(Thanks to a suggestion that Jackson read Origami Yoda and Darth Paper, we made some origami cranes and put them in their origami nests. It’s a post-racial way to honor MLK, as we judged these cranes not by the color of their paper, but by our ability to fold them without making them all wrinkly and sad.)

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”  Mary Oliver

“The truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.”  David Foster Wallace

“‘Your father and I just expected so much more from you.’”  Sarah Brown

“. . . not until a mother’s womb softens from the pain of labor, will a way unfold and the infant find that opening to be born.”  Rumi

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”  Margaret Atwood

“Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”  Howard Thurman

“Build a vivid image in your mind’s eye of what you need.” “Intensify your commitment to mastering the work you came to this planet to do.”  Rob Brezsny

“Which decision makes you the better version of you?”  Evany Thomas

“The primary moral imperative is to think clearly.”  Blaise Pascal

“What is the secret of your serenity?”
Said the Master, “Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.”
Anthony DeMello

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”  Immanuel Kant

“Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.”  Henry Van Dyke

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”   Steve Jobs

I was wandering through fiction hoping for inspiration when I found an old Wodehouse novel called Jeeves and the Tie That Binds. The inside flap said rather effusively that P.G. Wodehouse published this book on his ninetieth birthday, and that this was his best novel yet, and also that it was clever, delightful, uproarious, entertaining, and fun. Skeptically, I flipped the book over to see if there was more hyperbole on the back:

Nope! But he could still touch his toes. Best author photo ever.

*You’ll have to remind me.

I recently got a chance to look through the books that were being culled from a local library because I Have Connections. Side note: there’s a wonderful blog about the decision-making process librarians go through when removing a book from a collection and it’s worth reading through to see how simultaneously thought-provoking and hilarious weeding out old books can be.

I don’t know why thrift and used book stores won’t sell old library books but it’s nice to know that whenever I go through my next book-weeding frenzy I can just chuck these into the recycling with a clean conscience. I won’t, though, because the friction caused by my father’s spinning in his urn will result in him burrowing straight to the earth’s core, which resulting explosion will make you wonder if the moon was always that close? And why is your skin bubbling? And I’ll tell you why you can’t breathe, it’s because your lungs are those things you keep slapping away from your face.

“It is spring 1626, King Charles I and his young bride Queen Henrietta Maria are guests of honor at a splendid banquet held by George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. At the climax of the feast a large pie is set down before the Queen, who is given a knife and invited to cut into the pastry. Before she can do so, however, the crust begins to crack and rise of its own accord. From out of the pie emerges a tiny man — perfectly proportioned and dressed in a suit of miniature armor. He climbs onto the table in front of the Queen, bows low, and asks to be taken into her service. The little man’s name is Jeffrey Hudson. He is seven years old and stands only 18 inches tall.”

This is from a different book, about the sinking of the Lusitania. I have a new interest in 20th-century maritime disasters and I’m not going to tell you why because it will trivialize this photo. I can’t imagine what those men saw.

I’m not sure whether this is comforting in its banality (small minds rise up generation after generation yet we often progress beyond them) or disappointing (sometimes the small minds get awfully puffed up over their small victories and go on to have bigger ones). Either way, the Beatles live on iTunes now so go suck on that, record-burning teenagers who are probably all dead now anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Terry Jones.

Secondly . . . I don’t remember what my second point was. Which just proves my first point: KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. Hands at ten and two. Face, shoulders, abdomen, legs, and feet relaxed.

Treasure the transition betwixt hither and yon in focused yet meditative silence.

No. I mean, yes, I could do that some of the time, drive in silence, but the impulse–and maybe it’s more than an impulse, maybe it’s a true need to fill the void between home and work with some reminder that the highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, and that everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide. But why not use every ten- and twenty-minute commute between nowhere and back to do more than live with the sadness, Wendy? Why not.

So I took it upon myself to use my drive-time for self improvement, which is how I discovered that the library is full of audio books about people murdering one another and pretending they didn’t. However, if you look hard enough there’s a little path to enlightenment winding right past the NPR Driveway Moments CDs.

NOW I remember what my second point was: the font size on my phone is so tiny! When did that happen, that I can’t read 7-pt. type with my bare naked eyes anymore? So that’s to explain why I was wearing reading glasses while I was driving. Trying to find Marvin Gaye on my phonepod.

