Badger bag - messy, surly, full of books

Friday, October 31, 2003 cyborg love Oh, wow, I am in love... Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. What could be better... be still, my heart! posted by badgerbag 10/31/2003 10:08:00 PM comment musings on Halloween and nostalgia 2 halloween parties later.... 1 mac n cheese filled crock pot ... 1 parade of a roiling chaos of 40 pre-schoolers across a 6 lane road... 7 princesses, 3 spidermans, 1 panda, 1 zebra, 1 white lion, 1 robin hood, 1 hawaiian cat princess, 2 dinosaurs, 3 army outfits (scary). 2 blocks up and down in the rain... the sadness of lone old ladies answering the door with badly suppressed excitement and near tears for the one minute of kids jostling and screeching at the door, kids who forget to say thank you... Kids suddenly catching on to the magic of the whole thing - you get to run up to strange people's houses... you get to see inside... they are all kind and give you presents. Kids out at night! Everyone indulgent! Moomin flashed into a wide-eyed understanding and began waving his candy bucket, waving his sword, leaping like a gazelle after the throng of slightly older kids. "Let's go to the next house! Come on!" Jo's daughter Elizabeth was very funny, getting into the proper post-trick-or-treat gloating spirit with me. We dumped out her candy and sorted it by type, taking turns to write down the inventory. I realized she did not know all the types of candy - how strange! Rook and I knew them all quite intimately. I think I gave her an incredulous look when she did not know what a Krackle was, or a Now n Later. She went around charging people and the funniest bit was when she instructed 4 year old Iz in how to make a credit card. "You put your first name and the last name and the year..." As if Iz didn't have a vat of her own candy! I had it in mind to make her do a statistical analysis of her loot, but the party got chaotic. I had some wine and mooned around wishing dimly that I had a piano. Moomin came in the room horrified as I picked out the first few chords of that chopin prelude. "STOP, mama, that is too scary." In class today the myths prof was giving possibly his most boring lecture ever, but there was a good bit about how rituals and holidays always refer back to a golden age. I think he said something about how people always think that the holiday or the ritual USED TO BE BETTER. This made me drift off into thinking about memoirs where people wax poetic about their glorious childhood memories of spending a nickel in the candy store - of reading the sunday funnies on the floor in 1932 - of spending all Saturday in the movie theater watching cartoons and newsreels. Meanwhile their elders freaking about their trashy activities. My generation now has the chance to wax poetic about the glory of Saturday morning cartoons. This glory no longer exists, as kids have videos and access to all-day cartoon channels. I have certainly heard my generation go on about how great Halloween used to be and now it can't be that way because people are paranoid and don't let their kids out. (Remember the whole weirdness in the 80s about taking your candy to be x-rayed?! Check urban legends snopes page for a fascinating monograph on the subject...) This is why I like Redwood City - people DO let their kids out. There seems to be a truly unholy trend in many places - taking your kids to the mall and let them trick or treat there. As if some random mall store employee is more trustworthy or accountable than your own neighbors... I feel a little false nostalgia for a generation or so back... for some TrixieBelden-ish old neighbor lady inviting the gang inside for hot chocolate and freshly baked cookies... bobbing for apples? playing blind mans bluff? (buff?) This sort of waffly false nostalgia quickly leads me to the land of the 5 little peppers, the little brown house, and Laura Ingalls' first party as a teenager where she freaks out about how to eat an orange. "Oh, Ma, we each had a whole orange!" I have never tried bobbing for apples, but it seems quite disgusting and unpleasant. cold water on the face, and other people's spitty, half-bitten apples. Ew. I also thought (not for the first or last time) of my current nostalgia for the happy modem handshake noise. (I just looked for an online sound file of this noise, and did not find it. I will hook up old computer and record the noise, which is curiously lovely. Could compose a song with it perhaps...) Oh the tense and exciting anticipation of the connection, the BBS or later the