Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Tuesdays with Sadie

6:45 Please stop crying and go back to sleep. Daddy had to stay awake to catch up on things after returning from a long vacation.

7:25 s awakes with a smile. She's been in a good mood for the last couple of days, bestowing smiles freely and generally just being a happy little girl. I don't want to mention it to her though. It's kind of like talking to a pitcher during a perfect game. I just keep smiling back and picking her up and kissing her fat cheeks.


10:45 A.M. I frantically look around the house to try and find the attachment for the net of watermelon I'm supposed to give her. The thing is basically akin to a kite, but all I have is the net or kite part, I've got no handle and string. I empty the diaper bag, which marks the first time I've ever emptied the diaper bag. We've got a heck of a collection of stuff in it. Sadly, none of the stuff is the aforementioned butterfly wand. I think what I intended to compare the thing to was a butterfly net rather than a kite. At some point while stomping around the house looking for, well, to be honest, I wasn't entirely certain what I was looking for, I just decide to hand it to her. As it turns out she's not entirely thrilled with cold watermelon and turns her head away in disgust. But with babies disgust ain't screwing around. It's how you or I would look if we were feigning disgust, but she actually means it.

11:15 She gets some bits of oatmeal and rice cereal to eat mixed with breast milk and makes a big mess of the whole thing though I have to keep reminding myself that she's getting better as her oatmeal slimed hand reaches out to grab the spoon leaving a long slime mark along my right wrist. And when she complains and whines as I clean her up I want to let her know that it's for her own good that I'm reaching the wash cloth beneath her voluminous chins, but that is the sort of thing that has to be implicit rather than explicit when you've got a baby.


2:00 P.M. After talking to S I retrieve the thing that I need to attach the net to properly feed s a watermelon. Except at first I don't have all the right parts and I struggle with trying to push the thing the net is attached to into a spherical type thing that isn't shaped to take the object at all. After five minutes or so I figure out that I have the wrong thing, also I read the directions and couldn't find any mention of the spherical thing I'm trying to shove into the net. And really the only thing I take from the directions is that the whole thing is supposed to be "fast and easy." I head downstairs with all the proper objects. By this point s is starting to pound the little table that goes underneath her bumbo as if she's a giant waiting for food and cranes her neck to see just what I'm up to. I want to make sure that before I put the watermelon in that I know that it all will properly fit. So, not entirely true. First I dropped the net on the ground a time or two and had to decide whether it needed to be washed or whether s would be all right with just a bit of dirt from our nice clean floor. Naturally I attached it. Okay, the thing works. Except that after I have the two child safety locks engaged and the watermelon ready and the little girl bending herself in half to try and figure out when she's going to get fed, I realize that I can't open it. I've closed it so tightly and the safety locks are so well engaged that I can't access the net. And I yank and pull on it for five minutes and feed s a rice cracker that I'm fearful she'll choke on, so I give her smaller pieces though these seem to almost choke her even more than just giving her the whole thing, while I struggle with the watermelon net until I just give up and feed her rice crackers and try to make sure that she's breathing after each bite.

Afternoon-As the day goes by she beings to lose interest in sitting on the mat. I cheer her on for a while in the bounce seat, and she graces me with some smiles. Later she spins around in a circle pivoting her small body away from all her toys, so she can face the carpet and cry. I try and explain the virtues of gross motor skills to her, but she just wants to hear me sing the ABC's along with the machine that shrills them out as well. The only thing that calms her a bit is taking her outside where she can sit on the porch and watch birds and flies and squirm around. The mail man compliments me on my cute little boy, but she seems unfazed. I remember back to a month ago when she would sit on my lap quietly observing the world. Now she is trying to eat both sides of the chair's arms or spin around to her stomach or stand up and bounce, what she does not want to do is what I want her to do, sit quietly.

5:50 When S walks in the door s gives her a big smile without even hearing S say a word, and she keeps smiling for the next five minutes, and I sense that at the end of these long days that she is sometimes as tired of my ways as I am of hers.

6:45 I read her a story. I consider it a successful story because she doesn't attempt to eat the book for the last two pages. After we read a second book that she doesn't try and eat at all I lean in to her and S for a hug before I depart for an event, and she extends her little arm so that we can have a big family group hug. I mention it to S, get greedy and try again. This time s snakes her arm in and leans away from me and into S. We'll have a family hug again some other night.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Wednesday




She was sitting in the dark looking at a picture of some type of tree on what she thought might be called a moor. On the moor, if indeed that's what it was, a fine sort of mist was rising around the tree, creating a nice image against the black trunk. It wasn't all that dark, or she couldn't have seen all of these details. Let's make the room just sort of half-lit, like a sub or something. Are subs half-lit?

Sitting in the living room, even on a comfortable chair, the cushy sort that were very popular in the nineties, staring at a picture of the heath, for now she had decided that it was indeed, a heath, though she couldn't distinguish between a heath and a moor definitionally; she felt sure of this assertion. Her son was coming home for the weekend from Albany where he lived with his girlfriend and her two children. She felt ambivalent about her son, was the problem. She had never expected to amount to anything herself, but for her little ball of tenderness and joy to be spending afternoons watching some half-wit's brats; she knew she was feeling things too strongly. She thought people were supposed to mellow as they aged, but she found herself just growing more angry.

The picture was really mostly black, and her dead husband had put it in a nice white frame with ample borders to provide contrast. Her dead husband had been a truck driver for seventeen years, but that was not the point. She stopped looking at the picture of the heath and what she'd decided was a plane tree and made herself a cup of tea. The tea was Early Grey, and it burned her tongue mercilessly. She ascribed a good deal of malice to the tea unexpectedly.

In his youth, her little boy had been whip smart. Head of the class through junior high and at least on the honor roll all the way through high school and a scholarship to a college up north. At some point during this time her husband died, which was immaterial.

This morning I had the image of a woman reading on her front porch rocking chair about a war that had been over for two weeks. And I have to wonder as I am writing this story whether this is that same woman, waiting for her son to come home, so she can feel sad.

Tea is not malicious, she reminded herself as she probed the top of her mouth with her newly burned tongue. The image that kept flitting through her mind that evening was of, it wasn't really quite like that. People don't spend all day thinking about parents of blue hills or sunsets over mountains or hems of skirts like every writer wants us to believe. No, most days the best people can manage is wishing they were anywhere but where they are, something like a man sitting at a desk wishing he was sitting on a bench and that it was warm outside. So what I'm talking about here isn't exactly the precise image that flitted through the woman's head, but rather the image that subconscously essentializes the feeling.

She remembered sitting on the linoleum. Her small son sitting between her legs in a spool of light, his cheeks still red from the warm wash cloth she's used to rub off the dirt, and a pile of cherry tomatoes drying on paper towels. And she remembers his small voice counting the tomatoes on the paper towels, "one, two, three, four," and then stopping and turning to face her, his face now lit by the sun waiting for her to tell him what to say next.

She dumps the tea into the sink with a flourish. She knows now that she will not age gracefully. She will grow old on her own, turning on the television and not leaving the couch until afternoon, thoughts swimming through her head on their way to wider seas. No one will turn to her quite like that, asking for the world to be defined.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Tuesdays with Sadie

6:45 A.M. S-she'll probably go back to sleep.

