My war on the floor

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I am SO EXCITED about the project I am starting today. We have been living in our house for 4.5 years and I have hated the carpet the whole time. It’s nice enough carpet, I suppose, if you want to just look at it. Or even if you want to prep yourself for clean room duty and then get to lie on the carpet and do nothing. Maybe you don’t have to do nothing.  Maybe you could read a book. On your Kindle. Definitely not a newspaper or a magazine or something like that, cause one inky finger and then your whole house will look like the Cat in the Hat showed up to eat cake in your tub.

The carpet is a very bland off-white color in that flat loopy berber style that is so popular with people who are getting houses ready to sell. I wish I had a picture of what the floors looked like before the children of the last owner (who was also the original owner, and the builder) of this house got someone to roll out all this blah (and I wish I knew what the walls looked like before they let people come in and randomly paint things white and off-white with a sprayer).

But really it doesn’t matter what it looked like before, and honestly I’m not sure I would want to see it, because the sellers did leave enough clues of their father’s taste behind for me to have my doubts that it would be any better. Take the toilets (please! they’re out by the curb for bulky trash pick up, and the other night some neighborhood jokers moved one out into the middle of the street, where our new neighbor almost ran into it at one in the morning which is why she decided to march up to our door and ring the bell and knock loudly until Mr. B finally answered the door and moved the toilet back to the curb and came in and told me he met our new neighbor. She seems nice.)…. Both bathrooms in our house have the original tile from 1960, which is super awesome in the master bath because the tile is a gorgeous midcentury blue. It’s a little less awesome in the hall bath because the tile is a murky shade of Mamie pink that doesn’t go with anything. It’s also a bit overwhelming because the tile matches the tub, the double sinks, and … the toilet. The original 1960 Mamie pink toilet. Except that it has  a blue toilet seat, which I can only guess was thriftily moved from the original toilet in the master bath, which h.ad been replaced by a plain white toilet with a padded seat.

A couple months ago I finally got new toilets installed in both bathrooms (that is a story for another time, my duckies, and I will tell it when I can do so without tears) and now I am tackling the next big issue. I am getting this carpet out of here. The problem is, we can’t afford to replace the carpet. I don’t want new carpet, because ew. What I want of course is a wood floor. I even peeked hopefully under the carpet to see if there might be a wood floor under there but no. Weirdly, though, there was a plywood subfloor, which I wasn’t expecting because our house was built on a slab.

But anyway. Today I cut a square of carpet out of the living room and pulled it up (which was a richly satisfying experience) and revealed the horrible sticky and crumbling carpet pad which I also pulled up. Now I am going to scrape the glue and stuff off the cement that was under that (not sure what’s under the carpet in the other rooms yet) and I’m going to do a test area of the new floor I want to put down, which is made of paper. Paper, I tell you! isn’t that amazing? I learned about this technique where I learn everything now, on Pinterest. Most people use brown kraft paper, of the type that grocery bags are made from. But I don’t want a grocery bag brown floor, because there is so much oak in our house and I’m afraid it will clash. Also I don’t want to have to do the extra step of staining the brown paper before I seal it. And anyway after I saw the beautiful green bamboo floor at Snap Kitchen I knew I wanted a color on my floor. And the color I want is grey. And grey kraft paper is a thing! you can buy it by the 1000′ long roll on Amazon! And you can buy it by the yard at Teacher Heaven, which is what I did, to get the paper for the sample I am working on today.

Pics and links to come. For now, this is Missy Diggs, signing off to create the home she always wanted.

9/11 Dance Mix

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So we’re coming up on the ten-year anniversary of September 11. It’s a big heavy day, and I think the wildfires smoking up our beautiful Austin skyline are working as reminders as well…. not necessarily of the actual terrorist attacks and everything that happened on that day, but of everything that has happened in the ten years since then: the wars, the natural disasters, the shootings and plane crashes and fear and lies and devastating losses and climate debates and layoffs and oh, just everything. And for me a lot has happened since that day as well: I got married just a few weeks later, and had a miscarriage and then a baby, and made some of the best friends ever, and then had a lot of mysterious illness, and then cancer and cancer treatment, and then put my kid in the Best School Ever and then had that school close and then lost some of the friends and made more new friends and now I’m here looking back from the most stable position I’ve been in for years but still reeling over what the hell just happened.

And that’s really all I feel prepared to write about 9-11 itself, because anything more than that feels like it will just be clichés, really, and maybe half of that was clichés already. It’s probably not surprising how clichéd my individual thoughts seem to be…. to me it seems that the bigger the thing an individual tries to think about, and the greater the distance between the person and the thing, the more that person’s thoughts about the thing will resemble everyone else’s. In a way, I find that comforting. In fact,  I find that the events of the last ten years –both global and personal– have me craving community and connection more than anything else.

Another powerful craving is for movement and joy. In following that desire I stumbled upon something really great this summer, so great that I didn’t even include it in my last post because it really does deserve a post all to itself. It’s called Dance Dance Party Party. The one I go to, in Austin, is a MeetUp group that takes over a small yoga studio on Sunday evening for one hour of dancing. It’s just for women, it’s just for fun (or exercise, or therapy, or whatever you need it to be for), and there are just three rules: No Booze, No Boys, and No Judgement. Every week somebody signs up to bring the mix, and we turn the lights off, turn on the disco light, and dance. I loved it so much the first night I went that I signed up for the first available dj spot a few weeks later.

But then I got sick.  It could happen to anyone, but in this case it happened to me because my immune system just ain’t what it was B.C. –Before Cancer. And I was very disappointed to miss my night to dj but the women of DDPP, who have a roller-derby-ish tradition of assigning themselves dj names, didn’t miss a beat. My shift was covered by DJ EZ-Bake or DJ missme or DJ Boyfriend or somebody and the next time I went I just signed up for the next available shift.

Which turned out to be 9/11/2011.

Before I even left the room I realized that I could be in trouble. I said, “Oh wow, 9-11.  I think I’m gonna have to change my mix for that.” And someone said, “Or not.” A third woman chimed in, “Yeah, cause if you change your mix the terrorists have won!”

And then I think we all sort of realized that we were right on the edge of joking about 9-11 and we all got very quiet and then someone else said, “All I can say is, that mix better be uplifting!”

