Rock On, Oh Wise and Whimsical Universe!

I dreamed I started bleeding.

And I thought, Damn! Why do you always get your period at the most inconvenient times?

And then I thought: But I’m 65 years old. This isn’t my period. It must be cancer.

And I sat there in my dream for a couple of minutes reviewing the implications of cancer. And I decided, Hell, no – I’m not getting treatment. I don’t much care if I die.

###

David sent me this, wrote Annie. From Auntie Jane to send to you – it was in her will.

Damn.

A check in precisely the amount that I was musing just the other day, If the Universe really loved me, it would give me [your sizeable but not exorbitant number goes here] dollars.

I guess the Universe really loves me.

Or Auntie Jane in her insane way loved me: It is true that I am probably the only member of the F2 generation who shares – shared – her fanatic devotion to high literature, which means I am the only one in some essential sense who gets her.

The Universe reveals itself through the magic of its timing. I was still reeling over the story behind lookfar's screen. How she saw it one day in a thrift store. How she knew it wasn’t for her but for someone else – who that person was, she didn’t yet know, but she bought it anyway. How some time later, she began reading my LJ, saw the photograph of my Chinese Cultural Revolution kitsch statue, and realized: The person that screen belongs to? That’s her.

Rock on, oh wise and whimsical Universe!



I’ve been sleeping badly.

Part of this is related to helping Max with his admissions essays for [Famous Dead President] Public Policy School at [Ivy League University].

The dual natures of mother and editor are difficult ones to inhabit simultaneously because naturally all my editing recommendations sound to him like, And you better clean up your room now, or I’ll ground you! I have to tread very lightly.

Treading lightly is mentally exhausting.

What I really want to tell him is, You are waaaay overthinking this! You’re too much of a perfectionist!

It’s odd how being a perfectionist and being a total fuckup often have the same end result: You miss deadlines.

No, Max didn’t miss any deadlines. But he came close. He got the essays in at precisely 11:59pm EST. They were due at 12am.

When I asked him, “Can I say something candid to you?”, he replied, “That depends. Is it going to hurt my feelings? If so, hold off for a few hours; I need to focus on getting this paper done.”

So, I didn’t say it.

Max’s essays were really good, particularly the last one. Famous Dead President Policy School had asked him to take a stab at writing a policy analysis. He wrote about how the admissibility standards for eyewitness testimony are far less empirical than the admissibility for forensic evidence and expert testimony. This works to the disadvantage of defendants, Max argued. (He’s doing the Innocence Project this semester.)

But this is actually a masters thesis.

Very ambitious.

He sent me a very incoherent version of the essay Thursday night.

“Uh – you do know public policy people are very picky about formatting, right?” I said. “They like everything to have an executive summary. Also, you should break out your methodology. An analysis is only as good as its methodology –“

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom,” he said. “They want to see whether I can analyze something! They don’t care about whether I include an executive summary or a methodology!”

You’re wrong, I thought. But I got to work editing the document anyway. If you’re gonna help someone, you have to give them the help they’re asking for, not the help you think they should be asking for. Caught all the misplaced commas and dangling participles that had played havoc with pronouns. Moved some sentences around and got it into some semblance of structure.

Then on Friday at 7pm, he re-sent the essay. He had completely rewritten it! With an executive summary and a methodology!

The moral of that story, I guess, is that they do consider parental advice if you can keep yourself from ramming it down their throats.

This version was much harder to edit because it contained a lot of legal argumentation and jargon that made my eyes glaze over. So it was a struggle to the finish line, and when it was over, and Max confirmed, Got it in by the deadline, I was so adrenalized that I didn’t get to sleep until 3am.

###

I love to sleep more than just about anything on the planet, so not sleeping is hard on me.

Hence, I am in a weird disjointed mood.

I have been exercising. The little elliptical bike has been getting a daily workout because it’s much too cold to go outside, temperatures barely grazing 25 degrees. But I think maybe it’s the fresh air as much as the exercise that’s soporific.