Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Whine.

This week is a little bit crazy, and we are trying with only moderate success to entertain our out-of-town guests. Oddly, they have decided to stay around longer than originally planned. Maybe they hope that if they wait long enough, we will be magically transformed into someone more useful. Their optimism, I fear, is unlikely to be borne out by reality. Meanwhile, Steve has to steal time from the evening to get his work done, I have a talk to give tomorrow, we won't get any weekend, I'm behind on laundry, the cat pissed on the sofa, and we have fleas. FLEAS. I think they arrived via the Thing That Scrabbled Under the Floor.

(Last week, we heard an alarming scrabbling sound under the floor. It fortunately has not returned since then, but Steve and I both reacted to it the same way, which was to daintily pull up our feet in alarm. You can perhaps imagine the scene. Very practical and butch, both of us. Despite this, and the fleas, and the cat piss, I swear to you that we appear to live in a fairly clean and charming little house, not a depressing shithole. It doesn't feel that way at the moment, however.)

We dosed the cat and I just did an elaborate and dusty nontoxic thing that is supposed to suffocate any flea eggs lurking around while leaving all the other living things in the house unscathed. But Jesus Christ. Please send cake.

We are adventuresome.

This weekend we were determined to go out and do something, beyond our usual adventuresome outings to the market and the coffee shop. So we packed the baby into the car and headed off to Knapp's Castle. This is the ruin of a former mansion up in the Santa Ynez mountains. The house, first built by the (I presume robber-baronish) founder of Union Carbide, was consumed in a forest fire just a few weeks after the second owners moved in, in 1940. As you can see at the Wikipedia link, the remaining sandstone bits made for quite majestic ruins, much more attractive probably than the original building. 

You can visit it as the apex of a long hike, or you can drive nearly all the way there and park at the top trailhead. We were in the market for more of a little outing suitable for tucking in between lunch and Her Majesty's afternoon nap, and less of a multi-hour trudge with infant strapped to one's front, so up we drove.

Oh, up and up and up, windier and windier, blind turn after blind turn, and the fog blew across the road and the mountain sheered off just to our right into the deathsome abyss, and Steve's knuckles got whiter and whiter on the steering wheel. Poor Steve. 

Then we emerged through the top of the clouds and arrived at our destination, hurrah!

Well, perhaps not entirely hurrah.

   

 

There were some bugs. Indeed, there were dense swarms of bugs, and the swarming they did was around our heads.

 

So we gave the view a brisk, admiring glance, turned smartly on our heels, and went home. The drive was much less harrowing on the way down, as mountain drives often are, and we even got back in time for a quick trip to the coffee shop. I call that an outstanding success, especially as no one got shat on.

What did you do this weekend?

"You are granted an insight."

"I'm pleased that my gray hair seems to be coming in in a streak."

"Yes, you're like Rogue."

"I'm a Roguelike!"

...

"Let's not ratchet that nerdiness up any farther."

"Yes, let's leave that right there."

Here, have another animated gif of the baby as a reward for putting up with that nonsense.

 

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.

I am a lachry-mouse.

SCENE: I am tidying some things in the fridge after our trip to the pediatrician, who has recommended -- quite possibly mainly as a strategy to give me something to feel proactive about -- that I not eat dairy for a bit, in case it is contributing to Jane's slightly suboptimal digestive performance. (Oh boy! Digestion!)

I come across a nice plump package of my favorite tortillas, which we normally use to make breakfast quesadillas.

"Ohhh." I go get a hug from Steve.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm a little sad about dairy products," I explain, dripping tears on his shoulder.

"I think you'll be able to have them again soon, you know."

"Yes, I know. And I don't even really care that much, it's just that all the nice little routines I was happy about resuming seem to involve dairy." Tears leap out of my eyes and puddle on his shirt.

"I really don't mind very much," I reassure him, truthfully, in sensible tones, sobbing all the while.

"I promise I am not experiencing feelings of hopelessness." I put my head down on the counter and weep shamelessly.

Two minutes later, I stop and feel entirely better.

Here's what I want to know: Is it possible that there is actually something in my system that I need to excrete through crying? It is an excretion, after all. The internet tells me that emotional tears contain prolactin, which I certainly have in abundance at the moment.

Can it really be the case that every once in a while you wind up with too much and your body deals with it by making you cry about dairy products? Tell me, is this insane? Is it something everybody knows to be true? What's the deal? I would really like to hear your views on this question.

Sap flood.

We have been discussing what music I might bring with me to the hospital, to drown out the beeps and the Jerry Springer drifting down the hall and my water buffalo noises. Our friend J., for instance, said that she listened to a lot of Hem.

Today we were in the car, listening to an iPod mix I made a while ago for the purpose of playing on endless loop while I cranked out some deathless article or other. It includes things like School of Seven Bells and Tiger Trap and Iggy Pop doing "The Passenger" and Spoon. "How about this?" Steve suggested. "It's pretty!"

Then the New Pornographers' "Bleeding Heart Show" came on and to my surprise and dismay, I immediately burst into tears, because it reminded me of this high schooler-created music video and I am full of sappy sap sap sap.

Maybe we should stick to instrumental music instead. I eagerly await the full regrowth of my cynical protective shell, sometime around 2014.

Like a sieve.

