Month: March 2008

They’re currently dredging the King’s Ditch so large swaths of the Backs are all ripped up, the river stopped, a footbridge closed… mayhem!

Iain says my next book should be Cancer for Fun and Profit!

That would certainly be amusing, though I wonder where the profit would come from? Perhaps I need my own telethon.

On the fun side of the question, the mail today brings news: the people who run Oral Surgery are badass in the extreme, and have ruthlessly cleared time in the schedule for me. Guess I can’t avoid that one any longer – sigh. I dislike having my face Xrayed!

The people who run the Cambridge Breast Unit (insert your own joke here) were so very impressed with the survey I mailed in they have elected to kick me straight to Clinical Genetics, without an initial stop to let their own people have a first poke. That seems quite polite of them. Though we all know exactly what tests will be ordered, at least there is yet another delay so I can continue to dwell in denial!

To conclude, I must admit that when I wrote to the assorted clinics I forgot to contact my skin cancer docs. What could have caused the oversight? Perhaps the fact that they are the most likely to cut me.

In fact, the likelihood hovers around one hundred percent…. and the biopsy will be accompanied by stern lectures I can recite verbatim. Never fear, none of this worries me. As always, I am mostly just annoyed – though at the same time hugely impressed that the NHS provides such high quality (if grubby) services. Free of charge.

Earlier today I was telling Mark Mitchell that I have been considering giving up sugar including but not limited to honey in my tea, alcohol in general, and cinnamon jelly beans. Why? For the entertainment value.

He said Giving things up out of boredom is odd to me. When I’m bored, I engage in even more dangerous behaviour, rather than cleaning up my act. 

I pointed out that there isn’t really much else on offer except, perhaps, taunting swans. Not exactly something that interests me.

Someone else helpfully suggested I address my current existential crisis thus: find yourself some nice football thug with a dick like a coke can and GET BUSY!

Technically there are no hoodlums in my general environs except those who live on Drunk Bench, and of course, I am too pure and innocent for such antics. Though that person does offer a certain underlying wisdom. Essentially, I am lonely.

The main reason I never talk about my problems is simple: my early life provided sufficient drama that I appreciate my current good fortune. I survived cancer, poverty, violence, and brutal accidents – what else could compare?

Unfortunately that does not mean I lack challenges, even problems that other people would recognize and sympathize with. All manner of turmoil has bubbled and oozed through my existence, especially since I moved to the UK. Did I talk about any of it? Not much, not hardly, no way. Some people heard scathing anecdotes, a very few others were allowed glimpses of grief (especially after the suicides last spring), but I have no vocabulary of discontent, no relative desire to share the burden of worry.

Why? Possibly because that is the honor code of my family. Perhaps because the early trauma required silence to endure. More likely because I am deeply private, contrary, and cryptic by nature. Beyond those semi-pathological explanations the even more basic fact is that I am, even when wounded, even in the darkest depths of despair, both a stoic and an optimist. I’ve always been a Hey kids, lets build a clubhouse! kind of person.

The last few months have been very difficult, but it is only now, in the last few days before spring opens up the world, that I can talk about it. Or, for that matter, allow myself to feel it. Winter is always a problem – I get very depressed, and can’t do much to build up my store of vitamins and sunlight without risking my health in other ways. Mostly I just hang on, and try to spend a few hours pacing around outside fully covered with warm clothes and sunblock. It helps – a little.

This year the problem was exacerbated by my longest ever sustained period of being a single parent. When I had my daughter I was still a teenager, and knew that I needed support. Even though her dad vanished I had my own parents, his parents, several sets of great-grandparents and cousins and aunts, friends, and housemates to help.

James and Byron were always around in the early years, and after I moved to Portland there was Polly and her menagerie, the magazine community, IPRC friends, and eventually the chorus. Being a mother is a solitary experience but I was never truly alone – I always had at least a designated co-parent, and usually a whole squadron of people who supported and loved my little family.

Even when I did not wish to access these resources, they were there. Even when I moved to a new city, the whole thing happened again, partly in an organic fashion, but mostly because I knew that it was a necessary tonic. Seattle has a reputation for being deeply unfriendly but I had AEM, Jeffrey and Tizzy, a different set of magazine folks including Yantra and Sal, the parents I met through AS1, and onward.

I’m not a friendly person but I am a community organizer; that is my calling, my trade, the skill the fairies granted at birth. England presented a unique set of new and puzzling challenges, Cambridge even more. But before I arrived I knew Sarah, David, Rachel, Emma, Don, Barbara, Andy, Karen, Iain. From that starting point I was introduced to a whole phalanx of other people, and found mysterious connections – people who are close Chloe, a woman who knows Ayun.

Of course a large number of those people are in London or even further out. And, as reported earlier, this year saw a vast exodus of Cambridge friends as they finished their academic work and departed.

