Word, Apartment Hunting in SF & The Perils of the Creative Process

Max performed with the Spoken Word Collective last night, Stanford's answer to Def Poetry Jam.

And he was… amazing.

Yeah, yeah, I know – I'm Mom, not the most objective judge in the world.

But you know that quality that every really good performer has? How when you're in a room with them and they're on the stage, the room is suddenly bigger? Not a metaphor – their energy actually seems to tweak the spatial coordinates.

Max did that. My mouth fell open. Literally. I had no idea Max was an actor, his every day personality is just so antithetical to that total self-absorption I generally associate with actors.

There were one or two other kids performing who had flashes of that brilliance too. But hands down, he was the best. The audience felt it. The kids who were there had turned out to give it up friends who were performing. Max doesn't have that many friends – he just transferred to Stanford in September. But they gave it up for him, clapping and stomping and hooting.

I'd driven up with Annie. That was scary. She's a worse driver than I am, if that's possible. We narrowly avoided a side collision when she cut across three lanes of oncoming traffic to make a right hand turn, and several times she overshot her turns and we ended up on the sidewalk. She reminded me so much of Grandpa Al – and I flashed on that time Max was four years old, and I brought him back to New York because I knew Grandpa Al was going to die that year and it seemed vastly important to me that the oldest meet the youngest of the clan. (Don't ask me how I knew – there was no medical indication. I just did.)

So I got in a car with Grandpa and Max. Grandpa started cruising down Broadway and I saw that he was right in the middle of two traffic lanes because he was using the white line between them as a visual guide for centering his battleship Buick. Naturally angry, honking, screaming drivers surrounded us on all sides, most of them taxi drivers.

"What are you doing, Daddy?" I screamed.

He chuckled. "Oh, it's fine, Patty. I do this all the time. It's good for them to slow down."

"Pull over," I said.

When we were next to the sidewalk, I pulled my four year old out of the backseat. He was squalling in terror. "Sorry, Daddy," I said. "I can't do this. I'll meet you at the restaurant."

And hailed one of the honking taxis.

This precipitated a major family argument. "You hurt his feelings!" Annie screamed.

"Maybe so, but I'm alive, aren't I?" I answered. "And more importantly, so is Max."

Annie's driving last night reminded me so much of this incident that I pulled out the surviving photographic evidence: Grandpa, Aunt Helen and Annie are all smiling for the camera, but toddler Max was still too traumatized to pose and you can see the tension in my mouth.

In other news, Kat and Adam have found an apartment in Berkeley. They gave up on San Francisco after Kat showed up 6am for an apartment showing one day, and the guy told her he'd show her the place if she'd give him a blow job. True story!

Also, I am stuck in the transition what comes next? The botanica's front window has been shattered by a bullet from a drive-by shooting, but I don't actually know how to describe it. Do I do comic? Do I do melodramatic? Do I just cut to the fucking chase which is actually the boy bleeding to death on the sidewalk? Ah, the perils of the creative process.