Emily Dickinson, being read way too literally in RedCity.

Parting ~emily dickinson

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

Four gifts of this fertility quest so far.

1. Loving Thy Self. For someone who used to have as a serious life goal to have a bikini model's body and to document this physical state with copious photos before I had kids, it's been a real shift of priorities. That's the best I can ask for from my body? To look pretty? I mean, REALLY? I want to slap my 20-something-year-old self. Now I look at myself in the mirror and I cradle my belly. I ask it to perfect science experiments that I myself would no doubt fail if it were me standing in a lab coat with test tubes bubbling over the Bunsen Burner. I ask it, nicely, to please make a baby and then to hold onto him or her very carefully.

2. Knowing Thy Self. I feel so much more connected to my body. I notice and remember symptoms and how they are interconnected, and I never would have before.

3. Always, Gratitude. I hear a man in the parking lot yelling at his little girl, watch him tug her arm violently in effort to get her to listen, follow, behave. I want to remind this man to be grateful. But I also know how naive this sounds--naive and bitter at the same time--because it's not like I think it could never be me, someday, at wit's end in a parking lot, trying to make the right decisions but also so frustrated that I could cry. But what I hope I never lose underlying the rest: always, gratitude. The linear sense of what it took to get to that parking lot. Of how much I want to begin a family, and love a child, and take on those challenges.

4. The Ever-Radness of People, Intimates and Strangers. When you are willing to put your business on the Internet, people are willing to open up to you, too. Any lingering shame I might once have felt about "airing my laundry" or whatever is utterly dissipated in the face of the support I've received and the honesty I've been privy to.

I've said it before but I'll say it again: I love "Tired & Stuck: Three Women on a Mission to Get Knocked Up."

These ladies make me feel sane.

Writes Logical Libby on June 14:

I am going to be nice to myself. I am going to remember that I am not the sum of my reproductive parts.

Writes Christina on June 23:

I have a friend who doesn’t have children, and she and her husband don’t fully know why. It took me awhile to understand that she really doesn’t want to find out exactly what is going on, at least not right now. She would like nothing more than to be a mother (and she has been to doctors and tried various things). But on the flip side, really having answers might mean finding out she will never have children, and she just doesn’t want that information at this time. She’s told me if they found out for sure that children weren’t possible she and her husband would probably have to take a month off work to grieve and plan and refocus their lives. At this moment, for her, it’s better not to know.

Writes Erin on June 29:

So you're having timed intercourse? the doctor asked cheerfully.

Timed intercourse is the least of it, woman!!! Timed intercourse is for amateurs! I deserve an honorary doctorate from Stanford! is what I was feeling. "Yes," is what I said.

Well, you're healthy. You're 32. Sometimes these things just take longer for some people, she said.

Go sit in some woods at midnight, ululating with wolves.

This photo comes by way of my friend Justin's brilliant photoshopping skills. That's my face, alright, but the rest of it (including those enviable abs) belongs to Angelina Jolie. But it was the perfect photo to kick off this post.

So, I tried belly dancing the other night. The all-women gym in town offers yoga and dance classes, and you can drop in for $10 a pop instead of committing to an actual membership, so I said why the hell not. Why the hell not because part of "maximizing fertility" is doing gentle exercise every day as well as focusing/meditating on the womb. I know, I know. It all sounds like hocus pocus. Anyway, I got there and was easily the youngest person there by a decade. Also, the most underdressed: the other ladies had shown up with long flowing skirts. The oldest woman student in there--probably in her sixties?--was wearing black harem pants with golden stripes as well as a tiny wrap around her waist bedecked in bells. As if that didn't make a statement enough, she was salsa dancing while also carrying on a conversation with another woman, who had wrapped her arms around her middle and caved her chest in awkwardly, as if protecting herself. I felt like I was wearing khaki and a safari helmet, peering around my jeep whilst deep in the savannah, clutching a telescopic lens and binoculars, and observing the wildlife. Look, the submissive females of the pack. How fortunate to spot the dominant lioness while she performs her dance of intimidation, just daring any of the others to think about usurping her position. How FASCINATING.

