Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Fruits of the season.

I loathe wrapping presents, and yet I am very particular about how the presents should look. This is a brilliant combination that prevents me from outsourcing any part of the task even as I whinge and mutter and say "Goddammit" and drop things on my toe. I have a whole system of mixing simple wrapping papers in lovely colors with crumpled blank newsprint saved from things I have been mailed, and satin ribbons with cotton twine, and interesting labels with hang tags cut out of odd scraps. Then every element of a given package appears on at least one other package, so that the high and low intermingle harmoniously, AND I AM COMPLETELY INSANE.

Fortunately that's all taken care of now. Well, I'm still insane, I doubt that's going to change any time soon, but the present wrapping is done with, anyway. 

OH MY HEAVENS

Breaking news: Steve had gone next door to give our extremely nice landlords some cookies and ask if they would look in on the cat while we were out of town. He has just returned with a remarkable object.

It it shaped and sized like a smallish desk lamp, but is, in fact, a very large candle, seventeen whole ounces of candle in a glass container. It is Spiced Vanilla Bean flavor. I can smell it vividly through the hexagonal plastic packaging. There is a shade, as well, which is what makes the whole so particularly lamp shaped. The shade, also glass, is flocked. The flocking is a tasteful beige, in a damask-inspired viney motif.

We are going to have to bring this thing to my mother's, so that we can dispose of it there, where the gentle, kindly landlords cannot see. Do you think it was a gentle, kindly, cunning tactic to stop us ever giving them Christmas cookies again?

Joy.

Well, I am certainly feeling very chipper today. I surely love the opportunity to blither at people about my research, indeed I do. Blither blither blee! It combines the things I love best, yammering and myself.

So cheerful am I that I am going to post a picture of myself in which you can see both my 30-week-pregnant torso and my shining face.

 

Am I not radiantly replete with beatific enthusiasm? Does not my entire person proclaim, "I am an avatar of the miracle of life"? Is it any wonder that no one dares to touch my bump?

(I really am feeling cheerful, though, I promise.)

Like a sieve.

The last couple of days were meant to be a relaxing opportunity to get caught up on things around the house, in the happy lull after I turned in final grades for the semester. Instead I spent most of the time in a deranged tizzy. The more tizzied I became, the more each thing took longer than intended, the later I got started on the next, and so on, ad infinitum. (I'm better now. Everything is bought and filed and examined and scheduled and packed up and mailed off, and I'm sitting quietly in a chair and listening to the soothing hum of the dishwasher.)

My always tenuous ability to stay on top of things turns out to have been more tightly bound to a predictable weekly grid of responsibilities than I'd realized. Certainly during the semester there were loads of new things to attend to every week, but they were all permutations of the same sorts of things, and I could expect them to turn up on a reliable schedule.

Then the semester ended and everything became a fresh new one-off responsibility. Each task pitter-patters out of my head like rain through a sieve, leaving me with nothing but an acute but pervasive awareness that I am Not On Top. Then I have to go rushing to check what I'm not on top of. It pit-pats out again immediately, and I have to check again right away, like the poor canonical OCD sufferer dashing into her house again and again to make sure that the oven really is turned off.

As a result I snapped at Steve, wasted a lot of packing paper, had to reschedule an eye doctor appointment, covered the house with a fine layer of paper scraps, and generally did everything in the most inefficient way possible, including racing to campus just so I could be there for a student meeting that wound up taking all of ten minutes. It was probably more like nine minutes, strictly speaking. Then I went home, because all the things I still needed to get done depended on information or objects I'd carefully removed from the office and taken home with me the day before.

"You're going to be lots of fun when you're old," observes Steve.

"I'll just make sure no one expects me to take care of anything at all when that happens."

"Good idea. Me neither."

My grandmother did a pretty good job of this when she was old and demented. Her ability to keep track of conversations was much like that of an extremely stoned person, and she got similar enjoyment out of tasty snacks and Miss Marple videos. Everyone adored her, she was so pleasant and tidy, and she sailed through most of her days with a serene, potheaded demeanor that served her well. The only downside was that my grandfather died a few years before her, so she didn't get to take advantage of the experience with a full time drug buddy. With luck, Steve and I can go naturally hash-addled in tandem, gently abdicating all responsibility and giggling ourselves creakily to sleep in front of ultradigitally remastered 8-D XXHD recordings of The Core and Iron Man XIV.

In other news, my mother has convinced me that the burning, needling intramuscular pain just below my ribs is the result of sharp little prenatal heels puuuuushing cruelly against my tender parts. This information doesn't help anything, particularly, but it has given rise to a new fetal nickname: My Pal Foot Foot. ("Click on Foot Foot to hear Foot Foot"!)

The holiday spirit.

Christmas this year is sponsored by my new expensive thermometer. We have no tree or fuzzy green stuff or fairy lights or even an advent calendar, but the counter is buried in heaps of sugary treats and baskets of things to package them up in, and it turns out that this alone is enough to lend things a festive holiday air. There are the preserved pears and a bowl of clementines, and then lots and lots of candy.

