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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


2004-01-29 ... 7:27 p.m.

Yeah. Where have I been? Right here, mostly, in my pajamas. There is no big story behind this Break From Blather. I am just so very Mommy these days, and everything I need to do (vacuum up Cheerios, read, nap, lie face-down on the couch and enjoy not hearing myself talk) (my god you talk a lot when you are wrangling a one-year-old all day) gets crammed into two hours or so, while Nora naps. Chattering away on the Internet is a pretty low priority, but if you truly missed me, take heart in the fact that soon I have to go back to work. While I don't exactly have a laid-back sinecure of a job I do have downtime, during which I promise to type type type and post post post, and I will make sure to force you to your knees and give it all to you. Open wide.

Ahem.

Another factor contributing to the lack of updates was my having another one of those Crises of Conscience. This one can be blamed on a friend of mine who is in a fairly successful local band that plays fairly generic rock. He was visiting my house the other day and talking about how he is getting kind of fed up with the boringness that is this band, even though it is great to play music for a living, and he said something like, "I just don't think the world needs us." That comment triggered a reprise of the same crisis that I had in that last-summer link up there---that the world certainly does not need another online diary. (I really am not fishing for compliments or e-mail, I am just thinking out loud here.) With this book thing happening there is a serious danger of me starting to take this diary too seriously. I am so wary of that, my self-bullshit detector is in such top-notch order, that even the merest whiff of taking myself seriously causes the whole enterprise to shut down.

However, the strongest "fuck you" I can think of to the paralyzing type of depression is to notice it and let it go. To know something is futile and transitory and to do it anyway. Thus: I am here now. I have baby stuff, some vaguely current-events stuff, and stuff I did in bars.

BABY STUFF

1. What are Nora's favorite toys? Anything that is not a toy. The remote, the phone, the cat, the camera, pots and pans, tubes of hand lotion, my checkbook. She is also very fond of taking books off the shelves and crawling around with them. Yesterday she had a paperback copy of Existentialism and Human Emotions clutched in her grubby little fist, and she shrieked bloody murder when I tried to get her to release the Sartre.* In fact she would not relinquish it for any reason whatsoever, so it went in the crib with her for a nap. My baby's existence so totally precedes her essence.

*Oh man it would be so funny** if Clash of the Titans was reworked to be all about philosophers/phenomenologists. "Husserl! Release the Sartre!"

**Except that it wouldn't.

2. She turned one year old! The big one! We had a party, with margaritas and cupcakes. My friends were all jazzed about introducing Nora to refined sugar, but when the big moment came she just looked baffled at our singing and at her flaming cupcake, and was very reluctant to chow down. She fingerpainted with the frosting for a while, made a yuck-face when I put a cupcake crumb in her mouth, and finished her evening by enthusiastically eating her usual dinner of tofu and vegetables. She may be a US citizen, but she has a lot to learn about American junk food.

3. She is starting to walk, in these tottering sideways Frankenstein steps, which means that Mimi and LT's Half-Assed Babyproofing had better grow the rest of its ass, and right quick. Right now Nora will only take unassisted steps to get something she really wants, like the cat, my keys, the aforementioned slim volumes of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the television (I have always been very anti-"entertainment center," but with a small child I am starting to see the value of the behind-closed-doors model of television storage, rather than our current model of pile-of-rickety-components-on-an-Ikea-bookshelf).

4. I should get over it already, but I continue to be amazed at how much I love this small person, and whenever I get despondent and in the mode of What Does It Matter, I Am Interchangeable With Dozens Of Other Neurotic, Overeducated, And Moderately Funny Girls, I stop and think: It matters to Nora. Not just anyone could be her mommy, and not just anyone could be my kid. The following seems a touch too mystical to admit out loud, when you have a brain as skeptical as mine---but even though I did not grow her myself from an LT-fertilized ovum, there is not a past, present, or future kid on this planet who I could love half as much. All right, pull your heads out of the puke basins, I am done gushing now.

EXTERNAL STUFF

1. I have a lot of trouble with this headline.

2. Recommended if you want that wistful unhappy indiepop feeling: The Long Winters. "Share" it with a "peer" today, or sample the goodies on the official site.

