January 6 Something like a snowflake

Ummmm... what if I typed in Gibberish? Sighs? A silly song? Memories? Helloes? Goodbyes? What if I typed in something like a snowflake, which just fell on the hot page and chilled a spot like a tiny star before it melted? What if I typed in something like a roaring cold wind which left peculiar stinging in the cheeks and created wooden toes in anyone who read it? What if I wrote like sickness, a bronchitis of the sentence, steam treatment to loosen the material, then wiping of the nose, a cold cloth to the flushed face? What if I scribbled signs on a curl of birch bark and threw it in a stream, never knowing where it would arrive? Or arranged scraps of chartreuse tree moss to form a script known to me alone? What if my pages were like full larders, bulging with commodities, last summer's huckleberry jam, always a full jar behind each half empty jar, fresh loaves of bread every morning, always a hot pot of tea? Or what if my notes were concocted of such strange ingredients as the drinks and dips of New Year's Eve? "It's not guacamole" made from peas and an Indian dip of peanut and onion, a complete protein! How can I describe getting into New York only twelve hours late this morning, pulling in to Penn Station at 4 am, straight out of Winter's Tale (by Mark Helprin), a taxi ride through the Broadway theater row all lit up and empty, getting to Grand Central at the same time as the kicked-out-the-night-before homeless, 5:00 am? Younger One and I carried our six pieces of luggage, way too much, but all the burden we had by then, and dragged ourselves into the empty white marble rotunda, with the starry strange blue ceiling, and all the great marble staircases and brass hand rails cleaned and shined to a soft glow. A wonderful perfect commuter train to home was leaving at 5:35. I wanted to dance in the empty station, whirl around and around in all that lovely space, somewhere familiar, somewhere that felt like home, here where I knew where Track 18 was. I really wanted to spin, even just one whirl, the station would never be so much mine again. But I didn't dare risk being taken away by the authorities at that point, we were so close really, Younger One would have been very disappointed in me, so I stood still and tried to behave. Now I really want to write that I really did whirl all around the station, but I don't dare to. Now I am home and I really must try to behave.

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		January 7 Infected with wannabeism

Well, here I am. Absolutely refusing to admit that I'm completely uninspired. Still mopping up the fallout from leaving home for 10 days. I got groceries yesterday. I went through the mail (seriously) today. And today, news started to filter through of Older One's misbehaviors while I was gone. What did I expect. I feel guilty about leaving an almost-19-year-old at home alone. Many parents would not do this. But I did. His dad sort of overlooked him, I mean, looked over him, while I was gone. Tonight the dad called to deliver his anxiety to me. I tried not to accept it, but some of it seeped in through the cracks. So I left Older One a note in his room that we need to revisit some of the household operations. I'll take advantage of him while he's feeling guilty. I surfed today. Bleah, bleah, bleah. I found very very very little to interest me. What does this mean? Who cares? What's the point of all this? Why am I contributing to it? On the other hand, ever since I discovered the Uzumian nature of this journal, I feel like at least I have a minor grasp of why I'm doing it. In my surfing I was infected with academic wannabeism. Why should I not get a doctorate in structural poetics or words and technology or hypertextualism or whatever it is they call these things? I wouldn't mind having a doctorate. What kind of foolish person has a doctorate anyway? I'm just going to take graphic design 2 at the local community college and be happy about it. The main realization coming through the fog is that I prefer art to religion. And I prefer words to images. Although I love images, I am just not as versed in them, so to speak ha ha ha I have managed to subscribe to an overload of periodicals. These came while I was gone: The Studio, "an odd little artzine" (LOVE it!) The American Poetry Review (often love the essays, seldom like the poetry) Doubletake (which is running out of money, this type of glossy artsy publication always seems to) Calyx, a journal of art and literature by women (valiant) Earth's Daughters (poetry and fiction by a collective out of Buffalo, inspiring) World (the UUA journal; had a bland article on feminist theology and an article of minor interest by Margot Adler, "Savoring our World and Saving It, Too") I got a postcard for a free issue of Art News. I might try it. Subscribing to periodicals is too easy. I could sit in my house forever stacking periodicals. I want to be more involved in that type of work. Maybe I should think about starting a zine. I feel depressed when I think of writing articles or submitting my work for publication. I want to be in CHARGE! I want to be involved in production. I want to handle paper and ink and stuff folders and envelopes. I want to publish and distribute tracts. (Can you imagine, me out in the plaza in front of the library, pushing my tract on the person who is pushing their tract on me? That vision alone is enough to cheer me up tonight!) (Oh yeah, I was partly responsible for a huge billboard down the block advertising a hopeless speakers' series -- dream come true) I can't believe I am interested in such a godawful, hopeless, ridiculous, nervewracking, draining, ill-paid, thankless and useless line of work. (falling on the floor and rolling my eyes at the ceiling) I think I'll just take my stacks of reading material up to pile on the bed. Tomorrow's another day. (great)

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		January 8 "...the roots of rhythm remain..."

I am feeling more hopeless than usual. Yesterday's mood persists. I was searching for some idea that would be a tonic, that would cheer me up. I found something -- me as a girl. I remember myself so fondly. Natalie was talking about how she loved creating little villages, cozy little worlds. I couldn't remember being interested in that type of play. I tried to recall what gave me the most joy as a child. Running. Skipping, hopping on one foot. Skating. Clapping games. A sailor-went-to-sea-sea-sea. Riding a bike. Hula hooping, moving the hoop up and down my skinny body from waist to neck to waist to knees to waist, with imperceptible twitches. And especially jumping rope. Watching for the moment to jump in, tuning my body to the speed of the rope. Lulling myself with the slap-slap of the rope on the asphalt and with that two-hop on-the-toes rhythm that boys never seemed to be able to do. They always had a flat-footed thud-thud-thud style if they dared to try to jump. Chinese jumprope made of rubber bands stuffed in my pocket, cold mornings before school, stretching it around friends' legs, bending my knees hundreds of times, ankle high rope, easy step, knee high rope, bend kick to the back, thigh high rope, kick high to the front. This was done to the chanting of M-I-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I. I wore shorts under my uniform skirt so I could kick my foot so high. There were a lot of variations, but just running was enough. The attraction of playing horses and most of the attraction of playing spies was just to justify running around the neighborhood. Later, in a different place, I would start up at the top of the neighbor's woods and run downhill a long long long ways on a steep winding path near the hemlocks, down through the birch forest, down through the meadow. Then I would do it again. I'm not going to distort these memories of joyfulness with any bitter twists -- contemplations about the present, or about exercise, or about aging, or about weight, or lack of weight, or about competition sports and winning, or about being white, or about being a girl, or about dance cheerleading and drill teams, or about restlessness, or about "running away from my problems." In this case, there's no metaphor. I just have always liked to move. "... the pulsing of blood in the veins..." (these are barely remembered fragments of a Paul Simon lyric; I really should go look it up, but I think Older One stole it, and if I go down in his room I'll spoil my whole evening)

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		January 9 Bras, breasts, burqua