I love my stupid thermometer. It is digital, easy to read, quick, and accurate over a gloriously wide range of temperatures. It has a handy probe --

(This reminds me of the good times we had when Ford distinguished itself by putting out a compact sports car called the Probe. "I've been rear-ended by a Probe!" we cried. "I wish that Probe would quit riding my ass!")

-- that works at any number of angles, and only needs to be inserted --

("Oh my god, that Probe came out of nowhere and just plowed right into me!")

-- an eighth of an inch into something to register its temperature. I can therefore now tell you with confidence that the air in my kitchen is 66 degrees Fahrenheit. When the water is just right, my bath is 107.5°. The bowl of yogurt I just ate was 37.8°.

Not unrelatedly, it turns out that if you heat a sugary slurry to the exact temperature they tell you to in the recipe, it turns into exactly the kind of candied substance they claim it will, every time. It's magic. I can't stop. I hope the people on my Christmas list enjoy their diabetes.

Ho ho ho.

Look how internet fashionable I am, with my flaky sea salt caramels and my super close up photographs. I also made some marshmallows. They're pretty nifty, but I didn't take any pictures of them because they are not vegetarian and this lapse embarrasses me. Of course, here I am now, announcing my animal byproduct consuming ways to the world, but there are no pictures. That's the important thing.

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Elsewhere, an NFL place kicker and his evangelical pastor teamed up to produce an astonishingly terrible, magnificently stupid thriller called Monday Night Jihad. It would certainly make a mind-blowing gift for everyone you know. It's even stupider than it sounds. It's so stupid it makes me giddy. If you want to revel in the most American brand of idiocy that money can buy, this is the book for you. And if you also love prose that clunks more clunkingly than a Volkswagen Thing, this is really really the book for you.

Of course, Things are lovable, while this book is a horror. But either way: clank, clunk, clonk.

The government was remaining tight-lipped about the attack on the Mall of America, so the news channels had exhausted their facts on the failed terrorist attempt hours ago. Until new information broke, they were just filling time with stories like the girl with the big hat who worked in the third-floor Hot Dog on a Stick who had confessed to staring in shock as the liquid rolled back and forth in the slushie machines immediately after the explosion.

"yes I said yes I will Yes"

If you want to enjoy this monstrosity without going to the trouble of reading it yourself, or providing any financial reward to the clowns who produced it, you can immerse yourself in its glories via our friend Dan's aptly named Shitty Books tumblr site. Start here.

Happy Chanukah!

Finland

The sky outside is an ominous yellowish gray. I am avoiding meeting the eye of the looming stack of final papers that I must grade. In half an hour I will go attend a colloquium at which the speaker promises to argue vigorously, in detail, and at length in support of a conclusion that everyone in the field already accepts as a matter of course. My primary accomplishment of the day has been to describe the protracted and disappointing American health-care reform drama as a process of "being panda-fucked in the ear".

More happily, later this evening, a colleague and I will send off an abstract for a conference being held in Finland this summer. I have a crush on Finland. I have never been there, but it is the home of Moomin and the Helsinki Complaints Choir and the Finnish language and Finns. What more do you need? 

I could listen to this all day, and indeed have done so, when I was finishing my dissertation. It is cheering, and makes me like the Finns. They have good complaints.

Reading Hel Looks is also a good way to appreciate Finns. One thing I especially like about it is how often the people being profiled mention their grandmothers as style inspirations. Grandmothers, and also Hanoi Rocks. Finland!

That old chestnut.

We were talking about the Salvation Army, and the conversation naturally turned to Smurfs. Specifically, to Smurfette and her participation in bukkake, group sex, and other orgiastic activites.¹

"In the end, you know, Smurfette holds all the cards."

"You do outnumber her by about two hundred to one."

"Oh, but we could never force her to do something she didn't want to do. Fortunately she's up for quite a lot."

"What about the rest of you?"

"Well, sometimes we go for the cat."

"How does he feel about that?"

"I think he'd like a little more turnabout. But we know he's got a barbed penis. So -- sorry Azrael, only receiving for you."

"And he understands that no means no?"

"Oh yes."

"So your perverse sexual universe doesn't have any rape."

"Of course not. It is a children's show!"

¹ Really -- first we were talking about the Salvation Army, and then, by a very short and entirely natural short sequence of conversational transitions, the conversation moved smoothly to the sexual exploits of the Smurfs. And everyone who's spent even the smallest second thinking about Smurfs has discussed the Smurfette gang-bang scenario.

Two dreams.

1. In which my subconscious does a terrible job of dwelling on my anxieties, opting instead for a hearty dose of deranged wish fulfillment

It's time for me to have the baby! Labor takes about fifteen minutes; it is quick and tidy, like delivering a well-wrapped package. After a brief period of confusion in which she looks strikingly like the cat, she is as pink, plump, unblemished, and at least three months old as any 'newborn' on television, and has a full head of lovely black hair. We are surprised to discover that she can climb the stairs right away (also rather like the cat). For some reason, we have named her Danielle. I am feeling fit as a fiddle, and it occurs to me to check to see how squashy my postpartum middle has become. Oh, how funny, it's not squashy at all. Indeed it is positively toned. I certainly am feeling well. Perhaps I'll go do some grocery shopping.

