Maybe I should work on my character sketches
No I should just keep drafting.
It doesn't feel like anyone might call
I wish someone might call
Am I narcissist
What exactly is a narcissist
What would be the opposite of a narcissist
I wonder if I should run around the block
Why did I drink that coffee so late in the afternoon?
Should I make another cup of coffee?
Googling India's  Carvaka movement would be fun.
Are people still having parties?
It feels like forever since I got invited to a party.
If I washed those three pots, the dishes really would be all done.
What would it be like to never go on Twitter again.
Maybe I don't want things hard enough.
Do I want things hard enough?
Are you a better person if you want things or don't want things.
There's just nothing better than pastry cream.
I should work on my character sketches.
How long exactly would it take to make pastry cream?
To sketch pastry cream?
To sketch a character who loves but is allergic to pastry cream?
Wouldn't it be perfect if that was a perfect solution for something?
How did it get to be perfectly midnight.
It's perfectly midnight.
An invitation to 500 imperfect words.

2. My love of libraries
With all my soul, I have loved libraries since I remember loving anything. As a kid, libraries seemed like magic palaces of possibility. The shelves seemed to hold rows and rows of moveable worlds, each one fronted by a door in the shape of a book cover. All you had to do was swing it open and walk inside. And voila! Imaginary people and situations and places and choices. Those childhood books made it clear that I had choices about what kind of person I wanted to be, how I could live, what might count as “normal” or “good”. Libraries have to rate as one of our most beautiful human inventions, especially public ones.

 

7.  The realization, at the advanced age of forty-something, that Cyrano de Bergerac was a real person, and ten times more brave than the character Rostand created in his great play of the same name. Stunningly effective duelist. Eventual pacifist. Fierce free-thinker. Science-fiction writer. Satirist. Loyal friend. He lived his life with a brave willingness to speak his mind. It most probably cost him his life. 

felt tantamount to attempting to shove it down the world's throat. The act of bringing a book to someone's attention felt exactly the same as trying to hard sell it Glenngarry Glenn Ross style, and perilously close to trying to hard "sell" myself in the same bill of goods. I felt bewildered by the cloudy intersection between wanting to encourage the reading of my story for the value I hope it has, and the related need to sell books, to underwrite the possibility of writing and publishing the rest of the stories I want to tell. I wanted it to find its audience in some "pure" fashion. The way water finds its way across and under the earth through its own chosen crooked channels.

I started using my Twitter account a little (because that's what lapsed Catholics do when they're not swinging thuribles). I felt dirty if I retweeted something positive that someone had said about my book. I felt like a fool if I couldn't bring myself to do it.  In the midst of trying to get my head around the beginnings of my second book, the question constantly posed itself: How can I let people know about my book without being an overbearing, self-centered, irritating, honor=less fiend? Well, I'm paraphrasing a little.  

The truth was, that despite understanding the outrageous extent to which luck, privilege, the generosity of others, and smelling the right way on the right day,  mixed with my own efforts to result in THE NINJA LIBRARIANS getting published. I didn't want to have to sell it.

1. Ate seven cartons of Kate Bennis' expensive soup that she left in the writing cottage. Replaced it. And then ate it all again.

2.. Invented a at least 212 reasons to go downtown when I didn't really need to for the sole purpose of buying great big hoggy milky cascades of Mudhouse coffee that I didn't even have the decency to carry away in a reusable vat.

3. Bought a bottle of shampoo. The kind with 43 ingredients printed on the label in a font so tiny that they might as well have been written in Sanskrit. The kind that will burn a hole in the planet down to the magma core if you pour it on the ground and give pebbles cancer. Why? Because I used some just like it in Johanna Lindholm's shower, and I wanted that silky softness to be mine, mine, mine.

4. On multiple occasions, I chose makes and models of bread and other foodstuffs that I knew no one in the family but me would like. Sometimes I barely liked them. But were they there when I was hungry? In all their Pyrrhic glory

5. Purposely positioned the garbage cans in the hopes that used remnants of garbage stickers might be interpreted as whole and virginal and newly boughten.

6. Took full advantage of my five year old's willingness to give long luxurious hair brushings for the price of a dollar which she never remembered to collect.

7. Told myself it was okay to read the part of my 17 year old's facebook page that he left up on my computer as long as I didn't do any scrolling.

8. Was un-neccessarily nasty to a telemarketer. Really. Like I did have a genuine limb of some conifer all up and in there. I think its gone.

