Elegy for a Silk Tree
After his mother’s funeral was over and the few mourners had left, faces he couldn’t quite place in the fog, he sat on the cold stones and reminisced about the summer when he began to doubt the existence of things.
His childhood, to that point, had been about credulity. The back yard was the clay upon which he pressed his bits of belief. The yard was framed twice over, first by a graying cedar fence and then by junipers, winters gem, and English Holly. The rectangular center of the yard was made up of ambiguous brown grass cut through with clover and dandelion, which was occasionally cropped by the neighbor’s cadre of rabbits. The right side of the yard was dominated by a large white pine, branches lopped off so that the first available foot hold was well beyond his reach that rose spire like into the bright blue cathedral of the sky. That lack of a foothold, so precious to a child, led him away from the awesome pine and towards the old silk tree in the side yard. The tree was positioned just behind the gate on a small strip of land that was shaded almost year round by the junipers and winter gem. It stood about eight feet tall, sturdy and many limbed, its grey bark riddled by holes from some long dead woodpecker. The umbrella shaped canopy would carry pale pink blossoms come spring. He loved the tree with the sort of intensity that other children reserved for their dogs. He didn’t care for dogs.
He remembered spending evenings, the sky a purple bruise, a warm wind blowing from the west through the small valley town raising goose bumps on his bare arms, climbing into the welcoming arms of the silk tree, placing his foot at an intersection between two limbs that looked like nothing so much as an elbow. And he’d sit, for what seemed like days, with his spine pressed, not uncomfortably, against the tree’s reassuring trunk, his feet dangling in space, while mosquitoes and robins engaged in a deathly evening ballet. Beneath him bits of the foundation lay exposed, exhumed for a canal he’d built for his army men a summer ago. He’d used the larger rocks—dolostone, limestone, and brown chert—as mountains for the soldiers to climb over as they trudged wearily onward. In the distance other small birds, nuthatches and house sparrows, kept the evening full of song. They were average singers at best.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Etymology: beating a dead horse
I spend a bit of time on a website entirely devoted to Michigan football, which is awesome. It provides me hours of distraction and relief. However, the main thing that it provides for me is funny picture. Anyhow, sports websites and more specifically arguments are pretty much carried on with as much civility as debates on whether we should be a giant socialist country or not are in Congress. Anyhow, at some point during the discussion on Mgoblog somebody tends to bust out this picture of a guy beating a dead horse vociferously. Or, vociferously beating a dead horse. Pick your poison. Either way, it's amazing.
But we should probably get down to tackling the word root origin instead of just chuckling over this jaunty fellow wailing away on what might actually be a camel. Wikipedia describes the idiom, a bit toolishly as flogging a dead horse and claims that it is sometimes used in the bits of the Anglophone, you just know some Brit wrote this, world. Wrong, Wikipedia. Everyone says beating a dead horse, even Brits, and if they don't like it they can talk to George Washington.Oh, snap. Below is a graph of how I used the term correctly.
Brief aside to admire cute babies laughing.
Okay, enough enacting the labyrinth of the post-modern mind. The OED credits it to the globe in 1972, while Wikipedia, who do you trust?, credits it to famed orator, a term I use infrequently, John Bright. Apparently he used it in reference to Parliament feeling apathetic about more democratic representation. An idea I can get similarly apathetic about because enlightened despotism is the way to go.
Wikipedia also offers this little nugget, which gives me a second chance to plug Antigone on this very blog when the great orator Tiresias says, "Nay, allow the claim of the dead; stab not the fallen; what prowess is it to slay the slain anew."
Things I've learned about parenting.
She seems to sleep better when we turn the monitor off. I haven't figured out if it's causal or just dumb luck.
Babies, by and large, enjoy crying.
Toys are frustrating rather than fascinating when you don't have gross motor skills.
Zoos are not the as amazing for infants as they could be.
Infants, for the most part, don't enjoy Harper's. Start with board books. Then go crazy reciting them.
Babies don't mind drool.
Adults do.
Of late I end with writing that is not my own:
“But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.”
