Writing Cancer

Facebook Freakout, and Snow

2009-03-01T17:49:00.004-05:00

Items:

For the first time in three years, we're getting enough snow to play in. Roads closed, run on the market for bread and milk, school doubtless canceled tomorrow. (Obamas will ridicule!) A has never really seen snow. Lotta squealing going on around here this afternoon. It is beautiful -- the snow, and the delight.
I dipped my toe into the Facebook puddle and got sucked into an ocean of webby goodness. Overwhelming, and I don't know what I'm doing (who can see what, etc.) and it's really, really cool. Apparently everyone I've ever met beat me to it and checks it incessantly, judging by the mountain of friending that happened in a five hour period. Wow. I wriggled through a wormhole.
The snow makes me crazy-happy. M and A just came in; A is laughing/crying over her frozen extremities, and giggling with tales of snowballing her friend Gigi's door, and having no proper snow shoes. Poor kid went out in patent leather Mary Janes. M is brewing some chili. Very cozy.
A just made an announcement ("May I please have everybody's intention?"): Tonight, we are all to wear our pajamas backwards and flush an ice cube down the toilet, in order to bring on the accumulation.

M and Me

2009-02-28T14:40:00.005-05:00

Apparently everyone's doing it, though the only ones I've actually read are Bloglily's and Charlotte Otter's. I'm probably way late on the uptake, but what the hell. I don't often write about M, so I'll do it now, by way of this odd little survey.

How long have you been together?

Since January 2006 <-- This is wrong, should read 1996, thanks, Hopie!, during the snow.

How long did you know each other before you began dating?

A couple of months. He'd just quit his job as a newspaper reporter and came to work as a night-time assignment editor at the TV station where I was a news producer.

Who asked whom out?

Hard to say. It was my sister's idea; she came into the newsroom one evening, I introduced her to M, and as she and I were leaving, she whispered to me, "He's cute as shit." Indeed. After that, I think I probably asked him if he wanted to join "us" (the night crew) for a drink after the 11:00 news, and it turned out no one else wanted to go (or maybe I wasn't so expansive with the invitation?), so it was just the two of us, and there was a lot of snow on the ground, so he drove us in his truck, and it turned out it was his 25th birthday, and I bought drinks and afterwards he took me to my house and we stayed up late talking and then he left. That was the beginning.

How old are you?

I'm 47, he's 38.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

Mine, because she and her funny husband live just a few blocks away. We'd see his brother and his wonderful wife and baby if they didn't live 800 miles away, or if we didn't.

Which situation is hardest on you as a couple?

Gosh, this is hard to say, because cancer affects absolutely everything lately. I'd say childrearing is toughest, though we're very much in synch with each other, and with A. What's tough about it is how skewed the balance has become; M has to do pretty much everything, all the day-to-day, all the care. He gets her up, gets her dressed, gets her breakfast, fixes her lunch, gets her to school, brings her home and gets her supper, supervises homework, gets her to bed. On weekends, it's M and A: he takes her to playdates and parties, she goes with him to the grocery store and the butcher and cheese shops, they do laundry together. My role recently is a kind of really lovely combination Jabba the Hutt/Yoda, a blob on the bed and, occasionally, the sofa, who spouts profound truths and allows herself to be served pretend tea. As I've written here somewhere, one of the most difficult aspects of illness is being unable to fully mother (gah - noun/verb) my little girl. Hard on me, hard on her, excruciatingly difficult on M. So, combined with the crushing weight of cancer itself, I'd say the imbalance of everyday duties (and accompanying guilt) exerts the most pressure on us as a couple.

Did you go to the same school?

No, and if we had, we wouldn't have known each other since I'm a thousand years older. We both went to public high schools in different states; we attended different colleges. (I went to Tulane, he to University of Richmond.)

Are you from the same home town?

No. He grew up on Long Island. I grew up in a Quaker village in rural Virginia.

Who is smarter?

He is much quicker on the uptake than I, both intellectually and socially. He has a better memory. (A lizard has a better memory than I.) I'm better than he is at thinking ahead and seeing lots of possibilities (does this account for my outsize ability to worry?); he's more spontaneously creative. We both blow at math.

Who is the most sensitive?

I'm not sure what this question means. We're both humanoid, with all the attendant emotional equipment. It used to be that I "got over" arguments faster, probably because I'm less temperate and usually in the wrong, but lately M has given me, erm, a wider berth. More rope? Anyway, he's extremely patient.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

Swear to God, I can't recall the last meal out as a couple. When I'm feeling up to it, the three of us go for sushi in a matchbox of a restaurant (with equally minute servers) a few blocks away. Haven't done that since last summer. A puts the chopsticks to seaweed salad and edamame and noodly things while M and I knock back spicy tuna rolls and saki.

Where is the furthest (farthest?) you've traveled together as a couple?

We're talking earth orbit, I presume. We were engaged in Rome (he bought my ring in Florence - sigh). A few years later, the two of us followed the sun and the curve of the earth to Changsha, Hunan Provence, PRC, and jetted home two weeks later, a family of three. Best. Thing. Ever.

Who has the craziest exes?

I win that race hands-down.

Who has the worst temper?

Hi. Me again.

Who does the most cooking?

The most? How 'bout the only? That would be M. I can make a mean holiday apple pie. And quiche, I can make quiche, if called upon to serve, which is rare.

Who is the most stubborn?

I am, unless M digs in his heels and becomes angry, in which case I know he's serious and I cave. (Isn't everyone stubborn? What is the definition of stubborn? Determined? Tenacious? Resilient? Jury's out on this one.)

Who hogs the most bed?

I think we're both pretty polite. It's never been an issue; we're a tiny people.

Who does the laundry?

M does 95% of the laundry these days. I do it when I feel up to it. I do my skivvies. Yet another imbalance about which I feel unending guilt. On the bright side, we are fortunate to have a whole huge laundry room on the second floor. No more running to the basement, or the laundromat. Seriously, the second floor laundry changed my life. Make this the first major shopping accident you have after the Not So Great Depression ends: move the washer and dryer upstairs.

Who's better with the computer?

He is. He is.

Who drives when you are together?

He does, unless it's a long trip, in which case we split it. I love to drive (except at night, when I don't see so well), so I don't know how we fell into such traditional roles; probably has something to do with that first snowy night in the truck in January 1996...

One other unsolicited item:

M and I had been dating just over a year when I was first diagnosed, in February 1997. In October 1998, we went to Italy, where he asked me to marry him. How many 26-year-old men do you know who'd stick around through all that cancer nonsense, and then willingly sign on for more?

Crap month

2009-02-28T14:22:00.004-05:00

Been a long time. When I started this blog, my intention was to write as honestly as I could, every day or two, about my experience with cancer, writing, mothering, wife-ing, etc. I especially thought that writing about cancer would help... someone... maybe me, maybe someone else. I was inspired by that friend of Ted Koppel's whose name I cannot recall*, who was sick and blogged and then died, just a day or two before I started this journal. Anyway, I figured if he could write something every day up until the end, maybe I could, too.

Obviously, I can't. Things got so dicey this month that I went head-down. At one point, when I asked Dr. J if we could get more aggressive in treatment, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" To which I responded, in my head, "I want you to save my fucking life again, idiot."

I had my first treatment in a month yesterday. For various, hideous reasons, we had to postpone, and postpone. Today I feel better than I have in a good while, surely because I've psyched myself into thinking that the medicine will be a blockade if not a backhoe.

Curiously, I got a lot of work done on the novel. And I got a lit paper written and turned in.

My friend Bloglily inspired the next post. Thanks, BL.

*Leroy Sievers is his name. Blogged on NPR.org.

How did I miss this?

2009-01-29T16:47:00.010-05:00

Don't want to talk about cancer today, except to give a quick update that Dr. J doesn't know WTF is happening with me.

What I do want to discuss is this fascinating blog called the Book Design Review (a NYT blog? apparently so). How have I missed it? As with many things I stumble upon, this one came via a random read of another favorite blog, VQR, whose January 29th post is a nice rumination by Jacob Silverman on the state of the art of book covers called "Judging Covers." It interests me as a reader, as a writer, as an advertising and marketing professional, and as someone who has worked with a talented designer named Kevin Flores to design a book, cover included, by a fabulous writer named David Maizenberg. It's still available on Amazon, at twice the original cover price. (We're out of print.) The cover graces the top of this post.

Book cover design is of eternal interest to me -- the psychology behind the design (or lack thereof). The last book I bought because of the packaging was Michael Chabon's "Maps and Legends" -- I love Chabon, knew it would be a good read, but the cover was a layered gem, and the heft of the book (attributable to paper stock, not page count) felt substantial and very appealing. It's really a beautiful book, but you have to see it in person to get the full effect. Feels mysterious and layered, like an elaborate pop-up book does when you're six.

Meantime, having logged in fifty books for my MFA program's annual First Novelist Award, I can report that, while it's apparent I can and do judge a book by its cover, I'm even quicker to judge -- and abandon -- a book with a goofy title. Holy mother of God, what were these publishers thinking? It would probably be untoward of me to list the worst offenders here; I'll wait until this year's award has been decided before nailing them semi-publicly.

Book covers and titles... two mightily important elements authors rarely have much control over. Too bad.

Chemo tomorrow, then off for two weeks. A dream.

About that novel

2009-01-25T18:12:00.004-05:00

Obama in the Oval notwithstanding, it's been a shit month.

Just posted this to my novel workshop discussion board:

Dear Novelists,

Despite my best efforts, my novel insists on becoming a fucking bleak but spirited meditation on illness -- not at all what I wanted to write, the opposite, in fact.

Some of you know that my own health has been unsteady for many years, and has frankly tanked in the last few months. The smoky scrim affects the attitude, you see, darkening both the writer's world view (a.k.a. the H*** Doctrine) and the characters' moods, abilities, and personalities. Whereas a protagonist was sharply complex, occasionally witty, perhaps endearing if exasperating in Chapter 2, by Chapter 8 he comes off as caustic and cynical, and nothing if not self-involved. Another character, initially in possession of some semblance of humor, now finds herself altogether bereft of charm. Wit is eclipsed by a withering tongue; anything and anyone in her orbit is a black gnat to be swatted away efficiently, inelegantly. Nor can I seem to write minor characters who might elicit empathy or interest; even the children are hateful.

It sucks to be sick. It does. I wish I could write a novel about people rising to an impossible occasion, but the truth is that some people don't rise at all. The power of positive thinking is crap, I assure you. (I've lived twelve years in fear and loathing. Twelve years!) Yes, optimistic people beat odds all the time. So do cynics. And yes, sunny dispositions "lose long battles fought heroically," while many, many more frightened, confused, grim and hopeless souls slip without note into the great hereafter. It's an obscene fallacy that you can think and act your way out of cancer, and while it's my nature to appear upbeat -- some say naive -- I'm bone-tired of putting on the show.

Writing this novel was to be, for me, a way of spinning beauty of the transcendent sort out into the universe. Human heart conquering and all that. What I've learned is that the only beauty I have to offer is the godforsaken Keatsian kind: the truth as I know it at this moment, ugly and unvarnished, spare, splintered, seething and practically impossible to manage.

Writing the first sixty-five pages of "Control Theory" has been, aptly, not only a reflection of but an exercise in the theme of the novel itself: mustering the illusion of control in an uncontrollable circumstance. The prose is precious, careful, cold. It's pretty in places, but passionless. (Passion being the willful release of control.) Just look at how ridiculously crafted, how cloying, this first-draft synopsis is -- I wrote it in early December, before the most recent shitstorm shook me awake:

"Coco Fine and her family have lived next door to neighborhood eccentrics Victor and Anna Gibbles for four months, and they’ve never tried to be friendly. But when Anna collapses one rainy afternoon, her daughter appeals to Coco for help, initiating Coco’s reluctant involvement in the Gibbles’ lives.

Anna, a successful painter, is a diabetic and alcoholic whose declining health has gradually thrust Victor into the role of fulltime caregiver. As their relationship succumbs to the pressures of illnesss and Victor forges a friendship with Coco, Anna decides to end her life.

Hilarity ensues.

Not really. Coco and her husband Charles, rattled by the death of a neighbor they never took the time to know, resolve to assuage their guilt by “adopting” Victor—checking in on him, inviting him to holiday meals, having their young children, Eleanor and Gus, spend time with him. Each relationship deepens and differentiates, revealing the complexities of Victor’s and Anna’s marriage, the mutable dynamics of the younger Fine family, and the sacrifices people make for those they love."

...Really, aside from the aside, you can almost sing along with the jacket flap copy, can't you? HORK.

Screwing up my courage: where to go from here? Well, I think what I turn in next will necessarily be a hot mess. Coco a bad mother? Yes, indeed, I believe she is. Victor an acerbic old miscreant lusting after the neighbor as his wife -- herself a real peach -- lies dying upstairs? Absolutely, yes. Crap kids? Fuck yeah.

Will these people be likable? I doubt it. Despicable with a dash of funny, more likely. Will they be interesting? They interest me. Will their actions and motivations be true? Utterly.

Tired of being sick. Tired of writing what other people want to read, of saying what other people want to hear.

Gloves off.

***

So... I experienced the sudden onset of new symptoms on Friday afternoon, just after I got home from chemo. Awful, terrible mess. I'm to call Dr. J's office tomorrow to check in, and will go get checked out on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a ton of crap to do for school -- meetings, papers, so many pages to read. I like reading, of course, but feel overwhelmed and unable to concentrate. I've apparently dropped the ball on the novel award I administer for my teaching assistantship; got the faculty adviser, who is also my novel workshop instructor and my thesis adviser, a bit worked up. The worst. It'll be a stone miracle if I pull off finishing this semester.

Worse than cancer

2009-01-13T09:53:00.007-05:00

Cancer is nothing but sucky, let's establish that off the top. When I was first diagnosed twelve years ago, I had surgery and started chemo almost immediately after, and for a while there, I went into that "survivor's euphoria" -- experiencing an outsize joy of everyday things, all that shit. It was nice while it lasted, maybe about three months. In due time, as I started to recover, the glow wore off and I went back to being myself; that is, my "worldview" (my Bush Doctrine, as it were) snapped back into place and I became appropriately grumpy over little irritations, argued with M, made humor from cynicism, etc. When the shitstorm started again four years ago, I was quite bereft of the smell-the-roses impulse, and it was all fear and sadness. The poorer my health, the lower I feel, the darker my moods, but even during the in-between upsides, I stabilize at my normal true self: optimistic, but looking over my shoulder.

None of this has to do with how much I love or appreciate my family. I am keenly aware of time passing, as any parent is when a tiny six year old starts spitting out teeth like she's George Foreman. My heart races when I think about my daughter, and it's literally tough to keep my hands off her when she's with me. I know we have maybe three or four more months of this utter innocence, this enchantment with fairies before -- poof! -- it gives way to something a little more grounded, mature, and "real," and I know this not because I have some enhanced sense of time brought about by illness, but because I'm a mother.

I don't need euphoria, because normal is so good. I adore my husband and daughter, love my family and friends, love school, love where we live. We are the luckiest people in captivity.

It's easy to imagine people not so lucky. I don't even have to imagine them; some of my friends are not so lucky. I think of the heartbreak, the complete despair, of friends whose marriages are in flux and I hurt for them. To me, probably because of my rock-solid base with M and A, it would feel as though I'd been catapulted into another universe if my family life came undone. I cannot fathom anything worse.

Then there are the people I see in the infusion center every week who're in worse shape than I am, or appear to be. Some of them have cancer, some diabetes or kidney disease or immune suppressions that require perhaps daily professional care. Some of them have no family or friends to lean on. There is the hunched man who goes around our neighborhood with a mostly-empty shopping cart. There are people who hate their jobs, their circumstances, their lives. People who're stretched too thin, barely getting by on a few hours of sleep and taking care of small children and aging parents. People who are losing their homes. People who are unemployed and have no health insurance. (Jesus God, protect M's job and preserve our health insurance.) People who're losing or have lost loved ones. People whose child is desperately sick; who've lost a child. (The worst of the worst. I'd lose my fucking mind.) People who are dispirited for whatever reasons, and find the world too much, just too much. I don't have to look beyond the confines of my own little orbit to find these people -- they're right here, in the neighborhood, in the local newspaper, at school, friends, friends of friends... never mind political upheaval and wars and famine and disease and unrest around the globe.

All these situations are, to me, worse, much worse, than cancer.

Cheever, school, and teeth

2009-01-11T18:59:00.006-05:00

Have read several articles on and one interview with Cheever (Paris Review) in the last several days, as I turn around in my head the effects of his last, slim novel Oh What A Paradise It Seems. One tenet that consistently arises: keep moving forward, don't look back. He did not, for example, like to give interviews because he didn't like to discuss his work (looking back), and he found reading his own books as distasteful as "listening to a recording of my own conversations" -- he didn't do it. Sharklike; always thinking about the next thing. That's good advice for me to cotton to, considering my awful obsession with submitting (and collecting rejections for) my short fictions. If I could just concentrate on the novel to the exclusion of everything else... Publication is like love in that respect: happens when you least expect it, if it happens at all.

Speaking of the novel, school starts tomorrow, and novel workshop has moved from Wednesdays to Monday evenings. I'll also be taking a lit class (Magical Realism) that meets twice a week, and thesis hours. The Program of Strengthening and Conditioning has worked well over the last week, and I think I will have enough stamina at least to get my ass to campus tomorrow evening. I have a chemo next Friday, and no class the following Monday (MLK Day), so it'll be a few weeks before I can discern whether treatment is going to impede me. In any case, I haven't driven a car in six weeks. Should work out well, I think.

The Big Story around here is that A lost not one but TWO teeth (center, bottom) in the last two days. The Tooth Fairy came last night to our house for the first time, and back she'll come tonight. This morning, A pretended to believe with all her heart that a fairy had visited her, but her six-year-old cynicism kicked in this afternoon, and she announced she thought it was probably Mama and Papa who'd swiped the tooth and left the loot.

The teeth themselves are impossibly tiny, and I will keep them in a special box forever.

Little victories

2009-01-07T08:36:00.005-05:00

My campaign to regain stamina, now in its third day, progresses apace. It's as though I've broken the seal on Roo's Strengthening Medicine and am enjoying exponential results. Last week this time I had to follow a fifteen minute shower with an hour's nap; yesterday I did four loads of laundry. Urrah!

I finished the last page of Revolutionary Road, closed the book, switched on the teevee, and saw Leo and Kate in a trailer for the upcoming film. Glad I didn't catch it while in the thick of the novel, 'cause that Hollywood set's not at all what I'd imagined the Wheelers' kitchen to look like. The novel now tops my list of favorites, and gives me all kinds of ideas about how to structure my own novel. I could gush for hours about the writing (really, I could; see "Strengthening Medicine" above) but the upshot is: I want to write like Richard Yates.

I also want to write like John Cheever, whose last novel, Oh What A Paradise It Seems, I am reading this morning. It's slim, spare, and devastating, and has as much to teach about what to leave out as what to put on the page. Makes me want to take a weed whacker to my work.

I read Chapter 1 of Ruby the Red Fairy to A last night. It felt great; she snuggled close. It's a Big Girl Chapter Book, you see, so intensely interesting. Tonight we discover if Rachel and her new friend Kirstey find anything cool in that black pot at one end of the rainbow.