7 A.M. And we're up for the day. Unfortunately, I had decided that the exciting conclusion to the Thunders vs. Mavs game was worth staying awake for and had gone to bed at 1 A.M. It's hard to measure how good a game is going to be vs. the need for sleep when taking care of a child.

9 A.M. After finishing a fairly routine feeding of s, the whole affair was less gruesome than some of our other events, primarily because squash turns out to the consistency of soup when pureed and thus can't look entirely disgusting when it's mashed all over a face, I noticed that her onesie was a bit wet. And I discovered that a good deal of the squash soup mixed with milk mix had ended up pooled in the bottom of her seat. Thus, I had to decide whether she was wet from your garden variety diaper leak or whether it was admissible to remain in the onesie even if it just had been dampened by squash soup. I decided, bad parent withstanding, that if I had spilled soup on pair of pants that I'd probably stay in them, but that if I had urinated in them I'd probably feel obligated to take them off. I think it's fair to apply the same to a baby. The oneside stayed.

s is currently teething, so she spends most of the day angry/looking for toys, keys, knuckles to gnaw on. This irritability also causes me to have to do crazy things that I wouldn't normally do like watch her closely, and take hour long walks in our neighborhood. But mainly it means that she gets to spend more time in her jumperoo. A jumperoo is sort of like heroin for a baby. And even when she starts to cry after fifteen minutes or so she still continues jumping and whimpering to herself because she knows she can't give it up.

2:00 By this point I'm ready for my second nap of the day, but s shows no mercy. I notice that she's got enough lint stored underneath her layered chins to stop up a dryer. I make ineffectual stabs at removing the stuff while she looks at me wondering what the heck I'm up to. I desist after a while and chalk baby chin lint removal to mom's task.

2:15 By this point in time I'm trying to figure out how to nap while still watching her. She's sitting on the two blankets I've put out for the day grumbling about teething, and I close my eyes for just a moment and when I open them she's rolled over from front to back, which I don't think I've ever actually seen her do, and I suspect that the little urchin has done so on purpose to punish me for being tired and loving basketball.

2:30 To alleviate further discontent we head out to the front porch. The fun part of summer in DC officially ends when the mosquitoes come out. And yes, I know summer hasn't even started yet, but I think it's safe to say its over because s and I were fending off the pests for ten minutes or so. But at first we were just watching the neighborhood, her little neck craning back sometimes and she looks up at me as if to make sure that the lap she's sitting in is actually mine. "I'm here," I tell her, but she's already peering at a car with a cheap muffler bumping down our pot holed street.

And as the mosquitoes start arriving, small pesky things, not the larger things that had occasionally worried my childhood on the west coast. These mosquitoes bite toes and calves, smart enough to ignore the arms and wrists that lead to instant death. And as I'm flailing my arms about wildly in an attempt to keep us both clean a strange sound comes from the little serious and quiet person in my lap. And, after a minute, I realize that s is giggling. Apparently she finds me swinging my arms wildly in an attempt to snatch mosquitoes pretty damn amusing. And for the next three minutes, even though the mosquitoes have gone, I bend my right arm at my elbow and close the fingers of my right hand on an empty air while s fills the day with peals of laughter. Minutes later when a new brave mosquito appears I lean into s's elephant like hair and whisper, "We're on the same team, let me know if you see one."

And by six o'clock when S arrives home we're back on the front porch, only this time I manage to kill four mosquitoes, and s finds my gestures less amusing, perhaps because she can now see that they are not idle, that these hands can kill. I suppose if I have a take away from the day, which was truly tiring, is that I'm excited to have this just over two foot tall wispy haired little girl on my team. It is a good thing.

Monday, May 23, 2011

MSN Mondays

I'm pretty excited about today's topic from MSN. Yes, I have already written the definitive blog post on hair styles that still gets page views from people trying to look at how awesome Zach Morris' hair was on Saved by the Bell. However, I think it's fair to say that hair is in my wheel house. Therefore; without any further ado, in conjunction with MSN and hotmail and other corporate sponsorship from Vidal Sassoon and Paul Mitchell I present: 16 New Things to do with your hair

1) Curl it. I know simple right. No, apparently it takes a really long time to curl your hair and oh, how annoying. False, if you have straight hair just move to a place where it's humid. You're going to quickly find that your hair is awesomely curly without all the hassle of waking up early with a curling iron. Or, carry a humidifier around with you and wear it inside a stylish hat, so that your hair is constantly getting the sort of humidity it needs to be curly without all the hassle.




2) Straighten your hair-Uh, this one's a little tougher. You probably will just have to wake up early in the morning and straighten it, but don't forget to try and convince everyone that the whole process was effortless because no one likes vanity. Unless that vain person is super hot and should probably be even more vain.




3) Side pony tail. No, we can't all look as good as Debbie Gibson, but you're going to have to learn that life doesn't always give you lemons to make lemonade. Sometimes life just gives you a poo poo platter and nobody wants to eat or drink that. So put your hair in a side pony tail and take up buddhism and learn to love you a little more.






4) Wait, these are supposed to be new ideas not just recycled ones. Okay, how bout putting your hair up in a beehive like Marge Simpson. But, get this, you have a small family of squirrels living inside the beehive. No, bees. Actual bees. Imagine if your hair had a bunch of honey bees in it. Yeah, that's a good idea.






5) Concrete your hair. Why? You're totally going to enjoy your saving, but imagine dunking your head in some cement. I mean, like style it really awesome ahead of time because your going to have this hairstyle for the rest of your life. It's pretty solid though, look at how good it still looks on The Thinker.






6) Try a new barber. Yeah, I know you got your guy. But guess what? Your guy ain't going to give you what you need. You think your guy is keepin up with Parisian styles? No, he ain't. You're leavin' without even gettin' your hair layered with some squiggly lines in the back. Your guy just cuts it the same damn way ever time. Switch.






7) Go into the barber shop. Sit down with a series of photos. When you finally get up to your seat hold up a photo of an elephant and say, "I want to look like him." When the barber laughs, mention that you can take your business elsewhere. Point out the fine comb over that the elephant is pulling off effortlessly. Complain after the haircut that you don't look like the guy in the picture.


P.S. This elephant has the exact same hairstyle as Sadie.


8) Take in a picture of Taye Diggs' abs. Insist that you want to look like that.






9) Comb over. It's gotten a bad rap. The comb over is a totally underrated hairstyle that can be made to look good year round.

Nope.

10) Go into the barber shop with a pair of scissors. If you're balding cut out a picture of a European model. Insist that you want your haircut to look like hers. Say that you think with the proper layering you think the look can be achieved. Volunteer to just do it yourself with the scissors and to pay them for the use of the shop.

She's too busy dating comb over guy.

11) Cut it all off. Bald is awesome. Awesome.






12) Take a series of photos of people wearing hats. Go into the barber shop with the pictures and say you want to look like these people. When they mention that they are all wearing hats feign confusion. Ask what the heck a hat is. Tell them that if they can't get the job done maybe they're in the wrong rodeo. After the argument has concluded insist on wearing a hat during the appointment.


Uh, look closely.





13) Take in a picture of your great grandparents. Ask them if they're capable of doing hair cuts in black and white. Insist that they use the garden shears that you brought in from home. Ask for an old fashioned shave even if it is Supercuts.

14) Bangs. Simple. Take in a picture of yourself at the age of three. Insist that you used to be cute. Ask for a similar haircut. Leave in a rage when this proves unachievable.


