As if cleaning the garage wasn’t bad enough, we decided to get the entire inside of our house painted. I tried to tell W it was a bad idea–bad for me, that is–because I’m trying to finish this novel. As a matter of fact, I’m desperate to finish, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of marriage, it’s that domestic projects both large and small, everything from landscaping the yard and getting the roof fixed to calling the plumber and repairing towel bars, usually end up being my responsibility. I’ll stop short of saying ALL domestic projects because that wouldn’t be accurate. W does do most of the cooking and helps with the laundry–which is more than a lot of husbands would do–and he did call for the dumpster. So, I’m grateful.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Having a house painted is no small undertaking. Even when a house is empty it’s a time consuming endeavour. But when every room is filled with furniture, when every nook and cranny is crammed with the clutter of family life, the “pain in the ass factor” grows exponentially. W works in Silicon Valley three or four days a week so when we started talking about this project, I knew he wouldn’t be around. Which is all to say, the moment I told the painter he could start on Saturday, I knew two things:
1) I’d be the one shuttling back and forth to the paint store
2) the novel would have to wait

If I were sitting around eating bon bons all day, perhaps I wouldn’t mind taking on an extra chore. But since that’s not the case, I had to figure out some way to justify the decision. This is what I came up with: Our old house in LA never looked as good as it did the day we put it on the market, which taught me a valuable lesson: enjoy a house while you’re in it. Seize the day. We’ve lived here for five years now, and to be honest, the house was starting to look like it. “Oh look! There’s that little corner in the entry hall where someone knocked a big chunk of plaster off the wall. And ah, see the water mark on the ceiling where the upstairs toilet overflowed?” Every time I’d go up to the girls’ rooms, I’d notice all the fingerprints and smears on the walls and feel like screaming. And don’t let my mother come to visit. She never passed up an opportunity to point out a knicked base board or a bit of peeling paint.

Earlier in this post, I complained about the time away from novel being my main concern, but the truth is, I couldn’t take it anymore. Each time a Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn catalog arrived in our mail slot, I’d salivate over the warm mustard or sage colored walls, then stare at drab off white we were living with and ask myself what I was waiting for. So last Friday, I packed up the novel and all my books and set about the business of dragging chairs, sofas, tables and bookshelves into the center of each room.

For the last seven days, we’ve lived refugees, sleeping on the floor wherever we could find space and cooking our meals in the microwave. Now, a week after this whole time-sucker of a project began, I’m overjoyed with the result. Our kitchen walls make me feel like I’m standing in the middle of a garden at the beginning of the Autumn harvest, and my office is the color of the bottom of a wine glass. And even though W complained that the green in the entry was “too girly,” he admits the house looks a thousand percent better. Without a doubt, it was worth it. I love these colors. I even love their names: “Folk Art,” “Liberty Park,” “Coriander Seed,” and yes, “XP-31,” which now covers the walls in my office, a color so rich and sensual, it doesn’t even have a name.

So for those of you who are on the fence about that next home improvement project, I say go for it. Because there’s nothing like a little “Laguna Yellow,” and “XP-31″ to make you feel like you’re alive.

By now, we’ve all heard about David Foster Wallace’s suicide.  It’s a sad event, to be sure.

A couple of years ago, I head Wallace in conversation with Rick Moody at the Herbst Theater. I hadn’t read any of his work (and still haven’t) and went to hear him speak out of sheer curiosity, thinking that I’d come away from the interview with some insight into the author and an eagerness to dive into his work.  But in my opinion, the interview was a disaster.  Wallace and Moody seemed bored, not with each other, but with the idea of having to engage in a conversation for the benefit their adoring fans.  I thought Wallace, while clearly intelligent, was sort of an asshole, and took personal offense when he remarked that he was bored with traditional narrative–the kind of writing I love to read and write–and I put him at the top of my literary shit list.

But this interview makes me think again. His interview takes place in the second half of the show.

There’s nothing like spending a Saturday cleaning the garage to make you realize how much money you’ve wasted.

For months, W has been threatening to order a dumpster so we can clear out the junk piled in our garage.  On Wednesday he pulled the trigger and early Friday morning, the garbage man knocked on our door. Twenty minutes later, a box the size of a shipping container was sitting in front of our driveway. 

We’re not new to the dumpster concept.  We ordered one for the first time three years ago when we finally got sick of stepping over all the junk we’d brought with us with we moved. Our garage was so cluttered we couldn’t get in it. Old swing sets, car tarps, rugs, baby cribs, plastic toys with their thousands of tiny pieces . . . why we brought all that stuff with us when, I’ll never know.  When all that junk was gone I felt light and unburdened, like I’d just had a derma peel (actually, I’ve never had one of those), so relieved to see the garage floor that I swore I’d never set foot in another retail store.

So what happened?  How did we end up with a garage full of stuff all over again?