Second day in a row we've awoken to driving rain outside, and a pitch-black house. A is a trooper. It takes her a while to wake up, but once she does, she's laughing. What an agreeable little being. There is nothing I don't love about my child.

Now: more Cheever, then a bit of fictioneering.

One week to build up strength

2009-01-04T12:16:00.004-05:00

After four weeks spent mostly in bed, I am suddenly feeling better -- feeling like being downstairs, looking forward to going someplace -- anyplace -- other than the hospital. Relieved that the advice the infusion nurse gave me (blame discomfort on the medication, not on the cancer) seems to be apt: the side effects of the last chemo I had, on Dec. 26, apparently are dissipating. It's not the fentanyl that's had me down, or even the tumor. Now that I have causality, I can plan around it and not worry (so much) about it.

What's different is hard to quantify. I am still terribly weak, from being in bed and not eating well. (Lost a couple more pounds in the last four weeks, which made Dr. J frown.) But my stomach does not feel knotted up and I can eat two scrambled eggs without a terrible gurgling, full sensation. Yesterday I ate breakfast; took a shower without feeling lightheaded; tidied up the front parlor; got dressed (including earrings and lipstick); hosted my lifelong friend KK and her sweetheart, who stopped through town on their way somewhere else; ate some salmon M had smoked; played with A; ate a normal amount of salad; had ice cream for dessert; watched a movie with M; and didn't go back upstairs until a reasonable adult time (11:00). In other words, if you discount the two-hour nap after breakfast, pretty fucking close to normal.

Classes start a week from tomorrow. My goals are to write fiction every day, and to build up my strength enough to get my ass to campus, park, walk, and be in class from 5:15 - 9:40 (two classes back-to-back on Mondays).

Me me me. Yawn. M just walked in sans A (who went to lunch at a friend's house) and with the Sunday NYT. There's a nice afternoon unfolding in front of us, and perhaps I'll have something to say about a subject besides my own damn self in the next post.

Here's to 2009.

Book, film, fentanyl, parent tricks!

2008-12-31T09:16:00.008-05:00

I'm reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It made my wish list because of my writing workshop instructor's high recommendation (he characterized Yates as a major 20th C. post-war literary novelist who has gone largely unnoticed and unheralded). I'm about three-quarters through it, and I love it, both for what it does to me as a reader, and for me as a writer. The story is so compelling, yet not much really happens outside the characters' own heads. All about suburban ennui, middle class angst, the search for greater meaning in work and family life, means justifying ends, and traditional vs. progressive roles of men and women as viewed in the fifties. (If a woman doesn't want children, might she be insane?) Pretty bland stuff. But Yates does the trick of energizing a story that in lesser hands would be a yawnfest by infusing the characters with such specific motivations and actions and flaws that there's instant empathy and, therefore, interest. Even the summary narrative and quasi-scenes sing. Describing the worries of two young children who are, compared to the main characters, only roughly sketched in, Yates puts us in their heads just before they drift off to sleep, "as their toes reach for a cooler place in the sheets." Ah! What a great and telling detail (it's warm in the plain little tract house, they've been in bed long enough to be restless, their worries make them tense) -- a clearly human gesture, so commonplace that the mere expression of it is startling. Beautiful.

Another point of admiration is pacing and structure. Each character has a rather complex backstory, but somehow Yates slips it in almost between the lines of the forward action. There's very little "flashback" -- a lot of it comes about as summary narrative in the form of in-the-moment thoughts. So tricky, so seamless. I can't express how much I love this book.

Another inspiration that came my way via Hopie and Andy -- and Netflix -- is the film "Starting Out in the Evening." I hadn't read the novel, but there are many moments in the movie that I am certain come directly from the book, particularly some odd gestures like the graduate student suddenly kissing the old writer's hand; smearing honey on his face; the way they lie side by side, crosswise, on the bed, like corpses. These bits, strung together, pull the characters to life, but it's their motivations -- again, specific, particular, complicated -- that create understanding and empathy. And like Revolutionary Road, nearly all of the "action" is interior: what choices will each person make, and why? How will they respond to each other in light of new information? How will their relationships change? How will they change?

I'm a sucker for complicated characters in ordinary situations, and writing that elevates them to individual human status. I haven't written a lick in two weeks, but because of these two influences, the book and the film, I'm jazzed about picking up the next scene of my novel. Not bad.

Saw Dr. J yesterday, who upped me to 50 mcg fentanyl patches and suggested we take off a couple of weeks before going back for another round of chemo. OK.

After five and a half years, I still feel very much a rookie at this parenting business. However, occasionally I stumble onto something that works and makes me feel like a genius. Therefore, I hereby present a Parent Trick:

M took A to work with him this morning -- she is excited because she will get to sit in on two meetings, which makes her feel very grown up, since "meeting" is the euphemism M and I use when we go somewhere she is not invited. "Miss Amanda is coming over tonight to hang out with you." "Why?" "Mama and Papa have to go to a meeting." Worked for my parents, and so far, it's working for me and M.

Off to read and, perhaps, write.

2008-12-27T19:46:00.002-05:00

Rough week, physically; fentanyl has already lost its magic -- the infusion nurse says my previous use of it probably has something to do with the speedy resistance -- and it's getting harder to eat. Pain is pretty constant, a matter of degrees.

Christmas was nice, although we never did finish decorating that damn tree. Hopie and Andy were with us. Santa brought a microphone for A. Lots of books all around.

I'm waking up at night, twirling. Worried about everything, but specifically:

Getting sicker, and options narrowing
Finances -- if I'm unable to continue with school in a few weeks, I'll lose my stipend, and then what?
How my increasing reliance on bed is affecting A
The mounting pressure on M

A is tucked in, and I'm going to try to watch a movie with M. The treatment I had on Friday has put me under the clouds the last couple of days, so this will be a test of attention. I hope it's a good flick.

Up and not so running

2008-12-20T12:51:00.004-05:00

M and A dragged our Christmas tree home a week ago. M wrestled it into the stand and stood it upright without my help. (A relative term; typically my help comprises holding the trunk with two fingers while he squirms on the floor, tightening and loosening screws, asking, "Is is straight now?") He strung it with big fat colored lights. Two nights later he unstrung the colored lights, which were shorting out periodically, and replaced them with those tiny white lights that everyone decided during the Reagan Eighties were somehow less tacky than the lights of our youth. That's when tinsel took a mortal hit, too, I think.

Now, we have a beautiful tree with lights but no ornaments. Strangely, A hasn't been begging to decorate the tree. She's excited about Christmas, but she's not nutzo like Hopie and I were at her age. On the other hand, she's always been able to entertain herself, to be satisfied, with what's right in front of her. Can't find both shoes she wants to wear? No worries, these others will do nicely, and there are two. That's just how she rolls. Nice little presence in our house.

I, like the tree, am up but not exactly good to go. Treatment yesterday took everything out of me; we got home at 1:30, I went to sleep and woke up six hours later. Last night I slept 12 hours. I still feel groggy, and there is so much I want to do for Christmas. A should have presents gathering under the tree (right now there are Amazon boxes and, I believe, a screwdriver or two). Hopie and I should be conspiring about brunch Christmas morning -- bagels and lox? Something sweet? Who will provide the champagne for mimosas? Or should we get M to mix a batch of bloodys? Which night would Hopie like to bring over some A gifts, so she and Andy don't have to schlepp everything Christmas morning? So far, none of that. I haven't even hung the excellent, sparkly, and very likely magical kissing ball A made in pre-K last year. It really is stunning. Glitter.

M's parents are driving to Atlanta to celebrate their new grandson's first Christmas. He will be almost five months old. He is an excellent baby. M and A are at his folks' house right now, about a half-hour down the road, dropping off goodies for the Atlanta contingent. What's weird about that: I had nothing, but nothing to do with those presents. Not even the wrapping. I don't know what M is sending beyond a little something he carved from wood and painted. (M is a talented artist, imaginative and patient.) I ordered a treat for the baby off the Interwebs and had it sent directly. That's it. I feel like I've dropped off the face of Christmastown. Makes me sad.

Tonight we have our annual secret gift exchange with friends. (I was unsure I'd be up for it, until I went to workshop on Wednesday night, which was at the professor's house and featured chili and lots of wine. It didn't deplete me at all, so I have confidence about tonight.) I'm almost completely unprepared, and have relied on M for help selecting and acquiring the thing. It's 1:30 Saturday afternoon, the babysitter comes at 7:00, and there's still one more element to the present I have to get done before wrapping. Maybe a nap first.

So, in summary: Sloggy sleep, white lights, lots to do, lots foregone, lovely children, just a bit more sleep, please.

Doesn't seem so different from most Christmases, now that I think of it.

Ten things about my father

2008-12-16T21:14:00.003-05:00

My father's name was Gus. Among other things, I remember that he loved:

Naked Lady Night in Waterford -- Nude model, artist friends, sketchbooks, and an egg timer. And wine.
Ideas -- Politics, astronomy, mathematics, economics
His own half-baked theories, presented with conviction -- "I just told you a fact!"
Taking a scorching-hot bath in the late afternoon
Great American and European cities -- San Francisco, New Orleans, Quebec, London, Copenhagen, Prague, Florence
Food and wine -- red wine and red meat prepared "almost bloody" at fine restaurants, or dinner at Eleanor's farm or the Pink House
Painting, drawing, playing the piano
Silliness -- John Cleese, Martin Short, Jon Stewart
Alabama football -- The decal of on the back window of his 1968 Chrysler was Bear Bryant walking on water, with the slogan: "I believe."
His family and friends -- His brother Henry, his wife Faye, me and Hopie, Eleanor, Eleanor's granddaughters (who called him Grandfriend), his granddaughter A (who knew him as Grappa), all the Waterford women who cheerfully spoiled him rotten (who knew they were being totally played), Victor, Harry, Chuck, Clayton, Allen, Andy, and M.

Bloglaw

2008-12-16T14:26:00.005-05:00

Well, after an exhaustive investigation, consisting of googling "blog comments libel" and clicking the first of a bazillion hits, I discovered at least one ruling that finds bloggers cannot be held liable for potentially defamatory comments by anonymous posters, even if the blog owners monitor or limit comments (and thus appear to exercise editorial discretion). The immunity is founded on the Communications Act.

Here's the 2006 law.com article.

What it doesn't address is whether comments posted by identifiable individuals, rather than anonymous posters, might implicate the blog host. And the ruling's more than two years old. Maybe there's been an update.

I became intensely interested in this topic this morning, after an exchange with an author friend whose personal life and character have been savaged in the last few months by a handful of vicious but vocal blog commenters. (The overwhelming majority of Internet posts I've run across regarding this author are reasonable: polite if not extremely complimentary of the writer himself as well as his work.) One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, was a genius who linked to his own, personally identifiable -- as in picture of the guy on the homepage -- livejournal site. I'm all for free speech. I'm also all for manners, generosity, intelligent discourse, honest disagreement and common sense.

Novel crank

2008-12-15T13:14:00.005-05:00

Whew! Third and final submission for the semester to novel workshop: check! This thing is coming slowly for me. As much as I loved poetry workshop this fall, I should have followed the advice of my novel workshop instructor and committed single-mindedly to prose. It was too easy to take a break from the long form (which intimidated me to begin with) and dash off a poem or two instead. And polish. And revise.

Once I get cranking on the story, I love it -- but there's definitely a learning curve when I put it away for more than a couple of days. I reckon it is all about momentum at this point.

Something else that's not working the way I'd envisioned it is this blog. The purpose was to blather about illness here so I could keep it out of my fiction, but you write what you know, I guess. Small wonder there's not one but two characters in the novel with life-threatening conditions, struggling to work out all the dynamics and deal with the pressures I'm slogging through in real life. Bleh. Maybe in revision one of them will turn into an organ grinder whose main conflict is lack of monkey.

M fussed at me this morning for following my own judgment rather than doctor's orders, and saving some antibiotics that were prescribed a couple of weeks ago for now, when I actually do have a mild sore throat and fever. My thinking was that I didn't need them before, and good thing I have them now. M's argument was that the doctor said I needed them and I should have finished them as directed. He doesn't need an even sicker me to take care of. I understand that, but I feel it's my job to monitor my health, not his. If the tables were turned, we'd each be making the other's argument.

A went off to school this morning proudly sporting brand new shiny black patent Mary Janes. The child could not be more fabulous.

Medicine and magic

2008-12-13T18:36:00.003-05:00

The Fentanyl is definitely helping blunt the pain. The cost is full consciousness. Hard to tell yet if part of why I'm sleeping so much is that I'm finally comfortable, or if it's 100% drug-induced. There are other side effects that haven't kicked in yet: all narcotics affect appetite and motility, but apparently there is a new wonder-treatment for that, in the form of an injection. Cause I can't get me enough needles.

Also saw that the CA125 is, finally, going in the right direction. (That's a blood marker that tends to rise with malignancies, though not reliably. Normal is 0-30. Mine was 60-ish a few months ago, and up to 125 several weeks ago. Yesterday it was back down to 75.) I have been willfully not looking at my CA125, but Dr. J mentioned it on Thursday, and so I peeked at the paperwork after the blood draw yesterday, and even though it is notoriously unreliable -- I mean, like, they tell you not to pay attention to it at all after you've had one round of chemo, and I've had, um, I have no idea how many rounds I've had, ten, maybe? -- it's a spirit-lifter when it's on the way toward normal, like a rainbow, elevating but not substantive, but still, why would they bother counting it if it has no bearing at all?

Run-on sentence much?

A and M are downstairs having an earnest conversation about Christmas tree lights. A keeps using the word "magical," not the schmaltzy kind, but the real-live fairy kind, as in, "I bet those lights are magical." M agrees. I love their voices.

Glam Scam

2008-12-13T15:27:00.008-05:00

Yikes! Poor Darin Strauss, whose novel, More Than It Hurts You, I've admired in these pages, is featured in The Village Voice as an author who has been burned (and lived to tell the tale) by blog commenters who never actually read his book. I followed the discussion over at LROD where Strauss first became entangled, after which the blog owner did the right thing and planned a discussion of the book on a certain day -- so as to give the commenters time to actually read the thing. Despite the host's good intentions, the book discussion was a bust. Seems most of the people who'd dissed the author didn't care to do the work of backing up their opinions.

Anyway, the Village Voice article highlights the difficulties of 21st Century noveling. It's not hard enough to write a novel, and to get an agent, and a book contract, and see it published and marketed, perhaps even with a book tour, underfunded though it probably is. No, in this cynical, snide, e-anonymous era, an author must also negotiate (or not) ignorant missives from assholes with keyboards. Success enjoys its own company only for a short time before it devolves into a target for the loudest and crudest and least likely to succeed.

Nobody ever said writing was an especially glamorous business, but yeesh. Sorry this happened to a good guy like Darin Strauss. Sorry it happens to any writer who's achieved what most, if not all, writers strive for.

Is it better to be alert and in pain, or asleep?

2008-12-11T16:02:00.004-05:00

Well, feh. Fentanyl it is. Is there an alternative? There is. It's called OxyContin. You know, the zippy little bump that turns housewives into hobos.

Fentanyl and fat. Lots and lots of fat. Direct quote from Dr. J: "Don't even talk to me about that vitamin water shit; you need calories, and real food."

So, the theory is this: The Fentanyl will smooth out the rough edges, enabling me to feel like, I don't know, getting out of bed and eating a Big Mac. The hydrocodone is for breakthrough pain -- perfectly OK to pop one on top of the Fentanyl. My sister just called to say she is on her way over with "fattening crap." So, when I go in for chemo, I should feel like a shiny new nickel, my body will tolerate it better, I can get enough of it into my system to beat back this fucking tumor, and everything will be rainbows.

Unless I fall asleep. In which case, jamming fat into my face may be a challenge.

My friend Julia is lovely, and so generous. She is a massage therapist. I started seeing her once a week four and a half years ago, when this Second Wave hit. When things were going to hell in 2007, Julia brought her table to our house. She waived her fee. When I was too weak to come downstairs, she jumped up on the bed with me and gave me the most relaxing massages imaginable. It was a point of pride for me when I was well enough to resume our appointments in her cozy office. But this morning, it was pouring rain, I was stressing about the Dr. J appointment, had slept poorly, and so I asked M to call Julia to cancel. Instead... she invited him to take my spot. She is an angel. She told M that she would come to our house next week, to make things easier. I am so grateful to her, but it makes me sad that we are edging once again toward that dark place where just driving ten blocks is too much for me.

Hard to live in the moment. Hard not to anticipate difficulties.

Pain mania

2008-12-09T10:24:00.004-05:00

The psychiatric definition of mania is "profuse and rapidly changing ideas... irritability, and decreased sleep" (Random House Unabridged, 2006). It doesn't mention anything about emotional instability; it seems to do more with cognitive misfirings.

In any event, I am concerned to the point of sleeplessness (would that be overly concerned?) about my prescriptions for nerve pills and pain medication running out. The more I hurt, the worse it is, predictably. Not only did I awaken several times last night frantic that I wouldn't have enough pills to get me through today, but I dreamt I had run out of pain medication. The label says to take a pill every four hours as needed. Lately, I've been living in four hour increments, with the goal of waiting perhaps four and a half hours, even five -- to prove to myself and Dr. J that I am not yet at the point of needing the ghastly Fentanyl.

Cancer presents all manner of choices. Would I prefer to be needled in the arm, or in the chest catheter? Would I like to lose my appetite due to chemo or disease progression? Would I rather be incapacitated by pain or by narcotics? The answers are not as clear as you might expect. Catheter-chemo-narcotics seems logical, until you consider what you're giving up. When the nurse draws blood from the catheter, you are very much, undeniably, for all to see, a cancer patient. When you lose your appetite due to chemo, your strength is depleted exponentially -- not only are you unable to eat enough to sustain your body, but the chemo is making its own caloric and nutritional demands, so it's just freaking impossible to keep up, and you start looking like wasted Cancer Girl (or, in my case, Cancer Boy, as my figure is gone and my britches are all satchel-ass). Narcotics relieve the pain, but they also relieve you of the capacity to think, to write, to recall, and to stay awake for stretches longer than the average three month old baby. Driving is out of the question. Wine. Reading a story to A.

The trick, see, is to hold the need for these choices at bay for as long as possible. Resistance may be futile, but so is drooling one's way through the day.

My friend Amy (my very wise therapist) reminds me that pain is in itself stressful, and crazy-making. Relieve the pain, she says.

I'll pop a nerve pill and consider it. And in the meantime, I will be willfully grateful that I still have choices.

My audience of one, or, "Brains can't save her now!"

2008-12-08T09:57:00.006-05:00

It's quite true that being smart, or generous or funny or happy, or pretty or wealthy, or devout or even centered and mature, holds no sway over cancer. Yes, studies show (apparently) that educated people with health insurance have better prognoses than underprivileged people; it sucks five ways from Sunday to be on the wrong side of middle class in this country. But I'm talking about the individual, cellular level here. Cancer doesn't care how well I did on my SATs.