But we should probably get down to tackling the word root origin instead of just chuckling over this jaunty fellow wailing away on what might actually be a camel. Wikipedia describes the idiom, a bit toolishly as flogging a dead horse and claims that it is sometimes used in the bits of the Anglophone, you just know some Brit wrote this, world. Wrong, Wikipedia. Everyone says beating a dead horse, even Brits, and if they don't like it they can talk to George Washington.Oh, snap. Below is a graph of how I used the term correctly.
Brief aside to admire cute babies laughing.
Okay, enough enacting the labyrinth of the post-modern mind. The OED credits it to the globe in 1972, while Wikipedia, who do you trust?, credits it to famed orator, a term I use infrequently, John Bright. Apparently he used it in reference to Parliament feeling apathetic about more democratic representation. An idea I can get similarly apathetic about because enlightened despotism is the way to go.
Wikipedia also offers this little nugget, which gives me a second chance to plug Antigone on this very blog when the great orator Tiresias says, "Nay, allow the claim of the dead; stab not the fallen; what prowess is it to slay the slain anew."
Things I've learned about parenting.
She seems to sleep better when we turn the monitor off. I haven't figured out if it's causal or just dumb luck.
Babies, by and large, enjoy crying.
Toys are frustrating rather than fascinating when you don't have gross motor skills.
Zoos are not the as amazing for infants as they could be.
Infants, for the most part, don't enjoy Harper's. Start with board books. Then go crazy reciting them.
Babies don't mind drool.
Adults do.
Of late I end with writing that is not my own:
“But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.”
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Saturday Night....almost
On the whole I believe lines are simultaneously overrated and underrated. It is precisely this type of thinking that drives me crazy. Of course, it's that sort of metacogniton that could drive even the most sane person batty. And I think we can all agree that we'd prefer the term batty be used infrequently at best, and the term, batshi- crazy replace it whenever possible.
Today, as I was reading s a story called corduroy, a word I struggle to spell, though now that I'm seeing correctly I'm not entirely sure why, she began to cry. Why? Because the aforementioned and easily spelled corduroy is all about a bear who comes to life in the middle of the night at a toy store in order to try and track down his missing button. And, irregardless, because it's slightly longer than regardless, of whether he gets a button or not, he doesn't, I think lil s was pretty upset about the clear copyright infringement on the part of the Toy Story franchise and if the writer of corduroy, so easy to spell now, is alive, we, as a family, hope he is rolling in dough. Like real thick pancake batter type stuff. I jest, though usually minus the hat. I believe that S suggested that s may have been crying in a fit of boredom or hunger or just general baby fussiness, but I won't have it. My child is genius. She was concerned about copyright infringement.
On the whole I find basketball entertaining. However, at some point in time I'm probably going to have to run a statistical analysis, including many graphs, f11 for the savvy user, two v's there mind you, in order to determine my enjoyment quotient versus waste of good time that could be spend doing other stuff like discussing copyright infringement with my daughter. Unfortunately, I, like 75 percent of the population, am left brain dominant and fail at things like spatial perception, musical talent, and low grade theoretical math. Thus, my graph will probably just be a prose poem. I'm not sure if it'll be as conclusive.
Writing by people who are not me:
"An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers." DFW
Today, as I was reading s a story called corduroy, a word I struggle to spell, though now that I'm seeing correctly I'm not entirely sure why, she began to cry. Why? Because the aforementioned and easily spelled corduroy is all about a bear who comes to life in the middle of the night at a toy store in order to try and track down his missing button. And, irregardless, because it's slightly longer than regardless, of whether he gets a button or not, he doesn't, I think lil s was pretty upset about the clear copyright infringement on the part of the Toy Story franchise and if the writer of corduroy, so easy to spell now, is alive, we, as a family, hope he is rolling in dough. Like real thick pancake batter type stuff. I jest, though usually minus the hat. I believe that S suggested that s may have been crying in a fit of boredom or hunger or just general baby fussiness, but I won't have it. My child is genius. She was concerned about copyright infringement.
On the whole I find basketball entertaining. However, at some point in time I'm probably going to have to run a statistical analysis, including many graphs, f11 for the savvy user, two v's there mind you, in order to determine my enjoyment quotient versus waste of good time that could be spend doing other stuff like discussing copyright infringement with my daughter. Unfortunately, I, like 75 percent of the population, am left brain dominant and fail at things like spatial perception, musical talent, and low grade theoretical math. Thus, my graph will probably just be a prose poem. I'm not sure if it'll be as conclusive.