And I, DJ MissyDiggs, said with lots of false bravado, “We’ll see. It could go either way, really.”

And I went home and stayed up late lying awake in the bottom bunk of the Vivid Girl’s bed making playlists on Rdio with my iPhone and headphones. And I was thinking about 9/11/2001, and about the last ten years, and I came up with a playlist that really hit the mark for me. It’s got songs about New York, songs about coming out on top as a survivor, and some pretty dark songs that really got to the fear, anger, and sadness stages of grief. And what I thought was that I should just make the list I wanted to make, leave it alone for a couple of weeks, and then play it at DDPP.

But then I got kinda worried. The Vivid Girl wanted to play the mix and dance to it, and she had some pretty strong opinions about which songs should stay and which should go. Without giving her too many details I explained about it being a serious day in American history and that a lot of people have a lot of big feelings about it. And I told her how, even though I realize that there’s no way a dance mix could be expected to convey anything really meaningful about that day, I had picked songs that more or less matched the feelings I had when I was thinking about it. She seemed to understand that, and then she played “Walking on Broken Glass” over and over and showed me all her new dance moves. And I started to feel like that was a terrible song choice, and anyway it started to seem very hard to dance to, and I started feeling little PTSD-type flutters in my chest as I tried to imagine the state of mind that people are likely to be in that day, and how each song I chose might affect them.

So I posted on facebook and asked people to recommend songs for my playlist.

I got a friend request from a cricket.

By which I mean, I got no responses at all.

Until a few days later when a friend of mine sent me an email to suggest a couple of uplifting songs. Which makes me think that uplifting is what most people want. In which case I am maybe kinda out of touch, cause I like looking at the light and the dark. Especially the dark. And I also have a tendency to gallows humor, which can be especially tasteless and offensive to people who don’t share that mechanism. (During cancer treatment, I could hardly stand to listen to songs of encouragement; I spent my time singing “Chemotherapy” to the tune of “Psycho Therapy” by the Ramones. I also loved “I Don’t Want to Die (in the Hospital)” by Conor Oberst.)

So what I think now, with only two days to go to make my playlist and make sure I have a way to play it (I use Rdio, everyone else uses Spotify, and what if I use my phone to play my Rdio playlist and someone calls me during that time?) is that I should either just go with my gut, and play the list I came up with in the first place (though I will probably replace Annie Lennox). That’s Plan A, and this is the playlist:

  • New York, New York (featuring Debbie Harry ) Moby
  • Deee-Lite Theme Deee-Lite
  • Walking On Broken Glass Annie Lennox
  • Bad Romance (Lady GaGa cover) Artist Vs Poet
  • Sabotage Beastie Boys
  • Jump Jive An’ Wail The Brian Setzer Orchestra
  • Hot Hot Hot !!! The Cure
  • Survivor Destiny’s Child
  • Souljacker Part I Eels
  • Dog Days Are Over Florence + The Machine
  • Cracks Freestylers feat. Belle Humble
  • Oh My God Ida Maria
  • Heads Will Roll Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • 4 Minutes [feat. Justin Timberlake And Timbaland] Madonna
  • I Will Survive Gloria Gaynor
  • New York, New York Ryan Adams

Plan B is to just play the list I came up in the first place. Except I’m going to replace that “Dancing in the Dark” song by Dev because I only liked it until they started playing it on KISS-FM. Now I’m totally over it.

Plan C is to give the people what they seem to want, and put together a list of uplifting songs. You know, like Jessie J and Michael Franti and “Just Dance” and stuff like that.  I’m trying not to be too attached to my own way of doing things but I have to admit I’m feeling some resistance to this idea.

Plan D, and my current favorite, is to make the whole list be a love song to New York.

What do you think I should do? If you were going to dance on 9/11 what would you want to hear? Would you be offended (or, worse, triggered?) by the songs on my playlist?

And if you’re female, and in Austin, and you wanna come support the debut of DJ MissyDiggs, please do. I would love to see you there.

 

What I did on my summer vacation

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Hello, blog readers! I’m back from my “summer vacation”, otherwise known as Three Long Months When My Child Was Not in School and the Temperature Was over 100 Degrees Every Day. But now it’s September, my kid is at school, and the temperature has actually dropped to the 90s, which is shockingly refreshing…. or would be, if the town I live in were not surrounded by raging wildfires.

What’s more refreshing is having time to myself, time to actually move my thoughts around in my mind and move my body around in space without bumping into the ever present and ever busy and ever demanding Vivid Girl. Mamas who spend a lot of time with their children often share the experience of hearing themselves sound just like their own mothers; this summer brought me more of those moments than usual, but since I can’t generally get a word in edgewise I more often found myself thinking things my mother used to say. (As well as some things my mother, who as you know is very nice, would NEVER say!) When I could hear myself think, that is. Which I usually couldn’t. Which is one of the things my mother used to say. (Another thing she would say, when we would interrupt her conversations to ask her what she was talking about, was “Oh, we’re just talking about running away.” I have not actually said this one to my own child –yet– but I spent a lot of time this summer thinking it in a REALLY LOUD VOICE. So loud I could actually hear it.)

One of the main things I did this summer, in fact, was think about running away. This activity manifested in several forms:

daydreaming, of course

planning long and elaborate (and prohibitively expensive, unless you sit in coach, and who wants to try to get the Vivid Girl to sleep in coach?) trips on Amtrak

emailing people who live in cool climates and saying “Are you gonna be home next week? cause if I can snatch up some cheap last minute plane tickets we are coming to visit!”

obsessively checking for cheap last minute plane tickets

planning a road trip from Austin to Santa Fe with swim stops every two hours or so (first stop here, last stop here)

adding “Bend, Oregon” to my list of favorites on my weather app and checking the temperature there several times a day

I also actually managed a couple of minor escapes, even though I didn’t actually get out of my original climate zone. Mr. B, the Vivid Girl, and I drove up to visit my parents at their lake house for the Fourth of July. Mr. B had to be at work on the 5th so he came home but VG and I stayed a few extra days. We swam every day, which was fun but not exactly refreshing because the temperature of the lake was approximately 92 degrees. It was more like bathing, except that the water was murky and green and you had to take a shower right away to wash the swamp smell off of you. Still, it was fun, and the real bonus was that my parents’ lakehouse is in a part of Texas that actually got some rain this year so the Vivid Girl was able to set off all kinds of fireworks, which were banned in Austin because the last time it rained here was 2007.