15) Create a celebrity in your mind. Go into the shop and insist on having a haircut that looks exactly like said celebrity's. When they get close to figuring it out say things like, "That kid who was voted off in the last portion of American Idol like before they even get on the show." Later make a similar claim but insist that it was one of the characters from Night Court.

16) Take a picture of yourself on your camera phone in the car right before you enter. Ask for your hair to look like it does in the picture. Try to guess how much they'll take off.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Spring Cleaning




On Yardwork:

Alas, no matter how clean you make your yard, it is still comprised of 98 percent dirt.

Sticks and Slugs:

At some point this evening I bent down to pick up a stick, which turned out to be a slug, and as I jumped away like a frightened school girl, well after, I remembered that as a child we used to play on the sidewalk with snails and poke slugs with sticks. It is hard to say if tonight was revenge.

Small sadness:

By the time we got to the whiskey we were already full of deli meat and cider. This strikes me as falling on the lower scale of human tragedy.

Conversations:

S: I don't think s does well with crazy crazy schedules.

M: What baby does?

Afternoons:

About once every two days, when I just want to sit and relax for a bit, I'll pull s onto my chest and try to breathe slowly, to mimic the heartbeat in the womb. And every once in a while, one in ten times, she lies on my stomach for longer than a minute or two without starting to cry. Today, we sat on a beige blanket, with the limbs of a large oak shading our eyes, and I closed my eyes for fifteen minutes while she stared up at a pale bluish sky, and the birds flitting from place to place followed by her eyes. And I kept telling my heart to slow down even more that this moment of peace could not last forever.

Don't trim the Juniper:

As we are walking to the car I notice bits of glass in the street that I step past because I have bare feet. Later, when we are moving heavier things to smaller cars I notice a speck of glass in front of our own sidewalk and this time I bend down and pick it up and another just like it, and I walk across the yard and drop them in the juniper bush that we never trim. They are some other fool's problem now.

Spring Cleaning:

The baby's toys are migrating downstairs. The distance is somewhat shorter than the 22,000 traveled by terns, but no less impressive in all the spaces that are revealed between wing beats and bits of green wall.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

We

We were arguing for the umpteenth, not a word either one of us would have used, about something related to the exact point at which it became no longer reasonable to throw away trash. Our limits seemed entirely unrelated to each other. You see, when I see a trash can that's nearly full, I see the possibility for unlimited space yet to be realized. I guess you could say I can see the true potential of a bag of trash in a way that is foreign to hers. She would call it laziness, but I would call it a degree of difference in potentialities. In the end the trash generally gets taken out somewhere in between its potential ceiling and the low sort of goal that she sets for it and reinforced on a biweekly basis. At that point in time it's really hard to blame the bag for much. It's clear to me that the behavior is coming from the mother. And on the way out the bag will often say to me, "Hello, good sir. I am capable of holding up to twenty pounds." The same brands all say the same things. And I gently let it know that for today, two pounds, a banana peel, a plastic wrapper for crackers, leftover rice that has gone bad, several wrappers from spent burritos, a piece of paper on which is the phone number of someone I never called is written will have to be enough. The trash usually understands. Np pun intended.

Uh, other writing thing

The fellow to my right has been engaged in onananism, and I’m not the sort to judge a man for what he does to himself. I leave those types of decisions to a higher power. But of late, the man has begun to place himself violently upon me while engaging in the act. One assumes that he is perforce, asleep during what I’d be remiss to call anything but a kind of rape. The landscape is barren and white. Women, oh women. The snow does not make up for the lack of them.

“March on,” yells the commandant, who has, as far as I can tell, has not a good bone in his body. Why, just yesterday we witnessed him shooting a poor fellow who stopped by the side of the road to cough. And what these Russians might call roads, are not the sort of things that you or I would call them. It’s more like a loosely driven path through snow. The soldier, a young man named Hans, was from a village not twenty miles from where I grew up in Paris. I’m not going to write to you about the set of his mouth when he was dead, or even the color of his lips. What’s the point of that? The soul has already departed the body, or never was. What remains is merely a shell, discarded by a hermit crab who yearns for larger things.

I was a baker of some repute in my village before the little man called us all off to help bring glory to France. I was renowned for my baguettes, my rose filled macaroons. I put into my baking the sort of manic energy that a young and foolish man puts into an affair. The women, I told Hans, before he was lying in the road, “you see,” they are like the ocean. Hans, his eyes filled with what can only be described as stupidity asked me to clarify my point. “My boy,” I said, “they come and they go. There is no use chasing the waves, they will always break.”

I was well-known in our small company for being a philosopher of the highest degree. A patent lie that, but one for which I stoked the fires as hard as if I was watching the dough rise in a brick oven. The men constantly came to me with their little problems, and I would listen to them in exchange for some small ration. Bits of flour, stolen from a farmhouse and snaked away before the captain could see, a small piece of chocolate ripped from the pantry of a crying Russian peasant.

“War,” I told Hans, warming myself in a lice filled blanket “is no more ridiculous than anything else in this world. Why would I study a thing like mathematics? Because two and two is four? What does this tell me about being alive, Hans? Not a damn thing! Now, when I stare down the musket, and put a bullet in another man’s stomach. What do I learn? My God, Hans, can you not feel it in the heat of battle? War reminds us how much we enjoy being alive. What a very precious thing it is. Without war, Hans, we’re just shells playing at being human.”

I didn’t believe a word of it then, but it certainly sounded nice to say. And the others in our unit were no doubt enlivened by the nobility of our pursuit, which was, empty and misguided.

In the evening we set up camp at the side of the road. The sky was a grey pinwheel of clouds. We’d just that afternoon begun drinking from the puddles that were low lying in the road, in the company of our horses. Who, despite their solid stink, I regarded fairly highly, though not highly enough to enjoy being mouth to mouth with them over a bit of drainage.

The commander, bless him, keeps insisting that we are going to win a great victory for France, this while his teeth chatter in the numbing cold. And by this point its become apparent to at least half of us that we’re marching to our own death.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Friday, Friday

Observation: Q comes too early in the alphabet. It rightfully belongs closer to its other lesser used brethren like X and Z.

Observed: Several nice tree boxes on the way to work.

Thought: If one spends the walk observing tree boxes, perhaps it's time to bust out the black socks and sandals while mowing the lawn.

Observation: People seem pretty excited about the rapture. Why? I think we should all be quaking in our boots over the Mayan calendar ending, but this one strikes me as a bit of a shot in the dark. Also, does the rapture happen on EST or Pacific time, or does it occur first in New Zealand and then work its way over. I can't say I've ever really been able to figure this one out.

Thought: If you had five months in which to muck about post rapture, what would you do? And, on a larger scale thought initiative, what would humanity in general do and what does your answer to both imply about your belief or lack thereof in your fellow man/woman.

Joke: What would you do if you knew the earth was coming to an end in one hour?

G: I'd eff anything that moved.

What would you be doing?

G2: I'd be standing completely still.

Observation: Listening to the disembodied moaning emanating from the monitor would be troubling in any other context. Why do we assume that it's s moving about in her sleep and not a ghost, pretending to be s, who has always been present but is only now being picked up by our monitor?

Possible answer: Sanity/a preponderance of historical evidence that shades do not exist.

Query: Is it more important to be liked or respected?

Theory: Most of what ails modern man is the same thing that has ailed man since his inception. Man.

