Rockin’ Poncho

Infinite Jest

First, and I don’t know why I’m so surprised by this since it is, you know, his thing afterall, but I am completely blown away by the descriptive power unleashed here. Like this:

I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone. (p 9)

I am also looking for any chance to use “The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir!” in real life. (p 15) Please someone, please give it to me.

The first (3) time(s) I tried to read this book, I remember being really frustrated at the chapter where Erdedy’s waiting for the woman to arrive with his weed. I mean, it runs ten pages afterall. Maybe I’m just more patient now, but I really slowed down and read it and now completely love it. It fits. I wouldn’t have seen that it fit before. Maybe it means that you read IJ when it’s time for you to read IJ. I hope this is my time to (finally) read it!

‘So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we an get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.’ (p 40)

I’m sure all this madness will come together at some point. I hope I can keep enough threads going in my head to be able to recognize when they do, but for now I’m just enjoying the ride. Each little scene is so well done that I just can’t care about the big picture yet.

The Littlest Hobo’s Twitter page.

(And you thought it would be Ed Westwick’s GQ spread? Ok, that’s pretty good too.)

Study Spot

I don’t think I ever posted about this (because I never post about anything anymore) but I’m taking some classes. For a while now I’ve been trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up. And by up, I mean old. I don’t really want to go into an office five days a week and work for someone else, listening to what they say and what they tell me to do and dealing with insane coworkers (no, you all are totally lovely of course) and crappy office politics for the rest of my life. I’m pretty sure that my expensive handbag and online shopping habits, along with the really pathetic state of my 401K, mean that my work days are going to have to continue well into my feeble elderly years. Unless I move onto an ice floe at 62, which is a possibility. And if you think I’m cranky now, imagine what I’ll be like working in a cube farm at 70. It will not be pretty. So I need to start working on my escape plan. And heck, with the way the economy is, I could be thrown out of the airplane without that parachute any minute, so best I have some kind of mattress to land on, right?

After thinking about what sorts of work I could do freelance style - and after discarding prostitution (too unsanitary) and writing (I don’t want to eat cat food before I absolutely have to) - and what suited my personality and particular strengths and skills, I settled on freelance bookkeeping.

I’ll let you think about that for a little while. I’ll just add that the ability to keep one’s chequebook and credit card accounts perfectly balanced for years while still having a completely disastrous personal financial situation are not mutually exclusive. Ahem.

And let me say this: trying to make a mid-career whole-career change is REALLY HARD. Nevermind the doing it, but the figuring out what you have to do to do it is hard. There’s no one source that says: Do A, B, and C and then take this exam and boom - now you’re a bookkeeper! If I wanted to be a CPA, sure, but while I might be a little kooky and a lot bitchy I am NOT INSANE. I don’t want to put myself into major debt doing something that may or may not pay off for years. And I don’t want to find myself falling short of what’s required. Working out what classes to take, and how to approach this has taken almost of year of research and I’m still not sure it’s all right. It would be a lot easier to do if I could just quit my job and do it, but I can’t afford to do that (this has been the only time in my life I’ve actually regretted being single and not married to someone who could support us both while I did it, which if you know me is a pretty opposite to how I usually am!).

So right now I’m registered in two online classes. One is a community college level intro to bookkeeping class. It’s really basic and involves about 3 or 4 easy hours a week plugging numbers into old school paper journals and ledgers and the biggest challenge is getting my numbers to fit into the teeny boxes. But I enjoy it - a lot actually - because it’s so neat and organized and everything all just adds up in the end. And did I mention it’s easy? Yeah, awesome. I need easy. Plus, it’s a great foundation for just understanding the basics and how it all works together.

The second class is an intro to financial accounting via Berkeley extension. It’s a UCB credit course, so it’s definitely a lot harder. Much harder. Much, much. Frankly, I feel like a moron most of the time. The first two chapters/units were okay - a bit confusing but I sorted it out and finished the first mid-term with a 100%. Yay me. (Though I mean, I could research all the answers and have other people check them before I submitted it so…). But after that… I can’t say I’ve understood more than about a third of what I’ve read. It reads like a foreign language!

Also, it’s very clear I have no idea how to study. I never did since I just understood everything so I mean… why read it more than once. Who needs to re-read things? Stupid people, that’s what I thought. Ouch! What just bit my ass?! It’s really hard to develop study skills after 30. Your brain just isn’t that flexible any more - or at least mine isn’t. I mean, I READ and shit, but I don’t do book learning! And this book? This is not a liberal arts major’s book. It’s hardcover! It weighs 20 pounds! It has Mini-Exercises, and Exercises, and Problems, and Self-Study Problems, and Alternate Problems, and Cases and Projects and…. YOU’RE EXPECTED TO DO ALL OF THEM! Have I mentioned the Study Guide?! No? Oh, there’s one of those too!

