Adventures in the Pointless Forest

You might as well say 'I eat what I see' is the same as 'I see what I eat'!

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"I love you... a dozen."

"You what?"

"I love you a dozen."

"I see. Well, in that case I love you two dozen."

"What? You can't love me TWO dozen. That's like saying, 'I love you mauve' or 'I love you scrub brush.'"

"I love you, Scrub Brush."

I'll bleb YOUR withering hay.

This Sunday took place in the shadow of a painfully blocked milk duct. The progression of events went about like this:

1. Good morning! Wow, my tit is certainly very full of milk.
2. Oh, damn.
3. Hours of fruitless hot compresses, hot showers, glasses of water, ibuprofin, attempts at expressing with the dairy-cow machine, and lethargic moaning (lethargy and moaning both of course known to be highly fruitful at the best of times).
4. A timid and tentative piercing of the bleb with a sterile needle.
5. THANK CHRIST. Bless you, suckling infant, for the powerful hoover of your maw.
6. Forty-five minutes of limp, yet enthusiastic, vocal relief.

Quite a satisfying dramatic arc, in the end, with all the ingredients—foreshadowing, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement—just as they taught us in school.

And what a fine word "bleb" is, incidentally, isn't it? It's even better, as so many words are, if you take the time to read up on it in the OED. There you will find such splendid sentences as 

fig.1651 [Henry] MORE Enthus. Triumph* (1656) 180 You blebs of venery, you bags of filth!

and 

1880 J. E. BURTON Handbk. Midwives §38. 25 The ovum, or egg, is at first a little bladder, or bleb.

The second of these may seem fairly unremarkable on the face of it, but I think you'll find that it's very catchy. Try it aloud: The ovum! Or egg. Is at first a little bladder! Or bleb.

You'll also be happy to learn that "bleb" can also be a verb, meaning (and the exact phrasing of this is the good bit, obviously) "to furnish with blebs." Hence:

1821 CLARE Vill. Minstr. II. 84 While big drops..bleb the withering hay with pearly gems.

Do you think this was written to be romantic, poetic, evocative, tender, lovely? I believe it was. But I fear, John Clare, that this line has not stood the test of time.

 

*Full title: Enthusiasmus triumphatus, or a discourse of the nature, causes, kinds and cure of enthusiasme.

Conversations featuring the young of this fine state.

I think the girl in the first case was about seven, and the boy in the second one was a little younger, five or six.

Northern California

Little girl: Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.

Mother: Yes?

Little girl: (urgently) What about the goat cheese?

Mother: I already got the goat cheese.

Little girl: (very relieved) Oh, okay.

+

Southern California

Mother: How'd you like it?

Little boy: (earnestly) It was so relaxing. 

Mother: Oh yeah?

Little boy: Yeah. You just, like, meditate for sixteen hours.

Don't you just wish you were married to me?

Me: Sometime we should go out on a date that requires real dressing up, in the sense of you wearing a suit. Or doesn't require it, but includes it. Plus dzing.

Steve: dz?

Me: Your perfume.

Steve: Oh, Dzing! Not "Dee Zee-ing".

Me: Right.

Steve: I was like... "Demilitarized Zoning"?

Me: That would be "dmzing".

Steve: MORE FOOL I.

Me: Which smells like napalm.

Steve: Victory.

Me: Old napalm. Indeed.

+

We occasionally have the old-fashioned kind of conversation, too.

(As I said in a voicemail when we were trying to coordinate our activities from across a bay on this recent trip: "You need to call me so that we can discuss this with words. From our mouths.")

On this occasion, I am clanking about in the kitchen: "What's 200 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?"

"About 400." (hem, hem.) "392, specifically. You can figure it out exactly, because it's 1.8 times 200, plus 32. It's super easy to go in that direction. Harder going the other way."

"What? How am I supposed to remember 1.8?"

"Well, boiling is 100, compared to 212 in Farenheit. So you just offset by 32 degrees because of freezing, and—"

(Psh.) "'Fahrenheit is really great; multiply by 1.8.'"

Sorted!

Travel broadens the mind.

