Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Winter, a cavalcade of delights.

Me: Those little bowls are for condiments.

Jane: Of the house?

Quite.

Christmas was pleasant, as it canonically is supposed to be. I was I think only once compelled to refer to it as "Fuckwad" (merry fuckwad). Sweets were made, presents were exchanged, carols and murder ballads were sung, friends and family joined in pleasing harmony, et cetera. 

Now the semester is about to begin, the really-truly winter has arrived and with it its associated Stockholm Syndrome reactions (today it is THIRTY-SEVEN DEGREES FARENHEIT, break out the sundresses), and I have a nice lingering racking cough to go with it. Jane thinks it is all pretty swell

at least by day. The cold dark of early nightfall she still considers pretty objectionable, and really who can blame her? Certainly not I.

Lord, what little I have to say and how mundanely I manage to say it! I will try to scrounge up something more entertaining soon if only to stop boring myself, though it will have to be about something pretty dull at its core because that's all I've got going. Options that leap not-so-enticingly to mind include: drips, itchy hands, poorly-bound books, instant soup, piles of objects, dust in the corners, expensive face cream, inadequate baby lotion, jersey shirts (the dowdiness/disintigrating nature of), hair static, antihistamines, reading the same books over and over because they are the ones already in the bedroom, feeling like a jerk, how annoying the disappearing scroll bar is in OS 10.7, and sweet potatoes. Don't you want me to get started right away?

PS. Do not break out the sundresses.

I could post something new, I suppose.

What, hello, hello, what?

My colleague across the hall likes to ask me if I have "anything new or interesting" to report. The answer is always, always no. No, there is nothing new and certainly nothing interesting. No.

It is becoming a sort of principle on which my entire life is predicated, this complete lack of novelty and interest. That is perhaps why I have not said anything here for two weeks, and that was a dream about tooth spiders.

But, then, who am I to presume that you would rather read about things that are interesting or new? Maybe you prefer the old and the dull. Maybe you have been thinking, "Oh, everyone is always telling me about interesting new things! That sort of stuff is so predictable and easy to find. What I would really like, and no one ever offers me, is some good, stale tedium."

If so, join me, won't you, over a nice cup of the boring detritus of my unglamorous life?

The gardener (who is employed by our landlord and usually comes and goes on his own mysterious schedule, leaving things attractive and doused in toxic chemicals) rang the bell the other day to tell me that one of my trees was dying. I do not think it is dying, I think it is manifesting its deciduous nature, about which I was warned by the nursery when I bought it.

But the gardener assures me that it is dying, and that the problem is its pot. It is currently sitting inside a nice wooden planter, not yet freed from the pot in which it was purchased. The pot in question is one of those weird paperish pots that you can supposedly pop right into a hole in the dirt and let disintegrate. The gardener tells me that the tree is dying—and surely he would know if a tree was dying? better than I would, right?—because the pot does not drain. But when I water the tree, the pot manifestly does drain. And how could a pot whose problem is (also?) probably that it is turning to dirt itself pretty quickly also be killing the tree inside it by not draining? 

In any case, this weekend I have to go find a tree-sized plastic pot that will please him. "These pots," he says, indicating the other, non-deciduous trees, are fine. "Get one like that." I don't know what he will say when the tree continues to turn yellow and drop all its leaves after I put it in a shitty plastic pot. Or we could get some dirt, which will be heavy, and plant the thing right in the planter, after which it will still die, or "die." Either way. 

A SHORT LIST OF THINGS JANE HAS BEEN SAYING ALL THE TIME, WITH THE MANIFEST, AND MANIFESTLY MISTAKEN, IMPRESSION THAT THEY WILL BE UNDERSTOOD

• Ducky (nb: whatever this means, it is definitely not "ducky")
• My key (nb: whatever this means, it is definitely not "my key" or "Mikey")
• Babetz

"Babetz" is actually the least mysterious of these, oddly enough, because she always says it at the table, and has recently occasionally been pronouncing it a little more like "mawetz." Ah. Babetz = more water. Of course. That should help with the ducky and the keys.

She also answers all questions "no." Whether they are phrased in a yes/no format is immaterial. It is a sort of gentle, chiding "no," a touch condescending. "Noooooo," you silly person, no.

Q. Do you want more beans?
A. [reaching for more] Noooo.

Q. What do you mean when you say "ducky"? Ducky?
A. No, no. Ducky! Ducky! Ducky ducky ducky.

Q. What do you think of that toast, Jane?
A. Noooo. No.

In conclusion, obviously very advanced. 

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?

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.)

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.

It's raining, while Rome burns.

It rains and rains, and nothing drains. Crossing the street is an exciting adventure in fording streams. It is damp even inside the clothes dryer and my hair is retaining water like a pre-menstrual victim of congestive heart failure. 

First world dilemmas, how embarrassing you are. For instance, I wear the same shoes--boots, actually--nineteen days out of twenty. They are quite wet at the moment. They were aggressively expensive, but considering the use I have gotten out of them I am not too ashamed about it. Then this week I started thinking with alarm about the eventual day they wear out, not to mention the fact that wearing them daily puts greater wear on them than giving them a day between wearings would do. The future looms, cold and bootless. 