Thought projection: Years ago I remember watching a Discovery Channel show that posited what the earth may look like over the next few thousand years. At some point during the show humans go kaput, and squids wind up crawling onshore and mimicking primates, one can only assume that the squids hurling pine cones was actually a tongue in cheek joke as we know that squids, like chimps, would hurl feces instead. What would their king-sized beds look like, and would they run into overpopulation problems more quickly because of increased size? Or, would you bet money on the giant squids or the little squids to run things?

I fear we've wandered too far afield.

T.S. Eliot on the rapture from The Hollow Men:


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


Dylan Thomas on old age or what we're calling the Rapture:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Epicurus on the Rapture, uh, sort of:

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Here is a picture of tomorrow

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Fixing a door with your spouse: Ten hour day

My favorite thing about working then hours isn't the working ten hours. I know. For a lot of people that would be enough. They'd just be pretty excited about getting to put in that much time at work. I've always wondered why most work weeks are only 40 hours, confession, I only work 35, when we could make it like fifty or sixty or something. I think I speak for everyone when I say that work was created by the good Lord to make us have meaning and 401K's. Anyhow, the fact that I get to work ten hours isn't the only reason I'm excited.

The main reason I'm excited, what kind of a segue was that? Can you reasonably even start a new paragraph at this point in time? is that when I arrived home our back door wouldn't shut. You can store what I know about fixing things in a teacup, so set to work.

Wait, I forgot about the other awesome part. If you live 4.5 miles away from work and you've just finished working ten hours, what would you do? Would you take a bus? With poor people. Ewwwww. Would you take the metro? No, I'm not rich. I can't afford the metro. No, you'd say to yourself, I'm going to walk my tired ass home. Of course, after a mile or so you'll start looking for places to sit down because you are old and walking without stretching for an extended period of time, both, hurts. And sure, Rock Creek Parkway doesn't have sidewalks, but at least you got to see a deer and a fox hurdling across the median and sprinting off into the distance. The whole experience was almost as majestic as the whir of the cars passing by a few feet to your left. Aw, nature. So glorious!

Anyhow,

step 1: Complain at your wife for asking you to do anything after your ten hour day. It doesn't matter how bad anyone in the world has it, you probably have it worse, you've just worked a long ass day. Let no one forget this. Remind her as she makes baby food. Remind her as she washes the dishes. Regale her with stories of your day. Do not under any circumstances make an attempt to fix the door. It might fix itself.

Step 2: Get up and try to fix the door. Always use brute force. You can't underthink this problem. Just start pushing and shoving in random sequences to try and make the thing shut. Do not consider the problem. That is for sissies. Real men fix problems by slamming their shoulder into them. Later, when you're done failing, remind your wife that you worked ten hours.

Step 3: Walk around to the other side of the door. Kick it if necessary. Examine all portions of the door looking for other parts of it that could use a good kick.

Step 4: On her advice, actually consider looking at what's going wrong. Remind her that you worked ten hours. Ask her why she broke the door. Disregard her saying that she just opened the door. Say that it looks an awful lot like breaking the door to you. Remind her that you have the knees of a much older man.

Step 5: Shove the door again to see if it will work. Suggest that you pull the door off its hinges and rehang it. When she suggests that it isn't a good idea. Remind her that a heliocentric universe once seemed like a bad idea. When she sighs, suggest that if you hadn't worked ten hours you'd do it yourself.

Step 6: When it becomes clear that no one is rehanging the door go online. Google has the answers to everything. Read about using a piece of wood to sort of pry the thing up. Also read about applying petroleum jelly. Avoid jokes. Go get a hammer. This feels like good work. Take hammer, grab a small peg that will barely do the job and start hammering. During this process keep examining the lock to see if it has moved at all. At some point your wife will note that you're hitting the thing the wrong way. Switch to her way. Remind her that people who have worked ten hours aren't always sharp. Hammer away.

Step 7: Suggest that your wife apply some petroleum jelly again. Show disdain for her suggesting that it won't work. Note that it is going to make this amazing. Examine the door at random. Note that nothing is changing. Break a peg. Take your wife's advice and get a paint stirrer instead. Obviously made of sturdy stuff. This is going to fix things. Break the paint stirrer while accomplishing virtually nothing.

Step 8: Mention that you'll probably just have to live with the open door. Start by saying that if someone is trying your door every night you're probably going to be robbed anyway. Listen to your wife who suggests that you shove the door, this is your heart's desire anyhow, while she pulls up or something. Fail. Try again. This works. Credit the jelly. Insist that it's your idea making, and this after ten hours of work, that really solved the problem. Suggest that you buy a new door and storm door. Say things like, "I ain't stopping you." When she says, "I've done a lot of house things, can you take care of it?" Mention that you are too tired, and that you've just worked ten hours.

Here is a picture of a door.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Beginning

"What if we created a scenario in which, and here is the part I think you're really going to gravitate to."


Steven Millhauser from Dangerous Laughter
"As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies."

The rain makes no patterns against the window. It just falls in the streets turning them a bit darker, pooling beneath trees, and generally just becomes annoying in the way that it can on a day that you wish you were outside, sitting on a raft in dappled sunlight while your children, my god, you have children, are catching beams of sunlight in nets intended for dragonflies. It was that sort of rain.

"The idea is about an accounting system. I know, you're already tuning out. Don't tune out."

I had a tendency to do a lot of things in those days that were not classed as normal by my peers, visiting the graveyard to read a novel, running from oncoming waves as if I were a child, throwing rocks at the windows of girls that I didn't even like all because I enjoyed symmetry and was perhaps too taken with Romeo and Juliet. But then again, says I, what is normal?

"The idea is this. Quite simple. You could write the thing yourself."

I found after a week or so of doing them that Tuesdays, usually mind you, were almost exponentially better than Mondays. The same did not hold true for Wednesday mornings but could almost, though not quite, be applied to Wednesday evenings. Thursdays were an entirely different story that required all sorts of spreadsheets and F5 type situations to really put the whole week into its proper context.

"The idea is this: you create an infinite system of checks for the accounting system. Every back up has a back up of its own. The world could be comprised entirely of middle manager types or perhaps some sort of sub-species that just keep checking things, no, one thing, eternally. I think you can see the potential legs this thing might have in the mind and fingertips of an artist like yourself."

Thursdays were somewhat more dependent, and fluctuated wildly due primarily to age and general energy levels, though they were also often contingent upon things like the weather or the look of the Friday calendar right before you left.

"Well hold it, how is that a story? It's just a bunch of people, or sub-species or whatever, and they're just doing one thing over and over. What's the hook? Is the thing supposed to be interesting?"

"No. You're missing the point. The point is not that they're doing the thing over and over again, it's that none of them have the balls to ask why they're doing it. They just keep doing it because their fathers, and here I'm imagining again the sub-species though it might be possible to draw some sort of correlation to the general practice of human enslavement in this thing the metaphorical possibilities are really off the charts here, had been doing it, the work, before them."

"So what you're saying is not that I'm to pay close attention to the thing that they're doing, but rather the process by which they are doing it? Higher order thinking and the like."

"That's the idea, I suppose."

