33!

Every year, as I try hard to savor my birthday without suffocating it, I reflect on the past 365 days and all that they've wrought. 2011 has been especially transformative--the year I transitioned into a true freelance writer, took a hiatus from the classroom, got that much closer to surrendering control.

And this holiday season was the first I've spent in California! Though I cherish all those past Louisiana and East Coast Christmases, the lemony days and windy coastal nights have been lovely and serene. M and I kicked off Christmas Eve with fresh-baked blueberry muffins and a surprise package from Mom containing 12 presents for her future grandchild. (I never thought I could get so excited about white-knit booties :)

Then we headed down to LA to celebrate with M's family, which has become my family. These game-playing folks trotted out Apples to Apples, Guesstures, ping pong, and plenty of back gammon. Good times with my nieces, nephew, and sister-in-law! After a pit stop in the supremely clean, corporate, and stucco-roofed Santa Barbara, we came to San Luis Obispo for my birthday weekend.

So far, a charming day, beginning with a quick stop at Gum Alley, then breakfast at the ultra-hip Kreuzberg Cafe and Book Bar, whose menu items are named after famous authors. We feasted on the J.D. Salinger (bagel with lox and capers) and the Victor Hugo (hot beignets), then headed out to the coast for a gorgeous, windy beach hike.

Here I am, completing my 33rd trip around the sun...

I Love Being Pregnant

I love feeling the baby squirm around inside of me

I love being asked "when are you due?" by strangers and grocery store clerks who take one look at my round belly and grin

I love collecting soft swaddle blankets

I love the ferocious urge to purge, cleaning out shelves and closets, organizing the mud room and attic, making even fluffier and cozier our sweet little nest

I love meeting other pregnant women at prenatal yoga, our instant comraderie and connection

I love watching my taut belly jiggle when M makes me laugh

I love the love that we feel right now, from everyone. I love that we were thrown a Nonesuch baby shower and got to celebrate with lots of former students who seem as excited as we are, who even gave us gifts of baby Doc Martens and hand-made knit hats and little cardboard books...

I love talking about birth, babies, and breast-feeding with any and every mom who crosses my path

I love reading about things I never would've thought about, like baby's first bowel movement

I love the anticipation of meeting our baby, girl or boy, looking into those giant eyes and saying, welcome to our world

Crash

My computer is dead. I spent an indecent amount of money on it four years ago, wrote more than I've ever written on it, and now it's at Office Depot with an infected, irrevocable motherboard.

I never backed up. Four years' worth of photos, music, and writing will likely be retrieved from my hard-drive, but I won't know for sure until tomorrow afternoon. To top it all off, I just spent nearly an hour writing a long, involved, and to my mind quite insightful blog post about the whole experience, replete with lessons learned and a tidy ending, and just as I was finishing the final sentence, the entire document was highlighted, deleted, and the changes automatically saved. It happened so fast I couldn't even make sense of it.

It's easy to feel devastated. It's easy to loathe computers and their insidious ways. But the truth is, I'm darn grateful to be typing this on M's lap-top, which he defragmented, cleaned up, and gifted to me today. It's smaller and lighter than mine, more square, less gloss. It's already proving to have some issues (the aforementioned erasure of my blog post). Still, I've adorned it with some stickers, I'm enjoying the tight clank of the keys.

And no matter what, from now on, I'm taking the time to back it up.

They Might Be the Best Band Ever!

M started listening to them in the late 80s, charmed by their new sound and sharp lyrics. I'd like to say that I joined the 90s as a savvy music-lover myself, but I'd be lying big-time: as a newly minted fifth grader, Air Supply and Dr. Hook were spinning in my CD player. Fast forward almost two decades and I marry M, a veritable musicologist whose knowledge of chord progressions, drummers, bass lines, and album covers makes my head spin. On one of our sun-filled road trips he introduced me to the song Cowtown, an evolutionary science lesson packaged as peppy fun alternative rock. I fell hard.

So it was with great excitement that we saw They Might Be Giants at the Fillmore on Saturday night, me for the first time, M for the first time in almost 20 years!

The Fillmore, for me, has long been defined by patchouli-scented long-skirt-spinning jam bands (Dark Star, JGB, String Cheese, Greyboy Allstars) or down-home folksy swaying to the likes of Willie Nelson, Gillian Welch, and Ani Difranco. Never have I seen a show there with so much laughter and so few graying ponytails.

