Today was my girl's first day of fourth grade. Fourth grade is a big year. The homework starts getting serious. You learn hard math. At least someone in your class starts wearing a bra for realz. The foursquare competition sizzles.

And apparently, you don't want your mother taking pictures of you on the first day of school, even if your father is on a business trip when you start fourth grade.

We woke up early to do her nails, white with gold glitter topcoat. Of course she touched them while pulling on her cowgirl boots, so we ended up slapping more gold glitter on while waiting for the bus. There is little that can't be covered with a thick coating of gold glitter.

When the bus pulled away, she didn't wave. She always waved in third grade. A little part of my heart hurt, and another part of my heart sighed with relief. As much as I want her nose in my neck, I also want her to face her challenges with the courage that comes from believing in yourself. You can't believe in yourself if you think you need your mama at your side all the time. I know this.

But as I walked back into a house suddenly silent after the past forty-eight hours spent just the two of us and Kizzy getting under each other's feet, I felt a little hollow as I started the process of adjusting -- as I have since I got pregnant -- to another new normal. 

[Editor's Note: After being gone part of last week and now behind at work, I don't have time to do this post justice. But I'm going to write it quickly, anyway.]

Last week we went down to Table Rock Lake. Saying we were going to Table Rock Lake was actually kind of a trick, because I didn't realize that Table Rock Lake is actually pretty much attached to Branson, Missouri, the Dollywood of the Midwest. 

Even though I knew I was in Branson, I had perhaps unfounded expectations for the entertainment. While visiting the amusement park -- Silver Dollar City -- I was, well, angered to be treated to a helping of rape culture on the train ride. 

(Note: In our version of the train ride, YANKEES were supposed to attack the train, because perhaps between February 2013 when this video was filmed and last week, someone informed Silver Dollar City that using a Native American war cry in your train robbing skit is uncool. Otherwise this would have been an even longer post taking on racism, as well.)

(Another Note: My rant has nothing to do with the person who filmed the video and put in an intro. I don't know her. I just know I saw the skit performed by these same two actors, and this was the most recent video I saw of the skit on YouTube.)

You may think I'm overreacting, but the train robbers actually talked about handing over a trainload of women.  What did they want them for? HEY HEY HEY. To shove something unwanted into the women's orifices, perhaps? 'Cuz that is FUNNY!

There was also a sign that I forgot to take a picture of on a bridge saying basically that bridges had coverings for the same reason pretty ladies wore long skirts -- to protect the underpinnings.

What, pray tell, from?

I'd love to see a sign hanging on a bridge talking about protecting a man's asshole from all the people bigger and stronger out to stick something in it. Because that would totally happen, right? And everyone would get the joke?

HEY HEY HEY

When we joke about women being raped, no matter how honkytonk and family friendly the ride is supposed to be, we teach girls and boys and men and women that it's totally natural for a man to want to rape a woman, and really, women should have to protect themselves from the randy males all around her. Or maybe if she can't, her man should protect her.

Or maybe she should just cover her underpinnings.

There is nothing funny about rape, folks. And this skit perpetuates rape culture. 

The best part? At the end of the ride, the conductor told us all to have a blessed day.

Today I wrote a post I've been mulling for weeks over at BlogHer. Here's a teaser -- click the link at the end for the full post!

A few weeks ago, I drove down to The Writers Place in Kansas City, Miss., (full disclosure: I serve on the board of directors) to talk to a group of around twenty upper middle-school kids about writing fiction. We ended up talking about race.

I didn't start there. I started with writing process. I talked aboout how I wrote my first novel in ever-lengthening Word documents saved by date and how the novel I'm working on now is coming together thanks to software called StoryMill. How this time I'm writing in scenes, not chapters, because it's totally easier for me that way. Their eyes glazed. I passed around my scene list and long outline for my new novel. They shuffled the paper around the room. I was losing them fast, and I still had the better part of an hour to go.

The group of kids was diverse. There were black kids and white kids and Asian kids and biracial kids. So I threw out a question that has been nagging at me ever since I learned that children's book publishing hasn't kept pace with census data regarding racial demographics. How did the kids feel about a white author writing nonwhite characters?

Read the rest on BlogHer!

So I've been on about a ten-day social media cleanse. I drove home from Chicago two Sundays ago after BlogHer '13 with my sister. I was home just long enough to unpack, repack, pet Kizzy and kiss Beloved before the little angel and I drove up to Iowa last Monday to stay with my parents for four days, just basically hanging out with family, reading, writing and not working. 

