Detail from "Untitled (Big Man)," 2000, a sculpture by artist Ron Mueck, in the Hirschhorn Museum's permanent collection. Photo by Jennifer Trinkle.

I'm still here, still in DC, the blog and my blogging friends neglected. I'll be catching up over the next week, but in the meantime ...

When we flew into Dulles twelve days ago, I thought I was over it. We’ve been gone from DC for exactly two years and I’ve adjusted to life in Northern California. I prefer the open, laid-back vibe of Berkeley and San Francisco and the first thing I recoiled from when I walked the familiar avenues of DC was the attitude. Lots of self-important people with important tasks. This town is crammed with policy wonks, the young ones fresh from graduate school, green with enthusiasm, the old ones graying in their suits, cynical but perhaps even more full of it, the seriousness of their jobs, the weight of the decisions they make, a heavy surety of purpose.

But it’s beautiful here. I’ve always loved the brick rowhouses with their curving lines, the public buildings full of grace. Late April is too early for wilting humidity, too late for wintry mix. Rock Creek park is punctuated by the delicate whites and pinks of dogwoods, with twisted redbuds adding their outlines against the pale green of new leaves. Everything growing is green or white or pink, though we’re missing the explosion of azaleas that happens in late spring.

I was cocky. I told people that the pull I felt for my adopted hometown (which intensified greatly with Obama’s election) was gone. Then, tonight, our last night here, I felt the pangs.

I have no choice in the matter. We’ll fly back tomorrow evening and I’ll go back to my strange little life, return to my third incarnation, now playing the part of a stay-at-home mother with a writing complex. I’ll spend hours without stepping into crowds, wander the empty sidewalks of my moribund neighborhood, thinking back to the bustling streets of DC, to my quick jogs across busy intersections with only seconds to spare before the light change. Once a month I’ll meet with my writing group and feel awkward, without context, but still grateful to be there. And I’ll dig in my heels, try to grow a life without the context of work and a love of place.

Tags: Washington, dc, homesickness, policy wonks, california

Nora, researching a blog post.

The writing to survive household is traveling this week and next, from DC to MD to DE to NJ and back. In the meantime, Nora, our Russian Squirrel Hound, will be filling in. Or something like that. Expect a photo post or two.

P.S. -- People googling my name: You are freaking me out.

Tags: Nora, dogs, Washington, dc, canine writers, blogging, vacation

Back when I was into admiring my own legs. Mirror, Little House, 1986?

I wonder if he (or she: yeah, right!) was disappointed. From a little box on Google or AOL or Yahoo, he typed "she was drunk" naked legs and somehow ended up at writing to survive. Yeah, I've written the sentence she was drunk here once, in one of my short pieces of fiction. Check one. Certainly legs come up somewhere on the blog, perhaps in that same piece, but for sure in Heartbreaker with the line admiring my legs in the dashboard light. Check two. And you might notice a link to Robin Easton's wonderful blog Naked in Eden along the sidebar. Check three.

But did this anonymous surfer, this seeker of information on a drunken woman, perhaps one with naked legs, leave happy?

I'll never know.

What about the Bertie Wooster fan who typed in their hero's name but added an interesting second search term: birching? I have never written about this practice, a form of corporal punishment that involves hitting someone's bare skin (usually the buttocks) with a birch rod, though I have mentioned the Neighbornator's birch tree. Google lumps the blameless tree together with its not-so-innocent use. Combine the search engine's folly with my post on a crush -- I had a nickname for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. -- and another imprecise conclusion is reached.

There is always an answer, some reason why writing to survive becomes a search result. It's no mystery. You can look at the keywords and the text to figure it out. Still, I have to wonder why some people decide to click on a link to this blog when there are better sources of information out there. For example, yes, Happy Easter the hamster may have been in the early stages of rigor mortis when we found his corpse in the basement, but this doesn't mean that I know anything about the actual process, what the body goes through after death. Inevitably the people searching on how long rigor mortis gerbil and how long does it take until rigor mortis disappears had to move on to more authoritative sources. And, sad soul who turned to the internet to find out whether hamster rat poison survive, I think that the two are a fatal combination, though you have my deepest sympathy. I've been there.