We have been having good times with our friends in Berkeley, handing round our baby to be dandled on their knees and scampering off to eat olives and drink cocktails. Now—this very minute, even—we are in the middle of traveling back by train. It is a long ride, because there are many stops and you never do pick up all that much speed in between them. Ten hours! But I still feel it is the best way to go.

Steve is hanging out in our miniature sleeping compartment with Jane while she naps and I partake of the wifi in the parlor car. I am sitting opposite two large and affable Australians who seem to be enjoying gin and tonics. One has a single dangling cross earring à la George Michael circa 1987. 

The missing "p" key on Steve's laptop has lent a certain piquancy to the whole endeavor, and I have been relieved to find that there were not too many alarming emails piled up in my inbox. 

Later we will have lunch in the dining car, and then after a stint ambling about, we can retire to our seats for novel reading and more napping. If only all modes of travel allowed one both to walk about and to lie down whenever one wanted, how much more relaxing it all would be.

Earlier the conductor announced that the lounge car was open. Apparently this is the snack bar bit of the train. The conductor would like to head some frustrations off at the pass.

"When you get to the front of the line, please do not try to open your box," he says with the sad voice of long experience. "Please do not touch the lids. Please do not try to help. That will just make your fellow passengers have to wait in line longer. It will all go much faster if I do it all myself. Thank you."

I hope he gets his wish.

So it is all very civilized and pleasant, but the best part is the inhabitant of the sleeperette opposite ours. He is a ropy, white-haired, leathery sort of fellow who looks like he is probably from Maine (as Steve observed). His compartment door is closed, but the curtain is open, so we can see the glow of his laptop. 

What's more, he seems to have vision problems, because he has the screen set to display in quite large type. The type is so large, and the contrast so beautifully high, that it is nigh impossible to avoid seeing what he is reading—or perhaps writing? Oh, please, God, let it be what he is writing.

It is Harry Potter fanfic.

Hooray!

I am so glad I have the category "American Things".

Scene: Our house is on a corner lot, with no fence or wall to obscure the view of either street as it approaches the intersection. I am standing idly on the front step, holding Jane, who had become fractous indoors.

Two moderately glossy cars pull up, one right after the other, from the west, and pause at the stop sign to my right. The drivers are of a similar type, somehow very Southern Californian: fifty-something men, lightly tanned, well kept but casually dressed, hair silver rather than merely gray. They are perhaps music executives, or successful tax attorneys, or character actors who play music executives and tax attorneys.

The first car turns left. The driver of the car behind leans out his window and shouts: "TURN SIGNAL!!" by which he does not mean, "By Jove, old shoe, if it isn't my old chum 'Turn Signal'!" nor "Bravo, my good man, for your brilliant deployment of the turn signal," but rather "Jesus fucking christ, jackass, try using your fucking turn signal sometime."

The other driver nearly hits the car parked in front of my house in his haste to lean out his own window in turn, so that he might reply: "BITE ME, MOTHERFUCKER!"

Both cars drive away with vigor. I cackle with delight.

The end.

Action packed.

It's Jane's half birthday! We have already obtained some cake to eat on her behalf.

She herself has recently had the opportunity to scarf both roast zucchini and bits of tamale, both of which she approves of very heartily. She was less interested in the potatoes that came with my brunch last Sunday, but then I didn't think they were very delicious, either. (There is a theme uniting these foods—can you spot it?)

So that would seem to mean that it is September of 2010. And yet apparently it is 1999, because I am currently in mourning over the fact that there will never be a second season (series) of Ultraviolet. It holds up surprisingly well.

Idris Elba remains very handsome.

The characters are a good and plausible mixture of clever and not, dispassionate and self interested, savvy and gullible, brainy and lummoxy, laudable and infuriating, with a pleasing balance across genders.

The phones, it must be admitted, are very large.

But the representation of what computers can do is shockingly realistic, especially for the era. I never saw anything remotely as real as this in anything that I was watching in 1998.

(That one features a nice underplayed eyeroll just before it, right after someone else says, snidely, "Good luck, by the way. He wiped everything.")

The metaphysics are well thought out and hang together neatly.

And they never actually say the word "vampire".

I even like the music. (Dammit! I see that an "Extended Version Of Ultraviolet Theme Music" was one of the special features on the DVD. If only I had realized before we sent it back to Netflix.)