"I've heard better. Lots of times to be honest. You know a guy like me gets people scribbling things on napkins all the time. Why just last week a waiter-

The spreadsheet shows the largest and almost always exponential, discounting certain teenage years and 21-25, rise when it comes to Fridays. The graph does not include respondents who work on Saturdays. A flaw which I hope to eliminate in the next iteration. You can never be sure about those folks, and perhaps it'd be interesting to make a separate study that tries to take into account those folks that have this ambivalent relationship with Friday and just to see how it correlates. Like, even now, I still think that summer should mean some sort of vacation. When does that go away? Does it ever?



Here is a picture of the Panda Bear

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Tuesdays with Sadie: I'm probably Einstein.


6:40 A.M. Receive a series of instructions from S about various events that will take place during the day. Ignore. Attempt to shove pillow over face in order to avoid more talking. This may or may not have happened.

7:20 A.M. It's time to wake little s up. She is grinning at herself in the mirror we've put in her crib. I encourage her vanity by smiling at how cute she is. Vanity is a good thing, I think I remember learning in my confirmation classes.

8:40 A.M. s goes down for a nap. S calls me and regales me with facts about electricians and other things that I try not to listen to because I am trying to sleep.

8:42 A.M. The milk man, yeah that's right we have one, knocks on the door to tell me he doesn't have enough room for all the milk we've requested. Even though I'm really annoyed about the fact that I won't be getting a nap I'm pretty excited about our continuing goal of stocking up on milk in preparation for it becoming the new gold standard.

S: You know, if you're just sitting around during the day you can mash up a banana and feed it to her.

M: Listen to me. If I ever decide to break up whatever good rhythm s and I have going on to mash up a banana and feed it to her, you can mash up my face.

S: What do you mean? Eventually she'll need to eat more.

M: Then maybe she should learn to talk and tell us when she's hungry.

(Pause)

M: Parent of the year.

11:00 A.M. I strap s in the car and take her to the doctor. The whole visit is pending an disagreement s and I had about whether her crying was due to normal teething symptoms, (mine), or some sort of catastrophic and mind altering ear infection, (hers).

M: I think she's going to be okay.

S: I know you don't want to hear this but that's typical of dad's. They just think it's going to be all right.

M: I'll bet you twenty bucks that it's not an ear infection.

And because I'm the dad taking his daughter out for the first time officially alone I entirely forget her diaper bag, and start worrying about whether the nurse will want to weight s or not. And if it takes place in public like the first time we brought her in, like in this hallway right in front of the nurses station, and if she'll have a poopy diaper. All the while I'm trying to rehearse what I'll say to the nurse/wondering what other parents think of me just wandering into a pediatric care group minus a diaper bag, like a jackass. And then wondering if she's pooped herself. What do I do if that's the case? (For some reason I never smelled to check, probably hoping for dumb luck) And wondering how long it was since I'd changed her, and wondering if they had extra diapers around and wipes, or if I'd just have to put the poopy diaper think back on her with all these nurses, mothers of four most, watching and judging me, not to mention the other new moms standing around with babies or God forbid, the occasional other dads, I saw one, with a diaper bag held over one shoulder and with not one but two kids but handling the whole thing like an old pro. The bastard.

11:37 A.M. She has a poopless diaper. I love my daughter.

Aside

8:13 P.M.

S: How did her appointment go?

M: Just fine.

S: (somehow intuitively knowing without any reason for actually knowing) Did your remember the diaper bag?

M: Nope. Just plain forgot it.

Aside: I won the twenty bucks. Apparently s crying and running a slight fever is pretty much standard for a baby teething. I told you so. The good bedrock of every marriage.

2:20-3:30-A friend stops by to babysit. Yay! Thank you! I head out to Whole Foods because even though I've got a low paying job at an academic library I still fancy myself as one day becoming a yuppie and learning how to tie my sweater over the back of my collared shirt and playing tennis at a country club. I spend the first few minutes trying to buy organic vegetables and learning in the process that every vegetable at Whole Foods is labeled as conventional or organic, and I'm amazed and ashamed that I've never noticed this before. Although I'm trying to do the local thing farmer's market, creamery etc. , which is even more bad ass and like a considerate version of a yuppie but still aspiring. Then I buy a lot of meat because we eat that now. And yes, Michael Pollan, I hunted down the cow that I bought and got all my chickens from Joel Salatin. They were wonderful. Stupid world always making me feel guilty for everything.

Aside: Sometimes I worry that facebook isn't changing enough, and I'll send out like five e-mails to the higher ups so that they understand that I count on facebook to periodically change for no discernible reason. This is a core value in my life.

4:00 Why are you bored? Look at all these toys? You've got like seven different varieties of teething rings. When I was a boy all you had was the edge of your crib. That's why kids from back then learned to stand up faster. And look at this giraffe. Look at it. The thing like disinfects itself after every use and is French. Do you think we had French giraffes when I was a kid. No. We had a hand me down horse that had been gnawed on by other kids for fifteen years or so. And you have the audacity to be bored? Here's a stick. Yeah, that's right, now it's a sword. Welcome to childhood. You want to go in a jumperoo? What? You're not happy there either? Can't you see that I'm trying to make you happy? Ingrate.


S: Is he (John Krasinski) still dating that Rashida Jones chick?

M: I don't know. I lost track of his life after he did that DFW movie? He did a DFW movie called Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

S: I know. We watched it together.

M: Oh, sorry. I just figure if it was something artsy and cultural that I was probably the one doing it while you read a baby book in the background or (noticing that she's not paying attention to the monologue but is gazing at our bottom sheet) just worrying about our sheets.

S: (Throws sheet on top of the computer). (Pause). Somebody has to worry about our sheet.

5:50 P.M. After fussing, shi- who says fussing? Why do I now say fussing? That's not my thing. She was whining for an hour or so, and I have her sitting behind me while I prepare a variety of things to grill, and I'm talking to her the whole time and suddenly she decides that me shucking a piece of corn is extremely funny and starts laughing. And it occurs to me that what she's probably laughing at is the great demeaning that's taking place, one of the greatest minds of the age destined to spend the day shucking corn. Then I realized that maybe she was just tired and feeling a bit loopy. At that point, we both got a little sad, but we didn't need to say anything. It was one of those things where you just know that the other person is feeling the same way as you and you can just shuck the corn in silence without having to talk about the lack of predicted rain, or the flowers blown down in the yard. Yeah, I got you man, her toothless smile seemed to say.

Monday, May 16, 2011

MSN Mondays

I am entirely compelled by the structure of my contract with MSN to present these scenarios each week. Anyhow, disappointingly, I might add, but won't, this week's collection is 25 ways to get quick energy boosts. Really, twenty five MSN? A bit much. I think the general populous would probably settle for three and then they can get back to tweeting and facebooking and looking at tagged pictures of people they forgot they were friends with on facebook. Come on!

25 Ways to get a quick energy boost

1) Call your mom. Tell her to tape record her voice telling you to get up in the morning from when you were fourteen. Play this tape when the afternoon doldrums start to hit. You'll no doubt find that your mother's voice still has the effect of helping to perk you up, and also make you want to never hear her speak again.



2) Gin. It tastes like pine trees. Everyone talks about recharging the batteries in nature. Guess what? You can't visit the nice pine forest while you're at work. But you can visit the local liquor store and bring a little piece of the mountains with you to work. As for drinking at work, they do it in Europe, and we used to do it in this country. It's fine. We're weird about booze. Weird enough to prevent you from having that energy boost you need.




