Monday, June 16, 2014

this place is full of tourists

Once you live in the city for awhile, city things are slowly normalized. 

I haven't left the city, really, for about 8 months, so I forgot what 'Merica was like. 

My first thought when seeing all of these baseball caps, mom jeans, fanny packs, friendly smiles, and Midwestern accents was, "tourists. They're everywhere here." 

But, I'm actually the tourist. 

No one has been a trace ironic. My friends at the classy lounge last night were in town because going to local demolition derbies is their summer hobby. The folks tonight are here because there is a new mall that opened in the neighboring valley and it was a special trip for Father's Day. Someone is drinking Budweiser from a bottle. 

The mo-tel lounge has a pleather barstools. There is exposed brick in my room, but cinder block, not "brick." The breakfast buffet included fried chicken. 

I like it here, as a tourist.


Saturday, June 7, 2014

Observations

Walmart
There is one right in the center of the city. I went there. I saw a young gal driving a Prius picking up a case of PBR. So much confusion in my brain. Aren't Prius programmed to avoid Walmart at all cost including self destruction? PBR? Sooo Portland 2004. Let's move on. 

#notinidaho
Young men wearing white button-down shirts, ties, black slacks, bike helmets, and black backpacks while riding bikes down the street are not necessarily Mormon missionaries. Just commuters. Hey! 






Who and where the hell am I?

Yesterday

Walking down H and a guy stops me. I think, "Ugh, no, I don't have any change." But he instead hands me three red roses. I think, "Ugh, no, I don't want to buy roses." He says, "I am fighting with my wife. I tried to give these to her and she refused them. Take them. I want to show her that a woman can accept flowers and be happy." 

I am happy, yet confused. Do emotional manipulation roses have bad karma?

The next guy I see asks me for $20. I offer him roses. He declines. Even Stevens. 

This morning

Typical work from home day. Sell a waterbed to a rhinoceros. You know. Work. 

This afternoon

Rush to Union Station to eat terrible pizza and visit with my cousin and her son during their horrific whirlwind tour of DC and NYC. Why would you torture yourself thus? 

Reminder: Driving is lame. Bus tours are uncomfortable. Teenagers are angsty. 

Tonight

At a burlesque "club" in Chinatown wearing heels and tight pants drinking cosmos. Who is this fancy lady? 

Tomorrow
Anticipating a hangover. 

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Idiot-proofing the baby library: My review of “Five Little Ducks”

FIVE LITTLE DUCKS

By Raffi. Illustrated by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey
Random House (1989) (Board book, ages 6+m)

Imagine you’re a baby.

What’s your biggest, hugest, most insane fear? The one that results in a hysterical, high-pitched scream where the time between each spine-twisting wail lasts up to 30-seconds as you suck, suck, suck in the O2 to fill your tiny lungs and then re-attack the world with your animal noise?


You know, that fear? The one that makes you hold out your arms and sob uncontrollably as you toddle like a zombie stalker, single-minded in your quest to attach like Velcro to the shins of the Mommy?

C’mon, you can feel it. The terrifying nightmare that pulls you out of slumber, causes you to wrench your body onto it’s little chubby feet late, late at night while you emit a soul-crushing, trembling, incessant moan?

Do you have it inside you now? It’s the one thing that you can’t even bear to comprehend, so you cling and hope and feel the warmth of the Mommy and the Daddy, blanketing them in your tiny arms, gripping and pinching them with your slender fingers, feeling their reality and proximity.

The fear is that they will leave the room, and never, never, ever come back.

This book about ducks "going out one day..."
“Quack, quack, quack. But none of the five little ducks came back." 
There may be a happy ending in here somewhere, but I had to push down the urge to cry and vomit simultaneously at this point in the story.

I immediately called my mom to tell her I love her.

This is the worst book ever written.  

Idiot-proofing the baby library: My review of “Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!”

OH, THE THINKS YOU CAN THINK!

Written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss
Random House (1975) (Board book, ages 6+m)

I am a big fan of Dr. Seuss. I remember those days curled up on the sofa reading about the silly alien guy who wouldn’t even taste that green ham, so that tiny other alien followed him around bugging the shit out of him for what seemed like eternity. Just try it, already, I would beg and giggle because I knew the end.


Spoiler alert: Big alien loved that rotten food after all!

It wasn’t just “Green Eggs and Ham” either. I loved that “cat” alien and his pink slime, the Grinch, the colorful fishes, and the magical worlds that were even more fun when Dad was having a hazy poker night and the Dead were blasting on the home stereo.

But, here’s my problem with this particular board book. It’s a six-year-old’s novella adapted for a b-a-b-y.