There are ratios. There is math. I had to buy a new calculator. And I bought the wrong one.

Is this why Jeff and I just sat around all the time and everyone else went to the library? Oh! Now I get it!

Yeah, I don’t know how to do any of it. The chapter might be 40 pages long but I have to read each one three or four times and take notes and I still don’t think I get it. I know I CAN get it, but I really really don’t.

And it turns out, I kind of need to this time. I want to really do this and it means not just getting 100% on the exams (which I can totally do because I’m good at that kind of achievement) but the actual learning and understanding and grasping and integrating knowledge? It’s just really excruciating. And it takes a lot of time. Way more than I expected.

My plan has been to finish these courses this summer (the bookkeeping one will be done by early July anyway) and then take a course in the fall which will put me on track to take the AIPB’s bookkeeping certificate exam before the end of the year. Then I’ll do some Quickbooks courses in the new year and figure out from there. But I just don’t know if I can get this class done this summer. I don’t think I’ve ever actually felt stupid before. I feel really really stupid. I’m re-thinking my timeline.

But I am not re-thinking the whole thing. I will be your bookkeeper one day and by then I hope I actually understand how to adjust for deferred expenses. I suspect it’s kind of important.

My cousin Christa and her husband Ryan had their first baby: Charlotte Alexa.

I hope no one in Poland needs to mail anything…

There cannot be any stamps left after that performance! 22 x 10 groszy and 1 x 1 zloty stamps on that sucker. It came to our office to fill a request we made for an academic article. I love my people.

I am declaring this the Summer of Amherst. Since we’ve started with the fantastic news that that is where the Kid is going to school, I want to keep the love continuing.

FOUR TIMES, I have now purchased Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s fiction masterpiece. I have never made it past page 120. Two of the previous copies of the book actually went to the used bookstore on the same time. I lost the first copy. I might have lost it intentionally. However, since this is the Summer of Amherst and, DFW being my second favourite graduate (and hopefully, one day my third!) I am going to give this Infinite Summer thing a shot. It seems so do-able, doesn’t it? Just 75 pages a week. That’s completely possible. And if I bring only this book - no magazines, no trash reading - to the cottage I could probably even get ahead that weekend.

My first favourite Amherst grad? Why, another David! David Suzuki! And yeah, I have the t-shirt. It’s a good Canadian filter if people recognize him. If they don’t, I get a sort of squinty “Why are you wearing a Japanese man’s face on your t-shirt?” look. AWESOME JAPANESE-CANADIAN YOU MEAN.

Anyway, so yeah, Summer of Amherst. Hope it’s a good one!

I’m not proud of it but… damn, it is going to be a LONG SUMMER.

How’s your 100 days doin’?

Am I having a party or what? What’s everyone been up to?

The New York Times’ section on education this spring has been fascinating and educational for me as I tag along (prod along?) the process that The Kid is going though. Their most recent article on how financial aid decisions are made reconfirms what I’ve felt this week: the process is completely arbitrary and ridiculous.

We all know The Kid has no family income. Yet of the three acceptances she’s received - two from private schools and one state school - the award information is so varied as to be laughable.

The two private schools come with an annual price tag of about $55,000 each. One of them told her she’d need to contribute $400. The other said $19,000 and suggested her parents take out a federal loan. There is a serious lack of getting the memo there clearly.

The state school is so screwed up it hasn’t yet even given her an aid offer - they say it isn’t ready yet. And she’s supposed to decide by May 1st.

For a variety of reasons most of us are rooting for the $400 school but she can’t decide until she knows about the UC offer. So there is at least another week before it’s all decided and we can start to plan for the transition to college. Where can I get some of those extra-long sheets in bamboo anyway?

This post is super late because I couldn’t get the photo off my iPhone and, really, this sort of thing can’t be believed without that kind of evidence.

A couple of weeks ago, Denise invited me over for my bi-monthly vegetable-ing. Yeah, every other month or so she fills me up with enough vegetables so that I don’t die from scurvy or whatever for at least two more months. I swear, whatever she makes is really tasty but if I were to ever try to make it myself it would taste like crap.