I admire people who have garage sales, and every six months I fantasize about getting my act together enough to organize and tag all the old clothes and toys and bikes that are gathering dust downstairs. Part of the reason our garage is so junky is because I keep saying, “hey! don’t toss that flea bitten bear skin rug! I’m saving that for the garage sale!” But who am I kidding?  I have neither the time nor the temperment to hang out on the sidewalk while strangers sift through piles of my old shoes and haggle over the price of a wicker basket.

But there’s something about filling a DUMPSTER with all the material goods you’ve purchased, that makes you feel like you’ve been a bad global citizen.  Every time I carried another load to the curb I felt a little knot in my gut. Did I really need that third pair of cowboy boots? Did the girls really need those extra Ikea bookshelves or those fishing poles they only used once?  And when in God’s name did I buy a Gargoyle garden statue?

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I packed my car with some of the better recyclables and drove over to Goodwill.  I made four trips. That’s insane. And the bizarre thing was, the Goodwill store was packed with shoppers! What does that tell you? This crazy cycle of consumption is never ending.

I’d like to think that I’ve learned my lesson, that I can be one of those people who declares they’re not going to order take out for a year or dumpster dives for their produce.  I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, I could chuck this life and live off the grid in a house made of sod.  Because I do feel wasteful. I don’t like to think of myself as one of those ugly, selfish, short sighted American consumers who’s killing the planet, which is why I’ve started taking my own bags to Trader Joe’s and trying to drive less and walk more. But it’s not enough. I haven’t even changed all the light bulbs. I look at all the stuff I’ve thrown away, stuff I convinced myself I needed, and I know I can do better.

I received this email yesterday and thought it was an excellent analysis of our current political situation–or maybe the better word is crisis.  I forwarded it to friends, but thought I’d include it here too:

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:

Small town values — a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
Ignorance of world affairs — a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.
Family values — a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be heeded.
Rigid stands on guns and abortion — a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
Patriotism — the usual fallback in a failed war.
“Reform” — an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from “us” pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama’s call for higher ideals in politics can’t be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow — we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

Just in case you’re wondering what it feels like to write a novel, I thought I’d share this picture. I think it says it all.

I finished another chapter this week, and last night I was up pretty late reading it over.  I managed to get a lot of work done this summer, more than I thought I would, and for the last couple of weeks I’ve felt pretty good about my progress. I have the last third of the book to go, just about seven chapters, maybe a few more, so the finish line is in sight.

But last night, as I thought about what I still have to do, what I have to figure out, what I have to go back and tweak, my spirits took a dip. I’ve invested so much of myself in this story. My fellow novelists know what I’m talking about.

Next June will mark the tenth year I’ve been working on this book. That’s one quarter of my life!

Good God.

Just as I figured, there’s plenty to write about now that the girls are back in school.  Take this afternoon for instance.  I was in my office putting the finishing touches on a chapter when I heard the girls coming down the street, and soon enough C burst into my office, threw down her backpack and climbed into my lap.  After a quick kiss hello she asked, “So what does porn mean?”

Oh man. Is this what I’m getting for all that private school tuition?

C was grinning sheepishly so I knew she had a some idea she was asking a loaded question.

I struggled to maintain a poker face. “Who’s talking about porn?”

“Some of the kids on the bus.”

“What kids?”  In my mind, I was already composing an e-mail to the transportation department.

The thing is, I’ve heard from lots of other parents that the school bus can be tricky.  In the time it takes to go from the bus stop to the school parking lot, all sorts of childhood beliefs go by the wayside.  You want your kid to keep believing in Santa Clause?  Keep her off the bus.  But until now, H and C have only come home with stories about Billy getting busted for chewing gum or playing with his Nintendo DS.  Once, they reported that some kid was written up for trying to moon a passing car but that was the worst infraction.

Just this morning on my way to the bank, I heard part of Terry Gross’s interview with Alan Ball, creator of “Six Feet Under,” and “American Beauty.”  When I tuned in, they were discussing his new movie “Towel Head,” and Ball was saying that sexual messages are everywhere, they’re impossible to escape, so of course kids today are going to take them in. He argued that the problem is people aren’t willing to acknowledge the that kids (by kids, I mean thirteen and up) are developing a sense of themselves as sexual beings, and that being open and helping them navigate those choppy waters is the key. Pretending otherwise is a fools bargain. Seems reasonable to me. As I listened to the interview, I thought about the shows my girls watch–Ugly Betty, Project Runway and those ridiculous Disney Channel sitcoms–and tried to recall what inappropriate messages were getting through. Not many.

But I’m not a fool.  The girls are getting information from lots of sources, most of which I’m aware, but some of which I’m not. These days, it’s not uncommon to be driving along, listening to the radio (when we’re not listening to Harry Potter for the millionth time) and they belt out the lyrics to some hip hop song I’ve never heard before.

“Who’s this?” I’ll ask.

“Ah come on mom, this song came out last year! This is Rihanna!”

“Rihianna? Who’s Rihanna?”

