Adventures in the Pointless Forest

It's raining, while Rome burns.

It rains and rains, and nothing drains. Crossing the street is an exciting adventure in fording streams. It is damp even inside the clothes dryer and my hair is retaining water like a pre-menstrual victim of congestive heart failure. 

First world dilemmas, how embarrassing you are. For instance, I wear the same shoes--boots, actually--nineteen days out of twenty. They are quite wet at the moment. They were aggressively expensive, but considering the use I have gotten out of them I am not too ashamed about it. Then this week I started thinking with alarm about the eventual day they wear out, not to mention the fact that wearing them daily puts greater wear on them than giving them a day between wearings would do. The future looms, cold and bootless. 

Obvious solution: buy a second pair of related but different boots from the same maker, if you like them so much. And yet the prospect of spending nigh on (oh I can't actually quite bring myself to say it, after all) for no real pressing reason seems not entirely prudent or frugal, somehow. Yet is it not less frugal to wear my existing boots into the ground like a horse that is never rested nor watered?

This in fact goes well beyond being a mere first world dilemma into the realm of moneyed-idiot pseudo dilemma, a whole super-class of moronic "problem" best solved with a quick slash of the guillotine. I do hanker after those boots, though.  

No matter. It is easy for me to deny myself in this case, quite aside from the sway of my bank balance and common decency, because I am far too incompetent to deserve any treats at all. Today's major achievements have been making vast quantities of horribly mediocre tofu curry (you may wonder how mediocrity, by its nature, can be horrible, but I assure you it was), somehow giving myself an itchy face rash in the course of trying to make my skin look nice, failing to take a shower, and tramping mud all over the kitchen and laundry room floor. 

("I don't wonder how mediocrity can be horrible," Steve remarks, reading over my shoulder. "It's an existential horror." Isn't it, though. And he ate the curry.)

Better than chimps, at least.

Going to the zoo: when you have children, it's a thing you do, isn't it? I'm zoo averse, normally. There's something about the whole project, with its small helpings of context-riven animals, one after the other after another, that gives me a kind of existential vertigo.

But I've been twice this month, and while the vertigo persists, I will admit that it is nice to see several napping otters all in a heap, and the capybaras are good too. The rest is a mixed bag. The condor enclosure has piped-in flute music, for reasons that remain unclear to me. There is a glass-fronted cavelet full of hissing cockroaches with a red button underneath that you can press to hear their hisses. It sounds to me very much like some assistant zookeeper got roped into making this recording, and I don't mean by holding up a microphone to the insects.

"Maisie! Come hiss into the box. You do it best."

"Oh, all right. Ssss. Sss. Ssssssss. Are you happy now?"

There are also giraffes, which remain gratifyingly bizarre, even to my jaded adult perceptions. Their necks are so very long, and their tongues so very black. Their heads are so very small by comparison to the rest of them, even as they are very large indeed by comparison to you. Also, they stink. (Apparently they have "at least eleven main aromatic chemicals in the fur." Delicious.) Later Steve regaled me with giraffe facts gleaned from Wikipedia.

"Let's find out about the giraffe lifestyle!"

"Lifestyle? Being a giraffe isn't a choice, you know."

"During courtship, dominant males will displace subordinates from the presence of the females, by staring and walking towards them."

"Yikes. Creepy."

"Although generally quiet and non-vocal, giraffes have been heard to communicate with various sounds. Courting males will emit loud coughs."

"I'll just wait here patiently while you tell me how terribly your current boyfriend treats you. You know, sometimes it's funny how we don't see the best solution to our problems when it's right in front of us! COUGH COUGH."

"And male giraffes determine female fertility by tasting the female's urine in order to detect estrus."

"Just like you, darling!"

"I beg your pardon."

"No, right, sorry, I had you confused with someone else. A giraffe."

So it appears that there is a giraffe lifestyle, and it consists of silent menace, passive aggression, and drinking pee. Giraffes: just like undergraduates, only taller? You be the judge.

Oh, what a pity.

Not to worry, I'm sure they'll be restocked soon.

It's lovely rice pudding for dinner again.

We spent all day wondering what was the matter with Jane. Was she sick? Was it teething? (It's never teething.) As you know, she is normally very jolly, but not today. The low point came when she woke from her afternoon nap. She assumed her habitual post-sleep attitude of extra sunny good cheer, but could only sustain it for about three minutes before leaning her forehead against me, putting all her weight into it, and dissolving abjectly into pathetic sobs.

