This movie

might be the best I've seen all year. Ewan McGregor (love him) plays a young man mourning the death of his father, played by Christopher Plummer (love him), an elderly man who, at the death of his long-time wife, announces to his son that he is gay and then proceeds to live out the remainder of his life joyfully, fully embracing his new love and life. I couldn't possibly do justice to the yearning, wistfulness and melancholy of this movie --- the relationship between the son and the father, the father and the mother, the father and his lover, the son and his lover and the dog, the dog, the dog -- well, I won't give it away. The director, Mike Mills, weaves the several strands of story together seamlessly and beautifully, each scene suffused in both literal and figurative light. I found it nearly perfect.

Go buy yourself a ticket, get a bucket of popcorn and escape into the love --

Cake and Fish

Lemon Cake with Lemon Curd Cream Filling
Lemon Frosting
Pop Art Fondant Flowers

Stare at these pretty koi for a bit, run your mouse over them and watch them "eat." There's something about this app that completely delights me.

Words to describe a Zen koan

Sophie in sunlight, 2010

"dark to the mind, radiant to the heart"

My boys are home, safe and sound from their respective camps. The energy level in the house has ratcheted up accordingly.

Despite Carmageddon, the roads seemed relatively peaceful today. I spent nearly the entire day organizing crap that was stacked up everywhere in my house.

I threw some baby spinach in the Cuisinart with a handful of walnuts, some Parmesan cheese, and olive oil for a pesto to go over linguine for dinner.

Sophie is playing with her beads in her room. She had a nice session with the therapist who works on iPad/communication stuff with her and only a few seizures today. The impending decision/work about the Modified Atkins Diet for seizures is just that -- impending. I'll think about it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.

The sun is shining through my bedroom door and the palm fronds are rustling. The air is Los Angeles summertime warm and cool together with not a speck of humidity. I thank the universe every day for this weather.

The moon, I believe, will be full and I'll be looking at it tonight with all of you.

Warning: Political Post/Rant

You might as well click OFF if you hate politics, if you think I'm a crazy, unpatriotic communist or if you're a relative that disagrees because I'm not going to engage you directly. That said, here goes:


I agree with Bernie Sanders, the estimable senator from Vermont, when he says:

Our right-wing friends in the House of Representatives have given us an option. What they have said is end Medicare as we know it and force elderly people, many of whom don't have the money, to pay substantially more for their health care. So when you're 70 under their plan and you get sick and you don't have a whole lot of income, we don't know what happens to you. They forget to tell us that if their plan was passed you're going to have to pay a heck of a lot more for the prescription drugs you're getting today. They we're going to throw millions of kids off health insurance. If your mom or dad is in a nursing home and that nursing home bill is paid significantly by Medicaid and Medicaid isn't paying anymore, they forgot to tell us what happens to your mom or dad in that nursing home. What happens?

And what happens today if you are unemployed and you're not able to get unemployment extension? What happens if you are a middle-class family desperately trying to send their kids to college and you make savage cuts to Pell grants and you can't go to college? What does it mean for the nation if we are not bringing forth young people that have the education that they need? They forgot to tell us that. And if you are one of the growing number of senior citizens in this country who are going hungry, they want to cut nutrition programs. And on and on it goes. Every program that has any significance to working families, the sick, the elderly, the children, the poor, they are going to cut in the midst of a recession when real unemployment is already at 15 percent and the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing. That's their idea.

Shouldn't the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations contribute to deficit reduction rather than just the elderly and the sick and working families? They say no. They're going to defend the richest people in this country -- millionaires and billionaires -- and make sure they don't pay a nickel more in taxes. We're going to make sure there is no tax reform so we can continue to lose $100 billion every single year because wealthy people and corporations stash their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, and that's just fine. We'll protect those tax breaks while we savage programs for working families.

Those are the choices that our right-wing Republican friends are giving us. Default with horrendous economic consequences for working families in this country and for the entire global economy or massive cuts to programs that working families desperately need.

via Huffington Post

I might add to Mr. Sanders' comments, too, that these cuts also affect the DISABLED, children and adults like Sophie, my daughter, and those who have far greater problems than hers or ours. In fact, government programs for the disabled have already been cut drastically all around the country in many, many states ALREADY because these people HAVE NO VOICE. 

Is Bernie posturing? Is it all politics? Well, I'm a middle class sort of person with a disabled child. I can't go out and get a job because I can't afford childcare for my sixteen year old daughter who is severely disabled.  I cobble together piecemeal jobs and work from home as I can. The Husband works twelve to eighteen hours a day in his own small business nearly seven days a week. We send our children to public schools because we can't afford otherwise and because we like to support equity in education. We pay for private health insurance and have seen the rates TRIPLE in the last three years. Every single "service" that Sophie received -- state and federal - has been eliminated or cut drastically in the last three years. I read stories almost daily about grotesque atrocities and hideous care in institutional settings for persons like Sophie and don't seriously consider it as an option for our family to place her in one. 