Google searchers, AllTheWeb seekers, AltaVista clickers, I'll never know if you found what you were looking for, if what you sought was on this blog, because you probably didn't leave a comment, just came and skimmed. Most of you left in a hurry, though a few clicked through a page or two. I'd like to know, was it satisfying? Did you leave happy, or did you still feel a yearning for information you didn't receive?

There are stories behind every search. The people who usually end up here are often led by a sense of anxiety, fear, or worry. I'd like to soothe, to provide reassurance. In that spirit, I give you the below list, question and answer, taken from the searches that led people here.

can my relationship survive if I am twenty years her senior?
It depends.

crush on married woman
I'm a married woman who is prone to long term crushes (though I seem to stay away from married men even in my fantasy life). I never expect anyone to have a crush on me. Enjoy the unreality of it all and don't go any further.

dysfunctional families at easter dinner
What makes Easter dinner different from any other dysfunctional family dinner? It will be predictable, probably unpleasant. Prepare yourself.

explain hangover to parents
They've probably experienced a hangover before and know the symptoms, but you can always blame it on a tummy bug. Chances are they will choose to believe you. How old are you, anyway?

My striptease saved my marriage
Is this a hope or a statement of fact? I am doubtful of the ability of striptease to save anyone's marriage.

Bad stepmother blogs
Despite my one post complaining about her (which no longer feels relevant, but served a purpose at the time), I love my stepmother and would never claim that she is bad. Still, I'm sure there are plenty of blogs out there that discuss "bad" stepmothers. This isn't one of them.

Just remember: someone knows what you've been looking for, or at least they know the words you've chosen in an attempt to find it. Luckily, though, they don't know your name. Not yet, anyway.

(For an earlier post on the same topic, see How did you get here?)

Tags: Google, search engines, internet searches, irrelevant results, keywords, misleading tags, search strategies

I am a pacifist. Bombs and flak, strafes and submunitions, the indignities and violent glories of war: I don't want to read the stories. I don't even want to see the movies. War is about death and pain and wounded souls and it's happening right now, in real life. It surrounds us. With the exception of Pat Barker's fine Regeneration trilogy -- and my daily dose of the New York Times -- I've successfully avoided the topic.

Sometimes, though, when ideas are percolating, our minds lead us in strange directions. (And, of course, that's what's going on here, not really procrastination, but preparation. Percolation. All this will all lead to a wondrous stream of language soon enough. Right??)

Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb.

I don't want to be loosey-goosey on the details, because that would give it away, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the B-29 bomber, nicknamed the Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed the plane in the early 1940s as a long-range bomber, large enough to reach the shores of Japan, and it was a technological wonder. It also was a bit of a rush job, with early models especially prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype burst into flames on a test run when an engine fire quickly spread to the wing, destroying it. All ten crew members and another twenty people in a nearby meat packing plant were killed. By the end of the war, engineers had worked out most of the kinks, though the American public was most likely clueless about its defects (for example, this anti-Japanese government propaganda film on the bomber is all blue skies and heavy bombs).

Ball turret.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell

From B-29s my mind meandered to ball turrets, those little bulbs of steel and plexiglass that popped out of the bellies of B-17s and B-24s, two guns loaded on either side for enemy planes. The gunner would be cramped in the ball turret for hours, trapped, rotating, circling, with a bird's eye view of the destruction below and in the air. There are two excellent oral histories by former ball turret gunners on the web. Earl Mills, who flew in a B-17 and was eventually shot down, tells of his experiences, while author Sabine Ulibarri details a particularly frightening mission in an excerpt from Mayhem Was Our Business. Both men were diagnosed with combat fatigue, better known now as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Stryker bed frame.

Really, though, what led me to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the first six months, he was in a Stryker hospital bed frame (often used for patients in traction). From what I can tell, his mid-60s model was made up of a skinny mattress supported on either side by two mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he would wait for the moment when the bed would begin to move, to slowly flip his position from supine to prone. What would it have been like to be in that bed, sick, practically skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost gone, in and out of lucidity as his body fought off opportunistic infection? It turned him at least twice a day and he would often beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep it from happening, in part because he associated it with the painful removal of his burn dressings, with debridement.

A man who avoided going overseas in World War II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda, rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized war stories of precision and heroism with an undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear. Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.

Off to write. Slowly.

Tags: procrastination, preparation, writing, WW2, B-29 bombers, Stryker frames, Ball turrett gunners, grandfather, hospital, burn injuries