We took shelter from a raging monsoon in St. Joseph and bought the little angel her first adult-sized pair of cowgirl boots.

We helped Blondie bestow extra BlogHer swag on our parents, who can't say no to a free coffee cup.

I went jogging in two different places on two consecutive days, and y'all, I ran wind sprints on my high school track, which is something I could not do in high school. I was so fucking proud of myself, yes, I was.

The little angel and I went to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.

She got some slippers shaped like flamingos, because really, why not?

My parents took the girl to see a dinosaur named Sue, and I spent three hours working on PARKER CLEAVES. We had aunts, uncles and cousins over for ice cream.

We drove back down to Kansas City on Thursday. We saw cousins and my uncle on my mom's side. My parents came with us and stayed Thursday and Friday nights. We made popcorn after dinner.

On Saturday after my parents left, we tried to go geocaching and got all full of bugs, so we ended up at the swimming pool instead. On Sunday, we went to the Kansas City Toy & Miniature Museum while it rained outside. The little angel and I watched The Great Outdoors AND Summer Rental and wished we could vacation with John Candy. I told her all about the eighties.

Today, I came back to work, remembering clearly what life was like before the Internet. 

It wasn't a total cleanse, because I did look at the mentions column of Tweetdeck and responded to anyone who talked to me. I hate leaving people hanging. And I checked my work and personal email a few times to delete spam and just keep things organized so today's re-entry wouldn't be too painful. And then I actually worked for a few hours last night, again in the interest of minimizing re-entry pain. 

Since I still used Google every 1.5 nanoseconds during my cleanse, I can tell you for sure I'm completely unable to delay information gratification anymore. If I don't know an answer, I get very agitated if I can't just look it up. But as much as I enjoy the social media part of the Internet while I'm working, I didn't miss it while I was away. I love all my friends, but I wasn't worried they would forget who I was or anything if I wasn't around for a few days. I didn't feel that lonely why is there no one to talk to weirdness I sometimes feel if I'm away from Twitter during the work day -- please tell me I'm not the only person who has ever felt like that?

I am coming to the conclusion it's vital for my continued forward motion to slam the lid on the laptop and use the phone as a phone for a few days every quarter or so. I can feel the beeping and zipping and zapping start to get to me at about the ninety-day mark. I'm really glad I stepped away for a little bit, especially right after the emotional and intellectual disco ball that is a BlogHer conference. I feel more equipped to deal now, at least for another ninety days or so. 

The Internet is a tool, not a life, right?

Hey, there. I'm leaving tomorrow for BlogHer '13. If you are there, I'm speaking on Friday and Saturday on turning your blog post into publishable essays -- if you come to either session, please come up and say hi and be patient with me if I look at you all glassy-eyed because presenting takes a lot out of me but I really like to meet people. Also, I may have met you thirty-five times before but will still ask you your name or your blog because I have the recall of a tree frog.

If you're not there (or you are there and seriously have time to read blogs) and you want to enter for a chance to win a copy of THE OBVIOUS GAME, my latest Goodreads giveaway has another two-ish weeks on it.

And my daughter has pneumonia and I have to leave her, so send good vibes toward Kansas City, okay? And also me, because I went to test the thermometer by taking my own temperature and either there is something wrong with the thermometer or I have a low-grade fever, too. I bought three bottles of Purell yesterday and will not touch anyone without disinfecting them afterward.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

Giveaway ends August 06, 2013.

See the giveaway detailsat Goodreads.

Enter to win

Next week, the girl (who will hopefully be better) and I are headed to Iowa to hang out with my original nuclear, so posting may be light. I'll try to get some fun pictures from BlogHer for those who can't make it -- it's always a little surreal.

More soon!

There was a day last week when I thought I might crack in two. Something happened with the girl, something happened with me, and I was so stressed out I found myself in my garage with tears coursing down my face, knowing my husband and my daughter and my neighbors were waiting for me in their SUV, ready to take us out on their boat in a beautiful invitation to frolic on Blue Springs Lake.

I'm trying to pretend I am mentally healthy.

I'm trying to model a mother who knows how to deal.

Earlier that day, my girl dissolved into tears on the way to summer camp, and here I was, dissolving in tears in the garage. I wanted very badly to model self-control.

I forced myself into the neighbors' SUV wearing my sunglasses. Tears still streamed down my face, uncontrollable, but I just assumed no one would see because of my sunglasses. In my experience, most people don't actually pay attention unless you draw their attention to you.

At one point, my neighbor woman asked me a question, and I just nodded, too upset to speak.