We also got to sit out on the dock three nights in a row and watch huge displays of fireworks all around the lake.

We also did a bunch of crafty and seasonal stuff like using Sharpie markers to “tie dye” tank tops with firework designs.

And we made pretzel rod treats that are supposed to look like sparklers.

And it was really hot, and my parents have air conditioning and

satellite TV, so we watched a lot of TV (mainly commercials for the Regular Show: Yeah-uh!) and played a lot of Doodle Jump.

My mom and I also pulled out the old fiberglass canoe that played such a huge part in my childhood and took the Vivid Girl out for a little paddle in the pond.

That sounds so fun and wholesome in summary but here’s how it went in real time:

We went into garage to get lifejackets and paddles. The Vivid Girl has outgrown the kid-sized lifejacket my parents bought for the lakehouse, but the kid-sized lifejackets my sister and I used to wear were nowhere to be found. So VG had to wear a grown-up life vest, which went to her knees and made it very hard for her to move her legs. She complained about this quite a bit. Also the life vest smelled bad. She complained about that, too.

We pulled the canoe down to the pond but somehow managed to choose the muddiest place to try to put in and my mom and I both sunk to our knees in rich, black, stinky ooze. The Vivid Girl started to cry because she couldn’t lift her knee high enough to get into the canoe. My mom got out of the mud somehow but I had to lie on my stomach and crawl out, and the mud sucked one of my shoes off  (I was wearing my dad’s water shoes) so then we had to get a shovel and dig into the mud to rescue the shoe. The Vivid Girl sat on the bank and sobbed and narrated a story about how nothing ever goes right.

We moved the canoe over to a sandier part of the shore and all got in, and as we started paddling around the lake the Vivid Girl started screaming because there was a SPIDER in the CANOE and she is DEATHLY AFRAID of spiders. My mom and I used our paddles to try to flick the spider out of the canoe, all the while trying to use our (sadly lacking) core strength to keep the canoe balanced so we wouldn’t all go into the pond. Which was even greener, murkier, and warmer than the lake. With turtles.

By the time my mom magically disposed of the spider the Vivid Girl was practically hyperventilating and saying “I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here.” But since we had gone to so much effort to get ourselves into this situation we gamely paddled around the pond a few times. The Vivid Girl even pulled out her paddle, which was just her size, and did a few strokes. Then she announced, “I’m bored! Let’s go inside!” and we went inside and watched more TV.

Our next getaway was closer to home so it was just as hot but had some very cool aspects. My friends went out of town for a few days so the Vivid Girl and I went out to Lakeway to housesit and take care of their three whippets.

Their neighborhood has a little lake park with a rope swing, a boat launch, and some docks. We swam in the lake everyday, and here the water was clear and clean and cold because it comes in under the dam with a current that will carry you from the dock to the rope swing to the boat launch. And I could happily jump off the dock, float to the rope swing, watch the girl swing, float to the boat launch, climb out and start over all day long. But the girl decided she would rather play mermaid in the big rocks between the boat launch and the rope swing, and so she did that while I got some exercise by swimming against the current and getting nowhere, like I was in my own personal endless pool.

The rest of the time we sat in the air conditioned house with the hot and panting dogs and watched TV.

Mainly what I did this summer is watch TV, actually. Because not only did I watch a lot of TV with my child (we are now totally addicted to So You Think You Can Dance, and after you watch this video I think you might be too!), I also watched a lot of Netflix on my iPhone while I was lying in bed helping keep my child asleep in a strange bed. Here are the TV shows I have gotten totally caught up on in the last few months:

Mad Men

Party Down

Louie

Head Case

Wire in the Blood (though I recommend quitting when Hermione whats-her-name leaves the show)

Damages

Glee

Samantha Who?

And I’m currently watching American Pickers. I’m not saying I’m proud of all the TV I’ve watched; I’m just telling you what I did this summer.

Right before the Vivid Girl and I went to whippet-sit Mr. B had a minor medical procedure done, and at that time it seemed that his recovery was going to be quick and unremarkable.

By the time we got back from Lakeway, though, it became obvious that his recovery was going to be long, complicated, painful, and expensive. He developed an infection, for one thing. Then he developed a hematoma that somehow tricked his body into displaying many of the signs of an infection: body-wracking chills, fever, aches and pains, heat and swelling, lots of pain. We have some experience with infection from when I was in the hospital for two weeks with cellulitis, so we were freaking out and calling the doctor a lot. The doctor, and the on-call doctors I talked to when the regular doc wasn’t around, were very nonchalant and seemed content to call in prescriptions for antibiotics and tell us not to worry. Finally Mr. B actually saw the doctor and got some actual medical care and began to recover, and then I got an infection. And so we spent the rest of the summer obsessively washing our hands, our bodies, our bedding, and our doorknobs with hospital-grade cleaning products. And spending our vacation money on doctors’ bills. And air conditioning.

And when I got better I took the girl swimming as much as I could, because swimming is the only thing other than watching TV that we could really imagine doing after 70+ days of 100+ temperatures. One day when we swimming in some of the nice cool water coming into the lake from under the dam the Vivid Girl really surprised me by saying, “Remember when we went canoeing with grandma? That was really fun.”

“You think you might want to do it again sometime?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “but next time let’s do it someplace cooler. Like Bend, Oregon.”

 

You knew it was coming

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So my friend Jennifer Hritz posted about what she likes, and then I posted about what I like. And then she posted about what she does not like……….so I’m pretty sure you can guess what this post is going to be about. (One thing I like: not having to come up with ideas for my own blog posts.)

It’s a funny thing, though, talking about stuff we don’t like. It makes people uncomfortable. For one thing, we are all so desperate to be liked that I think we check ourselves against any expression of displeasure to find out whether we are displeasing. And if we are, or imagine we are, we are wounded. Or angry. Or belligerent. Or retaliatory.

