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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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I shall put the Nora-related stuff at the top this time. You know, instead of trying to kid myself that she is not foremost on my mind, and that I really am giving equal time to Drinking; Reading All Kinds Of Difficult Books In A Sad Effort To Convince Myself I Still Have Intellectual Credibility, Whatever The Fuck That Means; Lusting After Certain Coffeeshop Waitresses; and Gross Things I Saw On The Bus. Those things are still in their respective brain file drawers, and I still do/obsess over them in approximately that order, but the actual Nora would never sit still and wait her turn while I rambled on about my usual little weblog topics, so why should the textual Nora? (Somebody please slap me. Eventually this page will become one long disclaimer/explanation/defensive rationale. Someday I will not be able to get out of bed until I explain why it's TOTALLY MY CHOICE whether I get out of bed or not.) MIMI SMARTYPANTS PUSHES YOUR HEAD DOWN AND ORDERS YOU TO SUCK HER NUMBERED LIST 1. Yesterday. Blah. Throw yesterday on the compost heap. Work was stupid, I had eight million errands to run afterwards, and when I staggered through the door under the weight of my groceries and dry cleaning Nora was happy to see me, as usual, but soon became rather whiny and strange for the rest of the evening. Then we had dinner, and then LT cleaned up while I played in the living room with Nora, and then she used her baby superpowers to get hold of an empty beer can that we had forgotten to recycle or put out of harm's way. And of course she promptly stuck her finger inside the hole and cut herself. So here is the Monday night scene: Not only am I having the oh my god my child is bleeding thoughts, and not only am I wrestling with a screaming Nora, trying to keep her still while LT applies pressure and gauze, but also I am having complexly-layered other thoughts, such as it's like a bad joke, that my child would cut herself on a BEER CAN, can't I escape the internet persona for one goddamn minute? and if we have to go to the emergency room and tell our story, that Miller High Life tallboy is going to magically turn into a caffeine-free Diet Coke. But wait, it gets better. The bleeding slows and stops, the cut turns out to be quite shallow, and Nora's howling is much more about being restrained for the first-aid process than it ever was about the actual injury. LT puts a tiny band-aid around her finger just in case the cut comes open again, goes to finish the dishes, and we are back to playing. Nora does not like the band-aid, and I have to use every ounce of my Baby-Distraction skills to keep her from fucking with it, and I swear I was sitting right there helping her put toys into a large box and then dump them out again (this is a favorite game), when suddenly I notice that the band-aid is no longer on her finger. Nor is it on the floor, anywhere that I can see. I get a hunch and start doing fingersweeps inside her mouth, which is not easy with a girl who likes to try out her new teeth at every opportunity, and yes, there is the band-aid, between cheek and gum like a pinch of Skoal. We almost had two opportunities last night to practice our first-aid skills, for bleeding and for narrowly avoided choking, and I spent the rest of the evening feeling all shaky and weird. Of course, I know it won't be the last time. 2. New favorite toy? A novelty rubber chicken foot. It was on one of my bookcases when Nora decided she wanted it, and now it is just sort of permanently in her toy box. When the social worker came for her meet-and-greet, to see the actual baby that resulted from all that paperwork, Nora insisted on playing with the chicken foot for the entire visit. She held it, she talked to it, she banged on the coffee table with it, she waved it around like a voodoo queen. The rubber chicken foot is quite realistically rendered, and I got a bit of a shock one day when I turned around to see the baby crawling across the floor with a chicken foot in her mouth, like a feral animal. The Nine Inch Nails song "Closer" was on the playlist, and with a few more scratches and sepia tones, and maybe some facial deformities, Nora + chicken foot could have been a scene from that video. 3. No one pissed me off this Thanksgiving. All was smiles and relaxation and wine and pie. What's with that? Where are the dysfunctional holidays of yore? The absence of Redneck Racist Stepbrother-In-Law, to whom I once memorably said "If you don't drop the subject I will pour gravy in your lap" (tight little ha-ha giggles all around as everyone tried to pretend I was joking), and of whom LT once said, to his father, "If he comes, we don't," may have had something to do with the peace and quiet. Or maybe children really do mellow out the world and smooth over the pricklies. The most tension we had all day was when LT's stepmother brought out some toys for Nora to play with. One of them was a stuffed Noah's Ark, and when I saw it I cried, "Look Nora! A Darwin boat!" Ignoring the dirty looks from The Saved, secular Nora and her secular mommy happily pretended that Noah was Charles Darwin, back from the Galapagos with breeding pairs of animals to study in captivity. 4. Lessons in futility: the Itsy-Bitsy Spider. Goes up the spout. Deluge. Washout. Spider starts over. It's like Sisyphus with an all-arachnid cast. Nora has an itsy-bitsy spider book, complete with a cute detachable plush spider toy (so cute that if it were crawling up your arm you would just be all like: awww), and I read the back jacket very carefully and did not see Homer or Albert Camus credited. However, there is no mistaking that the itsy-bitsy spider is a sort of post-existentialist myth, and that the spider has totally escaped the dilemma of existence and continues forevermore with its absurd, waterspout-climbing task. Death be not proud! Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the anti-hero! 5. Last week I took the painfully slow Division Avenue bus west toward where my husband and daughter were helping a friend move (well, LT was helping---Nora mostly hung out with the platoon of volunteer babysitters, eating Cheerios and being cute). I sat behind a guy dressed like a finalist in the International Mister Leather contest, all chains and piercings and too-tight animal-hide clothing, and he had shaved his head completely, smoothly bald. This all made an okay fashion impression if you are into that sort of thing, but I must give a shout-out to all similarly attired and groomed folk: If you shave your head bald, you must, must, do something about your abundant ear hair. Bad enough on a hairy person, absolutely jarring on you. 6. Spammers are starting to combine the penis enlargement theme with the holidays, as in, "Give her a deep dicking for Christmas" and so forth. What a great gift. "Merry Christmas! I got you my big penis." 7. I really refuse to link to this, but if you want to lose all faith in the universe, if you want to see something that will make you scream WHY GOD WHY and then go hit the tequila and Xanax, or if you just want to verify that yes, someone did take the Billy Bass concept too far and come up with a wall-mounted, motion-activated, singing penis, just Google "Sammy Schlong." If I were Satan, and got to sentence sinners to particular hells, I think cold-calling people for all eternity and trying to get them to buy the singing penis would be a good one. ---mimi smartypants is all spangly and sparkly and shiny. back/forward |
