Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Breaking news.

Sometimes Steve will burst into a conversation with something urgent to impart.

"HOLY SHIT!" he'll shout, regardless what I was in the middle of saying or doing, because he has just learned of something so galling, so infuriating, so amazing, that he must relay it right away.

And then, sometimes, because he has been reading Nixonland, it turns out that this breaking news is from 1968.

"Henry fucking Kissinger got the Vietnamese to scuttle peace negotiations by assuring them that the Republicans would give them a better deal after the election!"

"Can you believe this shit?"

Or from 1971. John Wayne gave an interview to Playboy in which he said he supported "white supremacy"! Or 1972. Hubert Humphrey got Lorne Greene from Battlestar Galactica to accuse McGovern of being anti-Israel?!

Today, I have something even more urgent and newsworthy to tell you.

It is this:

Gary Cooper was extremely handsome.

And funny! (We watched Bluebeard's Eighth Wife last night. Oh, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, how I love you both.) But, especially, handsome.

Now you know.

It's wole!

It is my way to develop intense enthusiasms for things that are essentially the opposite of anything that might ever become a trend. These objects of my devotion are too basic, too non-brandable, too deeply un-chic, and too mundane in every way to be the next big thing -- unless you're me.

Let me give you a few examples from my past, to illustrate. Have you heard the good news about

• Prunes?
• Dried beans? (Though, weirdly, these kind of are actually trendy.)
• Fizzy water?
• Epsom salt? (It makes every bath THE BEST)
• Baths in general, for that matter?

These days my little heart is on fire for wool. I love wool. It's a magical wonder fiber. It is!

Everyone already knows about SmartWool socks, ho hum, old news. Here are my far more thrilling wool picks for 2010:

Because. That's why.

"Pinkie is a good nickname. It's an especially good nickname for a baby. You know why? Because, A, babies are pink. And B, you buy them to feed to your snake."

It read "Ice Cube's a pimp".

Yesterday, everything was dismal. It was cold and rainy, and I couldn't bear to try going anywhere. The baby screamed, Steve snarled, I wept. We felt pent up and incompetent. Our eyes slowly melted out of our heads. We hardly noticed our nice dinner and finally fell wretchedly into bed.

But this morning we woke up from a night infinitely more restful than the one before. In the morning the baby slept while I worked. At midday she snugged peacefully against Steve's chest while I made lunch. In the afternoon I stuffed her into her sling and went for a long walk while Steve got some work done at the cafe: first to the library and then on a meandering path to the ice cream shop. The sun was hot and bright, so I shaded her face with the tail of my scarf.

On the way back I ate my gelato—pistacho and chocolate—and got so warm I took my jacket off. I joined Steve at the cafe and read a bit of a library book. One of the other regulars came past our table, on crutches because of some recent back surgery, and said, "Oh, I didn't realize you had a baby hidden in your shirt!"

"Yes, she's my secret ambush baby," I said.

"Do you think I can sit behind you without being ambushed?"

"You should be safe. She's on standby at the moment."

And so she was, making only the occasional mumbled mewl until we left to walk home in the evening that was still light, thanks to daylight saving. She cavorted nude on her woolly blanket and didn't pee on anything. We gazed deeply into one another's eyes. Dinner was delicious and we even noticed.

I wish today could be bottled so that I had something to drink when she's being inconsolable at 4 in the morning.

They're a chamois cloth.

The downside of this "Things I Cried Over" sidebar is that it tempts us to exaggerate. As I have amply demonstrated in the past, I am a giant simp. As a result, any number of ridiculous things can easily engage my sentiment. Sadly, it's not always the most satisfyingly absurd ones that actually rise to the level of making me weep.

Last night conversation turned to prodigious pitchman Billy Mays. We looked up the list of products he'd shilled, from the Awesome Auger to Zorbeez.

"Zorbeez?"

"Zorbeez! They're a chamois cloth."

"Ah, like ShamWow."

"Like ShamWow but not as good. Wikipedia says 'It has often been tested with mixed results.' and 'Popular Mechanics compared the absorbency of two towel products and declared ShamWow! the more effective of the two.'"

"Oh no! That's so sad," said tenderhearted me. "To have the whole point of your existence be how absorbent you are -- how ZORBEE -- and then to fail."

"Are you crying?"

"No."

"You are!" Steve inspected me closely. "Your eyes are shiny! That's a tear for sure!"

"I'm sorry. It would make a better story if I cried over Zorbees, I know, but it's just not happening."

Here are a few more things I didn't actually quite cry over:

• Failing to get the baby into her sling.
• "Chicken Soup with Rice," the song.
• "I'm so thirsty."

Just as people use video-game style badges to make real-life achievements more thrilling, having this record of my ridiculousness makes everything a little less ridiculous. Or ridiculous, but funny rather than sad. Plus now everyone wants to make me cry! It's a win all around.

L'Air du Temps

Thank you for all the excellent book recommendations. Lots of them were reassuringly for books I already love, which makes it seem most likely that the ones I haven't read yet will be similarly pleasing. Kelljones should be specially satisfied with herself, for providing a mix of new suggestions with old ones so very beloved that we actually chose Jane's middle name in large part in honor of a favorite character from one. (That would be the narrator of I Capture the Castle.)

In return, I would like to recommend a movie. Because I am a pain, it is a movie that is:

• 193 minutes long
• In French
• Not available at all on Region 1 DVD
• Totally deranged and high as a kite

And probably half of you have seen it already anyway.

Nonetheless! I persevere.

