We’re committing. I think.

Just so no one can accuse me of burying the lede: We’re moving again. In 28 days. Lord. Help. Us.

It’s a long story how we got here: Frantic calls to the owner of a rental property that, I found out five minutes too late, was in a school district people kill to get into. Hand-wringing over the “perfect” house, which was, perplexingly, in the school district that had the most violent elementary school in Oakland (and if you know Oakland, that’s saying something). Endlessly obsessing whether we should just suck it up and stay where we are. Charts where we assigned numbers to different qualities (money, schools, beautiful house, jobs, etc.) and ranked our living options.

But after a couple of weeks of all of this (and our daughter saying one too many times, “I don’t want to get on the highway!”), we decided to go for the “not-so-perfect” house.

And actually, except for the moving part, I’m really, really happy about it. The rent is doable (he came down a tad for us), the backyard is awesome, the neighborhood is where we spend most of our time already, and there’s room for the three of us, the dog and an office.

But probably even bigger news than the house itself is what signing the lease means: It means we’re staying here. We’re not moving to someplace smaller. Or bigger. We’re going to live in Berkeley. For real.

I decided that even if we stay there for five years (and I’ve never lived *anywhere* for five years, ever), our daughter will still only be seven years old, plenty young to make a bigger move if that’s what we want.

The other decision that’s been made relative to my crisis is one of what I’m going to do for a living.

After lots of soul-searching and a couple of calls with the amazing Hiro Boga, I decided not to do anything radical with my work life (no real estate, no acupuncture school, no nutrition counseling).

I’m going to keep writing.

To put some energy and intention behind this decision, my husband and I formed a little company to promote our work. The website is in process right now; I’ll be pimping it here once it’s live.

I feel mostly good about both decisions. Emphasis on “mostly.”

But I still don’t know why committing is so hard for me at this point in my life. It’s like fiction: I want it, but I get pulled away from it by shinier things that give instant satisfaction. Commitments don’t do that. Their rewards are long-term. I know this. I know I’ll feel good once we do settle somewhere and stop saving moving boxes. But it still feels scary right now.

Speaking of fiction, that’s the only thing that’s not falling into place right now. But I’ll save my kvetching about that for another day.

Barry Hannah, dead at 67.

I just found out that my first fiction teacher, Barry Hannah, died today.

Barry changed my life.

I was 35. I had ended up back in Mississippi for a complicated set of reasons involving my dead father and an old college friend-turned-boyfriend. I had started writing some personal essays for the little local paper just to ease the boredom.

One Saturday, Barry stopped me in The Grove at Ole Miss to compliment me on my writing. It was one of those moments where the world outside of the bubble of the two people involved gets all fuzzy and silent. There were no towering oak trees. There was no marching band in the distance. I stammered my thanks, said something about wanting to take a class with him, and he said, “Come on.”

He let me in the class, and I was smitten from day one. With him. With writing. With how I saw the world when I was writing. I wrote lots of horrible stories, at least one that was Hannah-esque (Barry himself pointed this out to me and I was mortified; such a rookie mistake).

When I decided to apply for an M.F.A. program, he wrote a recommendation letter for me. It was much better than any of the stories I sent in with my application.

While in Montana, I wrote him every so often, the last letter after he had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He wrote back, telling me how coming so close to death had converted him. I’m making it sound like a cliché, but Barry was incapable of cliché.

We didn’t write to each other after that. He had been converted. He had a new life to tend to. I got caught up in my own new life in Montana. This is how things go, I guess.

Fiction hasn’t become the center of my life as it felt like it might back in Mississippi when life was slow and uncomplicated and aimless.

But because I had the honor of studying with him and knowing him, I am more myself than I was before I met him.

I will be forever grateful.

What’s up with how much writers hate to write?