If I have a crisis I know that there are people nearby who could help; Xtina, for instance, is a person I trust and admire who would not be frightened by the madness of my medical routines – something that I have to consider. But she is in London, so we do not share a daily routine. We can exchange email and visits, but we are not geographically close enough for the sort of casual intimacy that exists when you live in not just the same city but also neighborhood.

In Portland, most of my friends lived in the same neighborhood. In Seattle, Jeffrey was three blocks away on the other side of Beacon Hill. Here in Cambridge, this winter, I have exactly zero relief or support. Yet because of my previously discussed reticence I haven’t mentioned it.

Of course I will build up a new network of local friends; I just haven’t had time, and winter is never kind. Critically though, if I were simply alone, I would not even feel isolated. The problem I have been pondering this winter is the fact that parenting alone – without anyone to share either the good or bad parts, without any breaks, without respite or adult conversation, is one of the loneliest experiences I have ever had.

This is true even though not much has gone wrong, nobody is in crisis, and I emphatically love my children. They’re the best, the most entertaining, overall and completely my favorite people in the whole world.

Those facts do not change my latent seasonal depression, the burden of being accountable for all practical chores, or a hundred sundry other worries. Could it be worse? Yes, of course – and that knowledge is exactly why I normally keep my mouth shut. If only censorship were a solution!

Certainly I do not know what anyone could do for me, and I’m an expert on the subject.

This is a temporary situation for me; it will all be better in a few months. I am endlessly impressed by those of you who are single parents for an entire lifetime: you are heroic beyond measure.

Today I’m grateful that spring has arrived and that everything will change again very soon. New friends, new adventures, hurray!

It is once again time to apply for a mooring permit, for which I am required to account for all of my time away from town. Yes, I know – my secret boyfriend George Orwell would have a lot to say about that! If he were, you know, alive.

This is a useful exercise because while I generally feel like a ramble through the Fens is the sum total of my adventures, this is apparently… an illusion!

I never imagined I would leave the Puget Sound, let alone be a world traveler.

Author admits gang-life ‘memoir’ was all fiction

The fact that her sister tattled on her is just genius. Though I am a wee bit tired of this trend.

I was already annoyed with misery memoirs as a category (hence my subversive little true and verifiable book), let alone flat out lies.

If you want to write fiction, write fiction. Stop making life hard for the rest of us.

One of my genius west coast friends anted up a link to a completely hilarious Seattle Craigslist rant, later deleted, that is summed up by: Just fucking fuck me, already – the basic presumption being that men in that city do not know how. Or are too complicated and sensitive. While I found the listing highly amusing, I have made a scientific study of the miscreants of that beloved metropolis, and I feel compelled to defend their honor.

To state the most obvious point: men fulfilling the desired criteria are not likely to cruise Craigslist for a date. Where are they? At a show, club, or bar – scoring. Hard to locate? Not at all. Any day of the week you can walk into just about any Capitol Hill drinking establishment, walk up to the bouncer or bartender, and state your requirement.

If they don’t offer themselves up with alacrity (the normal response given a corresponding sexual orientation) they will succinctly give you a list of potential candidates, often accompanied by comments on relative penis size.

How do I know this? Remember – I went on a Hunt for Bad Boys and Lumberjacks when Ana Erotica needed a research subject and playmate.

In fact, though I did not personally sleep with any of them, I did acquire several significant friendships out of the deal. Thankfully, only one imagined he had fallen in love with me (and I suspect there is a correlation between my chaste refusal to have sex and the love thing – that is a Bad Boy Paradox).

Where else could you find a really bad boy? Almost anywhere, though I once picked someone up in criminal court – I thought the charge of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes was wildly funny. You might not share my sense of humor, but you get the point.

One of my charming companions pointed out that the problem with some of our female friends is they say they want gangster, but then date emo. Hint: if you want a fast date, it is a better bet to look for a filthy boy or dirty girl.

During our hunt Ana Erotica had an explicit and detailed list including all manner of details; we found countless people who matched. Her main problem is that she wants them to pass a literacy test – if she asks what they are reading and they say Miller, Bukowski, Kerouac, or Burroughs their services are not required. Too obvious and banal.

My comment that the man of her dreams is more likely to be found with porn or Guns & Ammo did not amuse her. And she makes a living writing porn!

Though recently some dude said he was reading Scientific American and she replied that her friend Byron’s work was described in the magazine and he knew the article and score! That bad boy probably wondered what hit him. We’ll never know cause obviously she didn’t leave her number behind; she didn’t care what he thought of the whole encounter.

Of course I myself seek true love and have eschewed bad boys with a firm hand, or at least, insist that our relations are virtuous and innocent. My point is that they are easy enough to find.

The larger question is whether you want to keep what you catch. Just saying.

Right about now a very large crane is pulling my steel canal boat out of the water to have her hull inspected, and then blacked. Scary!

I wish I could be there to watch – the whole thing is excessively fascinating. Too bad the marina isn’t on a bus route.