Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Cunning stunts.

My parents were always willing to tell me what "bad" words meant. This gave me a certain degree of clout and satisfaction, because in those days cussing and related topics were surrounded by a great deal of highly unreliable mythology. I remember once coming home and reporting to my father that someone on the bus had claimed that putting up your middle finger meant "all the swears."

"Oh, no," my father said. "It means 'fuck you.'"

I also had a steady source of material largely derived, as in A Christmas Story and the Jean Shepherd stories the movie is based based on, from listening to my father attempt to fix things. This passage, for instance, rings very familiar:

"THAT SON OF A BITCH HAS GONE OUT AGAIN! THAT GODDAMN CLANKY SON OF A BITCH!"

The hot-air registers breathed into the clammy air the whistling breath of the Antarctic. A moment of silence. The stillness of the tundra gripped the living room; the hoarfrost sparkled like jewels in the moonlight on my mother's Brillo pad in the kitchen sink.

CLANK! K-BOOM! CLANK! K-BOOM! CLANK!

"SONOFABITCH!"

CLANK! K-BOOM! K-BOOM! CLANKCLANK!

But for all that, there was one word that I learned much, much later than the others, by a margin of years. I'd asked my parents what the worst swear word was. "Oh, 'motherfucker,' I suppose," they said. Hardly.

It was not until I was twelve or thirteen, amazingly enough, that I finally encountered the last one. This will seem really especially backward to any of you who speak British English, but I think it was pretty backward, regardless.

I remember the context well: it was in a graffito on the public mailbox near my house, and it was about a girl in my carpool. Her name was not Helga, but it was something very nearly as improbable, so let's call her that.

HELGA IS A CUNT

it said.

Poor Helga. She was pleasant, as I remember, a recent transplant from Austria whose English was excellent although she persisted in calling me "Wera," friendly and eager to please, an ordinary-looking girl with a nice habit of saying "Pardon?" instead of "Excuse me?" when she hadn't heard or fully understood your last remark. She also made me feel a little twitchy, because she gave -- or so she and others said -- blow jobs to college boys for money.

(Seventh-grade cash for blow job transactions have apparently not gone out of style. A few years ago, a teacher friend told us about a recent scandal at his school. A girl had been performing for selected boys at fifty cents a pop. This little prostitution ring had eventually been found out because the boys kept coming into the office to ask for change. Eventually someone wondered why they needed so many quarters, and why they looked so damn cagey when they asked for them.

I realize that it reflects very poorly on me that my first reaction to this story was: "If only she'd realized. She clearly could have been charging a dollar.")

Adult me looks back on pre-teen me and is sorry that Helga freaked her out. I was young for my age and couldn't quite deal with the blow job information. So even though she was nice, I gave her a wide berth and didn't return her phone calls. Maybe the college boys were even a figment, I don't know. In any case, I hope she's happy somewhere now, that if she's still giving blow jobs, it's for love and not money, and that it's been quite some time since anyone has called her a cunt.

Winter wonderland.

Yesterday the world filled up with slithery cruel snow that kept covering the car as fast as I could clear it and made the road terrifying. Today the world is full of crusty, dirty, unpicturesque snow that has already covered everything and makes the road bleak. This is not a tremendous improvement, though it does mean that I will be able to fetch the parcel containing my new winter hat from the post office.

The hat has a giant pompom on top, which, in addition to being extremely dignified, should keep me extra warm by trapping the hot air that vents out of the top of my head. Pompoms are very practical in this way.* This is important because none of my coats will button up over old Foot Foot. A coat that did do up might come in handy now that it is really winter. But at this point, so kind-of-close-ish to the end, I am far too stubborn to buy one that will. Pompoms and voluminous scarves will have to fill in the gaps.

The weather is in fact rather frightful. Last night it sounded like a pack of injured wolves were being flung at our windows. They howled (understandably) and slammed into the rattly wooden frames, then someone dragged them off and did it all over again. It was tiring for everyone involved.

So the world outside is hideous. But inside, Steve has made his annual weblog post. Hurrah! It's much cleverer and more interesting than anything you'll find here, which is why it takes him all year to produce one. Plus their rarity makes them collectible. This year it's about dreadful Christmas movies and invasion literature. It all comes together in a lovely way. Go see!

Also I have received my beautiful and useful tea cosy.

Here's a worse photo that shows off its dashing bow more effectively.

Though I believe it was designed for a shorter, rounder teapot, it fits very nicely on our tall, pear-shaped one as well. Shite on the outside, nice hot tea on the inside -- it's a microcosm of reality. How cunning!

*No, they're not.

Holiday photos.

May your 2010 be this happy.

This sawhorse lives in the courtyard of my mother's gorgeous block of flats, where we spent Christmas. He is holding up an admittedly not so gorgeous extension cord. This is an important job, though, as the cord provides power for the fairy lights that give the court its festive holiday air, despite the (blessed) lack of snow.

Because our priorities are not entirely in order, these are the only photos we took over the whole trip. Loved ones opening their carefully selected presents? No. An adorable three-year-old trying again and again to pluck the glace cherries off the top of the trifle before it's been served? No. A room stuffed full of people singing decreasingly Christmassy and increasingly tipsy songs at full voice for hours on end, to the accompaniment of three guitars and a musical saw? Certainly not. 

Sawhorse? By all means.

 
Hello! he says. I love you! Happy new year!

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.