Which brings me around to that "audience of one" I've been thinking about for a week, since an anonymous commenter posted the provocative idea in response to my extended whine on writing. The connection whacked me in the head by way of a quiet email late last night, barely three days after I'd sent a small batch of poems to the Virginia Quarterly Review: rejection, of course, and not even the typical "though your work shows obvious merit" line they usually give me when they decline my fictions after stewing on them for over a hundred days; I heard the unmistakable sound of the door slam and the lock click on this one. My head spun.

I like smart; I strive for smart. I want to be in that club so damn bad. Among the literary publications and magazines I submit to, I consider several to be whip-smart: VQR, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harper's, Boston Review. Certainly there are others I'd love to get into -- Missouri Review, AGNI, Tin House, Ploughshares, actually there are lots of them -- but I am drawn to the first set due to what I perceive as their intellectual prowess. They are on the pulse, taking on the giant issues of the day, publishing thoughtful essays and critiques alongside accomplished fiction and poetry. Politics is more than a fictive theme in these publications; it's a driving force. They have that big-picture perspective that tags them as brainiacs, the ability not only to see societal patterns in individual acts, but to embrace existing in this most unforgiving space, willfully (rather than haphazardly) presenting a cumulative commentary on the world as it turns in the moment. They live outside their own precious heads.

I suppose it would surprise no one to learn that my parents put a premium on smarts. Or that they were not just politically involved, but prescient, moving their young family from their hometown of Montgomery to Washington, DC in 1965, eschewing the mindset they'd grown up with and making a difficult, determined reach for change, for the future, years before it was even remotely acceptable. They had vision. The acted on it.

I often wonder, if I'd been born in the Depression-era Deep South and come of age under Jim Crow, if I'd have had the vision and the will my parents demonstrated. I do not believe I would.

My mother worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Mike Mansfield's Democratic Policy Committee, got a law degree, and worked at Treasury. A young up-and-coming Washingtonian, everyone said, smart as a whip and ready to do great things. Her trajectory was abruptly reversed by illness; in 1983, she died of cancer. She was 48.

My father ran an association on alcohol and drug policy, and became an international expert on the failure of prohibition, and an advocate for the disease theory of addiction. He was endlessly gracious and had impeccable manners, but privately, he made it understood that he did not suffer fools gladly. By the end of his life (he died in 2004), he refused to suffer them at all -- it seemed he had little tolerance for most people. I understand that to be a classic pattern of aging, where one becomes more oneself as the years go by.

Anyway, hard acts to follow.

I've spent my life trying to live up to the level of smartitude so clearly valued in my family, and feeling out of my league. Trying to compensate, I stacked up achievements instead, as a kind of proof that I was worthy, that there were brains between those ears, even if, during family trips or holidays, I was the clown. I went to an academically middling but artistically competitive university and won every acting award they gave out. Afterwards, I wormed my way in the back door of a TV newsroom and got hired as a reporter, and scarcely three months later, was promoted to anchor and producer. (I was 22 years old.) Lookit, see me, interviewing the people who make the world go round? Telling other people what's news? I would repeat this pattern twice more, in advertising (copywriter to associate creative director within a year), and in the cradle of intellectualism itself, the University (adjunct to fulltime instructor, even lacking an advanced degree, in one year).

All the while, writing. And now, I'm doing what my own mother did, though in a manner decidedly less intellectually robust than law school/Capitol Hill/family: I'm back in school, for an MFA.

It's pretty clear to me that I'm trying to get my father's ear. There's no way he'd be interested in this novel, but the act of completing a novel itself would impress him. My mother loved fiction and poetry, but I didn't get a chance to know her as a grownup, and so any speculation about what kind of novel she might admire feels fruitless.

The motivation behind my achievements thus far has been to prove that I'm smart. I choose smart friends, I married a smart man. I genuinely like smart. Maybe I can write a smart book. The lessons my parents instilled in me help make living artful and worthwhile, but they do not help with simple survival. Where can I go to learn how to fuck with cancer's plan?

I've heard or read more than one writer say, in effect, that they write in order to save their lives -- in order to live. I like that, but I don't think it works that way. Cancer won't care when VQR comes calling. On the other hand, this weekend I recklessly submitted some stories (and a batch of poems) to a bunch of journals, many which are notoriously slow in responding. Six months is a lifetime; who knows if I'll be in any shape to accept an offer of publication? A small act of hope.

Meantime, I'm still trying to envision my audience of one.

Citizen's arrest for public stupidity

2008-12-07T21:17:00.007-05:00

In the Sunday NYT, Timothy Egan crawls way out onto the elitist limb where I and many others have perched, squirming, lo these last eight years, averting our gaze as the seeds of anti-intellectualism sprouted into an insidious, full-on clusterfuck of stone idiocy in hardback and trade paperback. Hyperbole aside, it's nice to have some company out here; someone who is willing and able to get published his spot-on indignation over those meatheads, presumably in possession of opposable thumbs but nevertheless lacking the ability to rub a noun and a verb together, who insist on sucking up the oxygen in American bookstores. All two of them.

It's not that I begrudge idjits their God-given right to large advances, publicists, and marketing. It's that these historically precious resources -- the advances, not the idjits -- have become practically extinct in the last, what?, week, since the publishing industry went off the rails and onto life support. Yes, it was largely self-inflicted (see "last eight years" above), and precipitated by the Not So Great Depression, certainly. Still. The choice to offer Whalin' Sarah Palin a seven-figure book deal while edging out, I don't know, me, is hardly a moral dilemma on the scale of Sophie's Choice. Who shall thrive in difficult times? The fittest! Who shall be published in a whack market? The writer! Who shall be left to do the necessary work of fixing toilets? Joe the Motherfucking Plumber!

See? Not so hard.

Conundrum

2008-12-06T22:17:00.006-05:00

Ooph. No chemo yesterday due to a fever I didn't realize I had. Also, I had a pretty intense meltdown and called an audible just as Elaine-the-best-infusion-nurse-ever leaned down to access my port (for the uninitiated, which I hope you are, that means just as she was about to stick the IV needle into the catheter in my chest to draw blood for lab work). "Do we have to do this today," I asked. The answer was no, absolutely not, good call, way to take control, take a week off and feel better, we'll re-do the schedule, going to call your doctor, be right back.

Well, here's the thing: because of escalating symptoms, I am scared the chemo is not working. Yet the nurses and my doctor tell me I haven't been on it long enough for it to do its thing; I have yet to complete a three-week cycle. So, while I'm afraid it isn't working and we're wasting valuable time, I'm also afraid to skip it, and frustrated that my body finds ways to confound our best efforts. First my blood counts crashed, now a sudden fever. And I keep getting sicker.

Cancer Blows, Reason #973: BORING. The world folds in on itself. All I talk about, think about, write about, is me. My body, my illness, my pain, my blood, my cells. Cancer snares me in a self-perpetuating web of self-involvement, and bores the everliving shit out of me.

What were we thinking?

2008-12-05T10:30:00.003-05:00

Off to Week Three of the new chemo regimen, and hoping my blood counts aren't too shot to get the medicine. M is taking me to the infusion center, and my friend Amy will meet us there and hang out with me so M can run a thousand errands. His brother is flying in this afternoon to surprise their father for his seventieth birthday, and for the sake of ease, we somehow planned to have dinner here tonight. M has made a birthday cake and hired Chef Bill to whip up a fabulous dinner... but M still has to run to the airport to pick up his brother, pick up the food, get the table set, pick up A from school, etc. How is this easier than going to a restaurant? Obviously we were out of our minds when we planned this. Shit, we still haven't entirely cleared the table of Thanksgiving linens and assorted utensils. Brother is spending the night with us tomorrow night, which calls for some attention to the guest room. I bet he'd like sheets.

My aim, if I'm feeling up to it, is to help M as much as I can, and possibly do some thinking on that "ideal reader" issue a commenter raised a couple of days ago, and post here later this afternoon.

Or maybe a nap.

My body not my body

2008-12-03T23:27:00.007-05:00

Sometimes it's hard to determine if I'm following my body's signals or creating them. It's become a struggle, in the last two to three weeks, to keep a normal schedule. Each day I am a bit more exhausted and uncomfortable than the day before, so I limit my outings, do less, lose stamina, and can handle even less the next day. It's not sleep I crave, it's oxygen, nutrients -- fortification. Something substantial to give me weight, to anchor me to the ground. The sensation I have is that my body is a shell, hard-edged but hollow, and drifting.

M skipped his own class tonight, left A at home with her sitter, and took me to school. He hung out for three hours while I was in novel workshop, then drove me home. By the time we walked in the door, I felt completely spent: lightheaded, empty, aching. I did nothing all day, literally, in an attempt to store up energy. Marking up manuscripts and writing workshop letters was just ridiculously difficult, draining. I took a shower and had to rest for fifteen minutes before getting dressed -- then had to rest again.

I catch my image in the bathroom mirror these days and see a woman receding: drawn face, whispy hair, pale eyes. I look sick. I look old and hunkered. I am not old. I wonder if this is how elderly people feel -- is cancer as withering as aging, or more, or less?

Everyone knows how depleting chemotherapy is. I'd argue, though, that illness itself is the most challenging, the most damaging. It's impossible to feel like the medicine is working when the medicine is making you feel like shit. Or is it the cancer that's beating you up? Is the persistent pain a sign the chemo is not checking the tumor at all, or that the disease is progressing, or possibly both? Fuck all, you see the dilemma.

Still, fighting through penetrating exhaustion -- there should be a word for this kind of tired -- to do normal things, like going to class, ultimately helps me feel stronger by giving me the illusion of control. Which is all any of us has to begin with.

Thank God for M.

Things that help me feel strong

2008-12-02T11:01:00.004-05:00

This week's reminders:

A laser-like focus on writing, on structure
A fridge stocked with food from sweet friends
Writing; making progress with the novel, especially when it comes easily
Watching A Room With A View in bed while M carves wine stoppers in the chair beside me
Helping other writers work out narrative and structure problems
Reading a story or passage or poem that leaves me breathless (Brodsky's "Stone Villages")
Not worrying about prepping the guest room for M's brother's visit this weekend
Getting dressed and walking to the cafe -- not that I've done that lately, but maybe today
Watching A recognize the irony, and the humor, in her own selfish response to that classic motherly lesson about children around the world having little to eat (A, whining: "My tummy hurts because I ate too much." Me: "We're lucky, yadayada." A: "Well, I'm not feeling lucky right now." --> laughter)
M and A

A Kerouac kick in the pantaloons

2008-12-01T12:38:00.003-05:00

After all my boo-hooing about not feeling like a real writer (and using the feeling as an excuse to, um, not write), a very kind writer named Manuel sent me this classic Jack Kerouac quote (6/22/47)*:

"Another thought that helps a writer as he works along -- let him write his novel 'the way he'd like to see a novel written'. This helps a great deal freeing you from the fetters of self-doubt and the kind of self-mistrust that leads to over-revision, too much calculation, preoccupation with 'what others would think.' Look at your own work and say, 'This is a novel after my own heart!' Because that's what it is anyway, and that's the point -- it's worry that must be eliminated for the sake of individual force. In spite of all this insouciant advice, I myself advanced slowly today, but not poorly, working on the final draft of the chapter. I'm a little rusty. Oh and what a whole lot of bunk I could write this morning about my fear that I can't write, I'm ignorant and worst of all, I'm an idiot trying to achieve something I can't possibly do. It's in the will, in the heart! To hell with these rotten doubts. I defy them and spit on them. Merde!"

Misery, meet company.

And thanks to Manuel, who is working on a book he expects to finish at the end of this month.

Off now to work on mine. 'Cause did you know? I'm writing a novel.

* From Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947 - 1954

Writers, real writers

2008-11-29T14:11:00.009-05:00

I had chemo yesterday and I feel like poo, don't feel like thinking about it, so instead I'm thinking about people who inspire me.

I had the pleasure and the pain, late Thanksgiving night, to run across the New York Times 100 Notable Books 2008 list. Pleasure because, obviously, it's a list of books I've either read and loved/admired or hated and possibly admired, or books I might love or hate. (I stop reading a book pretty quickly if I don't at least admire the writing.) Pain because it was late, I was exhausted, and couldn't stop following the links, googling the authors, and updating my wish list. Although I often disagree with the NYTBR, reading it is like having a discussion with other like-minded, book-obsessed people: always stimulating. I was heartened to discover that many of the books that made the 2008 fiction/poetry notable list were debuts. Maybe I'm mis-remembering years past (or, more likely, failing to remember at all), but it seems there is a bumper crop of first novels, story collections, and poetry books this year. Nam Le's The Boat has been on my list since it came out last spring. (Also, bonus, he's brainy and gorgeous.)

I could go on for days about books I hope to read, but the broader point of this post is to acknowledge the authors who manage to write at all. I am reminded constantly how hard it is to write, never mind to write well. I can come up with a thousand excuses to procrastinate; many a successful effort is cataloged in this blog. Drafting this novel of mine has proven to be more of a struggle than I'd expected. Not the actual writing so much, which I enjoy and comes easily, but the ass-in-the-chair aspect of it. I'm good at improvising, so I trust myself to follow the characters and come up with a compelling story. I'm good at writing (I think) on the sentence level, and even on the chapter level. But because I've never tried a novel before, I don't know if I'll be any good at the entirety, at finishing -- and I get lazy quick when I'm not certain I'll succeed. (See: Algebra I; high school; disaster.)

I'm impressed with the other writers in my novel workshop. They are writing. They are not afraid of the mess. They are real writers.

I admire my instructor, who has written a dozen novels and has an extraordinarily loyal readership. He is a real writer.

Likewise J. Robert Lennon and Rhian Ellis, both authors, both steeping in fiction (teaching, running a book store), both blogging about writing, reading, and publishing at the smart and thought-provoking Ward Six. They are real writers.

Poet Seth Abramson, a current Iowa Writers' Workshop student, has recently won some high-profile accolades for his work, and his first book is coming out next spring. Seth is a real writer.

I admire my friend Lily, whose first novel has won or been shortlisted for awards and fellowships, and is now being shopped around by an excellent agent. (Lily also started submitting short stories to journals just a few months ago, and already has met with success. Go, Lily!) Lily is a real writer.

And just today, I read that my friend Valley just completed the first draft of her first novel. An Anne Lamott-style shitty first draft, according to the author. I seriously doubt it's shitty; I know it's thrilling for Valley. It thrills me, and I haven't read a lick of it. But Valley makes her living as a writer and book reviewer. Valley is a real writer.

I've always made my living as a writer, too -- journalism, then (God help us) the more lucrative and much less substantial advertising. Still, while I think of myself as a writer, I don't consider myself the type of writer I want to be: a writer of fiction and poetry. A novelist. At the moment I feel like a tourist, a dabbler. It's not because publication eludes me; I know that publication doesn't amount to authenticity. It's that I don't have that ass-in-the-chair ethic yet, and I don't know that I'll ever have it. I write when it's fun for me (i.e. easy); I write when there's a deadline (i.e. out of fear). If left to my own devices, however -- I know my own propensity toward laziness -- no matter how much I want to say I have written a novel, I doubt I'd have the discipline to do it without prodding. Saying I am writing a novel is painful and embarrassing, because I feel like a poseur. It feels disrespectful, somehow, to make a claim on that sacred territory.

I don't know what the fuck I'll do when I'm finished with my degree and have no one expecting twenty pages of me every couple of weeks.

Meantime, cheers and great thanks to the real writers who help me, for the moment, keep the faith.

Steroid psychosis

2008-11-24T10:24:00.003-05:00

What a week. I had chemo on Friday morning, then gave a reading Friday evening. The reading went exceptionally well -- I felt calm, comfortable, and the story was well-received by the 75 or so people in the audience. Very energizing. Then I came home and slept, hard. M's parents came by yesterday and, unlike the immediate aftermath of most Topo Gigio treatments, I was perky enough to hang out with them for a couple of hours. That's major progress.

You'd think the fact that I'm getting a slightly lower dose of chemo than before (which actually adds up to a higher amount over three weeks) is what made the difference, but you'd be wrong! We also ditched the Decadron, a steroid that helps quell nausea and, incidentally, didn't anyone tell you this?, just a little tip, can bring on the batshit crazies in some huge percentage of patients. When I told Dr. J a couple of weeks ago that for three days after chemo, the world seemed about to end, he immediately suggested we drop the Decadron. But it was the infusion nurse who snapped it into perspective for me and M on Friday: "Steroid psychosis! We see it all the time with Decadron. Google it when you get home."

So. While I'm thrilled to know that the source of my... how you say... emotional delicacy was a pre-med, and apparently a non-essential one at that (no horking at all without it, phew!), I find myself in a familiar state of dismay over having lost all that time to crying; over freaking out my family; over assuming, as I often do, that nothing can be done and I must take my lumps. A long-term cumulative effect of sliding health, trauma and chemo -- and I've had "a helluva lot," as Dr. J never fails to remind me -- is fuzzy memory. So I don't recall being out of my mind with Decadron when I was on Gemzar or cisplatin (or whatever it was) last year. M does remember it; when he googled "steroid psychosis" this morning, he said it all looks very familiar, and I am not alone.

One of my favorite shows on the teevee is "House," as I've mentioned before. Part of what I love about it, aside from the consistently complex characters, is that the medical cases always present the physician's paradox: how to save the patient without killing the patient? I guess the fish an oncologist is frying really are that big; the smaller ones (what's a little psychosis in the grand scheme of things?) don't seem worth mentioning.

The week overall: a net gain.

Procrastinating

2008-11-18T14:07:00.005-05:00

Well, putting it off will bite you in the butt every time.

I've put off paying bills this month, and -- woopsie! -- Comcast got so testy they disassembled the series of tubes that connects our house to the Interwebs. (I'm writing this from campus.)
I've also had great success this past week putting off the novel writing. So much so that I have a chapter due tonight for Workshop tomorrow... and as is apparent, I'm blogging instead.
I have piles of emails to go through.
I'm wearing superstylish ca. 1997 jeans because I've made such a project of laundry it just seems too, too much. I don't even have to schlep it anywhere; we have a lovely washer and dryer in a huge laundry room on the second floor of our house. Literally, it takes three minutes to get a load going. Too much.
Ancillary to Point 1 above (am I using that word correctly?) is that I have put off sending a chunky October invoice on a freelance job. Getting paid would certainly make paying bills less stressful.
Now that the election is over, M and I are in negotiations with our souls over whether to ditch cable TV. Part of what makes that idea palatable, in addition to the savings, is that pretty much everything is available for free viewing on the Internets. That is, as long as one pays the Comcast bill on time. Also, we have not actually sat down with the Comcast bill to see how much money we would, in fact, save because, um, it's a bill, and I'm putting off looking at bills.

Feh.

New plan

2008-11-13T22:59:00.004-05:00

I had a good appointment with Dr. J today. Good in that he was all, Sure, let's try that! Sounds good! I told him I thought the blood counts crashing a few weeks ago was an anomaly and he agreed to an accelerated chemo schedule. Instead of every other week, we're going for three weeks on, one week off (which apparently is the protocol for Topo Gigio). Cutting back on the Decadron (steroid) to try to smooth out my crazies. And the physical exam was OK, i.e. soft, smooth belly, no apparent -- what? -- lumps? Yik. Anyway, I am more confident when we're aggressive.

