B was listening to Guys and Dolls while he cleaned the bathroom today. I think that Guys and Dolls has great music, some of the best songs in the American musical theater songbook. They are not the songs that I am more familiar with. I grew up on The Sound of Music and West Side Story and Hair - also full of great songs and, important to me, I know all of them intimately. There is something about the music you sang along to while you twirled around in the living room that stays with you forever. That's The Sound of Music for me. For B and R, it's Guys and Dolls and Fiddler on the Roof. I think it's funny how their living room music isn't going to be mine.

I've had crappy difficult days at work this week. I have multiple pieces for which I feel that I can't edit the reporter out of their horrible traps. There are other pieces I've killed that someone farther upstream tells me I have to make work and I go back to the previously discarded hopeless situation and despair for the coherence of the story.

Most days I come downstairs to be done with work around 3:30 or 4, but today I stumbled out closer to 5. I started to cook dinner only to have my phone ring again and I went back to the office for more.

When I finally reappeared in the kitchen E said, ostensibly to me but really to R, "R told me that when she grows up she wants to be a mom and not have a job. I told her that I'm very lucky to stay home and she can't count on being that lucky. She has to stay in school and get good grades so she can get a good job and support herself." E gave me a big back-me-up-on-this-one nod. I jumped in.

"And Mommy worked very hard for 17 years before she stayed home with you," I said very slowly and sincerely. "Seventeen years is a very, very long time. She earned her own money all that time at her own job, so you need to plan on getting a job, too."

E made this funny face that means, "I have no clue where she got THAT idea," and I made a funny face back that said, "I don't know, she's your kid."

Tonight, though, I know exactly where R got the idea that she would just stay home and somebody else would earn the money. She sees me work a lot now that I am working from home. I'm working when she leaves for school and I'm in the exact same place seven hours later when she gets home, still working. She sees E come up to school, eat a snack, hang around. R is not stupid. She can see which of her mothers has the nicer life and she'd be an idiot to think that she'd rather have my life than E's.

The thing is that in our family, R's not saying that she wants to be the mommy who stays home because she thinks that's what she's supposed to do because of some expectations about gender roles. She has two female role models and she can tell, objectively, who has the better deal without caring if somebody is getting oppressed.

Whatever this illness is, it's not the swine flu - and I really don't understand why E and I have it and the kids are totally fine.

There's a lot of stuff in Out's extended interview with Adam Lambert, but in the part that's up today, one thing in particular - it's almost an aside - struck me.
( Read more... )

I hate the shirt I wore today. It itches like crazy and it's not particularly flattering, I think because it's a maternity shirt that I got as a hand-me-down from some acquaintance of E's who has long since moved away. I hate this shirt. The last time I was pregnant was more than five years ago and still I keep this shirt and I wear it. It's not even like I rolled out of bed this morning and it was the only thing that was clean. I packed this shirt to take with me on a trip. I had a whole drawer full of shirts I might have put in my overnight bag, but I picked the uncomfortable one made for a woman who is growing a parasite and another liver.

A long time ago, E and I talked about me taking a writing vacation. I can date this series of conversations pretty specifically to 1997 and 1998. The idea that we tossed around was for me to take three weeks off work, go off my medication and drive somewhere I could just write. We were laboring under a couple of assumptions. The first one was that I could not write well while I was taking my meds and the other was that I should not go off them once we had a baby. If I didn't do something like this writing vacation soon the opportunity would be gone until the children were grown. I didn't have anything to write. It just seemed that I should do it before I couldn't.

The writing vacation never happened. If I remember correctly I decided that I would rather take those three weeks of vacation as paid maternity leave. We dropped the idea. Five or so years later I went off my meds anyway, it was a fucking disaster, I went back on them and then I started writing again. I discovered that I could write just as well on the meds with the added bonus that I wasn't non-functional in every other part of my life as well. I forgot about the writing vacation.

I didn't even remember it two months ago when wearemany floated the idea of the two of us going on a writing retreat. We both have projects we've been working on here and there. Spending a whole weekend away from home and typing as much as I possibly could sounded great.

This was the only free weekend I had between Halloween and the end of the year - plane tickets from Oakland to Burbank were $50 each way - both of us are otherwise broke - so we retreated to her house. We sat all weekend with white earbud cords looping from our computers to our ears, typing or staring into space.

