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::

Day One Recap

I wrote the first 1,675 words of my novel yesterday... It was a very interesting experience, because the writing itself went a lot more smoothly than I thought it would. I'm not complaining! I know that it won't be as smooth all the time, certainly not, but wow! How exhilarating!

I feel like I've been waiting for 15 years to write this novel, and the fact that I'm finally doing it, well, I need to give myself a deserved pat on the back for even starting.

Anecdote:

Long, long ago I worked at Big Chain Bookstore, and there I met all sorts of fascinating people that were in various stages of drop-out-of-college goodness, or taking the fast track through the multi-level hell of depression, all of us just trying to figure out who the hell we were. We called it the "Home of the Unmedicated Minority" because we were all popping our anti-depressants like candy, all day, every day... and flush shelving in between doses.

One night, I went to Ruby Tuesday's with one of my co-workers, a girl a few years older than I who would eventually end up in the Foreign Service, but who gave the appearance of being a dumb bunny. We went to this totally mediocre restaurant to talk, and all I remember of the conversation is telling her about how much I wanted to be a writer, but how bogged down I was by my own circumstance.

She said to me, and I'll never forget it: "When you let it all go, that's when you get your gift."

Have I gotten my gift? This NaNoWriMo thing certainly feels like a gift, even if it's not the gift that Tina was talking about.

As for letting go, well... more on that later.

A lo lejos...

I've been reading a lot of the blog Wabi Sabi Moments, an American citizen writing from abroad about the election--*AWESOME* blog.

It's made me reflect, though, on my experience of the 2000 election, when I was in Spain, and having to explain to people every day about the Electoral College and, later, what the HELL was going on in Florida...

... but this was before YouTube, and even Teh Interwebs were in their adolescent stages of development.

The day of the election, I took myself to a little Internet Cafe and tried to get on cnn.com to get any sort of information that wasn't from the International Herald Tribune. There were, apparently, so many hits on the site that it had slowed to a crawl and there was simply no getting on.

So I resorted to Radio Nacional de España and listened to what was happening the night of, which was the morning of the day after for me. I woke up at about 6 a.m., knowing that the polls had closed, and heard the official result... Bush had won with 271 electoral votes.

I don't remember, prior to my existence on that day, ever knowing that 270 votes were needed to win the presidency. But I won't ever forget it now.

Bush won, and we all know the rest of that story.

I sneaked over to my American friends' apartment across the patio and attempted to stick a little note in their reja with the news. At that moment J. came out and I handed him the paper that said "Bush won. 271 votes." He looked at me, his liberal Oregonian face semi-shell-shocked. Slowly put down the paper and said "What does this mean?" I just shook my head and shrugged.

And then the Florida thing happened and there was, for a minute, hope.

But honestly, the 2000 election, being as far away as I was, never fully registered with me. Only now, after 8 years of That Man do I realize how much was at stake.

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. ;-)

It Only Took Eight Years, But...

I got this .jpg attachment in an email sent to me by my Dad on 2 December 2000, right after the "election" of George Dubya Bush. I gave an uneasy guffaw (if that's possible) when I got it. And looking at it now, well, all it's all I can do not to, simply and sadly, turn the page for Bush as he fiddles over the smoldering embers of this nation.





I am so angry at Bush, who is essentially acting like a Deadbeat Dad to this country. I've never been angrier. There is no leadership in Washington right now. NONE.

This election cannot come soon enough.

Poetry on the Foam

I ended up hauling that foam mattress from my parents' house to my new place and putting it in my office... or maybe I should call it a studio, since it feels more creative than anything else, not quite so work-oriented right now.

It was a beautiful day here so I opened my windows and read for some long hours, all sorts of poetry, the kind that makes me weep.

Ever since I was a child, poetry has had the capacity to make me feel both wounded and exalted by beauty at the same time. It's an excruciating, piercing sensation, when some metric taps out the rhythm of your own heart, when words on the page seem to seep into your skin.

The foam mattress was positively tinny, pounded thin by over 20 years of wear. I think my friends and I used to sleep on these same mattresses back in high school. So, lying there, reading Baudelaire, I thought of my own little "fleurs du mal" -- the peccadilloes of youth that seem so grand and tragic at the time, that really end up being nothing.

The beauty of that, though, is that when they happen, those tiny traumas between friends, they feel so immense, and it's only 15 years later, lying on the same foam upon which you fell from grace, that they shrink to become gems, the anecdotes you will tell for the rest of your life.