I’ve been in New York since last Sunday and I feel as though I was hit by a slow-moving truck that then ran over my chest and parked. Last Saturday, the day of the event, was so freaking awful, and I feel in no way recovered. My excema is laughing, heartily, at my new excema medicine, as well as every other kind of glop I’ve used to try to quell the maddening, wildly itching rashes coursing up my shins. I’ve been getting those weird pains again, too, the ones that are like lightening somewhere in my chest and then gone, leaving a haze of pain. It has been a very difficult week for a number of reasons. One, I was supposed to get a bunch of work done, and have been entirely unable, because of two, which was the fact that my baker is here in New York and… and it is so strange, because whatever was there in California is so changed. Being together was not what either of us expected.

But the Democratic National Convention- god, for the first time in years I had hope. Kerry was fantastic. At one point I said, “If Bush is watching this, he is totally asking someone to find a dictionary to look up all of the multi-syllabic words” and my mom said, “Nah. Bush is probably asleep”. I know I’m being petty and ugly and elitist, but I can’t wait for the presidential debates largely so Kerry can show Bush to be the utter nin-cow-poop that he is. I mean, seriously, on what level will these two communicate? They hardly speak the same language.

I’m now up at the farmhouse, looking forward to my first real rest in over a month. I wish I had a week up here.

There are so many things worth a string of words but I am hitting the wall fast and hard. I worked from 9 AM to 11 PM yesterday on a show that partially benefits my organization and it was bloody hell. I was underprepared, without knowing that I was, and overstaffed because the other organizations thought I’d be underprepared, and at one point, a woman turned to me and said, “How exactly did you get your job?”

I’ll tell you. I got my job because with the smallest amount of clarity in communication, I can move mountains. I realize you think I’m just and incompentent actor, but to be frank, I’m not even that anymore. Rather than plead my case, there’s one simple thing to tell you: fuck off.

I’ve never worked so hard for something that reaped so little, and that mostly reaped frustration and petty bitterness. I’m realizing why certain things in my current situation are essentially in the toilet. I can create change, but only within the parameters of middle-aged, narrow-minded, well-marrieds with too much time on their hands. My hands are bound by how far those around me will grow. Thankfully, luckily, I don’t really ever have to work with the people from this weekend again, and really, many of them were lovely. But man alive, one sour apple so easily spoils the barrel.

I could rage on about this, but instead, I’ll sleep an extra ten minutes.

I’m back in New York, looking forward to time with mom and brothers. I have a fair amount of work to accomplish as well, but… but maybe not tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I just won’t think about it. I’ve only had one weekend day and it was spent largely on a plane crying my eyes out as I watched “Moulin Rouge”. I need at least one more whole day.

And to those of you naysayers who read blogs but then can’t figure out why anyone reads blogs, see above paragraph 2, sentence 4.

ANASTASIA, COME HOME!!!!

Yeah, it’s sort of ridiculous to not have written in a week and a half, but sometimes it is simply impossible. Highlights of my week:

1. Yesterday, my underwear was on inside out all day

2. Today, when I had two hours to do six hour’s worth of work, my printer stopped working. In those two hours I experienced anger, hatred, hysteria, defeat, and exhaustion. The work is still not done.

3. My dates were utterly boring and not worth writing about.

4. I saw ten anti-Bush bumper stickers on Monday without even trying to look for them.

5. I booked a ticket to go to New York where I will get the chance to see some of my favorite people in the universe, and will get to wake up at the farmhouse.

6. Three nights I’ve been at work past six, and two nights past eight. P.M., that is.

7. My legs have stopped screaming from my morning runs. Now they just complain loudly.

8. My excema is raging across the plains of my body. It’s disgusting, and worse, it itches to holy fucking hell.

That’s all I have to report. I could write about the family who has been asked to leave their house because they’ve been hosting “MoveOn.org” parties, or the 30-year-old murder mystery in downtown Napa, California, but instead, I’m going to go to sleep. I’ll get to those stories eventually.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been at my new job for five days. I’ve learned so much, but have so far to go, and there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I’ve been forcing myself to go home after nine hours or so, but I could easily, easily work ten or eleven hour days and still not feel like I’ve done all I have to do. I dropped the ball several times at my last job, and I was afraid that I’d do that again here, but I’m getting re-acquainted with my true self: the one that needs to be busy to be successful. I had so many “Office Space” moments at my last job that it became the status quo- sometimes working for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in an eight-hour day. I didn’t have nearly enough to do.