I wanted to model someone under control, though, so I just sat there.

It was awkward, I admit.

My neighbors are wonderful human beings. They invited us out on the lake on a Tuesday night, and they had every intention of taking us, despite my obvious awkwardness. We got to the lake and backed the speedboat into the water, and upon seeing the expanse of blue I started to feel the tension ebb, just a bit.

"Rita, all you need is some HYDROTHERAPY," my neighbor man said. And he dropped in the boat.

For three hours, we played. We tubed, the little angel and I knocking against each other in two separate tubes, her face alight with glee. I waterskiied. The little angel and my husband got up on skis gripping the boom, their eyes wide, finally understanding what it feels like to flit like a waterbug across the surface of the water at high speeds. 

It feels like flying.

We swam, and we saw the two parent eagles and the two baby eagles calling SCREE SCREE SCREE across the sky to their nest. 

"Do we have time?" my daughter asked, looking to the water. 

"Yes, it's 8:15. Sunset's at 8:41," said my neighbor lady.

And as we pulled the boat back out of the water, I felt like a new person. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you for letting me shake off my mood. I almost didn't come because I didn't want to subject you to me tonight. Thank you, it worked, the hydrotherapy."

My neighbors grinned. They are happy, wonderful people. They are my parents' age. I want to be them when I grow up, logging their time on the water in a little notebook, telling stories of when they learned to barefoot ski.

I saw the sun set that night over the water. It was summertime, and none of the things I thought were so important mattered.

Kelly said she's leaning in, waiting to hear. She might not have been talking straight to me, but since Kelly is my race red pill, I heard her, anyway. I didn't want to. It's a week from BlogHer '13 and I had trouble with my daughter today and I have a million other excuses for why I don't want to talk about Trayvon Martin, but I hear you, Kelly, sometimes you have to talk about things that just piss you off because they are important.

I had just left a soccer match on Saturday night and was standing in line for the shuttle when I heard about the Trayvon Martin verdict. The older couple behind me were clearly trial junkies, as the woman started in on everyone from O.J. to Casey Anthony, and apparently she'd been following Trayvon, too. "Not enough evidence," she said. "I knew they wouldn't convict him."

I felt my color rising. I wished I'd watched the trial so I could speak intelligently, but I've felt this entire time like I didn't have to watch the trial to be pissed off. Trayvon Martin was walking home unarmed with candy and a nonalcoholic drink. George Zimmerman was packing heat and disregarded 911 telling him to stay away. The fact that he called 911 on a kid carrying candy is troubling enough. That he followed Trayvon with a gun? Where did this all go so badly off the rails?

With the law. 

I've thought and thought about this since it all went down, and the problem is with the culture that writes the laws. The laws are too vague. The laws may ignore common sense and ethics. And the laws and the court of public opinion have always been against the black man. (I am aware that George Zimmerman isn't white. Don't care.)

Think I'm wrong? Watch the local news in any city for five nights and tell me how many times an assailant or thief was described as a black man, then tell me how many black men actually live in that city. I don't watch the Kansas City news that often, but every damn time I SWEAR that I watch the news, a black man has gotten away with something! How many black PEOPLE are there in Kansas City?

White alone, percent, 2010 (a)	59.2%	82.8%
	Black or African American alone, percent, 2010 (a)	29.9%	11.6%
	American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent, 2010 (a)	0.5%	0.5%
	Asian alone, percent, 2010 (a)	2.5%	1.6%
	Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent, 2010 (a)	0.2%	0.1%
	Two or More Races, percent, 2010	3.2%	2.1%
	Hispanic or Latino, percent, 2010 (b)	10.0%	3.5%
	White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, percent, 2010	54.9%	81.0%

I'm guessing about half of those black people are female. Those black people sure are busy!

Or are we just more worried about what they are doing than what all the other people are doing when it comes to crime? Other people commit crimes -- they just don't get covered as often on the news. 

Now, on the flip side, how often do we hear about white people who have been kidnapped versus black people? 

In all my reading, the person who has summed up my malcontent best is Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewoodand the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.

You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. 

And, so, Kelly, that's where this white lady stands. Am I pissed at George Zimmerman? Yeah, I am. But I'm more pissed that anyone could feel comfortable stalking an unarmed minor because he was black and wearing a hoodie.  (Emphasis mine)

Zimmerman

He's got his hand in his waistband. And he's a black male.

Dispatcher

How old would you say he looks?

Zimmerman

He's got button on his shirt, late teens.

Dispatcher

Late teens. Ok.