Writing by people who are not me:
"An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers." DFW
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Day Two
6:45-s wakes up by making noises/yelling at the ceiling in order to test her voice. S tells me that I can get her when she gets frustrated.
7:15 The noises from the other room stop, and I go back to sleep.
Am I a poor parent for letting her shout and gurgle at the ceiling for thirty minutes? Or was I actually doing her a favor, helping her to develop the ability to "self-soothe?" You'll hear people say self-soothe a lot if you have a child. Or was I helping her to become more autonomous in a world that verily demands it? Or was I just tired from getting home from work at 12:30 and would have slept through anything short of a natural disaster?
Interpolation: From comments by sixth-grade science students on proposed changes to tobacco labeling with graphic images.
The least effective one is the feet with the label on it because some people might say "it's just feet they won't kill you."
The one that doesn't work is the picture with the little kid crying. It's just a baby crying. I mean, babies cry all the time so that won't work.
The one that is most effective is the one with the bald macho guy with the beard and shirt with the No Smoking logo because teenagers like macho truck drivers.
The one with the person injecting nicotine in his baby is bad because it's a cartoon and nobody takes cartoons seriously.
8 A.M. s awakes. Do we:
a) Read a book together while I prop her up against the couch. (I've noticed that she likes the longer books rather than the typical little kid board books. She is possibly a genius, or maybe just incapable of seeing over the larger books and therefore forced to look at them more intently.
b) Lie down on the ground and attempt to eat animals that are dangling above her. (I've noticed that this toy has become less effective today, and I'm worried that it's because s has decided to become a vegetarian).
c) Sit up on her bumbo and select various toys to pick up and shove in her mouth. (This whole process can be frustrating to watch because she doesn't exactly have the greatest motor skills, so it's hard not to just put the toy practically in her mouth in the first place to avoid watching her try to figure out how to pick something up).
d) Sit with daddy and exchange smiles and noises. (She seems to have the least patience for this activity. After all these years spent honing my conversational skills it turns out that to my baby I'm incredibly boring).
e) Change diaper.
f) Give her the bottle.
8-9 Some combination of the above.
9-10 We take naps.
10:00 I decide to change her out of her sleeper. I've debated only changing her at 5 o'clock right before S comes home because it's easier, but I keep reminding myself that I'm also lil s's father and perhaps having her sit around in damp urine isn't the best thing even if it's the easiest thing. A lesson that it seems I'll be learning for the rest of my life.
And yes, I did put her top sweater on over her head inside out. And because she screamed during the process, babies have giant heads, I left her in the inside out shirt, which, being inside out, sort of bunched up a bit and pretty much looked like an inside out belly shirt. I did wind up changing her after three hours or so because even my fashion alarm was going off.
11:20-11:30 Nap. Can it be called a nap if my child spends ten minutes in her room. I think she slept. I don't know. She decided that it would be more fun to yell at the ceiling. Perhaps I should try it myself someday.
Interpolation: The opening to the DFW posthumously published book "The Pale King."
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Afternoon-Spent alternating on A-F in one fashion or another.
Interpolation:
From the autobiography of Mark Twain
Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.
2:30-Whenever.
We're off. Rest cheek against smooth forehead. Marvel at the half-moon fingernails that dig into skin. Watch strawberry blond hair rise like wheat before harvest. Catch deep blue eyes and smile.
7:15 The noises from the other room stop, and I go back to sleep.
Am I a poor parent for letting her shout and gurgle at the ceiling for thirty minutes? Or was I actually doing her a favor, helping her to develop the ability to "self-soothe?" You'll hear people say self-soothe a lot if you have a child. Or was I helping her to become more autonomous in a world that verily demands it? Or was I just tired from getting home from work at 12:30 and would have slept through anything short of a natural disaster?
Interpolation: From comments by sixth-grade science students on proposed changes to tobacco labeling with graphic images.
The least effective one is the feet with the label on it because some people might say "it's just feet they won't kill you."