I'm still in pretty persistent pain but my outlook is more hopeful. And I got a swell birthday card from A today, with drawings and declarations of love for Mama. And a cool, original Modern Library edition of Absalom, Absalom! from my sweetheart M, an appropriately Southern gothic choice under the circumstances. And cards and calls and treats from friends and family. Nice day.

Oil pastels

2008-11-09T16:36:00.003-05:00

After a rocky weekend, I've perked up considerably this afternoon. A and I are hanging out in the front parlor -- there's a beautiful glow from the changing leaves outside, and lamplight against the orange ceiling -- while M bakes bread and makes chicken stock and beef stew. I hear the football game on the TV. Very cozy. A has decided to mount an art show after Thanksgiving, and is inspired by the fall colors. She is using oil pastels to sketch trees. She says she prefers them to crayons, which are "baby," and to regular pastels, which are too chalky and smeary. This is some little artist we have here.

It felt good to get out a little this afternoon. A was playing with some friends across the river, so M and I got some coffee and walked around the neighborhood while the sun was still out. Now, it's cloudy and cool and just beautiful.

Busy week ahead; I hope to hang onto this good energy.

Chemo today

2008-11-07T08:32:00.003-05:00

M is going with me this morning for what I hope will be an efficient infusion. My faith in this drug continues to wane because I am not feeling better, I'm feeling worse. Pain is more of a constant than an incidental, and eating reliably causes increasing discomfort. I'm getting to the point where I just don't feel like doing much of anything; going to campus is a major deal even though it's only ten blocks away. Just getting myself into the shower and walking a block to Starbuck's is now something I negotiate with myself every morning. Unless my feet are out in front of me, I'm uncomfortable, so staying in bed seems reasonable. That's not good.

Next Thursday we meet with Dr. J to see where we are and make adjustments. A year ago when we saw him on Nov. 13, he made the glorious suggestion that we stop the cisplatin, as it seemed to have done its thing. Much celebrating. Next week, I'm afraid he's going to come at me with Fentanyl patches and the news that we've exhausted our chemo options.

I'm nowhere near ready to hear that.

Already doing the right thing

2008-11-06T17:32:00.005-05:00

Can a Web site change a nation? Of course not. But it can start to change some minds, win over dissenters, and pull people together toward common goals.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have launched change.gov -- and the site's inclusiveness follows through on Obama's election night pledge to listen to everyone, especially those who disagree with him, and to be a President for all Americans. It invites visitors to share their ideas and their stories, and to participate in government. It is comprehensive and beautifully designed and right on time.

I am so down with these guys. I know they're going to make mistakes, but man are they good.

Did Bush bust my artistic ability?

2008-11-06T13:56:00.006-05:00

Blogging over at the excellent Ward Six, author J. Robert Lennon considers the positive effect of an Obama presidency on his own ability to write fiction. JRL's startling observation is that for the last eight years, Americans -- and American artists -- have toiled and ultimately faltered under the weight of a political ideology that displays roiling contempt for the very people it purportedly serves.

I've always been well aware how deliberately the Bush administration has run counter to my personal morality, and have indeed been steeping in an ugly brew of anger. I have considered the corrosive effect the Bush/Rove contempt has had on the constituency as a whole (the national mood). For some reason, I have never applied it to my personal psyche. I don't know that I feel as directly affected as JRL seems to feel, but I think he has a point: if there's been a collective impact, it has to have been borne by individuals. And it's going to show up in art, and perhaps in the creative impulse, or lack thereof.

At the least, JRL has raised the possibility for me to blame any troubles I've had writing in the last few years squarely on the sloping shoulders of George W. Bush.

Will writing fiction become less burdensome for me under Obama? I don't know; I guess it depends on whether I find greater motivation in repression or liberation. I think this blog proves I'm pretty damned motivated by my anger. The word "spew" springs to mind. And apart from the current whackjobs in the White House, I have plenty of things to fear and doubt.

Sure, I hope writing gets easier for me. If it doesn't, though, no matter; I'll take Obama's promise of hope and optimism and sure-footed leadership, for my little daughter's sake. For the first time since I became a mother five years ago, I feel I am no longer inadvertently imperiling my (Chinese-born) child by raising her in a careening, rudderless nation. That's worth all the stories I can write in a lifetime.

WEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-11-04T23:05:00.000-05:00

PRESIDENT OBAMA

Will gladly say so long to this kind of fun

2008-11-04T11:56:00.003-05:00

As though we need further proof that SaPa is a dipshit or a snake, or both: after voting in Wasilly this morning, Palin was asked whom she voted for. She demurred.

Either she has the reasoning ability of a preschooler, or she voted for felonious Internets titan Ted "The Tube" Stevens.

Psst, Gov'nor! I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours.

My own experience was easy-peasy. Small line, helpful -- even cheerful -- poll volunteers, no trouble with the touchy touchscreen, and now I'm sipping free Starbucks.

Hopie and Andy are coming over tonight to watch the returns. Virginia polls close at 7:00, and I just read on Pollster.com that we won't see any of those super-reliable exit polls until 5:00 or later. Maybe I can get some writing done today.

Happy, happy election day!

So proud!

2008-11-04T08:58:00.004-05:00

It's raining and chilly in our Virginia town this morning, but the voting lines are long. M took A to our polling place at 6:15, and they were done by 7:30. M said the people in line were upbeat and excited, and that A was so well-behaved that people commented on her composure.

I expect the wait to extend throughout the day, so I'll walk up the street as early as I can after a 10:15 business call. There's a Starbucks on the corner where I'll wait in yet another line to claim my free cup of coffee.

I go all weak-kneed over the displays of patriotism and love of democracy that come out, despite the ugliness, on election day. Very moving, very inspiring.

Very determined to send McPalin back to Arilaska.

VOTE!

Frayed nerves

2008-11-03T11:38:00.000-05:00

Jumping out of my skin today.

You?

And the winner is...

2008-10-31T13:28:00.003-04:00

M won a pumpkin carving contest at work with this entry, lovingly named "Awkward Teen-O-Lantern."

Pulled me right on outta that funk I was in.

Stupid

2008-10-30T19:42:00.007-04:00

So much to ridicule tonight, starting with kindergarten, whose grownups apparently are unacquainted with five- and six-year-old people. This week's Big Dumb Idea concerns a Halloween party during school tomorrow. Here's what I think when I hear "Halloween party": Halloween costumes. Yes? No. The directive is for the child to "dress as your favorite story book character." Never mind that my child wants to be a fairy queen ballerina ghost, a costume she has been planning for weeks to wear for Halloween, which is an awesome fake holiday and which tomorrow is. Halloween. Other children may dream of dressing up as spiders, or witches, or hobos. Because it's Halloween all across this great land of ours tomorrow. Halloween, not to be confused with Story Book Day, which is not a fake holiday in America because it is lame.

So, fucked once again by kindergarten and the evil choice between fighting the stupid and ensuring our daughter doesn't feel hopelessly odd and left out, we must now come up with an additional costume based on an emergency favorite story book character, which we are having a tough time doing because we are frightened of, not delighted by, wolves and trolls and chubby brother-and-sister teams who shove old ladies into ovens.

According to the overinvolved, understimulated kindergarten party planners, making our original, excellent fairy queen ballerina ghost costume just wasn't challenging enough.

Stupid kindergarten.

In other dumb, nine percent of eligible voters still have not made up their minds. Oh here's a choice for you, intelligent, ethical leadership to dig you out of the ditch you've put yourself in or a flaming vat of lying dogshit. Hmm. Don't know? FAIL. Forfeit turn. Disallowed to vote.

Honestly, I don't care what the undecideds do; I just want them to go away. I want to stop hearing about them, their smug, coy "power," how they're the key to the election. Get the fuck out of the way already.

Stupid.

This, too, from today's boneheaded McPalin dolts.

And this, from the Old (and I mean old) Guard.

And this.

Oh, and there's this crap to look forward to.

All this, and so much more, in just one day. And I didn't even have to go off the blogs.

UPDATE 10/31/08

God in heaven, this AP article puts the number of "persuadables" at 14% and clarifies who these people are: the accepted euphemism is "low-information voters," but I prefer the more accurate moniker, "stupid fuckers."

Funnel

2008-10-28T12:09:00.002-04:00

Several things give me the sensation lately that the world is shrinking -- my world is shrinking. The election first. The closer we get, the narrower my reading becomes; in the last couple of weeks, I've found myself sticking close by and constantly refreshing WashPo, NYT, HuffPo, Politico, Wonkette. My fingers type the URLs almost automatically. I have no use for other news, never mind other outlets. I have fallen off my habitual grazing of writing sites in favor of all politics, all the time. I'm a junkie who can stand ever less time between hits.

Second is writing. The novel is stalled. Anxieties burst forth in short poems. Nothing is lyrical anymore -- everything I write is pistol fire. Time seems short.

Third is this fucking illness. Less time between hydrocodone; whereas a few weeks ago I could count on several hours at least of feeling OK, these days I'm hurting within an hour of getting out of bed. When I eat, it no longer surprises me that I feel like shit immediately after. One of the chemo nurses told me to blame the medicine, not the disease, but it's hard when I feel progressively worse.

Socially I'm caving in on myself. One of the hardest parts of being sick (and being treated with poisons) is that it becomes increasingly difficult to plan ahead. I've been invited to a birthday tea for a close friend this Sunday, but I know I'll be feeling like hell by 3:00. Should I accept the invitation and hope for the best? My inclination is to let everyone off the hook and send regrets.

A's birthday party was a low point last Sunday. I'd had chemo two days earlier, and was in full-throttle freakout (steroids? anti-nausea meds?) by the time the guests arrived, a blathering snotty mess. The prospect of functioning -- i.e. acting like a real grownup person -- in the thick of a dozen kids and their parents was just overwhelming. I was so afraid of pulling attention away from A and having the highbeams on me, I didn't make it downstairs until the tail end, hence disappointing the most important person in my life on the most important day in hers. Fucking awful.

I was very, very sick in 2007. Gather-the-family kind of sick. And I recall the perverse urge to pull away from A. I don't remember much about that spring, but I do remember thinking that she was going to have to get used to me not being there, that she and M were going to have to learn to do things without me. It must seem crazy -- it has seemed nuts to me, until recently. Now, though, I'm getting to the point where the logic doesn't seem quite so twisted. I understand the impulse, even as I reject it. That scares me.

So. Shrinking, funneling, retreating. Illness is isolating. Cancer is a whirlpool.

Rain

2008-10-25T17:08:00.003-04:00

Just when the leaves start to get beautiful, we get rain. It happens every autumn; this year, after an exceptionally dry summer, we welcome it, but still -- I'm not ready for those leaves to wash down into the gutters.

A spent the night with her lifelong friend Tori last night (Tori is also from China, adopted by her mother about eight months before A came home), and M went to a friend's house to prep a spit for a pig roast today. They're both there now. I hope A gets some seasonal new clothes for her birthday tomorrow. My sister and M's parents and her godparents can always be counted on for an updated wardrobe at birthday time. God knows she needs it; we sent her out today in a summer dress with a too-small sweater. It's alarming how children shoot up like sprouts after a downpour, and I have a thing--a leftover anxiety from my own childhood when I felt I had nothing but ill-fitting clothes, too tight, too short, too worn--that A will have clothes in her closet that fit and are appropriate for the season. I am projecting, of course, but I think this is a basic thing that will help her know in her bones that the grownups are paying attention, and are actively taking care of her. Clean sheets, clean clothes that fit, clean fingernails, art supplies, books and music. Basics.

My treatment yesterday went fine, but the aftermath was, and continues to be, trying. I don't know if it's the Zofran or the steroids that make me crazy-tense, but I've been alternating fits of hollering at the TV and crying for the last two days. Going to have some hot tea and read Everyman, which we're discussing in Novel Workshop on Wednesday. I also have a new poem to turn in on Monday. Strike that: I have to write a new poem for Monday.

Feeling weak and cranky, but I got A's birthday presents wrapped and ready for tomorrow. Art supplies, a cookbook, a fancy math set with a compass and protractor, Hello Kitty stationery, peach hand lotion, a CD of Chinese Lullabies by the Beijing Children's Choir (her old copy is scratched, but she still tries to play it), some face paints, and a "diamond" ring from the vintage shop down the street (which M let her pick out last week).

She'll be six tomorrow. I hope she knows, or comes to understand, how desperately M and I love her.

So over it

2008-10-23T16:57:00.013-04:00

I haven't written as regularly in the last week or so for several reasons. The Republicans have jumped the shark -- or, more precisely, continue to jump the shark, over and over again, day after day. Just when you think it cannot possibly get more shrill or ridiculous, out comes some random asshole suggesting Palin's big shopping accident is somehow eclipsed by Obama's use of his campaign plane to fly to Hawaii to visit one of the two most important women in his life, the grandmother who raised him, who is on the verge of death. And look, over there is Nancy Pfuckinpooter insisting that oh I can't even tell what evil she is trying to weave on MSNBC today, I'm too weary and disgusted to follow along with these desperate blowhards. Not to mention the candidates, one of whom (and she shall remain nameless) cannot define "preconditions" in the context of international relations or, shit, anything else, and who thinks elitist refers to "anybody who thinks they're better than anyone else." GAH. I am ready for the circular firing squad to commence. Please, God, let the Earth spin off its axis just long enough to create a 12-day rip in the time-space continuum; I'll gladly forfeit the next two weeks if it'll spare the nation this stinking nonsense. Really, am I the only one who could use a nice long nap? Not even my vast supply of nerve pills, generously dispensed, seems to be helping.

The other thing is that I feel like crap most days, which is not conducive to writing about feeling like crap. I have a chemo scheduled for tomorrow, and I have to say -- bring it on. Very anxious about this week on, week off pattern. As in politics, two weeks is an eternity and the bastards may just have enough time to get the best of us. So, scared.

We're throwing a birthday party for A on Sunday afternoon, for which I am trying to gather, or at least conserve, energy. For reasons unknown to me or M, she has taken to calling herself "Hip-hop," so the sheet cake we ordered (M usually makes the birthday cake, but we're going low-effort this year) will feature a festive pink Hello Kitty motif and the message, "Happy Birthday, Hip-hop!" I adore my almost-six-year-old girl.

Random anxieties, worries

2008-10-20T20:59:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: Barack Obama is suspending his campaign for a real, legitimate, heartbreaking reason. This trumps the tally of pitiful distractions below. Prayers to the Obama family tonight.

As my mother used to warn when I was five and whining: tone. Tone.

Limbaugh and other conservative mouthpieces stirring the uglypot
Ricky Dicky Davis, Part A: spicing up said uglypot with stale Rev. Wright dogshit
McPalin attributing more credibility to some random fake plumber's assessment of their opponent as "socialist" than they do to anyone with an actual brain
Nancy Poopinfucker making her own crappy contribution to the uglypot with her assertion that fully one-third of Virginia isn't real
Ricky Dicky Davis, Part B: implying there's something sinister about millions of people just like me and M donating an average of $86 to Obama/Biden
Bachmann Bachmann Bachmann

God, there's too much to fully catalog. On top of it, I don't feel well. My energy is waning and the I'm eating more hydrocodone than ever. A asked tonight when I am going to feel better, because she wants to go places with me. My time with her lately has been limited to snuggling on the big blue sofa, or in bed.

Anxious and worried.

Yes we can!

2008-10-18T16:45:00.004-04:00

100,000 supporters in St. Louis. This is thrilling! Oh, my.

Why authenticity matters

2008-10-18T10:26:00.005-04:00

The New York Times runs a story on Cindy McCain's experience as a political wife in and out of Washington. The details of her story are not new -- her implication in the Keating Five thing, her addiction to pain killers, her isolation. What's interesting is Cindy McCain's announcement to British media that she intends to use Princess Diana as an example for comporting herself.

Never mind that Princess Diana was, well, a royal princess. My five-year-old likes that idea, too. Forget for a moment all of Diana's well-aired psychological and emotional difficulties. The qualities Cindy McCain chooses to focus on and attempt to emulate are Diana's lauded efforts on behalf of the world's poorest, neediest people, particularly children. AIDS babies, land mine victims, sick orphans.

The trouble with Cindy mimicking Diana's humanitarian efforts is that the impulse is at odds with Cindy McCain's life story and, as is clear from her record, her true nature. Yes, there have been many philanthropists, primarily women, who train their sights on the world's least fortunate to mask the pain of their own misfortune; even lazy armchair psychologists like me know that the do-gooders relate to the suffering of others because in it, they recognize something about themselves. Diana is the poster child for this Poor Little Rich Girl Makes Good dynamic.

But Diana's impulse seems to have been genuine, a repudiation of the difficulties of a failed marriage played out on a world stage, an extension of her expressive love of children and empathy for the downtrodden, and in keeping with her inner life. Organic; authentic.

Unlike Diana, Cindy McCain's difficulties have been entirely her own doing, in direct relation to her outsize ambitions. She was the only congressional spouse implicated in the Keating Five scandal. She was not merely a troubled political spouse who found comfort in pain killers and came to be dependent on them; she stole from her own charity to support her addiction and lied about it to salvage her husband's career (and in the process, threw other careers, not to mention needy people, under the bus).

It's all well and good to admire the charitable example set by Diana. It's quite another to announce to the world that you intend to follow Diana's example when you've already wrecked your reputation doing just that. (The article reiterates that Cindy McCain never actually went to Rwanda in her fabled 1994 humanitarian mission during the genocide.) She's a poseur. She has proven repeatedly that her first interests are herself and her husband's career. I wouldn't trust Princess Cindy to collect money at the PTA bake sale, never mind as an ambassador for the very people on earth who can least afford her politically expedient motivations and attendant fuckups.

Running a sleazy, shameless campaign that is by all accounts antithetical to his own true nature has proven unsustainable for the multiple personality disordered John McCain, and probably doomed his shot at the White House. And while it's fine that that Cindy ask herself WWDD -- there are few among us, after all, who actually live up to our ideal selves -- her chances of attaining anything close to the grace to which she allegedly aspires are dim indeed.

Mrs. McCain, we knew Diana. Diana was a friend of ours. You, madam, are no Diana.

Pulling my hair out

2008-10-15T16:07:00.006-04:00

Figuratively, literally.

I'm going to miss the first hour or so of the debate tonight due to novel workshop. My money is on McCain raising the Ayers thing, using the same transparently flawed logic he has brazenly tried to advance for the last ten days: he'll claim he doesn't care about some "washed up old domestic terrorist" or Obama's gay Connecticut marriage to Ayers, blessed by that scary Rev. Wright who hates America, but that the American people of whom Obama is not one deserve to hear the truth and that it's a question of truthfulness and truthiness and truishness, which ryhmes with Jewishness, which reminds him, did you see that the socialist Obama's own Negro supporter, Jesse Jackson, is warning that the terrorist Obama administration will abolish Israel from the face of the earth, and every grandma and grandpa in the Sunshine State had better run for their lives? I'm just sayin.

Elsewhere, from atop my head, my hair continues to flee. Trying as desperately as my man Joe Biden to sidestep the combover. I've asked M to let me know when it's too sketchy to ignore -- when the part is a bit too wide, too white -- so I can avoid embarrassing myself and everyone else and put a hat on already.

Was all weepy and hurty yesterday. I think it must have something to do with the decimated blood cells... I felt tres fragile all day, and fussy last night. Keeping up with economic and campaign news didn't help, but I'm a junkie. Today's better, me-wise; the economy persists in sucking out loud.

