Alchemy and Anxiety

I don't know about you, but I feel so weird these days, so out of sorts, so self-conscious and aware and filled with adrenaline and disgust and anger and -- should I go on? I miss blogging, too. I miss marking my days here and the casual way I'd throw out some thoughts and observations, a bit of poetry, a rant or two. I'm not tired of blogging or of blogs, either. I am preoccupied. I am so afraid of normalizing that POS running the country, the sycophants that support him, those that still maintain we must come together. Come together, my ass. I'm as overwhelmed as every other woman by the toppling of the patriarchy, too. When is the head dude, though, the Sexual Predator in Chief, going to get his due?






I'm baking a lot of cakes. I baked this one:

Coconut Cake with Coconut Buttercream

and I made five of these:

Apple Toffee Crunch Cake with Cinnamon Buttercream

I made about a million of these:

yeast dough rolled in cinnamon sugar

It came out like this:

Cinnamon Pull-Apart Bread with Caramel Glaze

Baking, unfortunately, does not alleviate the stress of the Repubs screwing us, over and over, now with their new tax plan which is really another version of their healthcare plan, which basically reinforces the direction the Disunited States of America is going which is a plutocracy. I want to say f*^k all of them, but I tire of cursing.







I also made the most killer cinnamon buttercream.

Butter, sugar, egg whites, cinnamon

Honestly, that stuff is nearly sexual. A silky sweet meringue that takes butter and transforms into something that melts on the tip of your tongue, just a trace.

Alchemy.



I had my first paid gig at The Los Angeles Times on Saturday. Here's the link.


#gigeconomybaby

The Old Gray Mare, Part 435,679

It used to be that I pretty much did it all, and then I came on here and told it. It's all I can do these days to get a weekly post out, and even that one is hard going. I'm not sure why to keep on doing it, to tell you the truth. Not it as in all of it, because I'm still sort of doing it all, but the blog itself. I don't have anything funny to say anymore, and I feel as blowsy as those peonies dying on my dining room table. Everything of beauty seems somehow tainted these days, doesn't it? I hate saying that the political climate affects everything, but it kind of does. While I'm as committed as ever to resisting, it takes an inordinate amount of energy to maintain composure, to not feel profoundly depressed, to not want to give up and give in. When you have close relatives whose politics are directly contrary to yours -- well -- it's enervating, to say the least.

The only rant I have energy to make is something like what I posted on Facebook, and I'm perfectly aware of how ridiculous and destructive it is to curse and rant and otherwise refuse to reach across the aisle or extend a compassionate hand or seek to come together with those of differing views. There are times for that, and I just don't think this is one of them. So here's what I have to say:

Another round of FUs to those who voted for 45, didn't vote or voted for a third party.

That's my response to the most recent news that our POSPOTUS pulled out of the Paris Climate accord. I might also have posted, "Way to sever global alliances, 45." I'm thinking our return to Dickensian times of chimney sweeps and ten children families is nigh. 45 really is a POS, but the bigger PsOS are those legislators and citizens that are watching and abetting him.

The old gray mare ain't what she used to be. She curses at least 5,456 times a day now, out loud and in her tiny little mother mind.™

So, here's my rant again:

Another round of FUs to those who voted for 45, didn't vote or voted for a third party.

I doubt there are any 45-supporters out there lurking around and reading this blog, but if there are, FU, too.

Charming, right?

The old gray mare just ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be.

On a brighter note, the old gray mare is finally getting some pages together of Ye Olde Booke or what I used to call MGDB.* Sorry for cursing again. The process has been to write the thing for nearly ten years, be awarded a prestigious three-week writing residency on Whidbey Island where it is finished and then spend the next two years dismantling it into a series of fragments.

It's in the fragments that I lie.

*My Goddamn Book

Confession (with an unapologetic curse word embedded) and a Venn Diagram and Cannabis Update

I have one to make. The other day, as I prepared my presentation for the Epilepsy Summit CBD seminar, and even as I spoke, I had the tiniest hope that I would somehow be vindicated, that a line of neurologists, many of them familiar and most only teenagers when Sophie was diagnosed, would have each taken my hands, looked me in the eye and said something like this:

Thank you so much for telling your story so honestly and beautifully. Thank you, too, for helping us to learn more about epilepsy and cannabis. We are so sorry that we haven't helped your daughter and millions like her. We are so sorry that we've actually done so much harm to her and have continued to turn a deaf ear to your appeals for partnership. We are sorry that we haven't disclosed our unethical relationship to big pharmaceutical companies and how this has utterly influenced our outlook and judgement, as well as our hospitals' malpractice lawyers and our peers. We are sorry that we've prescribed dozens of little studied drugs in mysterious combinations and then had the nerve to put down your own studies about cannabis, demeaning you as "just a mother" and "unreliable" and "prone to the placebo effect." We are sorry that the treatment for infantile spasms is exactly the same as the one you embarked on twenty years ago with your daughter and has the same results which are abysmal, yet we continue to resist, openly, an option that might be better. You are right. We've fucked up. Most of all, though, we are in awe and thankful that you and legions of other parents of these children that we haven't helped have not been defeated by our obduracy. 

How hard are you laughing?

I've gone over and over this thing for a couple of days and really did some soul-searching, trying to unravel my own insecurities, hubris, faults, etc. I always come back to our story, though, and the twenty year tail I carry around with me.

There is no such thing as vindication, and if there's anything I've learned over the years, it's as difficult to shed those last vestiges of desire for it as there is to drum up the will to keep going.




Here are two Venn Diagrams that my friend Greg made for me to use in my presentation. I was hoping that someone would have asked me for a copy, but -- well -- you know how that went.

In case you're like me and can't confess to not quite understanding a Venn diagram, here's a verbal explanation:

• Sophie has been alive for 7,226 days (as of this past weekend)
• Of those 7,226 days alive, 4.1% or 271 of them have been seizure-free.
• Of those 7,226 days alive, 454 of them have been on CBD. 6,772 of them were on pharmaceuticals alone.
• Of those 7,226 days alive, 0% or 0 of them have been seizure-free while on pharmaceuticals 
• All seizure free days have been while on CBD and none have been while on pharmaceuticals alone.

Decorative Gourd Season

I don't remember who sent me this McSweeney's essay, but when my little sister Jennifer reminded me of it today, I laughed so hard that I cried.

Be forewarned: there's an awful lot of cursing in it, particularly the "f" word.

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfu#%^ers!