The one that doesn't work is the picture with the little kid crying. It's just a baby crying. I mean, babies cry all the time so that won't work.
The one that is most effective is the one with the bald macho guy with the beard and shirt with the No Smoking logo because teenagers like macho truck drivers.
The one with the person injecting nicotine in his baby is bad because it's a cartoon and nobody takes cartoons seriously.
8 A.M. s awakes. Do we:
a) Read a book together while I prop her up against the couch. (I've noticed that she likes the longer books rather than the typical little kid board books. She is possibly a genius, or maybe just incapable of seeing over the larger books and therefore forced to look at them more intently.
b) Lie down on the ground and attempt to eat animals that are dangling above her. (I've noticed that this toy has become less effective today, and I'm worried that it's because s has decided to become a vegetarian).
c) Sit up on her bumbo and select various toys to pick up and shove in her mouth. (This whole process can be frustrating to watch because she doesn't exactly have the greatest motor skills, so it's hard not to just put the toy practically in her mouth in the first place to avoid watching her try to figure out how to pick something up).
d) Sit with daddy and exchange smiles and noises. (She seems to have the least patience for this activity. After all these years spent honing my conversational skills it turns out that to my baby I'm incredibly boring).
e) Change diaper.
f) Give her the bottle.
8-9 Some combination of the above.
9-10 We take naps.
10:00 I decide to change her out of her sleeper. I've debated only changing her at 5 o'clock right before S comes home because it's easier, but I keep reminding myself that I'm also lil s's father and perhaps having her sit around in damp urine isn't the best thing even if it's the easiest thing. A lesson that it seems I'll be learning for the rest of my life.
And yes, I did put her top sweater on over her head inside out. And because she screamed during the process, babies have giant heads, I left her in the inside out shirt, which, being inside out, sort of bunched up a bit and pretty much looked like an inside out belly shirt. I did wind up changing her after three hours or so because even my fashion alarm was going off.
11:20-11:30 Nap. Can it be called a nap if my child spends ten minutes in her room. I think she slept. I don't know. She decided that it would be more fun to yell at the ceiling. Perhaps I should try it myself someday.
Interpolation: The opening to the DFW posthumously published book "The Pale King."
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Afternoon-Spent alternating on A-F in one fashion or another.
Interpolation:
From the autobiography of Mark Twain
Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.
2:30-Whenever.
We're off. Rest cheek against smooth forehead. Marvel at the half-moon fingernails that dig into skin. Watch strawberry blond hair rise like wheat before harvest. Catch deep blue eyes and smile.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Day one of daddy day care
I'm thinking that if I can just get Eddie Murphy and either John Travolta or Arnold (whatever) to participate as well I could probably have my own reality television show. Either that or if I had a twin brother or something. Or maybe just if my brother lived here, and I tweeted a lot and knew lots of stuff about handbags like the difference between a purse and a handbag and maybe if I was dating a professional athlete like Danica Patrick or that one volleyball lady who's name is Gabi or something, then I think we might really have a fantastic reality television show on our hands about dads who have famous wives taking care of their babies, which would mostly consist of putting Oxi clean (sp?) on crapped on clothes and practicing how to blow bubbles with the lil un's. We would probably set the show in the south and I'd have the sort of accent where lil un's is totally appropriate to say.
5:23 A.M. A baby cries in the distance. I roll over to see S leaving the room and walking into a hallway of light.
5:45 A.M. S returns, and I put on my glasses ready to hop into action like Clark Kent. She mumbles something about me needing to rest and her sister taking care of Sadie. I oblige.
6:43 A.M. The child is put down for a nap. I spend the next few moments in bed staring at the ceiling and contemplating this odd feeling of loss. You see, we creatures, or perhaps just most of us, are ones of habit. So, as I lay in bed beneath the ceiling fan trying to piece together what the gilded bits at the base of the fan were (either: tulips, a crown, a man hung on a cross with Modiglianiesque arms) I felt a heavy sort of sadness settling into the still dark room. As it turns out, I was going to miss going to work at the normal time. I was going to miss the normal little life that I'd carved out for myself. The wife, the baby, the yard, the fence, the job. Isn't life about getting ducks in a row? And now here someone had come along to kick the ducks over, or so it seemed. And then I felt guilty because how could I feel sad about taking care of sweet lil s? Luckily human beings are also, evolutionarily speaking, great creatures at adapting, and so I can already know with certainty that I'll have developed some schedule with il s that I will be sad to see go months or years from now, and perhaps I'll spend that morning wondering about the shapes at the base of the ceiling fan, while the monitor buzzes on, sounding like a wave from the California coastline of my past that never recedes.