9. Failed to anticipate, by say, longer than an hour, every single solitary birthday party, class, event, and appointment in my children's lives. Or in anyone else's.

10. Did a lot of other things, when I should have been...uh...doing other things.

"It'll be fun," I remember fake-enthusing to my three-year-old son after my electricity was turned off for the umpteenth time in my single mother days. "See, look at the pretty candles. It's like we're in olden times." 

We weren't. It wasn't. 

Our economic life got better when I married, but as our family grew, and my husband and I  embarked on our attempt to start an organic donut-making business - dubbed the LWP (Latest Wacky Plan) by my sister-in-law, "extra"  never became a thing we felt we had, our born in the middle-class, white, college-educated privilege notwithstanding.

But after a decade of wearing a groove in the earth sprinting between Peter and Paul and often showing up at one or the other's door with nothing but a pocket full of lint, something changed this year.

We experienced a small bump in our income as our boot-strapped business finally crossed the line out of eating up all the borrowed resources in sight into making a small profit. On top of that, I got paid a good chunk of my advance for my novel. 

So what have I done? Bought seven garments. New. From not a thrift shop. Arranged for piano lessons for my daughter. Didn't blink when my husband brought home the "free" broken will-cost-a-mint-to-fix hot-tub. In the grocery store, I've stopped tensely watching the amount displayed on the cash register as it rises with Everest steepness. For the moment anyway, I know I won't have to play last-minute Sophie's Choice between a can of beans and a package of hot dogs. 

And I've taken up a heretofore unthinkable new habit: Regularly purchasing $3.52 cafe au laits at one of those lovely coffee shops with the shiny machines, a "fair trade" coffee bean option, and music I never hate. Cupped in my hands, these coffees, besides smelling and tasting divine, feel distinctly and dangerously luxurious. As though, if the family wallet continued to fatten, they might lead to puma-hide toilet seat covers or Goddess help me, pea gravel, and most alarmingly, to a wandering away from my immediate knowledge of what it's like to live in even relative economic insecurity, and my at least proximal knowledge of what life is like for the huge number of people who --  multiple orders of magnitude worse off than I or mine have ever been --  struggle far too hard to obtain life's most basic necessities -- and, through no fault of their own, often can't procure them. 

Steaming and sprinkled with nutmeg - thank you, beautiful young barista - there's no telling how long my access to this coffee will last but for now the luxury daily insists upon potent questions which I can not ignore: 

1. Why do gold-plated bath-tub faucets and mouths full of missing teeth for lack of dental coverage still exist in the same Universe?

and

2. If you don't want to hoard wealth, and yet, not being saintly, also want to do right by and take care of your nearest and dearest, well then how much wealth is enough? At what balance point in your personal calculus, do you say: "Over and above this amount, any other income I earn, win, or hookly or crookly get, I will share, and spread out and invest in others?

Is it when you own a house (at least on paper), can pay all your basic bills easily, and can afford the organic pecans and a new package of underwear each year and a Stetson every five?
Is it when you have all the above going, plus $10,000 squirreled away in a Swiss bank account, plus a full set of matching bath towels, linens, and tupperware?
Is it when you can regularly buy coffee house coffees?

Up until now, because of our family's chronic indebtedness and lack of fungible flim-flam (plus the fact I only started drinking coffee a year ago) , the consideration of such questions has been a largely theoretical exercise, intellectual pillow-talk, akin to wondering how I would have behaved if I'd been a German during World War II - would I have gone against the Nazis? Rationalized a passive complicity? Become a dehumanizing dehumanized monster? I will never know and I don't want an opportunity to find out. Or maybe I already have had one. Iraq. Moving on.

The fact that the one llama I chipped in on for a family in Peru stands out in my memory in lonely technicolor splendor on an otherwise empty windswept philanthropic landscape, tells you how much sharing of my resources I've actually done up until now. A few dollars for local radio stations, donuts and truly minute amounts of cash for this cause and that hidden in the scrub, and that's about it.

But what if we keep doing better financially? Though no one in a convincing Mistress of the Universe up-do has guaranteed us anything, it feels for the first time at least possible that we could -- with the help and cooperation of a whole lot of people and circumstances, between the donuts and books, create "extra". If we are lucky enough to end up consistently generating/receiving such "extra", I fervently hope that I'll recognize it as such, and not let expanding appetite trick me into ever mistaking that "extra" as somehow newly "essential" to our "needs". I want to deeply remember just how "extra" coffee shop coffee feels at this moment, and if we prosper, allow the warm cup in my hands to be the constant bellwether that indicates "Enough".