The first improving CD I checked out from the library was called The End of Your World written/read by a man named Adyashanti. This man seems very nice. He speaks in a really friendly, accessible way about things that are laughably over my head. I almost believe him, that I could achieve full awakened enlightenment in this lifetime. It’s not that he’s so terribly charismatic and now my bedsheets are in the washer being dyed saffron with RIT, it’s that he’s like the best soft-sell salesman in the world. He’s the guy who says, “I don’t care if you buy this car. It’s a great car, and it will never need to be fixed or run out of gas, and the keys are sitting right there on the dash because you don’t even have to pay for it.” And at first you think, No! This is too good to be true! And then he says, “If you want this car, all you have to do is see things as they really are,” and you think, Wait, enlightenment is a rainbow-hued sedan with a permanently open sun roof and spinning rims? And then he chuckles at you (you are kind of funny) and offers you a kale smoothie.

After Adyashanti’s advanced course in managing the post-awakened ego, I felt like I needed to backtrack a little; before I melted down my psychic armor in the white-hot furnace of the bliss I needed to figure out how to get the damned stuff off. And who was coming ’round the mountain but Pema Chödrön. Pema is an American Buddhist nun and she is hard core about the Eightfold Path. She is committed to taking off her armor and she’ll show you how to open your heart if you’re ready. Yeah, it sounds pretty, but it’s hard work, and it can be scarier than any Stephen King hacks-her-body-up-and-hides-the-pieces-where-they-may-be-found doorstop.

I did give in and download some Cee-Lo the other day, because one of the joys of parenthood is introducing my son to lyrically inappropriate music. And it’s not quite right to say that music doesn’t matter to me anymore–it’s just that I don’t have the heart I once had to weed through so much bad music until I found the song that would make me drop my armor for two minutes and thirty-five seconds, or the album that would turn my life around.

I had been trundling along for 76 pages, tra-la tra-la, but when we got to this page I stopped. I probably read it five or six times until Jackson was like, Mom, turn the page, PLEASE, but I couldn’t because all the atoms in my body had lifted apart from one another and I found myself floating between them, grounded in groundlessness, space, and light. It was like Fantastic Voyage combined that other thing with Martin Short when he played a grocery clerk who got accidentally injected into and then sneezed out of Dennis Quaid. Clearly, a decade-plus of yoga has made me susceptible to meditative suggestion (I will relax my teeth, breathe into my forehead, and lift my cervix at the drop of a mat) but it was one of those moments when something I read just fit. There is so much space within me! Ahh. I am more than an inflexible spine or a clenched heart; I have a universe inside that’s big enough for me and Raquel Welch to tease each other’s hair zero-gravity style.

*Did I tell you I once saw David Carradine? I was pulling into the parking lot of the old Vons on Victoria Street, looking for a spot, and these two pedestrians, a man and a woman, were walking reeeeaally slowly in front of me, not over to the side so cars could pass, but right in the middle of the, whatever, car lane. So because I was young and impatient and the world wasn’t responding to my needs quickly enough, I did the old passive-aggressive parking lot move, I drove reeeeaally slowly ten feet behind them, not close enough to run them down but close enough to be all HI, YOU’RE WALKING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LANE AND I NEED HOT DOG BUNS. Then the man turned around with his stringy hair and rangy physique and I was all, “Oh, shit, it’s David Carradine,” and that was my last thought on this planet because then he bored a hole into my skull with the intensity of his stare. And then I stopped my car and he turned away and he and his lady friend went into the store. At that point I may or may not have driven away and gone to another grocery store, I can’t be sure of what happened because Kwai Chang Caine erased my mind.

But you know who I really loved in that family was the dad, John Carradine. If you haven’t seen it, you should rent The Grapes of Wrath right now, it’s so fucking good.

For example. The other morning I dug out two pairs of jeans I’d bought at the Lucky Jeans outlet because my two favorite and, actually, only pairs of jeans have grown thin and full of holes. I put on the first new pair and marched around the house in them for a little while to break them in. They are somewhat high-waisted and kind of full in the leg but snug around the crotchal area. (I know, I just made them sound like something Garry Shandling would wear.) Jack came home and was making an espresso–he goes to the job site early and then comes home mid-morning for breakfast–and so I started strutting around the kitchen like some sort of shameless, middle-aged hen.