I spent most of the morning in bed. It helped me get a grip. I wrote a very very very long journal entry which was mostly about clothes and underwear and ranged from childhood slights regarding training bras and ugly vests to the proscriptions of the Taliban. The entry did not have proper punctuation and I let myself write it like one long runon sentence.   Pressure and writing. The pressure builds up inside me. Writing releases it. That's pretty simple. Lately I've been thinking of writing as exerting pressure. Pressing on topics, pressing on incidents, pressing on events. Exaggerating. Lying. Being more disgusting or more cruel or more embarassing than necessary. Being more emotional than necessary. This morning, I was experimenting with having more self-pity than necessary. It worked like magic. Originally I was intending to post paper journal entries in the online journal, in a separate room like the attic. I haven't done this. It just seems like too many words, even though I would be very discriminating about which entries I post. Maybe I will someday. I heard a short story read on the radio tonight by Naomi Shihab Nye. It was called "Maintenance" and the subject was basically housekeeping. Listening to it made me angry because -- hey, I could write something like that! I could make today's journal entry into a story and call it "The Bra." I just haven't got the hang of this writing business yet. Family Anxieties Interrupting: My dad has had a sore on his forehead for several weeks. He finally went to the doctor who thought it was the bite of a brown recluse spider. I thought this was truly horrifying, but my parents both seemed quite calm. They also seemed to take Lyme disease mostly in stride. I haven't actually seen Older One since we got home, although I've heard his voice. Today there was a message on the answering machine "I'm safe at Phillip's house. I'll take a bus home. I'll see you tomorrow night." I didn't know about any of this. I guess I'm glad he called anyway. Now I know that as of sometime this evening, he was alive. Okay, got that over with. Now -- I wish I could develop a means to dim the lights and evoke a sacred hush in the room -- I'm going to document the most astonishing pointless coincidence of my vacation: Sandpoint Idaho, the morning of January 3, 2:30 am. At the train station with Grandma and Grandpa and Younger One and our six pieces of luggage waiting for the Amtrak to pull in. I feel like it's 2:30 am, frayed and fragmented below the thin veneer of departure excitement. There's a row of benches in the waiting room. The station office is large and walled off from the waiting room. There's a little window where tickets are sold, which is shut and locked, since no one's in the office. I peek in the window. It's a sterile, beige-y office, with old computers, phones, desks, chairs, neat, no clutter. I peek to my left. There's a counter running along the inside wall. The only object on the counter is a book. I recognize it with something like electric shock. It's an exhibition catalog, Breaking the Rules, Audrey Flack, A Retrospective 1950-1990. This is absolutely the last book I would expect to see there. This book is an old friend. I kept it in my bathroom for months, so I could look at it every day and be inspired by the vivid vanity paintings, the self portraits in underwear, the "icons for a secularized age," the naked goddess sculptures. The title seems like some kind of obscure important message to me, seeing it like this in the train station. I have no idea what the message means. The sculpture on the cover holds out her hand to me, her wings are golden and aloft, her breasts are naked curves of ivory. She is striding forward, wearing a toga like a sarong, and a headdress of roses. She is "Islandia: Goddess of the Healing Waters." (Slowly now, lights come up, sacred hush is broken by the slow solemn striking of a gong, an amplified voice says:) I am upset by what I have been reading about the women of Afghanistan under the Taliban. January 9, 1999 ... I wish there could be a great crusade of women, countless numbers of them, unkillable due to their great numbers, who could march on those places and take those women in black by the hand and throw back their veils and take them into the streets with naked heads and arms and legs -- hell, walk in the streets with them, all colors and body shapes stripped naked -- and if the men shoot them all, more take their place, and if the men shoot them all, more come, and if the men really shoot them all, every last one of them, well then the men will finally learn some respect once they are living in a dead world without women. I have a lot more to say about this.

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		January 10 This is stored in a box.

Fluctuations in energy. I slept until nearly 9 am. Younger One was at the grandparents overnight. Then I was excited about going to church and seeing people I haven't seen for several weeks. Then I shopped until I dropped. At home, I danced in front of the mirror to Paula Cole, I was so happy with my new underwear. After a rest, I took down the Christmas tree. Then an attack of nausea and fatigue. More rest. Vacuumed. Felt sick. Rested. I didn't go grocery shopping. It always screws up the following week when I don't shop on the weekend. I didn't do a lot of things I should have done. Something from Calyx, Winter 1998/99. The artist's statements by Kathy Ross: I am not trying to make something Grand, something Beautiful, something Cutting Edge, something Universally Meaningful -- leave that to chance. I don't aspire to much in the way of communicating with the culture or contributing to the art dialogue. I am after the dark and light of my own heart. On the path, to be worked at: a compassion, a nurturing, a steady attention, an introspection, an unraveling of stream-of-consciousness imagery. I am convinced that this placing of one foot in front of the other, this following of the whims of the subconscious/barely conscious, is the route to something with true heart in it. I am sure that the best I can offer the world is -- my own heart, all its loves and fears and miseries. (Thereby giving my support and permission for the expression of everybody else's.) I like what she says. I identify with her statements. They apply. I am always catching myself feeling inadequate because I am barely literate in my own culture and quite incapable of contributing to any larger dialogue. Just today, in fact, I watched part of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for the first time. Hasn't everybody seen that movie? I just don't watch many movies. I have also never seen "Dr. Zhivago" which has been mentioned to me several times as a cultural comparison for my train trip. Oh, God, I am clueless and out of touch. I am not "erudite." But I am after the dark and light of my own heart, you know. "Following the whims of the subconscious/barely conscious" -- am I doing that here? I'm freely following whims in my choice of subject matter every day, which is a big part of the fun. But how consciously? Visual artists may seem to be able to get away with subconscious connections a lot more easily than writers. But that may be only an illusion. Just because I'm expressing myself in words doesn't mean I'm conscious. LOL Oops, don't mean to joke. I do have a desire to get consciousness (or self-consciousness?) out of the way in writing. Here it mainly happens in my awareness of possible topics -- which one is nosing its little green shoot most vigorously into the air tonight? Pluck it up and examine its root. Overly destructive image. Let's try this one: look for the freshest source of bubbles from the underground spring and take my cup of conscious expression from there. (I have two spring tales to tell from vacation.) And finally -- support and permission for the self-expression of everybody else? I do get a minorly rewarding feeling that this journal may somehow do that. You know, if I can do it, anybody can do it. ... But I hear a much stronger, bitterly censorious overtone claiming that everybody's self-expression may not be such a good thing and in particular my self-expression is probably not such a good thing and maybe I had just better Shut Up, like the good child I always was. (long silence; lost my train of thought) Whew, I came back. My antidote to the Shut Up frame of mind: I tell myself this journal is still a secret. I call lovingly to mind the image of Emily Dickinson's bundles of poems, sewn into packets with twine, and stored in a box. The breathtaking privacy of her voice. Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson have recently been published, Open Me Carefully, Paris Press. I'm almost afraid to read them. If I do, I might turn into a completely different person.

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		January 11 Destructive energy

I disliked yesterday's entry very much. I thought about uploading a January 10b. Or deleting and rewriting. But I didn't, only out of respect to Emily, and laziness. For one thing, I have to admit I was trying to gain myself some time by writing it at 8:30 instead of at 10:00 after the boy was in bed. The entry seemed slapped together, parasitic, chintzy, and boring to me. No imagination. Second, it's not nice to say Shut Up. So anyway, with the time I gained for myself, I watched a documentary about Lou Reed (rock and roll animal) on PBS. I enjoyed it. I loved the way people's heads would appear, silent, shown on the screen two or three times, and then finally start talking. This was especially effective with the dorky music critic, who was adorable. I smiled a lot throughout the whole piece. I laughed when Lou Reed described how awful it was to take the New York stylings of the Velvet Underground to San Francisco, and how much they hated the hippies. I liked hearing about Andy Warhol and the Factory. I liked watching Patti Smith with her elegant gestures and her witchy gray hair and dirty-looking T-shirt. I loved seeing some of the actual characters in "Walk on the Wild Side" singing along with the song. That song was in my head all day today. I was left with this great desire to defend my sex-drugs-and- rock-and-roll credentials (of which I have none) (or very few). I was never rebellious in that way. There's something about it though. Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller. I want to say they are my heroes, although that's totally ridiculous. You can't be like that and take care of kids. And physically, for me anyway, I get absolutely raggy and non-functional if I take any mind-altering substances (including Extra-Strength Tylenol) or don't get a decent night's sleep. I'm in love with the edgy, dark, and original in their writing. It says freedom to me. ~~~~ Now here's where my rebellion kicks in: I'm browsing in this very wonderful book called Women in Praise of the Sacred, 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, edited by Jane Hirshfield. It seems like the kind of book I could really embrace. But I get to this sentence in the very first biographical note, of Enheduanna, and the whole project is spoiled for me: This hymn is ... the sole representation in this book of the fierce female energy found in spiritual traditions throughout the world. In figures ranging from the Hindu destroyer-goddess Kali to the Hawaiian Pele, we see how this destructive goddess-energy creates a necessary balance ... There can be no genuine beauty or harmony that does not acknowledge the opposite powers of anger, fierceness, and destruction, the plot of this hymn tells us: a true spirituality includes all of life's aspects, not only those we find pleasing or simple. Okay, I agree with those statements, but I want to smite the editor for including this energy only in a "sole representation." How can she make a comment like that without further explanation, especially when speaking of "balance"? Why is there only one representation? Have all the other representations over 43 centuries been destroyed? Is she buying into our cultural scorn of the angry woman? Does she really think spiritual poetry should be all nice and erotic? (This certainly makes the lords feel much better, maybe more books were sold to men because of this judgment.) I'd like to see a whole book of selections of the feminine energy of destruction (for balance). And that, exactly, is what I like so much in those drug-crazed and dissipated maniacs, Miller, Kerouac, Lou Reed. I just wish more normal everyday mothers wrote that way. (Annie Lamott has come close, I have to admit.) I never felt better than after I read the first section of Devi, where Durga and Kali and the other handmaidens slaughter just about everybody, one warrior after another going down in a bloody and disgusting fashion: My Kali comes down from the crest of the mountain. Her bones protrude through her flesh. Strung skulls clack on her slackened breasts. A fanged tiger-skin flaps on her dried-up haunch. Her eyes are dull red, two coals sunk in darkness. Her tongue lolls out, side to side, loose as a tail, coursing the ground. Her heads are two and then three, her tongues spin around, lashing the legions below her, throwing the fighters and mounts, chariots, horses, and elephants into her mouth, down to the pit of her darkness, some swallowed whole, some with the black stumps of her teeth crushed into fragments, some ground under foot, some flung by their hair and caught in her mouth in mid-air. All are devoured. This is dedicated to M, who accused me of "male-bashing" after I made one sole tiny meek mild critical comment. What I really wanted to do at that point was strike off his head with a slash of my tongue.

