The first time I fell in love I was seven years old. That is not entirely true. Rather, it was the first time that a young lady confessed her love for me. It was done after recess, and I was most likely a sweat mess, not possessed yet of that awful scent that accompanies the onset of puberty and a confusion about when one starts using deodorant. I do not believe that I was still wearing glasses, glasses which had troubled my early years in school with their doltish awkwardness. I think it’s fair to say that my, still persistent refusal to wear glasses is less based in other kids jokes and more firmly grounded in the fact that the first time a girl said she loved me I had just ditched them.
The drawing was done on cheap white paper. I seem to remember a large sun in the right hand corner, with thick bars around its halo in the way of every child’s drawing of the sun. In the foreground was a small grassy patch, colored in quite effectively with green crayon, only a few slivers of white paper showed through. This was the sort of thing that you could tell the young lady had taken time on. There may or may not have been a tree on the left hand side of the paper, right side if you were the canvas. If there was, it was brown, and possessed primarily of limbs that vaguely resembled the rays of the sun. Second graders are not really adept at leaves. The drawing possessed two key features, which I’ve yet to elucidate. One, fore grounded, in what was probably a hand in hand kind of walk were two stick figures.
For years I drew stick figures by using two circles, one larger for the body and then one for the head. Thus, I was not actually drawing stick figures but blob figures. This is the sort of thing that haunts a person like coke bottle glasses. The stick figure on the left had a few strands of hair that sort of also resembled the sun’s rays, and the figure on the right, who I soon presumed was me, possessed not a hair on his head. He may have been wearing a hat. It’s unclear now, twenty four years later. I should point out here that both of the figures had been colored in with a brown crayon, and though the young lady was tan, I was, a bit more Irish than Italian in skin tone. A fact which makes me realize my first brush with love may have been no brush at all, but merely S showing me a picture of some other fine fellow in our class of twenty or so that she’d picked out to walk hand in hand with.
She sat in front of me for those few weeks. We were on a rotational schedule that year whereby the teacher would randomly redistribute us every two months or so. I’m guessing that the teacher’s would claim that it was allowing the children to establish working relationships with a number of different kids, but let’s be honest, was really about separating kids once they got to be friends because they’d no doubt create more problems in the class and laughter and the sort of stuff that you don’t want happening when you’re facing a room full of twenty five seven year olds. Teacher’s aids, mind you, weren’t really in vogue then, so it really was a teacher standing on an island in front of a sea of pale faces.
At that point in time I was sitting in a pod of four desks with her, and a child named T who I remember having an incredibly long tongue that he’d curl and sort of stick out of his mouth while he was attempting to write, and we’d all noted it, and had bits of fun at his expense because kids our cruel. And he was no doubt aware of it and seemed to secretly hate us as we probably hated him in our cruel childish ways. I don’t remember who the fourth child was, nor can I account for having received the note from S with her turning around over her right shoulder, brown hair, shoulder length, respectably cute, though I don’t remember liking a girl until the third grade. I don’t remember what she said to me as she handed me the paper that had, right in the center, where presumably the sun should have been, why do children, myself included, always put the sun in the top left or right of the scene. Is it because it is so rarely directly overhead that we perceive it in this manner? Or is it more direly related to some pre-Copernican idea that we all still secretly cling to, that it is the sun that moves rather than the earth? This should all probably go below. What I do remember her saying, days earlier, was that she did not want to sit next to T. And I must have gestured to her or something because she continued, I say gestured because I don’t remember ever saying more than three words to any girl besides my mother and sister before the age of fourteen, and even then I limited it to fifteen or so, and said, “He picks his nose and eats it.” This is the sort of telling detail that gets remembered long after everything else about a person has faded away, and even now still sort of sends a shiver up my spine. The horror. The horror.
For the record Leopold the 2nd was the king of Belgium who helped to orchestrate the mass murders of thousands of Africans near the turn of the century. Therefore, despite his awesome beard, he was just plain awful.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Thursday-Defining Things
S: We should read her Bible stories.
M: Yeah, that would be exciting.
S: See, this one is cute. It's about the young hero and the horrible giant.
M: Jack and the bean stock is Biblical?
Composition
By the second of January in the following year, it had been at least ten months since I had written anything memorable. See if this floats your boat, the rain made slow puddles in the street, an impressionist industrial morning. Now, I know the portion about the puddles is, at the very least, weak, but I’m inclined to believe that the part relating that very morning rain to a painting by Monet is at least passable, and when I’m not being modest, I’d be inclined even to say, quite good.
On Jefferson
Dear Sirs,
I cannot advise you in any more lucid terms to cease and desist. Our fine magazine, established 1817, at the very house where Thomas Jefferson himself composed the declaration of independence has no time, nor desire to read second rate prose constructed by a first rate annoyer.
On the use of the word gentleman
Gentleman,
And I do use the term lightly in view of our last correspondence. I don’t see how you can turn up your nose so incredibly quickly at such a pretty turn of phrase.
Observations on the following subjects:
The Male
The male subject routinely awakes and appears to smash a small plastic object that is on his left-hand side. He seems to regard the object, an alarm I’m now told, ambiguously as it is both the harbinger of the morning, and apparently, like the albatross of yore, of a strange death. Two times a week the subject does not hit the item in question, but turns it towards himself and sighs very deeply. This same sigh is often utilized during the time when the subject has left the shower and has not as of yet, begun clothing himself. Generally the subject emits a low grunt when the alarm goes off, and occasionally, on the way to the bathroom he mutters “oh shit.” At this time we have not found a correlation between his bowel movements and this perhaps colloquial utterance.