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2. A psychic experience

I dream that I have heartburn, AND THEN I WAKE UP AND REALLY DO. It is just like one of those amazing spooky dreams in books where you get in a fight with a terrible monster and have terrifying glorious adventures and then are all 'oh wow, what a crazy dream.' Then you get out of bed and see that your legs are all scratched up in reality from your supposedly dreamed escape through the brambles and are like WHOA and then you discover that the key to the treasure is actually under your pillow. Yes, it is exactly like that, except with Tums.

Gaze not.

The other day I awoke to an intense, sudden, and overwhelming awareness of the horror of the "morning zoo" style radio program. The circumstances under which this apprehension arose, as I lay in a guest room bed at ten minutes to seven, might make you think that it was inspired by some actual exposure to the thing.* But no, it was an unprompted revelation, beamed into my skull as a special gift from the goddess of banal pseudo insights.

Not that the fundamental notion that morning radio is horrible is incorrect or indeed news to anyone, but in my drowsy hypnagogic state I was convinced that it is truly the face of the abyss. The frenzied auditory capering, the pathetic sequence of zany set pieces and wacky songs about how unpleasant it is to get up in the morning, the jokey nicknames, the promotional photos displaying weary middle-aged radio personalities in labored 'funny' poses or costumes -- all too, too depressing to contemplate and surely the product of a species that has been beyond hope since at least 1981.

This, you will have noticed, is a profound and significant epiphany. I am almost deep enough to be fourteen again. (If I really were, though, I'd be far too busy practicing my newly crabbed handwriting by filling countless tiny green notebooks with an endless stream of cryptic phrases to tell you about it.)

They are really awful, though, aren't they? Or were. Actually I have no idea how widespread they are anymore. They used to be tremendously popular. There must still be something in that genre and time slot. I still see billboards advertising radio stations' Whatever Team and Loony Crew. How far-ranging was the zoo phenomenon, anyway? Are there radio presenters in New Zealand playing 'Fish Heads' at six in the morning and bumper music about how much the listener can be presumed to hate getting out of bed? Are there Spanish and Norwegian Zoo Crews? Ugandan?

It turns out that Glenn Beck, jackass 'political' 'commentator' extraordinaire, first made a name for himself on one of the earliest and most popular of those programs. And actually, once you know that, his whole spazzy, coked-out, goofy-voiced pile of tics suddenly snaps into focus as something with a provenance. Steve kindly suggests that thinking of Beck's career as one long run from the horrific maw of morning radio makes it slightly more sympathetic, but I'm afraid that's a vastly more generous interpretation than the facts can bear. Still, even the hint of sympathy for Glenn Beck suggests that my fourteen-year-old self is absolutely right about the abyssal qualities of the Zoo Crew.

* In fact, I awoke to the infinitely superior sound of 'Single Ladies.' Suck it, Nietzsche! No abyss for me.

Pears for victory

Soon we are off to balmy Florida to observe Thanksgiving with Snark's parents, where the sun shines all day on egrets and big tropical flowers and tiny dogs and retired people, and you would never know that winter is coming. I like seasons, though, so I am going to try setting up a post to go off (as it were) while we're away, with some photos from my most recent bout of highly autumnal cookery.

This will not be interesting for anyone, of course, but at least the photos won't go to waste.

Let's see if it works!

Look, I peeled some pears. They were very cheap at the grocery store, because it is currently autumn, when pears are in season.

Lots and lots of pears. Six pounds of pears.

Mmm, pear peelings. (This peeler, incidentally, is fantastic. You can peel raw bell peppers with that thing, or tomatoes. It is powerful.)

Burble burble burble burble.

A mere three hours later, they've turned all pink!

I was thinking of taking one of these jars with me to Florida, but then I realized that they weigh a ton and would be taken away from us by the TSA in any case. Also no one there would appreciate them the way that I would, so I will save them for some other purpose.

Meanwhile, what exciting adventures do you suppose we've been up to while you were falling asleep reading this? Have we been watching something boring on a very large television? Have there been awkward silences? How many? Have I been tempted several times to kick a certain very small and skittery dog who shall remain nameless?* Has someone touched my middle? Has anyone told me that I am "big"? Have I felt both irritated and guilty? Have I desperately, desperately wanted a drink? Who can say?

*I promise, I will never kick the dog.

No, I don't have any special cravings, why do you ask?

SCENE: It is before dinner. I am eating some crispy fried onions directly from the jar.

STEVE: Jesus, do you have pica?

ME: They're food!

STEVE: No. They aren't. It's like you're eating paint chips. Let me make you some toast instead.

ME: What a good idea. Okay.

STEVE: Would you like some butter or some almond butter?

ME: Butter and marmite and almond butter.

STEVE: And olives! And jalapeños!

ME: And paint chips.