FUCK FUCK FUCK! My blogrolling code is out of date. My blog roll is collapsed. I don’t have the time to rebuild it in my blogger blog today. I feel so cut off!

My Mom & Ken are both Aries. They push and push. I think that’s part of why Ken is home. His physical therapist wasn’t sure he was going to let him go home but he really improved in the last few days. He pushes himself. So being pushy has its advantages. And Mom is always wanting to get going. And they both have strong notions about right and wrong.
I, on the other hand, am always wanting to philosophize, consider and muse. I feel sort of bowled over by them most of the time.
I had trouble sleeping last night. I tossed around. The first thing I heard this morning was my Mom saying, “Why did you pull the blanket out?”
“Huh? Wah?”
“The blanket isn’t tucked in. Were you cold?”
“I…I…dunno.”
The blanket was no longer tucked in at the end of the bed.
It’s an odd little story, I know.
I reminded Mom to pay a bill yesterday but I reminded her a block too late and she said. “Why didn’t you remind me earlier?” It meant that she needed drive around the block. Not a big deal.
When I was younger this was the kind of thing that made me feel picked on. But I watch her now and I see that it’s just the way she vents.
Still. I begin to feel braced for attack.
I made butternut squash soup, fennel & apple salad and green onion biscuits for dinner last night. Tonight I’m making beet risotto and mixed green and cucumber salad.
They only have one phone line so I’m still not getting much Internet time.
I still think Ken may have come home too early. He got to the end of the hall today and couldn’t move his right leg. I got the wheel chair and we got him over to his rocker.

We went up to the physical rehab place to get Ken and bring him home. I’m not sure he should be home. He still seems pretty weak.
I’m not sure how to write about all this.
Right now he and Mom are taking naps and I’m trying to read around the blogs. I’m missing out on great a great discussion or two. But I’m going to be making butternut squash soup for dinner and I only have a few minutes of computer time. I owe e-mails. Soon. Meanwhile the shout outs are making my day, so thank you!
My Mom & I shared a room for the first thirteen years of my life. When I was about eight she bought a bedroom set. There were two single beds that could be made into bunk beds, a tall dresser, a short dresser with a mirror, and a desk. When I was a teenager it was the furniture in my room and when I left home it became the guest room furniture. I’m sleeping on the same bed I slept on when I was a kid. My dolls are in a chair in the corner. But it doesn’t look like my room. There’s no poster of Jon Lennon, or books, or records. There’s stuff that holds memory for me but it isn’t really mine.
Mom is high strung, in general, and worse in times of stress. Little things are setting her off. She gets fussy and I get quiet and moody. I’m still pretty tired from the trip.
So. Must make dinner now.

Here’s the saga.
I got into Atlanta at 2:00AM my time. And followed the signs to my connecting flight. I had a few hours to wait and I saw a Starbucks. As much I hate them I was so dazed and unsure of what was where that I just succumbed to the need for coffee. I got a carrot muffin, a bottle of water and a medium coffee, found a place to sit where there was a screen showing CNN and tried to shake off four hours of plane misery. (More on that later.) Then it was time to get on the second plane to get to Ashville. We had to walk down these stairs to the tarmac because it was a smaller plane. There weren’t that many of us. Then they told us to get off the plane because the weather was too bad to fly to Ashville. They rebooked me on a plane that was leaving in four hours. I found a corner and tried to sleep, mostly I read. At a certain point I went up to the gate to ask if I could get my seat assignment and was told that I wouldn’t be leaving till 6:00 PM. By then I was dingy from lack of sleep. I called Mom and she told me that it didn’t seem to her that I would get a flight, the weather was just too bad. So she told me to go to a hotel. I was so fucking tired. I went down stairs and found a wall of ads for hotels and phones to pick up and use to book reservations. I called a Best Western and they said they’d send a van. But they didn’t ask for a name or anything. I stood outside in the cold waiting. The guy in the Holiday Inn Van asked who I was waiting for and I told him. He said, “Well just come sit in here and stay warm.” He was nice. I decided to go the Holiday Inn. I ordered a burger from room service, ate it and went to sleep for a while. Watched a movie. Slept. Talked to my Mom on the phone. I got a plane today. I’m here. I’m a little bit …uh…whacked.
I'm way behind on all things blog. I promise I'll catch up soon.