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		January 12 I'm up thirty five cents

Notes from my day: I find a quarter on my way into the post office. It's not quite enough to pay for a new stamp. I follow a gray coot of a cheerful man into the long line. He has an interminable number of envelopes which have to be individually weighed. I stare at the brown nuts that my new boss (a subDon) has for eyes. He is growing a white and gray beard which looks like lichen covering his cheeks. I'm trying to gauge how much joking he will tolerate. An invisible narrowing of his irises indicates that it won't be much. I give it a shot anyway. If I don't joke, I will have to lie down on the floor in this briefing meeting. Two programmers take my computer hostage. They are trying to make it grow up and conform. They wave their arms over it and inscribe fiery things upon it, inside and out. When I come back from lunch they are gone, leaving two small footprints on the desktop, one labeled Production and one Test. I don't know what they are for and I forget to ask. I call a friend I have never called before and wish her Happy Birthday. Her birthday gifts this year are a stove and a jewel. I rescue an article on Angela Carter from the pile of newspapers to be recycled. I decide I want to be Angela Carter. Or, maybe rather, read her. She died in 1992. I talk to a young functionary at the community college who gives me misinformation about registration. I pretend to be bent out of shape at what she is telling me. Then I go register for Graphic Design class, ignoring her warnings. It works out just fine. There isn't even a line and the electricity had come on just hours before. I find a dime on the floor under the registration table. I walk out of there whistling. I feel like I'm wearing someone else's clothes and that my legs are hinged to my pelvis in a loose new way. I whistle all the way down to the parking garage. I pass several eerie people on the dark sidewalk, a tiny child in a bright snowsuit carrying an ice ball as big as her head, an upright delivery man holding a clipboard who seems to have one arm, and a gray muffled lurching guy with a nonconforming spine. I would be afraid of him were I not whistling quite so loudly. (They are all now writing -- passed eerie whistling woman on dark sidewalk ...) I remember the unexplained appearance of beetle clip art on the front cover of the college's spring schedule. I meant to ask what it meant. An Italian angel coated in olive oil appears suddenly in an email discussion about God. He sits on people's shoulders and leaves greasy spots on their shirts. I think I recognize him from my cupboards. I am totally charmed by the appearance of this odd medieval creature interrupting philosophical arguments full of text. I chop the heads and tails off two fish for dinner. I don't even have a qualm, except that the knives are very dull. I tell Younger One we are having trout for dinner, and he calls back "What kind of trout?" Older One has finished up some more dish washing and now washes 50 pieces of fresh romaine leaf for iguana food. He is dressed very nicely in spiffy brown corduroys and a stiff blue Oxford cloth shirt with an embroidered crest. His thin brown ponytail meanders down his back. Younger One puts on his boots to help me take out the trash and recycling, even though it's past his bedtime. He is dressed in spiffy navy corduroys and a sharp dark green thermal henley. Both of them seem to completely accept their clothes. They don't act like they are imprisoned here, not one bit.

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January 13 Getting to know me

I feel frazzled and shitty. What day is it? I worked quite a lot today and then I surfed quite a lot looking for -- something -- resources, a home on the web, something that seemed compatible, a community for Vestinambula to join. I found a vast surplus of exclamation points and cute light stuff. I think they are hiding the real sober reflective charming meaningful intelligent Internet from me.   ~~~~~~~ I got this e-mail at work yesterday, me and 20 lucky others -- As part of our upcoming IT meeting on January 28, we would like to run some videos at the break times. Rather than use videos that have been used in the past and along the lines of "getting to know the people in IT", I thought it would be a good idea to have a random number of IT people introduce themselves and make there presence known to the rest of the staff. As part of a random sampling process, you have been selected to participate in this adventure. Congratulations!! P. will be doing the taping in the morning on Monday, January 18 and Wednesday, January 20. As part of the segment, please follow this script: 1. Introduce yourself 2. Let us know how long you've been with [CompanyName] 3. Have a short blurb ready that says something positive about [CompanyName] and/or our IT department. It could cover just about anything such as, why you like working here, what you like best about the company or department, a recent or current project or assignment, etc. Use your imagination, but keep it positive!!! I can't stand it. She obviously hasn't been doing any reading about the necessity to strike a balance with our friends, those pesky negative thoughts. The trouble is, I will go through with this and do exactly what is wanted of me. Only the most very perceptive will see the black aura creeping over my eyes, my gray cheeks stained with ghastly tears, and the invisible bats flying around my head as I choke my way through my positive blurb. ~~~~~~~ Negative writing comment, plunges me into shame and despair: Philip Zaleski, "God Help the Spiritual Writer," in the New York Times Book Review, talking of the world of spiritual publishing: Here one finds the bright-eyed divinity school student who "journals" her way into print. Could he be referring to someone very similar to -- moi?? And what do those snide quotation marks around "journals" mean anyway? ~~~~~~~ Positive writing comment, lifts spirits to barely level again: Hannelore Hahn, "What is This Thing Called the Guild?," in an article posted on International Women's Writing Guild website: Ah, there it is, that allusion to something more, always more than what we see and know. The quest to make the invisible manifest. And how does the Guild go about doing this? Well, for one thing, we break bread with that silent partnership by writing about the self. This mantra, this daily practice, is an essential exercise. It cleans the instrument and creates resonance. Through awareness, we learn to speak our lines with - and also contrapuntally against - something. And this syncopation brings rhythm into our lives. When we move in rhythm, we also sense that there is something moving us. Of course, the Guild takes care of business - the business of writing, its craft, its styles and genres, and its marketplace. But it is the awareness of another dimension which infuses daily work and makes for a more supportive and sometimes miraculous atmosphere - regardless of whether one chooses to pursue this dimension or not. ~~~~~~~ Totally freaking amazing writing comment, fills me with courage and gratitude for the meaning this activity provides in my life: Jane Hirshfield, in the Preface to Women in Praise of the Sacred, 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women: ...the image of Akhmatova standing amid a crowd of other wives and mothers outside the walls of Lubyanka prison, holding a food bundle for her son, is known throughout the world. "Can you write about this?" she was asked, and she answered simply, "I can."