I hit my goal around 4pm on Sunday and it felt great. I had no idea I could make something like that, an introduction and a first chapter made up of my ideas and my synthesis of other people's ideas. My whole career - my whole life, really - is about helping other people have ideas and then communicate them. Part of the reason I cling to my cooking - and I do cling to it, use it to clear my head and retain a sense of mastery over something - is that it's one thing that I actually make myself. I feel like I made something else myself this weekend.

I can't believe what an awesome idea she had.

It's been a really long time since I've looked at a magazine that wants to be sold to a straight man, but wearemanyhanded me Rolling Stone last night and it's been next to me all day. On the cover, Shakira only has one button done on her shirt, so the rest of the shirt splays out, shining, to expose her collarbones and the inside curve of her breasts and her navel. If she were next to me in person instead of on the cover of a magazine I would not want to touch her. I wonder if a man would, or if he would just want to look. I don't even particularly want to look at her.

I took today as one of my furlough days, so I told E she could sleep in and I would get the kids off to school. It didn't go well. It went fine in the sense that everything got done. It was not fine in the sense that I couldn't do it myself.

Even though I am at home when the kids get up in the morning, I only have the vaguest sense of what everyone is up to. I'm in the office, trying to deal with the volley of phone calls and emails from the east coast at 6:30 am. E deals with the breakfast and lunch, the backpacks and shoes and toothbrushes. I thought I could do her job today and I was wrong.

I had no clue where R's lunchbox was. I looked all over the house and finally I asked her. R didn't know. "It's in the back yard in her backpack," E called through the bedroom door. "It's on the wood table." I went out the back door and there it was, right where E knew it to be.

I was going to give B his favorite miso sauce with his lunch but he told me the container I was going to use leaked in his lunchbox.

"What does Mommy use when she gives you bean sauce?" I asked him.

"I don't know! She doesn't give me bean sauce!" he yelled.

"Mommy gives you some kind of sauce," I said. "What does she put it in?"

E stumbled out of the bedroom. "It's one of these glass containers," she mumbled. She went right to the cupboard and took our a glass jar filled with sugar. She washed it out and handed it to me, stumbled back to bed.

I really didn't want her to have to get out of bed. I wanted to let her sleep in. I thought I could handle the morning - but I couldn't, like all the other dumb dads who don't really know the details of their kids lives. I didn't know where the lunchboxes were or the right way to pack them.

Later in the day she was telling me about a coffee house. "It's right on that corner where B's orthodontist is," she said.

"I have no clue where his orthodontist office is."

"You've never been there?"

I had not. It's not like she's hiding these things from me, the orthodontist and the lunchboxes. There's just no need for me to know about them, just as people thought girls didn't need to go to college. There was nothing for them to do with that education, anyway, so why bother?

I do a lot of writing in a lot of different kinds of software. I use five different writing softwares daily. Here they are, in descending order of the volume I write in them:

1. Newsroom software for writing copy
2. Microsoft Outlook email
3. Semagic for writing in this journal
4. Google Docs for personal project writing
5. Microsoft Word for work projects

I'm getting ready for spending a whole weekend writing with wearemany. Mostly getting ready means pulling together notes, but this afternoon I realized that I don't know which software I want to use. Suddenly it feels very important to pick the right one. I don't like Microsoft Word, much, but I'm feeling like the intense autocorrect is something I'm going to need, so I can just write and have the typing errors swept clean behind me.

Back in the spring I was assigned to give the drash at the havurah service at the beginning of December. I wrote it in my calendar but didn't think about it much. Today the service coordinator emailed me. She wants to hand out the assignments to the Torah readers and she wanted to know what I wanted to talk about so we could read that part of the parsha. It's my Bat Mitzvah parsha.

B is obsessed with George Lopez. I started recording the reruns of his sitcom to do research about cultural ideas about fatherhood. I don't know how B started watching them, but now he can't stop. Every night there are two new episodes and B giggles madly as he watches them.

It's a show about a father, a Mexican-American father with a Cuban-American wife. We have nothing in common with that family, but B laughs his little butt off at it. The little mixed Asian-white son of two mothers thinks George Lopez is hilarious.