Steve first saw Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau at the Cinematheque about a year ago, some time when I was out of town. He enthused about it mightily and tried, at least, to tell me the entire plot. This is easier attempted than achieved, because because the movie is insane (i.e. totally deranged and high as a kite). It... resists summary. It is three hours of dream-logic and then dream-logic within the dream-logic. 

When we finally sat down to watch it together, Steve was worried that he'd oversold it, but no. I found it entirely awesome.

Céline and Julie are best friends, or maybe strangers who meet at the beginning of the movie, or perhaps lovers, or possibly the same person. They share an apartment and borrow one another's identities frequently. 

Also, they are naturally extremely high.

Céline, or is it Julie, knows of a house where something strange is going on: 7 bis, rue de Nadir aux Pommes.

After an hour and a half of lovely rambling deranged movie time, the girls establish a routine. Each morning, one goes to the house, disappears inside, and then is roughly disgorged back onto the streets of Paris to stagger into a taxi, remembering nothing, but with a piece of candy in her mouth.

The candy is magic! Or psychoactive, anyhow. Sucking it later transports you—in a hallucinatory, watching-a-movie way—to the melodrama unfolding inside the house.

And it is a melodrama, complete with cheap costumes, stilted acting, and over-the-top Jamesian plot.

Magical adventures ensue.

There are dinosaur eyes.

And no shortage of the previously mentioned complete derangement.

 

I have of course left out vast swathes of the movie (Julie's white-clad cousin! Céline's nightclub act! The backers from Beruit!), so you needn't worry that it's been spoiled for you in any way. It's 193 minutes long, after all. It's a big loose zany stoned mare's nest, but it never feels like a cheat, because there's no pretense that it's anything more or less than it is. 

"It has no moral," said the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico), "it is a Dada story."

Vita longa, comœdia brevis.

I am starting a tiny new thing! It is a running list of Things I Cried Over. Now at any time you can look in my sidebar to see the most recent excuses my body has seized upon as an occasion for lachrymal purging.

(This phenomenon is common enough that Steve and I have invented a notional radio show called "The Lachrymose Hour," featuring music by the likes of Smog, Antlers, and Cat Power.)

Here is the starting list:

1. The trailer for Whip It. Yes, the 2009 Drew-Barrymore-directed movie about lives transformed through the power of roller derby. "Be your own hero"! Also, Ellen Page has appallingly gorgeous skin.

2. Awkward swaddling. Dr. Harvey Karp's baby whispering secrets are brilliant and a major reason we are not dropping dead of sleep deprivation, but his approach to creating baby burritos and I do not get along. Fuck this, I am going back to my old method, which also doesn't actually prevent the baby from squirming her arms out from under the blanket but doesn't involve six false starts and a flood of tears. Maybe I'll revisit the superior technique next week.

3. A tender moment in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals. What could be more sentimental than a Terry Pratchett book about football? And yet actually even when I am not engorged with prolactin I have been known to cry over many of his works. You should have seen me while I was reading Feet of Clay. God, I'm a simp.

I love good light reading that comes in vast quantities, so that once you get hooked you can go on reading and reading and reading more of the same. Right now that means Terry Pratchett and Angela Thirkell. Funny, charming, undemanding, not stupid. The surely horribly out of fashion Miss Read, a great favorite of my mother's mother, is also superb for this sort of thing.

Not that I am going to run out of Pratchett and Thirkell any time soon, that being sort of the point, but do you have any recommendations in this vein? Life is long and light fiction is short.

Instead of cribbage

If you are not a person who wants to read a story about girl bits, gore, babies, birth, or my embarrassingly short (but intense) labor, please visit this fine source of sleek, fur-covered cuteness instead. I think my baby is cute, but I will not lie: otters are cuter.

I am a lachry-mouse.

SCENE: I am tidying some things in the fridge after our trip to the pediatrician, who has recommended -- quite possibly mainly as a strategy to give me something to feel proactive about -- that I not eat dairy for a bit, in case it is contributing to Jane's slightly suboptimal digestive performance. (Oh boy! Digestion!)

I come across a nice plump package of my favorite tortillas, which we normally use to make breakfast quesadillas.

"Ohhh." I go get a hug from Steve.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm a little sad about dairy products," I explain, dripping tears on his shoulder.

"I think you'll be able to have them again soon, you know."

"Yes, I know. And I don't even really care that much, it's just that all the nice little routines I was happy about resuming seem to involve dairy." Tears leap out of my eyes and puddle on his shirt.

"I really don't mind very much," I reassure him, truthfully, in sensible tones, sobbing all the while.

"I promise I am not experiencing feelings of hopelessness." I put my head down on the counter and weep shamelessly.

Two minutes later, I stop and feel entirely better.

Here's what I want to know: Is it possible that there is actually something in my system that I need to excrete through crying? It is an excretion, after all. The internet tells me that emotional tears contain prolactin, which I certainly have in abundance at the moment.

Can it really be the case that every once in a while you wind up with too much and your body deals with it by making you cry about dairy products? Tell me, is this insane? Is it something everybody knows to be true? What's the deal? I would really like to hear your views on this question.

Baby Schadenfreude

Last night I evicted a baby! I am currently luxuriating at the hospital while Steve reads a Donald Westlake novel and the baby in question sleeps peacefully, if temporarily. This is a very nice hospital, it turns out, at least for the purpose we are putting it to. Here are some exciting details:

1. Jane Cassandra.

2. 6 lbs, 5 oz.

3. March 2, 1:21 ack emma. This means her birthday is countdown day (when the date is written American style, anyway): 3/2/10.

4. 4 hours, which I promise never to mention again, because I like continuing to have friends.

5. Snurfly and sweet-smelling.

6. Distrustful baby is distrustful:

7. IT'S MOLE.