Love it grows on trees. Fall is once a year.

February 3, 2010 Progress Notes:

"Untitled Toronto Story"

Words today: 150.
Words total: 150.
Reason for stopping: Time to sit back on the haunches and circle this one too.

Darling du Jour: It comes in by water.
The city comes in by water and lodges in your skin. You never see it coming. It's a lifetime of quick showers, drinks gulped from the backyard hose, a face tilted up into the rain on a summer afternoon. By the time you switch to filtered water it's too late: there's lake silt and river-blood sunk in your bones, and no matter how you duck between the snowflakes and boil your cooking water, all is lost.
You will never realize the extent of your contamination until you try to leave.

Mean Things: I'm not actually sure yet.
Research Roundup: The Font de las Canaletes in Barcelona.

Books in progress: Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye.
The glamour: Dayjob in extremis, the murder of a decent amount of annoying paperwork of all stripes. And I made a cinnamon bread.

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This, I think, will be part of a diptych with "Stay".

I am cannibalizing an older part-drafted story for this one. It wasn't going right, or going anywhere, and I have a terrible urge tonight to write about my city and the love I bear it. Everything I have on the go is dark, or plans to be, or has darkness running underneath it like a river of ice, and I want to write a love story. Insofar as I ever write love stories. Well, insofar as they're ever clean.

Work earlyish tomorrow. I bid you adieu.

Two things. Both important.

"helptheproject is a fandom auction to benefit the Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go.

"Due to budget cuts, unless we can raise $15,000 by mid-March, we will lose our centerpiece program, the One-on-Ones. In this program, professional actor/writers write a short play to act in with the kid they're paired with, rehearse it with them in a beautiful countryside summer camp, and then return to Los Angeles to put on a show. This program has been running continuously for 20 years - let's not lose it now!"

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Via asatomuraki:

hominysnark needs a hysterectomy to keep an unpleasant medical condition from becoming a life-threatening one (it's already most of the way there) and she can't, because she doesn't have health insurance.

Why doesn't she have health insurance? Because she's self-employed, and as many self-employed creative people (she's an artist and writer) know all too well, when you have to choose between eating and having a place to sleep or having health insurance, the health insurance loses. I know this, because the hubby and I have been paying for self-employment health benefits for most of this decade, watching the cost go higher and higher while the benefits get lower and lower. We pay more for health insurance than we do for shelter, but live in terror of not having it, just in case. Because not having it could mean complete financial ruin, and destroy our children's future. It's freaking scary.

So, anyway. She needs $2700.00 for the operation, or she has to wait for her condition to become life-threatening. (It will get there long before she could save up that much, especially since she has $8,000.00 in medical bills from just having it diagnosed.) See, she falls in that sweet spot between having enough income to have health insurance or pay for health care herself and being poor enough to qualify for any sort of break from providers or government program.

....

I know that if every one who can will give a buck or two, maybe we can get this thing done before her life is at risk.

Lisa's my friend and has been for years and years. She's an awesome, funny, talented, creative, and wholly decent human being.

If anyone has a couple bucks to throw in to help defray the costs of this surgery, it'd be much appreciated.