I’m on salary for the first time in my life, which means there is no time clock, only results to show what work you’ve done in any given day. Before, I’d pray for the eight hours to be up, and then I’d also pray that something would keep me longer than the eight hours so I could cash in some overtime. Now, well, the only time I really look at the clock is when I feel like it might be getting close to six and so maybe I ought to think about going home. I don’t have to be at work at a specific time, I just have to show up for meetings and show up for myself and the work that needs to be done. I’m already plotting tomorrow, and next week, and two weeks from now, because I want to do what I am doing. It’s beyond refreshing- it’s exhilarating.

I’ve also signed up to volunteer once a week at the Democratic Headquarters in my town. They have a huge office space, furniture and computers, all donated, and they are opening at the end of the month. Finally, something concrete to do rather than shoot off my mouth all the time. I have heard conflicting reports on the political slant in this valley, but I know there are shabbily Republicans out there somewhere and I’m just the person to sway them. Or push them over, if I have to.

In other strange news… I have two dates this week. With different people. I think I’ve only gone on one real “date” in over three years, and that immediately turned into a wee love affair with a baker. One date is with a winemaker, another with a restaurant GM. I can only hope they don’t Google me before the dates, because it’s just not fair. The GM seems like a totally cool guy… but I’ve gotten pretty good at being rational about this whole thing. I certainly have high hopes, but not high enough to make real disappointment a possibility. I’d sure like to meet someone wonderful, and I think it shows great strides that I’m even giving it a shot. I have to give props to my baker, my sweet baker, who was a flash of gold in the mud of my love life.

Last night we had yet another fabulous wine dinner at Chez Elizabeth. Usually we pick a varietal and then build a menu around it; this time we all tried to bring wine that the others hadn’t heard of. And just in case you think that our wine dinners are all work and no play, please notice the notebook and Elizabeth’s furiously working hand in the right of this picture:

The wine we are drinking, Humanitas, is some pretty good juice. I particularly like it because like Paul Newman’s company, all of the proceeds go to charity. Check it out. Drink it at your wedding. You just might up lucky like my mac-daddy friend Jon.

But in even more exciting news, I was staking my tomato plants this morning, and as I was rearragning the stalks, a little something fell from the branches:

That right there is the first fruit to fall from my garden. It is the tiniest little Green Zebra heirloom tomoato ever, but it is a testament to the sad little patch of ground I call my own.

I put the little guy next to some big brothers in hopes that he will spread the word that his fellow tomatoes should grow up big and strong.

Mom, clearly you did not know the monster you created when you bought me a digital camera. But I’m taking the advice of my big brother Ian who says he sometimes writes entire blogs, then goes back and erases them and posts nothing but a picture. I hope my days of alienating old family friends with pathetic blogs are over. Welcome to the world of my tomatoes!

I am not someone who necessarily believes in better living through pharmacueticals, but currently, technology is serving me beautifully. I’d like to give a shout out to a few things making my life a billion times better:

1. My Olympus D-540 Zoom Digital Camera

2. My iPod

3. iTunes (particularly the “Party Shuffle”)

4. iPhoto

5. My Magic Chef Wine Cooler

6. My i705 Palm Pilot

7. My spanky new domain

8. Space Cat Litter (made of space-age polymers the absort both odor and liquid)

I just finished reading my brother Ian’s blog from yesterday, and all the comments from all the brilliant people who can’t help but read his words every day. I’ve been sitting here, listening to the birds and looking out my window at the early Northern California Saturday and feeling something that I only just now can put into words: I feel as though I totally copped out, that I tucked my tail between my legs and ran from the only place that has ever made me feel at home. My life is so incredible here, so rich, and full, but also so incredibly damn easy. I just don’t know how good that is. And while my friends are wonderful, the things that are most important to me aren’t necessarily the most important to them. I tell you right now that I would give up my job and my home if somehow it would mean that Bush was defeated this November. If I had to give up all of my comforts, and it would make a difference, I’d do it. I’d move somewhere else and start over again and I would survive. I freak people out here with the vehemence of my politics. I mean, I don’t even know how many people I know will actually vote because it’s hard to imagine that the mountains around us care who is president.

And the people here know a different me. Months ago I asked one of my best friends here what her gut feeling was about me going to Peace Corps in Africa. “Honestly?” she said, “I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think you can physically do it.” I was shocked. There is not one person in New York, friend or foe, who doubted my ability to do ANYTHING. But then I look at myself, and I know that I have become soft, as soft as possible in nine months. I also know that I’ve been recharging, that I have been loving myself as well as allowing myself to be loved, which is huge, but I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to start really working again. Working on my body, and my writing, that much I know, but the rest remains fuzzy. I’m a New Yorker, and I need edges to my life, and challenges, and people who will make me think. I want to believe that those things exist here because I am certainly not ready to leave.

