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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2004-03-01 ... 10:25 a.m.

THE FIRST WORD OUT OF MY MOUTH THIS MORNING

Was "fuck." Not "Hello Monday! Today will be a special day!" Not "Hey baby, let's do it 5 am style" (which would be totally lost on LT as he is in no way coherent at my getting-up hour of the morning, but if I took matters into my own hands [uh, so to speak] I'm sure I could get it done). Not even a superstitious "Rabbit rabbit," to celebrate the beginning of March (the imperative month!) Just a hoarse, muttered "fuck" as I scraped myself off the ceiling and tried to put my skin back on. My clock radio had somehow gotten turned up to maximum volume (I blame either Nora or the cleaning lady), so instead of a soft muttering of soothing NPR voices I woke up to the blaring nasal faux-drawl of George W. Bush saying, "and I'll tell you another thing" and that is all I heard before my heart gave out. Luckily one of my agonal convulsive flailings managed to hit the "off" button, so that was the only Smirking Chimp quote I had to deal with, but still.

SPRING FEVER

Okay, fess up, who gave my baby crack yesterday? I really have to compliment you on your timing---slipping her the drugs at 6 am on a Sunday, when I had gotten home at 2:30 that morning after one of my increasingly infrequent nights out drinking and dancing, was genius. Nora first decided to perform a 200-wpm monologue in her crib at dawn, loud and clear over the baby monitor. Baby-babble is fine and kind of cute but this quickly turned into babababababablah blahblaaaaaaaaaEEEEEE! EEEEEE! EEEEE! EEEEE! as she reached extreme-high-frequency registers in an attempt to communicate with the dolphins that live in her mind. There was no sleeping through that. Weekend mornings belong to me, since LT handles the Morning Nora every single weekday, so I spat some small furry dead animals out of my mouth (noting that they tasted faintly of Old Style), splashed cold water on my face to wipe away the worst of the mascara-mess, and retrieved Little Miss Hyperactive from her crib. During breakfast she hurled her sippy cup to the floor repeatedly, shoved a block of tofu in her ear, and continued her meth-psychosis babbling and shrieking. Playing in the living room did not go well either, as she could not settle down to do anything in particular and was mostly interested in testing the limits of the Great Leap Forward in her motor skills development. I used to be able to walk to the kitchen and back, to retrieve the newspaper or my tea, before Nora could toddle any distance after me. Yesterday I tried to do the same and holy shit, she is right behind me. By 9:30 am I was (inadvertently) waking up LT as I threw on pants and stuffed a protesting Nora into her hoodie and subsequently into her stroller, because an emergency trip to the park was the only thing I could think of to do. Of course, about four blocks later Nora was sound asleep in the stroller, so this superfun springtime outing turned into nothing but a nice long walk for me. The whole plan backfired in a big way when Nora decided that the Stroller Nap had fixed her up nicely, and there was no need for a proper afternoon nap in her crib when we got home, thank you very much, so the cycle of babbling and screeching was repeated when I tried to put her down.

Dr. Sears and his band of attachment-parenting groupies will no doubt come and throw me in Bad Mommy Jail for saying this, but: Even though Nora was decidedly not into the nap idea, she stayed in the crib for an hour in an attempt to get her to chill the fuck out. While I never let her cry, there is a huge difference between in-need-of-comfort crying and simple kvetching. I know all of the Nora Noises intimately, and what she was doing on Sunday afternoon was 100% pure bitching and crabbing that she had to do something as uncool as take a nap. She never did settle down, and after an hour I gave up and we had a snack and continued on with our slightly frenetic day (the crack did wear off eventually), but I refuse to apologize for forcing my kid to have an hour of Alone Time.

No place to put this, but here is a very interesting and detailed article about the administrative disorganization on September 11.

WEEKEND WRAPUP

Auto show notwithstanding, I did finally get interviewed for local television about this web page* and it was, as expected, very weird. Lights and cameras and the reporter all crowded into my very cluttered home office, or as LT calls it "The Museum Of Broken Computers," since he has approximately eight boxes in various stages of cannibalized disrepair strewn about the floor. To say nothing of the routers and wires and little blinking lights that do god knows what.

*File under "Whoa, Back Up A Second": A television interview about a web page. Our lives are hopelessly mediated. All these screens and bits and pixels. It makes you want to start rubbing up against people, smelling their crotches, I don't know, something. Something else.

I will not tell anyone when this interview will air because I sounded like an idiot. Maybe the editors can edit and spin and make me sound like less of an idiot, but I will not count on it. Interviewers are sort of like therapists in a way---if you listen carefully you can discern what they WANT you to say, and if you are me you can stubbornly, obstinately, refuse to say it. Yesterday the reporter really wanted me to say that Mimi Smartypants was a persona that I adopted when writing. He tried to ask the question several ways, postulating that I sit down at my computer, say magic words, and POOF! I am Mimi Smartypants! to which I was like, Look, I have a lot of problems but multiple personality disorder is not one of them. In my day-to-day life I do not crack wise quite as often as I do here on the page, and surprisingly I think I swear less in person. But I do not, Incredible-Hulk-style, change into any particular Smartypants persona (what would that be, anyway?) in order to update.

LT and I did not have a chance to locate a big fat native Hawaiian guy before this interview. This was the plan the night before, when I was getting nervous and thinking that I wanted to call the whole thing off, we wanted to call up a big fat native Hawaiian guy and have him come and be "Mimi Smartypants." But alas, no time, and no talent agency of big fat native Hawaiian guys on 24-hour call. If there were, I would certainly be on the phone with them right now and hiring a big fat native Hawaiian guy to pretend to be me during this week's proposed radio interview with BBC Scotland, as that is also something I am dreading, oh woe is me fame sucks let me go whine about it to Barbara Walters, right? I'm such a stupid ho. But seriously, in some ways I am looking forward to the day when the (very minor) hubbub about my weblog-turned-book dies down.

For hubbub on a more local level, see Jason Pettus crab about how people come to his site from Google searches for my name. Because there is nothing funnier than an irked Pettus, please be my guest to make at least one Google search a day for things like "Mimi Smartypants is way cooler than Jason Pettus" and so forth.

JESUS, I'M WAY OVER MY WORD LIMIT HERE

Last night I dreamed that when you were almost out of deodorant, a lovely B-flat warning chime would sound as you "turned base to raise product" (as they say).

---mimi smartypants is strong enough for a man but pH-balanced for a woman.

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