The challenge had already been set this time out: cauliflower, the most dreaded of all vegetables (except brussel sprouts but I’d already conquered my gag reflex on those thanks to Vanessa). She made a smart strategic move by cooking them well before I arrived because I probably couldn’t have done it had I had to smell them cooking. But by the time I arrived they’d been cooked through and seasoned and were incredibly tasty. So much so I took the leftovers home and ate them for dinner the next day. So here it is, my plate of veggies!

Today is a very important day: my kid turned 18 years old today. While she isn’t yet emancipated (that happens when she graduates high school in June), she is now a legal adult and for kids in foster care turning eighteen is a very big deal. The plans for how she was going to spend her birthday have been make a hundred different ways and just this morning I learned how they’ve panned out. To say that I probably won’t get any sleep tonight is about as much as I can reveal but the number of things my dad might have said that came out of my fingers and are captured in a series of text messages is shockingly large.

But no matter how ridiculous I think her plans are the fact is that tomorrow (God willing!) she’ll be waking up and will be able to go to her home and continue on with her life with all of the support systems she’s come to rely on in place for a few more months. She is legally an adult and she’s pretty mature but the fact is that she’s not ready to be out on her own yet. Very few kids who come up through the system are ready by the time they’re eighteen to find a job, find a home and live anything remotely like what we’d consider a productive adult life.

See what I did there? Do you think you were ready at eighteen to do it? I mean, in hindsight? We might have thought we were ready but the fact is that even kids who have every advantage that a stable home life gives them are no where near ready to take on a full adult life at that age. The statistics for kids coming from foster care are grim:

• In California, 65% of youth leaving foster care do so without a place to live.
• Up to 50% of former foster/probation youth become homeless within the first 18 months of emancipation.
• Twenty seven percent (27%) of the homeless population spent time in foster care.
• Fifty-eight percent (58%) of all young adults accessing federally funded youth shelters in 1997 had previously been in foster care.
• Less than half of former foster youth are employed 2.5-4 years after leaving foster care, and only 38% have maintained employment for at least one year.
• Youth in foster care are 44% less likely to graduate from high school and after emancipation, 40-50 percent never complete high school.
• Girls in foster care are six times more likely to give birth before the age of 21 than the general population.
• Sixty percent (60%) of women who emancipate from foster care become parents within 2.5-4 years after exiting care.
• Parents with a history of foster care are almost twice as likely as parents with no such history to see their own children placed in foster care or become homeless.

Kids who “age out” of the system have incredible challenges ahead of them and even greater ones they’ve already overcome. But it’s like trying to swim across a lake hauling a bag of sand - it’s only the very strong who survive it. In California, there are about 4,000 of these children thrown into the lake every year.

There is a bill before the California legislature - Assembly Bill 12, the California Fostering Connections to Success Act - that would seek to allow the state to provide foster care services (in a variety of forms probably more like independent transitional housing than what you might think of as family-based foster homes) to children after they are 18 until they are 21. The decision to take advantage of these would be up to the children (which is going to be a hard sell to some of them who are itching to ‘get out’) but additional care would be made available with the hope that in those additional years they could get through some school or find a job and a place to live.

The federal government already passed their version of this bill - Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act (H.R. 6893/P.L. 110-351) - in October of last year and the nature of it is that states have to opt into it by passing their own legislation to take advantage of the provisions (i.e. the MONEY). And there is every reason to believe that California will also pass AB 12. There has been widespread bi-partisan (really!) support for it and it has had favourable coverage in the press (you may have heard it discussed on KQED’s Forum last week but in case you missing it you can stream it from the website here)

But I don’t want to take any chances, so I am asking you please to contact your state representatives (find out who it is here) and ask them to do everything they can to make sure that AB 12 passes in this legislative session. There is a timeline that needs to be met. This website provides more information than I can possibly convey here (and the new research study they’ve published on the Research page is really the best thing to read to understand the problem and the opportunity AB 12 offers). Want a quick takeaway? Studies on similar already enacted programs in other states indicate that…

… each dollar spent on extended-years support to foster youths returns $2.40 as a result of their increased education alone. If anything, that cost-benefit analysis is extremely conservative, considering the state costs of incarceration, teen pregnancy, homelessness and mental-health programs.

This won’t “save” every kid but it will help those who are on some kind of forward, positive path on their 18th birthday to remain that way and have a shot at completing school or getting settled into a job and find a stable place to live. They deserve better than a cake and a suitcase.

–
Lots of information about research done on post-emancipation outcomes is available here:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/outofhome/independent/outcomes.cfm

I’m minding my own business this afternoon, doing laundry and some minor sewing work - buttons, seams and the like - when I get a knock on my front door. It’s my upstairs neighbour with a question you kind of never want to hear: “Is something burning in your apartment? I have smoke coming into my kitchen.”