I know that millions, if not billions of people live vastly different lives than our own as Americans and that we are, for the most part, a spoiled, lazy people prone to demanding entitlement and the ever-ephemeral happiness, but for god's sake, we are also a country with more wealth than has ever been seen on the face of the earth. One quarter of children in the country should not be living in poverty when one basketball player signs a $55 million dollar contract or one actress pulls in $1 million per episode. That seventy year old grandmother should not be forced to decide between medication or food when my neighbors and friends spend nearly $80,000 a year to send their children to private schools.

I do not know what the answer is other than to exercise my right as an American citizen to not just rant and rave but to vote for representatives that will work toward justice and equality. It appears that we're all getting what we voted for -- a bunch of politicians in Congress who have been bought by wealthy Americans and corporations hell bent on protecting their obscene salaries and misguided notions of what liberty, freedom and justice really are.

A bookworm can dream --

There's No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

Signs

seen in Silverlake:

seen in Los Angeles:

Acupuncture Dream

On the way over, I knew already what I was going to think about when the needles were in, the door was shut and the music was on. I knew that I was going to go back to you, to a house on the side of a road, a wooden porch, a Carolina dusk of sticky left off soft, a folding chair with rusty legs, your worn khakis and the reggae sway as I pulled into the driveway. I knew I'd think of it as I drifted off, my channels open, your guitar put down as I leaped into your lap, my head thrown back where you kissed my neck, your wide smile, tilting.

Thank goodness.

I'm kicking up my heels today.

Thanks for your thoughts and concern!

Day One

The fun never stops over here. Although the house is quiet, I'm not -- at least not on the inside. It seems that I have to go get some repeat screening -- testing of the annual type -- the words that all women slightly fear on their annual: I wouldn't worry about it, but please come in tomorrow for another look. If you're the praying type, please send one up and around, because I really don't have time for this sort of thing. :0

On another note, I read this in the quiet this morning and wonder if I might craft a bit of a retreat of my own in the day or so that I have left before The Boys come home. The idea of spending a week or so in the Italian countryside to do nothing but read and perhaps eat good food and take small walks -- well, that sounds like paradise to me. If I do so at home, I can enjoy our glorious weather, read the stack of New Yorkers and finish the Bonnie Jo Campbell novel. I might even crack the new Ann Patchett.

And I guess I'll finally chime in with the scandale over at the blog Marissa's Bunny, a site that I've directed my readers to several times -- the author, Mike W. has a baby girl (at least we think he does, although who knows now?) with infantile spasms and recently offered free iPads to many, many families who have children with special needs. Over the last couple of weeks, I was informed by a good blogger friend that she and someone else had unearthed some unsavory details about Mike and that they suspected the whole thing was a scam. It appears that Mike has a criminal record for similar scams and the whole giveaway appears to be another one. The special blogsphere (I hate that word) is freaking out -- for some good reasons, but I, being a more jaded and perhaps bitter sort, feel my eyebrows in a permanently raised position. It annoys me to no end that I sent people to Mike's blog and encouraged them to apply for the giveaway; it also annoys me that I had several private email exchanges with Mike himself, and he prevaricated and basically lied to me about what was going on. Both Ken and Heather have masterminded a Mission iPossible to get iPads to those kids that were promised them -- so hop on over and visit.

As far as the rest of the freak-out, I said to Ken over at Blogzilly and Heather at Little Wonders, I'm just sitting here on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away. 

Quiet

Le Silence by Odilon Redon

I just drove back from Santa Barbara where I dropped Henry off at lacrosse camp. On the way I also dropped Oliver off at a boys' camp. They'll be gone until the end of the week.

It's already scarily quiet.

I took the kids to see an exhibit yesterday called Art in the Streets. It was housed in the Museum of Contemporary Art's downtown gallery in Little Tokyo.

The exhibit was outrageous -- colorful, iconic, iconoclastic, disturbing, exhilarating, fascinating, creepy, beautiful and above all, stimulating. The irony of wandering around an enclosed space with displays of graffiti and installations of actual subway cars and dirty, city corners was not lost on me. I've always felt slightly uncomfortable in museums, both enamored of the art and the history and a bit repelled by the display of temporal things.  This exhibit had some cool documentation of social movements in southern California -- skateboarders, Venice beach, some pretty hard-core photography of the down and out. I'll never look at street art the same way again.

Take a stroll:

Get up, sway, dance to

this summertime music.

Special Needs Sibling Saturdays

Varda, of the wonderfully named The Squashed Bologna: a slice of life in the sandwich generation, features me on her blog today for Special Needs Sibling Saturday. The post is titled "Hilarity and The Mermaid's Brothers."

Please hop on over and check it out. We love comments, too!