We leave for San Francisco on Thursday and I celebrated by dying my hair red. I tried to dye it bright red but it just kind of turned out auburn which is a polite way of saying brown hair with the inability to flame;)

I keep trying to convince myself that maybe no one will recognize me at work tomorrow nor will my children be able to punish me for the desire to leave town without them but thus, I look pretty much the same. I know they’ll find me. Truly, there are days when being on America’s Most Wanted sounds appealing.

In other news, one of my artists today wanted me to help them get a life sized elephant out of the basement b/c they didn’t really consider the doors when they decide to bring “jumbo” to life. I think when Victor asked me, “hey Teresa, I want to make a realistic elephant downstairs, is that okay?", I was thinking more the pigmy variety.

I’m here to tell you---life size is friggen HUGE!

as promised the link to my front yard

 

There’s something about winter that makes me hunger for color. I want to paint everything orange. Olena Kalytiak Davis wrote, I am in love with a certain kind of cloud which makes me jealous b/c I wish I had written that line though I did read a line similar in some obscure Russian poetry book a few years ago which I’m sure Davis somewhere in her subconscious read or heard thus producing her poem.

I’m a firm believer in no original thought and rather sadly, I understand I have this idea, that the human race is like this big soup pot, you pour in the ingredients out comes soup, slightly varied, but basically the same damn chicken noodle.

It sucks to be a cynic and an idealist. It is kind of like being ambidextrous with no hands.

Coffee House Press seems to be putting out some really good books lately. I just finished Sun Yung Shin’s Skirt Full Of Black which was very good, though it always freaks me out to read local writers who I might run into at the coffee shop who turn out to be assholes thus ruining the whole literary experience for me.

I told E last night, that I like all my authors dead. Selfish I know, but if you write a really good book, just put in your will for me. Mediocrity is okay to mail.

The big sled rally was yesterday which meant that we made giant puppets out of cardboard, attached them to sleds, then sent them down the hill with children inside. Seriously, one had to sign a release form! I have photos of a life size woolly mammoth, a black bear, and a star wars thing that exploded into the crowd and took down at least three people. My friend Mark always has to use pyrotechnics whenever he creates. One does not dress flammable when teaching next to him.

Ohhhh the beauty of art in Minneapolis!

I’m trying to form language
with my hands but when I open my mouth
out flies a cathedral of birds.

I crush wingbones brittle from flight,
brittle from wind, because I need to breathe. Constantly
I’m reminded of my limitations. Growing

large to the eye, like a flock of crows
black coming to land, and if I spoke a name
would wings enter my throat-

land on the wire rib, peck out my heart?

if you live in New York

check out this link

come to my house, drink beer

we will build a fire

nine more days before I put my head in the mouth of the dragon

today I ordered my garden

 

crooked necks, everlastings and cut&come again

Yes darling I did remember the moon flowers.

I keep checking on-line to look at the photos filled with all the possibilties of what the seeds may become. Planning a garden is a marvelous thing in the winter--it is like hope all wrapped up in an UPS box!

 


Anyone who has ever written a brilliant book has had



a)A house keeper
b)No children
c)Great blocks of time
d)Someone or something that supports them while they write
e)Cabin
f)Clear ideas
g)Have found themselves neither boring, self portentous nor empty headed
h)Great shoes

 


Happy 10th Birthday our darling pirate girl---we love you!

We’ve all been at a hotel for five days, which seemed like this splendid idea in the middle of February, while our house was being worked on and we as a family could sit in the hot tub and swim laps in the morning in the heated pool.

Of course we hardly did any of that and ended up driving hours out of way just to get to work and school and life but it was also oddly peaceful, in my heart I am much more transient than I allow myself to be. I am home now. The house seems lonely & empty. We have new windows. All the shades have been torn down, rugs rolled up. Furniture gathered to the side. And because we have new windows, the wind doesn't blow in and out of the rooms. It seems as if the house has stopped breathing. Everything is too quiet.