I'm certain I've worn some, and my preternaturally tall children have probably also worn their share. I can't help but think this. We buy a lot of clothes at Goodwill and other thrift stores. I know that plenty of young vital people get rid of pajamas because they're scratchy, or too tight in the waist, or when unwrapped on Christkwanzzakah morning inspire comments like "my God what made Aunt Violet think I'd want go to bed impersonating a container ship full of pineapples?", but some people have their pajamas got rid of for them. After they die. In pajamas printed all over with pineapples. 

I've had to face facts. Of the total number of pajama pieces hanging anonymously on the overcrowded rack next to the shelf full of half-used notebooks and half-burnt candles, some portion therof, have been died in, or at least dyinged-ed in. That nice pair of light cottony flower besprinkled bottoms with one end of the drawstring disappeared forever in the waistband? Even if they weren't on point for the final breath, there's still a good chance they were in the final rotation.

We'll take them.

And sleep and lounge in them. Because my husband and I want to both spend a lot of time with our kids, and get to buy lap-tops. Because I want to both be able to work on the books I'm writing and feed my kids organic milk. To make them taller. So they can fit in a wider array of more adult-size dead people's pajamas.

We're used to such "trade-offs". For seventeen years, our family's domestic economy has been entirely based in the "pre-owned" market. Cars, furniture, books, Santa gifts, appliances, computers, dishes, pets. If we could get our hands on some used doctor's appointments, we'd at least explore the notion. Our economy has been entirely based on the perpetual need to stretch each dollar like a tarpaulin over a sprawling pile of goods and services that never quite fits in its shade. 

And we have it easy. 

Compared to those living in the grinding poverty of the truly poor, we are rich. Besides making an additional $14,000 above the poverty threshold for a family of five in 2012 ($26,000), we have education, cultural privilege, and perhaps most subtly powerful in the end, the peace of mind, and risk calculation adjustment that comes with having connections to at least a few people with more economic security who wouldn't stand by idly if economic disaster struck us. None of us have ever yet wanted for food or any other essential. Clean water? Check. Roof? Check. A zillion books? Check. A lot of time to ourselves and on our terms? Check. Friends and family who would help (and have helped) us with babysitting and loans? Check. Dead people's pajamas? Check. Or don't check. No way to tell, really.

Today, I became aware of the fact that I was walking across town pushing a jog stroller. Not in the "hey, whoa, who am I, recovering amnesiac sense - I mean, I wasn't surprised to see my hand on the stroller's handle. No, more in the coming out of the imaginary world of a book to stare blinking at the real world around you sense. 

Which, speaking of sense, made a lot of sense as a feeling, since I, just a moment before, in actuality, had indeed been reading a book while pushing the baby stroller. I'm sure some of you have done that, right? Hey, why not enjoy a chapter or two while hiking the 8.7 miles necessary to get the baby asleep.

Except there wasn't a baby in the stroller I was pushing down the well-traveled sidewalk. Not because, lost in a book, I'd left one sitting in the middle of an apple display at the grocery store, or on a ferris wheel, but because my colossal galoots formerly known as babies no longer fit in the stroller and I've commandeered it. I've taken to packing it with the stuff I need to write (a redwood tree's worth of index cards, a Staples' factory worth of notebooks, whatever seventeen reference books make the most sense that day, two pounds of cheese) and pushing it across town to the cottage where I ply my er...um...well, where I make my wild guesses about what word should follow another.

Now all this simultaneously pushing the baby-less stroller and reading the book would not be much to become aware of had I only been wearing shoes. I don't want to bore you with all the tedious details about why I've taken to kicking my shoes off whenever possible, but suffice it to say, I'm just as likely to walk out of the door barefoot as shod.

And did I mention the river-raft of a straw hat? It's a necessity when one is technically 57% Irish (don't ask), but one's skin somehow manages to be 100% People of the Bog. Come to think of it, the reason i may have suddenly become aware of myself, walking happily along, reading the book, pushing the non-baby-laden stroller, under my personal cabana, might have had everything to do with the fact that I had begun to mumble a bit of invented dialogue for the next book that had sprung up in my head. 

Today I became aware of the fact that I might be scaring people.

"Wait...come back! No need to cross over to the other side of the street. Really! I'm harmless! It's just a bad ankles and practical logic thing! Plus I write a little....."