Problem: My Feet are Cold

My feet are cold and I can't knit socks fast enough to keep them warm. I may have to cave and go to Wal-Mart -- I loathe Wal-Mart, but it's the only thing going around here -- and get some machine-made socks. Damn. I love knitting my nice wool warmy warmy socks. I guess that's what I'll be doing more of this winter. That and working on the novel, apparently with cold feet.

I could wear shoes, I suppose, but I'm a barefoot girl, always have been. My mom used to buy me slippers every Christmas in the hope that I would take to wearing them. She tried every kind imaginable: Fluffy Dog slippers, boiled wool clog-slippers, grandma slippers, etc. She finally hit on something when she got me slipper-socks, the kind with the little grabby rubber treads on the bottom. Those I would wear. When I moved out here, though, all my slipper socks were so grubby that I chucked them all.

Slipper socks. In my old apartment in San Liberal, it got so cold in the apartment in the wintertime -- like 59 degrees in the mornings and after dark -- that I would have to wear multiple layers of clothing... or else have to turn on the gas heat and pay an arm and a leg with my utilities bill. I was such a cheapskate, figuring I'd rather suffer than pay. It only gets cold in San Liberal for about 3 months out of the year. Still. That's a $20 increase per month to pay for the gas heat, and I was poor as a churchmouse. So no heat for me.

And now, at the very least, my utilities are covered and I'm not living in an apartment whose walls are essentially all windows. (Windows with no view, I might add.) So maybe I won't be so cold after all.

But my feet, my poor feet, how they require a new pair of slipper socks!

Off to Wal-Mart. ::sigh::

Cackelacky Logic

I talked tonight with a former friend/lover, all now tucked away in North Cackelacky with two kids, a wife and a house--a total amnesiac about our affair, too, (which, BTW, happened long before he was married) and which is probably better for him in the long run, but hangs like a white elephant doing the merengue on the telephone line between us.

We talked about the election. He's voting for McCain, because he thinks he's straightforward and won't "Rob Peter to Pay Paul", as he thinks Obama will do. So even if he agrees with Obama on social policy, apparently owning a house will make you vote for, essentially, the perception of better financial security.

As I don't own a house, I couldn't jump to the defense of Obama's economic policies. That and I know squat about economics in general.

Shamefully, especially since my friend lives in one of the most hotly contested battleground states in the union, I did not try to turn his head with my Most Heated Liberal Arguments. Instead I just kind of lay down and let him turn traitor. Why? Because I didn't want to push him any further to the right. It seems these days that that's all arguing over politics does--entrench people even further in their beliefs.

I went to hippie-dippie Montessori school until I was seven. In my hippie-dippie heaven, there was no gender, no race, no religion. It was *so* late-'70s nirvana. I have carried all those teachings with me ever since, and the school remains my imagined "happy place" when I see what's wrong with the world. I fit in well in San Liberal, where it seemed everyone lived in a hippie-dippie bubble.

Now that I'm back here, in the Red Part of a Blue State, I cling vehemently to my past, to my liberal views, but I've stopped trying to convert the McCainiacs. They'll just call me Pinko Commie Liberal. And I'll just call them Redneck Xenophobes.

God, I miss my friends in San Liberal. Not that they were open minded. They were not. It's just that their closed-mindedness I understood and agreed with. San Liberal is a bubble, though, and I'm learning more about what it *really* means to be an "Amercun" here in SJ.

I don't like what I see.

It's very lonely here these days. Just the writing and the working and the 'rents. Very little in the way of friends. And even less by way of dating.

Maybe I should call an ex-boyfriend or two. One is lurking outside of D.C. and another outside of N.Y.C.

Consider yourselves warned. ;-)

Raining in San Liberal

I checked the weather tonight in San Liberal via Yahoo and noticed that it's raining there. Finally, rain in San Liberal! I can imagine the brown velvet tinder-box hills starting to tinge green, the sigh of relief from the glacial hill near my old apartment that was long tagged with the red flags of fire season.

Winter-Spring-FIRE!-Fall: the four seasons of San Liberal.

I'm homesick for it tonight, sitting here smoking in my apartment, trying to come up with some sort of idea for NaNoWriMo. The electrochemistry novel won't work--too much research. I have to find something else to write about, besides the old axiom of "writing what I know".

Although, it could be said I know San Liberal.

But I think that would be too painful.

I left someone behind there.

More on that some other time.

I also know Hometown, NJ. I could write about this place, this disappearing place, getting eaten up by suburbia in spite of the housing crisis. At the county fair grounds, there's a bench with an engraving that says "Save Our Land". I have a picture in black and white of a young agrarian with strong arms, back to the camera, leaning against that bench. It moves me to tears when I look at it. Not even the strongest arms can keep out the developers.

::sigh::

Smoked my last cigarette. Maybe I should try quitting.

Going to stop rambling now.

I'm imagining the sound of rain on the pavement, the damp California air, the fog, all floating through my open window as I lie tangled in the arms of my (now former) lover.

I'll never get to sleep tonight.