Adventures in the Pointless Forest

She's been doing this all week.

I have an important scientific finding to report, regarding a newly observed heritable trait.

The pillow is the noteworthy thing in this picture, not the flappy hand. Although, now that you mention it, that too.

 

Towels, as everyone knows, are almost as helpful to sorting out bugs in your code as pillows are. God, these are terrible photos. 

Moving along. The pictures are not going to get any better here, just warning you, but the important thing, after all, is SCIENCE:

What's this? Some sort of textile object, I perceive.

Just a moment for adjustments, and... ah!

Just so.

Steve needs to step up his game. Sessile head-thinging is a head thing of the past! Head things on the move are the way of the future.

Binned.

(As I write this, Jane is sitting at my feet, where she has unzipped my boot and is fondling my ankle with firm, masterful squeezes.)

We all agree that this is the perfect baby bin.

Sadly, Target stopped selling them after I realized that I would like to have about fifteen of them. I finally found one on eBay and now we have three. 

Even one is enough for Jane, though, whose idea of a really excellent time, and who can blame her, is to clamber inside

and persuade us to drag her back and forth across the floor in her square blue boat until our aged backs fall off. I need to find some sort of bin-pushing stick. Maybe a shuffleboard... shuffle?

Additional Jane endorsements of late:

• cramming herself into the tiny space behind the sewing machine
• being under an umbrella
• eating paper, oh god, this is more fantastic than you poor benighted fools can possibly understand
• video chat with other, littler babies
• crawling into her bed-crib-tent thing while your back is turned and gathering up all the binkies in the world into her tiny girly fists

Empathically not endorsed by the Jane Institute:

• someone else's going into the kitchen. ARE YOU IN THE KITCHEN? NO REALLY ARE YOU SERIOUSLY IN THE KITCHEN? WHY ARE YOU IN THE KITCHEN? WHY? WHY? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

"But look, darling," I say. "I'm right here. And I'm getting you some lovely toast."

"BOO HOO BOO HOO," she disagrees.

"You just have to wait, just a minute, you see."

"HOOOOOOOOOO."

"How about this nice sock? You like chomping on a sock."

"BOOOOOOOOOO."

So here we sit, me typing at my computer and her kneading my executive stress ankle, and while we may eventually starve to death like this, I suppose there are worse ways to go.

Second verse, same as the first.

I have been exchanging a lot of planning emails with other academics this week. These messages might be too brief or blunt if we didn't plump them up with pleasantries. No one wants that. We must at all costs be pleasing and plump!

On the other hand, it is clear that none of us has a repertoire of stock phrases at all large enough to stretch to the number of stock spaces that need filling. So, on the theory that what worked once will work forever and always, we are very VERY ready to reiterate just how very much we are looking forward to things. 

I am looking forward to this event I am planning, with these speakers I am wrangling, and they are all looking forward to it, too. The organizer of the event I am attending is very much looking forward to my visit. I am looking forward to it as well! I am looking forward to her talk, and his talk, and meeting everyone. She is looking forward to everything. He is looking forward to everything. We are all so looking forward to what promises to be a very exciting forward-looking forward forward forward. Look!

When it is all over, I'm sure we can look back with pride at how thoroughly we looked forward to it all.

Musical numbers.

How to soothe a sad, teething baby: Star Trek slashfic music videos. I started there and took Jane on a tear through the suggestions in the sidebar. Catchy tunes, dancing Vulcans, plenty of light bondage, what could be more appropriate?

Thank you for your incisive commentary on world events.

What, I wonder, do I think I am doing, blithering—not even particularly amusingly—about shell games on BART trains while everything is going swiftly to hell in a handbasket? Not that I have anything useful or insightful to offer on the subjects of Japan, death, destruction, civil war, mendacious politicians, or horrific radiation. 

Most Plant Workers Evacuate; Residents Told to Stay Indoors

How stir crazy batshit insane would you go under the circumstances, told to stay indoors? I am imagining myself inside some apartment with Jane, taping up windows and losing my mind. Christ.

Steve has distracted and cheered me for now by making me a drink and directing me to read this delightful Comics Alliance post about Neal Adams' impressively deranged Batman: Odyssey. I don't know what to say, except that gosh, that Bruce Wayne sure is hairy.

Also, he seems to be showing us Arm-Fall-Off-Boy's arm. "Take a look at this forearm! Hairy, isn't it?" 

