Because if it's not about the election it's about my kid

My first! ever! RBOC post! It must be November!

• So, I got Z. an Obama/Phillies baseball shirt, too, only hers is an adult medium (so is yours, Mom!), which was the smallest they had. Until such time--if ever--as she grows into it, or gets bored with it, she's using it as a pillowcase by night, and a cape by day.
• Also, she had her flu shot yesterday, only it was a puff up the nose. She did great. I should probably get one, too.
  
• Her class is doing an "All About Me" unit, where they look at who has what color eyes and has how many people in their family and which pets and all of that. Thus, I know that she has brown hair and brown eyes, three people in her family, one dog, and is now 43" tall. That makes her too tall to ride for free on SEPTA and big enough for many many rides at Sesame Place that she couldn't go on last summer.
  
• This makes me feel better about having moved her into a booster seat last week. Once she started wearing her winter coat in the mornings, the carseat straps got uncomfortable for her and there was no more strap to pull, but she looks so, I dunno, untethered in the booster.
• She learned "God Bless America" to sing at the Phillies parade at her preschool last week. Two weeks ago? Whenever that was, with the World Series and all. She thinks it's a swell song to sing for Obama. She's singing it all the time. I wish she knew more verses, if it even has more verses. It's getting old.
  
• Barack Hussein Obama is gonna be our next president. How about that?
  

Does this brain still work?

I have coped with the past several anxious weeks by never slowing down long enough to really let my emotions catch up with me.

Pennsylvania was, until last night, the reddest of the blue states, and I live in the bluest part of it. Really, even in my strongly Democratic city, my neighborhood votes way to the left in primaries. I am used to electoral disappointment. I expect it.

When there was talk in the last week or two that Pennsylvania might still be in play after all, that without it McCain really had no shot at the electoral college, this election felt like Philadelphia against John McCain. My northeastern, largely African-American, heavily Democratic, underfunded, insurance-assaulted, university-dominated city, standing against the cynicism, vote manipulation, lies and disdain of a party that had no idea what kind of groundswell they were facing. Community organizers, my ass.

But I was worried. I was still really crazy worried that I hadn't done enough.

I know I have a lot of magical thinking about my participation in politics. I canvassed for nuclear disarmament the summers of 1988 and 1989, and you know that was why the Soviet bloc crumbled and the Berlin wall fell. In 1994 I failed to switch my registration to Pennsylvania in time and didn't bother with the absentee ballot in DC, and the Republicans swept both houses.

But what else can you expect from a lesbian born and raised in a disenfranchised city, within a mile of the Capitol? I expect to be left out and powerless, and I expect that my feet moving on the treadmill of the political process is the only thing that keeps this country from moving backwards faster. I think a lot of lefties in this country feel that way, though, and there are a lot of lefties in my neighborhood.

When they called Pennsylvania last night, I shrieked loud enough to make A. think I was hurt. When they called Pennsylvania, I finally believed Obama would win. Not just could, but would. This morning, Z. and I were ready to go more than an hour before we had to be anywhere, and I wanted to celebrate, so we did something we've never done before and went to the cafe for breakfast. Everyone there was saying "We did it!" No one said "He won." I started asking, and my neighbors had all been out knocking on doors and making calls.

We did it. We did. Philadelphia beat John McCain. Our side won.

But not in California, except, well, I haven't been as upset about Prop 8 as other queer folk I've talked to today. I guess the polls were running against it so strongly that I hadn't pinned a whole lot of hope to it, and I live in a state where what happens in California isn't going to affect us much. I also am not at all sure how I feel about civil marriage itself--as a shorthand for equality, hell yes; as a church-state catastrophe, definitely; as a wedge issue, I am pissed off beyond measure. But having spent my entire life outside of legally-sanctioned marriage and having a lot of, um, issues with heteronormativity, I'm not feeling it personally. My marriage doesn't have its basis in civil law. I feel pretty damn married without a slip of paper from the state. I grant you that I absolutely would not feel that detached from the fight if it were happening here, because then I would have done a lot of considering about whether A. and I should and would make it legal, and it would infuriate me to have those considerations rendered moot, but that's sort of where my limitations lie.

