Baby Clothes

Baby clothes are very small. That's probably something you don't really realize until you do five loads of laundry that include baby clothes. It's about the time that (true story) I was trying to put on this strange black sock that I realized how small baby clothes are. Why? Because that oddly shaped black sock turned out to be a pair of sweatpants. For a baby.

Pretty much S's favorite thing to do now is to walk in the room and apologize for shrinking my jeans while holding up a minuscule pair of little baby girl jeans. I would put up a picture of baby socks, but you really have to behold these things to realize how incredibly small they are. Like most intelligent people I know that a monster lives inside our dryer and that he/she feeds primarily on socks. I'm fearful that within the first month our babies socks will all be gone.

When we used to live in Santa Barbara S would often sigh (contentedly. I've sort of got a patent on the woe is me sigh) and mention how great the weather was, and I would, like any good husband, berate her for pointing it out ever damn day and perhaps mention the hours between 7:30-8 when it was briefly overcast, or how I really enjoy being warm and that SB is such a pain in the ass because you can never get quite warm enough. In retrospect, the real lesson to learn is not that the weather wasn't perfect or that people are never satisfied, but that I'm a bit of a whiner.

Within the past week as we've been doing loads of laundry S likes to pick up random items and scrunch up her face in a way that is reminiscent of little bunny rabbits hopping in a field full of clover. (We're not talking Watership Down bunnies here). This look is supposed to make me realize how incredibly cute the small item she's holding up is. And yes, usually the item is surpassing in its cuteness. However, much like living in Santa Barbara, I'm starting to wonder when we can just pass each other these tiny socks without having to make such a big deal about it. I mean, I get it, they're small. You know what's small and actually cute (disclaimer, after the first six weeks at the very least) babies.

And incidentally, why don't we have similar feelings about things like baby spiders?(Charlotte's Web excepted, apparently this book also had a small girl child whom I don't remember at all. I thought it was all about Wilbur and Charlotte and learning about the circle of life until the pigs took over the farm and stole all the collectives goods) We're pretty much mostly fans of other mammals I suppose. Relatedly, "scientists" claim to have found a new planet that could possibly support life. I think I speak for all of humanity when I say that if it is being inhabited by something, I hope that it's a bunch of little Koala bears. Otherwise, let's just nuke the shi- out of it from 20 light years away and conduct tests later.

I've also lately been on a kick criticizing the ridiculous gap in income between the rich and poor and the vastly inequitably allocation of financial resources. And I forgot to mention that the Supreme Court also sucks for making it legal for major corporations to donate an unlimited amount to campaigns further increasing the political gap between the common American and the really rich American. Supreme Court, you suck also!

No good deed goes unpunished

I'm generally regarded as an easy going person. Ask any person who knows me moderately well and they'll probably describe me as fairly easy going. It helps if you ask them a leading question about how easy going I am. Unfortunately, like most human beings, I can sort of be a pain in the ass when angered. I blame it on adrenaline and testosterone. I'm fairly certain I'd be a very peaceable woman, but that's neither here nor there. I was, a bit irked at receiving a hand scrawled note from our neighbor, and I immediately called and left a bit of an angry message on the answering machine pointing out the misinformation they'd presented in the letter and accusing them of not actually calling our phones and the like. Message below:

1) I received your piece of paper, and I can only assume that would prefer to solve it in the traditional manner, a duel at high noon. If you would like to recuse yourself from this duty due to old age I will accept a formal apology in the form of an egg McMuffin.

2) Hi, this is your neighbor Andrew over at Oneida Place, and I just wanted to make you aware that I've released an entire bee hive in your house. I think they've gotten into the walls, and I just thought you should know before you went in there.

3) Hi, this is your neighbor over at Oneida Place. I wanted to let you know that we've gone ahead and torn down your fence and replaced it with a piece of Modern Art made entirely from construction paper and Elmer's glue. I really think you're going to like it!