7:30 The little one awakes all smiles.
7:30-5:45 P.M.
I spend time with s. It's strange to spend time with a little being who's raison d'etre seems to be picking up various objects and then gnawing on them for a few seconds. This leads to a game where I pull her up to a sitting position and then as she pulls my knuckle towards her gaping maw I pull it away at the last second leaving her to suck on her own boring fingers. And okay, so the highlight of this period time is watching her frantically bobbing head as she tries to decide which small toy to pick up and shove in her mouth. After which, the gentle gnawing, she generally starts breathing heavily and may emit a sigh, as if the mere act of deciding which to shove in one's mouth is incredibly stressful, and I start to worry about her heart rate and cholesterol and wonder whether we should ask our doctor for some meds to make sure she's in good health in her sixties. Also, she blows bubbles, or raspberries or whatever, which creates a thick sheen of drool on any shirt and one of her three chins. It's a good time for all.
8:30-9:30 Attempt to help kindly visitor with her son as she prepares to leave. Fail. The child seems distressed at my attempts to keep him amused though he immediately grins at me as though I'm his long lost old friend as soon as his mother picks him up. I try not to take it too personally.
9:30 More raspberries, inane yelling, and bottle feeding.
11:00 Nap.
11:00
I decide that I need to continue my workout regimen at home. Google home workouts. Come up with the Spartan workout from 300. The video is two minutes worth of exercises followed by one minute of the guy doing the demo posing shirtless. I make note on the Youtube video that I found the first two minutes more useful than the last bit. I'm not sure that I can spend 1 third of my workout just posing with my shirt off because it doesn't seem like it would keep you in very good shape.
Exercise-It turns out I can't do one-armed push ups. Also, I find an old pipe, much to S's imminent displeasure who will make a cease and desist order as soon as she reads this, upon which I can do pull ups but not without ramming my head into the ceiling and the pull ups aren't quite all the way and the pipes are incredibly dusty, and I'm fairly certain that a brown recluse has been waiting years for just this moment, but I do them anyway, cheating death yet again while occasionally slamming my head into the ceiling.
12:00 Hi baby.
1:15 Nap.
nap. Now is my chance to make good on the day. I move laundry over, for S, if it were up to me we'd do one load every three months or so like I did in college, though lil s seems to need her clothes washed more frequently probably due to incontinence. Then I go outside and water our red maple, which pretty much just looks like a Charlie Brown tree at this point, no leaves to speak of, and the feckless (a word I love) workers who put it in (though one could point out that I could have probably bought and put in a tree myself) haven't delivered the bag that's supposed to go at its base, and so I'm watering it with the hose and wondering how soon until it dies like those azaleas from last year, and as much as I like gardens I think I should probably switch over to the rock variety.
2:05 Hi baby.
3:15 nap Note: Sort of. Closer to 3:30.
By this point in the day I've got the whole nap thing down. As soon as she even whimpers I take her upstairs, wrap her in a green blanket, and shove her pacifier in. The kid loves it. I remember a trip from a few weeks ago when I couldn't set her down without screaming and about how I almost went crazy and was pretty much certain that I couldn't do the whole taking care of the kid thing (of course she's interrupting this now with crying for the first time today and I'm reminded that pride cometh before the fall) and was contemplating evening jobs and cut rate workers from obscure foreign countries. But I guess I'm just going to take care of the little gal and get used to spitting raspberries and relearning my ABC's, and all that sort of stuff that a parent does when they have a child.
5:23 A.M. A baby cries in the distance. I roll over to see S leaving the room and walking into a hallway of light.