The Female
The female subject does not appear to smash her plastic object, when it emits a noise. Rather, she looks at it and then pulls it in bed next to her body. We have determined that the female is not feeding the object, and that it is almost certainly not offspring. The female subject holds the object to her chest until a certain point in time when it is restored to its previous place. During this process the male subject often moves limbs, but generally remains in a static state of sleep. The female subject does not utter any intelligible language during her morning shower, though she often emits a noise that can only be described as humming.
Here is a picture of king Leopold the 2nd of Belgium
M: Yeah, that would be exciting.
S: See, this one is cute. It's about the young hero and the horrible giant.
M: Jack and the bean stock is Biblical?
Composition
By the second of January in the following year, it had been at least ten months since I had written anything memorable. See if this floats your boat, the rain made slow puddles in the street, an impressionist industrial morning. Now, I know the portion about the puddles is, at the very least, weak, but I’m inclined to believe that the part relating that very morning rain to a painting by Monet is at least passable, and when I’m not being modest, I’d be inclined even to say, quite good.
On Jefferson
Dear Sirs,
I cannot advise you in any more lucid terms to cease and desist. Our fine magazine, established 1817, at the very house where Thomas Jefferson himself composed the declaration of independence has no time, nor desire to read second rate prose constructed by a first rate annoyer.
On the use of the word gentleman
Gentleman,
And I do use the term lightly in view of our last correspondence. I don’t see how you can turn up your nose so incredibly quickly at such a pretty turn of phrase.
Observations on the following subjects:
The Male
The male subject routinely awakes and appears to smash a small plastic object that is on his left-hand side. He seems to regard the object, an alarm I’m now told, ambiguously as it is both the harbinger of the morning, and apparently, like the albatross of yore, of a strange death. Two times a week the subject does not hit the item in question, but turns it towards himself and sighs very deeply. This same sigh is often utilized during the time when the subject has left the shower and has not as of yet, begun clothing himself. Generally the subject emits a low grunt when the alarm goes off, and occasionally, on the way to the bathroom he mutters “oh shit.” At this time we have not found a correlation between his bowel movements and this perhaps colloquial utterance.
The Female
The female subject does not appear to smash her plastic object, when it emits a noise. Rather, she looks at it and then pulls it in bed next to her body. We have determined that the female is not feeding the object, and that it is almost certainly not offspring. The female subject holds the object to her chest until a certain point in time when it is restored to its previous place. During this process the male subject often moves limbs, but generally remains in a static state of sleep. The female subject does not utter any intelligible language during her morning shower, though she often emits a noise that can only be described as humming.
Here is a picture of king Leopold the 2nd of Belgium
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Assorted things
People who are readers should probably read Lydia Davis because she is interesting. Lots of things are interesting--sports, movies, the lives and more specifically loves, or even more specifically, failed loves of celebrities, stories about what we had to eat on a night that we cooked--to varying degrees, but her stories certainly fall under that ever widening veil of things that are interesting. Dirt, if properly understood, can sometimes be interesting. Lydia Davis wrote a short story about things that were interesting. The last part goes like this:
Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.
She also wrote a short story about a fish and a lady that is good. Here it is:
Fish by Lydia Davis
She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.
Also this story is pretty damn good, especially for new parents.
I hope this essay has convinced you to read Lydia Davis, or at least to read the stories that I've excerpted. If not, I forgive you because I'm forever doing things that other people advise me not to do, like eating past ten o'clock and feeling sorry for myself rather than doing something about the very thing that's making me feel sorry for myself. What I'm saying is that I forgive you in advance.
Also, people like listening to music even it is cheesecake for the mind. And I saw that Matt and Kim were having a concert in Baltimore that I would, once again, not be at. I'm rarely at their concerts or concerts of any kind. But I still enjoy cheesecake just not at concerts.
Wait, this reminded me that I had one other thing that we should all talk about. It was an article about liking things on facebook by Jonathan Franzen. And as I was reading the article and enjoying it I went up and checked who the author was, and I was shocked to discover that it was Jonathan Franzen because he's always struck me as being rather douchey and less inclined to write an article about love. But, you know, the time to make up your mind about someone is never.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html
Here are some high points if you're the sort of person who would never follow a URL to an outside article. Though you really should because the article is short, and I think in our current configuration in the universe short is a particular type of virtue.
"There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie."
Or this one:
"Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."
There, now go love someone.
Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.
She also wrote a short story about a fish and a lady that is good. Here it is:
Fish by Lydia Davis
She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.
Also this story is pretty damn good, especially for new parents.
I hope this essay has convinced you to read Lydia Davis, or at least to read the stories that I've excerpted. If not, I forgive you because I'm forever doing things that other people advise me not to do, like eating past ten o'clock and feeling sorry for myself rather than doing something about the very thing that's making me feel sorry for myself. What I'm saying is that I forgive you in advance.
Also, people like listening to music even it is cheesecake for the mind. And I saw that Matt and Kim were having a concert in Baltimore that I would, once again, not be at. I'm rarely at their concerts or concerts of any kind. But I still enjoy cheesecake just not at concerts.
Wait, this reminded me that I had one other thing that we should all talk about. It was an article about liking things on facebook by Jonathan Franzen. And as I was reading the article and enjoying it I went up and checked who the author was, and I was shocked to discover that it was Jonathan Franzen because he's always struck me as being rather douchey and less inclined to write an article about love. But, you know, the time to make up your mind about someone is never.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html
Here are some high points if you're the sort of person who would never follow a URL to an outside article. Though you really should because the article is short, and I think in our current configuration in the universe short is a particular type of virtue.
"There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie."
Or this one:
"Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self."
There, now go love someone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)