I Can't Write This Week.

I'm too busy not writing.

I don't have time to write a post this week because I am too busy spreading the word about my grant & Dirndl fashion show kickoff on Saturday locally, my Fiberlicious intro on Zoom next Thursday (spaces still available), and my Earth Day event on Earth Day. Why do I do this to myself? (Because I like you, that's why.)

I bought potatoes and cabbage and Irish Cheddar for a vegetarian St. Patty’s Day melt on Sunday…there's so much that happens in March! The cat is shedding like crazy, it’s spring! And yesterday was even Pi day!

My best and most nerdy t-shirt

I'm also getting close to figuring out the tech for recording The Winning Family audiobook, and helping a friend through a tough time, and I burned my hand badly in a pasta incident (but healed it quickly).* And somewhere in there more healing began, and my Souls of Her Feet collaborator is performing one or two of our songs in a cabaret next month! And I am going to make a Jell-O mold today for the awesome artist/neighbor/friend/community better maker I wrote about in this months park blog. Kristi Holohan, who has made so many beautiful murals in Oakland, did one right across the street from my house with the neighborhood kids, reminding me every day that dreams can become reality. One of those kids (pictured in the blog) is even mentioned in Ten Days, Ten Pounds because he had become a notorious graffiti artist who scared me to death when I’d see his tag in unreachable places.

Speaking of which! I'm getting into gear for my agent search! What started as a story about a trip I took turned into a fat, juicy memoir about a beautiful and poignant turning point in my hypercreative life that is going to rock the world. Here’s a snippet from Pi day, 2015.

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Excerpt

Ten Days, Ten Pounds (forthcoming), Ch. 43, Pietá:

We always celebrate Pi day, March 14th, with a pie, and this year it was 2015 so it would be extra special because 3.1415. This year this national holiday for nerds fell on a Saturday, the night of the spring auction. Tonight would be my swan song as a parent ringleader. Affluent parents would sip wine in a hipster warehouse space and bid on treasure hunt parties and handmade earrings, signed guitars and more cases of wine. I’d go of course, even though I couldn’t afford to bid, or even buy a ticket, having lost a month or more of my already sparse income planning, taking, and recovering from my trip. But I was the PTA president—people recognized me from my time on stage—and no one gave me trouble when I snuck in through the back door. I worked the crowd, full of familiar faces from the circus of support I’d helped orchestrate at some five different schools. I wondered what would happen to all of these friendships when our daily parenting days were over?

The auctioneer rattled off numbers in a sing-song patois. Good will oozed through the room, good people in good spirits. This was the high water mark of good intention, those with disposable income coming together to help those without in a meaningful way, through enriching school services. This was the spiderweb of support that kept our community humming. These were the thousand points of light that Vice President Bush had envisioned in the 1980s, ensnaring my generation in the rhetoric of movement conservatism that had, as I had gone about my life, made the hills people of Oakland richer, and my neighbors poorer. I handed over a platter of Dave’s famous peanut brittle to a pre-school parent pal who cheered, “Yay, Dave’s Biggety Bomb Brittle,” remembering his recipe from parties a decade ago. She set the beribboned plate on the dessert table, thirty feet long and groaning with glucose. There were a lot of pies, because there were a lot of nerd parents.

In my book, I’d invented a word that sums up the magic sauce that’s present when bullying dynamics are absent: cooperation, kindness, support, empathy, alliance, justice. None of those sound like superpowers, but they are all ways to move from conflict to coolness. The word I invented was Zorgos! It’s Esperanto for “I will take care,” and it really does sound powerful if you shout it with your fist in the air. As I meandered among the offerings, agog at the display of creativity and imagination, I contemplated the emotion of caring that fuels these celebrations of generosity. Everyone who gives to and cares about others, in any measure at all, is a force for good, but it’s a privilege to be able to access this level of giving. It’s a privilege to have experienced just the right amount of hardship—enough to ignite empathy, but not so much that you’ve got nothing to give. It’s harder to access this superpower when the drip-drip or boom-boom of unmitigated trauma keeps you stuck in self-preservation. 

I sipped a signature cocktail with Leslie Moon, my new treasurer and shero who had stepped in to try to fill Stephen Brown’s shoes and was doing an admirable job. I asked about her kids, meaning the baby goats her family raised in their hilly backyard, and then she introduced me to her BFF, Dashka Slater. I gushed about Dashka’s New York Times article about the awful skirt-lighting incident on the 57 bus, which Donald had taken to school until he bought the Supra. The last time we’d seen Donald’s kindergarten teacher we were all trying to get our heads around how he was getting used to calling his son, now going by Sasha, “them” instead of “him.” And then to see him in national news. “I knew it,” I told Dashka. “I knew Richard was just playing the fool instead of being evil.” Her article, which later became a bestselling book, revealed the nuances of Oakland’s pain beyond the black-and-white hatred the world wanted to believe.

There was a rumor buzzing around that Marshawn Lynch would be bringing the jersey in which he’d won the Superbowl, for the final big-ticket item. [story about an encounter with Marshawn and his ‘AD-shit’ (ADHD) goes here, but edited to get to the point today…]

“Do I hear two thousand? Two grand, in the back. Do I hear twenty five hundred? Twenty one, front row. Twenty one going once…” I surveyed the crowd, rows and rows of eager faces, but the monotonous patter from the podium was boring me. I glanced at my watch and gasped. It was exactly nine twenty-six. My own AD-shit made me leap to my feet and shout, “Happy Pi!” The crowd turned to look at me, used to seeing my face. “It’s Pi Minute,” I explained, pointing to the clock on the wall of the garage. “3.1415, 9:26!” A few parent nerds burst out laughing, the rest stared blankly. “Sorry for the interruption,” I called out. “Please continue, Nelson!”

“Sold!” The gavel went down and the auctioneer glared at me. “To the crazy lady in the purple dress!”

Apparently by jumping up at just that moment, I had accidentally bid on a family vacation to Italy. Thank goodness he was a longtime friend, and was able to sort out my theatrics. We’d danced at parties. He’d read my travel blog. Nelson took a deep breath and picked up his mile-a-minute patter again, saving me from myself, my impulsive exuberance. “There must have been a part of you that secretly wanted to win it,” he said after the auction was over. 

“Was it that obvious?” I smiled, grateful for him for such gentle teasing. I’m grateful to everyone who’s able to let my own AD-shit appear as theatrics and not actual drama. I gave him a kiss and snuck out early. I heard later that the Marshawn jersey never showed up.

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Happy Spring! Sorry I couldn’t write anything today!

(But seriously, come find out that crazy fiber secret next week.)

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I can't stand it when people share wounds on social media and my eyes are assaulted before breakfast by things I can't unsee. But if you like gory details then here are the daily photos I took, morbidly fascinated by my burn, perhaps coping with the pain by cataloguing it. I used a bunch of secret remedies and I think it healed pretty quickly, the skin almost imperceptibly pink after less than 2 weeks. Ask me for my recipes!

And if you are (unlike me), a fan of gory details showing up in your feed, definitely follow the amazing and out-there Chris Hennessy who keeps kicking cancer's butt with all kinds of inspiring disasters along the way.