3. I am still planning to vote for Anyone But Bush, but here is my facile non-issues-based take on the freak show that is the current Democratic party.

Howard Dean: One of the weirdest smiles in politics.

John Kerry: I am bummed that he recently got a haircut, thus lessening the height of his once-impressive white-guy Afro.

Al Sharpton: I once had a dream that I pledged to wear his undershirt for charity.

Joe Lieberman: Excuse me, sir, could you be a tad less yellow and waxy?

Dick Gephardt: Yawn.

Wesley Clark: Has almost no ideas. Seems to be running for president for the hell of it.

John Edwards: I like some of what I have heard, except for this from a Senate speech:

Until this week, most Americans have no better idea how to respond to a terrorist attack than on September 11. Now the administration has begun giving out useful information, but we still don't have enough. We are not being told, for example, how to respond to chemical or biological attacks. In addition, there is still a serious question whether people will get the information they need when they need it, particularly when they are sleeping. Obviously TV and radio won't help if you're asleep. So I have a bill, which I wrote with Fritz Hollings, that will create an emergency warning system to reach everyone using new technology, for example special phone rings that could wake people.

JOHNNY EDWARDS, DON'T YOU BE CALLING MY HOUSE. As much as I despise the current color-coded terrorist threat "system," with its meaninglessness and its Dr Seuss quality ("Would you, could you, wage jihad? Blow us up to please your God?"), some sort of secret phone code is just as dumb and infantile. The government is going to text-message us? The government is going to be our AIM Buddy? D00d, Lo0K Ou+ f0R +ERrOR1S+S.

STUFF THAT TOOK PLACE IN BARS

1. I went with Sophie to see a show at Schuba's, but we did not see much of the show because it was all hot and crowded in there, and after we snagged a table lethargy took over and ass did not leave barstool for hours. We ran into someone Sophie knows, and one of the things she knows (firsthand) about him is that he waxes his pubic hair. Obviously, I am not supposed to know this, but you know, girls talk. We joked about how it would be funny if I got introduced to him and straightaway said, "So, I hear you wax your junk," but it was just a joke, I would never do a thing like that, except that of course by the fourth beer I did. Sophie was in the bathroom and I think she was ready to melt of embarrassment when she returned and I was sitting there discussing manscaping details with her friend. I would like to believe that the topic came up naturally, but it probably didn't, it was probably me being frisky and talkative and forward and tipsy. Who can remember.

2. That same night, I was accosted by Patrick, a drunken leprechaun, complete with Irish accent. Patrick wanted to get to know me. I had to keep physically moving him back several steps as he repeatedly attempted to drape his arm around my shoulders, and between the inebriation and the Irishness I could not understand a damn word he was slurring anyway. Eventually I gave up and started to decorate the man; coaster on the head, saltshaker in the shirt pocket, beer label stuck to his face. Then I had to tell him to take a walk, as the nonverbal humiliation was apparently not unsubtle enough. Yeesh.

3. This did not happen in a bar, but I did drink during the process: I got interviewed for a British paper. It was somewhat horrible but not as mortifying as I had feared. I have since gotten e-mails from both Chicago Fox TV and WBBM, and I am ignoring them. (Sorry, John Dodge.) Nothing personal, it is just that I have no talent for self-promotion, so the Mimi Media Machine should probably stick to print and word-of-mouth before I make an even bigger ass out of myself.

4. I also did a reading at the Red Lion Pub, of book stuff. I slacked off and procrastinated and thus was not prepared, so I spent the afternoon in a tizzy, pulling entries at random until it seemed like enough. The Twilight Tales series seems like it might gravitate toward the horror and the gentle ghost story, and I was a little worried when I arrived (late) and saw that the audience was on the elderly side. (Although I was talking too fast to notice, my sister said there was an audible gasp at my first "motherfucker.") Afterward I went up the street to Delilah's for dollar beer night, and an aging metalhead told me that I would make a great backup dancer for a band he manages. What was he basing this on? The sight of me bouncing in my seat and making llama puppets sing along to Dead Kennedys? Regardless, if I get to wear go-go boots, I may consider it as a career change.

---mimi smartypants has exceeded her word limit.

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