5:45 A.M. S returns, and I put on my glasses ready to hop into action like Clark Kent. She mumbles something about me needing to rest and her sister taking care of Sadie. I oblige.
6:43 A.M. The child is put down for a nap. I spend the next few moments in bed staring at the ceiling and contemplating this odd feeling of loss. You see, we creatures, or perhaps just most of us, are ones of habit. So, as I lay in bed beneath the ceiling fan trying to piece together what the gilded bits at the base of the fan were (either: tulips, a crown, a man hung on a cross with Modiglianiesque arms) I felt a heavy sort of sadness settling into the still dark room. As it turns out, I was going to miss going to work at the normal time. I was going to miss the normal little life that I'd carved out for myself. The wife, the baby, the yard, the fence, the job. Isn't life about getting ducks in a row? And now here someone had come along to kick the ducks over, or so it seemed. And then I felt guilty because how could I feel sad about taking care of sweet lil s? Luckily human beings are also, evolutionarily speaking, great creatures at adapting, and so I can already know with certainty that I'll have developed some schedule with il s that I will be sad to see go months or years from now, and perhaps I'll spend that morning wondering about the shapes at the base of the ceiling fan, while the monitor buzzes on, sounding like a wave from the California coastline of my past that never recedes.
7:30 The little one awakes all smiles.
7:30-5:45 P.M.
I spend time with s. It's strange to spend time with a little being who's raison d'etre seems to be picking up various objects and then gnawing on them for a few seconds. This leads to a game where I pull her up to a sitting position and then as she pulls my knuckle towards her gaping maw I pull it away at the last second leaving her to suck on her own boring fingers. And okay, so the highlight of this period time is watching her frantically bobbing head as she tries to decide which small toy to pick up and shove in her mouth. After which, the gentle gnawing, she generally starts breathing heavily and may emit a sigh, as if the mere act of deciding which to shove in one's mouth is incredibly stressful, and I start to worry about her heart rate and cholesterol and wonder whether we should ask our doctor for some meds to make sure she's in good health in her sixties. Also, she blows bubbles, or raspberries or whatever, which creates a thick sheen of drool on any shirt and one of her three chins. It's a good time for all.
8:30-9:30 Attempt to help kindly visitor with her son as she prepares to leave. Fail. The child seems distressed at my attempts to keep him amused though he immediately grins at me as though I'm his long lost old friend as soon as his mother picks him up. I try not to take it too personally.
9:30 More raspberries, inane yelling, and bottle feeding.
11:00 Nap.
11:00
I decide that I need to continue my workout regimen at home. Google home workouts. Come up with the Spartan workout from 300. The video is two minutes worth of exercises followed by one minute of the guy doing the demo posing shirtless. I make note on the Youtube video that I found the first two minutes more useful than the last bit. I'm not sure that I can spend 1 third of my workout just posing with my shirt off because it doesn't seem like it would keep you in very good shape.
Exercise-It turns out I can't do one-armed push ups. Also, I find an old pipe, much to S's imminent displeasure who will make a cease and desist order as soon as she reads this, upon which I can do pull ups but not without ramming my head into the ceiling and the pull ups aren't quite all the way and the pipes are incredibly dusty, and I'm fairly certain that a brown recluse has been waiting years for just this moment, but I do them anyway, cheating death yet again while occasionally slamming my head into the ceiling.
12:00 Hi baby.
1:15 Nap.
nap. Now is my chance to make good on the day. I move laundry over, for S, if it were up to me we'd do one load every three months or so like I did in college, though lil s seems to need her clothes washed more frequently probably due to incontinence. Then I go outside and water our red maple, which pretty much just looks like a Charlie Brown tree at this point, no leaves to speak of, and the feckless (a word I love) workers who put it in (though one could point out that I could have probably bought and put in a tree myself) haven't delivered the bag that's supposed to go at its base, and so I'm watering it with the hose and wondering how soon until it dies like those azaleas from last year, and as much as I like gardens I think I should probably switch over to the rock variety.
2:05 Hi baby.
3:15 nap Note: Sort of. Closer to 3:30.