Also, most of us like to have fun. And to be comfortable. And listening to someone talk about what they don’t like is not always fun or comfortable. But I wonder why that is? Is it because we secretly believe that we are actually powerless over the things we don’t like? Because actually naming the things we don’t like in order to make sure they don’t encroach on our comfort can be really fun. I know this is going to sound irreverent, and some of you may not like that, but it reminds me of the questions you have to answer at a baptism. Do you accept x, y, z? WE ACCEPT THEM. Do you renounce q, spit, bugs? WE RENOUNCE THEM.

I think there can be great power in renouncing the things that don’t bring us joy. Separating the light from the darkness. Putting a name on it.

At the same time, it makes me a little nervous. I was raised with the motto “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And my mother did not just say those words to hush us up when we were whining or being rude. She walked the walk. It was so rare to hear my mother say anything negative that the few times she did stuck with me vividly.

Once we were giving these girls a ride home from Brownies. They were in my sister’s class, and they lived right next door to each other. So my mom pulled up in one driveway and both girls got out and ran to their houses. As soon as the car door closed behind them, my mother said, in a tight dry voice, “Oh, I just hate it when I give kids a ride home and they don’t even say thank you.”

At that moment, I became a compulsive ride-home-thanksgiver. I never wanted anyone’s mom to say that about me. The horror! My sister and I started telling our friends, privately, and before they got in the car, that it was REALLY IMPORTANT to thank our mom for the ride…….. and once they had been told, they mostly remembered to do it. So we avoided any more of that unpleasantness. (Until we became teenagers and our friends were too annoying to be so easily reigned in, and we liked them that way.)

There was a girl in my first grade class (but not in my Brownie troop, because she rode the bus) who came to school with banana curls in her hair everyday. Oh were we jealous! My mother didn’t know how to do banana curls, and all our attempts to recreate the look were disastrous. To this day I still don’t know how to do banana curls…….. but this is not a story about banana curls. This is a story about the banana-curl-girl’s mother, J, who dyed her hair. She dyed her hair pretty frequently, and not just from one natural color to another natural color that she happened to prefer, but different unnatural colors every time: straw yellow, murky auburn with a bright orange aura, strawberry red. I remember how shocked I was when I heard somebody comment that J had changed her hair color, and my mother said, with a tight little laugh, “I think J changes her hair color a little too often.“

Wow! Knowing that my mother didn’t approve of J’s hair dying behavior changed the way I looked at J after that. One summer she was volunteering to help with the crafts at our Girl Scout day camp. She was wearing a tank top with thin straps, and when she leaned over to hand out pipe cleaners or whatever I was shocked to see that I could see right down her shirt and she wasn’t wearing a bra! But then I realized I wasn’t actually that shocked after all. Because, really. What do you expect from a woman who dyes her hair a little too often?

And so I was very aware of the power of choosing to say something not nice rather than saying nothing at all. Not only because I was somehow infected by my mother’s dislike of other people’s behavior, which I clearly was…. but also because, as I got older and started doing things like dying my own hair and wearing mascara in the daytime (another thing my mother didn’t approve of, at least at the time) I saw how revealing your dislikes could make you seem outdated, hung up, out of touch. It’s like a weird kind of peer pressure, right? If you don’t like what the cool kids like, you must not be cool. But then it also happens that the cool kids often discover that nobody likes all the dreary shenanigans they’ve been getting up to. Nobody likes it, but nobody said anything.

Well, I won’t let that happen to me! So without further ado, here are some of the things I hate:

overhead lighting, especially fluorescent

carpet. especially the carpet the sellers put in our house to sell it.
Here’s what the carpet looked like the day we moved in:

(I HATE IT WHEN I TRY TO PUT A PICTURE IN MY BLOG AND IT WON’T SHOW UP!!!!!)
Trust me when I tell you that is NOT what it looks like now.

CANCER

chemotherapy, except for how it saved my life. Everything else about it, I wouldn’t wish on a snake.

people who always answer a question with a question. unless they are really, really funny. then I’ll forgive them almost anything.

people who pretend to be joking when really they are being mean.

sexists
racists
homophobes
bullies

when people listen to music on their headphones so loudly that I can hear it

when people ask a question and don’t listen to the answer

the clashing sounds of two different stereos, or the radio plus the tv, especially in a restaurant or a doctor’s office or a salon. I recently got a massage in a room where I could hear the music in the lobby over the horrible new age music in the massage room.

horrible new age music

also, getting a massage. ugh! all that lying still and being quiet and being naked and listening to horrible music while someone touches me in a way they think I need.

air travel

humidity

whining

recorded live music. I like live music, and I like recorded music. but I do not like listening to recordings of live music. that special night will never happen again; if you were there, you can only relive it in your memories. if you weren’t there, you never will be. let it go. let the producers do their jobs. they’re good at it.

having dirty hair
having cold feet
flour on my hands (though I like baking!)
dirt under my nails (though I like gardening!)

people who fall asleep when they are not in bed and when I am hanging out with them. like on the couch. or in the car. or at the movies.

bad tippers

road ragers

other people’s hangups about parking: refusing to pay for parking, driving for hours looking for a perfect spot rather than just parking and walking, giving up on a whole plan because it’s hard to find a spot, blocking traffic waiting for someone to get out of their spot and being angry at them for taking too long

people who act like babies and children are a major hassle put on earth to inconvenience them

employees at a store or restaurant who don’t yield the right of way to customers

when I walk into a restaurant and the host/ess just stands there and looks at me, instead of asking “How many?” or saying ANYTHING at all. I HAVE DECLARED MYSELF BY WALKING THROUGH THE DOOR.

that weird thing that happened in the 90s when cashiers stopped putting the receipt in the bag.

people who are so opinionated they have a preference about everything and they are determined to prove themselves right

people who won’t express a preference about anything. (What do you want to do tonight? I don’t care. Where do you want to eat? I don’t care. )

know-it-alls

really smart and competent people who pretend to know nothing

my own bad habits

the relative inefficacy of magical thinking

whenever I find myself enduring something that I already knew I hated, just because I wasn’t willing to say so

And how about you? what makes you crazy? what have you been enduring that you would rather be avoiding? What annoying inconvenience could you eliminate simply by naming it and putting it in its place?

