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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


2004-03-23 ... 11:33 a.m.

FIRST, THE SELF-INDULGENT BABY PHOTO.

I call this Toddler + Cat: Unrequited Love.

My office stocks a brand of mailing envelopes called "Survivor." Remember that.

I spent yesterday deep in the grip of green tea psychosis, because I was hopping around the mood-altering game board (ages 12 and up) and jumped right over the square called Just Enough To Stay Awake And Be Productive. Instead I landed on the Caffeine Twitchiness And Really Crazy Oblique Associations square, which gives you an extra turn! Which you will inevitably squander by instead typing eight hundred words about the connections between Florida death-metal and Romantic poetry, or about an idea for a platypus-related media installation you want to make, or about the dream you had where you and your husband were trying to make a movie in a graveyard where a head of red cabbage rides past the camera on a bicycle. (The cabbage kept falling off the bike seat, and we had to do take after take after take.)

So that was my mental and physical state when I noticed the "Survivor" envelopes. Then I went to a meeting, and although I did my best to concentrate and participate, half my brain was busy choreographing a dance piece set to "Eye of the Tiger" (by the band SURVIVOR), where the dancers run around waving these envelopes. I even had a big dramatic show-choir knee-slide at the part with the wailed "eyeeeeeeeeeeee! of the tiger," and flashing lights during the staccato chords afterwards. Then I came to my senses and just in time, because it was the worst idea ever. Sometimes I like to imagine that there is a Mister-Burns-style trapdoor in my brain, and I can just open it and send the stupid ideas plummeting, down to my stomach, to be dissolved by gastric juices. Medieval concepts of anatomy are so much fun.

Speaking of big ideas, Nora can now say that something is "yum yum" or alternatively that it is "blah." Nora also can shake her head "no" and, more rarely, do an odd stiff entire-upper-body nod for "yes." Nora Knows Binary. Nora can now be safely raised in the Western intellectual tradition, at least until she reads some book on Zen in the eighth grade and starts to fancy herself a Buddhist, irritating us with koans at the dinner table.

It is strange to think about your child's future like that. Right now I have a hard time imagining Nora being any age other than her walking, babbling, mercurial toddler self, but of course there is much more to come. On the one hand I will be excited to watch her read and discover and pass through all those weird and confusing identity stages. On the other I think I will have to really work at not rolling my eyes and laughing at her during that period (at least not openly), since I remember ALL TOO CLEARLY my own many wrongheaded and adolescent ideas about life, coupled with passionate declarations about The Way I Am. Sometimes and LT and I have to work at not laughing at her right now, actually. I by no means want to encourage Nora's (very occasional) tantrums, but there is something sadly hilarious about the nanosecond shift between happy toddler and scrunched-up-face, pouty-mouthed, screaming and sobbing toddler, all precipitated by something innocent like me trying to turn the page of a book before she is ready, and there is something even more bittersweet-funny about her little tearstained head waggling back and forth in a "no no no no no no" when I say, "oh you are angry and sad, maybe you need a nap."

LT and I occasionally joke about putting together a parody of Reader's Digest just for this overdramatic toddler stage, complete with True Tales Of Toddler Survival like "THEY WIPED MY FACE!" or "MY DIAPER-CHANGING ORDEAL." Do you remember Reader's Digest? It is the shittiest magazine in the world but everyone I meet seems to have some childhood story relating to it---how they would read it at the dentist and try to memorize the jokes or whatever. My grandparents had tons of back issues of Reader's Digest, and whenever I was at their house I would go through them specifically for the Survival! stories of bear attacks or near-drownings or plane crashes, and I would read them in the spare bedroom and get all weirdly turned on. I was a perverted child with a first-aid fetish. Now I am a perverted adult, but these days it takes more than some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or improvised arm splints to get me going.

Recent financial and bankular and cashtonic factors have combined to make me very, very cranky today, and neither payday nor my tax refund can come soon enough. I know that in the grand scheme of things I have less to complain about than most people, but it is hard to remember that when the bills keep coming and March keeps being an exceptionally long month. Spring forward, please. Now.

---mimi smartypants is smitten with geometric forms.

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