Byline

No cosmic intervention (this time).

So here it is. (Scroll almost all the way down.)

Return of the Orange You-Know-Whats

I broke out the orange panties on Thursday for my first West Coast mammogram. The technician gave me the good news right away:

Everything looks normal.

For the record, those are some of my favorite words.

I'd gotten lucky when I called for the appointment the previous week. There's usually a three- to four-month wait, the scheduler told me. But, he said, there had been a cancellation.

I have to guess that hearing I was a two-time breast cancer veteran made the guy try that much harder to squeeze me in, and for that I'm grateful.

Out here, in the land of the velvet rope and the red carpet, it's nice to know that someone thinks I'm a VIP.

A Dollar a Word

A few weeks from now, absent some kind of cosmic intervention, some words that I wrote are going to appear in actual print. With my name attached. And for which I will have been paid. In real U.S. dollars.

This will be a first.

The piece is a departure from my usual fare, and it's a very different—and dramatically shorter—version of what I originally wrote for a class I took at the J-school a year and a half ago.

I wish that I'd tried to sell it sooner, and that more of it could be printed.

I'm nervous about seeing it in final, edited, fact-checked form.

I'm hopeful that I was somehow able to do justice to my subject.

I'm exhausted when I think of all the work I put into reporting and writing and endlessly rewriting the original piece.

I'm convinced that the pain experienced by a writer who's been asked to cut her story by 87% is almost—but not quite—offset by the value of the exercise, even if she gave up at the 80% mark and had the editor finish the job.

And I'm proud that the check that came in the mail today means I can say that part—a teeny, tiny, completely negligible part—of my income this year came from my work as a journalist.

Interregnum

When Zach was here for the weekend in mid-July, he noticed that the plants in front of our new place were showing signs of neglect.

Back in Brooklyn, the yard was Zach's domain. He planted the daffodils and tulips, seeded and mowed the lawn, trained the wisteria along the fence, and cultivated an herb garden. He created a beautiful outdoor oasis, which I enjoyed and admired but toward which I contributed absolutely nothing.

So when the move to LA turned out to be more overwhelming than anticipated, and I had to start triaging my day-to-day life, it was easy to put "water plants" in the "not absolutely critical" column. The plants weren't even ours—they were here when we arrived. And while I'm not proud of the fact that I have let them deteriorate, when Zach called me on it I was unapologetic. I knew that once he arrived for good, they'd be well tended. And compared to the other things I'd been neglecting—this blog chief among them—the plants didn't even chart.

Posting has been sparse here mainly because my limited energy has been overmatched by the move, the new job, the after-effects of the sewage backup, and the general trials and tribulations of living a completely unsettled life at the other end of the continent from the man I love. And while writing my way through all of that would no doubt have helped me find my footing a bit sooner, it also would have made for spectacularly dull and, I fear, rather whiny posts (um, kind of like this one).

Though it would be premature to say that life has returned to the Knower version of normal, things are most definitely looking up.

Zach is here now, and today is the first full day of our new life in LA.

He's already watered the plants out front.

Back to Haiku

So the Locals Say

Only 5.4
on the Richter scale? That's a 
hiccup, not a quake.

Well Then

Someone I work with in my new job recently offered to introduce me to a fellow breast-cancer veteran.

I'm so accustomed to having seniority in this realm that I just assumed I'd be the one offering advice and counsel, that my experience would be the more intense and complex of the two.

I just don't meet that many people who've had breast cancer twice, or who've had it young—let alone both—and I usually find myself occupying the role of instant mentor in these encounters.

Things were different when I was in active treatment—then I'd meet plenty of women with more tortured histories than mine. But they were usually hooked up to an IV bag at the time, or marking time in a doctor's waiting room, not out and about and looking like a million bucks, which this woman was.

We exchanged small talk for a few minutes before moving onto medical histories. I gave the short version of mine, then waited to hear hers.

When she said "Stage IV," I felt my mind turn back on itself, as if I'd calculated how much change I should get back from a twenty-dollar bill and then heard the cashier announce an entirely different figure.

Wait, my brain said to itself.

Go back. This can't be right.

But it was.

This lovely, vivacious woman had Stage IV breast cancer.

And she was as matter-of-fact as could be about the whole thing.

Not to mention smart, funny, beautiful, energetic, enthusiastic, kind, and generous.

So now I have a new friend.

And a whole new picture of what Stage IV breast cancer looks like.

It's a life sentence, yes, but it doesn't have to be a death sentence.

And what a life it can be.

Where I've Been

The thing about a sewer backup is that it's not exactly the kind of thing you want to write about.

Or talk about.

Or think about.

Especially when it's a bad sewer backup.

One that requires environmental remediation.

To the tune of $3,000.

(We didn't have to pay for it, but still. Three thousand dollars.)

It was not the way I'd hoped to kick things off on this coast.

As a start, it was anything but fresh.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Eleven years ago, when we moved to the Bay Area, things didn't begin too well, either.

I was mugged less than two weeks after I arrived.

In broad daylight.

In my driveway.

By a woman wielding the biggest wrench I've ever seen in my life. (And her accomplice, a classy dude who threatened me before speeding the two of them—and my stuff—off in the getaway car he was driving.)

It took me a good long while to get over that experience.

New home + violation = trauma.

So here I am, traumatized all over again.