I like it like it

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So I have once again devolved into being a once-a-month blogger. Mainly because I have so many things to do that seem so much more urgent and important than blogging…. but I would much rather be blogging…. and so what I end up doing is spending hours and hours pinning things to my boards on Pinterest, which is basically the best way to soothe the anxiety produced by the state of affairs of thinking that I am too busy to blog. (It’s also the best way for me to identify and organize all the gifts that would be most appropriate to buy me, if ever any of you should desire to buy me a gift!)

I also like reading my friends’ blogs, except when I am too jealous of my friends for blogging more than I do, in which case I get way behind and then have to spend hours of precious blogging time reading in order to catch up. It’s better, obviously, to just stay on top of everything all the time…. but honestly, that’s never been my style. I am fond of the new breed of self-actualization coaches who urge us to abandon the concept of balance in favor of whatever-better-thing-they-have-come-up, such as “catch and cradle,” harmony, WORK HARD PLAY HARD, “focus”, or “comfortable chaos.” I like to ramp up to a fever pitch of activity and intensity and then I like to coast and do nothing for as long as I can stand it. It’s like waves crashing in on the shore, and even though I cry as much as anyone when my sand castle gets washed out to sea I also know that I would be the one kicking down its turrets if it were left standing even one minute after I lost interest in it.

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SOS! Rx FTW! LOLz

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Sometime last year I decided that in order to keep myself up to date in this crazy social media world I would finally embrace Twitter. By that time, I had mastered Facebook to the point where it just wasn’t allowing me to waste all the time I had available for wasting, and a lot of the time that I needed to waste occurred when I was waiting around somewhere while the Vivid Girl had a lesson, or a playdate, or tried on twenty-seven outfits in the dressing room at Savers, so I wanted a way to waste time mobilely, on my iPhone. I hate those stupid egg-stealing pigs as much as anyone, but Angry Birds is basically just not gossipy enough to really capture my attention. Twitter, on the other hand, seemed like it could be a gossipy wisecracking paradise for me.
So I got on there, and started following people, and started following the people those people followed, and also Steve Martin, and Roger Ebert, and I tweeted a few things that seemed to go directly into the ether or the Library of Congress, never to be heard again in this lifetime. Twitter seems especially useful when you approach it by subject matter, or cause, and so that is what I did, adding all kinds of Young-Adult-Cancer-Advocates and Human-Rights-Campaign-Peeps and also a few funny people and movie buffs.
Ugh. It only took about two days to become addicted, and then it took about ten days to realize that what I had let myself get addicted to was basically equivalent to hooking myself up to an IV drip of bad news. The righteousness was intoxicating, but the constant barrage of tweets about various types of injustice and misfortune was soul-crushing. I started worrying about people I had never met and wouldn’t even be able to identify IRL. I got annoyed with one particularly whiny tweeter who I wanted to stop following but then felt like I couldn’t because she revealed in her tweets that she took it very personally when people stopped following her. OMG. I started taking my iPhone to bed with me and reading my Twitter feed late into the night; it seemed like what I should do, since I was having a hard time actually sleeping with that constant drip drip drip of bad news going straight into my brain all night long.
Then I cut myself off. I just woke up one day and decided that Twitter was not for me after all. Maybe someday, when I have something fun I want to share with the world and I can build an inspiring and fun Twitter feed. But probably never, because even inspiration and fun can become dispiriting and burdensome when it is so very relentless.
One of my favorite things that I read on Twitter during that time, though, was from a young adult cancer survivor/advocate who tweeted, “You know you’re a cancer patient when the pharmacist greets you by name!” LOLz!
Mr. B and I have moved several times since we started living together eleven years ago; we’ve been in Austin the whole time, but we’ve bounced from South Austin to East Austin, then West, then Central, and now Northeast. At the beginning we were both young and healthy and had only occasional need of a pharmacist, so we would just go wherever was closest to get our prescriptions for antibiotics and birth control pills and ointments for mysterious skin conditions. Even after we both decided to embrace the Better Living Through Chemistry movement and manipulate our brain chemistry to improve our lives we would switch pharmacies whenever we moved, or whenever somebody offered a twenty dollar gift card, or whatever. Our health insurance comes with a mail order prescription service, but it doesn’t save us any money and one time we got a package in the mail with someone else’s mail order medicine in it delivered to us by mistake, so we just don’t trust it.
When we finally bought a house, with the intention to stop moving around town all the time, we were excited because our closest grocery store has a big fancy pharmacy with extended hours and a drive through. Previously we had been using the pharmacy at another location of the same store chain, which we called the “Geriatric HEB,” partly because the store itself was so old and rundown, and partly because of its clientele, many of whom had seen better days themselves. The pharmacy at this store had limited hours, long lines, and no drive through, so we thought we were trading up for sure.
And then we started using our new pharmacy and discovered that there was more to it than we originally thought. They didn’t have long lines but they were s-l-o-w. Have you ever waited in a pharmacy waiting room with a sick three-year-old for what they assured you would be twenty minutes but actually turned out to be more than an hour? It’s not fun, I’ll tell you that, and this was before I had an iPhone with Angry Birds on it to keep her busy during the long ridiculous wait. One time I got a prescription filled there and ran out of pills mysteriously early; they had only given me half the number I was supposed to get, so I had to go in and talk to a manager and get a refund and then get a new prescription sent in and then get the whole thing recalculated and refilled…. and when I counted those pills they had shorted me again!
And then I got cancer. And one thing about cancer treatment is that things have gotten a lot better over the years, and one reason that is true is because of all the pills you can take. Pills to calm you down. Pills to help you sleep. Pills to ease nausea. Pills to boost your appetite. Pills to prevent your having an allergic reaction to the medication that might save your life as long as it doesn’t kill you first. Pills to suppress your hormones. Pills to suppress the hot flashes you get when your hormones are suppressed. Pills to treat and prevent the infections that might kill you because your immune system has been suppressed by the drugs that might save you. There are even new kinds of chemotherapy that come in pills and that you administer to yourself, at home. And if any of those pills don’t work for you, you can call the nurse and she will have the doctor send over a prescription for some other pills. Pills pills pills.
When I came home from my first trip to the rock star oncologist with a fist full of prescription slips, I knew I couldn’t afford to wait an hour and double count all the pills from my convenient local grocery store pharmacy. I also knew I couldn’t just get all my drugs from the cancer center pharmacy, because I was only there every three weeks and anyway I didn’t always have enough time to go to the pharmacy and also they have this computer screen in the waiting room that lists the people whose prescriptions are ready and one time my rock star oncologist’s name was on there and I couldn’t stop wondering what drugs he was getting, and why he needed them. TMI, imho.
So I went back to the pharmacy at the geriatric HEB and stood in line with the geriats (a term I no longer use at home because Mr. B pointed out, rightly, that it’s kinda disrespectful…but I still use it in my mind cause I think it’s funny) under the old flickery fluorescent lights and I always got exactly what I was supposed to get, in the right quantity, in a reasonable amount of time. So even though I have to go out of my way, back to my old hood, to pick up my prescriptions, it is totally worth it to me because the pharmacists and techs at the Geriatric HEB are rock stars in their own right. And now when I go in, I comment on the changes in their hair styles and they always, always greet me by name.

