Archive for March, 2008
Yesterday afternoon I cleaned up in the bedroom. Mainly, I put away clothes and moved piles of things to the yard sale pile. It took a while, though, and raised a lot of dust. I found some good things, though: a bottle of Ambien, a spoon, a Jasper Fforde book, a Dar Williams disk (unfortunately scratched). Plus, now I can find all my clothes.
I actually slept a little better last night. When I laid down and closed my eyes, I could imagine the clean room – I could feel the cleanliness around me — and it was soothing.
My mother visited this weekend. I’d been thinking of her on Easter; she usually comes to watch the little people at the egg hunt at church, and she didn’t this year. She had too much going on at work, but she also doesn’t really enjoy the holiday, since it’s primarily about church and food. She doesn’t like to come to church on Easter; she resents God for resurrecting his son and not hers. And I usually make a relatively pleasant ham dinner, but my mother doesn’t like food. So there’s really no point in her coming to visit for Easter.
So she came this week. She brought little tin Easter pails for the kids, which contained, among other things, creepy little angel dolls that repeat the “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer. She waved the doll about and asked the Little Guy, “Do you want to be an angel?” which I think she meant as an encouragement to good behavior, but sounded like a threat to me.
This visit was awkward, as usual. It always feels like she disapproves of my childrearing methods (such as they are). She spent most of Friday afternoon sitting on the couch, reading a magazine, while the children played at her feet. Apparently Miss Baby spent Thursday afternoon attempting to impress grandma by bringing her things, but Miss Baby more or less blew her off on Friday. If you’re not going to fall down and worship Miss Baby, she’s not going to waste her time on you. The Little Guy is another story entirely; he keeps trying to win grandma’s heart. Unfortunately, he does it by saying things like, “Grandma is the oldest person here.” Believe me, that doesn’t impress her.
The Little Guy doesn’t always have a lot of friends, and he is often OK with that. Today, apparently, he made a friend, or at least an ally. Evidently a tree was imperiled at school, and he and his little buddy wanted to save the tree. It’s not clear what they did, although he told me that they climbed another tree to try to get to the threatened tree.
He said it ended well; they were only pruning that tree, so it was safe.
After regaling us with this story at dinner, the Little Guy asked each of us — Grandma included — what our favorite part of the story was. He was pleased himself, not just for making a friend and trying to save a tree, but for having constructed such a nice narrative out of it.
We talked about Dora today, which is an interesting little piece, especially from a literary point of view, considering how Freud “writes” Dora, constructing her as a text, and then reads her and misreads her. In it, he makes much of Dora’s psychosomatic cough as having sexual implications for her Electra complex. The thing is, I’ve had a nagging dry cough for the past few weeks, and I had to defend myself: “Sometimes a cough is just a cough!”
Some folks out there are encouraging you to observe earth day in a practical and domestic way.
Or, as we call it, laundry day.
Fact of the matter is, I do find hanging out the laundry a simple, inexpensive, and pleasant bit of green activism. As far as I can tell, it is endorsed by the bigwigs at Costa Mesa City Hall, although it seems to me that I heard a few years ago that it wasn’t permitted if your clothesline could be seen by your neighbors. Given that our backyard is the common area for our apartment building, I suppose they could lodge a complaint. I’ve been hanging clothes out for the last 14 years, though, and the coppers haven’t shown up yet.
Give it a try!
We have a not-exactly princess. She doesn’t buy the whole marketing machine, but she’s certainly got her own strut, and her own style. Rosa Brooks has a nice piece about the disney princess machine in today’s LAT.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Hillary. This fellow in the Washington Post makes an interesting, if somewhat minor, point. Today in one of my classes we were talking about white privilege — the idea that by getting to be “normal,” whites have certain privileges in society. Whites don’t look for them, or try to get them, or even always realize they have them; if the do, they often think they don’t much matter. The point is that these privileges matter more to those who don’t have them. Although he doesn’t quite identify it as such, Michael Kinsley notices something about male privilege in his discussion of Hillary’s makeup.
I don’t really know very much about all this technology stuff, but since I get some of my news stories through newsletters, rss feeds, and the like, I have the impression that there might not always be a stable url on the other side of my little links when I chatter on about these things. So I am trying del.icio.us (despite the cutesy name) as a way to file the pieces and a stable way.
So let me know if this works.
I was at the coffeeshop, chatting with two students, when we hear a “whomp,” the doors swayed slightly, and the big windows shook. That’s right, folks, an earthquake — and really nearby too. It was mildly exciting — all the “baristas” (I’m sorry, somehow that isn’t quite a real word for me yet) chattered with us about it.
Meanwhile, at home, my DH went to check on the little people, who were not yet asleep (as they were supposed to be). He asked the Little Guy, “Did you feel that?” The Little Guy thought it had been Miss Baby. That tells you just how wild and crazy Miss Baby gets in her crib at night. He was impressed, though: “That was my first one.”
So, I’m continuing to struggle with the whole getting rid of books thing. On the one hand, it is about the only thing I can do right now that contributes toward the move. Can’t pack — there’s no place to put boxes, and I need to sort the stuff before I pack it. Can’t work on syllabi and chair stuff — I’ve got work to do for the school I’m at now. Can’t look for a place to live– if a house is available in March, they don’t want to wait until August for you to move in. But I can get rid of stuff, and books are the stuff I have a lot of. I’ve decided I’m going to have a book sale in my office, and move all my not-going-with-me books onto the shelves, send out e-mails, post signs on campus, and put a big shiny can on my desk, with a sign: “Take books. Leave cash.”
Hey, it’s a form of recycling. And having a big library is a problem, carbon-footprint-and-dead-tree-wise, but the books already exist. It’s better to pass them on to other, better caretakers than to drag them across the country (An interesting and mildly related editorial at the Washington Post here).
Did you ever think about how “The Carcass” is like the opening scene of an L&O episode? The young couple comes across a body in the park…
dun-dun.