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January 14, Best beloved

I've been in a hypnagogic state all day. This morning I woke up in a whiteout and in the semi-conscious wisp of my morning prayer, which is never more than a wisp of words before I jump out of bed full of emergency, I called myself "best beloved child of Sarasvati." Why not? Now this is very interesting. To paraphrase Judith Duerk, "How would your life be different if you woke every morning calling yourself best beloved child of Sarasvati?" I wrote about Sarasvati on November 11. She is dormant for me because I am not paying attention. In a drowsy stupor on the couch tonight, I found myself hearing the echoes of -- surprise -- Kipling. There was a poem, O best beloved, something about the great greasy banks of the Limpopo River, and heat and rain and reptiles and elephants and India. My mother read it to us in a very sonorous voice, O best beloved. I don't think I can access this poem on my bookshelves and I never thought I loved it until now. I truly hope I am not confusing the phrase "O best beloved" with "Dearly Beloved." That is what the minister says from the pulpit in a deep rich voice oozing with lies. (The minister, not my minister.) What a difference in just these few syllables. And I've never paid any attention to Kipling, who he was, when he wrote, what he wrote, whether he was politically correct, or a wicked misogynist, or racist, certainly an evil colonialist. Homework. I think I may have been trying to recapture the tone of "The Elephant's Child" in my writing all these years without realizing it. I'm certainly not striving for the tone of Jane Austen, or Shakespeare, or Charlotte Bronte (well, maybe a little Emily Bronte), or even Tolkien, or Dickens, or the King James Bible, or what else, any other book I can't think of with Anglophilic childhood resonance. Is everything a lot simpler than I thought it was? A few days ago, I had this flash vision of myself in a very simple place, after my children were grown and on their own, without many external demands, and I saw myself flooded with things to write down, my work flowed simply and freely from my pen, without a lot of research or study or critical thinking. I don't know if the vision will ever come true, but it was nice to have and to keep. Today I started thinking that I am really just too simple and childish to be able to deal with a career change or even a job change. I don't want to plan, I don't want to think about money, I don't want to make phone calls, I don't want to market myself, I don't want to start a home-based business, I really don't want to network. It's a miracle that I have a job that supports life. I don't know how I ever got to here. It was clearly another person who did this last eighteen years of work and striving. People I know talk of their career growth and plans and my eyes glaze over and I think I could never do that. On vacation, the word that came to me was "support." To do anything different, I would need way more support than I am ever likely to be able to muster for myself. Maybe I'm just overtired. I wish I had the option of retiring from the NBA. For today, the only change I can deal with is the novelty of thinking of myself as "best beloved child of Sarasvati."

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January 15, Ice prisons, illusions

Fading away to discouragement. If I don't have a tantrum on Friday night, all I can do is wither into sleep. Amen I say to it all, Giuliani and his work ethic, proclamations of abundance, claims that there's nothing to do, she's sick and tired of slush and ice and rain and snow after only two days of it, and the furnace's incessant funny bronchial breathing noise. The dog, he's running around and whining like there's an oozing bristly beastly cat prowling and mrowling around the outskirts, the tenderness in my guts just won't let up and it's giving me insomnia, I mean hypochondria, laundria, the toilets all need cleaning but why? for god's sake, it's a toilet, I hear scraping, scraping, scraping, all the snow shovels in the neighborhood still going throughout the night. A pleasant surprise, my ex-husband shoveled my driveway, leaving a thin film of slush that has iced over slicker than oil, thank you, tomorrow he's coming over to help Older One with his car which is wretched and disheartened sitting flat-tired in ice and snow. Tomorrow, don't even think about it, I was invited to a social event, an arts event, I don't have babysitting like a huge babysitterless dolt, I will have to crawl to the phone and force myself against my will to press buttons which will somehow or not lead to a babysitter, and for what? A stressful event in a foreign town with a strange woman watching contortionists trying to break through my illlusions, which are ice as thick as a plug in a bucket or as sheer as a page over my car windows or building into heavy ruts and thick clots of brownish slush imprisoning my tires. Note to myself: When you are writing like this it's impossible to start a new paragraph. It's also really hard to end the old paragraph. It's even really hard to start a new sentence. Once that boulder gets rolling downhill, hoo baby, nothing gets in its way. Your frame of mind is always better when you write in little bitsy paragraphs, one sentence, one word at a time. Counterargument: But then I am never surprised by words like "laundria" or the comparison of ice and illusions.

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January 16, In my green hood

Disorienting day. This morning I went back to bed right after eating my big heaping bowl of Wheatena. I tried to read, but I drifted in and out of sleep for hours. I was having really gentle dreams, and I was really comfortable. Younger One came in periodically and said "mom" in a low voice which of course woke me right up. But I didn't snap at him, I just mumbled "need some more sleep" and rolled over. He told me I looked like one of the hobbit's dwarves with my green hood; I was wearing a soft green mohair beret in bed; I just wanted it on to feel warm and comfy. Got up at noon, not feeling very perky. Tried to get some chores done, but really floundered. Got two important things done, laundry and the many-to-many letter. It turned out really nice (the letter; the laundry turned out just adequate). The dad came over and I tried not to get into the middle between the three men of the family, but I failed. Very unpleasant. Meanwhile I'm reading astonishing poems and bios of the "spiritual women." I forgive Jane Hirshfield for her near-exclusion of fierceness. Here's my favorite poem so far, by Mirabai: Why Mira Can't Go Back to Her Old House The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's body; all the other colors washed out. Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearls and my carnelians. Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings. That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher taught me this. Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day. I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries. I don't steal money, I don't hit anyone. What will you charge me with? I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious. (tr. by Robert Bly) I love the last line. Then the evening's event, which worked out just fine in spite of my fits of anxiety last night. My friend is apparently very rich. Or is it her husband that is very rich? I invited myself over to her house before the performance. Later she told me she hesitated, she was embarassed that she had such a big house. I was touched that she said that. I know it's not her fault. There's not much she can do about it. I didn't feel jealous. I felt glad that I have my own little funky messy house, and it's in my own name. Actually, I didn't even feel that. I'm embarassed to even "own" property. What I really felt is dazed by decorating, all the judgments necessary. And mostly I felt wistful, because what I really want is to emulate Mirabai, in taking up "the wandering life familiar to us from earlier women Shiva devotees." Oh yes, I ought to say the event was the Paul Taylor dancers at SUNY Purchase. I don't know. I have a lot of trouble being entertained, especially by "name" entertainment. And I'm not very familiar with dance. I enjoyed it, but it didn't plug into any electric sockets within me and zap me with overwhelming meaning. And I always feel like I'm taking time away from my own "work" even though I don't know what that is.

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January 17, The original plan

I spent all day in the grip of a really powerful fantasy. I decided it would be a good idea to quit my job in June, take the week long writing intensive with Deena Metzger, and then move to Toppenish to live with my sister-in-law for an extended retreat of three to six months. This was the alternative to last week's fantasy which was to quit my job in April and take the full time Skidmore class in computer graphics. Mostly I just don't want to work for awhile. For a long time I was resentful of women who were "subsidized," who could travel, take courses, dabble, be religious, teach courses ... whatever ... and not have to earn a living. Then I realized, hey, I can be subsidized. I can subsidize myself. In fact that was the original plan. I was going to work hard, earn money, get resume credit for working for one of "The Big 8" as they were called back then. I was going to write my own ticket. It was never intended to be a permanent career. These fantasies are a lot of fun. I could even conceive of one of them actually coming to pass. But when Younger One came home after spending the day with his dad, all my bubbles burst. I seem to have a cast-iron belief that stability is good for children. I'm not really in the mood for writing. He's still awake. I had a very disturbed night last night. Today I read sad and eerie Indian tales in Paula Gunn Allen's anthology. They contributed to my fantasy desires to escape this cultural and social environment. I know it's not all there is. I missed the reservation, even though I only spent a year there. I have doubts that it's possible to go back and do it over, only better this time.