Gettin’ Schooled

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I’m sure I’m not saying anything too unusual when I say that a large part of my life has been dominated by school in one way or another. As a kid, of course, school was my “job,” or so I was told by my parents on various occasions, such as when I wanted to play hooky for no reason or when I wanted to go out and get an actual real job so I would have money of my own. It would be awesome if that was the job where I earned all my benefits and pensions and stuff, cause it was the only job I’ve ever stayed in for longer than 3 years.

Mainly because I was legally required to stay there. Or at least I thought I was. By the time I was in high school and legally old enough to leave, I figured I should stick it out because I thought you had to finish high school in order to go to college.

Then I got to college and met a bunch of people who never even went to high school.

In high school I wrote poetry, and even though most of it should never see the light of day I still kind of like this poem I wrote, about the whole idea of “school.”

i had a teacher
who tried to teach me things
unimportant and
i could never remember
i never could
all the things
i should have
known if i
was good and
quiet and listened
and i really
did those things
except sometimes
i whispered or
sang songs quietly
or wrote in a black
book which no one
ever saw for so long
that it turned
invisible and
i knew how to
catch a frog
but the teacher
did not want a
frog so i left
that school and
i started my
own and it was
all good things
to learn like
words that
rhyme with
pedestal and
nonsense things
that are important
and the way
cats purr in
the sunlight and
how to swing
so high to
touch all the
trees and talk
to the birds and
i opened my
school and
no one came

Maybe the reason that poem still resonates with me in some way is that, at least in terms of my relationship to school, I haven’t really changed much since I was in high school. And when I was in high school I was still obviously in touch with how I felt about school as a child.

Which of course has a lot to do with why I went to a weird college.

And it’s also why I was so super-psyched that the Vivid Girl was able to go to the best school ever.

And why I am so freaked out that the Vivid Girl’s school is closing at the end of the school year and I do not know what we are going to do.

Of course, the whole school is closing, not just the Vivid Girl’s part, so we are not the only family facing this issue. And there is a lot of comfort in going through this with other people.

There is also a lot of stress in going through this with other people. Because I have been spending a lot of time in meetings and phone calls with stressed out parents. Also emailing. And texting. And visiting schools.

And emailing and texting and phoning and meeting about the schools we’ve visited.

And here is what we’ve discovered: the best school ever is not only the only school of its kind, it’s the only school in its category. It fills a space in the local school spectrum that is much too large to be called a niche. When it closes, there will be a huge gaping hole in the range of local school choices.

One of the great things about the best school ever is that everything is optional. The kids are never (NEVER) forced to do anything they don’t want to do. They are invited, encouraged, included, and sometimes even enticed… but they are not bribed, bullied, threatened, coerced, or cajoled (except by each other). Shoes are optional. Lessons are optional. Even lunch is essentially optional.

And at the lower grades, many students choose not to do lessons, or eat lunch. (Most students choose not to wear shoes!) But eventually, over time, they do choose to do lessons. And to eat lunch. And even to wear shoes.

A large group of parents went to visit the school that everyone keeps telling us is most similar to the school we already have. It is a democratic free school, and it is similar in some ways: namely, that the kids don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do. In almost every other way, though, that school was different from the best school ever, because the kids at that school are not offered anything. There are grownups on staff, but they’re not really teachers. They do their own thing, and the kids do their own thing, and sometimes they do stuff together. And if the kids want to do something, they can ask for the help, materials, or whatever they need, and then those things will be provided. Unless they’re not in the budget.

What the kids at that school mostly do is play games on the computers. Which is fine, and I have not yet met a parent from the best school ever who is willing to say that computer games are bad or that the kids aren’t learning from them, or whatever. But I also haven’t met any parents from the best school ever who want to pay tuition for their kid to play EverQuest all day, either.

So we went to visit some other schools. And there are some lovely schools around, for sure. Schools where the kids are working on really cool activities with really cool materials and have really awesome playgrounds.

But. We took the kids with us to visit a school and while the parents sat around and talked with the director and the teachers the kids played on the playground. They climbed the big pile of tires and had secret meetings in the tee pee and ran around the garden and swung on the swings and climbed on the ropes and had a great time for almost two hours. And they all came up to us and said, “I want to go to this school!” And when we told them, one by one, in the car on the way home, that at that school the kids get half an hour of recess every day, every single one of our kids said, “Half an hour?!?! NO WAY! Forget it, I’m not going there!”

Because, you see, at the best school ever you can play outside whenever you want. (Unless there is lightning, or it’s below 40 degrees and raining.)

And even if they did want to go there anyway, that school is willing to add ten students for next year, and we have 20. We asked them if they wanted to expand, take all our students, hire some of our teachers, and inherit some of our resources…. First they said maybe. Then the met us, and emailed us, and talked to us on the phone. And then they said no.

The Vivid Girl is sad about her school closing. She is worried that any school she goes to will only last about two years, and then be destroyed in some dramatic way. But she is willing to be excited about a new school, as long as her three criteria are met:

1) she wants to be with her friends

2) she will not sit at a desk

3) she will not do homework

These seem reasonable to me, and I am trying to accommodate them. Especially because the research overwhelmingly shows that homework has no value at the elementary school level, that relationships are the key to happiness and well-being, and that sitting in a desk all day will kill you.

