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If you have the stomach for yet more dispatches from the You Call That News? annals of parenthood, read on. Otherwise you might find it more interesting to go enjoy this genuinely fascinating piece about scurvy, which I mentioned a little while ago on the food blog, or perhaps this soothing live videocam of itsy bitsy rescue kittens.
Our child may be very small—indeed she is the merest tiny peanut—but evidence suggests that her world-weariness is already quite large.
Every time she settles down to feed, she produces a supremely dismissive "huh!" just as she latches on. Just now, her eyes flew open and she advised me: "Lie!" And when the cat was being extremely annoying yesterday, she suggested: "Glue." Whether she meant that it should be applied topically or that he should be turned into it remains unclear.
I often hear people mentioning that their babies have schedules. This sounds nice but unimaginably difficult to arrange.
What happens when the baby sleeps when she is supposed to be eating and then as a natural consequence is starving when you thought she was going to be sleeping and so on and so forth and the next thing you know all is frustration, shrieking, and remorse? If some days there are three naps at god knows what times and other days there is one long nap at some completely other time, and bedtime is whenever she has deigned to eat her fill and conk out of her own accord, so be it.
This still seems roughly correct to me. There will be no withholding of things that make the baby quiet and content, because quietness and contentment are always devoutly to be wished. I certainly by god am not going to wake up a gloriously unconscious infant just because I think she should be eating, nor do I want to revisit the memorable day of prime boneheadedness when I forced us to endure forty minutes of vocal distress rather than JUST FEEDING THE DAMN WEE THING EVEN IF IT IS THEORETICALLY "TOO SOON" YOU IDIOT.
But! Recently it has occurred to us that we might anticipate these events, and there sure is something extremely gratifying about swaddling up the baby, plonking her down, and watching her obligingly go to sleep on what one might conceivably, if generously, call schedule.
What we have here, obviously, is a state of affairs in which the baby has trained us to dance exquisitely to her tune, much as the cat did before her. Still, it produces a pleasant illusion that someone, somewhere, has things under some semblance of control. I am well aware that such an illusion can only be fleeting, so we are enjoying it while it lasts.
Sunday I attended commencement, where F and I at last realized our longtime dream -- formulated even before we went off to our separate graduate schools -- of being employed by the same institution and sitting next to one another in the ranks of faculty, flasks hidden in our hoods. Bourbon in mine, pear vodka in hers. Because we are old and boring now, and because commencement commences rather early in the morning, we did not get schnockered, but we did at least pull off a ceremonial toast.
It is delightful and astonishing to me that this extremely implausible scenario we invented has in fact come to pass. I did not think all those years ago to imagine an infant waiting at home for me, and getting things in and out of one's hood while sitting in a small folding chair is more difficult than I had anticipated, but all in all the whole thing was shockingly in line with our original predictions. Well done, us.
In the evening we celebrated M's newly minted master's degree by gathering in his backyard in our fancy outfits and taking photos. Then we lined up and had our own tiny processional around and around the garden. This was very festive and included both my infant in arms and a medium-sized dog frolicking about and nipping at his owner's heels. Steve, who has no fancy outfit, stood on the sidelines and clapped as we passed.
I find that I like other people's graduations quite a lot more than I liked any of my own. It is very satisfying to be part of the ceremonial furnishings. I used to like to say that I would choose my graduate program on the basis of its regalia, but of course I did not, and now I have robes that are not particularly flattering to my delicate complexion.
That said, it certainly could be worse. I am not actually redheaded, but have that sort of generally gingery coloring that graces many merely russetish-haired people with redheaded relations, and pale skin that can look dangerously like a cheese if threatened. There are colors that would be an unmitigated disaster. The "Sunburst Sandweave" yellow of Johns Hopkins robes, for instance, would be spectacularly dire.
Although it's a bit difficult to imagine who would be truly flattered by that particular sallow hue. Idris Elba, perhaps.
That's cheating, though, isn't it? I mean, are we seriously proposing that Idris Elba would be ill served by some other school's regalia? I think not. Still, if your school's robes look bad on Clive Owen --
-- and, as you can see, they do -- then I think we can agree that it is a bit much to ask most ordinary mortals, particularly a set of ordinary mortals united by the sartorially unpromising quality of having a doctoral degree, to manage better.