4) Hi, this is your neighbor over at Oneide Place. I received your message the other day. I wanted to let you know that I was in good spirits that day, until I read your note. And I'm in kind of a down mood now, and I suppose that's why I've just returned from your house after smashing all the windows and throwing candy in your living room. I wanted your house to feel like an open pinata when you got back, but I suppose a person could come home to a thing like that and call it vandalism. You say potato I say, leave me the hel- alone.

After leaving my fairly bitter message I waited a few days to receive a call from my erstwhile neighbor, letting my anger build to righteous indignation. And that's when I received a call from Ava, who apologized for the misunderstanding about the dirt in the alley, and said she was sorry that she couldn't make it to the house more often because she is currently trying to take care of her very sick husband. And, as it turns out, I am just some jerk on the phone now trying to back pedal my way into just being a neighborly sort of fellow and hoping that the rumors of her slight dementia are true, and that she'll forget the whole irritated phone message incident altogether. This is what I get for my biannual public blow up. Maybe if I lost it more often I'd feel less guilty. That's probably the lesson to be learned here isn't it?

Fencing-Do not cross me...

After receiving my letter of complaint I felt pretty good about dealing with my neighbors except that I didn't. Listen, if I want to spend x number of dollars on a fence then I don't want to hear a damn thing about it. If you've flooded my basement on three separate occasions because you didn't clean the leaves out of your gutter I'm not particularly interested in hearing your take on my new fence, which improved your property value. And even if I didn't, it's my damn money! (This is good preparation for parenting. I'm pretty excited about saying things like, "not in my house you won't!")

The fact of the matter is, if I want to spend my money on an above ground pool and install a diving board off my roof then I damn well will. I'm not really interested in you complaining about how I do things on my property. I'm all for civic duty, and public behavior and good society and such, but I'm not too crazy about people infringing on my personal space. Sign me up for the tea party. More tax cuts for the rich!!!!! (Interestingly, the top 1 percent of our earning population currently has 23.5 percent of the wealth. In the 1970's that figure was 9 percent. I don't have enough time to bitch about this yet, but it's coming).

If I want to import a lion from the serengheti (sp) and ride him around at sunset with my shirt off in my own backyard, then I don't want to hear complaints. If my lion gets on your property then we can talk.

If I want to start breeding elephants in the yard, making wild claims about creating a second Dumbo if I can just get the right mix, I still don't want to hear complaints because it's my property.

If I want to put together a team of small ponies, fashion ice skates from pieces of old pillows and a knife set, flood the backyard, bring in a giant fan and freeze it to allow for them to play ice hockey, I don't want to hear any complaints because it's my yard.

If I want to install a bunker under the lawn, with a nice espresso machine, and conduct Italian language classes based on stereotypes from the 1950's and the Sopranos, then I don't want to hear any complaints because it's my yard.

If I want to buy a flock of parrots that can sing the national anthem in perfect harmony....

Fencing

We put in a fence this weekend. And when I say "we put in a fence this weekend" I mean, some dudes we paid a bunch of money to put in a fence last Friday. As a public intellectual (self-proclaimed) I frown on someone who would embark on a project like building a fence when they could be spending quality time thinking liberal thoughts and pushing social democracy and the like. This despite the fact that I read in Harper's (a classic sort of text for a public intellectual) that we don't value kinesthetic learning enough and that people show measurably more satisfaction at something they have built than in something they have read or written. Ergo; as a public intellectual I should be out working on fixing our failing infrastructure. I jest of course, all government spending is evil and shouldn't be done, we don't need things like roads, better trains or schools because we'll all be filthy rich!!!

The point is that we now have a fence and have engendered a great deal of support from our neighbors.

Exhibit a) As the fence was going up and our neighbor walked outside she wanted to make sure that we knew that DC had a maximum allowable fence height of seven feet. This was largely due to the fact that the posts are put in first and they are ten high. Thus, it made it look as though we were building some sort of urban fortress. Anyhow, S let her know that we weren't building a fortress to allay her fears.

Exhibit b) A wadded up ball of tin foil tossed into our backyard after the fence was completed. Why? Because apparently people feel that a fence provides nice security from someone knowing who is tossing trash into the yard.