3) Fax things. Who the hell faxes anymore? Crazy libraries at my job. Just getting up to get to the machine and being vaguely confused....does this need a cover page? Do I put them face up or face down? will really help get you through the afternoon.



4) Drink a five hour energy. Why? I don't know, maybe because it's aptly named?

That energy drink has legs, which makes me trust him more.


5) Ride a rollercoaster. Note: You should probably get a job at one of the Disneys to make this really work.

6) Bring a horse into the office. Every thirty minutes take out your riding whip, mount it, and ride it around the office while yelling "and down the stretch they come." A pony would also work.

Ponies are real pretty.


7) Bring shampoo and soap to work. Take a shower every afternoon in your cube by pouring a few glasses of nice cool water over your head and lathering the soap in. I think you'll find that you'll have a hard time staying awake after a nice refreshing cup shower.

8) Coffee or some other drug. That's right coffee drinkers, drug. I'm judging you right now.

This horse doesn't like drugs either now does he? Does he? Ah, he'll probably win the race.



9) Ever day play a different character from The Office. Always go into character at 2:00 and refuse to leave character until at least three people have guessed who you're imitating. Never tell anyone the rules of the game.

10) Nerf basketball hoop. Dam that's a good idea.

11) Strike up conversations with people you don't know. Ask them about themselves and feign interest. Then, right before you leave, hand them a crumpled up piece of paper and ask them to hold onto it for you until you get back. Come back three minutes later from your office to reclaim the paper.

12) Watch an episode, or at least the theme song of Gummi Bears and Ducktales. Insist on talking with your co-workers about the hidden messages that can be heard if it's done backwards.

dddddanger lurks behind you. Rewrite history? What about the space time cont....

13) Ride a dog to work and repeat the scenario above with the pony/horse. Make sure to invite a shadier group of people to this event. Also, include a mechanical rabbit to complete the whole scenario.

This picture renewed my faith in humanity/ the power of this crazy series of tubes.



14) Ask your co-workers what their favorite color is then behave like that color for the rest of day. Incorporate interpretive dance, poorly.

15) Create lists of things for people to do and walk around distributing them to people in the office regardless of job/pay grade. Wish them happy holidays regardless of season.

16) Drink pure cane sugar.




17) Try running up the stairs faster than your co-worker can take the elevator.

18) Relatedly, set up an Olympic event for each day of the week. Hurdle chairs and time each other. Complain that the Kenyans win everything. Feel shame.


He made that couch his, well, he did. He said it not me.

19) Fight Club. Also with a couch.


Humanity one
Couch zero.

20) Eat a Luna Bar. Insist that it's okay for dudes.

21) Train an army of cats to come in and serenade you with bits of an opera. Sit them down afterward and talk about the ways in which they failed. Mean it.


The Internet is for pictures of cats.

22) So many things MSN!!!!!

23) Learn bits of a new language. Speak it between the hours of 2-3 irregardless, because it's more fun than regardless, of who is around.

24) Do a set of push ups on the ground. Ask various co-workers to sit on your back while you do them and other people to time you. Make wild claims about doing 100, but as soon as the first person sits on you collapse to the floor screaming something about workers comp.

25) Try gentle stretching or asking someone out on a date who you know will say no. Fly a kite. Cook a rib-eye steak to perfection on a hibachi grill that you've replaced your computer with.


My favorite thing about this photo is how natural it looks. Just three dudes enjoying the game.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Sleepy

On weekends he and Hal would slip into sandals and ride their bikes to the creek. They’d peddle slowly through the neighborhood—weeping willows arcing gracefully to the sidewalk, wooden fences guarding lawns in various states of repute, kid’s toys strewn across front yards or gathering dirt on the porch, the youngest of the children riding on trikes or using training wheels while their bored parents feigned interest and tried to read the paper or fix the hose and gain one moments respite behind sunglasses before the crushing weight of another work week and another work week beyond that weighed them down.

When they’d cleared the neighborhoods and hit the park—old live oaks mostly, a few white birch and sycamores scattered amongst them, these all ringed by reams of waist high star thistle and saplings—the boys would stop at the first available sandbar on the muddy path and dump their bikes into the sand, careless as boys often are. Tree limbs, weighed down by thick foliage trailed in the water, and fish swam through skeins of light above moss covered rocks. The creek reached, Hal would usually take the lead, picking out some piece of flotsam—soda cans, plastic bags, beer glasses—that often got hung up in the eddy near the farther shore, which became a target for the boys to skip rocks at. Hal usually threw first, a side-armed thing of grace, bending slightly at the right hip to generate a good arm angle and turning his left shoulder from his target so he could create good torque when he turned and sent the rock sent skittering across the water like a toad across lily pads before pinging on impact.

Unlike Hal, he was inexpert at selecting rocks, always impatient, a weakness that would dog him from the rest of his life from small fender benders to poorly written cards and poorly chosen wives. Thus, this impatience born of a desire for more time wound up being a great waste of time, and so he was always left holding some misshapen rock, or lifting the veil of some ill-conceived woman, the sort who loved to fight but not make up. And when he hurled the rock towards the stream, regardless of arm angle and torque, neither of which fell between the bounds of respectable, the rock always plunked down in the middle of the stream and sank quickly, skipless and sad. He seems to remember a pair of mallards floating by and making idle chit chat as ducks often do.

He

The big toe of his left shoe has a mark that he had been unable to buff out that morning. He’d spent a good ten minutes in the hotel room, applying the shine with teenagerly vigor to no avail. In the backround, the hotel’s air conditioning hummed like an old refrigerator and pale light made a small ingress at the feet of the curtain.

He remembers the rough tongue of the bark pressing into the tips of his fingers, and using those same tips to press into the small circular appearing holes left by a woodpecker from some other time. This image, of fingers pressed into holes, had come back to him today while delivering the eulogy, and he’d briefly and extemporaneously expounded upon the theological parallels between the unseen bird whose presence was still made manifest in the world and life after death. The irreligious people at the memorial were lost almost immediately, and the remainder of the crowd found the metaphor mildly obtuse, though perhaps apt.

It was Hal, his older brother, who had first helped him to believe in things unseen. After they’d been hustled off to bed—brushed, bathed, kissed, and reassured that they were loved—all by eight so that mom and dad could catch up on their own evening oblations of television and the easy familial camaraderie that comes with battling children and jobs and taxes and mortgages in the company of the same person for years. The stories Hal told him generally centered around animals that could speak and the very real presence of things like leprechauns and the tooth fairy, a character his parents did little to refute by putting one dollar bills beneath his pillow each time he lost a tooth. He still remembers the story about fireflies, perhaps because he’d watched Hal smear them across the sidewalk to make a well lit path. Hal told him that after their death firefly souls briefly rose up into the sky before coming back down to earth in the form of shooting stars. It was the sort of story that was only believable because it was dark and he was young. That week, he spent every night sitting in the silk tree after dinner, watching for signs of souls sailing through space. When the stories were finished Hal would occasionally reach down and take his younger brother’s hand. This was the sort of unspoken thing that the man sitting on the cold grey stones clung to, the remembrance of not being alone.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

-

We've been watching the Harry Potter movies of late for the first time. And, as a subplot of the movies we've begun referring to our sleeping s as Dumbledork. I'm not sure if it's kind, but that's just how she looks when she sleeps.