What I liked about the class was the positive focus on the body and "its hows," as e. e. cummings once put it. The class was pretty much the antithesis of all the women's magazines that tell us to: Fight the Flab! Burn that Belly! et cetera. The teacher didn't have washboard abs, she had a belly that was wonderfully feminine and moreover able. And as for the "hows" ... when the teacher broke it down enough, our bodies actually could do the same sinuous, undulating things hers could. 'Course once we had to worry about arms and abs, or god forbid do the movement four times as fast and/or to music, all bets were off. But my point is: our bodies are so much more able than we think they are. Than we give them credit for. Sometimes we just need a lot more patience and a little more faith.

Of course you know where I am going with this. Do I feel a little silly meditating on my womb in yoga class or taking belly dancing because of its positive focus on the same region? Do I pull up out of myself sometimes and float in the corner and question whether any of this is really making a difference: not having that cup of coffee I want so badly; drinking chlorophyll in my water to up my red blood cell count; beginning each day with a cup of hot water with lemon to support my liver function; taking seven pills a day; largely cutting out meat and ice cream and dairy; giving up running because the overaerobic quality of it could put me at risk for a repeated miscarriage; letting this go, and that go, and that, too, because it's better to not stress myself out; et cetera.

But I had to try something else. Peeing on strips every single day and worrying about whether or not I was going to ovulate and when and whether I'd miss the small window in which to conceive ... having a recipe of when and how to have sex ... putting up with the indignity of taking hormone supplements after having sex to "correct" my body, as if it didn't know how to do this most natural of things right ... remembering with uncanny mathematical certainty how long it's been since I miscarried (1 yr. 8 mos.), and thus how long we've been trying (1 yr. 6 mos.), and how long we've been really trying, with assistance (7 mos.) ... well, to put it mildly, it was kind of fucking with my happiness and self-worth. Instead, I did a little self-medication: I went to Hawai'i without my husband and thusly had zero sex, missed my ovulation window, drank coffee every morning and alcohol every night, had one hangover that took me back to my early twenties (ouch), and generally stopped thinking about any of this at all. It was healing. And when I came back, I didn't even wait a day before delving into Making Babies: A Proven 3-Month Program for Maximum Fertility, which had arrived from Amazon shortly before I left for Hawai'i.

So, here I am, opening myself to the wideness of possibility. You tell me that acupuncture can help? Then I will overcome my fear of needles. You say I need to drink a tea of a particular concoction of herbs once a day? I'll just add it to all the other shit I'm supposed to do. I'll do yoga and dance-worship my belly, and if you tell me it's been proven to work, I'll go sit in some woods at midnight, ululating with wolves. I am trying to keep my chin up and my heart anchored somewhere between steeling against disappointment and reaching, over and over again, for hope.

Death by Pufferfish finds a second home!

When I sat down next to Jake Adelstein on a flight from D.C. back to SF in February, I had no idea what it would lead to. I'm rarely chatty on flights--in fact, I'm rarely even conscious on flights. But talking about the book I was reading (Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux) led to a conversation about what we both did for a living led to the realization that we were both writers and kept on being fascinating from there. Jake was extremely modest--it wasn't till I got home and Googled him that I realized I was sitting next to a Pretty Big Deal. He is the author of countless articles, a piece in Quakebook, and the book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which I believe--according to his lively and oft-updated Twitter feed--may be getting optioned for a film(?). He has probably written a lot of other things that I don't know about from Google searching. And Jake is also the editor of the fantastic site, Japan Subculture Research Center, which "was founded in 2007 to expose the hidden side of Japan – its underground economy, its sex trade, and all the other intriguing and seedy aspects that keep the country running."

Many, many tweets later, Jake heard about Death by Pufferfish, read it at Hunger Mountain, and contacted me about featuring it on the Japan Subculture Research Center site. I jumped at the gift. This republication also features the artwork of Mari Kurisato, which includes all of the key elements in one elegant illustration and really captures the heart of the story.

Click here to read (or re-read) Death by Pufferfish at Japan Subculture Research Center.

(Also, if you missed it the first time, Hunger Mountain also did a really fun Author Visit with me about the story--another honor that totally THRILLED me!)

About Me, 2011: mayumi_msp_31_07.04.11.

I am a writer, editor, wife, daughter, hanai sister, niece, hanai granddaughter, and friend.

What I want to be most is a mother.