George Lopez has a new talk show starting this week and in the press he's doing he says that the show is for "the new America." He doesn't mean that the country is going to be Latino - although California is heading in the direction of being majority Latino. He means that he can be funny in his specifically Mexican-American way, throw in some Spanish words, and the Latinos laugh with recognition. The rest of us think it's funny because it's something we recognize in our own families or it's something we are just learning about George Lopez and his family. That's the new America. We aren't all alike but we want to see ourselves reflected somewhere - and we want to have access to the cultures around us. We want to be invited in, told a joke, even if the punch line is in a language we don't know.

Also, that sitcom is really fucking funny.

I really don't think too often about how I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother. There was a time - years and years of B's life - when my disappointment about not being the mother at home was the constant emotional undercurrent in our family. I was always jealous of E and her place in B's day and in his psychology. I learned, over the years, that there were lots of things that she did better than I would have. There are other things I would be better at, too, but as the kids get older I realize there is one aspect of stay-at-home motherhood, one crucial aspect, at which I would have been a horrible, miserable failure: driving.

I am a terrible driver.

Every single time I've seen wearemany in Los Angeles there has been a huge car-related failure. From the first time we met and I scraped another car in the restaurant parking lot (the owner of the other car wanted me to meet her the next day with cash to pay to fix it, I declined) - to my most recent trip when I thought I'd locked my keys in the car and abandoned it to go back to the hotel; really they were just in an obscure pocket of my bag (I woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible dream about the keys and dug them out, took a cab back to the car the next morning).

There are explanations. I don't process visual information well enough to make decisions based on landmarks while in motion. I think that cars are evil and we should all be riding bikes.

The explanations aren't enough. Last night I had to drive three miles from my house to another house I've never been to. The trip involved me going to the main road three blocks from our door, taking it for most of the three miles and making one left turn. I had to make a U-turn, then many lefts and rights. I went up to the wrong house and went back two blocks before I got there. This is not atypical. I just can't drive places, normal places like a normal person.

Driving is a major part of parenting children. They need to be picked up and dropped off all the time. E thought that she would freed from driving R to preschool three days a week when she started kindergarten and began taking the school bus with her brother. E still drives every day: up to school to volunteer, running errands, getting B after religious school.

When people ask why I ride bikes to synagogue with the kids, I tell them I believe that every minute I am not driving is a minute I am potentially not killing my children in the back seat. People laugh, but I don't. I really believe that. I honestly don't know how I would have dealt with this if I had been the one who stayed home, the staying home that really means driving.

Dressing for quinoa:

Juice of 3 limes
one tiny clove of garlic, pressed
olive oil, slightly more than the volume of lime juice
Salt and pepper
.5 tsp agave syrup
1/2 cup toasted pumpkin seeds, ground up fine

In a glass jar, let the pressed garlic sit in the lime juice and salt for 5 minutes to break it down. Add oil, pepper, agave and shake to combine. Add the pumpkin seeds, shake again, and toss with cooked quinoa.


This is unbelievably deep and rich.

The Shabbat dinner last night was the religious school zip code dinner. The idea was for people who lived near each other to get to know each other better. It was a good idea but the details threw into sharp focus the idea that affinity is complicated.

There were four families in our group. On the email chain I recognized three names. They were people I knew varying shades of slightly. It seemed that we would have stuff in common. There was a lesbian with two kids adopted from Asia, a single mother with a half Chinese daughter and a single mother with a little girl R's age. The Asian kids, the neighborhood, the other queer family, the ages of the kids - there was a lot we had in common. Oh - and one more thing: all three of the other women were divorced.

And that's what they talked about for most of the night. They talked about their own divorces - two and a half years and still in court, separate parent-teacher conferences, nasty things the exes say to the kids - and they talked about other people's - multiple affairs, women afraid to end their horrible marriages because they were afraid they could not make it financially - and the whole time it made me want to throw up.

Divorce really freaks out me and E. All of our parents are married to each other. There isn't much divorce in our families. Even so, I think our aversion to divorce goes beyond what is rational. She and are are so bound up in each other, so utterly interdependent and dug in to our life together that divorce --

Having children together is the most creative and satisfying collaboration of our lives. It's not just that E and I like being parents; we love to parent together, in concert. To listen to these women talk about how they go out of their way not to talk to their exes about their children freaks us out. Parenting is great, but I love the intellectual intimacy it brings to our marriage. I can't imagine wanting to get rid of either thing - the marriage or the co-parenting - but if I tried to plow both of them out of my life there would not be a whole lot left.