I'm actually much more upset about the Arizona measure that restricted state-approved parenthood to married couples. Z. would have one legal parent if she were born in Arizona. My straight friend who adopted as a single mom wouldn't have her daughter. If Pennsylvania hadn't allowed second-parent adoption at the time Z. was born, we would have made sure she was born somewhere that did.

Now I think I'm just rambling, folks. It's late, it's been a long month or two, or four, or twenty-two.

What I want to say before I tumble into sleep is that Prop 8 passed by less than four points. Eight years ago, California defined marriage, by referendum, as being between a man and a woman--that measure passed by 22 points.

From where I stand, The Bad Guys losing 18 points of their 22-point margin in eight years? That's us winning. That's all.

Election day/Election night

We lined up this morning at the Presbyterian church a block down the hill from us. Two divisions vote in the social hall there, and it was reminiscent of the co-op line fifteen minutes before closing on the night before a big holiday. Lots of crowding, but people patient and chatting with neighbors, everyone in it together and anticipating a celebration.

Z. dressed in a blue-striped dress top and (finally, after more shouting than I want to recall), red cords, with my yellow Obama "volunteer" button on her dress. An Obama poll worker gave her another, which I pinned on her coat--parents, you'll understand what a godsend that was while we were still lined up outside in the (somewhat) cold.

The whole wait was maybe 45 minutes. Luck of the draw, A. had Z. when we got to the front, so I went into the booth on my own. Standing inside the privacy of those curtains, I had a hard time pressing the green button to record my vote. For long, long moments, I felt caught in something that I couldn't move out of before I'd let it move through me.

It felt like prayer.

Please, god, please, god. A new world.

Edited at 11:02 pm: NBC just called it. For Z., President Obama will be who she knows, how she grows up.

Fly, my baby girl. Fly.

Obama is running so our children can fly.

This afternoon, I drove down Dr. King Drive, turned and took Powelton and Walnut out to West Philly, and knocked on doors for the third and last time this campaign.

I initially signed up to canvass because I was so infuriated by the McCain campaign's choice of Sarah Palin that I could not stand to sit by once she was in the race. I am excited about Obama and I voted for him in the primary, but I have always felt fairly cynical about elections because I'm pretty far to the left and it's always a fight between the center and the right. I'd much rather have the center in power than the right, but it's just hard to move out of my comfort zone and walk my feet tired to help people who, election after election, don't come out in support of my civil rights.

When the McCain camp shifted into buffoonery, though, it felt personal. I felt insulted, and I wanted to get even. So. I signed up. I joined the campaign.

Here's the thing: I clicked the wrong email, the one that said to come to Pennsylvania and volunteer for Obama. That meant I signed up as though I were an out-of-stater, and that turned out to be a great stroke of luck, because I didn't wind up at the campaign office on the main drag of my integrated, hippie-populated neighborhood, but instead was assigned to knock on doors in a part of the city ten miles away, in a neighborhood where seeing a white face on the street makes you wonder what brings them there.

Knocking on those doors changed my sense of what I was doing. Seeing the Obama signs up in house after house in a Black neighborhood, well. I'm a white girl, but I grew up in Southeast DC, on stories of Dr. King and Rosa Parks.

This was on the wall in the canvass office today:

Rosa sat so Martin would walk.

Martin walked so Obama could run.

Obama is running so our children can fly.

May they fly, may they all find the wings to fly.

What the cool kids are wearing

The new, hot shirt in my neighborhood...



...and I got me one. Score. I'm all set to canvass again tomorrow.

(Nicholas, I got you one, too, with slate-blue sleeves. I'll touch base about getting it to you.)

Writing for Marriage

Today there's a blog carnival going on about gay marriage, to raise awareness about the fight to defeat proposition 8 in California. I'm a married lesbian. How can I not write? So I'm writing.

But I'm not really sure what it is I want to say. I chose to marry because I am a lesbian. I wanted to build a home with A. and raise children with her and marriage was the way to get, oh, legitimacy, yeah, but that's not even the word I want. I wanted the mojo of all our family and friends in one place making it so that our relationship became a structure strong enough to raise kids in. It's a ritual magic I believe in. I wanted to stand up with A. and turn us into a family. I wanted the pictures to show the kids we hadn't conceived yet. I wanted my cousins to get the same invitations in the mail that they'd sent me. Well, for their first weddings, anyway.

