The Ladder Herald

The Shaman

I've been so out of it, sick with a terrible strep throat. Delirious. The only thing I remember from yesterday is lying on the floor in the kids' room while Rye crawls all over me shaking his rattle. I had this bizarre fantasy that he was a shaman and was healing me with his baby preverbal chant magic. It was cool to look at him that way, suddenly his babbling seemed wiser. Unfortunately, I did not improve.

Today the doctor said, it's a good thing you're on the antibiotics because you have an ear infection too.

The world will end not with a bang, but a virus.

First Day of Group Dynamics Class

The teacher, an imposing woman, greets us and says, "the feedback you give really says more about you than about the person you are responding to."

She also says that if something comes up in the group--conflict, feelings, reactions--we cannot process it outside of the group. We have to wait and bring it back next time. "You need to live with the tension," is how she puts it.

Without any further instruction, she stops talking, and there is silence in a room of twelve people. This is how it will be: no facilitation, no theory, no direction, no topics, no help. Just silence, and waiting for someone to speak: the beginning of three hours of class.

People risked, and spoke, and others responded. There was a lot to say, and a lot going on. I loved it! And it gave me a headache.

Rye's First Pancake at Boogaloos

*

Silly Friends

A Butterfly Museum

[You have to read this very slowly.]

Secrets on the Way

Daylight struck the face of a man who slept.
His dream was more vivid
but he did not wake.

Darkness struck the face of a man who walked
among the others in the sun's strong
impatient rays.

It was suddenly dark, like a downpour.
I stood in a room that contained every moment—
a butterfly museum.

And the sun still as strong as before.
Its impatient brushes were painting the world.

—Tomas Transtromer, Selected Poems 1954-1986

Some Haiku

Walking the city—
trash everywhere, crazy people.
And beauty of light.

*

So fragile—this night—
As everything continues.
It is all I want.

*

Walking the city—
sometimes I am so afraid
of other people.

*

Coming in the house,
an empty doll stroller waits
in the hallway.

My Life Right Now

I am in the bathroom, trying to change my tampon. Rye is with me, trying to unravel the toilet paper roll—I am blocking him with my leg while inserting a tampon. (Our bathroom is very small. I think it is actually a pretty serious health code violation to live here with two children.) The phone rings (Why do I have it with me in the bathroom? If you have to ask, you aren't a parent. So good for you!). Anyway, it is the nice lady who is the Admissions Officer at the elementary school we most hope to get into, who wants to schedule a parent interview. Just as I try on my pleasant, competent voice, Rye slips and falls and starts to cry, and Jonah and Sophie, who have up till now been playing pretty calmly together, start to pound on the bathroom door, simultaneously fighting and trying to get in here with me. I have no pen or paper, and instead of calling back, I just repeat the times and dates of the potential interview back to the Admissions Lady until she thinks I am autistic.

Diana Image—Dearborn Moon

Therapy and Understanding

Thinking about therapy because I am about to start school again after winter break. How does it work? What is it for? Do people ever get better? How do people really change?

"That psychoanalysis has lost its once formidable influence is undisputed. The question remains whether its insights have been surpassed or merely repressed." — Ellen Willis

I love this quote. And Ellen Willis, RIP.

Scanning around the web for resources when I was in finals, I noticed that the American Psychoanalytic Association's website has a feature called, "Ask a Psychoanalyst". I think it is so amusing, especially given Freud's way of working so uniquely and deeply with each of his patients (from what I have read and understood). There is no possible way he could answer the questions that appear there, such as: "Can you tell me something about commitment phobia? Including the causes and possibility of being cured?" The only thing he could and would say in good conscience is something like, "Please tell me more." I think that that should actually be the answer under each of the questions submitted.

The website also looks as if someone's cousin "just getting started" in web design created it. The graphics alone are worth a chuckle—in the main heading, a group of stoned-looking corporate drones stare out at the reader from around a table. How does this represent "psychoanalysis"? Weird.

Maybe I am jealous and just partly wishing that I had this job—to answer psychoanalytic questions. I guess that is why I am training to therapize people. I had this silly idea that I didn't do at Burning Man, which was to put a sign on my bike that said, "Psychological Problems Diagnosed with Poetry." I planned to have a little library card-file of poems with headings like, "broken heart" "hate father" "kids are fuck ups" "miserable over affair" "lost stupid job" etc. Then I could pull out a poem for the speaker based on what was told to me. Hopefully it would offer some comfort or insight...