The good thing about just starting to drink for my 40th birthday is that it only takes two glasses of wine to make the religious school potluck Shabbat dinner from hell to seem ridiculous instead of like the worst night of the last ten years.

This morning I was on the phone with one of my reporters with the radio on in the background. I was in my pajamas, drinking coffee and intently trying to help her problem-solve around her project. In the newscast a story came on about a cat getting H1N1 from its owners.

It felt like the beginning of a movie, when the great destructive scope of a threat isn't yet clear. All there is is a newscast in the background of a normal, everyday morning. The routine in the foreground is just a frame for the disaster.

E and I decided a little while ago that we need to be more careful with our money. We have this series of big ticket bills - insurance, taxes, synagogue dues, stuff like that - and I can almost but not quite see how we are going to get past them. It's fine. We lived a lot leaner until a year or so ago, when I figured that I had a job I wasn't going to lose so we should contribute to the economy more.

The thing I've missed buying: books. I never bought books before, not three at a time for no reason other than I wanted to read them.

norabird linked to this column by David Brooks in the NYT. She's vaguely amused at the middle-aged and unhip like myself who are hearing about Sex Diaries for the first time via his column.

Brooks is writing about (presumably) single New Yorkers who publish accounts of their romantic lives, and he's focusing on the way people juggle multiple possible hook-up partners in an evening via carefully composed and timed text messages. They don't want to commit to one until they are sure a better one isn't going to be available later in the evening. Brooks doesn't like this. He writes:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the "Happy Days" era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era.

My first problem with this statement is this: he's laying responsibility for the shallowness of the hook-up on dead feminism?

Beyond that, I have deeper problems with his claim that the social institutions you are brought up in (the "neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families" he lists) are necessarily going to have a good partner for you. That works great if you want to marry (or hook up with) someone who is like you, who shares the culture, religion, values and experiences of your family of origin.

It made me think of my dad. When I was a young teenager he took our family to visit his family of origin in Alabama. One of his aunts mentioned a young woman he'd been engaged to in a way that spoke fondly of the young woman and gently disparagingly of my father for having broken off the engagement. I was shocked. I don't think that my mother was present, but I was shocked that 20 years after the fact my father's aunt was still dredging up this old issue, that she wanted him to marry a Jewish girl in Alabama and not my mom, from California and Japanese-American.

I am sure that if my dad had not married that particular Jewish girl from Alabama he might have married another one approved by his - as David Brooks lists - neighborhood, school, workplace or family. They might have had a perfectly nice family and a perfectly nice life. But he would not have moved to California, and my father loves California. He rids his bike through the Delta or up in the Sierras and he understands the watershed and the wildlife and the system of freeways. His wide understanding feeds his deep love for the landscape. He would have not had that if his choice of a wife had been constrained by the guardrails David Brooks remembers fondly.

It's odd that Brooks attributes it to a "Happy Days" era. Young people have been making marriage choices more independently since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This is the whole plot of Fiddler on the Roof. It's why San Francisco and Washington DC were filled with gay people in the 70s and 80s. They weren't going to find the people they wanted to make long-term commitments with in their old neighborhoods. If they did find someone, their families and communities would not support their gay relationships. The "old social scripts" would never have served them.

The old social scripts, however, do serve me now. We're getting ready to go to Thanksgiving with my extended family in Sacramento. For me growing up, they were precisely the guardrails Brooks is praising. I had to move away from them to find my gay identity and my wife. I also moved back to them once I acquired my wife and my first child because I wanted my children to be closer to their extended family. Now, I think, if you are gay there's a good chance that you can stay inside the guardrails Brooks writes about and still be gay.

That would not have been possible if the gay people of previous generations had not broken away and made their own culture and community. The old culture and community, the one that could never have served gay people of a previous generation, the one that would not have served my father as well, seems great to the people who were served by it. I assume that David Brooks is one of those people who could be their full and happy selves inside the guardrails. For everyone who could not, I don't know what Brooks had in mind.

At the conclusion, he writes:

This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.

Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

He writes about "the accumulated wisdom of the community" as if it was a static thing. I wonder what he thinks is supposed to happen to you if you don't fit into the existing "pattern of being." And that whole last sentence - does he really think that if we couldn't text people would not hook up, they would just go steady and wait until they get married to have sex?

"Bring beer!" E said into the phone this afternoon, more than once or twice. I cooked the usual lineup: big vat of soup (black bean chili), a salad (carrot and mint) and a baked thing (cornbread). We let the dishes pile up in the sink and the bottle caps accumulate on the counter.

Most years when I cook dinner for Halloween I think of it as a public service. It's hard for parents to get home from work, make dinner, wrestle kids into their costumes and out to get candy. I make the dinner, which the kids can eat or not but the parents certainly appreciate, and neighbors will sit with me on the porch for a while as E takes the kids out to trick-or-treat.

This year, though, it's Saturday. The kids could blow past their bedtimes with fewer repercussions and the adults were willing to drink more beer than usual. After a circuit of the neighborhood they would hang out and let the kids eat some candy.

Our whole block really turned it out. It's because at the block party in August T encouraged everyone to decorate and hand out candy. People who might not have had their porch lights on went to Walgreen's for some bite sized Snickers. We weren't the only ones drinking, too. What's nice about me making dinner is that people at our end of the block expect it, so they all come through for a plate.

E invited some people I didn't know and then she took R out. A few times I was a little confused when strangers didn't just want candy - they walked into my house as if they had been invited, which they were. Sometimes families would come up just for candy and I'd think they were friends of E's and I offered them dinner. Sometimes the parents would walk away with a beer.

For the first time this year B went out with his friend AB - and no adults. We gave them boundaries and they went for it. Many years, B isn't interested in trick-or-treating because he can't eat most of the candy. This year being out after dark without supervision was exotic enough to make him stay out.

Around 9:15 B and AB called it a night. Their friend N had joined them at one point and the three of them holed up in B's room. His room is right at the front of the house, so if you are on the front porch (as I was with six or eight other adults) you can look right into his room. B and AB and N had dumped their treat bags out on the floor. They were sorting and trading - even B, I don't know why - and they had neat piles of Tootsie Rolls and Nestle Crunch and tiny bags of M&Ms. If you dumped everything on the floor of B's bedroom into a bomb calorimeter, a mushroom cloud would rise up hundreds of feet into the air.

At the end of the night our dining room table - with both leaves in it - was covered with empty beer bottles and a big bowl with a plastic skeleton.

This morning there wasn't a Bar Mitzvah at the service. I assume nobody would want to have a Bar Mitzvah on Halloween, so we had a lovely intimate service with about 30 people. As we came in the rabbi said to B, "Why don't you pick out part of the service you would like to lead." B shrugged in that way he has, cool but uncertain.

"Let's look at the siddur together," I offered. We paged through and I pointed out all the songs he knew, plus the first paragraph of V'ahavta.

"I only know the first paragraph but everyone will sing the second one with me so it will be OK," he said. B conferred with the rabbi and then told me he was going to lead two songs in P'sukei, plus Shema and V'ahavta. "I'm going to sit on the bima."

The rabbi pulled out the stool the shorter Bar Mitzvah kids stand on and he made sure the mic was arranged for B. I could barely see B from behind the podium. All that was showing was his kipa and the blue smudges on his forehead left over from his Halloween costume. The rabbi nodded to him and he launched into Ma Tovu. When the song was over, B sat in one of the big bima chairs and the cantor sat next to him.

After V'ahavta, B came to sit next to me and I shook his hand. I felt - accomplished - that the rabbi could casually invite B to help lead the service and B could do it, no big deal. The Shacharit service is totally familiar to him.

The other night I sent him to bed with a book from the library. He came out 45 minutes later and tossed it down on the couch. "Drained it," he pronounced with finality.

"What is that supposed to mean?" E asked.

I understood, even if I'd never heard that bit of fifth grade slang before. "He finished it easily," I explained to her. I liked that terminology, drained it. If you drain a book, you take in everything that it has to teach you. I feel like B drained it this morning, too, Ma Tovu and Elohai Neshama and V'ahavta.The melodies and the Hebrew ran through him easily, clear and vital as water.