Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Putting the pubic in public transit

There is a guy I often see on the bus who looks just like a Joseph Schindelman illustration of an Oompa Loompa:

He's a bit bigger, though, and generally doesn't wear a skirty little tunic. 

The bus is sort of an extra-public space, in that you are trapped in sustained and especially close proximity to your fellow riders, who have nothing much to do but notice what you are up to, or how much you look like you are about to test a piece of experimental hair toffee. 

A couple of weeks ago I watched a youngish woman across the aisle put on a particularly full face of makeup over the course of the ride home. Several different layers of stuff, most of it the color of her skin, which made it all extra fascinating somehow, as she rubbed and buffed and prodded her face about in perfect comfort: two different kinds of concealer, liquid foundation, pressed powder, some kind of cheekbone highlighter in the same general middling brown, eyeshadow similarly the color of her eyelids, brown eyebrow pencil, brown eyeliner, brown lipstick. She finished just as the bus pulled in to the station, too, very impressive.

More recently the same woman was checking something on her iPhone, the drop-down menu of internet search terms rendered in large, clear type:

SIGNS OF BACTERIAL VAG

SIGNS OF BACTERIAL VAGINOSIS

Oh, hello! How are you? Have you met my friend the Oompa-Loompa Man? I think you'll have a lot to talk about, what with the Whangdoodles and Snozzwangers. Oh look, it's my stop!

See saw.

I feel we are long past due for an animated baby gif. Let me fix that. 

Steve, as you can see, was similarly long past due for a haircut. In the giddy aftermath of that work event that we were all so much looking foward to, which I'm afraid in my case was absolutely a euphemism for dreading with ever more horrible pangs of nauseous anxiety, he even got one. Truly it was a banner weekend. (Also, the event was fine, of course. Everyone was lovely. Even the catered lunch was good, and I was only modestly awkward.)

Oh, have another gif for good measure. Why not? Christmas in April!

Minutiae.

As I type, Jane is entertaining herself here and there around the room. She has been experimenting with standing unsupported, and this morning took an actual step. However, her favorite mode of locomotion is a very purposeful striding about on her knees, like an exceptionally short-legged matron in tweeds marching across the countryside. This is very practical of her (like a tweedy matron), as it provides all of walking's freedom to carry things, with at least twice the stability. 

Steve has pointed out that she is also like a Roomba: Earlier she picked up a DVD box and carried it briskly across the room, where she fetched up in a corner. There she stayed, happily clutching the box, facing the corner and wiggling a little.

Just now, she seems to be on a mission to take everything rectangular and move it one quadrant of the room counter-clockwise. Then she goes back to the first one and begins again, with an occasional pause to menace the cat.

Though, really, to be fair, the cat is at least as responsible as she is for any menace he may feel. Her modus is to approach the cat with expressions of glee and outstretched hands, while he stands perfectly still and complains. Then she stops with her fingertips a foot or so away from his person. "Yeeee!" she says. He looks more and more affronted and objects vocally with increasing volume, but will NOT by god leave. It reminds me of the video of the cat being terrorized by a turtle, which made the rounds a year or two ago, this one:

 

It is not that Jane is behaving like the turtle, what with her gracious respect for Nemo's personal space, but that that both cats show an incredible failure to use their actual advantage in the case and just go away. 

Eventually Jane knee-thumps off to other things and the cat goes on complaining until we point out to him that she is now as far away from him as it is possible to be while remaining in the same room, and then he pretends that he was asking to be let outdoors, all along. Then, I'm sure, he goes and thinks about how he wishes that Jane were a Roomba, so that instead of being grumpy and beleagured here in the present, he could be the happiest cat of 2008.

  

Maybe he will learn to ride her next year.

Can't take me anywhere.

The other night we were playing charades at a party

-- an actual grown-up party for grown-ups! Jane came with us and slept in a back room, and incidentally, we have reached the stage where I am not at all sure that she is still welcome at any given event just because she was welcome there a few months ago, as she becomes less and less a portable baby and more and more a mobile yet distinctly non-adult person, though the hosts for this party were nice enough to mention explicitly that we should bring her and her sleeping tent, and I wonder just how much longer I can keep going with this aside and indeed with this sentence; I was thinking the answer was "surely not much longer now," but since I introduced that semi-colon to the proceedings, the possibilities have expanded considerably, although in any case, I've already made my point, which is that it is tricky to figure out when and how to navigate the transition from having identified the set of Events Where a Baby Is Welcome to identifying the much smaller set of Events Where a Toddler Is Welcome --

and Steve drew the word "buffalo."

He later explained that he was aiming for the scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner learns the word "tatanka," i.e. "buffalo."

So he pawed at the ground for a bit, and pranced around with two fingers representing his buffalo horns, indeed just like in the movie. It worked for the Sioux! But not for us. "Antlers?" "Horns?" "Deer?"

 

He pulled at his hair and indicated, rolling it up, that it was curly. "Ram?" S. guessed. Then he gave us a little more context. He indicated that he was on a train, shooting a rifle. Then he had horns and fell down dead. "Hunter? Matador?" Again. Horns! Curly hair! Man with rifle shooting! Falling down dead! Horns! Hair! Dead!

"Jew!" I shouted, because I am always appropriate.

We had to stop the game for several minutes while everyone collected themselves. And that is why I don't have to worry about whether Jane is getting too old to bring to festive events, after all, because no one will invite me to one ever again.