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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 have been neglecting my bus crazies. And that is unfortunate, since there has been many a good bus crazy in the past few weeks. Bus crazies seem to enjoy seeing children out and about, and they get very vocal when they see me struggling up the bus steps with Nora strapped to my front in the Snugli like a giant, baby-shaped barnacle. A hugely obese woman with some real horrorshow dental problems of her own snapped, "You'll ruin her teeth!" when she observed me feeding Nora a Cheerio. (I refrained from saying, "Oh, is that what happened to you? Too many Cheerios?") A talkative old lady asked, "Is that baby Asian?" (uh, a little bit) and then observed, "Asians have great musculature!" "Musculature" seems like an inappropriate word to apply to a baby, unless baby-clothing manufacturers start making breakaway onesies. Then we could teach Nora to growl and rip her shirt down the front like Hulk Hogan. That would be cool. There was also the woman on the Devon bus who ranted for twenty-five blocks about how the bus driver was late, and how his excuse of "traffic" was inadequate, and how SHE DON'T CARE IF YOU ARE BLACK, WHITE, GREEN, OR PURPLE, THERE AIN'T NO TRAFFIC TODAY AND YOUR SORRY ASS IS LATE AND YOU SHOULD DO YOUR JOB. YOUR BUS-DRIVING JOB. At one point in the rant she said, "Yeah, I've had a cocktail or two!" which caused me to giggle and think that there should be giant gameshow buzzers that go off whenever someone starts to undermine her own rant. The babbling was already illogical, but admitting to intoxication in the middle of an angry rant is the death knell of us taking you seriously. Is there anything sadder than a baby with a cough? Is there anything more pathetic than a new-to-parenting worrywart who took said baby's temperature four times in one day? Nora is getting better, the river of snot is subsiding, and the cough is infrequent and does not seem to bother her much, except one middle-of-the-night time when she coughed, then wailed, and by the time I got to her (just a few minutes, I swear) she had worked herself up into quite a state. I stumbled into her bedroom to find Miss Nora had bunched herself into a corner, under a blanket. In the darkness I could hear her but not see her, which was very disconcerting, and I had to do armsweeps of the crib like a blind person until I found the lump of baby. Then I picked her up and she promptly vomited on me, and I don't know if you have ever been barfed on in a dark room but it is one of the Top Ten Most Alarming Things In The World. I involuntarily exclaimed, "Jesus Christ!" This made LT wake up and sprint down the hall, as hearing that over the baby monitor made him think that the baby's head had fallen off or something. Yay, the whole family is awake. Yay, two thirds of it smell like puked-up formula. Yay, motherhood. I have the cold too, but I should not whine about it because that is boring. I will instead tell you some more tales of my interesting experiences with over-the-counter drugs. I do not know if it is just my drug-taking past that allows me to slip in and out of liminal consciousness like some kind of modern maenad, or whether it is just a brain-chemistry thing, but I certainly am prone to having profound experiences with Substances. Or if not profound, at least amusing. Last night I had every cold symptom on the box and then some, so I swallowed a generic Nyquil clone, but did not sleep so much as pass out and have visions. During one of these intervals I got the Super Bowl and my illness all mixed up and dreamed/hallucinated that Ed Hochuli descended from on high to speak to me, wearing his referee outfit, and he said, "Like you, I also have one completely blocked nostril and one completely clear nostril. The clear nostril is of no importance. It is the blocked one that is the seat of my power, and I will teach you to harness this power." (Did I mention that during this entire speech Ed Hochuli is making ref signals? Holding. Illegal block in the back. Unnecessary roughness.) "Okay," I said. "What do I do first?" "First, you must give your blocked nostril a secret name. Only you and I will know this name. The name of my blocked nostril is Ed," said Ed Hochuli. "Like my name, but it's spelled different." Then I woke up and thought: Spelled different how? Edd? Ehd? Then I passed out again.
Speaking of illness, today is that throat-blessing day! LT and I went to the symphony again recently, sitting in our "terrace" seats behind the orchestra, which gives you a nice view of the Vast Caucasian Sea that is the symphony-going public. Pinchas Zuckerman guest-conducted, and right as I type this I get a vague memory that I bitched about him online once before; yup, there it is. He may be a perfectly lovely man in person but on the podium Zuckerman comes off as a total pompous ass. He was leaning on the piano during the Mozart concerto, almost like he was asking the soloist, "You done yet?" That said, the Mozart, about whom I am usually like "yeah yeah yeah" (except for the weightier stuff like the Requiem or Jupiter) was quite nice. The violins sounded great but they could have been crispier in the adagio. (I like my adagios crispy. It's a tempo, not a mood, people.) I WIN THE SELF-REFERENTIAL PRIVATE JOKE AWARD Saturday my sister and I went all the way downtown to see Whole, a film about people who want to be amputees. My friend and I had discussed this film during one of our many eelings, and so on the way home, feeling frisky and communicative, I used my phone to text-message him the following: amputee movie stump stump stump. But you know what? There is a reason you should write down or electronically store your friends' cell phone numbers and not rely on your puny Nyquil-addled memory: because otherwise you will inevitably get a wrong number and receive a text message back saying WHO THE HELL ARE YOU STUMP???? MORE NORA NEWS 1. I am happy to report that Purple Dog, Nora's favorite stuffed animal who, according to her, has a delightfully chewable head, made it through the washing machine okay, on the Delicate cycle and protected inside a lingerie bag. He had been getting a little rank anyway, owing to all the head-chewing, but the Night Of The Barf sealed the deal. I was worried that I might have to run out to Toys Backwards-R Us and beg them to order Purple Dog's twin, but he is intact and clean and safely back in the crib, thanks for asking. 2. Nora invented her first joke. She toddles over to our futon-couch, and then slowly, with much magician-like drama, sticks her hand through the wooden side slat under the armrest, and wiggles it like "Oooh! Spooky!" And then laughs and laughs. I laugh and laugh too, because it is totally funny in a slapstick way, along with an extra-funny irony layer, since it seems like she herself knows this is a pretty lame optical illusion. So we both laugh and laugh. SO EMOTIONAL I am kind of angry/cranky that there are typos in my book thingy: a few bad-break hyphens in the middle of the page, a few inconsistencies in the British spellings, and one bad fact-checking error with a summertime date but references to winter clothing. I corrected tons of things like that on proof but I seem to have missed a few, but then again so did HarperCollins. (Let's spread this blame around!) I suppose these mistakes could be fixed on the second printing, but that is assuming there will be a second printing, and I fully expect to be a flash in the pan. Like a sizzle of butter and a sprinkling of shallots! Fry me! Then during my commute the iPod had to go add to my mood by shuffling up all its most wistful tunes, including the acoustic version of Radiohead's "Creep" (which always stabs me in the heart), the spiral of eyeball-scratching agitated depression that is Talking Head's "Crosseyed and Painless," some Yo La Tengo, and "Mirror Mirror" by Versus. But I felt better as the El sped up past all those snowy rooftops and I got Quasi's "The Poisoned Well," which for my money is the best happysad two minutes in modern pop music. Blarg. I am all discombobulated. You would be too, if Ed Hochuli was your totem animal. ---mimi smartypants is not at all ready for her close-up. back/forward |