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January 18, Current events

Oh what oh what should I write about today? There seem to be an awful lot of loose ends. I felt so sick this morning. The kind of draggy weakness where I'm not even aware that something is wrong, I am so foggy. I just wanted to sleep so badly. But instead I went to work. At work my Explorer failed to explore. It wouldn't even come up. It wanted to stay in bed sleeping. Same with the upload/download program. Half the time it was "not responding." I know the feeling. I did some very detailed writing documenting an issue this morning. That took my mind off my weakness. Then I went home for lunch since the kids were home. I took a Tylenol capsule. It was sitting in an opened sample package above the sink simpering at me. So I swallowed it. It actually helped. There was a wicked blue and purple thunderstorm right at evening rush hour. It rained and blew harder than I have seen in a long while. I was afraid that something would fall on me as I drove home, like a tree or a telephone pole or a building. The sky lit up over and over in colors like I used in my heading. After each lightning flash, there was a darkning flash as my irises struggled to adjust. There is a leak in my house where an addition was put on in front. The addition was not firmly attached to the rest of the house, I guess. So water was dripping down the archway between the computer room and the living room. And then dripping another level down into the basement! But the sump pump is working, praise the subterranean passers of water! Younger One put the doggie sweater on the dog. The dog didn't like it, but he wouldn't let us take it off him. He seriously tried to bite us even though I spoke to him most severely. I imagined he'd just be wearing a doggie sweater forever, until it wore off him into rags. I am glad to be feeling more alert than I was this morning. I feel very chatty. I had a nice talk tonight with B on the phone. I thought I was pretty entertaining, and shared many interesting problems. We talked about dolls. Both of our mothers were doll women. Our doll conversation can get very grotesque. Especially after just reading today in Fiber Arts magazine about fiber artist Catherine Heard, who creates "such nightmarish images as dolls in the form of Siamese twins, anatomical diagrams stitched from human hair, and a Victorian wedding dress embroidered with the image of a devouring vagina." I wonder how many subscriptions will be canceled due to that little article. I for one have always been uncomfortably aware that dolls' eyes were looking at me. No, that they were not looking at me. Well, uncomfortable in any case. Future topics (creating more loose ends, this writing is full of hair, I mean, threads): The loss of Wanda, the female stuffed koala The broken heirloom Ladybugs in the house Stenciling as spell casting These topics sound more interesting than they actually are. A challenge. And now to close with another quote from Fiber Arts, about fiber artist Jurgen Lehl's new house: ...the question of how to supply electricity to the new house turns out to have been resolved. "There will be no electricity," Lehl announces with some elation, as Takamine gives a gasp of disbelief. "I can keep in touch with the office by mail. As for the rest, I'll just have to do things differently, maybe go back to using brushes or find another way of working, which may change the look of my work. Yes, I think life without electricity will be very nice." I have to admire that. Especially since the next magazine I looked at, a magazine that I hate, and read just to fuel my hate, oh yeah and for the graphic design, was Wired.

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January 19, Meta motivation

I have been getting a lot of unsolicited strokes on the job lately. I am, as usual, boggled by the blankness of my reaction. I feel a little warm fuzziness rise up in my craw and then I hear a bunch of loud cawing saying "it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter." The new boss spoke with our two main business associates. He told me they were quite "effusive" in their praise of my work. Another business associate sent e-mail to the new boss because he wanted him to know how much help I had provided in a cleanup task. Today, I got a gushy note of thanks from another manager copying my boss because I had actually "enhanced" some code (with complete guidance from old Boss 1 telling me what to open, what to type, and how to resolve the ten obscure problems we ran into along the way). My boss wrote back with a comment that gee, I could "pack and enhance at the same time," amazing Wonder Woman that I am. (Everyone else was probably doing no-work since we had to pack up our cubicles for a move to other cubicles tonight.) I guess it's better than a kick in the ass, but I am feeling very suspicious. It's a trap. No, it's my horrendously sappy people-pleasing tendencies. No, it's my dysfunctional lack of ability to accept compliments. No, it's only a honeymoon period with the new boss. Or -- it just highlights my inability to be tough and managerial -- those types don't get comments like this. Or -- I really really don't care, I have some weird internal motivation to work and provide value for my salary. Or -- I know tomorrow they will find something fatally wrong with the system and change their tune, I certainly know I've made plenty of mistakes. Or -- I must be looking particularly ugly and morose lately, they have noticed and are trying to cheer me up. So I've been second-guessing myself into a terminal stew all day. Part of my hope for this OLJ project is that it serve as a form of self-administered career counseling. By making choices every day about what to focus on, and by listening in a new way to what I have to say to myself, and by struggling for some perspective on where I am, and by teasing out my authentic desires and motivations -- HERE, I invite my direction to be made known to me. It probably won't work the way I expect it to. Introversion colors everything I do. It is my curse and my blessing. I am immune to external praise because I listen to the inner world. I need protection from the competitive front-lines of business. I should not consider myself an entrepreneurial type. Right now this job provides strong protection. In fact it's downright cushy, but at what price? I'm not working on efforts that I value. I get so little satisfaction for the wondrous efforts I put in. So what do I value? Here's another fair statement of what I want, of what would matter to me: If feminists are going to transform religious symbols and actions so that they are relevant, numinous, and empowering to all women, to aid us in creating the world we envision, we shall have to take ourselves seriously as shapers of symbolic reality. ... Who holds the symbols, who shapes the rituals, who reflects the divine, has the power to define our internal and our external reality. Wendy Hunter-Roberts, "She Who Rules the Symbols Rocks the World," SageWoman, Winter 1998-99 I feel very motivated to do what this describes. It's much more exciting to me than getting the system to work, or making any person in the company happy. But it is the vaguest of vocations. "I want to grow up to be a shaper of symbolic reality." Feh. And so grandiose. Distressing. Even so, it was helpful to see this vocation expressed in writing, even though the author gets a little heavy-handed and the article doesn't help me much with the mechanics. But it's only the first in a four-part series! The OLJ does in fact let me practice what is described. Somedays I get closer than others. Today's entry is quite appallingly "meta." To me, this means self-referential, or what I describe to myself as "spiralling downwards". No like it, but I suppose it has a place.

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January 20, Red light green light

I am sitting in front of the pink screen eating a big heaping bowl of Wheatena. I love Wheatena. It's very coarse and hearty. I'm eating Wheatena at 10 pm for some reason. Why? I don't want to write about it. Oh yes, I was out at dinner time "networking." I have no faith in networking anymore. But I did unexpectedly meet someone I know from a different context at tonight's professional meeting (IABC) and it turns out she has a writing business and we agreed to talk and catch up. And tomorrow I'm having lunch with a "creative buddy." I'm looking forward to talking with her about my web experience. And I did a big training session for about 20 people today and I didn't overprepare and I wasn't overly nervous. I just figured I could count on my experience with the system and mostly wing it and there was plenty to say in an hour right off the top of my head. I did feel sweaty and drained afterwards, but relieved that it went well. I have to repeat it twice tomorrow. And I survived the new boss calling me over into his "office," i.e., cubicle, twice today. The first time to ask me if I would mind if I wasn't seated in the AVP row with all the other AVPs. I looked at him like he was insane and said "Is this a trick question?" What am I going to say -- "Yes?" "No?" There's no good answer to a question like that. (I said Yes, I wouldn't mind, which was the truth.) The second time he called me over to inject me with anxiety because there's no workplan for future development of the system, and what is the team going to do for the rest of the year, and how will we provide for my "growth" and the "growth" of the Russian programmer? I thought worrying about that was his job. And I survived (barely) another friend asking me at the end of the day, at my weakest point, What was going on with my hair? and Had I ever thought about bangs? All of a sudden I was thinking of nothing but my glaring white sweaty acre of forehead. Then I get home, watch a bit of a nature show about the nesting of the albatross, put Younger One to bed, make Wheatena, and sit down to the blank pink screen. I feel happier than I've felt all day. I didn't want to write about any of this. I'm angry. Pent up, wild-eyed, and unjustified. Flush left ragged right. (green light) I wanted to write about the tragicomic story of the brainstorming meeting. My career counselor asked me to invite some friends to a luncheon at my house and afterwards she would lead a brainstorming session which would magically produce the dream life direction for me. I prepared a clever little invitation, and made a cute little presentation, all hand done with markers, about Me, Myself, and I. And I invited six or seven of my friends. Halfway into lunch, the counselor calls to say she had been hit by a truck while walking across the street, and had broken her arm and wouldn't be able to make it. Later at lunch, a young friend asks an older friend what she does for a living. The older friend says "I'm a theologian." The young friend says "What's a theologian?" I gamely try to lead the brainstorming session myself. The young friend says that since she knows how much money I make, all she can say is to stay put doing exactly what I'm doing. The theologian says she thinks it's really important to honor my process. Another friend says she never runs into people who are interested in change like this. My wisest friend somehow says "look at what you've done" meaning getting all these diverse people to come together, and going through with this awful session, in spite of total disaster befalling the authority figure. But she doesn't work "outside the home" and has no practical suggestions. I still feel like laughing and crying when I think of that day. I didn't get a damn thing out of it. The only people I'm still friends with are the two that didn't show up. What the hell happened? I just think something is very wrong. I keep wanting to examine that afternoon more closely. There's got to be a hidden answer in there somewhere.

