There was a giant snowstorm yesterday in Minneapolis and it covered us all in snow. I was helping at Sisters Camelot (an organic food shelf) and now I have a giant box of broccoli in my kitchen and no friggen clue what to do with it all.

Side note: I took the girls to the gym to play basketball and to feel slightly human, and we looked down on the locker room floor and there was piece of broccoli by Bella’s shoe. Don’t tell anyone but I think we are being stalked.

Another side note: tomorrow is going to be my last fiction workshop tomorrow with Shelia O'Connor and I wished my piece rocked but it doesn’t. It is okay. Maybe good but it doesn’t rock.

Maybe I will bring her broccoli.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x++++
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible- x (most parts) x+ i love the bible if you take the crazy out
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman xxxxx brilliant series
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x+++ and little men
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x+++++
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x ++
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot x+
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x+
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (started this)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+ (I think I should get extra points for his science fiction series)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (started this but didnt finish)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving x+
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy x
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x+++
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (started this didn’t finish)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x+
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x+
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt x+
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro x
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry x
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adamsx
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole x
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute x
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x++++

thoughts

I have woken up again missing myself which is a rather odd sensation when your body is still in the room.

I’m reading Joe Brainard’s book “I Remember” that E gave me for Valentine’s Day. I have stopped bitchn about flowers because books are so much better.

I’m supposed to be writing a short fiction piece for the mentorship at the Loft. I do adore this year long residency but I wish I had more time. I haven’t really taken advantage of the studio space they given me. I have high expectations and little discipline. I saw at least two manuscripts in my year long future.

I wish there was an alternate life space for napping and writing. I need a whole lifetime for both…oh and reading. Painting. Eating good food and baking things with chocolate chips in them.

I dreamt last night that I was Jane Bond and people were chasing me with guns but I kept do backward somersaults, avoiding all the bullets and I never once felt afraid. I just felt fast and undefeatable.

Happy V Day and where oh where are all the men

I sent Em flowers at her work today at the library which is, no big surprise made up of all women and they are convinced that she was the ONLY ONE to get flowers because she’s married to a woman.

I would just like to note here, that I too am married to a woman and I didn’t get a damn thing. Oh and there are no men at my work either unless they are kids and that doesn’t really count.

Where have all the good men gone is a brilliant song and its now playing in my head.

Oh and they messed up the flowers and forgot chocolates so they are now sending her more flowers with chocolates tomorrow to make it up for it. Because yes, I am a lesbian with attitude.

Imagine!!!

isabel's birthday

my girl is 11 today, the magic age, the gentle girl, the caller of all things wild, dancing girl, the one who thinks things deeply, is most impatient, believes in all things, plays with dolls, writes plays, spells like me, loves every animal except spiders, who believes in the goodness of people and see things that others pass by, my girl, every day I am lucky to be your mama

We left for Mexico two weeks ago and have been back almost a week. It feels like a lifetime ago. For the past few days, “you’ve lost that loving feeling” has been playing LOUDLY in my head.

I’ve had an incredible hard time adjusting and it not just because it was beautiful, which it indeed was.

It seems so difficult to find joy in real life—I don’t mean happiness but quiet joy. E and I talked a lot about how they use to send women to the sea shore for a month as a cure for mental illness and I really think they should bring that back into vogue.

I would wake at six in morning and just go down and listen to the waves by myself and then E and I would climb over the rocks every night and watch the sun set. It was easy to feel whole. Why is that? How in the world can wholeness be translucent?

In other news: My writing was rejected from a major magazine today and I didn’t get the grant I was a finalist for. I spent the weekend with Honor Moore and learn a lot about myself and writing non fiction.

I also found out that my real life job most likely won’t let me go to AWP even though I am registered and I have a hotel…..does anyone want to wear my name tag and go to parties NAKED??????

I figure if I’m going to send in a stunt double, he or she should do stunts. I will be home, rewriting my resume and looking at two dimensional sunsets.