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. 

An innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term.

Today I was bustling around, feeling happy. Jane was being particularly cheerful and serene, thanks to a combination of the liberal application of cheese and the end of her latest bout of teething. The sun was shining, I'd gotten some chores done, school's out for the summer, tra la la di la la. 

Jane and I were toddling around together at the edge of our tiny yard when a teenaged girl walked up and said, "Excuse me, can I use your bathroom?"

"Sorry," I said. And then, instead of saying something true, like "my hands are full with the baby," or "my husband is on a business call inside," I said, "It's not my house."

WHY? What imp of the perverse possessed me? 

"Oh," she said, "I thought you lived around here," as I thought, WHAT THE FUCK and WHY DID YOU SAY THAT and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, smiling feebly, until she went away. Now I imagine she will probably spend the next year seeing me around town and thinking, "There goes that horrible woman who lied to me instead of just letting me pee."

Outstanding success. Maybe you could tell me something incomprehensible and/or stupid you did recently, to make me feel better.

(But probably not, because that kind of naked request for comments rarely works, does it? And all the less so when you add it to the end of your post a day after you posted it in the first place.)

Recent status

Con: Cat pissing on things, leading us to become ever more baroque in our habits in order to keep him and tempting piss-spots separated at the times of day when extracurricular pissing tends to occur. Rapidly decreasing likelihood that I will be able to keep up the pretense of a viable academic career for the duration. Concomitant anxiety about ability to be happily self sufficient, or indeed self sufficient at all. The need to go on performing onerous ceremonial duties despite aforementioned diminishing prospect of payoff. Bright red remains of pimple on neck, of all places. Laundry backlog. 

Pro: The usual embarrassing and obvious assortment of familial blessings. Also the weather is absurdly gorgeous. The first day of classes, which I had (as always) been dreading, was (as always) fun and stimulating, and indeed even more than usual. I am reading The Dud Avocado, which is as entertaining as advertised. 

Before that I was reading Joan Aiken's insane children's book Black Hearts at Battersea, the first sequel to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. (I am delighted to learn, via Wikipedia, that Joan Aiken had a brother and a sister, named John and Jane. Oh, Conrad Aiken, you card. "If only there had been a Jean and a June," Steve said. Greedy.) It has two best things:

First, the wonderfully offhand way that Sophie explains her unconventional upbringing.

"Who looked after you before that, then, child?"

"An otter in the forest," Sophie explained. "I can still recall how difficult it was to learn human language, and how strange it seemed to eat anything but fish."

Second, the depiction of the Duke of Battersea's apparently IMMENSE hot air balloon, "capable of carrying at least eight persons and their luggage for hundreds of miles." It carries not only our heroes, but also their dominoes, playing cards, spilikins, billiard balls, and telescopes, with room left over for Sophie to sew topazes onto a large velvet dress. It sounds like a highly comfortable way to travel:

In fact, the wicker, galleon-shaped car, with its high-decked ends and low waist, was excellently adapted to their needs. Dr Field and the Duke played chess at the forecastle end, Simon steered on the poop, directing the balloon's progress, when necessary, by means of a pair of dangling ropes, while Sophie with her dressmaking and the Duchess with her Patience occupied the central portion. 

Even better, at night everyone is tucked well up under piles of furs and sheepskin rugs, with a charcoal brazier to ensure that any last trace of chill is chased away. 

By midnight, generally, every creature in our house is gathered together into one small bedroom. Adults in the bed, cat curled up somewhere on top, baby in her infant cot-tent on the floor nearby. Because the house is poorly insulated and entirely unheated, the door is closed to give the gently glowing space heater in the corner a manageable amount of space to heat.

I like to imagine as I drift off that we are in some extra snug yet adventuresome and unlikely location like the Duke's balloon. Sometimes it is a specially eiderdown-laden version of the Kon Tiki. Sometimes it is a Victorian train car, or a biodome on the moon, or a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse.

TONIGHT, however, we are in a large fancy room at a large fancy hotel, so that I can attend Large Academic Conference. (All the small and unfancy rooms were sold out before I got around to making reservations.) There is a king-size bed! There are free cookies from the Executive Lounge! A loveseat! A six-foot-tall houseplant! There is even a corner, so that the baby can sleep around it from us.

And, god be praised, there is a real, true, functional BATHTUB. Not even the Duke of Battersea's balloon can compete with that. I can hardly believe my luck.

Things that terrify me

1. The electric garbage disposal, or "InSinkErator".

2. When people stand within two feet of the edge of the train platform.

3. Oh god, really, everything, at least when it's four in the morning.

Revisionist.