One look at their ipod playlists and you’d understand what I’m talking about. Chris Brown, Estelle, Timbaland . . .Who are these people? And when I ask the girls where they hear these songs, they say they hear them at summer camp or school dances. So it’s not entirely surprising that on those long rides to and from school, they’re picking up information.  Thirteen is the new sixteen and ten isn’t what it used to be. I’ve already written a post about the mine field the is the world of “PG-13″ movies.

But porn?  Really?

So I decided to take the take Alan Ball’s advice. First I gave C the two derivations of the word I could think of off the top of my head: “Well, porn is actually short for pornography or pornographic.” This is what you get when you have a writer for a mother. Then I explained that porn had to do with sex but not the way W and I explained the whole reproduction thing. Not exactly. This had more to do with pictures . . . pictures that no ten year old is ready to see. Because it’s one thing to think about the text book version, it’s quite another to see it in technicolor.  I tried to keep it simple.  But I felt the need to seal the deal, convey the fact that this was serious business. Without getting all Focus-on-the-Family-Sarah Palin-lipstick-wearing-pitbull-hockey mom-hypocritical-ultra cynical-drive-this country-into-the-the-ground-in-complete-denial-extremist on her, I wanted to make sure C clearly understood that we had rules in our family, and that anything having to do with her and porn was off limits. I told her I didn’t want her participating in any more porn conversations on the bus and she assured me she’d just listened. Then I told her she could always come to me with questions, she was growing up, and there was a lot of information out there she’d need help deciphering. C seemed satisfied, even relieved.

“Can I have four Joe-Joes?”

For those of you who don’t have the pleasure of shopping at Trader Joe’s, Joe-Joes are the healthy version of Oreos.

“You can have three.”

And that was the end of our conversation . . . for now.

The girls have been in school for exactly one week. I can’t even begin to imagine what questions they’ll bring home tomorrow.

This afternoon as I backed out of the driveway, I noticed a man next door. He was shuttling in and out of my neighbor’s garage, loading chairs and planters and dresser drawers into the bed of his truck. It occurred to me that he could be a robber, one of those home invaders so bold, they rip you off in broad daylight while everyone on the block just assumes he was some kind of hired help. But the pace at which he worked, the way he sort of sauntered into her garage, made me think otherwise. I was just about to pull away when I decided to satisfy my curiosity.
“So where are you taking that stuff?” I called, rolling my window down.
“To her new apartment,” the man said.
I thought it was odd that he didn’t call my neighbor by her first name, so I decided to probe further. But the man answered all of my questions correctly, and it was clear that he was, in fact, someone she’d hired. And then he offered some information I hadn’t known.
“You know the place is already sold. All they have to do is file some papers for the taxes.”
“Already sold?” I said. “You’re kidding. But when? How? I never say a sign.”
“Just shows you what kind of agent she had working for her,” the man said and snapped his fingers with a little swishy motion.
And it was true. I hadn’t seen a sign. Way back in May, my neighbor (whose name is Judy) told me she was putting her house on the market. All summer, workmen and painters have been scrubbing and scraping and patching, and at least once a week I’ve come home to find some strange truck parked in my driveway. I even braced myself for the streams of realtors, the weekend open houses, the looky-lous peeking over Judy’s fence into our yard and blocking our driveway. So it was kind of a shock to learn that none of that will come to pass. Some day, a few weeks from now, we’ll have new neighbors and that will be that.

My disappointment must have registered on my face because the man said, “your world is always changing isn’t it?” and gave another swishy snap.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”

Which made me think.

Who would have thoughts so many fundamental shifts would have occurred in my life during the last year. I think part of me just assumed things would always stay the same.

For a while now, I’ve been working to embrace change and uncertainty. There’s a passage in one of my favorite books that reads, “When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dormant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change. The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that ‘the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.’ If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”

Now why didn’t I think of that?

When I think back on most of my adult life, maybe most of my life, I have to acknowledge that my default setting has been cautiousness. Reservation has been the watchword. I’m not saying I’ve been a total scardy cat–I’ve managed to do some pretty bold things along the way–but there have been plenty of times when I’ve let my fear of uncertainty, my desire for safety and security take the lead, stiffen me up.

But lately, I’ve come to realize that caution doesn’t do much for you, reservation is boring; and that the grasping need to know what’s coming down the pike isn’t just exhausting, it keeps me from making real connections which leads to a deeper, more satisfying life. Am I declaring I’m going to throw up my hands and throw common sense out the window? No. And I don’t plan on jumping out of an airplane anytime soon . . . well, not for a few months. What I am trying to say is that life doesn’t have to be a white knuckler. I’m relaxing and it feels pretty good. I’m learning how to ride out the swells, roll with the punches and get comfortable with not knowing. It seems to be working. Life is a whole lot more interesting than it used to be when I was hunkered down. Yes, I still have my moments but they’re fewer and farther between.

It’s interesting that such a simple statement can be so profound, that the truth is so obvious. “Your world is always changing.” I might have to put that on a t-shirt.