John cracked us up with his spiel about why people should buy their new 6-foot tall poster (This neon pink color will fade to a lovely patina, he quipped) because people don't buy records anymore. At one point, he divided the audience down the middle with a strobe light and held a chanting contest. They also had a puppet show and nick-named random audience members things like "Byzantium."

And then, of course, their delightful music, which entices all sorts of giggle and wiggle, but which also makes reference to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Unlike, say, Dark Star, which always digresses into a tedious 45 minute rendition of Drums in Space, their show was refreshingly unpredictable and alive. They played some old favorites like Particle Man and Birdhouse in Your Soul, did a set of about 17 REALLY short songs, sang their awesome alphabet song, talked about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and played lots of new stuff, too.

Their first encore song, How Can I Sing Like a Girl?, off their latest album, embodies the kind of cultural observation and intimate honesty that make them so brilliant:

How can I sing like a girl
And not be stigmatized
By the rest of the world?

Gourd-eous

I wait the WHOLE year to carve pumpkins.

In addition to the five we had glowing on our porch last night, M and I each added our personal touch: his freaky owl picture hung above a sound machine that emanated an ominous beating heart; candles burned atop my Day of the Dead altar.

We took turns answering the doorbell and delighting in all the trick-or-treaters--the big-eyed toddlers who haven't a clue, the shy five year-olds clinging to their parents' legs, the ecstatic packs of pre-pubescent girls, the awkward adolescent boys with their giant pillowcases and embarrassed grins, and my favorite, the old man dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Ride Me On Language

Five days with Dorothy Allison at the Tomales Bay Workshop has me feeling a desperate urgency to "get naked on the page." I also feel sad, like I just said good-bye to an old friend I might never see again. And I feel, of all things, southern-proud, half-wishing my tongue still held onto home as gracefully as Dorothy's does. At 62 years old, Dorothy has long silky gray hair that she's constantly brushing away from her face. Her glasses cannot conceal the fire that burns behind them. When she talks, people listen hard, laugh often, even cry. She loves profanity.

Over the course of thirteen hours of workshop, she told us that writing is hard, thankless work, that salvation sometimes comes in the form of poetry in the middle of the night, that she sold 30 years worth of her journals to Duke University to pay for her son's college education. About my writing, she said she didn't believe the narrator, that she's hiding herself, that she needs to get emotionally raw. She also said it was "a damn good story."

And my favorites:

"Writing is deliberate seduction:
Take risks, put embarrassing stuff on the page, be DARING."

"You have permission to take revenge.
But you better be honest about how you were a motherf*^#ker too."

"You are an anthropologist of your own culture--write from where you came from. Write from hurt. Hurt has power."

"After we had a baby, I lost a year just staring at his feet."

"I get up in the night, an’ I need a story. I need a book. I need somebody to invite me into a world they have imagined whole. Or stolen. I genuinely don’t care. Just take me there. Ride me on language. Charm me. Fascinate me. Scare me or excite me, but take me out of myself. We are lonely. We are scared. We need story. That does not change."

Beat the Bank!

On Sunday, after a journalism workshop with a bad-ass writer/mother/former editor of Mother Jones, I decided to take the Embarcadero to the Golden Gate Bridge. Big mistake. San Francisco was seething with people on that lovely sunshine day. I literally sat at a stop-light, not moving, and watched it go through SEVEN cycles of red to green. An old man thumped my bumper with his Mercedes. Someone's 50 Cent drowned out my Nick Drake. I blamed the whole thing on Fleet Week (sailors? ships? who cares?) until I realized, after finally reaching the bridge AN HOUR LATER, that it might also have to do with the Occupy SF movement.

Which made it all seem better somehow: a noble suffering. After all, what's the inconvenience of a traffic jam compared to having the bank foreclose on your home? I used to lead the bullhorn at protests, my righteous anger sweating out of my pores. Now my anger has given way to a muted disillusionment, a tragic cynicism that makes me seriously consider never voting in a Presidential election again.

But the beauty of this current movement is that we don't even need a bullhorn to be heard. All of us who have money in the big banks have power. Imagine what would happen if we all decided to put our money in credit unions, to infuse our LOCAL economies with the hard-won fruits of our labor?

M and I opened a shared account at Bank of America because it was easy, he already banked there, and they were willing to cash the savings bonds my dad gifted me for our wedding. Convenient? Yes. Ethical? I don't think so. We're pulling out of there ASAP, moving all of our banking to the Redwood Credit Union. Because there are some things that matter more than nation-wide access to ATMs and savings bonds, because somehow we've got to believe that people like us can still make a difference.