Jesus, just because it’s a great book, doesn’t mean it’s suitable for infants. There’s a reason Disney hasn’t put out Pulp Fiction the Musical (although, there could be some fun in an Alan Menken song called “Ball Gag.” Think on it, Disney, and give me a call). 

Anyway, it’s true I was getting high on Seuss at the literate age of four. I’m advanced. But, not eight months.


At eight months we’re teaching shit like “don’t eat that,” “don’t eat that, either,” “definitely put that down and away from your mouth RIGHT NOW before I puke,” and “seriously, you’re going to eat puke, too?”

How is my kid going to learn anything if she’s introduced to things like “Guff” and “Schlopp” and “Na-Nupp” when she hasn’t mastered the basics of “no”, “yes,” and “dog?” She’s going to walk around making up some crazy ass language, and her preschool teachers are going to think we taught her Quenya, then they’re going to call child services. I see my future.

Then there are the illustrations. I appreciate the inclusion of “horse,” bird,” and “elephant,” but these drawings don’t even remotely resemble the actual animals in question. A horse with rabbit ears, a bird with hair, an elephant…well, I’ll give you a pass on the elephant.

Books are supposed to help kids learn about imagination, fantasy, and things their parents don’t want to talk about aloud. Baby books are supposed to help babies learn simple concepts like “red.”


The only thing my kid learned is that terrible Dr. Seuss board books printed in Mexico taste delicious. 

Please don’t call child services.

Idiot-proofing the baby library: My review of “Opposites”

OPPOSITES

By Charles Reasoner.
8 pp. Rourke, 2011. (Board book; ages 6m+)

Reasoner, author of the geometric, yet creative, “Shapes” (2011), falls flat on his sophomore debut “Opposites.” Where “Shapes” delivers the clarity and variety infants crave through connecting a concept (square) with photos from items in their real, tactile world (block, cracker),“Opposites” is a totally confusing work that clearly identifies Reasoner as somewhere between barely literate and good at searching iStockphoto.


Although he started strong with “Big” – a green toy fish – and “Little” – a smaller version of the green toy fish, the remaining chapters offer little in the way of clarity or connection, symbolic or otherwise.

Just seeing “soft” is an invitation to slap Reasoner in the face, as the image, featuring a cute, fuzzy ladybug slipper begs the question: “How fucking ‘Soft’ can a cardboard book be?”

And it's opposite, “Hard” isn’t even another ladybug. It’s a creepy wooden red car giving birth to the head of a mime.  Just because it’s red with black dots, doesn’t mean it’s a ladybug. It’s confusing. He’s jeopardizing my child’s future.

Chapter 3, “In,” features neatly arranged blocks in their yellow wagon. “Out” is just a stack of blocks. Where is the reference point for “Out?”

We’re talking about teaching abstract concepts to a human that literally just now tried to eat dog food while farting, and the best this guy could do was a picture of a stack of blocks and call it “Out?”

In a wagon; out OF A WAGON, sir. 

Christ. Look around. Anyone can find some hard-up graphic design student and pay them $18 or a half-smoked blunt to Photoshop the fucking empty wagon next to the blocks.

We need associative learning here. It’s not that difficult: FULL glass of orange juice / EMPTY glass of orange juice. OPEN lid/ CLOSED lid. LONG ribbon / SHORT ribbon.

The children are our future, and Mr. Reasoner is irresponsible.

Lightbulb moment: Big/little? Hard/soft? In/out? Is this what I think it is?

This guy is a total fucking creep.

Idiot-proofing the baby library: My review of “Love Song for a Baby.”

LOVE SONG FOR A BABY

By Marion Dane Bauer. Illustrated by Dan Andreasen
28 pp. Simon and Schuster, 2002. (Board book; ages 6m+)

This book isn’t a even song. It’s a visceral depiction of all the gross shit that you don’t want to think about when you have a baby, couched in a syrupy little sing-song package that you can’t actually put a melody to because it fucking sucks.


I’ll begin with the fake song.

Imagine how stupid I felt singing this “song” to my adoring fan when, with every page, I get slapped in the face with a disjointed assemblage of syllables. Just because your pages all end with the words “and we loved you” doesn’t mean you’ve written a song, or a poem, or anything but crap.

Not that I’ve ever written songs, but I sing a lot of shitty pop music in my car, and I am as sure as Kanye’s opinion of himself that songs contain meter and rhythm. This book contains neither.

Case in point: There are no long lists of shit in songs, unless the entire song is a huge-ass list a la “We didn’t start the fire.” And Billy Joel wrote that, so he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

It isn’t even until page 18 that Bauer makes even a bleak attempt at rhyming with “true” and “you” followed by “tears” and “fears” and a big finish “high,” “dry,” and “why.” But by the end, we’re back to six pages of a jumble finale that makes no sense.