By this point in the day I've got the whole nap thing down. As soon as she even whimpers I take her upstairs, wrap her in a green blanket, and shove her pacifier in. The kid loves it. I remember a trip from a few weeks ago when I couldn't set her down without screaming and about how I almost went crazy and was pretty much certain that I couldn't do the whole taking care of the kid thing (of course she's interrupting this now with crying for the first time today and I'm reminded that pride cometh before the fall) and was contemplating evening jobs and cut rate workers from obscure foreign countries. But I guess I'm just going to take care of the little gal and get used to spitting raspberries and relearning my ABC's, and all that sort of stuff that a parent does when they have a child.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Let's talk about the dead
I jest. Certainly discussing those who have passed, God willing, from this life into the next are best left to their own devices. That said, I read an interesting article this week in one of my magazines that quoted extensively from the autobio by Mark Twain. I must confess herein that I haven't actually read anything by Twain. I listened to Tom Sawyer, but I'm not sure that an audio book counts the same as reading it. Even though I heard every word, I'm still not sure that the experience itself is similar. Anyhow, enough dithering about, it's time to read quotes by people who are not me.
From a sign at a Tea Party rally
Is so read the
Constitution
As Americans we do not
have the right;
To a house
To a car
To an education
Americans have a right
to per sue (sic) happiness
not to have it given to
them!
Noted that the sign, accusing folks of cultural illiteracy, actually mistakes the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence where the pursuit of happiness line actually appears.
Chance that an American benefits from at least one government antipoverty project 1/6
Average annual income of an Englishman living at the start of the Black Death, adjusted for inflation: 1,300
Of a Haitian at the start of the current cholera epidemic: 659
Number of American soldiers who died in combat last year: 455
Minimum number who committed suicide: 407
Number of states that have applied for funding under the 2010 Affordable Care Act: 50
Number that have joined a lawsuit challenging the act's constitutionality: 26
From internal reports about FBI agents behaving badly:
During a polygraph investigation, and employee acknowledged conducting unauthorized searches on FBI databases and sharing information with coworkers. For example, the employee searched FBI databases for information on public celebrities the employee thought were "hot." Note: Isn't this just checking IMDB?
For my friend Mark on the difference between hipsters and scenesters:
"A hipster is somebody who cares about the music. They're really cool looking, and I guess they shop at thrift stores. They're do it yourself and very heavily invested in the indie music scene. A scenester is somebody who does it for the fashion and gets their clothes at, like, Urban Outfitters and pays 200 for a pair of jeans, which I think is ridiculous, but that's just me"--Betty 22.
Pabst Blue Ribbon. That's the hipster beer. Theres't that with everything. It's exhausting, absolutely exhausting. And that's why I don't try to keep up with it. If I was sitting here right now, and I had girls' jeans on, and a funky haircut, and was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon all the time, and getting import copies of Swedish psychobilly folk noise pop, whatever the hell, and reading David Sedaris(note: Not too crazy about Sedaris myself. He's good, but so are lots of writers) and watching obscure samurai trash cult movies, if I was going for this just way obscure, cooler than you in ever possible conceivable way kind of thing, I just wouldn't really feel like myself anymore.--Chris 20.
Fiction From Life in Three Houses by Edourad Leve
You used to read dictionaries like other people read novels. Each entry is a character, you'd say that might be encountered under another rubric. Plots, many of them, would form during the random reading. The story changes according to the order in which the entries are read. A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow one another, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain ressurects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.
Also, Sadie has long pieces of hair that stick straight up in the back. She looks like Dennis the Menace. First full day with her tomorrow.
From a sign at a Tea Party rally
Is so read the
Constitution
As Americans we do not
have the right;
To a house
To a car
To an education
Americans have a right
to per sue (sic) happiness
not to have it given to
them!
Noted that the sign, accusing folks of cultural illiteracy, actually mistakes the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence where the pursuit of happiness line actually appears.
Chance that an American benefits from at least one government antipoverty project 1/6
Average annual income of an Englishman living at the start of the Black Death, adjusted for inflation: 1,300
Of a Haitian at the start of the current cholera epidemic: 659
Number of American soldiers who died in combat last year: 455
Minimum number who committed suicide: 407
Number of states that have applied for funding under the 2010 Affordable Care Act: 50
Number that have joined a lawsuit challenging the act's constitutionality: 26
From internal reports about FBI agents behaving badly:
During a polygraph investigation, and employee acknowledged conducting unauthorized searches on FBI databases and sharing information with coworkers. For example, the employee searched FBI databases for information on public celebrities the employee thought were "hot." Note: Isn't this just checking IMDB?