Someone (STEVE) should make a virtual makeover type of application, but for regalia. In the meantime, this page is fun for browsing. Mouseover action! Enjoy yourself over there. There are some real horrors. I am sorry for your fate, poor University of Texas at Dallas graduates. If only you had known.
I had a period of some mild terror yesterday, when we returned from visiting my mother and I discovered in my email inbox an urgent message revealing that I had failed to complete the final step necessary to submit grades. This message went on to note that this failure affected one senior, whose degree eligibility needed to be calculated right away and could I fix it by eleven p.m. tonight at the very latest PLEASE! where "tonight" was... Saturday.
Of course I instantly repaired the situation, and wrote an extremely apologetic email saying so, but by then it was seven in the evening on Sunday and I was on tenterhooks for a reply.
I am rarely away from my computer for more than half a day. Even when I gave birth, I was only out of pocket for about eighteen hours. And now here I had apparently chosen a perfectly ill-timed day and a half to abscond.
Surely, I knew, the administration would not be so insane as to only pursue the question that close to the real cutoff. And surely they would not allow someone's actual graduation to be undermined by my failure to set a little electronic flag to "approved". Still. What an irresponsible idiot I knew I was! How anxious I felt, sitting by the computer waiting for confirmation that I had not sabotaged poor Student M.'s graduation by going out of town for Mother's Day.
It was a great relief to get the all-clear message an hour or two later (thank you, dean in question, for being much quicker to answer my email than I was to answer yours) but I was left with that pathetic queasy feeling you have when you narrowly escape getting into a car accident.
"I'm sorry you're so strung out," Steve said kindly. "The new Doctor Who has downloaded."
"Hooray," said me.
"I'm going to take out the recycling and make us soothing drinks. Then there will be Doctor Who! Doctor Who will not be soothing, though, because there are vampires."
"Soothing vampires?" I suggested.
"Well. Probably not. But it is Doctor Who, which means that it will be nothing a brave eight-year-old can't handle..."
"...so you should be good for the first 20 minutes."
Yesterday I finished revising an article in response to some reviewer comments, a process that did not make me feel the slightest bit clever in any way. (Why is this experience always so extremely vile? I always wind up feeling like a horrible scholar and hopeless dunce, and wanting to stab myself in the eye.) Today, though, I am a genius.
Me: "What's a good general term for using some object for something other than its intended purpose?"
Steve: "Well, if you're Cory Doctorow..."
Me: "No, not 'hack'."
Anyway, I bought a new pair of sandals last week because it turns out that boots and thick socks, as delightful as they may be, are not really ideally suited to all weather. I was pretty pleased with the sandals when they arrived (heaven forbid I should shop for anything in person)—they fit properly and seemed to strike a decent balance between being comfortable and not being too desperately unstylish.
The only trouble was that some glitch in the construction of one shoe, or of my foot, meant that there was a hard, poky edge that jabbed me right in the ankle with every step.
Ow. I didn't want to return them, though, because they were almost perfect, and besides, returning them would require a trip to the post office. Horror. No.
Instead, in my tiny act of brilliance for the day, I took some of this kind of stuff
...which sticks to itself but not to anything else, and wrapped a small strip around the offending strap. Success! The bit of bandage holds the nasty biting corner in place where it can't hurt anything, without gumming up either the shoe or my foot with adhesive. Plus the tail of the strap hides it all, so I'm not sporting the shoe equivalent of duct tape on the bridge of my eyeglasses.
What minor works of genius have you committed lately?
(This also reminds me of that perennially fresh topic of discussion, the invention of feeble superpowers. For a long time I felt that my fourth-rate superpower should be the ability to pickle things instantly, a power conceived of one day when I had cucumbers in the house and wanted a kosher dill. A much more powerful superpower recently invented at our house is the ability to shoot superheroes out of one's eyes. Now that's super! No comic books seem yet to have made use of it, however. A curious oversight.)