But this assault on the word “song” is mild in compared to the actual content of “Love Song.”

Reading this book aloud is almost more embarrassing than watching that steamy scene in 300 on an airplane in the middle seat with someone’s grandparents on either side of you watching it, too.
“When you came into our arms, slippery as salmon, puckered as prunes…”
Holy shit, she really just referred to my freshly birthed as a “fish” covered in vaginal secretions and amniotic fluid. Why not finish the line with “straight out of that stretched out love canal?”

She goes on to point out that the fish-child, we’ll call her Wanda, had no hair and no teeth and “Still, we loved you.”

This makes it seem like Wanda is some sort of fucking leper for having no teeth or hair, at birth. If she came out of my love canal with teeth, I would have freaked the fuck out. There’s no “still” about it. I probably wouldn’t have loved her if there had been teeth.
“Round cheeks, a round tummy, a round little bottom, all made us love you.”
True, I just mentioned that I may not have loved a Wanda born with teeth, but I didn’t also love her because of her roundness. And don’t mention the loving of a baby’s “round little bottom” in your book. It’s just not right.
“Even your burps were bells”
Really? Wanda’s burps were not bells. They were burps. Her farts were farts. Why do we have to bring the gastrointestinal tract into this story?

From Bauer:
           “We dried your tears and soothed your fears…”

It’s clear that she is plagiarizing at this point, or she’s got someone else ghostwriting pages 18 through 20. It’s so totally normal; it can’t be from the same demented mind.

By page 21, she’s back on form with the shit talk:
“We tossed you high, [sic] we kept you dry. Can you guess why? We loved you.”

I’m not sure how tossing and diaper changing are related. I believe we we change diapers because of the fact that it’s disgusting to let a baby sit in its shit, so it’s just the right thing to do.

Page 26 brings us to the most elaborate, non-Bauer line of text in the entire work:
“You burst upon our world like a comet, like birdsong in the silver silence of dawn”
I don’t even know what to say. From slime soaked salmon fish child with nursing-home orthodontics, to the silver silence of dawn? I am freaked the fuck out.


Don’t read this book.

Idiot Proofing the Baby Library

i don't have time to do a lot of reading. other than for work, stealing a glance at the days news on the iPhone, or catching two paragraphs of the sunday paper before M decides that i'm just playing a fun game of peek-a-boo and WHAM! she's torn it in half and thrown it on the floor laughing maniacally. it's pretty cute.

but i do read a lot of baby books. 
for the first 14 months, M had zero interest in books, unless they were delicious. 
apparently "SMILES," which is just a poorly lit board book featuring flash photos of smiling toddlers who look like they are sweating, is delicious. as is Dr. Seuss' "Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!" she pooped out a bit of page four one day. Dr. Seuss probably never thought about his book as turd. 
Oh, the thinks!  
i learned quickly that there is such a thing as being a terrible, terrible infant book "author" (i use quotes because my fucking dog could probably write a better book than some of these people just by randomly selecting items that he's peed on in the neighborhood to pair with photos..."flower pot" "trash bin" "shoe" "dog" "bicycle" "car" "tree." See?? See how easy that is, dumbass who has "Octopus" and "Orca" in a book for PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SCUBA DIVE. We're still trying to learn the difference between fish and lizard. Baby Einstein my ass).
As you can see, I have gotten really worked up about these books. So worked up in fact, that I had to vent. So I was going to write an open letter to children's book authors. Then I was going to have an old-fashioned book burning (this is still an option as we just got a fire pit for the backyard). But, I finally just settled on letting all of my feelings out. 
I'm sure there will be more, but here are the four books that no longer live here: 
I'll get to this one next.

stepping sideways

a hamster on a wheel walks and the wheel moves forward, and the momentum of the wheel keeps him stepping, so the wheel keeps turning. the faster he goes, the harder it is to stop. if he slows down too quickly, the wheel might take him for a loop-de-loop and cradle him to a stop at the bottom of the wheel. if he gets up and starts walking again, the cycle repeats.

the only way to get off the hamster's wheel is to step sideways.

i had never understood the concept of hamster-wheel living until i had a baby.

i step into the hamster's wheel and start walking - through wake up, laundry, [spinning], diaper, breakfast, [spinning]  dishes, drop-off, [spinning], work, pick-up, snack, walk dog, [spinning], shop, clean, entertain, [spinning], bath, diaper, bed, [trip, cradle], sleep, wake-up.

to be fair, my personality is terrible for parenting.

