It’s been two months now and our oven is still not fixed! And then this week my beloved toaster oven died (possibly of overuse) and all I could do to feel better was write a disappointed review on Amazon about it. Now Jackson is sick in bed with possibly-Covid, and this morning I drew the three of swords. Three swords in my heart, and two of them are oven-shaped.

We won’t know for a few days if Jackson’s got Covid, so he’s trapped in his room. Yesterday I brought him:

1. two pieces of toast

2. one slice of cheese

That was all he could eat; his head was pounding, nothing helped. I thought breastfeeding was supposed to create children with robust immune systems!

Today he stood up and his pants fell off. I said, “Did you lose weight?” Yes, a twenty-year-old man can not eat for one day and lose fifteen* pounds. He now weighs roughly the same as I do, but is five inches taller.

*Can you spot the lie? His pants didn’t actually fall off, but they would have if I were taller and could give him a good shake.

I turned 58 this month, which is outrageous but here we are. My whole head is fading into gray — my hair, my face. My earlobes are getting wrinkly. I put on lipstick for the first time in years, to prevent my mouth from disappearing altogether, but it just looked weird so I rubbed it off.

I look a little haggy, to be honest, but the mask hides the worst of it so I went and got two more tattoos. What must the staff at 805 Ink think when they see me coming?

They’re all very polite, all except that new guy with the French accent who bragged to me about all the prostitutes he knows. I guess he thought he could shock me? Like, let’s blow Grandma’s mind on her first trip to the tattoo parlor?

Thankfully, my tattoo artist stood up for me. “I’ve tattooed her like five million times!” he said, and the French guy laughed. “That’s one million more times than me!”

People are weird.

Anyway, Oprah has a lot to say about personal power, and you’re trying to read what she says but I keep diverting the flow back to me. It’s like me and Oprah are competing for your attention and who’s going to win?

I am but you can go back and read all the Oprah pictures straight through to make sense of them, and I hope you do because I think she’s onto something here.

I have been privileged to watch a few people let go of what they were taught to be, and then become the wildly beautiful thing that they essentially are, and nobody can fuck with them anymore. They are planted so firmly in their truth that no one can knock them out of it. And they are some of the happiest, weirdest people I know.

Their problems aren’t over by any means, but they have much better tools to deal with what life throws at them now. A few of them are gay or queer, and proudly so, who faced a huge, elemental thing about themselves that they were taught was evil and/or wrong, and instead they accepted that thing, and then loved it. Loved the thing about themselves that their families wanted them to hate the most.

*The ones who aren’t queer are just these goofy badasses.

I am not a badass of any stripe, I’m hung up and hiding things I’m uncomfortable with about myself, and that’s just a fact. After fifty-eight years. But I’ve seen it with my own eyes — your truth is where your happiness lies! Why does that still scare the shit out of me!