I have my doubts about civil marriage, but that doesn't matter at all. It is entirely irrelevant to this post. What matters is that in California there are some really virulent people spending a hell of a lot of money to prevent the rabbis who married me and A. from, well, marrying me and A. This is a church-and-state issue, folks. If you're not in California, you can help by giving money. Our side needs $3 million by Friday night to match the homophobes.

Please, give. Whatever you can. Everything counts.

The home stretch

The potty fairy came to our house last night. You know the one. She collects the potties from the bathrooms and the living room, and in their various places she leaves presents from the stash of little bitty toys that your parents have left over from the days when it was all about filling out sticker charts every time you even sat on the potty.

No more bowls to empty. I can't quite believe it.

She's a long way from dry at night (but with hopeful signs). She's a long way from wiping herself (but with hopeful--oh, wait, she's still apt to run away with her pants around her ankles...never mind).

But!!!

The potty fairy came to our house last night.

Phew.

Store miscellania

Recently, I've been doing some long-overdue publisher orders, and the books that wind up on those orders are the ones that we have been living without for awhile, so I'm looking over the sales numbers, wondering. The rule of thumb is that you want to turn your stock three times in a year, so if a book has sold less than three times in twelve months, I'm getting more ruthless about letting it go out of stock.

I'm closing in on three years of doing this, which is as long as I taught high school full time* and I think I'm better at this part of my job than when I started, right there at the core of my work: judging what my customers will buy.

One thing they pretty much won't buy is cd's, so we're selling off all our adult cd's at more or less cost. What I finally realized is that this is the perfect chance to refresh the store's collection of cd's. If they make a detour to my laptop's hard drive before they make it into the cd rack, well, ya know. These things happen.

*I taught in high schools in one way or another for more like eight years, so I have awhile yet before I'm caught up.

Skyline and homecoming

Twice this past week, I've been in Center City with people who don't get there too often. Me, I used to live there, six blocks over from City Hall, and varying distances south.

I grew up in a city without skyscrapers, and I used to get absolutely tickled that I could look up and see those immense glass sculptures, vistas changing as I moved around town. It changed my sense of scale, and of homecoming. The moment when I rounded the curve of the highway and saw the glittering spires and felt myself settle back into my skin became the payoff moment of the drive home from my parents' house. Now that I'm often coming home from points north, and home is in the northwestern reaches of the city, I miss that moment.

(For the record, the best way to approach Philadelphia is from the south, on I95 or I76, or, as Jane Dark reminded me, the R1 from the airport. I have opinions on other cities, too: DC is best approached from the south on I295, and Boston from Route 2, coming in from Concord, preferably after a long day spent at Walden Pond.)

Z.: For prwetend, we'yeuh not vegetawians.

S.: (Filling dishwasher.) Oh, we're not? What are we then?

Z.: Well we'yeuh Jewish, but we'yeuh not vegetawians.

S.: (Still filling dishwasher.) How very meat-eating of us.

Z.: We'yeuh not vegetawians, for prwetend, so I have dis dog on a stick for us.

S.: (Turns and sees realistic-looking Folkmanis black lab puppy hoist on cardboard-tube "sword." Dissolves into fits of giggles. Heads to the computer to record every word.)

Z.: We can eat it!

I'm ready to go back to work now

The past week has included:

1. Firing an employee, by far the thing I most hate about my job. The employee spent the week avoiding calls, then quit right before the shift when we were prepared to turn her back at the door.
   
2. A weekend of grandparents (and my cousin Nick!): fun, but tiring, and especially fun-but-tiring for Z.
3. A full-staff meeting. Also fun, but tiring.
   
4. A court date for an incident involving the store. The incident was in May. The trial was Monday. Dude got 3-12 months.
   
5. Therapy.
6. A day when Z.'s daycare was closed.
7. One giant zit. Giant.
   
8. More therapy.
9. Another day when Z.'s daycare was closed.
10. Not enough time to swim.
11. Not enough time to walk.
12. Not enough time.
    

Does this happen in your house?

Okay, this is one for the two- (or more-) parent families out there:

Z. has serious trouble coping with the transition between spending a lot of time with just one parent and then adjusting to the arrival of the other parent. She ignores, she's flat-out rude, she pushes, she tantrums. We hold a fairly hard line on it, and she's gotten a lot better than she used to be, but the problem hasn't gone away. It's worse when she's spent a lot of time with A. and I enter the scene (A. thinks this is because Z.'s relationship with me is deeper and more intense so her reactions to me are deeper and more intense), but it can go in both directions.