I’ve been thinking about this. A lot. It seems everything I read about writing (and, as you know, I read about writing. A lot.) talks about what an awful, tedious, nerve-wracking, sticking-nails-in-your-eyes process it is. In fact, I have a whole book called The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes, which is comprised of stories about the lengths that the great writers of our time (Carver, Didion, Cheever, Updike, etc.) go/went to get over their fear of writing and make themselves just sit down and write.

And it seems like every interview I hear with an author, he talks about what a slog it is most of the time, and that only very rarely does the writing come easy and gracefully.

A few days ago, Jane Friedman’s great blog for Writer’s Digest was promoting Book in a Month by Victoria Schmidt, which is kind of like less-hip, printed & bound NaNoWriMo, and filled with all kinds of advice for applying your butt to a chair and getting your book done. The author even gives you a contract where you commit to “making the necessary changes in my life to accommodate this goal” and so forth and then sign so that you hold yourself accountable.

Now, I’m not dissing this book (in fact, I’m mildly tempted to buy it); I’m all about strategies and techniques to make yourself write by any means necessary. That’s one reason I started this blog, so I would be accountable, to some degree, about my writing.

But I have to wonder: Do other creative types (painters, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, etc.) have such a problem with working on their craft?

I find it hard to believe there’s a “Painting in a Month” book or a book where Rothko and Koons and Mapplethorpe spill their guts about their procrastination techniques.

Of course, I could go and find out. But that would be just another procrastination technique to avoid my own writing.

And I’ve had enough of those lately, as you might have surmised by how little I’ve been talking about writing lately here.

I am writing. Hitting about 300-350 words a day. So slower than I was before. I think it’s because I’m realizing I’m not being honest enough in the novel. I’m too distanced from my characters, which makes them distanced from themselves; it’s a regular hall-of-mirrors detachment festival going on.

So now I’m trying to figure out if I have, in the words of my recent post about where we’re going to live, the courage to commit.

The alternative is to admit that I’m just not that into my novel and do the admirable thing and break it off before we both get hurt.

I’m not scared of hard work. But shouldn’t it all be less of a slog…and just a little bit more fun?

Is it time to commit?

If you’ve been following along, where we live is a big part of my crisis. Here’s a brief refresher course on what our options were when I started this blog.

Last week, while on the way to pick up Nora from daycare, we passed by a house with a for rent sign in the window. It’s literally two blocks from Nora’s daycare and just one block from the first place we lived in Berkeley when we moved here in 2006.

Though we haven’t even been in the place we’re living now a year, it was intriguing enough to call and see what the story was on it, and what we found out (3 bedrooms, sort-of within price range) was enough to make an appointment to see it.

When appointment time came on Saturday, we almost canceled because even though it was sort-of within price range, it was, in fact, more expensive than our current place, and the odds of us getting the energy up for moving again so soon seemed slim-to-none. But we figured it couldn’t hurt and besides, it would be a way to entertain Nora for an hour.

The house was, well, just fine. He’s in the middle of doing some upgrades, so it looks kind of funky and because it’s a rental, I don’t have high hopes that the upgrades will be very inspiring. But it’s certainly big enough, and it’s a whole house with a nice back yard and a big deck. But it’s not special.

Those who know me say that I’ve got amazing house/apartment karma. It’s not so much karma as it is that I become obsessed when I start looking and I don’t stop being obsessed until I find the perfect place. But we weren’t really looking this time; this place just appeared. So I guess it makes sense it’s not the “perfect place.”

But it’s in our near-optimal neighborhood in Berkeley (that is, one that we like and we can afford). We could walk Nora to daycare. We could walk to BART. We could walk to Berkeley Bowl. We could have an awesome garden in the back. We could stay there a long time if we want to. We can basically afford it. All good things.

Bad things outside of it not being “special”: It’s three doors down from a bar. It’s three doors down from a busy cross street. There’s a marijuana club two blocks away. Our bedroom would be on the front of the house. It’s a few hundred dollars a month more than we pay now (and we moved to our current place to save money). I actually love our current house (and see below), even though I don’t like the neighborhood we live in and how much we have to drive. We’d have to move. Again.