In the end it seemed that we had been inadvertently starving her? Oops? In a tricky double twist maneuver, she had a growth spurt first, and second acquired a sudden and unheralded need for twice the calories. Sneaky.

Ah, the deep mysteries of parenting. Truly it takes a devious and subtle mind to unravel that tangled skein. FEED THE BABY, LACKWIT. Oh yes. Sorry about that, sweetheart.

While I'm being a baby bore, I may as well go ahead and tell you about her latest tricks. They are so developmentally appropriate that it makes me laugh. It is like when you have a dream and all the symbolism is embarrassingly transparent. Couldn't you have come up with something a little more obscure? you ask your subconscious, but it can't be bothered, presumably because it is too busy producing all the lyrics to "Common People" today, after you couldn't remember them in a conversation three days ago.

Anyway, it is all about reciprocity at the moment. Trick #1 is to hand us things politely and then wait for us to hand them back. Trick #2 is to clap her hands until we all clap our hands, too, and say "yayyyyy," as you do. My mother was visiting this week and by the end we were all sitting around the dinner table, breaking every three minutes to break into a round of applause.

 

Maybe that's how Jane got so hungry.

Poor form.

There is an English Shop in town! How could I have gone so many months without realizing it? Sadly, and I'm sorry if by some chance the proprietor should ever chance to see this, it is not a supremely well stocked English Shop. It's on the airy, tea cozy provisioning model, rather than jam-packed as I would wish with dubious-flavored crisps and fizzy drinks. 

But I am patently ungrateful. Who is going to cater to a customer like me, who is thinking, Yes, there is Fairy washing-up liquid, but is there Persil? Yes, there is Wilkin & Sons jam, but is there Little Scarlet? Yes, there are Twiglets, but are there any other salty snacks at all? Not unless you count Weetabix or Bovril. 

Indeed, I am a horrible customer. I fondled the merchandise and monologized as I did it. "Let's just see how firm these Garibaldi biscuits are," I murmured to Jane, reaching out for a pinch. "Oh. Very firm." Another patron, who was standing rather more in earshot than I thought, enjoyed this commentary. The blackcurrant pastilles were very firm, too, even for their genus.

In the end I bought nothing. Nothing! I'm a monster.

Master class

Our new babysitter, who is crucially instrumental to our navigating this week of flip-flopping single parenthood, gave a very suitable, very feeling sigh as she tore herself away at the end of her stint on Monday. 

We were all squared up for money and saying "Goodbye, see you next time," and she lingered by the door like you do when you are sixteen and dating someone who you think is just dreamy, and you can't quite bear to tear yourself away and return to the cold dark world where you write "Mrs. Baby Janeypants" all over your notebook until you can see him again. Quite right.

I mean, it's ridiculous, of course. One cannot continually be having conversations that go "Your infant is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." "Yes, I know just how you feel." Not only is it unlikely, it's unseemly.

She is a nice baby, though, and I do like to feel that she is appreciated. 

When she was tiny, we observed that being out and about with a newborn was rather like walking around with a mid-range celebrity, in the range of responses it elicited from passersby. We decided that the mid-range celebrity Jane was was James Franco. And so conversations like

STRANGER: Is that a baby?

US: It sure is.

STRANGER: She seems so happy!

US: Yeah, she really likes being held.

could become

Is that James Franco?

It sure is.

He seems so happy!

Yeah, James Franco really likes being held.

Since then, you may have noticed, James Franco has gotten exponentially more famous. He's America's Sweetheart and Bjork all rolled into one, and suddenly we find ourselves with a special attachment to the zeitgeist's rising star. 

We can't help but think of his adventures and accomplishments as reflecting somehow on Jane, because we are simple. She's playing a multimedia artist named "Franco" on General Hospital! She's hosting the Oscars! And now, I learn, there's this.

"Master Class: Editing James Franco...with James Franco" will be offered by Columbia College Hollywood. Unfortunately, not just anybody can sign up for the course. Only 12 of the best editing students at the private film school will be selected to participate.

Once they're in the class, students will be tasked with creating "a 30 minute documentary film from videographic footage from Mr. Franco’s own unorthodox career." Essentially, it'll be a film about James Franco made from behind the scenes footage of James Franco.

Yes, it is nice to feel she's appreciated. It is.