Average amount NATO spends each week enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya: 1,930,000

I don't think children start resenting their parents until they are in their twenties. I'm not talking about that angsty sort of stuff that every kid goes through that has to be tough. I mean that point in time when you start to consider that even your wonderful parents may have screwed up a time or two. Dumbledork won't though because we are perfect.

Estimated value of arms sent by NATO countries to Muammar Qaddafi since 1969:10,000,000,000

Note: We've still got some zeros to make up apparently. I guess as a general rule we should probably, as a country, stop supporting dictators and gorilla generals and such.

Minimum amount Quaddafi held in U.S. banks at the time his assets were frozen in February: 29,700,000,00

I have an image of him swimming around in a sea of money with his number one dime in a case above him. Why didn't Uncle Scrooge have a lucky 100 dollar bill or a quarter or something? A dime is kind of cheap isn't it?

Percentage of Republicans who said in March that they fear ACORN will steal the 2012 election for Obama: 25

One in four isn't bad.

Date on which ACORN shut down: 11/2/10

That doesn't mean they couldn't get the band back together and steal the election, again, like Gore did in 2000. Oh.

Number of Congress members who gave up some portion of their 2010 salary for federal debt reduction: 3

Before bed each night the two of us generally creep into s's room and peer over the edge of her crib at her sleeping little form. And every time I am the first to leave. I have no idea what this means because I'm not unhappy looking at the child, I guess I just don't want to ruin it by staying too long.

Relatedly:

S: Do you think x (on tv show) is cute.

M: Yes....No, maybe not as much as I used to.

S: Huh.

M: You know people don't look as amazing when you start to get used to them.

S: You're right.

Relatedly: Lil s keeps changing every month or so, which means we never tire of looking at her. Oh, Sadie.

Total amount of these gifts: 15,223.56

That's considerably more than I gave a year ago

Number of seconds it takes for the federal debt to grow by that amount: 0.34

I'm thinking that if we can just take care of this national debt problem everyone can get back to working at good paying and fulfilling jobs, and, at the end of the day they can hop in their flying car and go back home to their wife/husband, loving children, or maybe just loving pet. I mean, things were going pretty amazingly until we hit this debt crisis. Remember how amazing everything was? Thank goodness we're devoting all of our attention to it because once it's gone, we'll probably devise a way to turn the whole earth into a giant rocket ship and we'll fly into a different galaxy where everyone on the earth will love each other and share wealth and stuff. Obviously, I'm kidding, only the hard working people will have money, kind of like now. Zing! I jest.

Signs that I'm older than I think.

Percentage of men who said they would start feeling old when music sounded too loud in bars.

I believe I was twenty eight or so when that started.

Steven Millhauser presents the epigraph:

"I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant."

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Quoting Things: TPK

"We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie."

"Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations. But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers' obligations are to the executives, and the executives' obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO's obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board's obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders/customers they've been fucking over in their own name. It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. [...] With corporations I have no problem with government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience function. What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are direct personal consequences for ourselves, any activity is okay."

"I think what's changed somehow is they don't think of themselves as personally responsible. They don't think of it like that their personal, individual going and buying a ticket for The Exorcist is what adds to the demand that keeps the corporate machines coming out with more and more violent movies to satisfy the demand."

"And it was 1840 or '41 that de Tocqueville published his book about Americans, and he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes it citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up solipsists, navel-gazers."

"He frequently had this feeling: What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"

Here is a picture of a cute armadillo:


Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Tuesdays with Sadie

7:20 A.M.
s wakes up happily. She always wakes up happily. She is either a morning person, or someone who just really loves a good nap. I hope that this remains for the rest of her life, and she doesn't wind up like most people I know who generally feel as though they've been flattened by a semi following a mid-afternoon nap.



8:00 A.M.
We drive down to Silver Spring to take the car into the shop. s does a good job of quietly looking on while we discuss the price of a new light and bumper. On the way home she sleeps while the metro rattles by and a car with a crappy muffler cracks into life on the street while I admire garden paths and bits of remodeling going on and try to figure out if it is related to an increase in home values or just that old adage about spring and birds and bees.

9:27 A.M. I commence feeding s, which stands as literally the grossest thing I've done for her yet. I kid you not, give me a poop filled diaper 100 times over. Note: This may be because I've already changed over 100 diapers as it is. Anyhow, s decided that she wanted to help me feed her the rice cereal, which is two parts rice and four parts breast milk or something, so when she stuck her hand in the bowl and then smeared it on her leg, cheek, my arm, and then ducked her head into the spoon leaving a mark on her forehead and a bit stuck in her eyelash, I was bit grossed out. I was up to my elbows in the stuff, and I eventually had to stop feeding her because it was too gross. She was pretty much covered in rice. And I'm fairly certain that she learned nothing and will be assaulting me as I try to feed her tomorrow as well as dribbling 9/10 of what I try to feed her on the bib while getting frustrated that I'm not giving her more to not eat/toss on her legs, my elbows, beneath her chin, on her elbow. Eh. Gross.



1:30 The strangeness of our neighbor removing the perfect dogwood from their backyard. Two weeks earlier I'd stood in the backyard with S and reflected on the satisfying brand of light that arrives as the days lengthen and that particular light still on the blossoms of the dogwood while we stood in shadow. (The tenor of light in late summer is a faded kind of silver that you see on cars that were once silver, but that haven't been retouched in years. This is the sort of light that arrives just before the uniform blue that precedes your garden variety darkness. Note: The strangeness is amplified by the fact that certain items, magnolias, dogwoods, azaleas, act as status symbols for brief periods of time in Washington, DC in the early spring. In the order listed above the bushes/trees come into full bloom and are not only beautiful but have attached to that beauty a kind of intelligence. Ie, the people viewing them, and probably not in possession of said items themselves feel keenly, or at least I do, a vague sense that the person with that item has gotten the better of me, that they are smart. Thus, it seems like not just an aesthetically questionable decision to remove the dogwood but almost intellectually, in a weird sense, as well.

3:15 At some point s becomes tired of lying on her stomach. Like any reasonable father I attempted to help her roll onto her back. Unfortunately during the rolling process I kind of lost her and she landed rather rudely on the back of her head and commenced yowling and crying while simultaneously holding on to me, by this point I'd picked her up, obviously, and grabbing on to my shoulders before leaning away again, so I could see the full force of what I'd done. (This reminded me of what most people wind up learning about relationships at one point in time in their life. That the people who bring you pain are often the same ones who we almost invariably turn to in order to alleviate that pain. I guess I hadn't thought of how it's born into us, that it starts when we are mere infants.)


5:15 She rolls over all the time now. Every time I put her down to try and get a chore done I come back and find her lying in a new place on her stomach looking somewhat surprised. The spot is generally also off whatever blanket/mat I've put her on, and she's just hanging out on the dirty floor. I'd carry her around when I do errands, but I'm pretty sure I'd just wind up tearing my other labrum if I haven't already. I plan to put up videos on this blog someday of me doing stuff like rolling over and jumping up and down to see if it's just as cute. I'm guessing it isn't.

7:00 s goes to bed. She is cute. I head out into the yard to try and cure my rose bush, the last vestige of the previous owner in the backyard unless you count that ants that we disturbed with our landscaping that are now eating Borax and taking it back to the wife and kids. Aside: I also noticed about a million flying ants crawling around outside tonight, and I attempted to spray them with Windex, but it actually seemed to make them stronger. Cringing. Anyhow, I'm trying to fix this rose bush that has blackspot by spraying it with baking soda or something. These dirty hippie recipes for success never work, and I'm sure I'll just be pulling it out entirely next year after it whithers away.

