…when I told her I did not get the full-time job I interviewed for (adding that I have not been offered full-time work since 1998):

“I think you forgot that you have been working more than full time since 1999. Yes it’s unpaid and undervalued but you have been doing the essential and invisible work of mothering since you got pregnant. After the revolution, mothers and elders will be revered properly, but until then we have each other to remind us that making breakfast, feeling warm foreheads, remembering the asthma meds, folding laundry, etc. is THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK ON EARTH.”

So those of you who need to hear this today? Yes, it is the most important work on Earth.

Thanks, my friend. I needed to hear that.

“Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.” — D.H. Lawrence

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’” -Anne Lamott

“She flies with her own wings.”

It’s Tuesday, and about time for an update from the Wacky House:

* School has started. The kids are doing great (4th grade and 7th grade this year #wheretheheckdoesthetimego???.

* Steve took some vacation days here and there this summer, and is back to work. He can bike to work now. He’s still bloggin’ away, as you can see, and occasionally arguing with assclowns. (Currie, you really do work my nerves. And don’t think I’ve forgotten how you like to defend pedophiles like “homeless activist” Michael Stoops.) (Hell hath no fury, and memory, like me.)

* Do I have a job yet? No, I do not. I am planning to start working the phrase “as a former sex worker” into conversations, though. For example: “As a former sex worker, I can recommend the non-fat skinny vanilla latte.” That should lively things up.

* Will I be placed in a school this year? Will I remain unpaid and still-gainfully retired, writing away? We’ll see…

* Book is almost ready for publication, I’ll keep you posted. Still working on my Dear Late Granny’s cookbook/memoir. Bogged down a little, what else is new? Seriously. I spent about 400 500 617 hours pinning laundry to the line this summer and watering the garden and yard. Seriously. It rained today and I almost ran out and kissed the muddy ground I was so happy.

* am Oregon girl.

* Mt. Hood fires need to go out. The air quality has been crummy, the sunsets and sunrises look a lot like L.A. and… I like trees. That mountain terrifies me, but I love it. Maybe the rain will help?

* in other family news, the youngest cat, Baby, has let the following be known (via his messenger, the youngest child, Wacky Boy): “He does not want his Chicken Coop to be called that anymore; he wants us to call it his ‘Man Cave.'” (Referring to Baby’s corner retreat in the library, where he keeps his scratching post, blankie, toys and catnip.)

* When my husband woke up our daughter this morning “it’s after 7! wake up!” she responded with this: “Fu…..” Her father’s response: “What was that?” Wacky Girl, fast on her feet, even when she’s sacked out: “I said ‘Ugh.'” Yeah, sure you did.

* This is the same girl who yelled, “Goddammit!” at her father when he got shampoo in her eyes, when she was not-quite-two. Steve: “Nancy, do you have any idea where she got that?” Me: “Nope.” (inside, heart swelling with pride, My girl.) (and really, aren’t you a little surprised that she didn’t yell, Goddammit, Steve!)

* what’s up with you??

— wm

This Sunday it will be ten years since 9/11 happened. I wrote this on 9/11/2006. It’s worth a re-run. Cuz things are worse in this country now not better.

Tears.

Tears and anger. I’ll say it because a lot of people aren’t: Right now America is at war with Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. By “at war” I mean, “our country is bombing the shit out of these countries, just for the hell of it.” (video babies go boom boom boom, it’s not real, right? It’s real.) Writer and peace activist Grace Paley called it, “wars that men plan for their sons, our sons.”

We need to pull out, we need to end the wars and the bombings, and we need to work for peace. They need to stop planning wars for my children, our children.

Maybe we would have money for jobs, to build up the economy, to pay for schools, to help subsidize health care, if we weren’t spending money on a bunch of war toys, bombs and planes. Then the vets come home and they have post-traumatic stress, their health problems are out of control, and they’re committing suicide at record rates. Then the U.S. government says, PS that was a pre-existing condition, we’re not gonna pay your health insurance anymore. PS there is no GI Bill and we’re not going to help you put a down payment on a house or pay tuition for school (that is, if you’re healthy enough to be in a position to buy a house or go back to school).

PS thanks for the help, U.S. Government. Thanks for a whole fat lot of nothing. PS Wacky Mommy loves and supports our soldiers; i want them to all come back home right now. Oh, I’m sorry. I meant to say right fucking now.

If, after 9/11, we had all, as Americans, collectively grieved, buried the dead, given aid and love and support to the survivors and families, imagine (john lennon imagine, remember?) (do you remember that at all? i do), imagine that we had all said:

Enough deaths. Enough.

Imagine we had learned from the bombings and the deaths. Imagine we had never retaliated. Imagine it had all been taken to the Hague, instead, and dealt with by international authorities.

The way it stands, I feel that everyone died in vain. eyeforaneyeeyeforaneye.

And now? I can’t talk about it anymore. Cuz it takes me down, it brings on my fierce anger and my tears and I, I want to lash out, too. I can’t. I have work to do.

Peace work.

Amen.

— wm

“Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them… there is nothing.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

http://youtu.be/UTNpaaPHENE

love this. (interview with the late writer Grace Paley, from the Paris Review.)

INTERVIEWER: What were you doing before you became a published writer?

GRACE PALEY: I was working part time. I was hanging out a lot. I was kind of lazy. I had my kids when I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven. I took them to the park in the afternoons. Thank God I was lazy enough to spend all that time in Washington Square Park. I say lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really. I had a part-time job as a typist up at Columbia. In fact, when I began to write stories, I typed some up there, and some in the PTA office of P.S. 41 on Eleventh Street. If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days.

INTERVIEWER: Could you tell the story of the publication of your first book?

PALEY: I’d written three stories, and I liked them. I showed them to my former husband, Jess Paley, and he liked them, and he showed them to a couple of friends, and they liked them, so I was feeling pretty good about them. The kids were still young at the time, and they played a lot with the neighborhood kids, so I got to know the other mothers in the neighborhood. One of them was Tibby McCormick, who had just gotten unmarried from Ken McCormick, an editor at Doubleday. She knew about these stories, and poor Ken was more or less forced into reading them—you know, The kids are over at her house all the time, you might read her stories. So he took them home and read them and he came over to see me and said, Write seven more of them and we’ll publish a book. So that’s what happened. Luck happened. He also told me that no magazine around would touch them, and he was pretty much right about that too, although two of the stories in that collection were finally taken by Accent.