The last couple of days were meant to be a relaxing opportunity to get caught up on things around the house, in the happy lull after I turned in final grades for the semester. Instead I spent most of the time in a deranged tizzy. The more tizzied I became, the more each thing took longer than intended, the later I got started on the next, and so on, ad infinitum. (I'm better now. Everything is bought and filed and examined and scheduled and packed up and mailed off, and I'm sitting quietly in a chair and listening to the soothing hum of the dishwasher.)

My always tenuous ability to stay on top of things turns out to have been more tightly bound to a predictable weekly grid of responsibilities than I'd realized. Certainly during the semester there were loads of new things to attend to every week, but they were all permutations of the same sorts of things, and I could expect them to turn up on a reliable schedule.

Then the semester ended and everything became a fresh new one-off responsibility. Each task pitter-patters out of my head like rain through a sieve, leaving me with nothing but an acute but pervasive awareness that I am Not On Top. Then I have to go rushing to check what I'm not on top of. It pit-pats out again immediately, and I have to check again right away, like the poor canonical OCD sufferer dashing into her house again and again to make sure that the oven really is turned off.

As a result I snapped at Steve, wasted a lot of packing paper, had to reschedule an eye doctor appointment, covered the house with a fine layer of paper scraps, and generally did everything in the most inefficient way possible, including racing to campus just so I could be there for a student meeting that wound up taking all of ten minutes. It was probably more like nine minutes, strictly speaking. Then I went home, because all the things I still needed to get done depended on information or objects I'd carefully removed from the office and taken home with me the day before.

"You're going to be lots of fun when you're old," observes Steve.

"I'll just make sure no one expects me to take care of anything at all when that happens."

"Good idea. Me neither."

My grandmother did a pretty good job of this when she was old and demented. Her ability to keep track of conversations was much like that of an extremely stoned person, and she got similar enjoyment out of tasty snacks and Miss Marple videos. Everyone adored her, she was so pleasant and tidy, and she sailed through most of her days with a serene, potheaded demeanor that served her well. The only downside was that my grandfather died a few years before her, so she didn't get to take advantage of the experience with a full time drug buddy. With luck, Steve and I can go naturally hash-addled in tandem, gently abdicating all responsibility and giggling ourselves creakily to sleep in front of ultradigitally remastered 8-D XXHD recordings of The Core and Iron Man XIV.

In other news, my mother has convinced me that the burning, needling intramuscular pain just below my ribs is the result of sharp little prenatal heels puuuuushing cruelly against my tender parts. This information doesn't help anything, particularly, but it has given rise to a new fetal nickname: My Pal Foot Foot. ("Click on Foot Foot to hear Foot Foot"!)

Damp squibbery.

Definitive proof that autumn is here has arrived in the form of the cat's renewed physical affection. It is a cupboard love, one in search of heat rather than food. In summer he is aloof and runs for the outdoors at earliest convenience. This time of year he would much rather press himself up against something that radiates heat, preferably multiple somethings at once. As I type he has managed to wedge himself between my front and the keyboard of my laptop.

Hello, Nemo.

Obviously this is an arrangement with a limited lifespan. Eventually there will be no space between my front and anything else. Enjoy it while you can, cat.

It's the lead-up that I mind, rather:

- Mew.

- Stop standing on my tits.

Cat steps onto the other arm of the armchair, leaving most of his weight on the one hind paw that remains on my chest.

Cat turns around.

- Mew.

- Please sit down and stop filling my entire field of vision with your asshole. Ow, and get off my tits.

- Mew.

- OW.

Et cetera.

Meanwhile, a few family things have been making me sad. Nothing awful, just awkward, with more startling and unpleasant experiences of being suddenly put on the spot than I would like. But then, also, here it is Sunday evening, the weepiest time of the week. What's more, there is no denying that the days are getting distinctly shorter, and it won't be long now before we switch the clocks around, making it that much worse. A great pile of grading would like my attention, as would a lesser, but more ominous, pile of job applications.

In sum: it is the time of the Great Feebleness, and I need to be jollied out of it. Please send entertainment.

Niecely done

Copy editors: a less privileged class. I wonder how many have been laid off from the New York Times in the last month alone.

Tea fancying

My mother and her cousin Louise recently came for a visit. They were ideal guests--never bored, good company, enthusiastic about my cooking, and perfectly happy to sit around drinking endless cups of tea and call it being entertained.

Louise, like many of my relations, is English. She lives in Brighton, well, in fact Hove Actually, and we visited her ourselves not long ago when we were done visiting London.

Like the rest of us, she's not especially patriotic, being endowed with your typical left-leaning intellectual skepticism about such things, but that doesn't mean her soul is utterly dead to national pride on matters of real importance. So, appropriately, she mocked me for buying my tea from France.

"French tea! The French don't know anything about tea! Coffee yes, tea no."

"I don't think that much of French coffee, actually," Steve offered.

"It's good tea though, isn't it?" I asked.

"But France! Tea should come from China, or India."

"I don't think anyone is suggesting that they grew the tea in France."

Anyway, it is awfully good, especially if like me you like all those Russian-influenced French teas with flowers and dried fruits mixed in. I order pounds at a time, to lessen the oof of international shipping. Then we drink it all in less time than you would think and I order some more. As a result, I am an official Théophile, which is to say a frequent buyer. In fact, the euro-spending threshold for Théophilia looks, I regret to report, comically low from here.

Well! you say. What a vice! Between that and the bricks of heroin, how do you manage to hold down a job?

To that I say, well, my mother has a special iPhone application for birdwatching.