Does this happen in your house? Are there tricks that work for you? Advice would be appreciated.

Wanting

A few days ago it was poverty awareness day in blogland, and I've been kicking it around, wealth and poverty. Well, the financial upheavals and my own risk-happy way of earning a living mean that I've been kicking this one around for a very long time.

One of the things I clicked on the other day was a poverty ranking tool, one that took your annual income and told you where you ranked in the overall poverty standing in the world. I'm not linking to it. It was cute, it was useful to have a jolt of perspective, but it was also beside the point. It embarrassed me, some, that I feel pinched when other people have so much less, but it didn't make me feel like I had more cash floating around.

Unless you are super-duper enlightened, whether you're feeling comfortable or deprived about money doesn't have anything to do with how much money everyone in the world has. It has to do with how much money the people have who are living next door to you have, or sitting down to dinner with you.

Last night, I was talking with a friend who told me how growing up where she did, she thought her family was poor because she didn't get a Porsche for her sixteenth birthday, making a point about how that setting warped her: we tend to judge our wealth relative to others', and we tend to think we should have the things that the folks around us have. Juliet Shor talks about this as the question of the reference group, the way we aren't necessarily looking at people with similar incomes when we judge whether our spending habits are reasonable.

This is something I struggle with, because I tend to judge my spending against my family's, but I am downwardly mobile. There is no way that in my line of work I will make even a little bit of the kind of money I was raised having access to, and even though A. is in a pretty darn secure, middle-class, professional kind of job, urban public school teachers ain't pulling it in hand over fist, you know?

So the way for me to feel wealthy instead of poor is to spend less, to want less. To feel that what I have is enough. To simplify. Shor calls this downshifting. It's really hard to pull off in a culture of abundance, which is, still, what we're living in here. Clothes are turning out to be the hardest thing for me to manage, I think because I've been losing weight and therefore my old clothes actually don't fit me. I do need to buy new clothing, and it's hard not to notice that the pants I think I can only afford on sale are often the least expensive ones in the catalog.

Special features

This evening, Z. and I varied our ritual watching of the Wizard of Oz by starting with the Angela-Lansbury-narrated animated storybook, which is far too abridged, but otherwise a really wonderful use of the original illustrations.

Then we moved on to the (also Lansbury-narrated) actor bios, and can I just say that I completely understand why Ray Bolger is my father-in-law's hero? What an amazing dancer. I can't say Wow! loudly enough.

Strangely, Judy Garland was omitted from the bio line-up. Do you suppose there was nothing they could find for a family-friendly DVD?

Debates

For all the time I spend online (and oh boy, I spend plenty), my inner Luddite holds sway in much of the rest of my life. We have a television, but it's about 12 years old and has no reception, which is extremely deliberate: we restrict our cable service to phone and internet. This means I've been following the debates via friends' tweets, having recently been inspired to start using the Twitter account I set up last Spring.

I gotta say, I think I got everything that was important to get. Anything I missed, I'll pick up on SNL videos tomorrow.

Patio camping

At kids' services on Saturday, I'm told the kids' service leader read the under-5's this Sukkot story and Z. has been in an ecstasy of living out the details of the book since then.

Last night, we slept in the sukkah. It was Z.'s suggestion but I was the one who made it happen--there aren't many years when it comes together: a warm enough, dry enough night, no guests, and no school for anyone the next day.

Sleeping isn't one of my strengths, and last night reproduced the conditions of both of the two longest consistently bad stretches of sleep I've ever had: the nights I spent in shelters on the Appalachian Trail, and the months in Z.'s second year when I slept close enough to her to touch her and her every twitch had an analog in my dreams.

So it was more of an aesthetic experience than a night of rest. Crickets, airplanes, traffic, a kind of nighttime hum from all the houses around us. The full moon, corona'd with a slight haze. The shadows of the garden on the green walls of the sukkah. The rough surface of the sleeping pad beneath me, the contrast between the warm covers and the cold, moist air. Sleeping with a hat on.