Given that my child’s desires for a school are right in line with what the experts recommend, doesn’t it seem like we should be able to find one school that we like, that our kids will like, and that has space for at least a few of the friends who are looking for a school?

Today the Vivid Girl and I are going to tour a school that I think sounds very promising. It is a one-teacher school, with a mixed-age class. They go outside everyday, take lots of field trips, work with all kinds of cool materials, and generally seem to have a great time learning and being together. They are even looking for girls who are exactly the same age as the Vivid Girl and her friends! Sounds perfect, right?

Perfect, but for one thing: they have a cat. And the Vivid Girl’s very best friend? is allergic to cats.

I’m starting to think it may be time for me to open my own school after all. I’m pretty sure I already know a bunch of people who will come.

This photo is from _twig on flickr and s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. Many thanks.

my latest nightmare

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I have been working on a little project that somehow I managed to finish and send off before the deadline (okay, well, actually I managed that last part because Mr. B–who knows how to use the scanner and who likes going to the post office–helped me). Anyway, the project is that I did a sketchbook for the Sketchbook Project and what is a little bit funny about it is that I signed up for the Sketchbook Project as a way of warming up for National Novel Writing Month. It wasn’t much of a warm-up, considering that I left the sketchbook in its original packaging until well after NaNoWriMo was over. Instead, I look at it as more of a consolation prize, because I did not actually write a novel but I did in fact finish my sketchbook, which is on its way through the mails to the Brooklyn Art Library and/or to a city near you!

But, just in case you can’t wait to see it, here it is, in all its scanned-in glory:

Chapter 55, in which I inadvertently take my husband’s name

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Hi! Did you miss me? I missed you! and guess what? I missed myself too, because one of the serious issues I’ve been dealing with, as I mentioned so mysteriously in my last post, is my recent discovery that for the last nine years or so I have not actually known my own name.

No, really!

Here’s what happened nine years ago or so: I got married.

It was fun! but it wasn’t only fun, it was official and stuff. And as part of the whole getting married thing, I gave a lot of thought to the whole should-I-change-my-name thing.

As a modern American woman I have actually had quite a bit of time to think about this thing, and I have known women who have taken their husbands’ names and women who have kept their “maiden” names. I have known women who have renounced the whole patriarchial naming system and given themselves names of their own choosing. I have known women who took their wives’ names, women who have created new names by combining their original names with the names of their spouses, and women who have changed their names and then changed their names back, with or without getting divorced. I have known women who have changed their names “socially” and kept their names “professionally”. I have known women (and men, incidentally) who have given up their fathers’ last names and taken their mothers’ original last names.

And then there are the hyphenators. Sometimes they hyphenate their names and their spouses’ names. Sometimes both they and their spouses hyphenate. Sometimes neither spouse hyphenates but all the children are born with hyphens.

There are a lot of personal and historical issues tied up in this decision, of course. Big questions, such as Who am I, anyway? and What even is a family?

Also complicating the issue for me is the fact that the last name I was born with, which is the same as the one my father was born with, is one of the two most common last names ever. Yes, that’s right: Diggs is not really my actual last name. My actual last name is either Smith or Johnson. But the thing that makes me a Diggs in the first place is my quirky and unique personality, and so having a too-common last name has been a burden, you know, over the years.

Also I have always been a feminist. When I was 5, I broke up with my kindergarten boyfriend because he refused to say that he was a feminist too. I figured if he wasn’t with me he was against me! It may not surprise you much to know that he was my last steady boyfriend for many many years. But not forever, because you see, I did actually…. eventually…. get married.

As a feminist, I had always been determined that my name was mine and I would never replace it with the name of some guy I just happened to marry. As a lover of the uncommon, I would occasionally concede that  I might consider changing my name at marriage if I managed to marry someone with a sufficiently uncommon name.

But I was born under the sign of Cancer, which possibly influences me to be very maternal and cozy and domestic, and one thing that always bothered me a bit about the married women I knew who kept their original names was that they generally ended up having different last names from their own children.

A wonderful solution would be to marry someone and have both him and our children take my last name! But, of course, it’s not really a solution and anyway it’s amazing how resistant men are to the idea of changing their names. I don’t know what their problem is; they seem to be attached to some crazy idea about having an identity or something.

My sister is younger than me but she got married first and she kept her name. She is also a teacher and so she encounters a lot of families where the kids and the parents have different names from each other. And she has been able to observe other teachers’ attitudes about those differences. She reported to me that she was shocked to discover that one of her colleagues always assumed that a woman with a different last name from a child was not the child’s “real mother,” and that she treated her differently than she would treat the “real mother.” Apparently she thought a woman with a different last name was probably the “step mother” and therefore had different rights to information about the child. Well, honestly, I think that teachers should probably let the child’s parents define all those relationships but also it struck me that the teacher’s conclusions weren’t even logical. In a culture where women routinely take their husbands’ names at marriage, a step mother would be more likely to have the same name as a child than the so-called real mother would.

My sister has children, and they have a different last name than she does, and she reports that she often finds herself explaining her relationship to her own children to people (teachers, nurses, whatever) who really probably should just take her word for it.

Anyway, all of this just confirmed my original Cancerian desire to have the same last name as whatever children I might end up with. It also fed into my original Cancerian desire to avoid conflict.

But! I too am attached to the crazy idea about identity. And I stubbornly continued to view my original name as part of that identity. I am not sure what conclusions most people come to when they think about grown women changing their last names but I have been shocked by what certain individual people have had to say about it. For example, when I was in college I worked summer jobs at my dad’s company. I was about 19, and my boss was probably in his early 30s, and I had been working with him for two years or so. It was 1989. So I was shocked when he introduced me to someone saying, “Her name is Missy Diggs. Well, her name is Missy… she’s borrowing the name Diggs from her father until she gets married.”

WTF?

I was not borrowing my name any more than he was borrowing his!

So when I married Mr. B I had some thinking to do. B was not a sufficiently unique name for me to consider trading my name for, and anyway by that time I had a career and stuff and I wanted to remain connected to my work history. We considered combining our names and both changing to the new name but the combination of our real names came out sounding vaguely medical and musty, unlike DiggsB which has a nice ring to it. And so I somehow came up with the plan that I would have a two-word last name, basically the same solution the hyphenators came up with, but in my case I eschewed the hyphen. For stylistic reasons, mainly. So I became Missy Diggs B. Which is how it was printed on my social security card, so that even though I had filled out the paperwork as Diggs B, Missy, you couldn’t really tell from the card whether my last name was B or Diggs B.