What I want to be second most is more published and more prolific, less good at procrastinating, and less afraid.

I live in Redwood City, California—by way of (most recent to least) ClintonHill-BrooklynHeights-Burlingame-Pacifica-NewYorkCity-Astoria-Bronxville-LosAngeles-Honolulu-Sacramento. RedCity is thirty-odd minutes south of San Francisco, and I feel absolutely zero loyalty to it: it is simply the place my husband and I have landed on this round of the East-West ping-pong game we’ve been playing for years.

I began blogging in March 2006 via Friendster and a year later moved to Blogger and have been tinkering and figuring it out here ever since. As I wrote in my last About Me, “although I arrived in cyberspace years after the trendsetters deemed blogging to be rather passe, per usual I arrived on my own damn time: late, but I'd like to think fashionably so.”

It’s a strange time for blogging these days—days of so! much! information! all! the! fricken! time! We are a wordy bunch, and frankly we all have ADD. How could we not? If you log off Facebook or Twitter or Google Reader (or Flickr, MySpace, Google+, etc.) or ignore your phone’s texts inbox for half a day, you spend the other half trying to catch up, trying to connect, trying to be present for your 1,000 best and closest “friends” and not miss their engagements, publications, promotions, babies. Presence becomes all the more ironic when you consider how far-flung your heart is, in all its pieces. Blogging has gone from an activity that a geeky-cool, highly insidery and technologically able elite performed to one that anyone who is literate can do. I include myself in the latter, not the former. Blogs have evolved: they can be high concept, specialized, encyclopedic and well-researched; they are promotion tools for companies; they are conversations between famous people and fans, or industry folk and those trying to learn from them; they can be anything you can imagine them to be.

This is not one of those kinds of blogs. This is a blog inspired by and now in tribute to bloggers like le petit hiboux—a friend in “real life,” via Sarah Lawrence College, who wrote the first blog I ever read. She wrote what I deem more of a “life blog,” which held under its umbrella the wide wonder of the world through her eyes. She broke my heart on May 17, 2011, when she announced she would no longer be blogging (incidentally, this entry is a great history of blogging, both hers individually and more generally). Like her, I don’t think my life blog fits in among all these brands and profit margins; like her, I trail off and lose my way and don’t post for months, only to follow that up with a month of posting several times a day, almost every day. This is the only way I can do it, the only way I can not quit. I have absolutely no forethought when it comes to this blog, no plotting out what it will yield for me, no vision of it being the home of The Writer Mayumi Shimose Poe, no idea of structure or shape or craft. It is a snapshot of my brain and my life and therefore appropriately messy.

So why should you be here, in this mess, with me? Why spend part of your procrastination at work sifting through?

I don’t know, really.

Maybe you like me. Maybe you like something I said, or wrote, or did. Maybe you added me to your Google Reader back in the day and now are so overwhelmed by your Google Reader, you don’t have the heart to go through and delete those blogs that no longer hold your interest.

Or maybe you are also a writer. Maybe you are also an editor. Maybe you live in northern California or once lived in Hawai’i or Brooklyn and feel, like, deep and complex feelings about those places. Maybe you know, like me, that dogs are the most awesome creatures in the whole friggin’ universe (including people). Maybe you aren’t sickened by hearing about how happy love and marriage have made me. Maybe you like to cook, be cooked for, read books, know about other awesome blogs, listen to me expound upon the people I love so hard it hurts, want to analyze my horoscopes and dreams with me, or like being surprised by a random collection of whatever the hell is interesting to me right now.

Maybe you like a shitton of words being thrown at you from time to time. Maybe concision isn’t your thing, either.

You must like swearing. Or at least not mind it.

Or maybe you also want, badly, to be a parent and in solidarity are interested in my journey trying to get there. Maybe you, like me, yearn to find a place that feels uncomplicatedly like a home but find yourself pulled in opposite directions; maybe you are also learning that the zip code matters less than the people in it, that feeling at home in a place starts with feeling at home in your skin.

No matter why you are here, I thank you--YOU—deeply. I welcome your (preferably nonanonymous) comments* and your return visits.

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* I do reserve the right to ignore any that are vicious in spirit or straight-up spam. In regard to “viciousness,” use this rule of thumb: speak your mind, but keep it kind.