these are the areas where my brain thrives:

  • consistency
  • efficiency
  • time for quiet reflection
  • time to make calculated decisions
  • planning
  • thinking
  • working toward a goal
  • long stretches of uninterrupted time to achieve a powerful result
  • complex problem solving
if you have a child, then you got to the first item on the list and started laughing. 

by the time you got to the end of the list, maybe crying. 

every part of parenting is directly in opposition to this list; therefore, a big part of me is in direct opposition to parenting. 

every thing my brain wants and needs is assaulted by the inconsistent, messy, noisy, impulsive, emotional, irrational, perpetually moving thing called parenting. 

i am often overwhelmed, by the thing. i just get on that damn wheel without even realizing it. 

as nap time approaches, i get anxious - what if she doesn't fall asleep this time (even though she's missed approximately 1/100th of her naps in 18 months)? as bath time approaches, i get anxious - what if she cries again when i wash her hair (and she does, for 10 seconds, and the rest of bath is awesome). as dinner time approaches, i get anxious - what if she won't eat tonight (and she doesn't, kind of, and then she sits on my lap and eats my food, and then i don't eat and then wonder why my jeans are too big). 

i become obsessed by the clock, the possibility of inconsistencies, the constant change. i get angry at the time it takes to do a simple thing, like go for a walk because i forgot the snack, the leash, the sunglasses, the shoes. i get frustrated at the whining and the noise and the mess. i want to be left alone.

there are a few things that are important to note:
  • having a baby changed me; i will never go back to being my old self. she doesn't exist anymore. 
  • my personal having of a baby, being a parent, and my existing inside of that new reality is unique to me, like a fingerprint. i am not doing it wrong, i know that. i am doing it my own way. and my many friends aren't doing it wrong, they are also doing it differently, in their own ways. 
  • when i say i am a terrible parent, it means i am not naturally good at this co-existing with a tiny human being and all that comes with her. i strain against the bindings instead of flex and bend. i am taking yoga classes. 
  • i like to be around other parents and their children with my child. i like being with groups of moms and dads and toddlers and existing inside of that chaos and flexibility. it allows me to relax, let go, and not worry. let's call it behavior modeling. 
  • i can't imagine what my life would be like without my daughter. i don't want to imagine that. this journey was so totally meant to be, that there is no point in considering another. it has been difficult for me, fact. But what's worth doing if not the difficult things? 

i am slowly learning what it means to step sideways. this book, and this blog, and this article, and this one, and so many others are screaming - just get the fuck off the damn wheel.

microwave some taquitos, skip bath time, eat pears from a can, forget the diaper bag, drink wine on the porch, watch tv. jesus mother of mercy, you're driving yourself insane.

i have new friends here who - even though the probably don't know it - help me every day. they take their kids to the zoo. i can do that. they skip a nap every now and again - i can do that. they get a housekeeper one month - i can do that.

it's time for me to use my awesome brain to solve this complex puzzle instead of fight against it.

why don't you write anymore?

i was reading a book review about a book that was about an author, but also about the author in that autobiographical way that fiction can be.
"a blocked writer...who can barely get a word down before rethinking it and concluding that 'to say anything at all would be a mistake.'" 
i totally get that.

but also, for the love of god, it's fucking BLOG. i'm over thinking it. i know.

but, i've had a lot of time to time to spend with my demons over the past year, and those bastards can really fuck a person up. between anxiety and self-loathing, and back again, you start to doubt, well... pretty much everything.

now, i'm not having a pity party or anything. i'm just saying that i've struggled over the past year. more intrapersonal struggle than i have ever had to struggle. more fight. more climb. more futility. more self doubt. more shame spiral. more on the line. more apologizing. more being tired of having to work on it. more wanting to be left the fuck alone. more white hot rage. more fear.

i sound like a candidate for Mom of the Year, right?

the good news is i've never felt alone. thank you, friends.

the good news is i'm not ashamed of any of this, including my real battle with anxiety. one that i've known about for years, but never truly engaged with (feint, feint, feint.) after childbirth, i realized it was better to fight, fight, fight. pushing back feels powerful.

the good news is i'm trying to stop listening to my own bullshit. i know that i need to be less alone. i need to be out in the world more, connecting more frequently with real people. connect with me. i am a problem solver. give me an assignment. i need to create things to build my confidence.

the good news is i feel good about life 98% of the time. the view out my window is good.

but, if you've ever known anxiety or depression, you know that 2% can be commanding.

a tooth is 2% of your skeleton, but when that fucker is abscessed, you're not thinking about your healthy femur. nope, Mr. Molar has control.

this is me saying: maybe i'll write some more.