Obvious solution: buy a second pair of related but different boots from the same maker, if you like them so much. And yet the prospect of spending nigh on (oh I can't actually quite bring myself to say it, after all) for no real pressing reason seems not entirely prudent or frugal, somehow. Yet is it not less frugal to wear my existing boots into the ground like a horse that is never rested nor watered?

This in fact goes well beyond being a mere first world dilemma into the realm of moneyed-idiot pseudo dilemma, a whole super-class of moronic "problem" best solved with a quick slash of the guillotine. I do hanker after those boots, though.  

No matter. It is easy for me to deny myself in this case, quite aside from the sway of my bank balance and common decency, because I am far too incompetent to deserve any treats at all. Today's major achievements have been making vast quantities of horribly mediocre tofu curry (you may wonder how mediocrity, by its nature, can be horrible, but I assure you it was), somehow giving myself an itchy face rash in the course of trying to make my skin look nice, failing to take a shower, and tramping mud all over the kitchen and laundry room floor. 

("I don't wonder how mediocrity can be horrible," Steve remarks, reading over my shoulder. "It's an existential horror." Isn't it, though. And he ate the curry.)

Poor form.

There is an English Shop in town! How could I have gone so many months without realizing it? Sadly, and I'm sorry if by some chance the proprietor should ever chance to see this, it is not a supremely well stocked English Shop. It's on the airy, tea cozy provisioning model, rather than jam-packed as I would wish with dubious-flavored crisps and fizzy drinks. 

But I am patently ungrateful. Who is going to cater to a customer like me, who is thinking, Yes, there is Fairy washing-up liquid, but is there Persil? Yes, there is Wilkin & Sons jam, but is there Little Scarlet? Yes, there are Twiglets, but are there any other salty snacks at all? Not unless you count Weetabix or Bovril. 

Indeed, I am a horrible customer. I fondled the merchandise and monologized as I did it. "Let's just see how firm these Garibaldi biscuits are," I murmured to Jane, reaching out for a pinch. "Oh. Very firm." Another patron, who was standing rather more in earshot than I thought, enjoyed this commentary. The blackcurrant pastilles were very firm, too, even for their genus.

In the end I bought nothing. Nothing! I'm a monster.

So much to offer

Query: Why don't you tell us something interesting?

Answer: I think you can guess for yourself.

I am always at my very most boring when I am also anxious. And I have been rather anxious, this week, as it has slowly drifted across my consciousness that there are looming work things that I am actually responsible for bringing to pass. It seems that I would vastly prefer it if my responsibilities could just tick along at the same modest and predictable level week after week after week. This attitude, as everyone knows, is an excellent recipe for success in any career.

What I'd really like, naturally, is very few actual responsibilities at all, just a nice salary and the option for someone to applaud appreciatively when I happened to do something accidentally, every now and then. I would be very ready to provide an annual output of, oh, let's see:

• One academic paper (absolutely no quality guarantee of any kind included)
• Several whimsical drawings (ditto)
• A story or few (ditto, ditto)
• 260 dinners
• Several batches of baked goods
• The solving of 52 crossword puzzles
• A lumpy craft project to be named later
• Dozens of blog comments
• Informal commentary on several films and works of light fiction
• Five or more animated gifs.

All that and I'll play with the baby too. A bargain at twice the price!

A thing we BOTH cried over.

The afterword to Knuffle Bunny Free. We were in public, too, merrily looking through picture books at the bookstore. I squirted real tears out of my eyes onto the ground; Steve merely turned bright red and hid, with dignity, around a corner.

The Red and the Black.

Once upon a time, I was truly broke, and also profoundly stupid about it. Because I could not afford to pay them, I hid my credit card statements under the futon. This was a brilliant scheme, in no way doomed to collapse like the proverbial house of cards. Indeed, it wasn't really so much a house of cards as it was a pre-collapsed messy pile of cards, lightly shredded so as to provide an ideal home for rats to come nest inside. Possibly literally.

That was all a long time ago, and I like to think I am much more responsible, though really it's mostly that I make more money now. But since our move, I have been gazing upon my dwindling bank balance with shame and horror.

I was absolutely hemorrhaging money. Yes, moving and appliances are expensive, and baby things, too. I knew that our rent had gone up and that I was being wildly free with such luxuries as expensive cheese and interlibrary loan. But really, it was appalling that I was apparently so utterly incapable of staying in the black; so out of control with my purchases of onesies, ginger beer, and organic sunblock; such a complete failure at living within my means.

I fretted, I cringed, I berated myself as an irresponsible fool. I considered getting myself some new lipstick, as I had used up my previous tube. But then I reconsidered. "You cannot afford treats like lipstick! You don't deserve treats like lipstick! If you buy that lipstick, you will not be able to feed and clothe your own child!"

Then, at last, I realized THAT NONE OF MY PAY CHECKS HAVE ACTUALLY GONE INTO MY ACCOUNT. None! For months. Thousands of dollars simply never arrived.

So:

(a) I'm an incredible simpleton who should not be let out of the house, and

(b) This is going to be hellish to resolve, probably, because the university system does believe that it has deposited them, and seems to have had the correct information for my bank and account numbers, but

(c) Thank fucking god.

"I do not deserve nice things!" Possibly.

"I cannot manage my money!" Evidently.

"I will never be able to retire!" Well, no, not if you never get paid even when you have a paying job, you moron. You are an idiot! An idiot... who can afford lipstick. Hooray.