The Stars and the Cookie Jar

So I keep writing this freakish piece of alternate Russian history - who's going to want to read that?

And I have a ton of material to just flat-out memorise by Tuesday, since memorisation is the only way I'll keep it straight.

As for Tuesday's other details, I have proper, painful, boned underpinnings; proper, painful, slippery heeled shoes, and stockings, and lipstick, and a clear band-aid for my tattoo, which shows because the sleeves of my best blouse are mandarin-cut. Talk about making a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Mother wanted me to cut my hair, but.

Oh, and copperbadge has finished Stealing Harry. Go, read that. It's marvelous. He also writes original fiction -- Felinecor's Land -- and it's very weird alt-history.

Kind of like what I'm writing, but with Romans instead of Russians.

I have no idea where I got the Russians. She asked for Cain and Abel... I think it was from Cain slew Abel, and east of Eden he was cast, so I thought, east, east, what's east?

(One of you just replied, in a Hirsh-voice, 'Ponar'...)

In closing, I am not perving on my boss.

Aiain called me today.

Aiain called me today.

Mother's Day.

With his ten Euro birthday money, he called me.

He said "Hello, hello, do you remember me?"

And then I was crying, and calling him back, and forgetting (oh, shit) how to dial an Irish number; and he's ten years old now. I call him on his birthday and Christmas day, but I have not seen him in two and a half years. He lives with narrow-minded people who apparently love him and treat him wonderfully; every year we enact the bitter little ritual where they tell me to fuck off, thanks. He knows none of this, and so somehow he got to thinking that I might ever, ever forget him.

I think I'd love him if I saw him on the street; I think I'd love him if he didn't have that odd point-chinned fox's face of his mother's.

And he has just finished reading Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, so I, in true sometime-parent fashion, have had dispatched to the Outer Rings of Cork, IRL, one copy of Harry Potter et l'Ordre du Phenix.

There was free shipping! Leave me 'lone about the 27 Euro!

We talked some about his mother, but mostly we talked about school, sea-bathing, going to Kinsale with his best friend Nate who has a computer, and Cedric Diggory. He also asked me how to make a cream cheese and olive sandwich. (Green, stuffed olives, if you wondered.)

He calls me 'Mom', one of the few words remaining him in a very Fall River accent, completely unselfconscious, completely guileless. Neither of us ever asked him or told him to call me that. I'd swear it.

"Maw-awm, when are you going to take me back to Massachusetts to live?"

If I thought I could give him a better life than he has...