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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
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Last week was our two-year anniversary of what many people call "Gotcha Day" and what I have decided just to call "Adoption Day." I'm not foaming at the mouth over the "Gotcha" terminology, but it does seem a little acquisitive, like your child was a prize you managed to snag with that big joystick-controlled claw, three tries for a dollar. For us, the day we met Nora and the day everything was made official were the same day, so "Adoption Day" works just fine. Besides---"gotcha"? Why should adopting make us lose all grammar and diction? I remember explaining my slight unease with "Gotcha" to LT, while we were still doing the paperwork, and he confessed that he had not thought of it in terms of grabbiness/materialism, but rather in terms of a practical joke. Guess what, little Chinese baby---GOTCHA! You're going to live with these crazy white people from now on! We did not do much to mark the day other than look at the photo albums and her little bitty baby clothes (Nora is somewhat alarmed by the split pants that she was wearing at adoption, albeit on top of a diaper and under a pink fleecy sleeper thing). We did go out for a Chinatown lunch at Lao Szechuan, and ate so much delicious food that I wished they had supplied wheelchairs to get you out the door. Nora, eschewing chopsticks:
And just generally looking pleasant:
OTHER STUFF 1. If you are sick of the rat race and want to go into business for yourself, like maybe by opening a home-based corndog stand, you will need a corndog fryer. The catalog copy includes the startling information that "the Hot Dog and Sausage Council says that any Hot Dog 7" (18 cm) or longer can be called a foot long." That is just not right. Rage against the hot dog machine! 2. I would make a terrible football announcer because I tend to get all hung up on players' names. Recently I have taken to shouting "OGUNLEYE!" whenever I am about to do something great, and to using "Darnell Dinkins!" as a mild curse. 3. On Saturday I went to what I've been calling "wacky yoga"---the kundalini class with the chanting and the asanas designed to open your third eye. At the end everyone was chilling out in child pose and the teacher put on some music, your basic New Age-sounding whateverness with drums and flutes and a woman singing about intuition and whatnot. Then there was an instrumental part and they used a voiceover of the guru guy imparting some wisdom, like a spoken-word guru interlude, and I almost started cracking up inside my self-made child-pose cocoon because he sounded a bit like Apu on helium. I am sure he was a great man but it was not the wisest meditation-music choice to have Yoda the Yogi just start talking in the middle of the song. 4. Recently finished books: Emma's War, the story of a delusional, self-involved twit who starts off as an African relief worker and ends up marrying a Sudanese warlord. I was so annoyed with Emma McCune that I couldn't really enjoy the book, but I felt vindicated that the author seemed to have a similarly low opinion of her (at least by the end). I also read Out, which was really fun in that thriller-with-a-forgone-conclusion way, and am now continuing the hard-boiled Japanese thing with Almost Transparent Blue. So far it is kind of shock-boring, like Bret Easton Ellis with a head full of Novocain, and there is entirely too much puking. But I am only fifty pages in so maybe all the gang-raping and heroin-overdosing will turn out to have a point, who knows. 5. Things Nora has (cheerfully) requested in the past week: a puppy, a hedgehog, popcorn, "football on the TV," sunshine, snow, bunk beds, a "wooden snake," bread for feeding the ducks, "privacy," more Incredible Hulk tattoos, gummi worms, Swedish fish, a magic-marker face drawn on her banana�s peel, a band-aid, stilts, repeated readings of this very odd book, a look at my "fuzzy vagina" (request denied), a hammer (she stridently insisted that she NEEDED it but could not explain why), and for the whole family to sit under a blanket making spooky sounds. ---mimi smartypants wants to hold you tight and share a killer, diller, chiller, thriller here tonight. |
