d be even happier with their stories if they’d all lived long enough to tell what it was like to live that way for 30, 40, 60 or 100 years.

The only experience I’ve had personally of living somewhat like this was when I first moved out here in 1995. For two years – the last two years of my marriage – I lived mostly alone in a small house on top of a heavily wooded ridge of mountains between Napa and Sonoma. The house was a mile past the end of the county road, totally private and pretty well isolated from our nearest neighbors who lived another half mile away.

Because of what was going on in my relationship I felt sad and lonely and afraid a lot when I lived there, but at the same time I felt so supported by the place itself, that in my memory those years have ended up being some of the most peaceful years I ever spent anywhere. I loved the silence, the trees, the animals, the feeling of being so much a part of the place itself that I actually disappeared for hours at a time, walking along the shaded trails, climbing up the boulders in the creek bottom, watching red-tailed hawks circling over the windy ridge top, or just sitting on my deck listening to the wind in the redwoods. I felt more like myself there than I’d ever felt anywhere before.

I guess what intrigues me about these guys is that while I sat in front of the fire in my comfortable cabin contemplating the hermit’s life, they actually lived it. And they also died in it. So their stories let me vicariously enjoy the life I dream about, and at the same time remind me why it’s important to not totally give in to my own hermit-like tendencies.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

In the university town where I grew up, I knew a lot of people (including my own parents) who lived where they lived mainly because that’s where their job was. I guess that’s just how it is when you’re an academic, or committed to making a living with some other skill that requires you to go where the money is. But to me, that always seemed like an exactly backwards way to organize your life. Why would you spend your entire life, which could easily and without warning turn out to be much, much shorter than you ever could have imagined (see #1), living in a place you don’t really like?

Which is why I’ve always done kind of the opposite of that – chosen a place I loved, and then figured out how to make a living there. It’s not exactly the easiest way to live, but it is the reason I’m able to answer the question of where I would like to live more than anywhere else in the world, like this: Right here.

Also high on my list are Portland and Eugene, or anywhere cool, wet, green and close to the coast. One thing I don't like so much about where I live now is the climate – relentless sunshine and blistering heat in summer and never a drop of rain from May through October. Even in winter it doesn't rain as much as I would like, and I dearly miss summer storms.

Northern Utah is also on the list, because that's where most of my family is. I would love so much to be able to live close to them again. And the thunder storms at the end of summer are amazing.

Puppies puppies everywhere

Last Friday morning when I grabbed my alarm clock I felt a strange texture on the front, and found that early in the dark hours of morning, as I slept, Mr. A had crept into my room and applied a tiny little half-inch tall puppy sticker to the snooze button. It made me smile, and all morning, as I wandered around the house getting ready for work, I found more stickers stuck to all kinds of things he knew I would find – mirrors, a juice glass, keys.

Thus began the official first day of the Seven Days of Tater's Birthday, which culminates today – his actual birthday – with a cream cheese and lox omelette for breakfast, a small party of friends for dinner, and special treats from the dog bakery a block from my office for dessert.

Nine years ago my friend called to let me know that sometime around five in the morning, his dog Beachwood had given birth to ten healthy puppies. I went to see them and instantly fell in love with Feather, whose black body and white facial markings reminded me of my cat Elvis, who had died (strange I'm just realizing this for the first time) an auspicious nine months before. Hmm!

A few weeks later I was holding him and noticed one of his eyes was open, looking me right in the eye. "Hey," I yelled to my friend in the next room. "When did their eyes open?"

"They haven't yet," he said. "I checked them this morning – none of them have."

I looked at the other pups and all of their eyes were still closed. That was when I realized that Feather was in some ways a more evolved little being than his brothers and sisters, and also, that I was the very first person he ever saw in his whole life.

As soon as he learned to crawl, he started coming to me to snuggle. He would crawl up inside the sleeve of my sweater and fall asleep there, as if it were a little hammock made just for puppies. When he was finally old enough to come home with me, I took a week off work to house train him. The very first night he woke me up at 3 a.m. to let me know he needed to go out, and I realized he already knew everything he needed to know about how to behave in the house. He's still never had a single accident.

I named him Tater standing in front of the 1960 Rambler American I used to drive, under a star-filled sky in the driveway of the house where he was born, in Penngrove, California, the night I finally brought him home to live with me for good. In the last few weeks his name had somehow changed from Feather to Shakespeare, but I knew I didn't want to call him that. My friend had walked us out to the car and we were talking about how fast the time had gone since the day the puppies were born. "They were so tiny," he said. "Yeah," I said. "All snuggled up against Beachwood like sweet little potatoes on the barbecue."

In my mind, I was picturing the way we used to roll up six or seven roasting potatoes in a cylinder of heavy foil, then twist between them and drop them on the grill to steam along with the chicken or fish or whatever else we were cooking. The puppies were about that size when they were born – small enough to hold in one hand.

"I think his real name is Sweet Potater," I said.

"You can't call him that!"

But the name had already stuck. You know how that happens sometimes.

He knows how to sing, and he loves to dance to Motown music. He taught me about partner yoga before I knew such a thing existed. He actually listens when you talk to him, and sometimes he tries to talk back. He still loves to sleep in our laps, even though he weighs as much as a 10-year-old child now; he climbs up onto the couch and puts his arms around your shoulders and lays his head on your chest, and looks up at you, and sighs. He has strange fears and anxieties – he fear-bites strange dogs who sniff too insistently, and every time the ice maker dumps a load of ice, he leaps up and runs out the dog door. He sleeps with his head on a pillow and knows how to pull the blanket over himself when it's cold.

I could go on and on, but my point is just that he's a magic dog. He's been magic for me from the day he was born.

The photos were taken when he was ten weeks old, and almost nine years old – just a few weeks ago. For those who don't already know this, it is very hard to get a dog to look at a camera long enough to take a photo like this one. In the first photo, he'd never seen a camera before, and was curious. In the second, I kept his attention by holding a Beggin' Strip on top of the camera.

Happy birthday, Mr. Magumisaki-san! We love you!

P.S. I got memed by Rozanne! And am almost ready to post my answers. So stay tuned!