General thoughts: s is getting big. I keep doing that thing that all parents do about "it's going to fast." But shi-, it's going fast. It's just that they change so rapidly that it becomes hard to imagine that only four months ago she was barely functional, and now she only jumps in her jumper for more than five minutes if she's receiving constant approval. Ie, she now has a personality and desires affirmation for things like jumping. This is strange for a parent because she could only worry about basic needs a very short time ago. Not much has changed for me in the last five months although I've really gotten good at not spitting up after dinner, but s has changed by leaps and bounds. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing for a person to witness. It's just a thing. I don't get a choice in the matter. The little urchin is going to keep growing up, like today when I was showing her flowers and we walked past a bush in the front yard and she grabbed on and pulled a branch out. It's weird that she can do that now, and good that it was a bush that I needed to trim anyway. She's a good kid.

Monday, May 9, 2011

MSN Mondays: 3 weird clues a guy is into you

I'm pretty much just going to turn my blog into a dating advice column since I'm fairly certain it would quadruple my traffic in about two weeks time. I can't really blame people for that because our core relationships are almost undoubtedly, jobs, kids, gambling, coin collecting aside, the most important thing in our lives. Anyhow, MSN didn't really give me the sort of great fare that I've grown accustomed to. Complaints aside, it's my job each Monday to blog for MSN, so blog I will. Okay, it's not technically my job, but it probably should be.

1) I know this is going to sound crazy ladies, (I learned from watching the second season of the Bachelor and about a million seasons since that it's cool to call women ladies. I apply this principle liberally when dispensing advice, but when a guy is....screw it, I'm not capitulating.

Instead: Seven Ways to deal with a mean manager




1) Whopee(sp?) cushion. So yeah, maybe your manager comes in and starts behaving in a general douchey manner like usual giving you the what for, which I assume is bad, then bam! whoopee cushion! All of the sudden your manger, who was previously kind of an ass, is probably going to be laughing his/her ass off because nothing says "Hey, I understand that this is a professional environment where we'll all trying to achieve our utmost for the corporations highest, but it's okay to have a laugh or two on the side," like a whoopee cushion. Your mean manger will probably promote you after the incident and shake his/her head every time they walk by your cube and say something like, "Whoopee cushion guy/gal. Good one."




2) Throw them a surprise birthday party on a random day. It's important that you order a clown for this occasion because clowns are even scarier than mean bosses. Next time your manger is thinking about coming down on you so hard they'll remember that you threw them a party on a day that wasn't even their birthday. Note: No matter how many times they protest that it is not actually their birthday, just be sure to disregard them and encourage them to play another round of pin the tail on the donkey. Insist on face painting. Do the painting yourself. Do a really poor job. Commence crying and letting face paint run. Find some hay bales. Sit on them. Apply the clown liberally as failing a good time your manager will at least remember that you aren't afraid to pay crazy people to come by the office and loom.




3) Impress them. Create a random e-mail generator on your computer that complains about office related problems. Send it to their blackberry on the hour every hour, including Saturdays with messages like, "Hey, just in on another Saturday working on those files. Also I'm wearing pleated pants." Pleated pants are very impressive to corporate types. Use this random e-mail generator to make them feel bad that you never leave the office. Bring in a tent but insist that you're not sleeping in it, spray it with bear urine and start setting traps around the copy machines and in the break room. Spend part of every morning skinning a rabbit. Ask your mean manger where the most dangerous game is. Leave the book on his/her desk. Ask them if they want to come boating with you for the weekend. Smile.




4) Buy them a kitty. Every person just needs their cold heart warmed by a fuzzy kitty. Failing that, buy them ten more fuzzy kitties. Drop them off at his/her house in the middle of the night for seven nights running. Develop an intense training pattern for the kitties. Nit your mean manger pillows with kitty's on them. Then, when the coast is clear, begin taking the kittens back one by one. Soon enough your mean manager will probably get all weepy and have to take some leave, which solves your problem. Also, sell the cats.




5) Ask them to go out to lunch with you, then sit in your car waiting for them to come out and meet you, drive up on the grass and give them a solid brush on the leg with the passenger side door. This will remind the mean manager that when you're mean someone might just drive up on the grass and hit you with a car. You should probably store some beers in the trunk for this occasion in case him/her realizes what a funny prank you've pulled and just wants to sit back for a minute or two.




6) Develop an internally inconsistent language and start using it around the office. Ask your mean manger all sorts of questions in your invented dialect. Request new hiring forms indicating that you're from Atlantis. Spend at least three hours of every day chanting to yourself and claim that your religious rights are being infringed upon if he/she asks you to work.




7) Photoshop yourself into your mean manger's family pictures. Display them prominently in your office. Insist that you were on the trip to Vail, but that you kept quiet. This will help your mean manger realize what a quality sort of fellow/gal that you are. After all, your mean manger wouldn't just take any measly employee on a family vacation. Barring this start sleeping on a mattress outside of the mean manager's home. Play only Bob Marley songs for three days straight until they submit and come downstairs to talk about loving people and also maybe drugs.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Things




Sometimes I dream that I'm swimming in a sea of eyelashes, all their soft little tips are brushing my skin. In the middle of the dream I switch to doing a half-assed kind of backstroke, legs beneath all those lashes, and I look up at the big eye in the sky staring back at me, eyelashless. I've never known what to make of dreams or the smiles you exchange with people that you never meet.

S: I'm going to take a shower, so I don't have squirrel droppings in my hair.

Everyone in the world has more time than me. I don't know how this is physically possible, but it seems it must be so. Yesterday I watched an old man with a cane tapping his way down a cobble stoned street and a butterfly clinging to the moss on an old brick wall just flexing its wings. Somehow they had nothing better to do, no old flame to see. And there I was all busy like I always am, watching them.

On Mother's Day:

M: I was going to buy you flowers today when I was out.

S: Ah. (Hugs).

M: But I had already spent all my money on pea gravel.

S: How much did it cost?

M: Enough that you didn't get any hydrangeas. It's at times like these that I fear I'm getting a bit too tied down.

Perhaps it's as you suggest. Perhaps everything I've, no we've ever done has been entirely wrong. Like that time I sat by the river and tried to think of all the different words I could use to describe its particular shade of black. Perhaps you're right about that summer I spent in the woods killing baby birds to help a native species survive incursion. Perhaps everything I've ever done has been like that summer, trying to keep away from the natural way of things. But I think that last night, in the middle of that terrible movie about producers and cats, when I reached out to take your left hand in my right, I think that was the first time I've done anything right. And if you had just squeezed back I'd think that you agreed.

"Look down your shirt and spell attic."

Sometimes I sit beneath the oak tree on the street and practice spelling words backwards. It's as if I'm preparing for some quiz that is never going to happen. evol. That's an easy one, and don't know if anyone ever really means it. tcepsmucric. That's probably a harder one to define, but it's the exact way that I was watching you when you got on the bus and kissed that person who wasn't me on the daeherof. Sometimes I do it when I don't want things to be true. I have this idea that if I could get everything spinning drawkcab. That's a really easy one due to the context. That maybe this time, I won't be on the street at mid day, cats yowling in the distance, gingko trees dropping crappy blossoms, spelling words that you won't ever read.