Adventures in the Pointless Forest

How not to be an asshole, or not.

I am often a testy, grumpy, ill-tempered person. An asshole, you might say. This is particularly true when I am confronted with the more slow moving and oblivious examples of my fellow man who drift across the sidewalk like this

. o o o o o .

or come to a sudden stop like this

!OOO!

(perhaps all piled up looking in the window of Forever 21)

or come to a not at all sudden stop by walking slower and slower and slower and 

AGGGH OH MY GOD

But, I eventually realized, I would prefer not to spend the rest of my life making pissed-off faces at people behind their backs, because (a) when you do that, you are the fuckhead, (b) it is depressing to think of the total number of hours of my life I have spent gnawing at my own liver over this shit, (c) how embarrassing will it be when I have a stroke caused by pedestrian road rage? and (d) who wants to watch their mother behaving like that? No one. 

So I am trying to be more chill when people or their objects obstruct my path temporarily when I am walking somewhere. Living in a tourist destination provides many opportunities for practice, and I have been trying a variety of methods.

First I tried asking myself "Where do I really need to be in such a hurry?" but unfortunately this strategy lends itself far too readily to snarky comebacks. Well, self, since you ask, now that you mention it, across the fucking street before I get hit by a car.

A better technique has been to try to notice the length of time for which I am actually put out. Yes, it is definitely a dick move to park your SUV at the bottom of your driveway in such a way that the entire sidewalk is blocked and the only way around is to wrestle my stroller filled with increasingly hefty toddler up and down the curb and into the street. However, in fact, it only took me about fifteen seconds to do this stupid thing, and then I was on my way. And fifteen seconds, who cares! Hurrah! Serenity now. 

But of course sometimes one gets stuck behind one roadblock after another, and the intervals of inconvenience start to add up.

In that case, you can think to yourself, well! These stupid slow-moving people are certainly very slow and stupid. Yes, they are. In fact, they are so stupid and so slow that their stupidity is probably its own punishment. It seems exceedingly likely that they are slow and stupid all the time, whereas I am only stupidly slow when I am trapped behind them with a toddler! HA HA!

Then, ideally, you should step sideways without looking first, so that you tread on some poor innocent who is trying valiantly to maneuver around the whole slow and stupid lot of you. 

So near, and yet so far.

Thomas Edison: "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory." Jane has just two thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-seven more failed trials to go.

(She's very advanced.)

Not kidding about the lack of wit and significance.

What ho.

My chair is rattling lustfully to the rhythm of the pile driver that is at work on the foundation of a new footbridge two blocks away. This is I think day four of all-day pile driving. At first it was an amusing novelty and opportunity for many ribald jests, but the bloom has come off the rose. I wonder just how many piles remain to be driven, and how many pile driver operators go mad every year. 

In other news, today I discovered that an excellent way to avoid toddler transition distress over leaving the playground is for said toddler to bonk her head -- not too seriously, just enough to require a little cuddling comfort -- about two minutes before one was hoping to depart. Alas for the poor recipient of the headbonk, but the end result was indisputably ideal overall. No pile drivers were involved.

And finally, I think you will enjoy this comment thread all about worst presents ever received. For example: 

My grandmother gave me a horrible Christmas present when I was about eight: a fat, ceramic pig, when wound up, played "Everyone is Beautiful, In Their Own Way..." What are you trying to say, grandma? I should lay off the Girl Scout cookies?

Nice.

And the servings are so small.

I am tired of this sedate and reticent posting schedule. It makes me feel that the posts I do make have to meet some minimum level of wit or significance, and this is not a plausible goal. So, away with wit! Down with significance! Up with frequency! Blather forever!

We are going out of town for part of August, and then people are visiting us, and then other people are visiting us and so on ad infinitum, so there are bound to be gaps in transmission, but let's see what we can do.

Since we last spoke, you and I, I went to Boston and attended a conference. While I was there, I discovered that it is VERY HOT in places where people have been complaining of the GREAT HEAT lately. Shocking but true. I also discovered that it is extremely possible to get brain-meltingly plastered from a mere two drinks in a hotel bar, which is frankly one of the last places I would expect such a thing to happen, but there it is. 

The next day, when all my responsibilities had been discharged, I went out into the GREAT HEAT and had a splendid evening with lovely people. On the way to the lovely people, I had the honor of sharing a subway car with a man who was not pleased that the train was not moving more quickly.

"This is not a professional subway. This is a terrible, amateur subway," he mourned. "A terrible, amateur subway."

As the ride went on, he warmed to his subject. "WAKE UP, PEOPLE!" he boomed. "Wake up from your sheeplike lives! This is NOT RIGHT. This is a terrible! Amateur! Subway!"

I am not sure what he wanted the rest of us to do about it, but point certainly noted. Take some inititiative and learn how to run a major urban public transit network, I guess.

Later someone told me that the T is sometimes delayed because the tracks catch on fire in hot weather. Can this be true? How does this work? Maybe the tracks themselves, being metal, get extraordinarily hot in the anvil of the sun, and then detritus on those tracks catches fire? Although a few smoldering coffee cups does not sound like enough reason to stop an entire subway train. ("That's my point exactly! Wake up, sheeple!") 

See you tomorrow. If you know anything more about this burning track business, I would love to hear about it.

All wet.