And so when I got my new driver’s license I was annoyed when it came back saying B, Missy Diggs. But I was too lazy to go get it fixed and so I just kept it like that and went around changing my name with my doctors and credit cards and other places like that. (Mr. B also changed his middle name from Cowboy to Diggs, so he was Mr. Diggs B, but it was really B, Mr. Diggs and he didn’t have to change anything anywhere else and no one got confused.) And so even though we go to the same dentist, for example, Mr. B’s files are under “B” and mine are under “D”.

And then we had a baby and we gave her a first name (Vivid), two middle names (Girl and Diggs), and a last name (B).

Honestly I wasn’t trying to make things so complicated. Apparently my preference for not using a hyphen is what has caused some people to record my name as “Diggs B, Missy” and some people to record it as “B, Missy Diggs.” But imagine my surprise when I went to get my new driver’s license and I explained that my social security record was under the name “Diggs B, Missy” and so I wanted my driver’s license to say that and the clerk looked me up on the computer and told me I was wrong. My name is, and has been for years, in the social security files and almost everywhere else, “B, Missy Diggs.” And that’s what my driver’s license has to say.

And the only things that say anything different are the random files all over town and then internet where I managed to convince people or computers that “Diggs B” was my two-word last name, and some of the people or computers I convinced have meanwhile contacted me to tell me that I obviously don’t know my own name and so they have taken the liberty of correcting my files for me.

And not once has any of these people just called me to ask how I wanted this issue resolved. And I can just imagine how part of this conversation would go.

Caller: Is this Mrs. B?

Me, meekly: It’s Ms. Ms B.

What Kind of a Writer Am I, Anyway?

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Well, it seems obvious that I am not much of a blogger. Except when I am. Such as today. Some people seem to be able to blog about life even when it is at its most intense and I truly admire that. Maybe I need more practice. I have been avoiding the blogging because there have been a few things going on which –while less serious than cancer– have just not seemed very funny or in-perspective to me lately. Such as: great alternative schools, while increasingly needed, are an endangered species, and loving one means opening yourself up to a certain amount of insecurity; lymphatic systems, once damaged, will never really function 100% properly again; girls who at 6 seem to be going on 16 may at 7 be unable to speak civilly to their mothers at all, at all; and also, life continues to be hard. What can I say? It’s a sad and beautiful world.

It’s also a fun and magical world, if you can get those parts going, and we have been having a bit of fun and magic as well, what with Halloween and birthday parties and making new friends and spending time with old friends at the Texas Renaissance Faire. AND it’s National Novel Writing Month and I am, ostensibly at least, writing a novel. I’ve never seriously tried that before, always thinking that I didn’t have anything to write a novel about. I read a lot of novels, and I’ve noticed that most of them have character development and plots and stuff like that, and I’ve just never seemed to have any of that stuff in me. But then I was on a mini-vacation this year on Galveston Island, and a story jumped off the widow’s walk of one of the fabulous old houses, crashed down through the branches of a dying elderly oak tree, and landed on my head, getting all tangled up in my hair like a bat. So that’s the story I’m trying to write, though now that I’m halfway through the Novel Writing Month and only about 25% to my word count goal, I’m starting to wonder how inspired I really am by all that.

Meanwhile, I applied for a couple of jobs in real life, but at the time I thought I wanted to do part time editorial or writing work, because maybe that’s the kind of writer I am, the kind who writes what other people want written and who gets paid for it? But I didn’t hear back from either of those jobs, and to be honest I didn’t even want the writing job, though the editorial job sounded kind of interesting, and that made me realize that maybe I don’t want to be that kind of writer after all.

There are a few kinds of writer left, though, and maybe I want to be some or all of them. I have always admired the kohl-eyed, velvet-robed diarist, such as Anais Nin. (of course, it might have been useful to marry a rich banker at some point, or to have been French, non?) Or perhaps the more American essayist, such as James Thurber, or a hard-nosed journalist, such as… well, I don’t really read them but I have seen them in the movies. There are obviously a lot of different kinds of writers to be, and I think perhaps I am one of those. When I am actually writing. Which is not really that often, usually, though this month I have written quite a bit more than usual and I do like it. I do.

For one thing, it gives me plenty of time to visit with The Fear and get better acquainted with it. The Fear is the main obstacle to writing whatever I want all the time, and it has been somewhat liberating to spend so much time with it and see that really it is not so big. It is certainly not qualified to be the Boss of me, because when I look at it closely I see that it is not there at all. It is only when I am trying to avoid it that it becomes so oppressive and ungainly.

The only problem is that when I push The Fear aside and write anyway I find that there may not be much there, either. I like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) because I have used it to spend lots of time in coffee shops chatting with friends, and also just hanging out in companionable silence while we work, and then closing up our laptops and going out to lunch. Also, I have noticed that interesting thing that happens when you devote yourself to a project… and all the other things that need attention in your life line themselves up to be dealt with properly too. It’s like the act of dedicating myself to one important task magnetizes everything around it, and all the little magnetic domains line themselves up in every part of life, and suddenly I am attracting all kinds of important tasks, many of which have seemed to be too scattered and chaotic to deal with at all. That’s interesting, not always fun, and energizing. Also exhausting.

So all of that makes me think that it’s not really the writing. But it is definitely time to get serious about something other than fighting for survival at the most basic level. It is time to build layers. It is time to find people to work with and go to lunch with. It is time to write a novel and get my life back. There is a lot of research about how writing can help people heal and organize their minds, because being able to tell a coherent story about what happened to you is key to mental health and survivorship. (it doesn’t have to be true, necessarily, or have a happy ending; it just has to be coherent. Isn’t that amazing?) There is also a lot of research about how the physical act of writing helps integrate brain function, and allows people to become better at almost anything, totally independently of the actual content. (It doesn’t even have to be c0herent; it just has to be writing. Isn’t that amazing, too?)

So, for now, that’s the kind of writer I am.

I’ll keep you posted.