All the frenetic posting I did yesterday was a great way to purge stress. But at some point (Maybe now.) I’ll stop posting and probably won’t post again until …well…I dunno. Maybe Wednesday night. I repacked and put back two books. (Heavy sigh.) I went to the bank and got some cash. Bought some gum for the plane. I keep going through a mental checklist, over and over.
Mom says there may be ice in NC so, she may not drive up to the airport until it melts off a bit. So then after flying all night and changing planes I’ll be hanging out in an airport in Ashville for who knows how long. Maybe. If it’s too bad she’s going to get someone else to drive.
It seemed like there was something else I was going to say. But … I don’t remember what it was.
Oh yeah.
Kell mentions handling work in a chaotic kitchen. Yes. I did. I was thinking about that this morning when I read Paul’s cool interview with Anita Roddick. I understand that she tried to bring some insight into the world of fat bodies. She tried. She says she “cherishes speed and physical spontaneity.” Yeah, me too. When you are cooking in a restaurant that serves 1500 meals a day you learn how move quick and spontaneously. And you have to be able to shift gears, and sustain that kind of movement for hours. And I was bout the size she was when she wore her fat suit the whole time I worked in restaurants.
But she’s right about one thing. She says, “When big women reclaim their language, only then can they reclaim their place in history.” Yes. And the word is fat. Fat women.

I didn’t expect I’d be able to sleep last night. I almost never do the before I travel. I woke up every two hours and struggled to get back to sleep. I always hope that it means I’ll be worn out and tired enough to sleep on the plane. But I usually can’t sleep on the plane. Which usually means I’ll spend my first day feeling a little bit like I’m coming off acid. Only I was eighteen when I did acid and I can only speculate how much worse it would feel now.

The sexism/girlism conversation continues. But it has expanded. And contracted. I spent a certain amount of time reading the comments at Shelly’s last night. I read them over and over. There was something happening that I couldn’t totally track. But it made me think about an event in the little hippy college where I got my BA.

A young man wrote a response paper to a piece by Richard Rodriguez. Part of the assignment was to try and write in a way that was not familiar. So the young man wrote a racist response to the Rodriquez. It was a spectacularly stupid thing to do. His teacher was a Cuban woman. There were women of color in his class. Things got really out of hand and there was a school wide meeting to discuss racism. You’d have to know how weird the little school is to understand how that could happen. School wide means that about fifty of us squeezed into a meeting room. The young man was desperate to convince the young women that he was not a racist. They were beyond accepting that.

In his urgency to convince them he kept moving across the room toward them. And finally I said, “You know, whether or not you understand why, these women have fear in their bodies because of what you have written. You need to sit down and wait for them to feel safe.” This was a very thin, medium height fellow. He was not a threat, physically. And what he was written was so dumb it was hard to take seriously. But the women had taken him seriously. And they needed to have their feelings be the more important truth. He just needed to say he was sorry. And wait.

I know that it’s hard for men who don’t see them selves as sexist to understand what women mean when they call out something that a man says that feels sexist. In their minds they’re trying so hard to understand and they aren’t getting credit for being the good guys that they are. It’s like liberal white folks who don’t get it when people of color don’t trust them. Liberal white folks can be so offended by any inference that they may be racist. It makes them feel bad.

Yeah. Sometimes stuff feels bad.

And Mike. I really do think Mike is cool. And it may be that sometimes his tone, his way of being tongue in cheek, or purposefully self-deprecating, kinda backfires. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that I am naturally loving. It may seem odd. I certainly hope I am loving. But either we all are or none of us are. And I actually think Mike would be the first to agree with me. We are all naturally loving. Mike’s distinction of me as loving and Dorothea and Shelly as not being loving to themselves is one in which he allies himself with them. He says he sees himself in them. And I believe he does. But, in a way, he is, obdurately, seeing them in the way he wants to see them. Which is, I think, part of the problem they are having with him. The closer he moves toward them the more worried I become, in the same way I was worried in that room back at school.

I think Mike is saying something very real. Those things that bother us most about another person are often the thing we have the hardest time seeing in ourselves. And when it comes to things like all the isms our hearts and minds sometimes work against each other. Or maybe it’s that they tumble around each other. One minute we lead with our heart and the next with our mind. And the debate shifts from the macro to the micro and becomes …loopy.

But. No matter what was said, or is said, at the end of the day, some women (count me as one) felt hurt by what seemed like casual and offhanded acknowledgement of a way of seeing women in the world.

Jonathon wrote a post. As I read it I felt like months of tension dropped from my heart. And, at the risk of sounding self-serving, he did a very cool thing. He let a woman have the last word.

At this moment, in the conversation I feel truly moved by the courage and willingness and care that people have shown in all these posts and comments. And there is a tension. It’s the tension of knowing that we are all still in the conversation. And it is a difficult one. And our hearts are on the line.

And it is not over.

I packed. And the whole time I’m looking at stuff and thinking, Mom will like this. Mom might not like that. I’m 49 years old and suddenly, in some very strange way, my Mom is dressing me.

And then there’s the problem of the books. I was hoping to put them in my suitcase so that I don’t have to haul them around in my laptop case. But my suitcase isn’t that big. So is it a Sophie’s choice moment? Which of the six books that I was going to take do I leave?