And the infant mortality rate is, shamefully, higher than that of 28 other countries.

And the Dow is down 735 points.

And we'll all be eating beanie-weenies and bark inside a month.

But, yeah, come on, McCain. Tell me all about Bill Ayers.

Ten more things

2008-10-12T21:04:00.003-04:00

While I don't subscribe to the notion that a sunny attitude will upend cancer, I do believe in making myself feel good. You know, for the hell of it. A periodic inventory of gifts and graces helps me feel strong. This week's list:

Listening to A's side of a phone conversation with her new baby cousin and his parents
Being on the couch with the Sunday NYT, student poems, and my laptop
The smell of chicken stew M is cooking
Utter certainty, confirmed with every news cycle, that we're right; that the nation will do the right thing and choose optimism over cynicism; that the batshit haters are the minority; that people are good
Going all day on one hydrocodone
Being well prepared for meetings at school tomorrow
Hearing all about my child's lovely manners from a friend who hosted A for a playdate
Talking with my sister-in-law, who is glowing and clearly over the moon ten weeks after giving birth
Writing a poem about illness that is not at all true (or at least is not my experience)
M

Are we done now?

2008-10-11T16:08:00.007-04:00

Newsflash: Sarah Palin abused her power and is in violation of Alaska state law. Essentially, Troopergate is a mini-scandal about unethical behavior. Unethical behavior from Sarah Palin. Could we not have dispensed with this nitwit Jerry Springer episode before it was thrust onto the world stage? We could have. But we were being mavericky in our selection of an unknown as a running mate, and we were too giddy with our silly surprising selves to save The Country We Love Above Ourselves the embarrassment of the Palin Posse even though we knew -- or pretended we knew -- about this investigation before naming her and her dipshit husband and her nineteen children or grandchildren or auxiliary children or whoever they are to the ticket.

Newsflash: (Didn't we already do one of these?) John McCain makes an attempt, at last, albeit halfassed, after weeks of stoking the flames, to tamp down the seething mass of ignorant hysteria that is his base by refuting that Barack Obama is -- what could be worse? -- an Arab. "He is a decent family man, a citizen." 'Cause, you know, there are no Arabs who are decent, who have families, who are men, who are citizens of the United States or elsewhere. So refuckinglax, everybody, even though you have John McCain's personal permission to be as angry as the six-headed beast that you are. Go ahead, get furiouser and furiouser, work yourselves into a frenzy, imply that Obama is a treasonous terrorist liar, but for God's sake, keep your collective voice down to a low roar and do it respectfully. And whatever you do, don't call him an Arab.

Newsflash: And yet they're still at it. SaPa is still urging crowds to "connect the dots" between Obama and "his associations" and that insufferable nugget Tucker Bounds is blaming the lynch mob venom at GOP rallies on Obama's economic policies and the current fiscal crisis. WTF? Obama is, as always, gracious and calm. (Warning re: the ABC blog link -- the dingbats come out of the woodwork to comment; brace yourself for stupidity on parade.)

News Summary: Why can't we skip the voting part and declare this thing over already?

Welcome to the Not So Great Depression

2008-10-09T16:43:00.008-04:00

Oh, I was all set to write funny, but then I turned on the TV and watched the whole goddamn economy crumble in, like, an hour, and now I'm in no mood.

Brothers and sisters all over the world are in a blind spastic panic, unloading their investments and driving down the markets. Cashing out their bank accounts. Stuffing bills under mattresses. Opening wide to tweezer gold fillings into little cups. Pilfering their own copper pipes. Jesus.

Rumor at school is that SaPa is coming to our little hamlet for a Hate-a-Thon sometime in the next week. I'm still waiting for her to explain (or be asked -- psssst, Couric: HINT) how Obama will "diminish the prestige of the presidency," while the close association of her own snowbilly lapdog Tard (Todd?) with the AIP will somehow elevate the reputation that W has methodically shredded in the last eight years. Grumpy Old McCain is back at it with the Ayers crap in a shameless effort to salvage a Straight Talk Express whose wheels came off weeks ago and whose smoldering carcass is still stinking up the bottom of the canyon.

None of this is enough to really do me in today -- I'm feeling like a shiny new nickel after the bloodsucking a couple days ago. But the cumulative effect, combined with the attempt to demonize, otherize, that one-ize, didja know he's black, wink? the honorable, patriotic, classy Obamas is so far beyond despicable I can't really get my head around it. I've been politically aware since about 1968, and I've never, never been so saddened by overt ugliness such as the McCain camp is launching, and its rabid supporters lapping up like blood-starved hounds. It's gone beyond insinuation to straight-up racism and fear-mongering. [This links to an elegant articulation by Seth Abramson of the real danger and potential legal implications of Palin's inflammatory rhetoric. An informative -- and chilling -- read.]

Please, Mrs. Palin, explain how this elevates the prestige of the presidency.

Sickening.

Chemo is on for tomorrow; we're going to try alternating weeks and begging the insurance gods to pay for Procrit.

My life as a vampire

2008-10-07T20:39:00.003-04:00

The blood-taking went well today. I've had transfusions before, but always in concert with surgery or hospitalization, meaning I recall very little of them. Today I was wide awake (for the most part) and a little queasy considering those crimson bags hanging above my head, their bloody tails snaking into my chest catheter. It's ghoulish, no doubt, but I'm thankful there are people willing to donate. It took about six hours. Afterwards, M and I stopped for fried chicken ("chicken on the bone," A calls it) and came home and watched the stock market crash. Then I slept for three hours.

The theory is that I will feel -- what? perky? -- by tomorrow. Chemo's on for Friday. Yeehaw.

My sister is on her way over to watch the Town Hall Debate, a genteel euphemism considering how thuggish the McPalin campaign has become over the last few days. Inciting violence now, they are -- openly, it would seem -- against anyone and everyone who doesn't favor their flavor of Kool-Aid. Obama. Biden. Journalists. Democrats. People with brains. Sarah Palin is a pig. McCain is a hypocrite (he voted for the bear DNA project he derided as pork in the first debate; that's the least of it) and a caricature of himself; a man who has sold his soul. I can't imagine his first act every morning isn't throwing up in shame.

Hopie's here -- showtime.

Today

2008-10-06T12:46:00.003-04:00

The last three days have been extraordinarily odd. I've been following politics, of course, and managed to read NYTBR, and watched back-to-back episodes of "House" last night (greatest show on TV) -- and in between, I did nothing but sleep. Hard. With dreams and everything. Lots of dreams about kittens in distress.

That's what insufficient red blood cells do, I gather; deprive the ol' body of oxygen, effectively putting it to sleep.

Today I have to go the hospital for another CBC (complete blood count) prior to tomorrow's 7:45 a.m. transfusion. Then, I have to go to school for a meeting about an upcoming event I'm coordinating, then it's on to Poetry Workshop from 4:00 until 6:45. And I think I need to stop to put gas in the car.

Poops me out just thinking about it, but I already missed one workshop a couple of weeks ago, and I love the class. Love it.

Apart from feeling veeeery sleeeeepy, the pain's not too bad today. I'll eat a pill before I leave home and hope it lasts.

So. Effectively there is no point to this post. Blah blah blah.

Staggering incoherence, Part Deux

2008-10-05T15:06:00.003-04:00

...In which word salad is reformatted and represented as amusing poetics.

From Slate, by way of Seth Abramson's The Suburban Ecstasies, I offer "The Poetry of Sarah Palin."

On Good and Evil

It is obvious to me

Who the good guys are in this one

And who the bad guys are.

The bad guys are the ones

Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,

And should be wiped off

The face of the earth.

That's not a good guy.

God help us, there are many, many more.

Staggering incoherence

2008-10-04T23:15:00.003-04:00

A blurb in the NYT, which SaPa claims to read "my copy of," features this actual string of words from the actual mouth of the actual woman John McCain would seek to install up there in Warshin'ton should, God forbid, they be blessed with the awesome blessing of service in this great state of Alaska and, also, America:

"If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us."

Pop a Pepcid and read all about it.

In the tank

2008-10-03T22:12:00.006-04:00

Well, I have nothing much to say about the VP debate that hasn't been said better by smart people all over the Interwebs. The dum-dums weren't listening last night, they were cooing; I have no use for them. Call me in the tank for Obama, if you must -- the genesis of that suddenly ubiquitous phrase is a mystery to me -- but at least I'm swimming with funny, bright people.

M offered to forward to me a Time snippet about why "women dislike Sarah" -- including fallacies such as "she's too pretty," "they're afraid she'll make them look bad," etc. Infuckingfuriating. I can't stand Sarah Palin for the same reason I turned against Susan Allen, long-suffering wife of Republican legislative delegate turned governor turned congressman turned senator turned "rising star" on the national stage who shot himself out of a canon and landed in Macacaland just a couple of years ago. Anyway, as a journalist twenty years ago, I covered his hijinx and caught on but quick that not only is he inauthentic in presenting himself as an "aw, shucks" tobacco-spitting, cowboy hat-wearing Southerner (???), but his wife is equally inauthentic in presenting herself as a button-nosed cutesy nitwit who defers to dumb men. (Not even smart men; dumb men.) It turns my stomach, the winking, the gee-whizzing, the flirting. It turns my stomach because, as a baby reporter with zero experience and blonde hair, I used those same tactics to try to get dumb men -- in my case, the peabrains in the police and sheriff's offices in Chattanooga, TN in 1984 -- to give me the information I needed to file stories. I wasn't asking for scoops; I just wanted the same access the boy reporters got. And every time I ran up against a brick wall, which was daily, sometimes hourly, I resorted to the only thing I knew how to do: I smiled, I flirted, I ingratiated myself. Sometimes it worked, mostly it didn't. I got pulled off "general assignment reporting" and promoted to anchoring (this was at a piss-poor CBS-affiliate TV station; I was 22; it did not escape my understanding that they'd have pulled a monkey off the street to anchor those newscasts, so low were the pay and the expectations). I hated myself for playing the game. I had slimed myself; had betrayed my gender and my mother's example and feminism and was caving to the most insidious kind of sexism. I may as well have slept with the fuckers in return for basic facts of a crime or court case. And now, I feel a twisting deep in my gut -- that old familiar, visceral stomach-turning -- every time I see The Two Faces of Sarah. Tough and confident? You betcha. Fine. Pandering and flirtatious? Wink! "Gee willikers, can ya help me out here? I just don't understand you big strong men from Warshin'ton, DeeCee!" Wink!

Puke.

An apt segue to what happened at the infusion center today, or didn't happen. No chemotherapy for me, so in the tank are my red blood cells and platelets. Fuck. First time I've ever been turned away. I have to have a blood transfusion. They scheduled it for Tuesday. I feel like poo.

And I'm scared I'm not going to be able to tolerate Topo Gigio, and then what?

Maybe I can summon that witch doctor dude from up there in Alaska to come pray over me.

Foundationally I'm just ill about it

2008-10-02T10:27:00.011-04:00

It is a terrible thing to lose one's words -- or not to have a word.

I guess in that case, one must invent a word.

In the course of the last couple of horrifying/screamingly funny Katie Couric convos, SaPa has thrust into the lexicon foundationally, which, near as I can tell, means something akin to fundamentally, though in the non-context of her word salad could also mean basically; theoretically; in my pretend fairy-world; or they told me not to say fundamentally because it'll remind people I'm a batshit fundamentalist extremist, so I'm gonna throw out something that starts with an 'f' and no one will notice, especially if I wrinkle my nose.

I just want to mention a couple of things I'll be looking for tonight. First, everyone is counseling Joe Biden to hold the hell off lest he appear to be condescending to or, God forbid, attacking his delicate female opponent. I think this counsel is patently sexist, especially considering the McCain goons have been instructed to "let 'er loose" and are, at this very moment, creekside in Sedona feeding her red moose meat and blasting the Rocky anthem. So, um. How come she gets to chew Biden't ankles with her wolverine teeth, but he's not allowed to respond in kind? She's allowed -- expected -- to use wise-ass sarcasm, but he's not? Yes, I want to see him be respectful; I expect that from her, too. No, he does NOT have to be, for Christ's sake, deferential, or worse, reverential, as some pundits have suggested. (I assume they know what the word means, since they're on the teevee.) Reverent because she's a she? Respectful because she's a mother? Polite because she can't take it, or because it would be ungallant of him not to roll over and let the little lady scratch him to pieces? Sexist sexist sexist.

Second, the format heavily accommodates SaPa's perceived strength -- that ability to say shit without saying anything at all. (Why is that valued, again? I always forget.) "In our great nation of America" is her new "um," replacing the "here in Alaska" phrase she repeated so frequently in her gubernatorial debates as a placeholder while she gathers her... her thoughts? Whatev. Anyway, my understanding is that there is no room for Ifill to ask follow-up questions of the type our Gotcha Gal Couric asked, which exposed Palin for the shallow, incurious, ill informed beauty pageant contestant she is. Over and over and over again (thanks, CBS!).

The anti-intellectuals will say she slammed it home. They'll say she's just like them. I say they're exactly right. Which makes my argument that the uneducated stupidshit should be nowhere near the Oval Office.

Heaven forbid we elect an educated, intelligent person who's actually been paying attention.

Loaded for bear. I got your loaded for bear right here, cretins.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, McCain seems to have foundationally misplaced his entire brain. On MSNBC this morning, McCain foundationally forgets that he foundationally voted FOR the bill he now says foundationally puts us on the brink of economic disaster, foundationally speaking. Call me crazy, but I suspect this is new GOP strategery: forget the multiple crises we face, focus on driving thinking people criminally insane with mindbending doublespeak.

Upbeat or else

2008-10-01T12:00:00.002-04:00

The New York Times runs an article today about Vitamin C and cancer. It's so confoundingly paradoxical -- and obvious -- that it infuriates me: some new study finds that taking large doses of C to boost the immune system, both to ward against infection while on chemo and to engage the body in attacking cancer cells, makes cancer cells stronger.

No shit. The reason this disease is so obscene is that it is literally the body turning against itself. What's bad for the cancer cells, chemo, is also bad for the healthy cells -- so of course it follows that what boosts healthy cells also strengthens and lengthens the life of the fucking cancer cells. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars went into the research that concluded that water is wet? Jesus.

My oncologist once said to me and M, "Oh, we can cure cancer. What we haven't figured out is how to keep the patient alive while we do it."

Anyway, reading that article brought me to another NYT article/public discussion about the expected emotional response to cancer, and how damaging those expectations are. I knew when I posted the other night that I am not alone in feeling pinched by this myth that a good attitude is paramount, and reading this article, and especially the back-and-forth of the public comments, shows it's on a lot of other minds, too.

Well, shit.

2008-09-30T14:01:00.006-04:00

Took a shower this morning, and after drying my hair, noticed it all over the bathroom. I'd like to report that I had the blower set 0n PowerBlast(tm), but that's not the problem.

Why is this so upsetting? I've lost my hair too many times to count; each time I fall apart. I mean, of all the things to worry about...

There are some things that distinguish this occurrence. First, I guess I was under the impression from my doctor and the infusion nurses that hair loss is not a sure thing with topotecan, that some people don't lose any hair at all. And because I always assume I am the exception to the rule (for whatever reason), it took me by great surprise to see it blown all over the floor. Second, I haven't told anyone at school about chemotherapy; I don't know how many people even know about the cancer (I was a skinny pixie with a close crop when I started last fall, but my hair had grown in to the point where it looked, I thought, like a fashion decision). Now I'm going to have to explain no hair. Without coming off totally self-absorbed. Fuck.

Third and by far most important: A has been waiting for my hair to "grow long" for as long as she can remember. (She was only a year and a half old when I got sick again in 2004.) Her hair is down to her bottom, and wild. Naturally, she wants my hair to look like hers, wants to be able to braid and bow my hair, to use the same "products," as she calls conditioner (where do they pick up the jazzy lingo?). Now, at age 5, she will need me to explain to her why I am taking medicine so powerful it leaves my head quite bereft. And so we usher in the conversation about Mama being sick, again. Doublefuck.

At the moment, my hair is chin-length. Crossing my fingers that I won't lose all of it -- that it will thin, but only to a point, and that I may be able to get away with a super-short boy-cut. And not have to explain anything to people at school. And when A asks why I cut my hair, I will tell her, gently, gently, that some new medicine is making my hair misbehave, so it's better that I keep it short for a while.

I've never worn a wig, and won't. Baseball caps in summer, scarves in winter are my speed. Still, regardless of what I do, I look like the Kancer Kid. People treat me differently, look at me differently. Know more about me (or think they do) than anyone has a right to know. It's not the loss of hair, it's the loss of privacy that is so upsetting, no matter how many times it happens.

On faith

2008-09-28T22:19:00.003-04:00

Predictably, stuff's coming out in my poetry (and my novel, now that I think of it) that illuminates what I didn't know I was thinking. This self-discovery is part of the narcissistic lure of writing, of course, and which writer was it who said she cannot be expected to know what she thinks until she writes it down?

I write, therefore I am.

Anyway, the process, coupled with the hyper-awareness of turmoil, both global and domestic, has really set my reptilian brain to percolating. The upshot is great confusion, an erosion of faith, perhaps, but at the very least there is a paring of what I believe not to be true. So, that's something.

Regarding cancer: I have no faith in the theory that attitude has any bearing whatsoever on the biology of the disease, either its progression or its retreat. Attitude is inauthentic, by definition, largely because of the faith our culture has placed in this theory: there is enormous pressure for the patient to act heroically by minimizing ill effects (smiling through it); to keep the schedule; to appear brave. Show me a cancer fighter on the teevee, I'll show you a martyr. We so hope that acting tough will result in victory, we are unwilling to acknowledge that (what I suspect is) a great majority of cancer patients privately fall the fuck apart. The upside of this clarity, I suppose, is my faith in people's capacity to do what they have to do. Note that this is not the same thing as toughing it out, powering through, taking one's lumps. Rage is a coping mechanism; depression, a protective device. I have no use for bravery, or even goodness. Consider all the brave people with stellar attitudes who've succumbed to a "long battle with cancer," and the opposite -- those pitifuls with piss-poor manners who scream and kick and cry and endure many remissions, or perhaps are cured. Cancer is not who I am; my response to it is not representative of my character. Cancer is nothing more than a piece of my struggle, one of many. And everybody's got somethin'.

I have faith in healing efforts as they extend toward me from an authentic heart. That is to say, I have faith in the love of my doctors, my family, my friends, my colleagues. I have come to believe it doesn't much matter what they do, as long as they're accepting of my visceral responses. As M and I tell A, it's okay to feel sad/mad/bored. I have faith in my personal biology, and have become (I think) better at following my body's signals and needs. But really, it's like my hair caught fire twelve years ago and I'm still hopping around beating my head with a wet towel. There's nothing deliberate about my response to this disease. It's al-Qaeda in the caves, elusive and enigmatic, indistinct, and multiplying. What can you do, strategically, tactically, but cross your fingers and hope?

What about maturity? The ability to control one's emotional response, to temper, to decide? A raving bunch of shit, in my experience. Yet we're expected to be able to control, or at least limit, the big scary emotions that accompany any misfortune -- grief, rage, sadness, we're supposed to move through them by stages; to get over them. (Thanks for that, Kubler-Ross.)

