Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Felicitations

It's Steve's birthday! I always especially enjoy Steve's birthday because until my birthday next swings around, we're the same age again. Come on in to thirty-four, I made it nice and warm for you.

 

Last year at this time he was doing this:

This year at this time he is rubbing the bridge of his nose as he puzzles over some computer programming problem. We really know how to celebrate around here, I tell you what.

And because we are such serious party people, he has received a number of presents which together conjure up a vision of a cobwebby old eccentric who probably has an owl in his pantry. Two mugs, vermouth, "Old Tom" gin, and several pieces of cheese. A fashionable magazine will soon be hiring our family to put together their gift-buying guide for Christmas 2010.

Suitable for framing.

Before a colonoscopy, or some kinds of surgery, lucky people get to indulge in what is tastefully known as "bowel preparation." That is to say, you are made to consume vast quantities of laxative products. Then you shit and shit and shit and when you are utterly limp from exhaustion and completely void of waste, you shit some more.

I hear this is a really good time. Since abdominal surgery itself is a walk in the park on a bright sunny morning, it stands to reason that you would want to precede it with a full day of miserable, wrung-out defecation.

As you can imagine, therefore, I'm pretty jealous of my friend who has just embarked on this magical adventure. However, good friends celebrate their loved ones' happy times, and so I swallowed my envy and made her this card.

Shut up about your baby.

Jane is being awfully charming of late, full of little peeping sounds and eye contact and dopey smiles and states of "quiet alertness," as some baby-wearing website I read put it.

I was already fond of the snuffling noises that were previously the only vocalization in her repertoire beyond yelling, bleating, and grunting, but this cooing stuff is really the business. Thumbs up to the fellow at the factory who thought up that one.

All snuggled up against Steve's chest? Very nice, yes, but toss in a musical "oh ah" and I think you'll find it's better yet. Gazing deeply into my eyes with an expression of besotted delight? Highly gratifying under any circumstances, to be sure. But a little nightingale warbling is a particularly fine way for her to indicate that the joy of my presence is just too much to bear in silence.

And right this very minute I can hear her making a series of small inquisitive owlet noises in the next room, where she is keeping Steve company as he types. It is pretty damn charming, I tell you what.

This is a good photo, I think. She was not actually making any birdlike sounds right at the moment I took it, but close enough. Also it documents our use of an actual towel-lined dresser drawer to put our baby in, just as if we were poor but honest young parents in a shabby but clean tenement flat. In fact, we are not so very poor or honest, and she doesn't sleep in it at all, instead using a handy little positioner thing that serves as either a smothering-prevention device in the bed or a minimal bassinet when placed on a table. We do use the drawer for changing her diaper, though, so it's not all a put on.

Genuine drawer!

Meanwhile, I may have a doctorate, but at the moment my proudest achievement is my ability to slide across the back seat of the car and transfer her from the car seat into her sling all without anyone's needing to get out of the car, stand up, or lose her shit. Then we emerge all neatly packed up together and she contentedly claws my cleavage with her tiny razorlike fingernails. Well done us.

Someday I may stop nattering on about my baby and get back to topics of more general interest. Won't that be exciting? Earlier today F. and I did have a nice cheerful rousing talk on the subject of Irritating Colleagues We Have Known, which was happy and engrossing as only that kind of grousing can truly be, and every single subject of the conversation was at least technically an adult, so there may be hope for me yet.

Pocketa pocketa.

It's spring! Yesterday that meant blazing sun and the continual awareness that at any moment one's sunscreen might expire leading to one's nose peeling off one's face. Today it is firmly in the April Showers mode.

I had been planning on walking down to campus for the couple of student meetings I have scheduled in the afternoon, but I think I may be weak and drive. Normally in fact I would much rather walk, because cars are a lot of trouble and require parking, while walking is equipment free and makes me feel wholesome, but in light of the copious walking I've fit into my schedule already this week and my desire to run the incredibly exciting errand of buying more hand towels, as well as the rain pissing down on the just and the unjust alike, driving has an unusual appeal.

Our car is entirely the least exciting car you can imagine, an oldish grey Honda Accord with a dent in the side from an incident before we fully grasped the idiosyncrasies of our current very narrow driveway. Its name is Walter Mitty, after the James Thurber story about the dashing fantasies of a meek office worker, because we like to imagine that the Honda, too, has a rich inner life.

I'm not sure whether I think it is more likely that it imagines itself to be something like this

...which disappointingly calls itself a "roadable aircraft" instead of a "flying car," or like this

...with gangsters hanging out the back. Probably both, and this, too.

I certainly hope so, anyway.

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The sunny weather that is now but a memory was well timed to correspond to the part of the week when Steve's parents were in town. Their visit inspired an unusual burst of activity, with trips to the botanical gardens and brunching out and long walks and other grandparentish adventures.