gophering and mudding pleasures that awaited! The thrilling net news and magic email! I am all powerful, I am magic, I will hack into the Pentagon! (Screw the web. Text, text, text. That is all I need.) When the modem finally did its successful handshake... joy. Like being at the symphony and hearing the orchestra tuning up, the chaotic notes resolving into a triumphant A. And when it didn't... that dull repetitive beepy noise interspersed with static, as if the modem was dissolving into disappointed, confused sobs. Busy signals were particularly poignant, evoking moments of frustrated long distance love in the days before call waiting was common. Anyway, my point is, suddenly in class I began to imagine myself at 80 years old, hearing the happy modem handshake noise for the first time in decades, and weeping with joyous nostalgia. I'm sure somebody is laughing at me by now. Nevertheless I am moved to tears by this thought. Back to Halloween and rituals - I was made very, very happy by seeing all the kids dressed up. Their excitement was renewing to the spirit in a way I didn't expect. They were excited without knowing what it was all about. I also don't know what it is all about, but it seems to partly be about (if you are not just completely cynical about rampant consumerism) participating in a weird event where you aren't sure what is going on, but older people do seem sure of the ways things are supposed to be done: there are supposed to be pumpkins, jack o lanterns, witches, ghosts and skeletons; any other costumes are also acceptable; all sorts of strange songs and customs and foods. So the magic is actually that something particularly meaningless is being transmitted AS IF IT WERE MEANINGFUL - a shared moment of cultural insanity. Plus, they were just really cute in their costumes so that all the grownups were tiptoeing around grinning and saying "Awwwww". posted by badgerbag 10/31/2003 08:52:00 PM comment costumes My old halloween costumes: age 3 or 4: skeleton (plastic drugstore costume) 5: ? 6: ? age 7: indian (as shown on Minnie's blog: sheet dyed brown with rit dye, pictographs, war paint, headband with feather, homemade tomahawk) age 9: gandalf (pointy hat, staff, robes made of sheet dyed grey with rit dye and astrological symbols painted on) age 10: dwarf warrior (viking helmet made by sewing cloth horns onto baseball cap, fake fur beard, wooden sword made by dad, wooden shield with lengths of garden hose for handles) age 11: ?? I think gandalf again age 12: Tarzana (aunt's zebra striped one-strap bathing suit, whorish makeup, stuffed monkey) age 13: this might be the age where the generic "punker" outfit was the rule - consisting of odd hairdo, a lot of eye makeup and as slutty of an outfit as one could get away with the intervening years are kind of blurry. 19-ish: full blown dominatrix outfit 20-ish: space girl with gold lamé dress, turban, golden laser pistol intervening years, memory blurry again, probably lots more slutty black clothes, though I do remember dressing in a really unsuccessful outfit of mmm's and going to the castro and it was really miserable. Later, with mohawk, wheelchair, and a double nosering, halloween seemed superfluous. 28-ish: Death from the sandman comix (hark, still dressing slutty in all black! true to my roots! tried unsuccessfully to spray hair with black spray stuff. Rook was Dream.) 30: Penguin (Rook, our friend S. and I all penguins: me pregnant and Rook with large styrofoam egg sewn to his foot as an emperor penguin dad, which I think still gets him major feminist points) 31-ish: greek robes with ivy in hair (was still like 170 lbs from post pregnancy) 32: ? 33: didn't dress up, or did I? can't remember.. am old... Rook wore his purple velvet sequined long dress and went to vibrant party and I stayed home... 34: "cowboy" (black hat, trench coat, red bandana, lasso) posted by badgerbag 10/31/2003 08:01:00 PM comment The Journal of Fabulous Ideas I had a fabulous idea last night in class: "The Journal of Fabulous Ideas". This inspired by me, the bull, reading some red flag of an article by Damrosch. Something like "of course we do all tend to downplay the things we don't know" etc. about why interdisciplinariness is doomed to fail and also dooms to amateurism the people who dabble in it. Rather than downplay things we don't know, because we are big shots at Columbia and have a huge vested interest in being experts all the time (nothing against him really but I was feeling testy towards bits of what he said and how he said it) - how about allowing a