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January 21, Still curious

I have been craving a little bath in some of Marguerite Young's excessive prose. So tonight I pulled out the cardboard slipcase which contains the two volumes of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. I bought it last summer after much debating with myself, even though it was only $6.95 at that little secondhand bookshop in Stephentown. I hesitated because I know I will never read this book all the way through. It's just much much much too much (much, much, much). But I wanted to dip into some of the interminable first section about the bus ride, because it is just so mournful and inexplicable and I feel like I'm on that bus ride lately. So I opened up the first volume and looked randomly for some of the more extreme sentences, and I came across this tucked between the pages: a little loop of strands of red hair tied into a tiny purposeful knot. And later, a business card, "Hair by Bonnie, by appointment only" with a phone number. If I'm ever going to attempt to read a really excessive book, I would 100 times rather it be this one than Ulysses, which I have never picked up and probably never will because of my unreasonable prejudices. A so-called sentence about Miss MacIntosh: Her false teeth should be in her bony head and not in the ruby-colored glass, and she should wear her salmon-colored corset tightly laced and with stout stays and double reinforcements, her breast pad, her brick-colored wig of bright, metallic curls and waves, her white collar with its moldy black velvet ribbon tied at her throat, her shirt front glittering in the pale sea light with threaded needles and rusted safety pins which made her prickly as a pin-cushion or a hedgehog or a star fallen on a lonely beach or some strange underwater growth gleaming like a star, her silver-dollar watch hanging by its black cord, her mud-streaked skirt with the parti-colored patch upon her knee, and she should not in any way be undermined or challenged or made clear, and my vision of what lies beyond should be locked securely in my own capacious heart, dislodged by no unthinking accident, revealed to her not by my slightly lifted eyebrows or some wandering gesture as when of old I pushed back my curls or dreamed of things too wonderful and rare for her comprehension. It would be simple to pretend that we were simple. (goes on like that for oh, 1000 or so more pages) I'm remembering a vision that I saw more than once when I was in college. I was in the locker room of the old Hall gym, changing or doing something or other to myself, when out of the corner of my eye I see a huge old woman, naked or partly naked, maybe in a black bathing outfit, lumbering laboriously, bent double over a walker, making her slow way from somewhere to somewhere, pool to changing area, I don't know. I felt too horrified to look closely, and I thought I imagined her until I saw her more than once. I remember her in a bathing cap, but she certainly could have been completely bald. And my grandmother. I could tolerate her kiss as long as she was dressed, with teeth, her hair neatly bunned. But the thought of sharing a room with her, a bed, when she was in pajamas, with her scraggly gray hair long and cheeks sunken ... or the moon-faced woman I saw riding as a passenger in a car down in Glenbrook ... and then saw her again ... or the most obese woman I have ever known riding her little bike around campus, and inviting me over for breakfast that time, where I observed her taking plenty of real cream with her coffee. I never saw a grown woman naked when I was a child. Or heck, a grown man, for that matter! I still feel as curious as a child. My own body is really very neat (she says with a truly disgusting smugness which is not entirely her fault). When I reached 35 or thereabouts, I lost almost all the hair on my legs. I don't shave anything. I have experienced hair loss (on the head I mean). Right now I'm growing the hair on my head long as a sign of my frustration. It's not good hair. Right now I'm wearing some of it in sort of a Pebbles sprout on top of my head. Oh, another fictional woman I love with bad hair! Nellie Cook, in Christina Stead's Dark Places of the Heart (it's called Cotter's England in England). Here's a great bit about naked women from that book: A number of naked women were rounding, breaking, wrestling, weaving together in the back yard between the brick walls, the high fence and the tree. The moonlight showed that some were rosy in the daytime, others were the colors of night-lighted fish and they were like queer fish, a seahorse, an old man snapper, a gar, a toadfish, a puffball and one rather awkward and hesitant was as yet, only a woman: and what was more ludicrous, partly dressed.

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January 22, A find

I found it! I found it! I found it! And it's even better than I hoped! In February 1993, I wrote down that Emily used the word "Gem-tactics" in one of her poems, but I neglected to write down the whole poem or the reference. Ever since then I've been haunted by that word, just plagued with wonder about the context in which she used it. Periodically I've picked up the Complete Poems, trying in vain to re-find that one word in 1775 poems. Tonight, through the random browsing method, I found the poem! And I found it applies wonderfully to the online journal, or any creative project! #320 We play at Paste -- Till qualified, for Pearl -- Then, drop the Paste -- And deem ourself a fool -- The Shapes -- though -- were similar - And our new Hands Learned Gem-Tactics Practicing Sands -- Earlier in this journal I said I had vowed to read all of Dickinson from beginning to end. I lied. All I really wanted to do was 1) to find Gem-tactics again and 2) to find this wonderfully subversive line, which I found on vacation earlier this month: #18 In the name of the Bee -- And of the Butterfly -- And of the Breeze -- Amen! Now I am satisfied! I really dislike so much of Dickinson's poetry. Way too many exclamation points. And I hate what I call her "little" attitudes. I could slap her face for writing that coy poem everyone knows "I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you -- Nobody -- Too?" I can't relate to most of her religious language and most of her slant rhymes set my teeth on edge. And who is that He anyway? But, every once in a while, one of her poems, whew, just zings like a flaming arrow right into that pool of combustible language-making inside me. #320 is exactly what I needed to read. I deem myself a fool almost every day about the shapes I wrote the night before. So? Inspiration could not come worded more perfectly than "our new Hands / Learned Gem-Tactics / Practicing Sands --". I want to rename the journal "Practicing Sands." I'm not quite up to naming it "Gem-tactics" although I love the sound of that manufactured word, and I am so impressed with it, and I say it to myself a couple of times almost every day. Someday when I'm an editor publishing my own 'zine of spiritual zinger works, I'll call it Gem-tactics, subtitle, Qualified for Pearl. You heard it here first.

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January 23, The burial lot of the dead flowers

Raw, overexposed, miserable. Too much in community. I left the house at 8:30 this morning and just got back now, 10:30 pm. Actually I was home from about 4 to 6 but devoted that time to putting groceries away and making a major salad for tonight's potluck and taking care of the dog. Thus I have nothing to say. If I write about the people I associated with today I will do nothing but rag on them because I am irritable and wiped out. And that would be no-compassionate. Which reminds me of a part of a journal entry from this summer, which is calling to me, so I guess I'll go get it and type it in here: 8/17/98 ...I stopped at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes after passing it twice. The stations of the cross are built into the hill. The whole place is full of rough wooden prie-dieus. The large number of votives flickering heated up the inside of the stone and cement grotto and made it seem alive. The quantities of hideous statuary winked and mocked me. No faith, no faith, they said. I said Ugly, ugly, in return. Mary had a garden-full of beautiful well-watered fresh bouquets at her feet, including a dozen red roses in a glass vase. Over in the woods there was the burial lot of the dead flowers. This moved me. Also, one remarkable hydrangea bloom [in the grotto], all dusky, green, mottled with faint purple and blue. I touched it. It was real. I didn't want to light a candle, although I thought about it -- to what? to the goddess? to the new? to the future? No faith, no faith. I left there. I don't want to do anything tomorrow.

