|
|
||
|
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
|
I have not felt much like posting, or even writing, lately. I go to work. I come home. I read. I play with Nora. I go to bed early. I get upset about stuff. Who knows what is going on, just moodiness or summertime ennui or what, but I feel all sensitive and exposed right now. I read terrorist! danger! stories! and I unspool apocalypse scenarios in my head. I get curious about the ugly-ass, falling-apart, ghettotastic townhome that is for sale one block over from us, the one where toothless babushka women hold a permanent yard sale consisting of rags and broken toys. I look for the listing online, and I find out that the asking price for this HIDEOUS PILE OF SHIT is three hundred thousand dollars, or in other words a whole lot more than we paid for our place, and I get really angry. (One could argue that I should be really happy instead, as this would seem to indicate our house has astronomically increased in value, but it just makes me angry.) I see the most adorable twin boys ever on the train. They are so adorable. Looking at them makes your blood turn rainbow colors, your heart get glittery, and your medulla oblongata assume the shape of a Care Bear. They are the styling type of little black toddlers, with matching overalls and striped t-shirts, and they are holding hands and kneeling on the El seats and counting stuff on the train, fucking it up in the cutest way possible ("one...two...eight...four..."), and poking each other and laughing and just generally being really sweet and smile-inducing and heartwarming.
Their mother (I assume) wore headphones and ignored them. Oh wait, no she didn't. That actually would have been preferable. She merely said, "Shut up!" every time they said anything. Anything. Their counting, their giggling, their little toddler-speak observations about the train were all answered with "shhh" or "shut up." I put my own headphones on so that I wouldn't be tempted to beat myself unconscious against the train window, but the damage had already been done and my ridiculous, over-empathetic, irrational tears came anyway. What a motherfucking joy to be crying before I even get to work, that sure lets me know it is going to be a great day. Why do these kids have to shut up? Why? Smacking your children around is unquestionably bad, and child abuse often goes unreported. However, it does get reported, and then people step in and try to fix things, and in the best-case scenario the child learns that his or her parents were wrong to do that. Things like TELLING YOUR COUNTING TODDLER TO SHUT UP make me want to scream because there is no number to call, no community outrage to share. There is just the slow death or serious wounding of yet another kid's happy self-expression, and I know that sounds melodramatic but what can I tell you. I have had a melodramatic couple of days. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE 1. Weirdly, my cranky Weltschmerz does not seem to have spilled over into my home life. Although LT has been working too much (and too late, so that by the time he gets to bed I have been asleep for hours, and will often wake halfway up solely in order to say something strange and baffling to him), things are nice. Nora has learned to say "no." She has been shaking her head "no" for months but now she says the word more and more, and it is the cutest, sweetest, gentlest little French-inflected (where in the world does her accent come from?) "no" you ever heard. It will probably be less cute when she gets older, and when she is saying "no" to mean "no, I won't do something perfectly reasonable like put on my shoes, you horrible mommy" or "no, you cannot borrow ten bucks from my babysitting money," but right now "no" usually gets trotted out when I start singing her a song. "No" is often followed by "cookie," by which Nora means "it occurs to me that I have not heard the song 'C Is For Cookie' in the last twenty-five minutes or so. Please sing that instead of your selection." 2. I saw a really cool dead rat in the street yesterday---the totally flattened, no-organic-matter-left kind of dead rat. I love that kind. It reminded me of how my mom and I used to press flowers between the pages of our family's big unabridged dictionary, only if instead of a dictionary and violets we had used a truck, the road, and a rat. 3. I got in some quality snarking the other day when an acquaintance, who was only twenty-five percent kidding (if that), said something about instructing her daughter in "the womanly arts." I asked, "Huh? Menstruation is an art now?" It was not that funny but I could not let a phrase like "the womanly arts," even if used semi-ironically, go unchallenged. 4. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. (No reason for the Finnegan's Wake quote here except that I like it. And that it is fun to give the spellchecker a workout every once in a while.) ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, LINKS VERSION I danced around with glee (literally) after reading about this old orange. Today I watched this for a very long time. So long a time, in fact, that I am not going to tell you exactly how long a time, because it is too embarrassing. This is a good book about the alphabet, and I also recently enjoyed Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, which may surprise you since it seems like just the kind of book I always bitch about. But there was something I really liked about the characters, and the way the story was told in such plain, yet evocative, language. She also has a deft hand when it comes to the narrative passage of time. I am not sure why Jesus in a bottle makes me laugh so much. Like it's not enough to be crucified, you have to be crucified in a biosphere! Or something. More religious misguidedness: a children's book about the godlike substance that comes out of your nose. ---mimi smartypants has secular snot. back/forward |