Antonia has me thinking about how to write about the things I don't write about. The big one, of course, is stories that aren't mine to tell. It turns out that life is littered with these, and that in fact many of one's own stories are only lesser adjuncts to someone else's more important and private ones. Leaving these out can feel disingenuous, but what can you do? Imagine if I were feeling utterly wretched because, say (NOT REAL EXAMPLES):

Our best friend had stopped talking to us because his wife claimed to have fallen in love with Steve, or

Steve's brother had racked up horrible gambling debts and his parents were bankrupting themselves to pay them off, or

We were disinvited from Christmas dinner because my niece had a terrible wasting disease and it made my sister too unhappy to see us and our happy, healthy baby.

There is no such person as our best friend's wife, Steve's brother, or my sister, but things like this sometimes happen. When they do, it would be impossible for me to write about it here. I would feel like an ass dropping cryptic little allusions, even. So there the things sit, in invisible lumps between posts about young adult novels and gardening, or whatever.

Happy things, too. It seems presumptuous to treat the innocent people in my everyday life as blog material. Steve and Jane less so, poor suckers, but still. I generally don't write in much detail about my work life, either. What the fuck do I write about? This is why it's nice to have what are called "outside interests," I believe.

We watched High Plains Drifter last week. I like how clearly it is the product of having watched High Noon and thought, "This is great, but wouldn't it be greater if everyone were way more repugnant?"

"And if the town were punished with a lot more than the sheriff's scorn and being shown up by Grace Kelly?"

"And if Gary Cooper weren't Gary Cooper but instead an avenging revenant from Hell back to ruin the lives of everyone who had abandoned him*?"

"And if there were a gun-toting dwarf?"

The scene early on in the barbershop is amusing for how precisely Clint Eastwood's sweeping aside of the sheet around his neck reproduces his usual business with a serape:

It's a pity that the movie is apparently incapable of resisting the hoary old chestnut in which a woman being raped ends up hot for it. It would have made a lot more sense in the internal logic of the film itself, too, not to have gone there, but oh well, it was 1973, I suppose.

*Patricia Neal might argue that Gary Cooper himself was a revenant from Hell intent on ruining the lives of those around him, given his super-classy behavior during their long affair. It culminated in his forcing her to get an abortion, despite her Catholicism, lest she embarrass him by having his child. He was mighty handsome, though.

La Brea Carpet.

I like grey, post-industrial cities. I like their rough edges and brick houses. I like scowls and efficiency and please get the hell out of the middle of the sidewalk if you aren't going to go anywhere. I like being a hater.

But I have to admit that sunshine, comfort, and gorgeous fruits and vegetables are pretty good too.

"These avocados are really nice," a woman near me said to the man selling them at the farmers' market. "Do you have them all year round?"

"Eeeeehh yes, but..."

"I know," she said. "Some times are better than others."

"Yeah, in December they get a little blah." 

There is no denying that it is extremely pleasant to be able to walk with ease to two farmers' markets bursting with produce, an excellent cheese shop, a sweet little bakery just around the corner with quite decent coffee, a slightly further away cafe with really very good coffee, multiple superlative taquerias, et cetera, all in the nicest possible weather and terrain for walking in. There are also several venues for frozen yogurt, if you are suddenly seized with the need for some. I haven't been, but you never know.

At the same time, it's all a bit obscene, isn't it? At least the Tuesday farmer's market is laid out cruelly and has a horrible thicket of people who need to learn how to get the hell out of the middle of the sidewalk standing between oneself and the lovely food. And there is no shortage of horrible marvellous aroma types to kindle a hot little bonfire of mingled self- and other-loathing in my breast. Still...

When we spent the night in Tucumcari, New Mexico, I woke up in the morning, stepped outside, and said "Oh! I see! This is why people like to live in this part of the world." It wasn't midday hot yet, and the air was soft and dry. It smelled wonderful in a way that is nothing at all like other places. 

From the day I was born until I went away to school, I lived in just one city. Since then, this will be the fifth. It will be good to have a year of saying Oh! This is why people like Southern California! 

Also, no doubt, Oh! This is why everyone else in the world hates Southern California. 

Here is something I like without reservation. It is a water machine. It lives near our house, outside a convenience store just down the block from the garage where the Spanish-language AA meetings happen.

Final polishing step is exposure to ultra-violet light. 

 

There's a soothing cadence to the slight failure of parallel structure, isn't there? This is why people BEVERAGES COFFEE COOKING ICE PLANTS Southern California.

It read "Ice Cube's a pimp".

Yesterday, everything was dismal. It was cold and rainy, and I couldn't bear to try going anywhere. The baby screamed, Steve snarled, I wept. We felt pent up and incompetent. Our eyes slowly melted out of our heads. We hardly noticed our nice dinner and finally fell wretchedly into bed.