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January 24, Day of rest

Since I wrote about Kipling the other day (okay, January 14; I can be so lazy with references!), I should note what LeGuin says about him in her wonderful Steering the Craft: The Just So Stories are a masterpiece of exuberant vocabulary, musical and dramatic phrasing, and humor. Kipling has given countless children a lifelong sense of the pure beauty of language. So I didn't do very much today. I seem to be unable to predict that a day (esp a weekend day) without time for myself always always always makes me feel like something left at the bottom of the laundry basket. And I always need a day to recover, or the feeling lasts and lasts and infects the whole following week. Today at least I knew enough to recover. I spent most of the morning in bed, trying to read a novel. My mind kept wandering. I can't read novels these days. So I wrote my contribution for the Poetry Round Robin. This was a joy, as always. I spent a lot of time fussing with the layout in MS Word. I'm frustrated that I haven't learned Quark Xpress yet. I'm sure it can't be hard. I just haven't been able to get to a class to get the credential. I'm thinking more and more about taking the 11-week full-time course at Skidmore. I realized I'm in a panic about graphic design class. The first session was yesterday. The instructor seems really demanding. My "new hands" feel like they have rigor mortis, are disconnected from the brain. Think with a pencil? ha, I didn't even bring a pencil to the first class, I didn't have anything to write with, which is really pathetic for a writer in a graphic design class. So I was panicking and wanted to defend myself to the instructor, but but but I have a BA and an MBA, and a good job, really, I'm not as incompetent and flaky as I appear ... which is really unbecoming thinking in an almost 43-year-old mother of two. And this afternoon I talked myself down about graphic design class, thought a little bit about the hydrangea of yesterday and new rituals, took a nap, and then I took myself to the movies! I love to go to the movies by myself. No irrelevant hassles trying to agree about what to see, where to park, whether and what to eat, where to sit. It is such a simple experience when I only have to know my own mind. I saw "Hilary and Jackie." Loved it. Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths as musical sisters, one a spoiled prodigy and one not. It reminded me a little bit of "The Piano." When it was over I felt like I had had an emotional workout. But I didn't feel manipulated, like I do in most tear-jerker movies. Why not? Maybe it was the acting. Maybe it was the tenderness between the sisters. Maybe it's me. I've learned to step back. I love emotions. When I left work Friday, I was pondering Fear and how unpleasant Fear was, as emotions go, and how I avoid placing myself in situations which will bring on the Big Fear, like quitting my job. But even Fear, I have come to better terms with. Anger is a frequent visitor. I am especially fascinated with the overlapping shadings of Self-Pity, Sadness, Nostalgia, and Mourning. This mixture was beautifully done in the movie when Jackie was experiencing the loss of her career as a cellist, loss of playing and hearing music, loss of wearing golden gowns, due to MS. I've got to go pick up Older One. I like it when he calls for a ride. I don't think it will happen much longer.

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January 25, The journal speaks

I am pink. I am the color of a blush, a royal flush, a blood stain, flesh. I am the color of the nudest tender fingertips, the undernails, hesitating on the keyboard, before they depress, repress, or raise the pressure, tingling to bring the heightened blood stream to the screen. ~~~~~~~~~~~ I'm a letter. "This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me." (#441) I'm resentful and demanding. I'm more than you ever wanted to know or do. I'm a creditor sending daily overdue notices stamped in red. Soon I'll be phoning. I'm a hassle. I'm a pest. I'm a morning missive. I'm a pensive post. I'm a midnight message. ~~~~~~~~~~ I'm a snake. Me of the golden angular eye and the electric tongue. Me of the poison and the muscle. Curled in my cage of wicker prickle basket, whose sharp ends don't dent my thick scaled skin. Until you sing me out, lift my lid -- I raise my head, sway hypnotized, stretch, retreat, right left, raise my spine, flicker tongue tastes electrons, poison surges like saliva at the sweet song. Low slow notes ease me back to rest and I will go, descend, into my curl. Close the lid on darkness. You control me well. You don't want me slithering and hissing, spiraling loose, making chaotic swirls, and threatening all your dear ones.

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January 26, The mundance

Mom and Dad came over to celebrate my birthday. So I had to real quick clean the downstairs bathroom and stash the dirty dishes in a bin and make a real dinner for me and Younger One so they could observe us eating well, and clean off the kitchen table, and look calm and rested when they got here. So that was nice, and we had ice cream cake, and after they left, Younger One and I collaborated on taking out the trash. We did a fine job. We took out everything, instead of saving the smaller accumulations for next week, like we often do. We did such a fine job that I gave the front door a celebratory slam when we finished, saying "We did pretty good, didn't we ..." and walked into the living room. Then I heard a loud ugly crash. The dead plastic terrarium had been shaken off the window sill by the door slam. It busted open scattering dirt and dead plants all over the front room. I got the new vacuum out, figuring oh this won't be that hard to clean up. Younger One is watching my every move waiting for me to lose my temper. I plug in the vacuum and start to clean. He nervously asks why the light in front of the vacuum isn't on. And "is it self-propelling? Does it feel like it's self-propelling?" Proper vacuum behavior, you see. It's not doing it. I realize I have it on "floor" rather than "carpet." As soon as I switch it to "carpet," a fuse blows. The computer and all the lights in the front room are out. So I traipse down into the basement, Younger One at my heels, and wade through the cats to the fusebox. Nothing is tripped. I try resetting every circuit breaker (by doing this I mess up all the electric clocks in the house, but never mind that). Nothing. I look all around the basement for the auxiliary fuse box which I never knew existed. Nothing. I suppose I'll have to call the electrician. So I come back upstairs, replug the computer and the vacuum in the other room, clean up the dirt, and put Younger One to bed. Calmly. I'm idly musing about the joys of getting all this housework unexpectedly done, and wondering how I'm to interpret all these mini-household-crises on my birthday. Then I notice another bonus gift, happy me, a little pool of dog vomit on the edge of my bedroom carpet. Well, I'm not up there cleaning it up, am I, she said, observing that bent feeling in my chest that means I'm this close to losing my temper. Instead, I'm sitting here typing and thinking about the surprise books that Older One is going to bring home soon as birthday presents. He gets a 15% discount today on top of his 25% discount at the book store. He's thinking "collage" and I told him think "typography." I could use some more sample alphabets. Earlier tonight I wrote the typo "mundance" instead of "mundane" in an e-mail. I think it applies. Words of typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst: The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms. (The Elements of Typographic Style, p.9) I can deal with that.

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January 27, "bearing colorless flowers"

No intuition tonight. It was secretly drained out of me through too long contact with intuition vampires all evening. I have been irritable all day. Too many noises. I feel irritation like bunched nodules of nerves along my forearms. The sensation is exactly in my arms, all along the front of my arms. I won't write about just anything. There's lots of things I could write. There's a whole backlog of dead topics. But what I'm trying to say is, nothing is calling to me. No little mouths turned up waiting for their kiss, no little chubby arms begging to be cuddled, no little hands waving "me, me, I'm here, pick me!" I'm looking around me desperately and I see nothing but dead flowers. I wanted to write about Gabriela Mistral (Chilean, poet). The introductions in the book I got from the library are just so awfully worshipful that I can't connect. And the book is bound in some kind of awful crackling cellophane that is coming off and is very unpleasant to handle. I do think I will find something to like in Gabriela Mistral (besides her name), once I find the right book. She said the poet is "an undoer of knots, and love without words is a knot that strangles." Maybe that's why I'm trying to write, with no intuition. She also wrote a poem called "La Flor del Aire" ("The Flower of Air"), about her Adventures with Poetry. Elizabeth Bishop, such a northerner, lived in Brazil for a time. I wish I knew more about her at that time. South America seems farther away than anywhere else in the world to me. Probably because I feel least drawn to travel there. I wonder what would happen to me if I traveled there. From "The Flower of Air": She goes before me, faceless, leaving no footprint, and I follow her, still follow through dense clusters of fog, bearing colorless flowers, not white or burnished red, until my release at the farthest limit when my time dissolves ... (tr. Doris Dana)