Zimmerman

Somethings wrong with him. Yup, he's coming to check me out, he's got something in his hands, I don't know what his deal is.

Dispatcher

Just let me know if he does anything, ok?

Zimmerman

(unclear) See if you can get an officer over here.

Dispatcher

Yeah we've got someone on the way, just let me know if this guy does anything else.

Zimmerman

Okay. These (expletive) they always get away. Yep. When you come to the clubhouse you come straight in and make a left. Actually you would go past the clubhouse.

To me that "and he's a black male" sounds a lot like Paula Deen's "of course" when asked if she'd ever used the n-word before. "And he's a black male" -- as though that's all it takes to be a criminal. "Of course" -- as though using a racial epithet is a normal and acceptable thing to do. "It doesn't violate the law" -- once covered slavery. Listen, the law is just what's written down at the time. People write the laws, and society dictates whether those laws are left to stand or rewritten. 

Clearly there's a huge gap between the law and right/wrong in the Trayvon Martin case, and that really sucks. It's a problem so huge I don't know where to start. Unlike women's health rights, there's no concrete one law to point to, to say "change this and we'll be safe." The overarching climate that made it defensible somehow in a Florida court of law to clearly single out a kid because he's a black male who's staring is the thing that needs to change, and it's so nebulous it's hard to know where to start. 

So I start in my neighborhood. I start with my daughter. I start with the people I know. I started with the older couple in line behind me at the soccer match. I told them I thought the law and what was right were two completely different things. The older couple didn't see the forest for the trees, or maybe it wasn't a Saturday-night conversation. But I'll keep trying. I don't know how much influence I have on my blog or my social media, but I'll keep trying. I'm not ignoring it. I'm trying to figure out where the fuck to start.

But I'm leaning in. And you know what? I think the fact the Trayvon Martin case got as covered as it did in the media is maybe a good thing. How many trials do we see on the national news for black kids getting shot? Let's keep the conversation going.

I remember a stopwatch in my childhood. I think it belonged to my father, though I'm not actually sure. I got ahold of it one day and started timing how long it took me to do things I normally did. I was shocked to find most of my daily activities took a number of seconds, maybe a minute or two. That knowledge was heavy.

If you think about all the tasks of everyday life in terms of individual actions that take merely seconds each, the day seems to stretch on forever in a ridiculously overwhelming fashion. It takes so many seconds to type each sentence in this blog post, to get a glass of water, to put away the dishes from lunch in the dishwasher. 

Knowing that, too, can be a little intimidating. If it really only takes a few seconds to do things, what the hell am I doing all day?

I thought about that sort of thing last night when I really wanted myself to work on PARKER CLEAVES but I was really tired from a full weekend and doing some work for my job already. I set the stopwatch on my phone for fifteen minutes. I wrote until it went off. I haven't read it over yet. I don't know if it's good. Doesn't have to be -- it's a rough draft. It just has to exist so I can fix it. Thinking about all the little fifteen-minuteses, though, is as overwhelming as the first full day of a new job or a new baby -- wondering how you're ever going to get through so many seconds to the end of the day. That's what writing the rough draft feels like to me. 

I could accomplish so much more if I spent more time realizing how little time it actually takes to do almost anything.

Do you ever look at all the people making sexy fish-faces on The Facebook and wonder how we got here?

Then, in the midst of my judginess, I look at my own damn profile picture, which is one of the only pictures I've ever taken in which I'm not smiling, because I was trying to be serious and authorial and not giddy. Totally no different than The Facebook. I'm guilty.

Sometimes I get so tired of myself and trying to promote my writing and trying to be, just, well, MORE. More as a writer, more as an employee, more as a mother, better, faster, more.

I have plenty of friends who ask me why I feel compelled to write books on top of all the other things I do in my life, and I think the real answer is that I take myself too seriously. When I'm honest with myself, I know there are almost 300,000 books coming out every year and it's a bloody miracle if anyone finds mine, reads it AND likes it, so sometimes it seems very silly to keep trying. And here I am, writing another one, not knowing if this next one will be bigger, faster, more or not.

Then I think, well, if I didn't try, then what point is there in doing anything? I was commenting on a post this week about a woman who doesn't like to make her bed because she doesn't see the point, but I always make my bed and the point is to have a made bed because I take myself and my bed very, very seriously. I take everything seriously, except for The Facebook, because The Facebook depresses the shit out of me and every time I go over there I find myself feeling bad that I'm not doing everything better, faster, more, and I hate feeling like that, like just living without hurting anyone else isn't enough.

I think I might need a vacation.