Exhibit c) A letter from our neighbor claiming that we had bent their fence (we actually removed a portion of the chain link fence between our yards and replaced it with a much nicer looking wooden one) and piled up a bunch of dirt making their gate unusable. A great point, except that it was the city, in the process of paving our alley, who raised the level of the dirt outside of all our back gates making them obsolete in terms of opening out into the back. This entire dialog left me feeling nothing short of thrilled I can tell you. And I look forward to blogging tomorrow, in my preferred method, because the internet is for ranting.

Things I said or enjoyed

(Crossing the street when the light is green for oncoming traffic but cars still seem far enough away to go)

M: Come on. You're pregnant let's risk it. (Takes hand of S)

(Moments later)

S: I wish I had a dollar for every time you said, "you're pregnant, let's risk it."

M: Did I say that?

S: Yes.

M: Oh. I probably shouldn't say that.

I could watch mascots fighting each other all night long.



No really, I could.



After reading a piece in the Atlantic.

M: I think of myself as a young and unsuccessful Joe Biden.

S: Eh.

Other conversations related to S feeling uncomfortable in the latter stages of pregnancy and feeling better after doing yoga stretches. Unfortunately, people doing yoga stretches in public look weird. S protested that she should be able to stretch if she wanted coming out with this gem.

S: Sometimes at work I just want to get down on my hands and knees and do a pelvic tilt.

M: I'm kind of glad that hasn't happened because it would probably change the parameters or our relationship.

S: It's a yoga move. I guess that did sound kind of bad.

M: Yeah, that's probably not one you're going to want to repeat.

Yup

S: I didn't do my kick counts.

M: Don't worry about it, at least you fed her paint fumes all night.

Friday nights aren't quite what they used to be. Admittedly, I'm not certain that Friday's were ever my night so shine. However, a part of revolts at the idea that we spent our evening painting our kitchen.

S: I'm not sure about the color. Do you like it?

M: It looks a little bit like Gumby.



Is there something wrong with me that I find something almost repugnant about spending an evening painting a kitchen? In short, yes. I'd include a clip here from Arrested Development where Michael starts to explain the concept of a job to his lazy siblings, but I can't find it immediately, so I give up. Here is a video someone recorded off their television. YouTube at its best.


As usual I'm going to blame being a bit educated as it set me up to want to have a job that gave me meaning. The whole thing breaks down as Randall points out in the movie Clerks because as he aptly puts it, we'd have no janitors because no one wants to clean up shi- for a living. The clip below is unrelated to that one but almost directly related to the whole job vs. meaning debate if you extrapolate a bit.



It probably deserves some more thought vis a vi the life of the mind vs. the life of the body and laziness vs. what I'll call moral rigor. The two terms can be used, in my case, pretty much synonymously, as I'll often accuse certain house projects of ours as lacking in a sort of morality. When the reality is, were I not working on the painting or whatever, I'd probably be watching television, which doesn't exactly scream intellectual at work solving the words problems. It's a sort of classic X generation trick, poking holes in the actions and ideas of others without providing any reasonable alternative. Tonight I proposed that a better use of our time would have been to get more informed about our local candidates before voting in the primaries. However, that ship had already sailed (and one could reasonably argue, barring some 1 vote off election that I haven't heard of besides second grade class secretary, that your vote, though it counts, is mostly meaningless in the scope of deciding the election) and so I made the reasonable suggestion that we watch a movie instead. A request that was met with a roller. Oh well.

Getting back on the horse literary style or I've been warned in advance that people enjoy funny

#1

I wrote a long note to you that included some choice words about goats but only in the margins. I tore it into a thousand pieces. I'm not lying. I counted. I put them on the hearth, which was cold, numbingly so, and I ate them one by one. You'll be surprised to learn that l's taste best, they have the distinct flavor of ice tea, and bring to mind screen porches and old apple trees, this despite the dearth of l's in a words like screen and porches. Up until this point in my life I had always thought that I was in love with e. It is strange, is it not, how wrong we can still be about ourselves.

