I need to change up my work routine (after I finish these novel revisions) before Scott starts stapling padding to my office walls. I’m a goal-oriented kind of gal and I don’t do down time very well, so I’m hopping off the hamster wheel and straight onto the treadmill. I just downloaded the L.A. Road Runners Marathon Training Guide. I’ve vowed to run the “next” marathon every year for the last fifteen years and have never managed to train past five miles. I’m hoping that maybe some of the physical and mental obstacles I was facing have lifted and this time will be different.
It’s always hard to approach something at which you’ve failed before with a beginner’s mind. But what other choice do you have, really? Maybe this will be my year. Hold me to it.
As someone who’s struggled with depression my whole life, I’ve followed Andrew Solomon’s work with great interest. His depression tome, The Noonday Demon, had a lot to do with me brokering some kind of accord with the beast.
My guilty pleasure these days is listening in the car to podcasts of the storytelling series The Moth, so I was excited to see Solomon’s name pop up on my iPod. I wasn’t disappointed. I found it so moving that I had to pull the car over. It’s called “The Refugees” and it’s about his meeting with a Cambodian woman who undertook a grassroots effort to help depressed women who, like herself, had survived the Khmer Rouge.
I’m not sure how to link to it, but you can find the episode on iTunes. Listen to it. It’ll change your day.
As a Leo mom who is still technically a licensed cosmetologist in the state of California, I love Tariku’s hair long. But my fantasies of him looking like the newest member of the Jackson 5 have been at war with my dread of the daily battle to detangle. So we decided that we’d just take a tiny bit off the ends and hope that made it easier to comb through.
I’m not sure what traumatized me most about the experience. First, I showed up at the salon and was told by the stylist (after having cancelled on me last week) that she was running behind and I’d have to wait an hour. An hour. With my two-year-old. Needless to say I was heading out the door when the owner walked in and offered to do it. I threw caution to the wind and let her cut it. Tariku liked her and she did an okay job, though when I pick it out he looks a little bit like a lopsided bonsai. Plus it’s shorter than I would have liked.
T was a trooper and he was just happy that I brought his muppets DVD. He LOVES Miss Piggy. He doesn’t care one way or the other about his hair. I, however, have been randomly crying ever since.
I have to remind myself that it’s not the end of the world and that childhoods are chock-full of bad haircuts. But it was so hard watching her cut his hair and thinking that it had been a part of him for his whole life.
It’s also hard to explain the pressure that accompanies being a white mom dealing with black hair. It’s a loaded subject and everyone has an opinion. I have actually been stopped in the street by a barber who offered to cut it for me. I thanked him but told him that I’m kind of a hippie and my kid is going to go to hippie schools where no one is going to tease him because he has an afro.
As a mom, how can you always know that the choices you’re making are going to foster a positive self-image? I just want him to love his awesome hair. I want him to keep loving all of himself as much as he does today. I’m not exactly sure how to foster that kind of self love, but I’m committed to trying.
We are a family who love to be on the road, though until now Tariku has only driven for long distances in what is essentially a rolling hotel room. So we were unsure of how our drive to the Weezer show at the Del Mar Racetrack last weekend was going to go.
Well, for starters it took a full four hours through crawling traffic. Tariku has a strict no-car-sleeping policy, so about three hours into the drive I had just about run out of songs and snacks and we had a mutual mini-meltdown, but I have to say that for the most part it was a joy. Tariku is a born adventurer and loves to just drive and drive with the window down, smelling the sea air and heading to someplace new
As for the concert, as someone who has been watching Weezer shows for eight years, I think the guys have turned some kind of a corner recently. The shows seem more electric than ever and I’ve even held my breath a few times wondering if Rivers was going to take a spill off of his precarious perch on a high speaker. They’re creatively and energetically out on a limb and it’s thrilling to watch. And T-bone, as usual, partied wildly for the whole show. The only full sentences he says so far are song lyrics.
Legoland on the other hand- not as thrilling. More like a Sartre play come to life. I guess I’m going to be one of those awful moms who grudgingly shuffle through Disneyland while making sarcastic comments about gender-brainwashing and consumerism. That should get me a starring evil role in T’s memoir.
But at least he’s been to like a million rock shows already and he’s only two. That has to count for something, right?
T-Bone partied all day at the video shoot for the new Weezer single “Memories.” The band shot it at the Pink Motel with the Jackass Crew as well as a bunch of pro skaters and BMX guys. T thought the skaters were rad and the feeling was mutual. I had to stop him repeatedly from attempting to hop on a skateboard and drop into the pool. It’s an awesome song and if the vibe on set was any indicator, this video is going to be a cult sensation.
It’s taken me a while to blog about the Europe wrap-up because as I stepped onto L.A. soil, I realized that there hasn’t been a proper summer for anyone around here and now it’s nearly over. I’m not complaining- a summer isn’t a bad trade for a dream-come-true book tour- but I have had an allergy to the computer screen ever since. I want to make some summer memories with T and to give myself much needed time to relax.