The sukkah is where I use up my tree-trimming energy, so we have a couple of boxes of harvest-y ornaments I've searched out in the after-Christmas sales, and they ringed us in two tiers. Usually I hang them all on the strings of lights that light the sukkah at night, but this year I contented myself with putting up the glass ones and strung up a line of purple cotton yarn at Z.'s level for the wood and metal and dried-gourd ornaments.

She was so serious and careful, making sure there was a green wire on each ornament's loop, hanging them equidistant from each other in each section of the wall. There's so much more her fingers can do now, and so many more things she's considering at the same time.

She needed me to soothe her through her buzzing excitement when we first lay down, and she woke a couple of times in the night. Once she saw I was putting my hat on, and wanted to put hers on. Once she thought she wanted to put the extra t-shirt on I'd brought out just in case she needed another layer, but she changed her mind and decided she just needed to rearrange her covers. Both times she went right back to sleep with no coaxing from me.

Me, I drifted into dreams and back out of them. Our street is eerily quiet at 4:15. A car starting up at that hour echoes strangely. Our three-storey house looms, when seen from the ground twelve feet away.

We woke and pulled on fleeces and sweaters to eat our breakfast in the sukkah: oatmeal, cocoa. A. davenned outside, with lulav and etrog (alas, once again, the etrog smells like wax to me). And then slowly our indoor lives took over again--showers, DVD's. Dishes.

We're sleeping inside tonight, but there is something comforting to me about having touched base again with that kind of halfway-sleeplessness, where my sleep weaves in and out of the night itself.

Withs Bees

There was a bee named Beauty who lived with her mother...no, Doodle, bees don't really have fathers...well, they don't exactly have mothers either, but closer...okay, so, she lived with her mother in a village of beehives, where her mother ran a bookstore-hive and Beauty helped her. She put the books on the shelves of the hive, and sold them to customers. And took their money, yes. I think they paid in nectar, or something.

One day, Beauty's mother was coming home from a bookfair, and she was so tired from buzzing along hauling those heavy books all that long way, and it was getting dark and cold, and she was looking everywhere for a friendly hive where she could spend the night. She was getting tireder and tireder and then it started to snow and it was so cold! Bees don't like the cold at all. It's very hard for them to fly when it's cold. They just want to huddle up with the other bees in the hive to keep warm, and Beauty's mom was all alone outside and she was so unhappy.

Just then she saw a castle-hive all lit up, and she thought she would just park her bookcart in a dry corner and fly over and see if someone there could help find somewhere warm to stay for the night. She buzzed right up to the door, and guess what? It was open! Just a crack, but enough for a cold, tired bee to fly in.

She called out--okay, she buzzed out--"Hello, is anyone home?" And she looked in every room, but do you know something? No one answered her. So she flew a little farther into the castle, and she found the kitchen, a big, old-fashioned kitchen with a big table in the middle and a beautiful fire keeping it warm. There were dishes of everything a hungry bee could want laid , honey and pollen and nectar all laid out, and a little note saying "You are welcome here! Please have some dinner and there is a couch in the corner where you can sleep tonight." And Beauty's mother looked into the corner, and sure enough, there was a couch with pillows and lovely warm, fluffy blankets, so she ate as much of the lovely bee food as she could and she curled up under the blanket and slept so, so well. But she didn't see anyone at all.

In the morning, she wrote a note thanking her mysterious host, and when she went outside there was a beautiful rose in the garden even though snow and roses are seasonally incompatible, and it made Beauty's mother think of Beauty so she picked that rose to take home to her daughter.

All of a sudden, a huge, big, ugly, scary HORNET-BEAST appeared and GRABBED Beauty's mother by the wrist. Er. Leg.

"I gave you food and a place to stay and you repay me by stealing!" he shouted and shouted, he was so angry. "I'm going to kill you!"

Beauty's mother was so scared, but she was most scared because if the Beast killed her, Beauty would never know what happened.

"I have a daughter who's expecting me to come home today. Will you let me see her first, to say goodbye, so she doesn't always worry about what happened to me?"

The Beast thought that was okay, so they went to Beauty's house, and Beauty was so happy to see her mother and so worried about the scary-looking hornet-beast. Her mother told her what had happened. Beauty got very sad and scared, but also very angry, and she said to the Beast, "Don't kill my mother! All she did was pick a flower! I think you're a very mean beast."

The Beast was very lonely, and he thought Beauty was very nice to look at, so he said "I won't kill her if you come live with me so I can have company and see you every day."

