Hallelujah on Adult Day Programs That Come Through and Gratitude for Your Tax Dollars at Work

at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

I wasn't going to say anything until it was a done deal, but it's a done deal for the most part and Sophie has finally started her day program in Santa Monica.

This is big.

This is HUGE.

Sophie "graduated" from the LAUSD over a year and a half ago. She's been on a waiting list for years for this place, got a place and then we basically had to wait a million years for the right aide and the right paperwork and the right funding and you know the drill. Sophie has been at home with me and Saint Mirtha for all this time, and I can tell you that I'm a really boring mother at this point and an even more boring entertainer/cruise director/activities coordinator. I'm not lying. I am as burnt out as they come, and I'm making no apologies for that. Catholic girls have enough guilt flying around their parts to cover it, and while I've sworn off the Catholic church, I can't swear off the guilt. Saint Mirtha's got some chops in all those fields, but Sophie has basically been hanging around us or a bunch of toddlers and babies and nannies at the neighborhood park. Nothing wrong with that, actually, as Sophie is very interested in babies, and I've fantasized about her taking on a second job (when she gets off her Uber shift) as a baby whisperer.

But this day program is the bomb. It's community-based, so the young men and women go out everyday into the community and do stuff. If they're able, they work, go to the YMCA and work out or learn a trade. If they're like Sophie, they go to museums, the park, the beach, have music therapy, learn self-help skills, learn how to better communicate their needs and -- well -- make friendships and enjoy their lives.

on a Metro bus, on her way to the mall

The drive to the program is pretty brutal because I live in Los Angeles and the program is in Santa Monica. I'm talking about 9.8 miles but forty-five minutes on the highway, but I'm happy to drive to the proverbial Timbuktu if it means Sophie is happy and getting what she needs to lead a good, dignified life of value.

I found out today that she has several classmates from her PRESCHOOL in an LAUSD program at UCLA. That was back in the last century! I've lost touch with nearly all of those families in the last twenty years, mainly because we don't live on the west side where most of them still reside, but I have such good memories of those early days, and I'm thrilled to get acquainted again. Sadly, several of the children that Sophie began her school years with have passed away -- in those early childhood days, it was not unusual to go to at least one funeral a year of a young person. Looking at these grown men and women and imagining all that they've been through is emotional for me in bittersweet ways.

Saint Mirtha is training Sophie's fabulous new aide, Lauren, this week. I dropped them off both mornings, went for a walk on the beach and then did some freelance writing work yesterday, another interview for a possible job today and then -- wait for it --

began revising my manuscript at the public library.















The universe is abundant.

Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

Years ago, I used the word shit during a speech at my first wedding. Yes, I had a first marriage. I have a past, as they say. Anyway, I used the word shit, and quickly apologized, mainly because my sweet grandmother was sitting right next to me. She laughed her musical laugh, and told me in her soft, southern accent that shit didn't take the Lord's name in vain and was therefore not a curse word. All of this leads me to actually taking the Lord's name in vain because what that means -- in vain -- is what I felt right after I watched this video about disabled children in Russia.

Jesus Christ! I said, and it's definitely in vain because these things are happening every single day and no greater power seems to be in power. In fact, it's difficult to not feel cynical and powerless, to not want to retreat into a cave, close yourself off. God works in mysterious ways, be damned. What can we possibly do to alleviate all of this suffering? Yes, this particular video hit particularly hard for obvious reasons. Not only is it horrifying, but it gives me perspective on my own relatively sumptuous life, and that perspective, however hard won, has been buried under a bunch of woe of late. I've always struggled with relativity -- yes, it's all relative, but then it's not. Suffering is in degrees, if you feel it as so, and my suffering -- hell, Sophie's suffering, is relatively miniscule compared to these children and young adults in Russia in the year of our Lord 2014.

Good god almighty! Jesus Christ!

I'm taking the Lord's name in vain, over and over and over.

Oliver asked me the other day whether I believe in hell. I told him that I did believe in hell but not as a place or a time or something fixed. There is hell all around you, I told him. As there is heaven. I told him I actually believed the words of Jesus Christ when He apparently said, The kingdom of God is at hand. I believe that to mean that it's here and now, the present moment -- the kingdom of God. At hand. Here. Now. The present moment. And hell? Apparently, it's in Russia at institutions for the disabled.

Sequestration, Shame and Children with Disabilities with a P.S.

Just so you know, I'm not an expert on any of this government business, and every time I see The Tan Man's face (that would be Speaker Boehner**), my insides curdle, so you could say I'm very biased, but this is what I understand will happen if the Congress doesn't figure out the budget, and sequestration occurs:

The impact of sequestration on education programs is an estimated $3.5 to $4 billion. That includes a $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 grants for disadvantaged students and an estimated $900 million to Special Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for the 2013-2014 school year.

More specifically, the resulting $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 could mean denying funding to nearly 4,000 schools serving nearly 1.6 million disadvantaged students, and more than 16,000 teachers and aides could lose their jobs and more than 10,000 special education teachers, aides and other staff providing support to children with disabilities.

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan 

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that demands sacrifice and belt-tightening from children, the disadvantaged and the disabled?

I did a little, a very little, research and found out that one drone called a 10-MQ-9 Reaper (how hideous is that name for a piece of technology that kills?) costs

$12,548,710.60.

If you do the math, that comes to approximately how many drones that -- I might add -- have been implicated in killing children in distant lands --to balance out the coming cuts in education for the disadvantaged and the disabled?

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that spends more on high tech equipment that kills people than on the education of children who are disadvantaged and disabled?

I'm ashamed to be an American and I'm not ashamed to assert that.

P.S. And we haven't talked (or ranted) about the state of Georgia nearly killing a cognitively disabled man in prison for murder yesterday. Or the death penalty at all.


**Spell check suggests the word Boner when I type Boehner which perhaps provides the only bit of levity in this post.

Art is as fugitive as fraud

the thoughts that came willy-nilly after reading this

Sometimes I read stuff online or I hear stuff on the radio or I listen to someone I know talking, and I'm overwhelmed by the suchness of it all and I just can't think about it, any of it, anymore. Someone over here is wondering whether or not global warming exists and someone over there is wondering why Cardinal Mahoney gets to go over to Rome and help pick out a pope when his decision-making abilities have surely been questioned as being less than ethical and then that someone over there thinks hero worship of the disabled is something to be denigrated and while I might know on some level what they're saying -- I know what you're saying, but -- sometimes it's too much suchness and I want to say calmly and matter of factly I don't care. I actually got a thrill when I watched Pretorius' silver blades running down the track and never once entertained the thought that he was less than or even more than despite, despite being the operative word. It was just a beautiful thing. So, I'm in the mood to call a spade a spade, a blade a leg, a blade a blade, a gun a gun and when a person has a gun something bad might happen. I personally don't want to defend myself or my kin with a gun and I have no idea what I'd do if threatened but when that person says they'd have no problem shooting the guy dead, it's too much such and I just can't think about it, any of it, anymore.

Andrew Solomon's new book

I keep reading about Andrew Solomon's new book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Solomon writes about children with disabilities, children conceived by rape, children who are transgendered and children with schizophrenia, among others, and the impact these differences have on families. You would think that I'd run toward this book, but I've actually felt overwhelmed by it, if that makes sense. I've felt weary at the prospect of reading it. I'm living the life that it evidently exhaustively describes (and Solomon himself is a gay dyslexic who suffered from and wrote brilliantly about his own clinical depression in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression). But I saw this promotional video this morning and decided that it's next on my list of books to read.