Probably he has been driven mad from sealing up all the windows in the Bat-Cave. Understandable. Wait, are there windows in the Bat-Cave? Well, the whole project is certainly crazy-making, anyhow.

No musical numbers.

The other day we found ourselves on an exceptionally plot-packed car on the BART train to SFO. Several competing movies seemed to be playing out in one tiny airport-bound space, with us awkwardly in the way of all of them. 

A few stops in, a young man and woman a few seats down, in my line of sight, started quietly freaking out.

He, staring with amazed delight at his phone and at her: "Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here!"

They continued in this happy but nonspecific vein for some time. While I was doing my best to eavesdrop more effectively, a group of hustlers running a shell game poured into the car and set up shop right at Steve's elbow. Their setup was the shell game equivalent of a bong made out of a Coke can: three plastic bottlecaps for the shells and a little grotty piece of foam rubber as the pea. 

Steve entertained himself by silently picking out the shills from the marks as I concentrated on the couple. Aha! Someone wanted him for their tv show in some capacity. For Fox! "As in F - O - X!" But what? He seemed plausibly good looking enough to be an actor, nebbishy enough to be a writer. 

Meanwhile, the guy running the shell game waved a hundred dollar bill. "Show me your money. Show me your money." F - O - X kissed, held hands, stared together at the phone. "I don't even know what to say. What should I say? I don't know what to say."

A shill flashed his comically obvious carny roll.

"What if this weekend was just... some one-time magical thing?"

The shill "won" the hundred dollars and exchanged very studied daps with the dealer.

In another part of the car, a separate, not very good, indie drama was unfolding in which a tall guy in his early twenties, sending off little pings to my gaydar, ran into a co-worker and engaged in some pro-forma flirting with her friend. "No, honey, if you weren't scheduled, you weren't playing hooky! I'm playing hooky."

An apparent actual mark lost twenty bucks. (Who the hell bets money on a shell game, anyhow, when the phrase "shell game" is literally synonymous with "scam"? I mean, really.)

The nature of the F - O - X opportunity finally revealed itself: "I wouldn't actually be the cinematographer, but I would be the first cameraman." (Hooray!)

Then everything wound down in nicely coordinated style. The shell game broke up, the participants putting in a merely perfunctory effort to disguise the fact that they were together as they left the train. The budding director of photography and his girlfriend settled in for some serious making out, and the flirting friends went their separate ways. 

Having written all this out, it occurs to me that my New York friends are no doubt still waiting for the part where something unusually subway-eventful happens. For you jaded Gothamites, please imagine all of the above performed by bingo-playing Jedi getting married and not wearing pants. In duplicate.

Part 2.

Jane's first... well, not word, because it isn't a word, but first wordlike entity, deployed clearly with reference to a specific and appropriate thing, would appear to be "nom".

"Nom nom nom!" she says of her food, or possibly "num num num," but obviously "nom nom nom" is more entertaining, so that's what we'll call it. We didn't really recognize how standardized and lexicalized away from generalized noises of food appreciation this performance of hers had become, until people we were sitting near at lunch today laughed and exclaimed over it. NOM NOM NOM!

And you'll be happy to know that we did eventually let her wear a party hat. Another way to look at this is that she allowed us to put a hat on her. Either way, there was a baby in a hat. Also there was a cupcake.

Option one: normal birthday snapshots.

Normalish, anyway.

Option two: Super art-directed film still Barry Sonnenfeld style.

Friends have pointed out that part of what makes the latter one look so perfectly full of artifice (and I confess that I love it as a photograph probably more than I should) is the perfect echo between the angle of the hat and the angle of the cupcake. What do you suppose is the plot of the movie in which this shot would appear, though? I can't decide.

 

Ats.

Tomorrow is Jane's first birthday. With my usual inimitable sanity, I have made party hats for the party we are not having.

Note that there are in fact more hats than people to wear them. Also, I took long enough at the store choosing the paper that I made the baby cry. Excellent parenting.

Steve and I put the hats on ourselves, of course, while she was sleeping. 

Soignée.

Admirably focused on his work. 

Then I put everything away before Jane could wake up and participate in any way herself. No birthday hats for you, baby. It's not your birthday yet, now is it? When she's older, we should make sure to ride her Christmas bicycle for her every night in Advent, and dogear the pages of all her books before she can read them. It's just more thoughtful that way.