Beauty said okay, even though her mother tried to talk her out of it. So the Beast let go of Beauty's mother and Beauty moved in with him. At first she missed her so much, and she didn't like that scary Beast at all, but then she got to know him more, and she taught him some things, and he learned how to be nice and not to be mean, and they were friends, and her mother sent her lots of letters and visited sometimes, so it was okay.

One day, Beauty got a letter from her mother, saying that her mother was very very sick. Beauty showed the letter to the Beast, and the Beast said "You need to go home to take care of your mother, Beauty. I know that it would be mean to keep you here when your mom is sick," and he pretended that he wasn't sad when he said it, but really he thought that if she went home she would never come back to see him again.

So Beauty went home to her mom, and helped her get better, and when she went back to the castle, the Beast was so happy to see her that he cried. Beauty asked him why he was crying, and he told her that he thought that after she saw her mom she wouldn't want to live with him anymore.

"It's true that I didn't want to live with you when I first came here, but you're my friend and I love you, and I do want to live with you now."

When Beauty said that, the Beast turned from a Hornet-Beast into a regular old bee. A witch that he had been mean to for picking a flower had put a spell on him that could only be broken when someone loved him. That witch didn't think anyone would ever love him, and maybe no one ever would have if he hadn't learned how to love someone himself.

After that, Beauty and the Beast and Beauty's mother lived together in the castle, and they had lots of friends and parties and sold lots of books, and lived happily ever after. The End.

Storyteller's note: I can't tell you how much I hate the story of Beauty and the Beast, with or without bees.

The benefits of a religious education: an occasional series

Last night, A. and I listened from the living room as Z.'s voice drifted down to us in the energetic tones of a storyteller. She was telling Puppy Pie stories. For three hours.

Z. still shares our bedroom so, even if we're tired, we usually wait for her to fall asleep before we go up so that our going-to-bed business won't keep her going, but last night we gave up. We were never going to wait her out, not if we stayed up a million years.

I finished my toothbrushing at midnight and when I turned out the bathroom light and crossed the darkened hall to the darker bedroom, Z. cheerfully informed me that Mommy had fallen asleep. Z. was still zooping along, chattering the way she does at 1pm when it's clear there's not one shred of nap in her that day.

I sat down on her bed and rubbed her back. The tone in her muscles was like a gymnast's about to start a routine.

"Little boo, sometimes when we have a lot of thoughts we're thinking, it's hard to fall asleep, and the thing to do is to fold those thoughts up and put them away."

"I don't want to put dem away!"

"Well, you maybe you could think them one last time, and then say 'Thoughts, I will think you again in the morning,' and then just fold them up and put them away."

"I want to keep thzinking dem! I don't want to fold dem up!"

"Hmmm. Are you having a good time thinking your thoughts?"

"Yeah!"

"Well, you could dream about your thoughts when you go to sleep, and that would be like your thoughts coming to life while you're sleeping."

"Yeah, yeah! Dat's wright, Mama! Dat's a good idea! I could have a dwream about some pirwates who build a sukkah! I could have a dwream about some BEES who build a sukkah!"



It's like the night before Christmas, when my brother and sister and I couldn't sleep for the excitement of thinking about Santa. Only, it's Sukkot, and wiss bees.

Our sukkah is up now, and lovely. If I can find our camera, I'll take pictures.

How we arrived at the Apocalypse

Arwen, Els, and Rachel explain why those four horsemen are gaining on your retirement account.

For the original post by Arwen, animatrice extraodinaire, click here.

Things are getting worse but I feel a lot better

Five songs in a row by the Counting Crows this morning. I'm not complaining about the Crows; I'm the one who put so much of them on the iPod, it's just that there are times when you pull the thing out of your pocket to make sure it's still on shuffle, you know?

Last year, there was a month or two in there when every. single. time. I did my half-hour walk I could count on the shuffle giving me "Amy Hits the Atmosphere" before it was over. Right now I'm playing through all 485 songs in my nano before I restart it, and Amy came up a few days ago. I think this was the way the iPod elves were trying to remind me of it.

I know we all have these flickers in the random sequence. What are the things that make you suspect your shuffle is controlled by elves?

For Penelope (and everyone else): laughing! yes, I will write up Beauty and the Beast, wiss bees.