But this morning we woke up from a night infinitely more restful than the one before. In the morning the baby slept while I worked. At midday she snugged peacefully against Steve's chest while I made lunch. In the afternoon I stuffed her into her sling and went for a long walk while Steve got some work done at the cafe: first to the library and then on a meandering path to the ice cream shop. The sun was hot and bright, so I shaded her face with the tail of my scarf.

On the way back I ate my gelato—pistacho and chocolate—and got so warm I took my jacket off. I joined Steve at the cafe and read a bit of a library book. One of the other regulars came past our table, on crutches because of some recent back surgery, and said, "Oh, I didn't realize you had a baby hidden in your shirt!"

"Yes, she's my secret ambush baby," I said.

"Do you think I can sit behind you without being ambushed?"

"You should be safe. She's on standby at the moment."

And so she was, making only the occasional mumbled mewl until we left to walk home in the evening that was still light, thanks to daylight saving. She cavorted nude on her woolly blanket and didn't pee on anything. We gazed deeply into one another's eyes. Dinner was delicious and we even noticed.

I wish today could be bottled so that I had something to drink when she's being inconsolable at 4 in the morning.

They're a chamois cloth.

The downside of this "Things I Cried Over" sidebar is that it tempts us to exaggerate. As I have amply demonstrated in the past, I am a giant simp. As a result, any number of ridiculous things can easily engage my sentiment. Sadly, it's not always the most satisfyingly absurd ones that actually rise to the level of making me weep.

Last night conversation turned to prodigious pitchman Billy Mays. We looked up the list of products he'd shilled, from the Awesome Auger to Zorbeez.

"Zorbeez?"

"Zorbeez! They're a chamois cloth."

"Ah, like ShamWow."

"Like ShamWow but not as good. Wikipedia says 'It has often been tested with mixed results.' and 'Popular Mechanics compared the absorbency of two towel products and declared ShamWow! the more effective of the two.'"

"Oh no! That's so sad," said tenderhearted me. "To have the whole point of your existence be how absorbent you are -- how ZORBEE -- and then to fail."

"Are you crying?"

"No."

"You are!" Steve inspected me closely. "Your eyes are shiny! That's a tear for sure!"

"I'm sorry. It would make a better story if I cried over Zorbees, I know, but it's just not happening."

Here are a few more things I didn't actually quite cry over:

• Failing to get the baby into her sling.
• "Chicken Soup with Rice," the song.
• "I'm so thirsty."

Just as people use video-game style badges to make real-life achievements more thrilling, having this record of my ridiculousness makes everything a little less ridiculous. Or ridiculous, but funny rather than sad. Plus now everyone wants to make me cry! It's a win all around.

Vita longa, comœdia brevis.

I am starting a tiny new thing! It is a running list of Things I Cried Over. Now at any time you can look in my sidebar to see the most recent excuses my body has seized upon as an occasion for lachrymal purging.

(This phenomenon is common enough that Steve and I have invented a notional radio show called "The Lachrymose Hour," featuring music by the likes of Smog, Antlers, and Cat Power.)

Here is the starting list:

1. The trailer for Whip It. Yes, the 2009 Drew-Barrymore-directed movie about lives transformed through the power of roller derby. "Be your own hero"! Also, Ellen Page has appallingly gorgeous skin.

2. Awkward swaddling. Dr. Harvey Karp's baby whispering secrets are brilliant and a major reason we are not dropping dead of sleep deprivation, but his approach to creating baby burritos and I do not get along. Fuck this, I am going back to my old method, which also doesn't actually prevent the baby from squirming her arms out from under the blanket but doesn't involve six false starts and a flood of tears. Maybe I'll revisit the superior technique next week.

3. A tender moment in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals. What could be more sentimental than a Terry Pratchett book about football? And yet actually even when I am not engorged with prolactin I have been known to cry over many of his works. You should have seen me while I was reading Feet of Clay. God, I'm a simp.

I love good light reading that comes in vast quantities, so that once you get hooked you can go on reading and reading and reading more of the same. Right now that means Terry Pratchett and Angela Thirkell. Funny, charming, undemanding, not stupid. The surely horribly out of fashion Miss Read, a great favorite of my mother's mother, is also superb for this sort of thing.

Not that I am going to run out of Pratchett and Thirkell any time soon, that being sort of the point, but do you have any recommendations in this vein? Life is long and light fiction is short.

Thoughts at three a.m.

I'm awake! I'm so very awake.

I wonder if this means something.

Maybe it's a sign that I'm about to go into labor.

It's incredible how completely awake I am.

I feel just like a mollusc.

...

Ah. Hm.

Maybe I'm not so awake after all.

[zzz]