On the dole

I have a very fuzzy memory of standing in line at the Welfare office with my mother as a young child. I remember playing with those movie-theater ropes that swung like hammocks as we slowly made our way toward the impassive face behind the glass-fronted window. My mother had a stack of papers in her hand. Most likely she was wearing her burgundy-colored Levi's Bend-Over slacks (when read as a command that sounds awfully dirty). I was probably in my bright yellow Big Bird overalls, the very first piece of clothing I remember caring about.

My mom was not on Welfare for long. Just in those first bleak years of single motherhood in the early '70s. Soon she would be donning her polyester dickie and her lab coat and heading off to clean people's teeth while I went to the house of that scary babysitter who washed kids' mouths out with soap (child abuse! my mother claimed), and tried to feed me egg salad with sweet relish.

She's still at it! But with better clothes

Then today, I was back. Ok, not Welfare exactly, but the Unemployment office. More specifically, the buzzing, fluorescent-lit Employment Development Department, where I had to take a class this morning to satisfy the requirements of my $440-a-week checks from the government.

Sitting there in that windowless room, listening to Jack walk us through how to fill in boxes (no check marks! God, please, no check marks!) I couldn't help but think of The Full Monty. Since watching that movie is the closest I've come to this type of place since the Big Bird overalls days, it sort of made sense. And besides, my entertainment choices were pretty much whittled down to daydreaming about British working class male strippers, listening to Jack make stale jokes about the Govenator, or gnawing off my own hand.

Please watch this extreme charmingness in action:

And I have to say, aside from the fact that today's visit was seriously lacking in good disco music and pelvic thrusts (would a little Donna Summer kill them?), it wasn't really so bad. In fact, I'm actually quite grateful for my government handouts. And believe me, I've done way worse things for $440 a week.

What I needs is a secretary

I am not the only one parked at Ocean Beach, sitting in my car and watching the wild Pacific through the windshield. The old Chinese man in the car to my right is napping, mouth wide open. The suburban-looking man two cars away in the silver highlander is smoking a cigarette, (I'm thinking his family still thinks he quit for good back in 2001). On my way in, I passed two old ladies sitting in a Civic, arguing.

Me? I’m blogging, catching the last 27 minutes before it’s time to pick up the kids from the hula-hooping babysitter and make dinner. And really, I can’t complain about the office space. I mean, I have a minivan, and as work carrels go, it’s pretty spacious.

This is what my time is like these days, little snatched moments that I try to stuff with something productive (I have a productivity disease and can only feel happy if I can list some worthwhile accomplishments for the day; this isn’t as hard as it sounds since I sometimes allow myself to count showering among my achievements.). Today my patchwork went like this: two hours on the couch while the kids were at school, then three more hours at Peet’s until I got kicked off the Wi-Fi. Now it’s Ocean Beach, with surfers tumbling in the white water right in front of me and the crazies sticking yet more old seagull feathers in their dreadlocks.

And in the killing-two-birds-with-one-stone category, I’m pretty sure the sun baking me through the windshield is good for my cold.

Playing Catch Up

As you may have noticed, I'm not exactly winning any Blogger of the Year awards for frequency lately. I apologize for my dereliction of duty. The good news is, my freelance life is booming. The bad news (for you, at least) is, with the exception of about 9 hours a week, I am taking care of my kids. Those precious free nine hours are spent writing about hotels or interviewing people who know stuff. Every once in a while they are spent watching You Tube videos forwarded by my mom.

But here are the four most exciting things that have happened to me and my family in the last week. Because, you know, I want you to feel up to speed.

1.) An MFA creative writing class at DePaul University in Chicago is using a short-short story of mine called "Why You Shouldn't Have Gone in the First Place," as an example of "time and place." I know this because one of the students wrote me an email to say he liked it. Isn't that nice? It's in this book, along with many, many good short stories. I wrote it a hundred years ago. Maybe a thousand.