So many times in my life I have felt this odd sensation of walking in on death. The chairs are moved—everything out of place, I want myself to find the order but I cannot. I sometimes feel, as if I don’t remember the simple procedure of putting one foot in front of the other.

I am temporal. While others, it seems walk around with the permanency of planets.

 

I love language. I love the way it smells and taste. It reminds me of earth, of dirt. I want to gather it up and swallow, let it grow into all that I am. It is tied into my essential humanness.

I read this article recently about how words become less used as one grows older; we tend to simplify our talk. Even our ability to create interesting combination of words lessens. I think this sucks if you’re a writer.

The article talked about when people die they tend to use vulgar words, b/c there is hierarchy of where language is stored in the brain. Even people, who never use vulgarity in daily life, find themselves using their last breath for that.

I find this so interesting. How the body will degrade into just sounds. How we universally as people, share the same sound, even if we speak in different tongues, the last monosyllable will be the same.

There’s only one thing which robs us of language. It is not sleep, or famine, or even the end of life—what robs us is pain, true pain. When the body passes it threshold of tolerance, it is the first thing to leave us. Our speech. Our sound. We are abandoned by even our animal utterance.

who says

there isn't a santa

The New Yorker and The Sun both came in the mail today.....

my dealer (mail carrier) really should learn to space these things out.

 

Tonight was a good night. Isabel finished her bath and I spent at least an hour combing her hair b/c I think the last time a brush went into the inner layers was in 2007. I rewarded her for enduring the pain by doing so many little braids that the poor kid now looks like a white Bob Marley….but oh, what a wonderful feather fan it will make when we take all the braids out in the morning.

Work highlight: strangers wandered into my office for a site visit today b/c they wanted to start their own afterschool program so I got to do my bitch and trap, which is basically me locking them in my office and talking to them about what a horrible job our government does with afterschool programming for low income children.

Someone, somewhere, decided that we as a society would spend millions of dollars getting kids off the streets and then bore the pluck out of them!!! So when these guys came into my office I started to talk about how I write “gifted and talented” curriculum for low income children, and they couldn’t understand how I found “gifted” children in poverty.

I then explained very slowly and kinda loudly how every kid is brilliant, we just have to find out what they love. And then I started to talk about how nonprofits tend to pay their teachers very little and their administrators way too much and if the administrators actually taught, how the whole industry might change.

Well, needless to say I think I scared the hell out ‘em and for some reason they didn’t schedule a second visit. But my friends, I have 67 kids in my after school program alone, and a waiting list of twenty and when I started there were only 20 students and twice as many staff, so they should be frightened. They should be very frightened indeed.

I’ve spent all day virtual planning our trip to San Francisco. God bless the age of computers. I know I’ve been before but E hasn’t and there is so much I want to show her, places I want to go, art to look at, food to eat.

Plus we are going to be there for Chinese New Year, which I know the locals avoid like the plague but hell, there is fireworks, dragons and little kids with fans. Plus all the dead farm animals hanging in the windows---I love Chinatown.

Meanwhile back in Minnesota, it is “get out and doing something week” but considering it is 4 degrees I am not sure what exactly one is suppose to DO besides freeze your ass off.

Yes, I felt guilty when I looked out the window and saw ppl. ice skating on the lake but I feel warm and guilty and I can live with that!

it is friggen cold

 

Well, I almost had to…(gasp) go to the doctor but I think I’ve gotten over the hump now, though I’ve had more drugs in me the last few days then I thought possible. I made it through the work week AND it should be noted that in my Nyquil stupor I was able to plan and book a vacation to San Francisco in the next few weeks.

Thank you dear Jesus, b/c it’s going to be 40 degrees BELOW ZERO this weekend and if I don’t have something to visualize I might go insane. While taking the girls to school today (it was a warm 1 degree in the sun ) the radioman said, if one wanted to boil a pot of water and throw it up in the air outdoors, it would actually make SNOW. What a great party trick.

The fact that I live in a state where entertainment involves throwing things up in the air, while freezing your ass off, is enough to make me want to stay in San Francisco and never come back.

my head