Some places around here look a little bit more aggressively Southern California than others.

Meanwhile Jane, so fearless and cheerful in other ways, is not at all interested in the prospect of swimming in the ocean that you could see just off to the right if I had only lifted the camera a few inches off the ground.

Indeed she does not want to go swimming anywhere. (Not in a hat, not with a bat, not on the dole, not with IT'S MOLE.) We took her to the nice quiet warm pool at our friends' condo and oh how she wept and wept and wept and wept and clung to me and wept.

Bathtime is a little touch-and-go too, so we are going to try a very gentle swimming enjoyment re-introduction plan, where at first she, like, just looks at some water from across the room or maybe we whisper the word "water" over her martini while looking in the direction of the shore, or something, and slowly work our way up until she learns to swim at the age of forty-six or so. I think this is a brilliant scheme and can see no possible downside.

You'll be happy to know, anyhow, that both shoes and putting things in other things retain their allure. Here you see the results of Jane's going through the house and gathering every adult shoe she could find and depositing them, one by one, behind the baby gate. (Confidential to The Harridan: notice how once again you cannot see any of the other parts of the room.)

Oh! I've just thought of something! Clearly we should invite Jane to throw all our shoes into the sea. This will solve everything and really definitely has no downside. How did it not occur to me before?

A miscellany.

Hello. I have been very sleepy these last several days. I am always on the tired and dopey side, but ever since it entered my head to try to get caught up on sleep I find that every step I take in that direction somehow makes me even sleepier.

Twice I have started writing blog posts about how I am too sleepy to write anything and ended up closing them unposted, in order to go to bed. Yesterday I went to campus and went to sleep on the floor of my office. Sleep sleep sleep. Sleep sleep.

I had a little list somewhere of recent Jane things I wanted to write about. I was waiting until I could turn them into a series of amusing stories, but if I persist with that plan we will all be very very very old -- and hey, you know, I am noticeably more tired now than I was when I started writing this sentence, so RIGHT, let's just get on with it.

Jane likes very much to put things in other things. An incomplete list of objects that she has put into my shoe alone:

• a pair of her own shoes
• a stuffed toy eggplant
• a coaster
• six plastic bowls, neatly stacked

She also likes hot sauce, and scooping things up with a spoon. Yesterday these two likings went TOO FAR together, when she swooped in and scooped a big spoonful right into her maw, and was inconsolable for many minutes. Alas but unsurprisingly, we couldn't convince her to eat or drink something else to ease the burning. She's better now.

She also, and this is nothing new of course, likes to look at things on the computer. Who doesn't?

The novelty is that where before, she would only bash the keyboard in hopes of making the laptop offer up some interesting tidbit, these days she likes to sidle up beside me and put my hands on the keyboard, then wait very pointedly. She is good at looking pointed, an important life skill.

Today, seeking some variety from the old grind of shoes-food-computer, we went to the aquarium at the nearby wharf. It is not a very exciting aquarium. Or rather, it is not a very exciting aquarium if you are me, and what you look for in an aquarium is a plentiful variety of interesting fish and sea mammals. If you are Jane, however, and your fondest passion in life is stairs, you will have a truly spectacular time. Up! Up! Up! Up!

Other current interests include dogs, and panting like them. (What noise does a dog make? "hh hh hh hh hh", OBVIOUSLY. What, were you going to say "woof" or "arf"? Are you a heathen? It's like that old joke about the talking dog who knows that the greatest player in baseball history is Babe Hh Hh Hh Hh Hh.) And if you come to our house and fart there, you are likely to find your efforts echoed by a prompt and enthusiastic raspberry blown from across the room. 

I think that about covers it. How are you?

An educational experience.

The bus I ride is usually filled with grad student types, lab managers, librarians, department secretaries, and the like. Every once in a while things are enlivened by signs of bacterial vaginosis, but it is a sedate group in general. 

One day last week, though, a couple of guys swanned on and began chatting volubly about (a) killer techniques for selling cable door-to-door, and (b) the good times of being on probation for drug-related criminal activities.

They were as cheerfully gossipy as any stereotypical little old ladies. Some dude called Aldo really brings the A-game with his pitch in Spanish, I hear, but if someone answers the door and speaks English he basically just walks away, oh and did you know he was a crackhead? Yeah, he did time for that in Guatamala. 

They had some tips for passing urine tests via drinking water with baking soda in it and also for being glad you got booked back before they were taking everyone's blood so they don't have your DNA on file. 

Then one of them was talking about the more hardcore mandated counseling classes he had to take under Prop 36 back when he was busted for possession, as opposed to the relatively mellow requirements of his probation at the moment. 

"Oh, this, this is just for DWI, it's real casual. I can drink, I can leave the country, whatever I want. We can talk openly about our drug use, whatever. And man, everyone in there has a million connects." 

Other guy: "You gotta be careful though, someone in there is gonna be a rat."

"Oh yeah, sure. Everyone knows. They say like, oh yeah, don't talk to Celia, she's no good. And then you see her file and you see yep, she got charged for like nothing."  

The other guy paused, thinking about the perfidious Celia and what could be done to protect hardworking cable salesmen, just looking for a hookup, from her ilk.

"There should be a blog for that," he said.  

"There is!"

(Apparently it's pay-to-play, though, and he didn't say what the URL was. Hopes dashed.)