I have no faith that I can control my fear; I have great hope that I can come to peace. For now, I'm relying on love and nerve pills.

Note to self: faith in books, next time.

This post is a bald, rambling mess. Feh. It's as close to true as I can make it tonight.

Paul Newman and yard signs

2008-09-27T11:31:00.004-04:00

We're getting a short reprieve after two days of rain, so M and A took her new magnifying glass and a sketch pad out to the park to see what they might see. I'm reading about the passing of Paul Newman, as elegant and graceful a person as has ever been put on earth. I admire his life for a great many reasons, primarily his determination to just do what he did, all self-deprecating and careful to resist the ego trappings inherent in movie acting. I admire his long marriage to a woman who was clearly his equal in every way. I admire his charity work -- Newman's Own, according the the New York Times, has donated over $175 million to charitable causes, and his foundation for pediatric cancer camps has blossomed into a global effort.

What I admire most about him, I think, is his devotion to authenticity. There does not exist an interview in which he seems to be trying to impress. He is so completely unselfconscious that he can tell a reporter that, with age, he has *not* become what (we presume he and) the rest of us aspire to: less angry, less judgmental, etc. Certainly other people have observed -- my father among them -- that getting older not only illuminates more of our flaws, but actually exacerbates them. I know I am becoming more myself the older I get: more outspoken about what I dislike and disagree with, crankier, shorter-tempered, less willing to put up with shit. Less able to rein it in. I guess in my interior life I am becoming more authentic, but I still will say "yes" because I think it's what others want to hear, or hold my tongue in the interest of being polite when what the situation really calls for is for me to call someone on their assumptions or ugliness. A skirmish.

All this to say, my friend Amy and I are kind of despairing of the lack of yard signs in our city this election season, and I believe I know what's going on. On the Democratic ticket we have an African American man; on the GOP, a white woman and a flailing old crank. Of the four candidates, it is considered impolite to talk about their defining characteristics, for fear of entering inadvertently into a conversation about racism, sexism, or ageism. (Or anti-intellectualism, aka stupid-as-fuckism, or religious extremism, or poor taste in hair, woops, that's sexist, God, the shit really piles up when considering SaPa). So. We know not where our neighbors stand on these candidates, because to expose our preferences in our yards is to literally stake out a dare. I dare you to tell my what you don't like about Obama. I dare you to insinuate McCain is too old. I dare you to speak the truth about Palin, a painful truth I already know, which need not be aired in polite company: that she is an embarrassment to all serious, thinking people.

If the tickets comprised Joe Biden, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, and Joe Biden, this town would be yard signed and bumper stickered to comic effect. We're used to talking about that kind of candidate, the one who's so familiar to us personally that it forces us to talk about the issues (but not abortion, still off-limits).

There seems to me a reticence in my little corner of the world to wear your politics on your sleeve this election year. It's too personally revealing, like dropping trou and flashing the neighbors, then daring them to admit they saw you do it by flashing you right back.

It would feel really good to put up a sign. Not just supportive of my candidates, but a gesture of personal integrity. Authenticity.

I bet Paul Newman didn't worry about yard signs. I bet he just wore a hat.

Train wreck

2008-09-25T23:28:00.005-04:00

I cannot bring myself to look away... The colossal spectacle up the road in Warshin'ton, as SaPa calls it, is stunning and, if it lacked the potential to put us all in the poorhouse, might actually be anthropologically fascinating.

Palin was less articulate than a seventh grader in her responses to Katie Couric. She is an insult to small town America, not a reflection of it. As a person who grew up in a rural town of fewer than 300 people (artists, writers, policy wonks, thinkers -- some Democrats, some Republicans -- all engaged) in an area of the South that was (and is) peppered with such hamlets, I take personal umbrage, because I can do that, at the notion that Sarah Palin is remotely representative of Tiny Town USA. She is a fool. If that makes me a condescending elitist, I'll take up that mantle with glee.

What's happening on Capitol Hill tonight, after McCain mucked up the works, is too grotesque to ponder. That doesn't stop me from hitting refresh four times an hour at HuffPo, Wonkette, Politico, Washington Post, and NYT. The only possible good I can see coming of any of this is that President Obama will be in the White House to truncate our depression, and our Depression.

Chemo #2 tomorrow morning. I'm hydrating.

Note to self: this weekend, some thoughts on what I have faith in, including people and books, because it feels important at this moment in history to be really clear about that.

Boondoggle!

2008-09-24T12:45:00.003-04:00

This will be a rant about a thing that bugs the everlivin' crap outta me. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me a giant waste of funds. No, it's not the 700 billion dollar bailout. Trillion. Whatever. No, it's not the millions in earmarks Palin requested so she can build a widow's walk atop the manse in Wasilla, the better to see the Kremlin from. No, it's not even the relentless lies the McCain/Palin campaign is paying tens of millions of dollars for, under the guise of political advertising, to pollute our public airwaves.

This is insidious. This is personal.

This is the big fat check M stroked this morning for kindergarten field trips and "special programs." There are ten -- ten -- planned this year, two of which are free. The hit parade includes:

$5.00 for a pumpkin-picking junket to a farm in October
$4.00 for a day at one of the stuffiest history museums in the South
$13.00 for three plays about Pocahontas, Rumplestiltskin, and Rikki-tikki-tavi
$15.00 for a "young scientists" program; there are no details about this one
$1.00 for another farm visit in May
$7.00 for -- are you ready? -- a trip to the local botanical gardens. Because as every parent knows, five year olds loves them some botanical gardens.

This is a public, inner-city school with a significant population of free-lunch kids. And they want parents to fork over $45.00 for what? For kindergartners to gaze at nineteenth-century sculpture and plants?

Full disclosure: A was in the pre-K program at this school last year; same deal. I emailed the principal to offer alternatives to these cost-prohibitive excursions: poll the parents, I suggested, and take the children to see what people do all day at work. I'm in graduate school, let me show them what that looks like. Annie's mother is an artist -- let's visit her studio. Plus, this is a burden on our household budget, and I am certain we're not the only ones. There is no opt-out feature; no Plan B for children whose parents can't pay up, or think it best not to. I never got a response from the principal.

Fucking hell, what is wrong with taking kindergartners on a nature walk around the block to collect leaves and squeal at bugs? They gotta herd them onto a bus and schlepp them to places only people with blue hair and powdered faces get off on? For money?

Nothing against old people, but my child is five. I suspect her interests are a bit different.

Can you imagine having more than one child in this school? "Pony up $135 you didn't count on spending this month or your children will be left out, identified as the losers they are, teased mercilessly and ostracized for life." Man, I feel for the families who didn't budget for it and just cannot afford it.

M (wisely?) wrote the check and got it into A's bookbag before I ever saw the extortion note. So much for feeling all smug about paying bills and having a little pad through the end of the month.

So, yeah. Kindergarten can suck it, again.

Still more things that help me feel strong

2008-09-23T14:18:00.004-04:00

Paying bills; having enough left over to get to Oct. 1
The change of light that comes with the Southern fall; whiter, lower, but every bit as intense as the blue of May, the gold of July
Collecting seeds from waning morning glories and flowering tobacco
Feeling like a rock star after a few days of puny
Chalking up the rock star feeling to a vat of caffeinated Starbuck's and a big fuck-you to the directive to knock off the caffeine whilst in the company of Topo Gigio
Anticipating A coming home, stepping up to M's camera tripod as though it's a microphone, and "reading" what she's dubbed The Daily News in a loud, disturbingly authoritative voice; "Today, we will count votes. How many voted for Barack Obama, raise your hands, great, Hillary Clinton? Great. Kindergarten is adopting a live fox who lives at the zoo, please give money, that is all of the news."
Friends and admired writers who drop by this blog to encourage and compliment; lifts me like helium; thank you
Skipping out on poetry workshop but getting a note from my greatly admired poet-instructor declaring she "cannot wait to discuss" my poetry with me; more helium
Wearing vintage Nikes and blue jeans and running around campus sans pain meds; no pain; more helium
Getting shit done; picking up A's vaccination records from the pediatrician; stopping by the circulation desk to confess I've misplaced a library book; catching a really nice break from the guy at the circulation desk (he renewed the book, so no fines); billing freelance clients; reading manuscripts for novel workshop tomorrow night; getting out of my own head; feeling as though I can do this; I can do this; I can do this

House of Pain

2008-09-21T23:50:00.006-04:00

Something else I had put out of my mind is a rhythm my family falls into when the stress of chemotherapy gets at us: A gets a cold, M catches it and it turns into something big and feverish. This happens almost like clockwork, usually when I'm just starting a new therapy, and it happened this weekend.

So far for me, the direct effects of Topo Gigio are minor compared to, say, Gemzar or Carboplatin. I had the crazies, as I reported earlier, and have been sleepy all weekend, but the most curious consequence is hunger. I'm ravenous, mostly for comfort food like M's homemade bread and split pea soup. As with other drugs, certain foods are so unappetizing I can't mention them, but bland things like crackers with butter, potatoes, rice... make way. I've been remarkably clear-headed since the mini-breakdown Friday night, which is unusual and, of course, welcome. Yes, I sleep a lot, but in between, at least I'm not fuzzy or dotty. That I know of.

All that to say: of the three of us, I'm probably feeling perkiest. A is overcoming like children do, but still not her usual self, and M is stoic and miserable.

And so the ill effects of my illness spiral outward, knocking down the people closest to me. For me, this domino effect causes the most distress: the most worry, the most fear, the most sadness. Goddamn it all.

Offbeat observation: McCain's eyes

2008-09-20T15:35:00.004-04:00

Amy and I talked yesterday about the bizarre change in John McCain's eyes over the last week or two, at least since the convention. It's not only the stunned, empty, expressionless gaze -- it's the color of his eyes, or rather, the lack of it. He has blue-blue-blue eyes, or did have. Lately, though, it looks as though he's either been sporting deep brown contacts or skimming the top of Cindy's ivory-handled pill dispenser.

When I asked my sister last night if she'd noticed McCain's eyes, she immediately said, "Yes! They're all pupil -- all dilated pupil!" So, it's not just me.

Here's my theory: The geniuses pulling his strings have decided it would be suicide if he came out wearing glasses, which I cannot believe he doesn't actually need, considering his robotic attachment to the TelePrompTer and frequent misreading thereof. So, geniuses took the opportunity to fit him with contact lenses... but not your ordinary contact lenses! No, these are the kind used by Hollywood stars to appear easy, open, and engaged. The principle is based on the biological fact that babies' eyes are huge in relation to their faces because large eyes engender in humans feelings of love and an urge to protect. (Think about those infuratingly adorable Hummel figurines you want to smash to smithereens.) And in soap operas -- I know whereof I speak here -- actresses routinely use big brown contacts to make their pupils appear dilated during love scenes; one of those involuntary biological cues to potential mates that we are interested.

So. John McCain. At once trying to look younger (no glasses), garner love/empathy (a robotic Hummel), and telegraph a real, human soul.

Too bad those contacts don't actually sharpen his vision, in any conceivable way.

Some things I'd forgotten about chemo

2008-09-20T07:43:00.004-04:00

Went in yesterday, after a nice, calming cranial-sacral massage from my friend Julia. Just walking into her studio makes me feel like I'm being taken care of: she always has yummy-smelling oils going, and puts on my favorite music without asking. It's very soothing and centering. Julia and Amy are part of my ad hoc E-Team; without them, I know things would be very different, probably intolerable. Their presence in our lives and in our home when we'd fallen into the darkest trenches last year -- it was a light, a dependable rhythm. I wouldn't be here without them.

So then, it was off to the infusion center, where our favorite nurse (and friend) Elaine took good care of me. All the nurses came in to give hugs and say, awkwardly but plainly, that they were glad to see us, though were sorry I was back. Everyone asked about A and we will be kicked out of the place next week if we fail to bring pictures.

It was a little disconcerting to be such an oldtimer that I knew the routine; it was almost like I hadn't gotten a ten month break. Everything was familiar and expected. Tapping the port, hoping for a decent blood return to indicate it's not clotted, and to draw blood for the CBC. After the numbers come back, it's showtime, with premeds: Zofran for nausea, Dekadron for I don't know what (it's a steroid). The Zofran makes me lose my mind, which manifests later in the day... I had forgotten what a crazy-making drug that is for me. After some hydration, the tiny packet of topotecan is hung above my head and drips for thirty minutes. No allergic reaction, thank God (was allergic to Taxol my first time out -- nurses were calling for the crash cart before someone yanked the line out of my arm -- yikes!). Then we were done. In and out in less than three hours. Not bad. My friend Amy brought me home, and I slept until about 7:00.

That's when the fun began. I woke up with a horrendous headache, weeping uncontrollably, over nothin'. M sent my sister upstairs and, as always, she soothed me and reminded me it was the medicine. She rubbed my head and nerve pilled me and we watched Chris Matthews screeching at anyone who could a word in edgewise, and I started to feel better by the time A came up to get ready for bed. She reeeeeally wanted to sleep in our bed again (second night; Amy says a second round of separation anxiety is typical when they start kindergarten and are staring down the barrel of being six) but M got her into her room and read her a story, Don't Let The Chicken Ride The Bus!, and they were done: heavy breathing, not a peep, weeee! She's still, Saturday morning, wearing the giant Mama sleep-shirt I loaned her so she could feel like I was in the room with her. I adore her, and often consider eating her.

Today I'm planning to be quiet and listen for side effects. That, or go to brunch with my sister and some friends followed by a political rally. That sounds reasonable, right?

Topo Gigio

2008-09-18T16:51:00.005-04:00

And the winner is... topotecan! Yes, it was a late entry into the lineup, a definite dark horse, a come-from-behind, an upset. To flog the flimsy metaphor until it wimpers, the wimpy little has-been outpaced the rest of the pack to win decisively in the final stretch.

We start tomorrow.

Let's think about topotecan. It's been around forever, forever comprising my direct experience: at least eleven years. (Before me, beyond me, there was nothing.) Its side effects are said to be relatively minimal. It attacks cells by interfering with their growth; they don't grow, they die. It whacks out the blood counts, but I don't know of a drug that doesn't. And its most appealing feature is that it is a quick infusion of thirty minutes -- none of that hours-long Gemzar nonsense -- meaning I should be out of the infusion center in a few hours tops (it all depends on how quickly the lab can do the CBC, which varies wildly at the hospital where the party happens.) Three weeks on, one week off, restart.

The bad news is that I have an illogical (I'm sure) regard for topotecan as a lightweight, last-ditch, ineffective hail mary that only gets pulled out when it's pouring rain under the stadium lights, the fans have left the bleachers, and the coach from the visiting team refuses to just run out the clock so we can go the fuck home already.

In my head it's the... wait for it... Sarah Palin of chemotherapy.

Why? How can I have such a strong opinion and weak expectation of a drug with which I've never rumbled? It originates with the very, very bad idea (for us) to attend a cancer support group/information session in March 1997 at the hospital. You know who goes to those things? People who've just been diagnosed, and people who are on their way out the door. I'd had surgery on Valentine's Day; I don't even think my hair had left me yet. Anyway, M and I were young -- I was 35, he was only 26 -- and we didn't realize how fresh we were into this thing. Compared to us, everyone else looked old, sick, scared, and angry as hell.

I remember this woman sitting next to me, fiftyish, having been through the fuggin' mill, skin blotchy and hair thin, who was firing questions at the doctor as though it were a private consultation the rest of us were being allowed to sit in on. She wanted to know about intraperitoneal chemotherapy (the "bellywash" where they skip the veins and put the weed killer directly into the abdomen, yik, never had that done), she wanted to know about why her CA125 wouldn't come down below 62 (I remember this very clearly, curiously), she wanted to know how she could lose the extra sixteen pounds she'd put on, and she wanted to know how long the topotecan would work. I remember the oncologists' answers: it's not appropriate for the type of tumor you have; I don't know; eat better and get exercise; I don't know. There was another woman, there with her husband, the two of them looked desperate in different ways, she impossibly thin, with waxy skin and wide sunken eyes, he with twitches and stutters and a voice so soft it didn't matter, in the purest sense, that he was asking questions. "Topotecan. We're moving in that direction. It's the last thing we're going to try; it's our last option. What are the chances?" Meaning what were her chances.

These are questions I will never ask; statements I will never make. I know now what I didn't know then -- that the white coats are just for show. Oncologists are alchemists, fooling around with beakers and calculations and elements and hoping they don't blow up the lab. They don't have any way of knowing, so why ask? Why let someone else plant the idea in my head that I have some percentage of life left in me? They don't know. It's a good thing I know they don't know.

So, yes. Topotecan. Henceforth to be thought of and referred to in our house as Topo Gigio, everyone's favorite imp of an Italian clown. See his antics? What a scamp!

Kindergarten sucks

2008-09-16T20:48:00.004-04:00

Back to School Night tonight. Me and M. Forty minutes in a sweltering 100 year old auditorium on foldy chairs suffering senseless PTA announcements/antics ("If you can guess what's NOT true about the principal, you win this shitty t-shirt. Ready? True or false: Mrs. J-- likes the beach!") and musing between us whether we were, in fact, witnessing the political debut of the Republican party's Vice Presidential nominee for 2012, followed by another clusterfuck, this one with giant parents perched on wee chairs in Classroom 117, and featuring a shitstorm of paper, instructions, admonitions and procedural doodads. No shit, the most pressing piece of information we got was that we should "make sure our kindergartner gets a good night's sleep" because they're phasing out naptime in October.

Getting the hang of the homework journal/daily agenda/pocket folder/backpack tango is as tricky as the tango itself, and as frivolous. (We're supposed to staple A's homework into one of those black and white composition notebooks. Why she can't do the homework in the composition book, that already has pages with lines, is an enduring mystery.)

In other news, Sarah Palin is still stupid as fuck.

The mood... the mood. Can you blame me? I'm drinking wine from a box.

Kindergarten can suck it.

Pickin' my poison! (This is not a post about Palin'.)

2008-09-16T12:41:00.008-04:00

Gosh, it's time to decide which chemo to try!

In this corner, we have Cisplatin, a quiet, light-on-its-feet option that is deceptively powerful. The pros:

Worked wizz-bang to take down a big fat bellyrat not once but twice (aaaaaahhhhh... and the crowd goes wild)
Most side effects minimal; a little joint pain, a little hair pulling, nothing you wouldn't expect in a match like this

The cons:

I last engaged Cisplatin to work its quiet magic 11 months ago; does it have the wherewithal to thwap again with the same intensity and smooth efficiency, or has the sly, shape-shifting Chimera that is the tumor become inured to Cisplatin's many charms?
It's a nerve-beater; my tingly little fingers and toes are already numb... can they withstand more punishment?

And in this corner, that clumsy old monster, the Cyclops-like Carboplatin. Nothing subtle about this big galute, a first-line footsoldier weilding a mace and a pack of Marlboro reds. The pros:

I'm checking with my friend Amy on this (who somehow, over the years, has committed to memory every surgery, treatment, dosage, and side effect I've ever endured... and in the right order) but I don't think I've mixed it up with Carboplatin since I was first diagnosed in 1997. That bodes well for effectiveness.
I'm sure there's another plus to this heavyweight, but I can't think of it at the moment.