I miss the farmhouse. I miss waking up in the morning with two other people sleeping in the same room with pillows over their heads because the sun is so bright. I miss breakfast around the table, I even miss not being sure if I belonged there because sometimes I didn’t know of the policies being discussed over coffee and Berkshire Blue cheese. I miss hearing the basketball pounding away on the top floor of the barn, I miss the hill, I miss Tessa and Jordana so much sometimes it knocks me over. To say that I miss the company of my brothers is to redefine the meaning of the word “miss”. I miss all the good people that came to my brothers and sisters- the Jons and Buds and Macs and Scotts and Lauries and Kellys and Chips- who are infinitely smart and funny and also a damn good time. Even when I was terribly lonely and unhappy, I loved being at the farmhouse.

I guess that’s the thing, though. I was often terribly lonely and unhappy in New York, and I am very rarely so here. But at the risk of sounding trite or silly, I was also so terribly ALIVE in New York. I wonder what the trade-off is. If I could move my friends and my job back to New York, as well as move the mountains… well, no. My friends are perfect here. Both perfect, and perfect here. Ultimately it’s about me, obviously, and not where I happen to be.

So a few of my friends and family members wonder what’s been going on in my life. I started a big new job, but that’s no fun to write about since I can’t ever name names again. So let’s start a little further back, and look at a day in the life.

First, I planted a garden. All the plants were itty bitty and then one day they started getting bigger:

Now they are even bigger and starting to scare me a little.

Then I had a birthday. We ate lots of food and drank lots of wine and then we went to a dive bar to shoot pool. I had to concentrate really hard…

… but in the end we ran the table all night and had a super time.

That is, until the following morning. Ouch!

It took me some time to recover, but eventually I was able to enjoy the pool party at my dad’s house that next day, particularly when I opened the gift from my brothers and sisters.

This past weekend was big fun too, particularly when my mom and Steve came to town and played in my garden.

I also got to welcome home my friend Mollie (right, with Elizabeth on the left), who has been in Italy for a month.

And finally, I’d like to send kisses to the sweetest boy I know:

I started my new job today, and I’m going to bed now. I hope to have my wits about me tomorrow.

In lieu of today’s regularly scheduled blog, I offer a test of the Posting Pictures System as developed by myself and my brilliant brother Steve. This is a taste of the photoblog coming your way from Birthday Fest 2004.

Jon and I after only a couple glasses of wine…

It’s my last day at work, so what am I doing? That’s right, writing a blog! Yippee!!!

I went to the St Helena Farmer’s Market this morning, as I do on most Friday mornings, to buy heirloom tomatoes at about $300 a pound. They are so beautiful, and so delicious, that I can’t resist, but I can’t wait for my own plants to start bearing fruit of their own. I also go to the market to see the world at its best: sleepy. Cats are so awesome when they first wake up, as are babies, and flowers, and people. Eyes are crinkly and fuzzy, hair has not yet settled, limbs are stretching and “good mornings” are plentiful. I love to smell the tomatoes, to hold them close and sniff deeply as if they were a deep glass of Amarone. I love that I run into people I might not see, and also see my best and closest friends. I love that the fog and mist has not yet broken over the mountains and that it’s cool enough for a sweater. I love that there is always both bad and good art for sale. I love to see old people leaning on their push-carts and little kids reaching for Kettle Korn. I wish I could afford the linens, I wish I could eat all of the strawberries on that table. I don’t care that it is overpriced, or that I’ve always had to go on my own. It’s one of the best parts of my week.

Today there was a table of local authors, all of them famous, most of them friends. I talked to one noted wine country author for fifteen minutes about my American Frontiers Trek two summers ago. This time that year, I was quitting my job and packing my apartment in preparation to fly to Utah for training. The author just thought it was the coolest thing since spice racks, and this is a guy who has done EVERYTHING. I’ve looked at his books sitting on my dad’s coffee table for years.

I’ve had an incredible outpouring of support from everyone here at my job, my job of only six more hours. But I’m finding much of it suspect. I’ve never been in a position where suddenly it might be beneficial for people to be kind to me. Not that I think my new position is going to have influence over all of these people, but many of them seem to think it will and are treating me accordingly. All I’ve ever had is what charm and confidence I’ve been able to muster. Suddenly it seems, with some select people, that merely my title will open doors, even if just into minds. This is by no means universal, but it is a fascinating phenomenon. And it is so utterly transparent. But at the same time, those who might be upset about me leaving, and might have punished me, are bending over backwards as if I didn’t know their true mind. It’s pretty entertaining.

Speaking of which, I ought to get done what I can in these six hours. I cannot wait for the end of this day!