My last couple of days in Europe were anti-climactic anyway. I did a couple of interviews in Hamburg, but my TV appearance was cancelled so I had a day to just walk around, which is my favorite thing to do when I find myself alone in a foreign city. Hamburg is a lovely place, but in many ways it feels like it was bombed to pieces then put back together. The sadness of the war seems imprinted in the fabric of the city. Or maybe i was just pensive because it was my last day.
I spent some nice time by the water and enjoyed the Rickmer Rickmers ship museum, which fit in perfectly with the themes from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. I finished the book on the plane on the way home and thought how satisfying serendipity is.
This weekend we have another journey planned. We’re taking a family road trip to the Weezer show in Del Mar Saturday night and plannign to hit Legoland on Sunday on the way home. I’ll see how Legoland compares to Slovakia and Germany.
Before I arrived at Vienna International Airport yesterday morning, Eva Urbanikova, founder of Evitapress, was just a name on a book contract to me. But in Slovakia, Eva is a local TV celebrity, author and entrepreneur. It seems the only thing she’s lousy at is reading a map, so after my arrival at Vienna airport, we tried for two hours to find the University of Vienna. I wanted to make the pilgrimage because it was there that my beloved grandmother went to university and she was the one who instilled in me my love of books in the first place. The goose chase through Vienna’s narrow, winding streets was a bonding opportunity and by the time Eva took this picture, she had told me the amazing story of how she had started her successful publishing house with the money from her self-published bestselling memoir. Now she’s committed to empowering women to tell their stories.
We drove from Vienna to Bratislava and met my translator for lunch on the bank of the Danube. The time between lunch yesterday and now has been a coffee binge of epic proportions, a lesson in Slovak history and a barrage of Czech and Slovak press that, while exhausting, has been fascinating and is certainly a rare privilege for an American author.
I began the morning with an appearance on a morning radio show called Fun Radio, the host of which is the biggest celebrity in Slovakia and nearly just won Dancing With the Stars. It felt a bit like I was in the Eastern European version of the movie Lost in Translation, but it was a hoot.
We did the rest of the press back at the hotel, which overlooks the main square of Bratislava.
I have a thousand stories about pig ears and castles amd Communism and a place called Chicken Hell, among other things, but I’m so tired that I was sure I was seeing ghosts a minute ago. Plus I have to be up at 5:30 to catch a plane to Hamburg tomorrow, so I’m going to sign off.
But before I do, I want to share a tragic story. Eva’s sister Yanna (pictured below on my hotel balcony) is crazy about beat poets, so she went to America as an exchange student when she was in high school. She landed at a farm in Arkansas and her English teacher had never even heard of Ferlinghetti (you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the name “Ferlinghetti” pronounced with a Slovak accent). Instead, her school had a class called “meat lab,” in which they slaughtered, processed and prepared animals for lunch. She never even got to visit San Francisco. I swore to her that if she could find a way to get to L.A., I’d drive her to San Francisco and take her to City Lights myself.
Seriously, I’m beyond overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the journalists and the generosity of my publisher here. I won’t soon forget this journey.
Day off today an A’dam. Of course I went to the Biological Market (their version of a Farmer’s Market) because that’s what I do for fun. I met a woman named Birgit Snitker, who spends half the year in West Africa and the rest of the year selling incredible jewelry she makes from the beads she finds there. We talked about how old jewelry has a soul. I wear almost all antique jewelry, including my wedding ring, for that very reason, so it gave us a chance to trade stories. I bought a fabulous necklace and we planned to meet in Africa one day.
Then I ate Dutch apple pie for lunch because I’m a grown up and I can.
As I finished the last bite of my pie at an outdoor cafe, the strains of Ode to Joy came off the water and I stood up to see the first of the Gay Pride floats drifting down the Prinsen Gracht. The rain made it possible to actually get a spot, so I parked it across the canal from the Anne Frank House and watched as the party raged. When the “Double Pride” Jewish float went by holding up a Star of David made from blue balloons, I think I saw a tear in the eye of my neighbor, a shirtless dancing boy wearing an Israeli flag as a cape. I personally had chills to the tips of my ears.
Then the African pride boat passed and the woman on the microphone hollered, “Do a dance that’s never been done before, cause this is the African pride boat, Bitches!”
After the festivities, I might have been guilty of doing the teensiest bit of shopping before meeting my friend Audacia Ray, her sweetie David Beasley and their buddy Jennifer Lyon Bell and her bambina for dinner. I love the travel phenomenon of meeting acquaintances from home, who become fast friends in the new context.
We had a fantastic dinner, talked sex-positive activism and film and books and babies. Jennifer recently directed a female-friendly erotic film called Matinee. It sounds awesome and will be available through Good Vibrations in three weeks. It’ll be a late birthday present for Scott and maybe he’ll forgive me for leaving him for so long and going out to dinner with porn directors without him. I’m having a blast, but I miss him and the baby like hell.
