Block party

We had neighbors over tonight, and I love it when everything is so ordinary and so precious in its ordinariness. I like how everyone just hummed along like little clocks on a shelf together. We're all friends and cohorts and all our kids are going to Grow Up Together. So it's a darned good thing we like each other, but we're incredibly lucky to have found the kind of community we have right here on the block. As far as I can tell, a lot of people live in bedroom communities that empty out in the mornings and fill back up in the evenings, and they don't know each other all that well. It's just the luck of the draw, too. Across the little gully behind our house and garden in Santa Cruz 20 years ago a guy would get drunk from time to time, yell and moan, and chop wood. I remember my exasperation, and wondering how it could be that I hadn't already done my time around people so deranged by drinking? I just had to let that idea go, or fume every time I heard the thwack! of his ax right across the little gully from us, where the surf and fog could swallow the rhythmic hacks from the hearing of most of his neighbors. Fortunately, I don't have neighbors like that anymore. Phew!

I have a good editor

I am realizing that I need a really good editor, someone who wants to guide me. But without sending my writing out, no one will know they want to work with me. So I did the thing that's always worked best, I have learned over the years, and said an affirmation. And made a plan to send out queries. And before you leap off somewhere else and write me off as a kook, know how powerful affirmation can be. Try it before you knock it, in other words. Every time I do this, something manifests. A friend of mine has a related philosophy but it's even simpler: Just take action... and the universe will give you something to do.

I have that beginning-of-September feeling of fullness, that it's time to organize and go back to a disciplined schedule, to get some things done. I'll start working toward specific goals for a certain number of hours a week. I am ready to put myself in the ring again. It's time.

More Random Factoids, or Why I read blogs

My mother always thought a great product to offer would be a calendar that had "365 facts you wish you didn't know." I still think she's got something there.

I liked that penguin movie story, which is more of a fact that's fun to know. My favorite random factoid for a while was that the French version of March of the Penguins does not have Morgan Freeman as the Omnipotent Narrator (aka "God"), nor does it even have Samuel L. Jackson*. Rather, it has French actors pretending they are penguins and saying, "Here, honey! I'm passing you the egg now. I'm about to roll it. No, sweetie, no, it's about to freeze! Get on there, you slowpoke of a husband, you!" And I think that version was as popular in France as the Freeman-playing-nature-show-host version that we saw in the U.S.

And this is so random: From the IMDB list of credits for actress Katharine Heigl (of TV's Grey's Anatomy fame):
13. Evil Never Dies (2003) (TV)
14. Love Comes Softly (2003) (TV)
And there's even an extra bonus random factoid in that in number 13, the TV movie with "Evil" in the title, she plays the character named "Eve." That's just too perfect.

See? Told you it'd be random.


* Samuel L. Jackson in an interview with The Onion's "AV Club" arts section:

The Onion: You're doing the voice of God for an audiobook version of the Bible. How does the voice of God differ from the voice of Samuel L. Jackson?
Samuel L. Jackson: Not very much.

What is, "The name of a foodie blog"?

This ("Enough Spoons," that is) is the perfect title for a food-lover's blog. Here's a foodie post o' mine:
http://www.chowhound.com/topics/show/319063

I have been thinking about what I'd like to be known for in a very non-morbid way, honest. I've just been thinking things like, "She saw the world in loving detail." or "She loved food and felt it needed to be done right if done at all." Or "She loved music: it could cheer her up faster than anything. Announce a Gomez concert in the next four months and all was well with the world for a while."

Today my mother bade me farewell by saying, "You just go back to stalking Gomez now," and it was totally jokey and funny and great, because we had just agreed that we knew that stalking was almost never about the stalkee but entirely in the deranged mind of the stalker.

Unfortunately this came up in the context of that creepy guy whose name I won't even deign to repeat arrested on charges of committing a ten-year-old sensational murder across town. I can hardly breathe when I think of that murder. My own child is six and so amazing and alive and has the cutest little voice on the planet. And one day when I was out gardening, a year or so after this terrible murder of a young child, a beat-up old Pinto or some seventies wreck of a car, tan paint with silver trim on the outside and the same shade of tan vinyl inside. And a guy slowed down and asked me where he could find JonBenet's house (he might have even said "The JonBenet house"). And I told him he was at the wrong end of town and to look somewhere else because he wasn't anywhere near it, which was absolutely true. So today I even have a question in my mind: Could that have been this guy that they are shipping back from Thailand to California and then here? Who the heck knows anything? I wasn't there, but I wouldn't trust this guy or the one who asked me for directions with a three-foot child. Not in a million.

So the world turns on its weird wobbling axis and people drift through, projecting their innermost fears or realities onto the symbol represented by another's. Music fans do it with their songsmiths just as those abused as children sometimes find excuses to obsess or even abuse as adults.

I hope I'm breaking the familial cycles of violence and early sexuality in my own child's life. I'm giving my own daughter her innocence by giving her guidelines about privacy but not restrictions on what she should and shouldn't do, although I suppose I'd better get on that pretty darned quick. I'm sheltering her so much more than my parents did me. It may be in part that I am happy now with my own innocence despite early and extensive knowledge. But I've never been thrilled about being made to see so much so early and sometimes feel the need to push back a bit, keep a little mystery in it.

It's your world; I'm just redesigning it, Part 63b

It amazes me to this day how difficult it is to use an airline's web site the way you want to. If you want to see a grid of lowest fares over two weeks to understand when the cheapest time to fly would be, you can go to a couple of airlines' sites (British Airways and Travelocity are fairly usable this way) to get that kind of display. But so many of these sites are so obviously untested by real-life people with real-life tasks.

And some things are just on the level of annoyances, like the format of American Airlines' itinerary/receipt. It's three pages long if you print it all (and of course you don't usually NEED those last four paragraphs). Someone could have tried to edit the text or the big fat table that displays the details of the flights to print two or even one page. But nooooooo, it is as if no one ever thought of that before.

And I mentioned Travelocity as a good source but more for information about potential low fares than for tickets. Once in a while I buy a ticket there I can't reproduce anywhere else but often if I find something great there, it vaporizes somewhere between the great low fare I've been told about and the reality once I start looking for dates and times.