Now they have returned home and this infant has entered a state of near-complete hibernation. She will deign to rouse herself minimally to suckle, then emits a tiny sigh and falls back asleep immediately. I am certainly not complaining as it is both handy and aesthetically pleasing (her little mouth hangs open in an especially fetching way), but I wonder what all her energy is going to. I suspect that at the end of the day her eyes will suddenly pop open and she will scream like a banshee, shit her pants, and grow an inch all in the span of forty-five seconds.

I see that this post didn't turn out to be much about anything in particular, but such is my exciting life. Here, have a picture of a cat, to round things off.

Custom work.

Sure to be the next big thing. Get one now, before they're as ubiquitous as that Elsa Peretti bean pendant.

Recto and verso.

Tiny houses

This is hardly a scoop, because it came to my attention via today's New York Times, but I really love Annina Günther's miniature interiors. Not only are they tiny and scrupulous, they are fantastically full of quotidian detail. 

For instance:

As she renovates the dollhouse, its tiny owners do the same in their own tiny way.

The front entry is cluttered.

And, as she says, every house share needs a hippie.

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I am feeling very fond of our own, full-sized, house just now, which is not actually our own but a rental. I like our stuff in this house, and how we have it arranged. I like the mixture of old and new. There's the chair with excessively elaborate turned wood arms and legs, a handmedown from someone with more rococo tastes, stuck in a corner and piled with blankets. There's the great slab of dark-stained maple that is our coffee table, the densely quilted quilt a friend made us, the stacking tables that were my grandmother's, the window seat that no one ever sits on because it has been co-opted as a shelf for a tiny fraction of our ridiculous quantity of books, the crib filled with pillows because the baby actually sleeps in our room. Everything looks right, though I admit I'd have made some different choices if I'd been designing the bathroom.

Soon, though, we won't live here anymore. This summer, we're moving across the country for the sake of a one-year postdoc I'm taking. It's a lovely position, in a beautiful place, and academia is like that, but there is certainly something highly deranged about picking up everything including a cat, a baby, and our ridiculous complement of possessions and taking it all that way, only to move it all again a year later. 

I'd try not to think about it too much, but we have to find a place to move into, and we've become spoiled and picky. The nice thing about going for such a limited time is that it makes it easier to throw money at this problem in good cheer. The not so nice thing is that, spendthrift or not, it's difficult to be successfully picky about housing from 2500 miles away. But I really mind living in dank places and rickety places and places with wall-to-wall carpet or, for that matter, places with no washing machine. It's a pickle.

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Once upon a time, I went apartment searching on Steve's behalf in Berkeley, where I already lived. It was a major undertaking. The rental market was appalling, and he was on a budget.

There was no Craigslist. Instead you registered with a place called "Apartment Finder" and phoned in every morning to listen to a recording of the dismal listings that met your parameters that day. A robotic voice took you through the paces. "Studio... apartment. Full... kitchen. One... bathroom. Shower. No... bathtub. No... pets." Then you ran off to the showing, arriving fifteen minutes early only to discover that the place had been rented two hours earlier to the fellow who was helping the previous tenant move out.

One day there was a listing in Steve's price range in a really lovely part of town. "Surely this apartment must be in the one and only falling down shack in the Berkeley Hills," my roommate and I said to each other. But when we arrived at the listed address, the building was beautiful.

Unsurprisingly, many other people also turned up for the showing. We milled around on the sidewalk, marveling over the attractiveness and eyeing up the competition as we waited for the landlord to arrive.

He emerged suddenly from around the side of the building. "This way!" he said happily, and motioned for us to follow. We walked up the driveway and through a side entrance.

This door led out of the beautiful sunny day into a dark, unfinished basement.

It was not a basement apartment. It was just a basement. The ceiling was just barely over my head. I am five foot four. The exposed pipes hung somewhat lower.

Stooping and staring, two dozen people made their way through the cellar in mounting dudgeon. In one corner, I can see it now, was a tiny bleak washroom containing a toilet and a not very nice sink. Nearby, two milk crates filled with pantry items and plates supported a small hotplate. Under the one narrow window lay a mattress with a rumpled duvet and a single pillow on top. I believe there was also a lonely guitar.

The landlord seemed genuinely puzzled as person after person made offended noises and left.

"Who would live there?" we wondered as we walked down the hill. "A zombie, maybe."

It might have its charms, for the right tenant. "Zombie... pit." Apartment Finders could say. "One... window. No... kitchen. No... shower. No... view. No... hope."

So, this is what I am afraid of, whenever we think about moving. Please don't make us live in a zombie pit. It's no kind of place to raise a baby, and we don't even own a guitar.