At first I was not writing because Aure got sick and then I got sick then he got sick again and then had a puff-up-eyes-swell-shut-and-itch allergic reaction then some more sickness and by that point I was keeling over with my own interesting array of ailments including aphasia⁰¹ and blacking out when standing up. Whew. I had nothing to say except an incoherent mumble about needing to go to bed. How on earth do people who work in an office manage the childhood illness thing? Daycare would never have accepted the poor hacking beast and it have would been downright evil to expose any babysitter with her own kids to this stuff, so one parent is just outa luck and work for eight weeks or so. Until this bout of plague, I don’t think I totally understood why so many people who like their jobs just give up and stay home entirely for a few years, but now I certainly do. Anyhow, once I don’t write for a while I can’t really remember how. The only cure is to start chatting and hope it gets easier. (chatchatchat, um) I’m determined to get some practice words in before we’re all felled by swine flu within three weeks. Sadly, however, exhaustion has trumped curiosity for a good month now, so although I must have been reading, I can’t really remember what and I’m pretty sure I haven’t thunk a thought in weeks. I know the reading was not work related because even coming at any of that sideways for a minute gives me a horrid glimpse of the mountain of things I need to do, ponder, design, or fix. It must have been a bit more escapist that that. Lemme think… I read The Good Soldier (This for the first time. Yikes!), Jane Eyre, Villette, An introduction or something by Charlotte Bronte in which she discusses Emily’s work, Liza of Lambeth (deservedly forgotten), all the Raymond Chandler insomnia books again, and several papers associating histamine sensitization with various infections. When I mentioned the latter to the allergist seeing Aure for the aforementioned puff up and itch incident, he responded with an oblique story about how “great” American mothers are, with their cr-razy questions and alarming capacity to research things. He asked me if I’d read about it on the internet. I am always caught off guard by that sort of thing. I did not respond Do you know who I am? as I would like to sometimes when people educate at me about how untrustworthy the internet is. (This is the only instance in which I will ever have, even in fantasy, the opportunity to make this demand. I am not otherwise anyone. I bellow at whomever is patronizing me, sometimes I snap my fingers in their face, toss the velvet rope aside, and march up to the counter to demand a double shot of Jack, as befits a longtime connoisseur of internet unreliability… Admittedly the scenario isn’t well fleshed out.) I just mentioned I’d found it on PubMed and he reassured me that makes it reliable. I muttered something about that not guaranteeing the methodologies any more than something printed in yellow caps on a black Geocities background of blinking stars, and he laughed politely. Setting aside the unconscious can of worms implicit in the prevalent discomfort with Mothers Knowing Things (also unpopular: Farmers Making Money and WIC Recipients Who Demand Healthy Food); it’s ridiculous to expect someone of my education and age, who can’t purchase a piece of minor electronics without researching it three weeks in advance, not to put at minimum, the same effort into my darling little shot at genetic immortality, whom I value at least as much as a slow cooker or a Pico projector.

~

Don’t go to school to learn about nutrition.

Ethan Zuckerman is a champ and everything he writes is worth reading, but I have been meaning to go back and reread his recent entry on Ai Weiwei, Censorship, and Sacred Facts.

And another study linking farming chemicals to Parkinson’s disease.

~

When we came home a few days ago, there was a white girl with a fat black backpack standing on the corner. She looked like an ordinary middle class girl who’d shown up to buy drugs or to interview the neighbors for a journalism school project.⁰² Except she was standing still on the corner in front of the bodega, just far enough from the bus stop for it to feel all wrong. Every now and then she’d look around or flop her highlighted blond hair back over her shoulder, but otherwise she stayed still. V thought I must be mistaken, but sure enough the next day she was there again and after that she started sitting next to the drug dealer over against the wall of the vacant lot. He’s recently moved there, under the shade of a low dense tree, across the street from the spot by the bodega he took over completely after the previous dealer was shot dead a few months ago. He now holds court (and this is not an exaggeration—he’s very open about what he’s doing and appears pleased to encourage the assumption that he murdered the previous tenant.) on a curious faux Victorian settee, the seat of which is upholstered in a pale patterned damask. (It does not look very comfortable.) Lookouts check in periodically, then slouch off in opposite directions. Women come and go. Some of them the same women who used to come into the building and proposition the men working here when we first started construction. There are three sisters who look enough alike that at first I wasn’t able to tell them apart. They all have heavy dark hair, sharp features, and blue black circles around their eyes. One has a tattoo tear on her cheek. All three are thin as runway models, and usually dressed in baggy t-shirts and pajama bottoms (yes, the ladies of the night shuffle around in pajamas) or men’s clothing. I saw one of them dragging a crying toddler a couple of years ago, but haven’t seen him since, even though she’s still around pretty consistently. There’s the woman who once told me, I’m going to do this until I die or I decide to stop. We make eye contact but she doesn’t appear to recognize me. She has sores on her face these days. There’s a girl I haven’t seen before getting in and out of cars. She looks pretty rough, like she’s been doing this a while, but her body doesn’t yet have the caved in look of the others.

A few weeks ago there was an influx of police in the neighborhood. A patrol person on every corner and more walking each block. It lasted a week or so. Instead of the dealer on the corner, there was a police standing in his place, slapping his night stick on his hand. There were two blue figures standing in the playground and another behind the school. There was a lot of loud silence, birds chirping, and a palpable sense of relaxation. The only people out were neighbors, people who actually live here. (The dealer and his posse don’t, nor do his customers, for the most part, live right on the block. Though, disturbingly, he seems to know a lot of the neighbors. I imagine the corner is desirable for its central location across from the housing project.) When the police left, the action on the corner sprang back with a new fury as if everyone had a lot of catching up to do.

When I was coming in again the day before yesterday, the girl with the backpack was sitting on the steps of the building next door. She has her head down and her hair was matted and tangled. When she looked up I saw her face was bruised and she had abrasions on both cheeks. She was wearing the same clothing as always. When the baby was inside I went back out for a minute. For a second I thought I’d demand her name and ask where her family is. I’d telephone her horrified suburban parents and break it to them gently. When they recovered, they’d come and take her home and nonjudgementally help her get clean and reenroll in college. Tough love or something. Maybe she’d write a story about her experience for This American Life.