I’m puzzled and reply that I don’t think so because I’m not cooking but hang on, I’ll check. I run around and sure enough, no smoke and nothing on fire. Near the kitchen I do smell what could be burning sugar, but it’s very faint. I report this back to her. She goes back upstairs and me, with my paranoid fear of dying in a fire, goes around to triple-check. In the back alley behind my apartment I can smell it more strongly - again, burnt sugar maybe - but see no smoke and most of the other apartments nearby seen empty and shut up tightly.

Back out to the front door and another report. “It’s still there”, she says. “Well, if I saw smoke in my apartment, I’d call the fire department. Maybe something in the walls, the back of a heater or something?” “I’m going to call them.”

They say that genius is the ability to two conflicting thoughts in one’s mind at the same time. I would never call myself a genius but I am pretty smart. Two thoughts simultaneously rush through my mind and knowing these will give you an intense look into my psyche:

1) Thank god I renewed my renter’s insurance!
2) Firemen!

No more than two or three minutes later (just enough time to exchange my sweatpants for jeans and grab my phone and keys) three police cars arrive, blocking off the cross streets, and officers come running up. Two full ladder firetrucks follow within a minute. We quickly explain what’s going on and they start banging on doors. A crowd is gathering across the street (Saturday afternoon in downtown Menlo Park does not get more exciting than this) and traffic is now blocked completely.

Everyone is running around, as we did, trying to locate the source of the smoke, sure that it’s coming from one of the lower apartments. A young fireman who had clearly been assigned “axe duty” is ready to break down the door of my next door neighbour, the one who is directly below the other neighbour but who doesn’t seem to be home because he’s not answering nor has he noticed all the commotion. He could, we all suppose, have succumbed to the smoke already.

A policeman, who’d run around to the back alley to check out the smell there comes up and says that it’s definitely stronger there and that it smells to him like burned popcorn. Two steps behind him is my upstairs neighbour, who’d run to get the master keys from the super, which would prove to be a painful disappointment for the young fireman. I say “Yeah, I guess it kind of does but… how could the neighbour be burning microwave popcorn if he isn’t even home?”.

She comes up short. “Popcorn?!”. A light of recognition comes on. “Everyone, hang on!” and she runs up the stairs, emerging seconds later with a burnt bag of microwave popcorn and the most sheepish look I’ve ever seen.

Apparently, she’d never had popcorn before - and certainly never made microwave popcorn before and put it in for the instructed 4 minutes before going to take a shower. When she got out of the shower, she’d forgotten about it but then saw the smoke in the kitchen and… well, I guess never put two and two together. It never actually caught on fire, but as anyone who’s ever worked in an office knows… that smell and slight smoke can linger for days. I think it was kettle corn, which explains the burnt sugar smell. I doubt she’ll ever make it again.

To their credit none of the firemen or policemen made fun of her directly to her face. They didn’t even roll their eyes. They are true professionals. But I’m sure that there is going to be plenty of hilarity in the MP Oak Grove station over dinner tonight. My super, a truly lovely woman in her 90s, said she might just make them all a cake for being so nice about it.

We got stickers out of the deal - MPFA decals. And one of the little boys watching from across the street got to come over and sit in the firetruck and got a red plastic fireman’s hat to take home. I had firemen in my apartment. And I won’t have to use my rental insurance. And hell, it was the most excitement I’ve had in ages.

This is not just the best thing I saw today, it’s the best thing I’ve seen in a long while and maybe for some time to come…

That’s my nephew Logan with his grandpa Bill (the other one, not my Dad) in Texas. Yes, that is a baby cowboy hat. I am told there are also baby cowboy boots. OH MY GOD.

Soup Club ‘09

Originally uploaded by MaryLynn

A couple of weekends ago, I hosted some friends for Soup Club. We each made a big batch (or batches) of soup, parceled them out and traded. Here is our output!

I put some in the freezer and have been eating the rest for lunches. Homemade soup is so good, mostly good for you (and ours were all vegan so definitely on the healthier side), and can be very easy to make. But if you’re like me, you get sick of eating the same soup over and over until the pot is gone so this was perfect - all of the soup with a variety of tastes.

Please note that while this appears to get Oprah’s endorsement as well I found it first and you totally trust me more than her.

I just bought my third jar of Branches Honey. I had to take a break because I was seriously eating way too much of it. But I have yoghurt that needs honey and now I’m a honey snob.