“How do you like these jeans?” I asked wiggling awkwardly. As I do.

“Are those the jeans you just bought?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t like them,” he said.

“What?” I said. “You don’t like them?”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“No, but look at the butt!” I turned so he could see my backside. “The butt!”

“They’re comfortable, right?” He said “comfortable” like you say Hitler or diarrhea.

“Well, actually, they ride up a little and I have concerns about a camel toe situation.”

But because he’d said all he had to say about my new jeans, he turned away to make some toast and focus on keeping a fucking roof over our heads.

“I’ll put on the other pair!” I shouted, running down the hall. I put them on. “These are the ones I thought were too young for me!” I shouted from the bedroom. They were straight but not skinny — I didn’t want to look like Joey Ramone, for God’s sake.

He liked those, and they’re actually even more comfortable than the “comfortable” jeans, and sometimes I hate my husband because he’s always fucking right about all this shit.

Even though I claim to have been reading Emma for the last two months (and it’s good! I like it! Don’t hit me! Ow!), last week I took a break from taking a break from the bonnets and parasols and snuck off with Steve Martin’s An Object of Beauty. I succumbed to the hype, in other words. But a 7-day-express copy from the library fell into my hands, so what was I supposed to do? Let some Montecito retiree whose library card was held together with packing tape read it first?

It was pretty good. It was sort of gauzy. Reading it felt like you were seeing the contemporary art world through a big piece of Press ‘n’ Seal that softened it and flattened your perspective, and also clung to the edges to keep things fresh. I’m interested in art, but I probably wouldn’t have read it if it weren’t by Steve Martin. I like Steve Martin. Born Standing Up was really good, though I have sort of a love/not-love relationship with other things that he’s done. Like anyone my age who saw him on the Tonight Show when they were fourteen and bought his albums and wore an arrow through her head until her junior high vice principal told her to stop or she’d poke someone’s eye out. That’s all of us, right? Good.

No one is acknowledging John Updike’s influence on Justin Bieber’s style, and it just makes me SO MAD.

This is a lovely book about a subject that kind of floats like an iceberg as you’re coming toward it. On the surface you see the fresh-faced young wives of Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, but just below the surface a massive chunk of civil rights is waiting to puncture…the hull of white comfort?

On one side of the story we have a circle of white girlfriends who’ve known each other forever. They’re all in their early twenties, all married with children except for one ugly duckling who graduated without her MRS degree, Skeeter Phelan. Skeeter loves her friends and playing bridge and editing the Junior League newsletter, but she’s restless. She wants to Write. A New York editor responds to Skeeter’s resume, telling her to find a subject she cares about, something close to her heart. Skeeter takes a hard look around her and finds the first thread of her story: Constantine, the black maid who raised her and who was probably the person she loved most in the world until Skeeter’s mother fired her without explaining why.

Since her mother won’t talk about Constantine, Skeeter slowly begins to approach Constantine’s peers, who also happen to work as maids for all of Skeeter’s friends, to see if they’ll give her any information. They won’t talk to her, of course, at first, but Skeeter’s slow but steady efforts to earn the trust of one maid in particular, Aibileen, form the hub of the novel.

The author concentrates mostly on the emotional core of the story, dropping in historical details (Vietnam, Medgar Evers’ murder) for little shocks of context.

Honestly, this was the first page-turner I’ve read in a long time. Emotionally it rang really true to me. It was also somewhat horrifying to realize that the precautions Skeeter and Aibileen take to meet in secret and work on the maids’ stories make it sound like they’re living in Nazi Germany; the consequences of their “race betrayal” could truly result in both of them ending up beaten, shunned, in hiding, or dead.

I’ve read some criticism about the author using dialect for the black characters and perfect, unaccented English for the white characters, and I suppose that’s a valid complaint. That said, I found the black dialect didn’t take much effort to read, and I just assumed the white characters had Southern accents, so…?

The point being, I liked this book. Should I give it a rating? Okay, I give this book four cantaloupes for being tough on the outside, sweet on the inside, and a healthy part of a nutritious breakfast.