For my friend Mark on the difference between hipsters and scenesters:
"A hipster is somebody who cares about the music. They're really cool looking, and I guess they shop at thrift stores. They're do it yourself and very heavily invested in the indie music scene. A scenester is somebody who does it for the fashion and gets their clothes at, like, Urban Outfitters and pays 200 for a pair of jeans, which I think is ridiculous, but that's just me"--Betty 22.
Pabst Blue Ribbon. That's the hipster beer. Theres't that with everything. It's exhausting, absolutely exhausting. And that's why I don't try to keep up with it. If I was sitting here right now, and I had girls' jeans on, and a funky haircut, and was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon all the time, and getting import copies of Swedish psychobilly folk noise pop, whatever the hell, and reading David Sedaris(note: Not too crazy about Sedaris myself. He's good, but so are lots of writers) and watching obscure samurai trash cult movies, if I was going for this just way obscure, cooler than you in ever possible conceivable way kind of thing, I just wouldn't really feel like myself anymore.--Chris 20.
Fiction From Life in Three Houses by Edourad Leve
You used to read dictionaries like other people read novels. Each entry is a character, you'd say that might be encountered under another rubric. Plots, many of them, would form during the random reading. The story changes according to the order in which the entries are read. A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow one another, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain ressurects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.
Also, Sadie has long pieces of hair that stick straight up in the back. She looks like Dennis the Menace. First full day with her tomorrow.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Drinking advice for new parents
We have a visitor staying with us right now. A kindly visitor who also has a nine-month lil guy of her own. No worries, we've already taken the requisite cousins of different genders sitting naked in the bathtub. The sort of thing that is incredibly embarrassing for the children and yet the parents trot it out at every occasion because they can't get over how cute their little offspring once were, the ungrateful curs.
Anyhow after completing an Olympic round of trying to put lil s to bed. I'm glad that our kindly visitor shared my feeling that it takes roughly fifteen to twenty minutes of being screamed at by an infant to begin to start having insane thoughts. And, let it be said, yes, it is sad that those five good hours you just spent with your little ball of joy don't measure up. If someone asked you how your day went your response would rightly be, "Oh, it was tough," as though the five hours of mostly playing and giggling didn't even exist. The same sort of thing rings true for most of life and is either maladaptive or evolutionarily useful for an undisclosed reason.
We sat down to a nice dinner prepared by S and decided to have a couple of glasses of wine. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes two glasses of damn near full glasses of wine were spilled across our place mats, table, floor and computers. I only regret that it didn't reach the play mat because then Sadie would have gotten a fun surprise when she set about shoving it in her mouth as she does with almost everything now.
Side note. I want to remind parents to drink copious amounts of water. Remember that study they did a few years back that said we should drink like seven gallons of water a day. Well, it was wrong, but you still should load up on water. Why? Because parents generally start the day extremely tired from a night of waking up on and off and thus have a cup or two of coffee. Then, by the end of the day, when the child has finally drifted off into peaceful sleep, the ingrate, you can't wait to have some wine. Anyhow, just remind parents to drink water because I'm pretty sure we've got a whole bunch of dehydrated people wandering around the city pushing strollers like zombies.
The point is just this for all parents. I'll probably include this in my parenting book. All parents should be drinking hard alcohol. Why? Because it's not going to stain anything, and it gets the job of taking some of the edge off the day faster than wine anyway. So put away that ten dollar bottle of wine you got at Whole Foods and pour yourself a nice glass of gin. Sure it tastes like pine trees, but don't we use them as air fresheners in cars? We must love the scent of pine.
Or sit back in the old television watching chair and have a nice glass of vodka. This will also help you understand famous Russian writers with long last names. I really don't see a downside to this plan. The only down side is new parents continuing to drink red wine until they've stained every part of their house. So, a call to alcohol, the clear kind, the good kind.
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