Scary things: It would mean we’re committing to Berkeley. The stake I put in the ground when we moved last time was that I wasn’t moving again unless we found a place to buy or we moved to a rental where we wanted to stay for a long, long time.

Also, moving there would put an end to the fantasy of moving somewhere smaller, slower, more affordable—or just smaller and slower: Marin/Sonoma.

And finally, moving there would mean my husband would not be pursuing a career in entertainment. Not that I wanted to move to LA or New York, and I certainly didn’t want him to sell little pieces of his soul to work in TV, but the idea of more potential (and potentially steadier) income that would come with that was vaguely appealing.

What makes all of this so confusing is that I actually love Berkeley. I love the Bay Area. I love my friends here. I love the weather. I don’t know why I have such a problem with committing to living here; I guess it’s just the broader problem of committing to anywhere tangled up with the issue of committing to a place where you feel stretched financially and sometimes psychically because of the pressure of living in “The Bay Area.”

We do have to decide soon, so at least this angst-y limbo won’t last forever. And in the meantime, we get to live in this lovely place:

And I do realize that we are lucky to have such problems. Even if I can’t help from complaining about them here.

Stay tuned.

Big shoe.

As if I needed any further proof that I’m getting old, as of today I am the wearer of what Nora calls my “big shoe.”

She’s actually scared of it (and rightly so); she made me leave the bathroom tonight so she could walk to the tub without passing by it. But a few times, her sweet nature got the better of her and she tried to make me feel better about it by saying, “I like your big shoe, momma.”

So I’m wearing this “big shoe,” which is actually an orthopedic boot, because I’ve been diagnosed with something called Hallux Limitus, or as it’s known on the street, Turf Toe. According to my podiatrist (dear god, I have a fucking podiatrist), it’s a form of arthritis that gradually turns your big toe stiff (that’s when it becomes Hallux Rigidus) and causes varying degrees of pain.

The good news in all of this is until I saw the podiatrist today, I was going on what my primary care doctor told me a month ago when I went to see him about it: basically, I was just going to have to live with this pain, which would probably get worse and worse as I got older.

But today, I learned it’s not so depressing as all that. The plan is for me to wear this totally unattractive boot and take lots of Advil for two weeks, then go back to my equally unattractive but oh-so-beloved Danskos and see if I’ve nipped the inflammation in the bud. It may be that after this, I can go back to only having pain when I do weird things like this:

If not, there are other not-so-scary steps to take, and if all else fails, they can operate and make me almost as good as new. Not exactly how I’d choose to spend my money and time, but I feel really, really happy a horrible ever-sorer foot fate has been avoided. Even if the boot creeps out my daughter.

The sun came out.

It’s been a long couple of weeks here in the Bay Area. Rain. Rain. Rain. Every day. All day. All night. Biblical almost. But today the sun was shining gloriously and I’m 90% over a weeklong stomach bug and all feels right with the world again.

Which makes me think: Maybe Portland’s not the right place for me.

Actually the “where” of this midlife crisis has felt a little less urgent lately. I think that has a lot to do with my husband. Whenever he gets super involved with his sketch comedy group, Kasper Hauser, to gear up for a new project/shows/etc., it seems to pull him/us back into the rhythm of life here in the Bay Area. And this is for good reason: Their group has been together almost 10 years now and they are wildly talented and they are also deeply good friends (and so are the “wives,” even independently of our husbands). So it’s really hard to imagine that we’d ever not be around these people, not to mention the fact that it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be a Kasper Hauser.

But the pull is always there for me, the pull of some place that’s more perfect for me than where I am. It’s a deeply ingrained obsession; in fact, I’m pretty sure I invented the term “geographic cure.”