The cons:

Oy, with the side effects. This thing attacks the cancer and, for good measure, rips out every white cell and platelet in my tired little bloodstream. Exhaustion. Loss of appetite. Not to mention baldy-bald-bald-bald.
I don't want to be a conspicuous cancer patient, i.e. skinny, bald. I've done that too many times to count. I always gain weight; the hair always grows back. I always hate it.
I just spent A's college tuition on my hair.
Did I mention I don't want to lose my hair?
Also, more importantly, the low blood count thing means hypersensitivity/proclivity to infection. "Stay away from people with colds," the guidelines say. I'm a graduate student with a kindergartner at home. All I can do is laugh at that advice and cross my fingers that I'll be able to finish the semester, keep up with A, and die of something other than cancer or a head cold many, many years from now.

M and I are going in to talk with Dr. J on Thursday, and in the meantime, I am mindfully thankful that I have options.

Palate-cleansing poetry post

2008-09-15T23:02:00.005-04:00

To get that icky Palin taste out of my mouth, I want to think about poetry for a second. Specifically, the self-revelatory nature of contemporary poetry. Some contemporary poetry.

OK, the poetry I've been writing.

Truly, though, it's not my own personal bag (I don't think). There is a tendency as a reader to attribute facts, characteristics, situations, perceptions in a poem to the poet himself. Now, I know there are plenty of people who can't tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction, who assume that the fiction writer believes what his characters believe, has done what his characters do, misbehaves as his characters misbehave, etc. Those people are dolts. (Have I mentioned that one of the most delightfully solipsistic aspects of blogging is the ability to refer endlessly to one's own previous witticisms? Why, it's positively self-referential!) But poetry is understood generally to be self-referential; it is therefore revealing of the poet's deepest intimacies.

I've mentioned here (there I go again!) that I can't seem to write about anything but The Subject That Dare Not Speak Its Name. That's cancer to you. And yet, I'm in a poetry workshop with a bunch of strangers and an instructor so talented she makes my palms gooey (true, I have a bit of a girl-thang for her), and I'm supposed to let it all hang out? I don't think so. No. The reason I'm drawn to fiction is because I get to sidle up to the truth, crab-like, without having to spill the actual beans. And while there's more room on the page, perhaps, for a poem to be oblique (like, nearly indecipherable to a literalist like me) than there is for narrative prose, which demands clarity, there doesn't seem to be any way to fudge the intimate facts of my life in poetry.

Maybe I just haven't found my metaphor yet. Or... could be I'm in so far over my head I'm coming out the other side.

At any rate, just want to go on the record here saying I feel uncomfortable turning in the pieces I've been writing, because they're all about... you know. My crush on Sarah Palin.

Willful ignorance: just plain stupid

2008-09-15T22:45:00.006-04:00

If I said all I have to say about McCain/Palin, this blog would self-immolate. So I'll stick to this, a not especially original observation:

Remember when it was, like, fashionable in, like, high school, to pretend you didn't make good grades and weren't one of the smart kids and the only thing you were really interested in deepening was your Hawaiian Tropic Tan?

Remember how you were pretending?

Remember the truly stupid kids who gleefully basked in their dumbitude?

Have you seen the 1983 Wasilla High School yearbook? Wait, I mean, the Palin administration?

Yet more things that help me feel strong

2008-09-15T00:27:00.002-04:00

Finishing and turning in the first draft of the first chapter of my first novel to my novel workshop mates. Even if it's caca, it's done. It was an unexpected shitload of work, much more difficult than I'd anticipated.
Having a new poem almost complete for poetry workshop tomorrow night. Ahead of the curve. Writing poetry is a shitload of work, too, but I guess I'm not good enough at it to worry it down to a nub the way I did the novel chapter. Poetry: comparatively easy.
Staying on top of pain with opiates. Knowing I can control it for now.
Reading widely and finding that the number, depth and breadth of credibly reported articles exposing the McCain/Palin lies increases exponentially each day.
Understanding that I have not yet, but must in the near future, read credibly reported articles in conservative venues and hold my nose and delve into the shit-spout that appears credible to people who are predisposed to believe/agree with it -- i.e. Drudge, Fox News, etc. "Reading eclectically" as my father-in-law puts it.
Knowing my limits; deliberately dodging, for the time being, the gloom about Lehman Bros, Merrill Lynch, Fannie, Freddie. Pulling a Palin and eschewing knowledge!
Eating nerve pills. Proceeding as normal.
Helping A look for "sparkle babies," also known as "twinklies," above the transoms. (These, I gather, are baby fairies.) Knowing she is this close to being sure it's all make believe, but remains eager to suspend her disbelief.
Keeping the potted plants lush and thriving: lavender, basil, clematis, cucumbers, peppers, impatiens, jasmine, begonias, cereus, morning glories, blooming tobacco -- all breathing, all beautiful.
Not flinching at three short fiction rejection notices in one day. Deleting the emails. Submitting the stories to other journals. Forgetting about them. (sorta)

Saturday morning

2008-09-13T11:06:00.004-04:00

M and A have gone off on some adventure or other. I slept poorly last night, having watched the coverage of Ike slamming into Galveston, and I woke up and put the TV back on, then promptly fell asleep. I vaguely recall A whispering in my ear, "Mama, did you turn on the TV or was it fairies?" I think I said fairies. Anyway, the house is quiet. M has a car show tomorrow he's preparing for (he has a 1964 Series II Land Rover) and I'm sure he took A to the art supply store to get a gift for a friend whose fifth birthday celebration is this afternoon. I like to think about M and A tooling around town in that musty truck, she in her booster seat beside him, he wearing some kooky old hat. I love them.

I am in the homestretch of a first chapter (if you consider homestretch to mean barely begun) for novel workshop; I'm due to turn in tomorrow for Wednesday night workshop. My problem is one of mental momentum: everything I see lately somehow will fit perfectly into this book. So, in it goes. Saw a crazy tease for baby footwear on CNN sometime overnight; it's going in. What this means, of course, is that I am still formulating the characters, still deciding what I want to write about, still procrastinating actually writing it.

I did not hear back from Dr. J's office so I choose to assume they didn't have a chance to mull over my predicament. In any case, it's unlikely I'll start chemotherapy this coming week, though they've waved me in pretty darn fast in the past. Trying not to worry about it. Trying.

M and A are home -- A says she found evidence of fairies in the car. Gotta go!

Seven years

2008-09-11T11:49:00.004-04:00

What I most recall about that day: the perfect blue sky... the slow dawning as we watched NBC coverage at the ad agency where I worked... driving to the grocery at lunchtime, picking up a bag of chips, and parking my car under a tree on the street, listening to NPR, and crying... talking to my father that evening, who was very nearly speechless... waking up with M at 3:30 the next morning, crying in bed... crying all week... all month... into Christmas... feeling helpless.

I'm watching the rebroadcast now, and I still cry, and I still feel helpless. Helpless and, in light of the disastrous failure of our leaders over the last seven years, furious.

I don't have a title for this one.

2008-09-11T10:32:00.009-04:00

Joanne called from Dr. J's office late yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving to fetch A from school. The plan is for Dr. J to consult with Dr. W on my chemo chart/history and get back to me. I hope getting back to me means an appointment in the infusion center, not some rhetorical conversation about limited options and pain relief. At least they're not talking about surgery -- that I know of. Hope I didn't jinx it just then.

I went to workshop last night (novel) and we talked about favorite first lines in literature. The consensus seemed to be that lines that set the tone/voice or introduce relationships or settings are nice, but what really pulls a reader in is putting characters in play -- putting them in peril, giving them a sharply defined dilemma, conveying the whole world of the novel. Somehow.

I favor lines that give a narrator (first or third person) a reason to be telling the story right then, right there. Kind of a, "Well it all began when..." sort of thing. For instance:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude)

That's a famous example and for good reason. Does an awful lot of heavy lifting, and it's lyrical and beautifully rendered to boot. Another:

"Fifteen minutes before happiness left him, Josh Goldin led his summer intern by the elbow to share in the hallelujah of a Friday afternoon." (Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You)

Again we're looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and I love that hallelujah image. It's as though the narrator is taking the reader by the arm and saying, I'll get to why happiness left him in a minute, but first you need to know what came before. It all started when..." Here are two more that suck me in but good:

"First, I had to get the body in the boat." (Rhian Ellis, After Life)
"My name was Salman, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." (Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

WHAM! We're there. How can you not keep reading? Although with the Sebold, the first thirty pages or so were among the roughest I'd ever read; I nearly couldn't continue. Actually, I quoted the first two sentences here, but the first one does the work with the past tense, was, telegraphing that this is a narrator whose earthly existence is in question. The second line is the payoff.

One of my favorite writers, whose work lately has been pejoratively labeled chicklit (lately, because the term and the notion didn't exist when her books hit U.S. markets), is Banana Yoshimoto. Youngest person ever to win the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award when she was 22 or thereabouts. She was translated to English for the first time in the late eighties/early nineties, and a whisp of a novel that came out in Japan in 1991, Goodbye, Tsugumi, was released in the U.S. only in the last three or four years. (I don't have it in front of me.) Anyway, the first line is:

"It's true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman."

Here's what I love about it: It sets a chatty, conspiratorial tone. It establishes three brains: the narrator, the reader whom she is addressing, and this character named Tsugumi about whom we are eager, suddenly, to learn everything. Yoshimoto's sentences are just this simple and straightforward throughout her work, yet the cumulative effect is a deep reckoning with what makes people tick; their motivations. Their fears, needs, and desires. And how can they help each other thrive? It's subtle, gorgeous writing.

The first line of my novel is crap, but I'll make it better once I find out what the thing is about. The only way to do that is to (cough) write it.

I'll just be over here, writing, if anyone's looking for me.

Someone else is having a rougher day than I am.

2008-09-10T10:28:00.003-04:00

Just took a deep breath and called Joanne in Dr. J's office to ask her advice: do I need to come in for another talk, or a checkup, or can we all just agree that it's time to start chemo and go ahead and schedule it?

After telling me that what I was saying was reasonable (God bless her), she said, "Well, you know, it's Wednesday, so he's in surgery right now." (Yes, I know that Wednesdays are surgery days; he's generally not in the office.) "I'll talk with him when he comes out and call you back, and we'll go from there." Great!

I hung up, and it hit me: that woman he's doing surgery on today is more scared, more uncomfortable, more freaked out, and possibly in deeper shit than I am.

Whatever strength I manage to gather for myself today, I will share with her.

It's time.

2008-09-10T09:18:00.008-04:00

I almost didn't make it out the door with A to get her to kindergarten on time this morning. Woke up (to the cat crying) feeling very puny. A was in bed with me, snoring away. My sister and I took her to the political gathering last night, where she was a big hit and I didn't say anything too terribly vapid, then we all came home and my sister and I drank wine on the bed while A tried to settle down. Needless to say, we were up late. Anyway, I didn't want to wake up A any earlier than necessary this morning.

M is off being corporate for a couple of days, but he's almost always the one who gets her off to school. They have their quiet morning routine. When I do it I invariably feel like I'm blumbling through the whole process. Really, A is such an easy child; drop a coin in her slot and she just goes, does what she needs to do, finds her shoes, brushes her hair, puts together reasonable outfits, figures out her own snack, etc. It's like having a roommate who's three feet tall and says adorable things. I'm the one pulling wrinkled shirts from the bottom of the pile, wondering if microwaved coffee from the bottom of yesterday's pot still contains enough caffeine to propel me the three blocks to the elementary school, and marching into the building as though I know exactly where I'm going, when in fact we're all supposed to wait outside until the first bell rings.

But there was an additional worry this morning, which I blame entirely for all the stumbling around -- I blame the Republicans, too, while I'm at it -- and that is the queasiness, the dull but distinct ache deep in my belly that is more apparent than it was even a week ago. I felt pretty good two days ago, I think, so I'd better follow the same routine of a huge triple-strength espresso and a granola muffin for lunch. As if my eating habits are causing the trouble. (I mean, I know they're not helping, but having a bowl of buttery pasta at ten o'clock last night did not this pain in the belly make.)

Before my sister left last night, I told her I am going to call Dr. J today and tell him it's time; try to get some kind of treatment going next week. Some kind of chemotherapy. And while I revolt against the notion of another surgery, I'll take it if that's the best option. I'm still so very, very scared he will tell me there's not a lot they can do, and to keep eating the hydrocodone to mitigate pain until it doesn't work anymore and we'll switch to Fentanyl which will make me comfortable and out-of-my-mind sleepy, and I'll just become groggier and less with it and will miss fucking everything: A and M, writing a novel, writing poems, writing stories, reading. Impossible to read in that condition. That condition being disease progression.

Anyway, I am sucking up strength today from wherever I can get it. M is in a different time zone and won't be home until late tonight. I'm going to call my sister, or my friend/therapist Amy before I call Dr. J. But first I'm drinking coffee (brewed, not nuked) and reading Huffington Post. (See, I had the presence of mind to make a linky-thing there, not too bad.)

If all politics are local...

2008-09-09T16:27:00.002-04:00

M is on a business trip (being the business man he is!) and so A and I will go quite unescorted this evening to a reception a friend is holding for a woman running for school board. I had a mild panic attack about this in the shower this morning. First, I am an introvert to the point of social incapacitation; I stopped answering the telephone about eight years ago, so scrambled am I by the expectation of reciprocal conversation. Cocktail parties, well, you can imagine. At a Christmas open house several years ago, I introduced myself to the same woman twice within five minutes of arriving... and she explained (again!) that we had met several times before. She was kind of mean about it. But that's not the source of my discomfort tonight (my sister will be there, and I know the hostess well, and A is always a perfect diversion).

No, what's put the fear into me is that I, mother of a public school kindergartner, have no idea what the issues are, nor any clue what they ought to be. Um... should I complain to this woman about the kindergarten supply list? Seems a little micro, no? What about all the crap they send home jammed in A's gi-normous My Little Pony backpack? (My Little Pony? Or is it Hello Kitty? Dora? Whatever, it's pink.) Can I complain about A having to memorize a whole new lunch code for this year? Does she expect complaints? Suggestions? As a parent, shouldn't I be following budgets and curriculum proposals and Virginia's aptly abbreviated SOL (standards of learning) program and application of No Child Left Behind bullshit?

So essentially, I'm bugging over impressing someone whose job it is tonight to impress me. Sounds like a crap date.

I know which lies SaPa and the McCainerator repeated about my candidates an hour ago, but I have nothing intelligent to say about my child's education. Nor anything unintelligent. I got nothin'.

Woopsie. It's about cancer.

2008-09-07T21:10:00.003-04:00

Well, shit. I thought I was writing a poem about my daughter. A simple little thing about tucking my child in.

Turns out it's another thing about illness.

Part of what bugs the shit out of me is that my filter seems forever altered; I apparently am unable to see anything through a lens other than the contorting lens of cancer. I want to rip these spectacles off my head and smash them for good, but I can't.

Like my mother said, everyone has something. (My mother died from breast cancer in 1983.)

The poets in my workshop are going to grow weary of this beaten subject, but fast. As long as it stays out of my fiction...

An inventory of favorite poets

2008-09-07T14:48:00.005-04:00

The poetry workshop I'm taking this semester is being led by a Pulitzer prize winner. I have long admired her work, and as a guide she is fantastic. She asked students to "return to your old favorites" and let her know which poets we plan to read and pay attention to as we craft new poems in the next several weeks. Here's my list.

Joseph Brodsky
Stan Rice
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds
Mark Strand
Mary Oliver
Rita Dove
Wallace Stevens
Raymond Carver
Claudia Emerson
W.H. Auden
From my mother's volumes, read and recited in our house growing up: Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Byron, E.B. Browning, Cavafy, Yeats, Burns, Shakespeare

I know nothing about poetic form; nothing about how to discuss poetry. I know what I like; sometimes I know why I like it. I hope to learn much more.

Meantime, I also have a poem to finish for workshop. To my knowledge, it is not about cancer.

More things that help me feel strong

2008-09-06T16:15:00.004-04:00

Railing against Rovian Republican fables
Playing Connect Four with A; watching the wheels turn as she thinks one, two, three moves ahead; her delighted giggle when she wins; her resolved sportsmanship when she doesn't
Running the dishwasher and unloading the dishes; feeling the burn on my neuropathic fingertips from the still-hot plates
Listening to the local independent station on M's huge old tube radio
The sound of hard rain on the roof after three months of dry; trusting that the new roof will keep the water out
Cutting lemon for hot tea
Following US Open tennis
Donating (more) to Obama/Biden
Seeing M's mannerisms in A's gesticulating explanation of why he cannot go first in the next round of Connect Four ("Dada, do you get this? Because it doesn't seem even a teeny little bit to me like you get it.")
Being socked in with M and A on a stormy Saturday afternoon

A is still in the excellent fairy-princess outfit we threw together this morning. She has fairy dust on her cheeks and loose, wild hair. Her fingernails, polished pink, are absolutely filthy.

Friday night

2008-09-05T21:17:00.002-04:00

Hurting tonight, and sad. M fetched A and took her out to meet some friends after work. Since she was expecting me to pick her up, he told her I didn't feel well, which made her sad. It breaks my heart that my five year old worries about me, as does my husband, and sister, and everyone else who loves me. Sometimes I can just barely stand to think about how they feel; most of the time I can't stand it at all.

There is a princess tea party tomorrow for one of A's friends. I told her I would feel better by morning, and promised to help her put together a "beautiful, beautiful princess dress," as she calls it. I will eat as much pain medication as it takes to be able to do that with her tomorrow. Tonight, nerve pills.

Adoption, children, and Cindy McCain

2008-09-04T22:04:00.004-04:00

I was going to step back. Focus on writing fiction. But I am compelled to write the truth here.

Cindy McCain, in introducing her husband tonight in the final night of the RNC, said the adoption of the McCains' daughter from Bangladesh was a mercy mission.

I cannot think of a worse reason to adopt a child (other than a determination to abuse the child).

M and I adopted our fabulous daughter for the same reason that we would have given birth; for the same reason other parents choose to become parents -- because we wanted a family. We wanted a baby. We wanted to be parents.

NOT because we were "saving" a child.

It's the most important distinction.

Can you imagine growing up in a household that presented itself as your savior? Poor little child, you would have perished had it not been for us, our generosity, our sympathy. We didn't want a family, we wanted a cause. Congratulations, you're it!

I can't think of anything more demeaning than growing up thinking you owe not only your existence but your survival, your food, your clothes, your fortune (literally, in the case of the McCains) to two mortals who plucked you from the brink of desperation.

Children deserve to feel unconditional love; they thrive on it. They need to feel that the reason they are in this world, in this home, in this family, is because they -- they -- are wanted for who they are.

Imagine anyone congratulating Cindy's humanitarianism for getting pregnant. "Oh, you've done such a generous thing." What?

As a grownup with occasional outward signs of illness, I cannot abide pity or condescension. I appreciate when people make allowances for my infrequent limitations, but I would not hesitate to deck someone who kept company with me because it made him feel superior.

Cindy McCain's attitude toward her beautiful daughter is shameful, elitist, and damaging. She would have done better to stroke a big fat check to Mother Teresa's orphanage and make way for people who want children because they actually want children.