Maybe I will do this next time. Or you can.

Another Diana Photo—Jonah Swing

Some Images From My New Diana Camera—Buddha Baby

War and Peace

Jonah and Aunt Cake and Aunt Bean.

Bathing

Haiku from Lately

The park's grass is mud.
The kids are listless, quiet.
Change in the weather.

*

Cries when he's put down,
and cries when we pick him up.
First birthday coming.

*

The baby smiling—
inky dark before sunrise—
One eye open.

*

Everything stops now—
city's quiet for a second—
noise of a bicycle.

Matthew Rohrer Poem

SHARP

Music all day on the stereo. And the rain
in the streets, it's like I'm with friends.
It is hard not to pour a glass of wine in the morning.
I am raining. A red-tailed hawk settles
on an old antenna behind the house
and looks right into my eyes
while I'm on the phone with Ellen. Ellen
I say slowly, I'm sure you will succeed
in your endeavors. Those are
not the words I planned to say.
I was still awakening from a dream of the distant war.

From: Rise Up, Wave Books (2007)

Bedtime

The story I try to tell my son tonight
for bed is about a robot who loves to surf
who has a magic whistle and whose best friend
is a mouse who lives in a tiny little cabin
in the robot's tin hat, with a bunk and a
bookshelf with very small books and
a table and chair built into the wall but

Jonah says that it is a story about a robot
and his best friend, a mouse, who go to
New York City and start a rock band called
the Fart Butts by putting up posters everywhere
that say "Be in Our Rock Band!!" and after the
interviews (there are so many people) they
get a mermaid, who sings in a tank on wheels
on the stage, and a polar bear, who plays the
keyboards, and a giant turtle who also plays
keyboards and a boy who is almost five
whose name begins with J, who plays
the guitar and sings along with the mermaid.

Deadline Looms

This Friday, January 11th, our seven-school list is due to the school system for our public school lottery requests. This morning I visited yet another school—Alvarado—that I liked (Gabe saw it weeks ago and liked it, and said I should look too). Arts, Spanish immersion, cool natty Principal, a kiln! a kick-ass PTA. And yet, I feel so unclear. They are bursting with pride (and should be compared to other PTAs!) because they raise $200,000 a year. This seems low to me, in relation to where we live. And they are thrilled that the kids have art and PE once a week from the PTA extra funds. This sounds thin to me. Maybe not. Who knows? And then, as I was leaving, I was suddenly struck with the idea that the most important thing is who my kids get for a teacher...could this be true? And in this case, are "experienced" teachers good or bad? More tired and burnt out or smarter?

Other parents and teachers and Principals all talk about how "you will know" when you walk into the school that is right for you and we don't. I mean, we seem to like the most popular schools that are hard to get into—as most people do. This is frustrating and confusing.

The other thing people say is, "Don't worry! No matter what school he goes to Jonah will get a great education because his parents are smart achievers and you will help him." I hate this rationalization. It's bullshit. If he is in an amazing place that can celebrate his power and truly help him in the places where he will struggle, he will have an great education. He needs a place where there is time for real creativity and extra attention for individual kids' personalities and temperaments. I went to well regarded public schools in a rich suburb, and they were awful for me.

I am just venting because I am scared.

We see two more schools tomorrow, and then it's time to make that list. Wish us luck! (But I don't know exactly for what!)

Jonah's Mockingbird Song Remix

"Hush little baby don't say a word, Mama's going to buy you a toy robot. If that toy robot won't talk, Mama's going to buy you an alien.

If that alien won't fly, Mama's going to buy you a tire swing.

If that tire swing won't move, Mama's going to buy you a sledding bird.

If that sledding bird doesn't like snow, Mama's going to buy you a poison bird.

If that poison bird doesn't like worms, Mama's going to buy you an electric spider."

And here, he stopped.

Word.

New word coined by my friend Doug Shoemaker tonight! I am proud to have been there at the birth.

A hunky wonk = a honk (!)

Some would say this is Bill Clinton, or Obama, I guess. Claire Horton would say it's Doug Shoemaker.

Maybe a bitchy wonk is a bonk? (And you know I mean bitchy as a compliment, Hillary, my girl!)

Winter Coat

Nobody likes
my new
coat, but me.
It's a bulky
black pod, and I
am it's pea.
It's quilted
and fur-trimmed
like a large tea
cozy. I'm
beneath
my sweet coat,
steeping
contentedly.