And so this is where I admit that though I love my husband beyond measure, to me this is the probably hardest thing about being married: you can’t just do whatever you want to do. (In the big picture, I mean; luckily for us, the day-to-day is a piece of cake.)

In my very long stretch of single years, I would get in my head that I wanted to move somewhere, quit a job, drive across the country for no reason, try another type of job, etc., and I’d just do it and figure out how to clean up the mess later.

(I realize with a two-year-old, this isn’t quite doable anymore, even if I didn’t have husband.)

But actually, maybe this is why being married is good for me. Because I think my being so free for so long worked against me in some ways. I often didn’t stay anywhere long enough to (in the incomparable Jake Goldstein’s words) “get any traction.”

So a big part of all of this crisis-y stuff is my knee-jerk eagerness to pick up and move—though in my defense, it’s rooted in some very real financial and lifestyle issues—and it’s rubbing up against another need of wanting and needing to feel more settled. And because I’m married now and dealing with it with my husband, it’s going to need to be handled with more thought and time and care than I would have ever done when I was single. And that’s a good thing.

(But I also know that if my husband woke up tomorrow and said, “Let’s move to Montana,” I know I’d do it. So I guess it’s a good thing for us that he’s not the waking-up-in-the-morning-with-wild-ideas type of guy.)

I’m giving up sugar. Again.

To those who’ve known me a long time, this will come as no surprise. Every year or two I give up sugar for some amount of time, usually a month or so–that seems to be about how long it takes me to get to where I don’t crave it and about how long it takes for me to feel virtuous about my sacrifice. I justify that it’s okay to go back because, really, I eat pretty well for an American and in general have very few true vices. Or so I like to think. I do have an unhealthy addiction to jeans and have been trying to find a pair that fit me as well as the original Levi’s 501s used to when I was in high school. Of course, I don’t have the hips I had in high school, so this is pretty much a “doomed to failure” situation, but that doesn’t keep me from trying. Again. And again. And again.

Anyway, sugar. So I’d been toying with giving it up again after the first of the year, but had just been a little lazy about it. Then, my friend Zoe tweeted about this must-watch video on youtube: Sugar: The Bitter Truth. It’s a talk given by Robert H. Lustig, M.D., of UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, and it’s all about how fructose is the reason for our nation’s obesity epidemic, not to mention a host of auxiliary problems (diabetes, etc.). I watched all 9 episodes (10 min each) and though I highly recommend this series to anyone who is at all concerned about their (or their kids’) sugar intake, I’d say you could easily skip the super-science-y 5, 6 & 7 episodes and you’ll get the meat of it.

After I finished the series this afternoon, I went and checked a bunch of things in my kitchen to see what had high fructose corn syrup in it. Luckily, as I said, we eat pretty healthily at our house, so there wasn’t much. But there were a few surprising things. “Homemade” tortillas from La Tortilla Factory. “Natural” peanut butter-filled pretzels. So I’m nixing those from the menu from now on, for both me and my daughter. Actually, I’m going to start being super-conscious of the fructose thing (not fruit, fructose; you’ll have to watch Lustig to find out the difference) for all of us, and for me, take it one step further and cut out sugar altogether.

Sometimes I need this kind of bashing over the head with data before I’ll make a change (I’ve gotten much better about washing my hands since listening to a recent Science Friday episode about germs).

But, hey, whatever it takes.

All I know is I feel better already.

Except for the fact that I can’t have these anymore:

Sniff, sniff.

2010.

I almost titled this post “January inertia” because here it is, already three days in, and I’m just now getting around to doing my first post of the year.

On top of that, I already feel like I missed the window of New Year’s resolution stuff because much of my resolution-y leanings are related to fiction and since our daughter’s been out of daycare for almost two weeks and we were visiting family, my fiction output has been seriously sucking.

But, as Nora loves to say, “It’s okay.”

(Yes, I guess that means a 2.5-year-old is my spiritual advisor.)

So I’m going to act as if January wasn’t already sprinting ahead of me and put my little resolution stake in the ground with this post.

