Look, I just got the latest issue of Granta. This is a very fancy schmancy literary journal, to which I have contributed a short graphic essay.

See my name on the cover? Right there with Siri Hustvedt and Ali Smith and Jonathan Lethem? There’s also a clever story inside by the wonderful and terrifyingly prolific Emma Donoghue.

Meanwhile, Holly decided we should move the birdfeeders closer to the house. Dr. Winnicott thinks this was a splendid idea. Click the below picture, it’s a video. I still haven’t figured out how to make my videos show up with that handsome, graphically lucid and self-explanatory “play” arrow on ‘em, which would make this entire sentence, as well as the last one, unnecessary.

Can you think of other comforting, unchanged-for-decades, so-familiar-they’re-invisible logos?

Thank you for all the kind comments on the Sydney and Mo drawing I made in the last post. I’ve been having a funny realization about my comic strip, which I probably wouldn’t share with you if it weren’t now well over two months since my last period. (For that matter, I wouldn’t tell you that it’s been more than two months since my last period if it weren’t more than two months since my last period. But all my customary instincts are going awry lately.) Anyhow, I really am reading that book that Mo gave Sydney, The Wisdom of Menopause. Holly politely suggested it to me some months ago, when I seemed to be inexplicably hot all the time. She has some older friends who liked it a lot. And I was like, yeah, right, I’m gonna rush right out and get The Wisdom of Menopause. And then I’m gonna buy one of these, and rent some grandchildren. I really didn’t think I was having hot flashes, I just thought I was, you know, hot.

But then I calmed down and got the book anyway, just to have on hand. And recently I started reading it. And it kinda rocks. The author, Christiane Northrup, starts out by saying that as she approached menopause she found herself getting really irritable with her husband and kids over things that didn’t use to bother her. Like her eighteen year old asking her “when’s dinner?” All of a sudden, she just couldn’t take it any more. I’m vastly oversimplifying her thesis here. But the gist of it is that one of the things all those female hormones do is keep you focused on other peoples’ needs. So you can raise children and stuff. So as they wear off, you start getting all crotchety.

So I started thinking about how curiously easy it was to stop doing my comic strip last spring, and how I haven’t really missed it. Hmmm. My comic strip, which for the past 25 years I’ve been producing at four week intervals, like a little ovum. Northrup says, “Biologically, at [perimenopause] you are programmed to withdraw from the outside world for a period of time and revisit your past. You need to be free of the distractions that come when you are focusing your mothering efforts solely on others. Perimenopause is a time when you are meant to mother yourself.”

Which isn’t at all to say my comic strip has only been some kind of community service–I’ve absolutely derived a huge amount of personal satisfaction from it. But there’s a way it doesn’t feel as necessary as it once did, both inside myself, and outside, in the world. Whatever it was I was creating, it’s old enough to get its own dinner now.

And now here I am, setting the comic strip aside kind of abruptly and impatiently so I can work on a memoir about my past relationships, notably including the one with my mother.

It’s all hormones!

For fucks sake!

Or is it “fuck’s sake?”

#&%@$!

That’s my ex-assistant Cathy Resmer posing as Ginger almost ten years ago. And here’s a really wonderful piece she wrote this week about DTWOF for our local alt weekly Seven Days. And look! There’s also a very slick and smart video interview that the Seven Days vlogger extraordinare Eva Sollberger* did with me last weekend. She does this brilliant series called “Stuck in Vermont” for the Seven Days website.

*A Simon’s Rock alum, like me.

It’s a cold world. Thank god this cord of wood got delivered today.
Click here to view the embedded video.

God, why am I going on about the weather and the driving conditions? I guess I’m still kinda stuck in family brain. On Sunday Holly and I fetched a Christmas tree. Holly’s mom made that hat for her when she was little.

Holly never throws anything away. She still has long underwear from high school, all worn to gossamer webs. This is charming in the abstract, and consistent with her philosophy of Waste Free Living. But it’s taking on a vivid immediacy right now since she’s about to move in with me and I need to find space for all the things she’s never thrown away.

Holly’s website Waste Free Living is in fact now open for business, if you need to get anyone some green & groovy gifts. All the products aren’t up yet, she told me to tell you, because she’s still loading things. But there’s some nice stuff.

Like these compost bins that our friend Jackie Marino and I are putting together at the Waste Free Living launch party a couple weeks ago.

I suppose one could argue that it’s waste-full to cut down a christmas tree.

But it’ll decompose back into soil. Matter is neither created nor destroyed.

But I wish it could be compressed. It would be really cool if there was some kind of Stuff-It file compressor for our physical possessions. That would make cohabitation a lot easier.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For just got this amazing rave in the NY Times.

Lemme tell you whippersnappers. I can remember when the Times wouldn’t even print the word “dyke.” In fact, somewhere in my vast archives I have a tiny clipping from 1983 or so…maybe even later…containing the first instance of the Times using the word “gay,” as opposed to “homosexual.”

I’m just saying.

If you live in Northern Vermont, come to one of my readings/signings for Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I’ll be at Bear Pond in Montpelier tonight, and at the Flying Pig in Shelburne tomorrow. Thanks to the redoubtable Cathy Resmer for posting about it on the blog of our local alt weekly Seven Days.

More links…a semi-coherent interview with me on Bookslut.

D’you all know about JoinTheImpact? This big spontaneous internet-based activist phenomenon that’s been going on since Prop 8 passed? Click here for a list of groovy subversive activities we should be participating in during the upcoming weeks. I kinda like the one about donating LGBT food to antigay churches. Once my ex and I did that by accident! We were looking for some church that served free dinners to people on Thanksgiving, and made a bunch of food for them. When we got there the straightlaced people all looked at us like we were aliens. They took the food, though.

And here’s a podcast of an interview I did last week with the illustrious Bat Segundo. Go listen to just the first minute or so–his introduction is really hilarious.