#2

Remember that time we were in that little cafe on the corner of 23rd and Whittier. Me neither. In fact, in staring at a map of the surrounding area that we used to frequent I can see that 23rd and Whittier don't even intersect. A fact which casts a great pall of doubt in my mind about whether I had something candy cane flavored that day or not. I suppose it could cast the whole day into a sort of shadow, could it not? None of these details are important though. The existence of street corners or little black baskets made of brass that held pink pansies. I remember that we were arguing about the integrity of the ending of something. I was hell bent on convincing you that it was not only aesthetically pleasing, but artistically moral, (the two don't always go hand in hand) if the main character died. It was raining by this point in time, and I remember your right hand was on top of your head because the wind was high, and you didn't want to lose your hat. I can see that I was wrong now, about any number of things.

#3

We were reading to each other in bed, even though we didn't have the slightest interest in one another, think Dante and levels of hell, when suddenly, it occurred to me that the two of us could amend the many differences we'd been discussing by changing the proximity of our bodies. I don't remember the angle of the sun changing at all. From up close, I could see that there was something amiss with your right eye, an asymmetry, and not of the pleasing sort. And the whole time we were in situ I kept thinking about that imperfection, trying to rationalize my way into believing that it was a beauty mark. I thought of a mother explaining a birth mark to her child, that it was just a more unique thing to love about them. I don't know whether it is unfortunate that parents lie to their children or whether it is unfortunate that the world lies to children about things their parents have told them. Either way, the sex was terrible.

Democracy doesn't work. Nor do human beings

As I waited patiently in line to file my special ballot in our new neighborhood I watched as an old woman voted for the very first time in her life, and I had a welling up of love for this deeply flawed country of ours. As she struggled through the handout, filling out portions that she wasn't supposed to, I actually felt proud that we live in a nation that would allow someone to "have their voice heard." The people who had been working in the polling station all day were relentlessly polite, offering S a chair, and continually apologizing for the time we had to wait to get our address change fixed. I sat next to S, seven months pregnant, the only white folks in the joint, and felt good about democracy.

It was at this point that I was asked to give the people an electronic signature to confirm my voting status. However, since I the cord couldn't stretch out long enough, I got up out of my seat and walked around two other people to put down my old John Hancock, attempting to not disturb that elderly woman at her business of being democratic. And as I leaned up from putting my signature down, I heard the polling lady say, "Is something wrong sir?" to the guy sitting next to me.

Guy: I'm trying to finish writing and this guy is getting in my way. Mind you, even if I was in his way, I actually needed to finish my paperwork in order for his to be processed.

Relentlessly nice polling lady Kathryn who called a number of people baby in an endearing way: "We're all working in tight spaces here."

Obnoxious guy who I briefly contemplate murdering: "It's not that tight."

Kathryn then looked up at me with her eyes brimming with kindness and patience and thanked me for waiting and directed me to the polling station lady, who was also relentlessly nice and sweet, and just the sort of person who you want working in a polling station, which is no doubt a grueling and annoying process. And as I voted all I could think about was how angry I was that obnoxious guy could get away with being such a dbag. I wanted the freedom to punch him in the mouth. However, besides not being the sort of person who does that thing, I was in a police station and had only moments before been brimming with hope and excitement over our good old democratic system.

As we left S asked me how I was doing, and I relayed the story about the obnoxious guy to her. (S had been off exercising her right to vote in the meantime. And the conversation took place outside after Kathryn and the other nice lady whose name I should have gotten thanked us for voting and gave us those little stickers that say I voted on them, which make me feel a little bit proud in a way that maybe a Toby Keith song does for some others.) And as I'm relaying the story I find myself getting upset a second time, (I think I need to spend some QT at an ashram on an upcoming vacation) and I say, in conclusion, "f--k democracy. Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote." A quote that seems to nicely sum up my general feelings about the obnoxious guy and the "populist" movement currently "sweeping" the nation, and I wondered about the merits of a good old benevolent dictatorship.


S: (After finishing dinner) Can you clean up the dishes while I go upstairs?

M: I don't think so.

S: Why not?

M: That's not really my role.

S: What is your role?

M: I tend to see myself more as a philosopher king in the Platonic mold.