John McCain is lauding her right now for "her concern for people less fortunate than we are," and intimated their daughter is among them. I count their daughter among those people, too. Poor, poor precious little girl.

Is this good for me? This cannot be good for me.

2008-09-04T14:31:00.006-04:00

I know we go all gooey over a "vigorous debate" in this democracy of ours, but truly, the heights to which my blood pressure has climbed in the last three days have got to be unhealthy, at least on the cellular level. And it's on the cellular level that my little body is giving me lip, after all. Maybe I'd better knock off rubbernecking the Twin Cities trainwreck and get back to fiction.

Although I've not written any fiction so brazen as that Rovian fantasy Palin laid on us last night... Gasping, still gasping...

Here I go, to work on the novel. See me go? Here I go.

And another thing...

2008-09-04T14:18:00.003-04:00

Here is a quick roundup of lies lies lies the GOP has been spouting in the last day or so. Honestly, I don't get my news from Huffington Post, but it's a good spot to wallow in the collective Democrat (human?) agony at the moment.

From small minds come breathtaking lies

2008-09-04T11:47:00.006-04:00

M and I were destined to despise everything about Palin -- including her bizarre, grating accent -- and so we pat ourselves on the backs this morning for fulfilling our destiny. The condescension oozing from this self-righteous, small-minded fundamentalist was outdone only by her unearned swagger. The Mayor of Munchkin City actually asserted she possessed more "executive experience" and "actual responsibilities" than the Obamas (yes, both of them) when they worked as community organizers in Chicago lifting up poor, disenfranchised people whom the U.S. government had left for dead.

How fucking dare she.

Do they think that saying a lie makes it true? No. They think that saying it makes us believe it.

Did we know, for instance, that she has "lots" of foreign policy experience because Russia and Canada are just, you know, right over there?

Did we know that candidates' children are off limits, except when it's politically expedient to flaunt them and promise policy around them, as she did with her youngest son? Or hold up their service to America as a personal qualification, as she did with her oldest son?

Did she know we could hear her when she disparaged Obama's and Biden's legitimate, honorable service to the country, but held up McCain's equally honorable military service as an ultimate qualification?

Did she realize she had an audience of people, apart from the frenzied masses before her, capable of discerning bullshit when she claimed that Obama will raise taxes, forfeit Iraq, negotiate with terrorists and leave us more vulnerable than George Bush?

Did Rudith Giuliani, as an exhausted Andrea Mitchell called him, know the microphones were on and the cameras rolling when he claimed, in a laugh-out-loud moment, that the 20-month governor/Queen for a Day has more executive experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined? Because she got a road paved?

Do the McCain mouthpieces realize they are talking to live human adults when they claim that Sarah Palin is a friend to the environment and champion of alternative energy?

Do the rightwing airbags know we can see their lips moving when they tell us this anti-choice, gun-toting mommie dearest is a feminist?

How can they square all this? They can't. So they lie, and hope we bite. They are despicable.

As is her taste in eyewear.

Even Peggy Noonan is losing her shit.

Travel, pain, Palin and babies

2008-09-02T10:51:00.005-04:00

Wow -- that was some trip. Eight hours in the car with a five-year-old who is *hopped up* on the prospect of changing a newborn's diaper, starting kindergarten, and eating Swedish fish. I worked on my first poetry submission for workshop, but scrapped the whole thing by the time we pulled into town. It was about a guy who is struggling to say something to his friends, who are gathered and partying in his kitchen. In other words, crap. Guess what I wrote about instead.

The baby rocks the projects, of course, and A was a good little cousin, for the most part. Neither the new mama nor I had any clue that a big spankin' lump can form under a baby's chest when he's processing all those birth hormones; we found out by calling the emergency pediatrician. Man, the tales Old Wives never got around to telling... Anyway, he's perfect and beautiful and damn near edible.

On Palin: call me predestined to hate her pious guts, but that pride she feels that her daughter "decided to have her baby" followed by the unmistakable nudge of a double-barrel to the ribs the boy must have felt when the world was informed his girlfriend intended to make a child-groom of him -- well, they're all smiling just a bit too hard. They say she's a feminist who would strike Roe v. Wade from existence in a sweep so broad even rape and incest victims would be forced to carry pregnancies to term. A feminist, you say? I'm supposed to like her because she has a million children? A job? A vagina? What the fuck? I pray (yes, Ms. Palin, I do) that voters will see this for what it is: the most cynical VP nomination imaginable.

In other news, the coverage of and response to Gustaf was breathtaking. Everybody pat everybody on the back. Over and over. In fact, let's raise money for all the victims of the relatively victimless non-event. We're all Americans today. Tomorrow we can go back to forgetting what a great job Brownie did. Today's a day for prayer and overreaction. Houma needs some help, for sure. So do the gazillion families who remain displaced, struggling, perhaps nearly destitute after the bumbling three years ago. But yeah, you boys were Johnny on the spot with this little gust called Gustaf. Unfurl the flags! Revise the McCain Web site! (Maybe if they can figure out how to raise money online for hurricane relief, they'll be able to translate this new concept into campaign fundraising... and change the face of politics in the twenty-first century!) Last thing about Palin: John McCain, when asked why he chose her, said she would "change America." How's that?

M and I, impersonating a family of pack-mules, got A off to Kindergarten this morning. I cried, just like I did on the first day of preschool last year. I felt then like I might be on the upswing; skinny, hairless, gasping but glowing with promise that I felt better, was getting stronger. Today I'm thirty pounds heavier, can walk three miles, and know I have this thing inside me that sooner or later we're going to have to address. I'm a bit uncomfortable, physically, and I did eat some hydrocodone on the trip to take the edge off. I slept a lot. Now I have to go write a novel.

Items

2008-08-27T23:24:00.002-04:00

Love me some Joe Biden. Super speech. Preaching to the choir, of course, but still. The cutaways of his mom killed me.
I missed Bill Clinton's speech (was in novel workshop tonight, fighting through a sudden-onset allergy attack, Biblical in scale and... thrust... and consequently graphic, gross and humiliating) but I gather he done good.
Can't get enough of Barack and Michelle. I am so sold.
Off to Georgia tomorrow to meet our new baby nephew/cousin for the first time. It's been a long time since I've cuddled a month-old baby. I don't think I have any hormone-making equipment left, and yet just thinking about how that baby head will smell sends my pulse racing. Yummy baby.
Felt pretty good today until about 5:00, when I started to hit the wall. I took a couple of Advil just before class (should have taken a Claritin and a sheaf of Kleenex). I hesitate to take codeine or opiate pain medication just now, since it obscures symptoms and creates other problems. Staying in touch with how I'm feeling, physically, dictates that I monitor pain -- circumstances, frequency, intensity, duration, quality (i.e. stabbing, dull, aching, localized, etc.). Anyway, the Advil took about an hour to kick in, but by that time I was sufficiently distracted by the explosive sneezing disaster, as was the rest of the class, so I didn't really notice how crummy I felt otherwise.

Will make more posts from Baby Central, unless I don't. Next week: Kindergarten madness!

Memory for shit

2008-08-27T13:40:00.003-04:00

One of the most insidious side effects of cancer therapy is "chemo brain." It may mean different things to different people. To me, it means:

Scattered attention
Inability to recall short- or long-term experiences, including (mercifully, perhaps) details of past therapies, names of drugs, treatment regimens, surgeries
Inability to remember (unmercifully) whether I liked what I ate for breakfast yesterday enough to order it again, where I read that really interesting article about caregiver fatigue, who was on John Stewart last night, and what I've done with my car keys
Failure to recall what I'm writing

That last is a real pickle. Just try drafting a novel when, each morning, you have to reintroduce your characters to yourself. Fucking hell.

I blame it on chemo, but maybe my brain is atrophying early. Maybe I have early onset dementia. I'm only 46; maybe I just don't pay attention.

Or maybe it's my psyche's clumsy effort at sifting too many mindbending stimuli. Like the idea that I'm mortal. That I can't vanquish the disease by force of will. That there are things beyond my control. That the therapies, for all their apparent sophistication, are really just barbarous shots in the dark. Let's cut it out. No? Let's put some poison on it. Oops. Looks like that was maybe a little too much.

Feh.

I have class tonight. I'll have to bring every thought I've ever had about this novel, in writing, so I can explain what I'm doing with this book. So I can remember. So I can live.

What the hill dillio? And good stuff on VQR

2008-08-27T07:30:00.008-04:00

She did it. Hillary did what she needed to do for the party, for the ticket, for her die-hard supporters (except the freakishly obtuse PUMAs), for herself, and apparently for her marriage -- did you see Bill gettin' all gooey eyed while she talked? I think I lip-read him murmuring "I love you" several times. Sweet but icky. The impish Wonkette has this demure play-by-play.

It may just be enough to eradicate from memory that haunting image of Sen. Mark Warner free-falling, in slow motion, from a player on the national stage to a second-rate pol who missed the opportunity to connect on the biggest stage he'll ever have.

Rob Saldin is blogging the convention for VQR and has some pithy first person perspective. I can't stomach attending writers' conferences, never mind national political rallies, so it's nice to be able to follow vicariously the intrepid into the fray through the system of tubes that is the Interwebs. Yay, VQR.

Also at VQR is a spectacularly intimate, candid series of conversations with women soldiers, done by my friend Laura Browder. Together, the interviews (to me) present a first-hand skewering of this failed administration and its contempt for the lives, the toll on real human beings, of its draconian ideology.

So, the score:

Hillary - fabulous

Warner - deflating

Wonkette - so ladylike

The DNC - turning it around

VQR - substantial content

Women vets - heroes

Bush - perpetually SNAFU

I'd be embarrassed, but instead I'm just bored

2008-08-26T22:28:00.003-04:00

Mark Warner fan here. Did a ton for the Old Dominion, is charismatic (really!) in person and at moderate-sized rallies.

But I sense his limitations, and I've been shaking my head over the DNC's decision to have him give the keynote. After all, he's a "coalition" guy. King of compromise. Everyone settle down, play nice.

Last thing the convention needs is Mr. Niceguy. And my God did he bomb tonight.

I mean, what the hell? Did no one tell him it's a Democratic gathering? Whose purpose is not to hypnotize but rather galvanize the base?

Why is he so tentatively toeing the middle? Do they not realize that the Appalachian "country folk" (invariably a pejorative uttered by pundits) aren't tuned in to this fucking snoozefest?

No passion. No frenzy. No climax.

No way we're going to win over voters if we can't even keep ourselves awake and attentive.

Come on, Hillary. Come on, Joe. Inject some juice into this thing.

M says he wants to see Bobby Kennedy, piss and vinegar, a real fight. It's not here. Not yet.

Come one, Hill. Come on, Joe. Come on, Barack. Earn it!

Chelsea 2020.

Poems and cider

2008-08-26T16:04:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I write poems. Often they're poems about -- sing along -- cancer. Other times not. I'm working on a new collection in poetry workshop this semester. One of them has to do with apples. Perhaps I'll polish the collection to the point that I feel confident entering it in a contest.

One contest I won't be entering is Cider Press Review, whose recent suckage came to my attention via the hilarious Literary Rejections on Display blog, by way of poet Stacey Lynn Brown's Ten Fingers Typing. To pick the tiniest nit, the publisher's abuse of the word abuse is just... abusive.

Karma dictates that Stacey's big fat ship will come in soon and roll right on past that dinky dinghy CPR. Go, Stacey.

Doctor, doctor

2008-08-26T14:51:00.004-04:00

One good thing about being a cancer veteran is that I know everyone in my oncologist's office. (And in the infusion center, and in the Women's Special Care unit, and in radiology, and outpatient admitting, and and and.) So when I call at the crack of 8:00 asking if there's time for a quick checkup today, I'm not talking to a switchboard; I'm talking to Paige, who has known me and my family lo these many years.

"Hang on just a sec, E," she says, and is back in no time with, "We'll see you as soon as you can be here."

So off we go, me and M, after depositing A at day school and eating a nerve pill. Everyone in the office -- Paige, Iva, Betty, Joanne, Dr. W (my oncologist's partner) -- everyone comes out and gives us hugs and asks after A and asks for pictures, as though we weren't in less than a month ago; as though they've done nothing in the interim but think about us and wonder how we are doing, daily, hourly.

We do the routine, guessing how much I weigh before the scale tells us for sure, and checking blood pressure (waaaaay up there today, brushed aside as "white coat syndrome"), and taking us to the exam room and hanging out with us, making us laugh, distracting us before Dr. J makes his bigger-than-life appearance.

I love him. We have a great relationship: I trust him, he trusts me. He is not icked out by M being in the room with us while he pokes around, vamping a monologue about throwing pottery and cooking for his son's fraternity house. He throws photos of his new grandbaby all over my stomach, knowing I'll squeal. Then he turns serious, but not too serious when he explains that he's feeling some "knuckle-like things," then reassures us that I've had worse exams. Better, too.

He says he thinks we're status quo. I tell him I think the pressure is more persistent. He asks about particulars, I tell him. He says he thinks we should wait. Keep a very close eye. Monthly appointments but come in earlier if you notice anything different. What happens if it gets worse? What will we do? We'll figure it out then. If we try to plan now, it'll just change. But he has more tricks up his sleeve, right? And more sleeves? He is indignant. Of course! Of course I do!

That's what I needed to hear. He won't just send us away with no prospects and a prescription for fentanyl. He'll do something. He'll fix it one more time.

Somehow we'll try something we have never tried before, and it'll work.

As we leave, he grabs my arm. You gotta show Iva the photo of A with the electric guitar. Iva, come look at this!

Late fragments

2008-08-25T21:50:00.008-04:00

Well, as it turns out, it was too big a day. I came home after class and cried a big snotty mess all over M. Starting to not feel good, persistently. This is upsetting, of course, considering the last CT scan was only a month ago; seems things are happening quickly.

I should mention here, because I haven't and because it's dear to me, that we adopted our sweet baby daughter from China in 2003. It was, and is, a miracle of love.

When I turned to lock the front door behind me tonight, I saw a note affixed to the light switch:

"Lost is fairy book. It was on my bed." The word "fairy" is written in cursive.

She is five.

She is magnificent.

Late Fragment, R. Carver:

[And did you get what/ you wanted from this life, even so?/ I did. /And what did you want?/ To call myself beloved, to feel myself/ beloved on the earth.]

Even so.

Early thoughts

2008-08-25T06:19:00.007-04:00

Sleep is overrated. For me, it's become a time to worry without the crucial ability to do something to adjust whatever I'm worried about.

Chief among worries this early morning: a niggling pressure in the lower abdomen. Is it getting worse? I can't tell. It's enough to wake me up and keep my brain twirling. Worry.

Secondary concerns: Final meeting with freelance client at 10:00 this morning, followed by two hours of brainstorming an acronym for a process change (different client), then to campus for first day/night of classes: poetry workshop beginning at 4:00, followed by Literary Editing and Publishing at 7:00. Home by 10:00. Long damn day. And on just five hours of sleep...

I'll plan better from now on so I don't overload myself (easy to do because I'm an off-the-chart introvert). This summer, it was helpful to build in E-time every day -- at least two hours between appointments, no more than two appointments per day (doctor, therapy, freelance or otherwise). Some days I'd have absolutely nothing on my calendar. What a luxury! Time to read, time to paint the ceiling in the front parlor a beguiling shade of sunset orange. And I got into the habit of fetching A early from pre-K summer camp on Fridays so we could "be girls together" for a few hours. I want to keep that up as long as possible.

Which brings me to the uber worry: A and M. She was so little when she got pulled into this mess, all she really understood was that Mama had a booboo in her tummy and the doctor was going to fix it. Last year, the first half of which I spent in bed, she was four and in need of explanation and reassurance. Now, at five, this Daddy's girl has grown a little clingy to me, possessive, a bit vigilant, even. And my worry is, of course, that she's so much more aware of what happens around her in general, with me in particular. I can't help think that when things turn, she'll be devastated. And M will be left to deal with it. How do you comfort a child who has sustained such deep loss? How do you comfort yourself? I know that children are tough and flexible and people are adaptable and all that. But this is my child, my husband. I'd throw myself in front of a bus to protect them from this -- oh the irony.

And so I don't sleep.

Ten things that help me feel strong

2008-08-24T13:02:00.006-04:00

Doing laundry. Changing the bed clothes. Teaching my daughter how to make her bed the old-fashioned way, tucking the pillows under a cheerful vintage chenille bedspread. Folding sheets.
Walking through the neighborhood with my husband, my little girl, and a go-cup, assessing paint jobs and plantings, peering through leaded glass doors, holding A's hand while she "walks up high" on raised brick curbs, carrying her piggyback for two whole blocks before her heft forces me to hand her to M. Feeling sweaty and a little buzzed when we get home, rocking on the front porch as the sun goes down.
Starting a blog.
Having friends over this afternoon for grown-up cocktails.
Drawing fairy dresses with A. Writing a fairy story. Showing her how to write "fairy" in cursive.
Buying all the crap on the kindergarten supply list.
Cursing in the CVS about the list.
Using coupons to save money on the supplies. (I saved more than $17, yay.)
Letting A stay up late to watch Laurel & Hardy movies. Cuddling with her in our bed. Inhaling her hair while she tries to keep her eyes open. Hearing her and M laugh over the dumbest slapstick. Watching them both fall asleep; hearing them snore in unison.
Picking up A without waking her and depositing her in her bed. Tucking her in. Kissing her sweaty neck. Returning to bed and turning off the TV. Reading. Snoozing. Resting. Sleeping.

Q: Do the Interwebs really need another cancer blog?

2008-08-23T13:57:00.017-04:00

A: No. But I need it, because I'm trying to write fiction, and this goddamn blight is infecting my prose and poetry. This is my attempt to surgically remove it.

I'm a writer, wife, mother, student, sister, Democrat, etc. Diagnosed with IIIC ovarian cancer at age 35. That was nearly twelve years ago. Recurred seven years later, three months after my father died. My daughter was 15 months old. There was not one thing about it that did not suck out loud. In the last four years, I've had too many surgeries and rounds of chemo to keep track of. 2007 was the worst, with chemo failing and in April, doctors suggesting I was too frail to keep trying new therapies.

Screw that.

I started a full-time, three-year residential MFA in Creative Writing program last fall, complete with 20 hours a week in TA responsibilities. Devoting my time to writing, reading, and thinking about writing; staying busy with classes and job responsibilities; buying a "new" 100-year-old house; and most of all, raising a fabulous five year old (kindergarten starts in a week!) with my adorable husband -- all have sustained me.

I reckon I'm a person who thrives on a project or seven.

Anyway, about three weeks ago we had a crummy CT scan. I'm feeling good, relatively asymptomatic, neuropathy isn't so bad when the weather's warm, so we're waiting. Which freaks me out. Last time we waited too long; I damn near died. But the longer between therapies, the better the chance the weed killer will work, until it doesn't.

So, it's a chronic condition.

To keep anxiety in check and be able to sleep without fitful dreams, I pop nerve pills. (If I miss a pill, my dreams are vivid, menacing and constant.) My intention is to use this blog to work out the day-to-day and even big-picture stuff, so that I can be free to write characters who don't have, um, some morbid disease. You'd be surprised how your subconscious nudges its way onto the page when you deprive it its dream space.

Feel free to leave comments.

Gobamabiden.