And here it is:
Beyond my 3-pronged, crisis-figuring-out-plan, the thing I most want to do this year is tend to my relationships.

I can blame my insularity on a lot of things: having a toddler; living in an Oakland neighborhood no one has ever heard of; having to work a lot during non-normal work hours. And all of that is true.

But the only letter in my Myers-Briggs stuff that never changed, no matter how many different times I tried it, was the “I” for “introverted.”

And though I do think that’s definitely a “nature” thing, a lot more of my solitude-seeking comes from “nurture.” My growing-up years were pretty much defined by my mom’s illness, which meant that I was left to my own devices much of the time. It also meant that I didn’t form a lot of deep friendships because the support system wasn’t there to help me do what I needed to do to create and maintain them. By this I mean when your mom is in bed all the time, it makes it hard to have friends over to your house because it feels super weird that your mom’s in bed. And then because no one else is around (outside of your mom in the bed), it’s even weirder: it’s just you and your friend trying to figure out what to do in the vacuum of that weirdness. It was much easier to wander around that vacuum by myself.

I’ve gotten better at relationships over the years. A lot better. And I am very lucky to have amazing friends. But now that I have Nora, I can see how important the “village” is. Actually, now that I’m typing this, I’m remembering that my oldest friend, Jerome, told me this exact thing when I had Nora. “You’re going to have to open yourself up to people now. It’s important to have a community of people around you when you’re raising a child. It can’t be all about you anymore.”

You can always count on Jerome for the truth.

(He’s the one who said to a friend, “Girl, if you want your next husband to be a white man, you better watch the size of that ass.”)

Anyway, so my resolution, or, in the parlance of the day, my “intention,” is to tend to my relationships this year with more time and diligence and genuine appreciation.

That and:
*eat less sugar and bread
*be more judicious about my online time
*get outside every day
*read a poem every day
*spend as much time thinking the good stuff I’ve got going on in my life as I do on what I need to change

December inertia.

There’s a manic quality to this midlife crisis I don’t really like. I’ll have lots of ideas/steam/optimism about the good that come out of a crisis for a few days. Then, out of nowhere, I’ll just run dry and feel like the more normal negative associations that come with the word “crisis” take over.

Yes, that’s me over there, grinding to a halt.

I’m hoping part of it comes from the fact that this is the end of the year and everybody’s letting things slide, not putting the energy into life that they normally do.

For example, I went on what I thought was an interview for an ongoing contract writing gig and turns out they assumed I was on board and we were just meeting face-to-face as a formality before I started doing work for them. Better that scenario than the opposite, of course, but what actually ended up happening was that because their approach to the whole thing was so loose, I left the office feeling at loose ends myself: no work in hand, no “I’ll send you a list of things we need by the end of the week,” no nothing. Again, I’m hoping it’s the general end-of-the-year, holiday-time inertia that’s working over at their place, too, and that when the new year starts, so will the work.

Ah, freelance.

Good news is I keep plugging away at the novel and got 650 words done today. I’m already seeing how much I’m going to revise. I’m still so curious about this process as it relates to novels. I’ve been focusing on writing scenes and building the story and am thinking I will then go back and make everything smoother and shinier. I wonder if other writers are more careful on craft on the first go round and then on revisions work more pacing, scene structure and the “mechanics” of storytelling.

In any event, I’m making headway.

Making more–and better–headway will be one of my core resolutions for 2010. More on that later.

20,000.

I just this second broke the 20,000-word mark on my novel.

I can’t tell if I’m excited to have made it (about) 1/4 of the way through or if I’m bummed out that I’ve got (about) 3/4 more to go.

I’ll see what I feel like tomorrow, but for today, I like the nice, solid five-digit number I’ve got working.

In related news, I read some good advice on writing this weekend. It has to do with momentum and muses.

And yes, I know. I was reading about writing again instead of writing. I know. I know.