Teenagers inform you of cool.

When you have kids, you somehow forget what’s cool and what’s not.

Maybe you knew when you were in college, but you have no idea any more.

You get disconnected from cool.

You start to wear cardigans and shop at Costco

and next thing you know you are wearing socks with your Birkenstocks.

Or you are excited about what kind of china you’re buying.

If you are getting thrills off the dishware,

it doesn’t take rocket science to see that you are miles from cool.

My kids steered me away from Crocs and Vibrams, white socks and 80s music.

Being cool isn’t really important, that’s what you realize at some point.

The people you think are the coolest are the ones you like hanging out with.

All five of my sister-n-law’s five grand kids are way cool.

Cool has nothing to do with stuff.

Nothing to do with the clothes you wear, the socks, the shoes, the car, the music.

Cool is you’ve decided to be the magic,

to love life and to be as good to people around you as best you can.

On the float.

Magic.

Ending the Tyranny of Cool

If I had more time

What would you do if you had more time?

You can work six days a week.  Have stuff.

You can spend a lot of time with your friends and family.  Have love.

You can spend a lot of time on your creative work. Have juice.

You can spend a lot of time on yourself.  Have soul.

You can spend a lot of time working out. Have muscle.

Or balance it all out.  Muscle. Love. Soul. Juice. Last of all—stuff? or kick the need for stuff.

Money is the one of these that matters the least.  It’s good to have enough to sustain yourself, but don’t work all the time. No one ever dies wishing they worked more.  Love/soul/juice sustains you.

Morning is all around me.

Four days of writing. Good times.

And then we saw Hell or High Water also good. A very good movie.

And I slept a bit. Caught up on sleep.

The mated pigeons hatched a baby bird and they throw up their food for the baby.

Gerber is good for humans, and watching the pigeons, I would say using a blender, buying baby food seems good.

I need to finish this book.

And the morning is coming toward me.

Women who make men crazy

Hilary makes men crazy for all kinds of reasons.

She thinks.

She makes her own decisions.

She’s her own boss.

The percentage of men who want Hilary to be president?

Quite a large number as it turns out.

But what percentage of men would want to be married to Hilary?

A smaller number.

 

The kind of women more likely to realize the hopes and dreams of a larger percentage of men is a quiet obedient type.

 

I looked around our family gathering today and my sister-in-law and her two daughters and I are not the quiet obedient type.  Not even close.

 

Even though, all four of us are wonderful women.

 

A feisty interesting woman is going to be a lot more interesting in the long run.

But men don’t know that.

 

I’d like to think that the world is ready for all types of men and women.

Feisty women are a joy, gentlemen. A joy.

10,000 things we want to do becomes 1 thing

My original 10,000 goals included:

Writer

Linguist

Ballet dancer

Astronaut

Acrobat

Actress

 

(a lot of my goals started with the word “A”)

 

When the Challenger went down in flames with a teacher from New Hampshire on board! I was shocked.  That’s when the first of my goals was gone.

 

By the end of college, I was sure that being a dancer was not going to happen.

 

The Acrobat and Actress goals went up in smoke next.

I could see that my talents lay in other directions, if I had any talents at all.

 

My point is that the original list of goals, not quite 10,000, but you get the idea,

Is being narrowed down considerably here.

 

Writing is it.

Which is a good thing.

 

People will say, writing is my life.

But, I think , writing is part of my life.

 

Great party today.

The kids running with the lights.

Labor Day

Having a party
With the kids coming over.
And in the back yard the rosemary is run over by jasmine.
There are two edible spinach plants taking over, walls and fences mean nothing to them.

The garden is mostly overgrown now.
Next year we are going to do something different with the garden.
Our garden has bad soil and not very good light,
and the only thing that wants to be there is this.

My idea has been see what grows and let it grow.
But now that idea has gotten out of control.
The mated pair of doves have a baby
To whom they feed and sing.

Breathing time

You get a little time to breathe.

But instead of breathing, you lie around watching stuff on TV and playing with your phone and telling yourself that you’re having a pretty good time.

Trust me, if you are home watching television, it is not possible that you are having the best time that you could be having.  I’m trying to balance all this.

I try to run and write first, then veg out.

 

 

Our generation of parents worry way too much about our kids

We question their choices in jobs, living arrangements and of course, who they date.  We could make better choices ourselves.  Of course, we didn’t make better choices though.  Many of us are on a second spouse, a second job, a second house.  We don’t actually know what’s best for our kids; we just think we do.  They need to make their own mistakes.

 

You get enough time to catch up, get sleep, think.  Your thoughts cartwheel.  Let them cartwheel.  Remember when your body cart wheeled as well as your mind?  Great times.

What is the love that dare not speak its name?

The movie Wilde which we saw tonight has me thinking about the nature of love.

Love is wanting what is best for someone else.  Love is a complicated thing.

Our mated pigeons sing to each other in the morning and take turns sitting on the egg.

The heat is backing off a bit.

I can see the spun light coming through the trees in the morning, thick lovely hot light.

And I’m running again even in the heat.

And working hard on a book, a good story, I think.

In 1900 Oscar Wilde, died.  He didn’t survive long after leaving prison.  Three years.

You could go to prison then in London.

For gross indecency.

For the love that dares not speak its name.

Oscar Wilde, you will live forever.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

 

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Infinitely Polar Bear

 

We saw this movie last night about being bipolar and it was good in a way that Benny and Joon never could be.  Even with Johnny being so beautiful, mental illness looked like fun, like going on a picnic, like camping is fun.  Polar was wildly kinetic and had microchips of happiness sprinkled throughout the sadness and it felt like yes, this is what it’s like to live with a writer, an artist, someone on lithium or someone who needs lithium. This is how you lurch across the floor, this is how you don’t dance as well as you did when your feet were properly attached to your body, this is the way sadness works its way into everything, this is the way you make kites in the middle of the night, this is the everything. And as she says, being poor is charming if you are white but not charming if you are black. This is the way the doors close on you, this is the way you close your own doors, this is the way you step outdoors and in the air feel very happy.  Zoe Saldana—so beautiful and amazing, Mark Ruffalo—OMG, the kids –fabulous and Maya Forbes—what a talented genius.  Till human voices wake us and we drown.

I want to sleep through this election year

In the heat, I want to sleep mostly.

In equatorial climates, one wants to sleep.

It’s easier to stay awake in cold climates.

For me a perfect vacation is always a warm climate.

I like getting enough sleep. I like the thick warm sleep of a warm climate vacation.

It’s an election year, and it’s hard.  Some people I think I’ll see when this election is over.

I wish for a warm vacation, the sweet sleep and warm waters of Greece.