2.) I had a minor but important parenting breakthrough after my total Sylvia Plath collapse last week. Here it is: I don't have to follow one parenting philosophy word-for-word. I can pick and chose and figure out what works for us. Like, I can give time-outs AND involve my children in decision making and conversation. I know, it sounds elementary, but for me, freedom from thinking I am a failure at being the perfect "positive discipline" groovy parent has been revolutionary. Peace reins in the household. Also, I think the fact that my children saw me just sob my eyes out has made them realize that I do have a breaking point and that they probably don't want to see it again. Proof once more that fear is as good a parenting tool as anything else.

3.) We went to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival where my kids sang along to "This Land is Your Land," got filthy dirty, and learned the phrase "jump the fuck up." Thank you, Steve Earle.

4.) Green Apple Books has a candy drawer in the office and, as the wife of one of the owners, I have access to it. I will now be working here every Monday morning.

Peace and chocolate, my people.

Unemployment: A Love Poem

How was my writing week, you ask? Well, in a word, it was fan-freaking-tastic.

A partial list of what I got done in my five free days:

- I cleaned out the bathroom cabinet and finally threw away those humiliating Slim Shots I bought during one especially low and vulnerable trip to Wallgreens.

-I made lentil stew so that I would not waste the bone from the pork shoulder I bought to make "shot-and-a-beer" pork. Very thrifty.

-I wrote about 30 pages of fiction, which is more than I've written in the last six months.

-I threw a potluck brunch for the neighborhood collective.

-I went running (everyday).

-I submitted two short essays to Babble.

-I gracefully received two rejections from Babble.

-I accepted a freelance gig.

-I submitted a short essay to the New York Times.

-I, together with the Mister, cleaned out the garage. Trips to the dump were made. It was awesome.

-I translated some immigration paperwork for my kids' wonderful daycare teacher.

-I played with my kids

-I hung out with the Mister.

Three times this week I have paused—I'm in bed or at breakfast, maybe I'm alone in the car—and had the surprising and utterly distinct feeling of contentment. Not the absence of complaint (which, for me, would be surprising enough) but the presence of contentment. A bodily feeling of contentment.

It's weird I tell you. So weird that I do this mental scan, looking for things that might be wrong. And, nope, nothing bugs me. I'm like the Dali Lama over here. Frankly, it gives me the jitters.

I am reading the amazing and wonderful novel Olive Kitteridge right now and there is a line in which one of the characters says, "I wonder what it was that made her so distrust happiness?" and it sticks in my memory because it is the only line thus far that has rung absolutely false.

Doesn't everybody distrust happiness? Isn't that what happens when you live into adulthood? It's absolutely just a fact that happiness, like the common cold, is fleeting and reoccurring. You're up. You're down. It's just the way of the world. And I'm ok with that.

From here

What gives me the willies are the days upon days of total contentment. Nothing is wrong. I love everyone (well, except the Republican members of congress and Sarah Palin). And really, it can only be one thing: unemployment. And let me tell you, if I had had even the least inkling of how great it would be to lose my job, I would have done it a long time ago. Like this guy. He might be on to something.

On a completely different note: There is still time to enter the "guess the date of the first egg" contest (I really should have come up with a snappier name). So far, we've got nothing, so you could still get lucky.

How not to organize your time

Today is my second day of true unemployment and already I can tell I'm falling into that weird timeless time where my to-do list gets longer and the days gets shorter and I keep eating weird things out of the fridge (to wit: one Thai shrimp dumpling and a spoonful of cold brown rice), and I start to feel sort of greasy and filmy and my outfits get worse and worse.

My to-do list contains the following items, verbatim:

--write novel

--exchange tanbark

--make headboard

--update website

--look into unemployment insurance

--clean out garage

--pitch stories to Cookie, Sierra, Coastal Living, etc

And then, of course, there are all the reoccurring things like sweeping and dishes and blow drying my hair. I can't figure out how to organize myself. So instead I sit on the couch stumbling through the world wide web until I find myself on Christian organic farming blogs.

But pretty soon I'm going to get serious, real serious. As soon as I buy a craft mat I can get right down to novel writing. Or maybe I should hang the teacup hooks first?

A thing I Like

A day at the Sonoma County Fair with my family.