The Ritual of Ritual

I like these photos Gabe took of me trying to drink coffee with Orion.

I Am So Proud of California

California Sues US Over Emissions (from the BBC)

BBC News

California is suing the US federal government, in an attempt to force car makers to conform to tougher cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The lawsuit comes after the federal Environmental Protection Agency denied California a waiver from US law needed to enact its own efficiency targets.

The EPA says it wants to avoid a confusing patchwork of different regulations across states.

But California says the EPA has "done nothing" to curb greenhouse gases.

Fifteen other states or state agencies are set to join the action. 

California Attorney General Jerry Brown filed the suit in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Wednesday.

A Measure of Wet

(From the new Poetry [January 2008])

The Late Worm

The worms
which had been
thick are thin
upon the ground
now that it's gotten
later. They stick
against the path,
their pink chapped
and their inching
labored. It's a
matter of moisture
isn't it? Time, a
measure of wet,
shrinking, the
drier you get.

—Kay Ryan

The Dead.

The New York Times Magazine's December 30th issue has an amazing feature "The Lives They Lived". I think they do this each year but I've really been appreciating 2007. In particular I loved Daphne Merkin's piece on Allen Wheelis, Lauren Slater on Marian Radke-Yarrow, and Rosemary Mahoney on Lady Jeanne Campbell. A few of them are complete headscratchers ("Joybubbles" b. 1949 — invented the prank phonecall? Sort of unclear.)

NYT Mag  (free, but you have to register)

Anyway, Merkin calls Wheelis "A neurotic's neurotic" and writes about how he "put himself—and psychoanalysis—on the couch." He was also a San Francisco local since 1954: my shrink knew him.

I love his darkness, and his poetry: "Life is unmanageable," he wrote, "escapes reason."

Here's the last thing I'll quote from the piece: "He never really became part of the orthodox psychoanalytic establishment—largely, it would seem, by choice. He trafficked in existential despair, unceasingly questioning the purposes and limitations of putting people on the couch — in "a room of listening, of longing" — even as he continued working in his chosen field. "I have not found in psychoanalysis the meaning I sought. I function as guide to the lost, but do not myself know the way.""

He wrote quite a lot. I've ordered a bunch of his books, including "How People Change". I would really like to know.

Cool Talk: Mary Brown!

Mary Brown, an old pal of mine around the neighborhood (responsible for the Valencia Street bikelanes!) is doing a presentation on Tuesday January 22nd at SPUR (where Gabe works) on her amazing geography master's thesis. Come if you're in SF! Check it out:

The Mission District of San Francisco is a pre-automobile suburb reconfigured, beginning in the 1910s, to accommodate the movement and storage of automobiles. Changes to the built environment included widespread removal of front yards for driveways and garages, widening of streets, and privatization of curb space for residential driveway cuts. Mary Brown presents her Geography Master's Thesis examining the effect of this shift to private mobility on the architectural landscape, on-street parking availability, as well as the conversion of garage spaces to other uses.

[Noontime forums are held at SPUR, 312 Sutter St. (at Grant), Fifth Floor, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. We are located close to the Powell St. BART station and several Muni lines. Feel free to bring a lunch. SPUR Forums are open to the public, free for members and $5 for non-members.]

Refresh Your Page/Refresh Your Life...

if you are bookmarked here...because I made a new valentine-ish color palette on Ladder Herald for the New Year!

My resolution to write a few lines (or more) of poetry every day in 2008 has been added to: I am now going to email or call Julia about it each day. And she me. I did it today! That's one.

A haiku:

New Year's Eve party:
at each person's resolution
I think: yes! Me too!

And I saw Orion the constellation in the sky at midnight last night! A good omen.

Favorite Song Lyrics Lately

From the Weepies song "Gotta Have You":

"No amount of coffee, no amount of crying, no amount of whiskey, no amount of wine, no no no no no: nothing else will do, I've gotta have you."

(From the Say I Am You album)

I also like:

"I heard a song, I heard the saddest song on WSUK, they play it every other hour of every other day. 'Cause the greaser sent them tease and toys, for regular airplay. All of your heroes are whores."

—Tanya Donelly "Mysteries of the Unexplained" from Lovesongs For Underdogs

and

"I'm the same as I was when I was six years old. And oh my God I feel so so old...The Universe works on a math equation the never ever ever ends...and the plants and the animals eat each other, and the plants and the animals eat each other..."

Sun Kil Moon "Neverending Math Equation" from Tiny Cities.