What dream do you remember most vividly? What message do you think it bears?
An evil man who was dressed like a TV bandit (kind of like the Hamburgler?) in black-and-white stripes and a black mask was spreading oil on the stair landing outside my childhood bedroom. He wanted me and/or my family members to slip on it and fall down the stairs. I was very young and this is the first dream I can remember having. I guess it was about a burgeoning sense of my loved ones’ vulnerability.
Why don’t you listen to what the universe or your mind or your body or your god whispers ever more closely to you?
My baby is screaming in my other ear.
If you could, what gift that is impossible for you to give would you offer and to whom? Why this specific gift to this specific person or persons?
I would give the gift of lifelong happiness to my son for obvious reasons.
Describe a person you love. How would you know them without their face?
My husband has beautiful hands.
How did you first know you were in love and what makes you unsure of it?
I felt desperate. I am unsure only because love is shifty and there are different kinds — I don’t know if I believe in “in love” — it’s like how they say the Inuit have 80 words for kinds of snow but no word for “snow”. Similarly, there’s some other forest-dwelling culture I can’t remember that’s supposed to have no word for “tree.” I don’t know if either of those things is true, but love is like that.
What besides love do you doubt and what makes you doubt it?
Everything’s relative, so everything’s in doubt.
In what way have you betrayed or disappointed yourself or others? In what way have you been betrayed or disappointed?
Tourists disappoint me. And I disappoint myself as a tourist. I don’t know. I don’t want to be an “appointer” but most things disappoint me.
What are the parameters of your small world? How do you decide where to draw the line, where to focus your energies, what to give your attention and time to? What, if anything, do you do to enlarge it? If nothing, why not?
Physically, the parameters of my world are currently defined by a 1-yr-old child. Philosophically, there are no parameters. Ideologically and politically, the parameters are about as far as my hand from my face. Art is an enlarger, but I don’t have a lot of time for it lately. I guess I write to keep the walls from closing in.
Why aren’t you more involved in trying to better the world of others?
Humans are inefficient and guilty for it.