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January 28, Tiger, eagle

A brief interlude of hysteria tonight. The week is getting to me. "love without words" ... "a knot that strangles" Speechlessness is getting to me. I got a birthday card that came with "love too seldom expressed." I had a dream last night about two big black hugs that made sort of a cave over me as I was slumped on the couch. I was very threatened and stood up and started talking, defending my job, that it allowed me to pay my bills, wear nice clothes, and so on. Today there was a day-long meeting of the department in which I was slumping in my seat and constantly having to metaphorically bite off my own tongue in screaming protest of the use of language in these meetings. And why I put up with sitting there listening to it. And what about the continuous theme this week of "relationships?" All of this noise from people looking for someone or getting over someone or looking for someone new after they get rid of the someone they have.... the speechlessness for me is in pretending I'm interested when I really want to just scream that I couldn't care less and I have no comprehension of why they are telling me this. Instead I mumble that I'm just not interested in finding anyone and I love and adore being single and I really can't offer any advice. End of conversation (I wish). And all week this underlying louder and louder hum in my head of "change, change, change." And then this battling counterpoint hum, "can't, can't, can't, can't." So I stared at this job posting at Beacon Press, design assistant, and thought, I would love that job. But it pays less than I need to survive. And I'm not even qualified to apply! I guess I'm just not ready. I've been daydreaming about going to art school. It started with thinking about the 11-week class in computer graphics. Then I thought, hell, why not dream big, I'd like to take a couple of years and go to art school and dabble! It seems like the only way I have thought of to get time to listen to what I want to listen to instead of all the noise that I am listening to now. I heard on the radio news that they shot a tiger that was roaming around in New Jersey. Someone was quoted that "the tiger never should have been in New Jersey in the first place." So there. Here's a poem by Gabriela Mistral. It is kind of long, but I want to type it in here to remind myself of something: The Other (La Otra) I killed one of me, one I did not love. She was the flame of mountain cactus. She was drought and fire, thirstless. With rock at her feet and sky at her shoulder, she never stooped in search of cooling springs. Grass shrivelled where she rested, scorched with her breath and the blazing coal of her face. Her words hardened in rapids of resin, never freed in the spill of an open dike. This mountain plant did not know how to bend. I bent at her side. I tore my guts from her. I let her die, a starving eagle left unfed. The thrash of wing grew still. She toppled, spent, and fell into my hands, wasted, consumed. Her sisters still lament, accuse me of her death. The fiery desert chalk claws as I go by. Passing, I tell them, "Search in the cracks of the earth and mould from its clay another flaming eagle. "If you can't, then forget her. I killed her. You kill her, too!"

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January 29, Trusting the process

Kind of together tonight. Kind of. Wearing a dark lavender panné velvet shirt jacket helps a lot. And I got a packet of information from IWWG (International Women Writers Guild). I really like what they have to say. I think I'll join. And they have insurance at "group rates." I can look into that, since the availability of insurance represents one of my biggest fears about leaving the job. I did what I was supposed to do today. Worked hard, answering questions and solving problems. Maintained calm while debugging a production abend that was holding them up at closing time. Was civil to all bosses. Helped Younger One with a school report on rattlesnakes. His wife was bitten by one during their simulation game of the Westward Passage. If he doesn't do the report, she dies and he loses 3 resource points. His comment was "but then I'll be able to get rid of her stuff and the animals will be able to move faster." And I got a decent amount of materials together for my graphic design class tomorrow. I'm nervous about it. And I did laundry. And I cooked a roast for the weekend. I often enumerate small personal & household accomplishments in my private journal also. I think it's because I need to acknowledge that work. No one else will. I'm not naturally inclined to do any of it. I can't put it on a resumé. I get satisfaction by writing it down and moving on. When I get so frustrated with my dreams, I just have to put it all aside, and face up to what's in front of me. So that's what I did. On the negative side, I was unsubtle (rude?) to a friend who called me tonight because I so much wanted NOT to talk on the phone. "Trust the process," I hear. I hate that advice. It's jargon-y. What does it really mean? I'm afraid it means a bland ploddingness of wandering with blinders on, while for me, I need to see the heights, depths, drama, hyperbole, dreams, nightmares, mood swings, miracles, mourning, museums, hovels, tantrums, maturity ... my process cannot be bland or blind, it must be drastic. On the surface, I don't trust it, because I know it's exaggerated. But more deeply, of course I trust it, because it's always there and it has a lot of texture. And it's coming out of my spinnerets, after all. I'm really surprised. I used to think my life would always be a lot of boring nothingness.

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January 30, Intimate correspondence

Open Me Carefully. I snatched up Emily's "Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson" from the new book shelf on Monday night, but I haven't had a chance to browse it until today. I find everything about this book extremely exciting. An odd, persistent thought keeps coming to me -- I don't know why this book hasn't been dominating the newspapers, magazines, reviews, the Golden Globe awards, everything. It seems so important to me. ... the descriptions of Emily's handwriting, her eccentric punctuation, and capitalization ... the mutual inspiration ... the breaking from prose letters into letter-poems ... the tender interweavings of family life and family tragedies ... the wildly passionate expressions of love ... that they lived as neighbors and yet wrote to each other ... the peeking into this intensely private situation ... the deeply spiritual investigations somewhere between the "apocrypha and the apocalypse" (MDB's words) ... even the constant repetition of their names "Emily" and "Sue" makes my heart beat faster ... And yet I still have strong resistance. I don't want to read too much of this because I don't want that voice creeping into mine. There's a sense of Victorianism, Puritanism, repression. Emily feels like a legacy to me, which I have, but I don't want to accept. I don't get that feeling reading Whitman. With Whitman, the feeling is of benevolent warm expansion and delight, reaching out for more. Of course, I was trained that Emily was precious and favored, while Whitman was considered coarse. So I'm still having a very adolescent rebellious reaction. I wish I felt I could "take what I like and leave the rest." Instead I feel like it's all or nothing. However --- I do like to think of Vestinambula as "intimate correspondence." It even occurred to me that it would be interesting to handwrite my entries and then scan them in, like another online journaler did recently. It would bring in more of the emotional flavor of handwriting. And I wonder what it would be like to have an online guestbook or some kind of continuous interactive dialogue. I would like to set up a page of links, but I am being so extremely discriminating, I haven't found anything I'm not scared of yet.

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January 31, Once in a Blue Moon

These colors are outrageous. At least they look that way on my machine. It's just such an interesting looking evening outside. I finished a paper journal today. It's a spiral-bound five-subject notebook, wide-ruled, 200 sheets, dark green cover. Almost all of my journals are spiral-bound notebooks. I started this one on August 8, 1998. There was intermittent writing in other notebooks when I went on trips. I was really writing a lot this summer. It was a joy to reread it. I have been writing less there since I started this, but I don't feel badly about that. I rediscovered some fascinating writing in there. The most striking to reread was this dream from 9/14/98: Twice, I was caught walking up in the air on top of stuff. Once in a bedroom, or a dorm room of a strange woman. I was convinced the only way to get to my room on the 16th floor was to carefully walk over the tops of her dressers, bookshelves. I tried not to disturb anything. Her boyfriend was in the room and challenged me; I explained and he accepted my explanation. He wanted me to write her a note. I did - on a huge framed quilt or canvas. I had a special greasy pen that changed colors, pink, blue, green. I drew pictures and just kept writing. I was fascinated by the pen. Later I was in a pottery store and I was caught walking over the tops of pottery stacked 5-6 feet high. The owners pointed to a sign, said something about "the glyph," and said it prohibited walking on the merchandise. I explained I didn't interpret it that way. I thought it clearly meant "so many people look without buying, go ahead and buy something cheapskate." I stopped walking on the stacks and went in the other room. ... Earlier, I was writing a long poem on the wall of [my brother- in-law's] living room. I thought this might be unwise, but I kept going. I was working in the sound of a smoke alarm "Wooo-wooo-wooooo" with a sound of honking also. The wall was a bright slate blue. I was writing near the ceiling, standing on something. There was a huge quilt unfolded outdoors somewhere near their house. I was showing it to B. I had "finished" it, although I had painted most of the roses rather than quilted it. It was longer than any bed and very warm and cozy. White with wreaths and wreaths of intertwining red roses. ... This was a very long involved dream and it goes on for a few more pages. But it sure seems to be a premonition of writing online. My writing in the dream was public (maybe "unwise") and with so many different colors involved. All my paper journals are absolutely black on white. I love the repetition of the motif of walking on tops of things. The feeling is of elevation, elation, but also striving, reaching, being off balance. And I love the way I explained myself to the boyfriend (and he accepted it!) and then I mouthed off to the storeowners. That is very confident dream behavior for me. I don't spend a lot of time in dream interpretation. I haven't always trusted my first impression of what a dream is about, since I read Robert Bosnak's A Little Course in Dreams, which basically says never trust your first impression of what a dream is about. It's a very valuable little book and I should probably read it again. Introduction by Denise Levertov, who talks about "sidelights on the nature of metaphor," one of my favorite subjects. But, clever interpretation aside, this dream is just a very bodacious and comforting expression of developing creative powers. I should probably reread it often.

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