Touchy, Feel Good Food

Well I just had the best lunch. Why is it that I love those hole in the wall places where people touch you (in a good way) before they serve you food? A few months ago I watched a woman who was covered head to toe, a small half inch hole for her eyes, read Lorca in Barnes and Noble. There was something so beautiful about how she flipped pages without revealing any skin, how she lifted the veil to take a sip of water.
My view of feminism has changed, my need to have people share the same vision has also changed. What defines a strong woman? Is it that she is independent, well read? Wouldn’t that be an educated bias about how one defines strength?
Sometimes I think that the whole purpose of growing old is to empty ourselves of all we believed when we were young…that universal truths do not exist, well maybe some do like kindness or love but the definition of people: what it means to be a writer, a mother, a lover. Those definitions are continually changing.

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I need to add more links, to other blogs, my work on the web but this is all new to me and the fact that the page kinda works surprises me every time I click on it. So hang on there with me. It requires more time than my lice filled world can handle at the moment. I am here, I am writing and hopefully someone out there is reading.

I am turning into one of those bloggers who always talk about their children or their pets (you know who you are.) Last night after Isabel's third bath and comb through she stretched herself out in the tub, letting blond hair fall around her, floating flat on her back she said, “look mom, I’m Canada.” I tried for a moment to figure out what animal she was really talking about and then I thought, maybe she really is Canada, reaching out to two oceans, all encompassing. How do we forget that ability to claim ourselves more than we are? How do we stretch our hand out in our lives and say….I am Canada.

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I am reading two wonderful books at the moment: Middlesex, which is pure how the hell did you think up that story and Dancing In Oddessa, an amazing first poetry book by a 26 yr that makes you want to slit your wrists because he is so good and so young. Okay, maybe not your wrists but you get the idea. I am writing my first book review for Odessa for a local journal. Maybe I should of started with a book I hate but I have always been one of those kinds of girls who eats her dessert first, which always makes me want to write desert, just to really *uck with that editor's mind who loves to spell check my blog…

Lice and all the tiny creatures that crawl

the girls have head lice….and that scream that Zena does, doesn’t even cover my reaction. It seems the creatures can hold their breaths underwater for over two hours—they go into a state like coma (no kidding) and so washing does nothing. This is the second time I have treated poor Bella’s hair and I am trying to convince her that a Dike cut looks good on a six year old;)
Needless to say I think the manuscript is cursed or I will have to find a way to put my children in a lice like coma for a week so I can pull all the loose ends together.
A good friend recently read my first post and pointed out all my misspelled words…and she calls herself a friend. Actually she calls herself an editor but doesnt the spell check shut off.
The thing is I am a horrid speller—live with it.
I have to go back to reading about the long lives of parasites and for some reason lice hate tree seed oil, which smells like old socks so our whole house spells like the gym at my old high school….oh the dreams I will have.

Lonely Bird

I have been reading blogs for a few months now, some relgiously and it seems to all come back to what Laux said in the conference, that we are all calling out to each other and writing is one of the ways in which we do that.

My first poem in Pleiadas is due out in a few weeks which ironically says,

there always two searching in the night

one of the things I remember most about being a child is whipporwills and how my father would cupped his hands together and we would wait for that one bird looking, hearing and returning to us in the same lonely language.

There are some days when I feel like a poet and other days when I feel like anything but. I never read on blogs about how much writers struggle with writing and being a parent, and I wonder if they exist. I do sometimes wonder where the other birds might be.