place in academia for the juxtaposition of nifty ideas, irrespective of depth of knowledge. Thus the Journal of Fabulous Ideas was born. It would be a monthly journal - I guess online, but paper is so nice - So that people could write hypotheses, or abstracts of possible articles, of stuff they've thought of but don't have expertise or time to do the research...and then maybe other people who DO know about film theory or music or whatever would see it and riff off it - would get fabulous ideas. This is why I keep trying to exterminate my own perfectionism -- "I can't write that paper on J. de I. and Modernism and feminist deconstruction because i am not expert enough..." No... just write it... translate it... even ineptly... it might spark someone else to do it better. That seems worthwhile. posted by badgerbag 10/31/2003 04:35:00 PM comment Thursday, October 30, 2003 Pinning the Inner Critic I have been reading the journal of Iris Storm and enjoying it very much. I suppose the trouble is that I feel that I have wasted all the 'gifts' that I was born with. I am really lazy. I can do nothing for days on end and I am never bored. I read all the time, usually a book a day, and think and potter about and start little projects. I can't bear to wake up in the morning and know that I have definite things to do at definite times. Of course, for most of my life I have had things to do but I used to quite regularly take days off from work and stay at home and do nothing, or I felt I would have gone mad. It feels so odd to be clever and articulate and artistic and practical and good-looking and sympathetic and amusing and to have such an unambitious, uncompetitive and unselfconfident personality. What was God thinking? And as a bonus to such oddly familiar ramblings we get pheasants, conkers, vicars, pantries, punters, and other (to the U.S.-ian) exotica. Join Iris Storm's highly witty and amusing Inner Critic and throw a few comments her way. (Since I just added the comments feature on there...) Also looked up the origin of the name. I had never heard of Michael Arlen but from this description, I am hot to read The Green Hat and some of his other books too. Lookit, Garbo and Tallulah! posted by badgerbag 10/30/2003 11:35:00 PM comment suddenly very stressed suddenly I am stressed and despairing beyond belief. I sat down this morning with about 6 projects looming over me: 2 long papers that have only vaguely taken shape 1 hour long lecture on women, evil, and hero myth 1 20 minute presentation on Great Literature (this halfway done) 1 short presentation on various journals (halfway done) Re-do entire 'student portfolio' and CV Print more Composite covers in preparation for (sunday?) folding party translate a bunch of critical articles on J. de Ibar. finish long translation of Elegia before nov. 12 conference would be nice to have more j. de i. booklets for that conference too... And flyers for the 2nd issue of composite! Arrrrrrrgh! Too much! And completely blah, uninspired, existential despair, curl up in bed feeling all morning long. Am I PMS-ing? This was my big day to get things done. I did do the reading for class, and vaguely looked at some of the critical essays in spanish. Tomorrow: - bring mac n cheese to Moomin's halloween party - remember to send him to school in his 'costume' - get giant mole removed from underarm, if they will condescend to cut the damn thing off - go to class (maybe could skip it....) - drink giant double mocha and write, write, write poetry and translating is so much better feeling than this stuff. posted by badgerbag 10/30/2003 01:50:00 PM comment Wednesday, October 29, 2003 parody and censorship I have been giving some thought to the 'hoax' issue with the fake Riverbend blog. (Here is the real Riverbend blog). I argued with myself over whether it was a legitimate form of political protest or parody. For example, I think the whitehouse.org site is a great parody and protest. I have wondered how the guy has avoided being sued or charged with some sort of crime, especially considering the general political climate under the Patriot Acts. It is conceivable that some people would look at this site and take it seriously - at least they might be fooled for a while. However, that is the point of a parody. What makes the fake riverbendsblog any different? Is it different? One thing that is noticably different is that the whitehouse.org articles are original. The riverbendsblog fake, in contrast, lifted paragraphs and entire posts from Riverbend and from Zayed of the Healing Iraq site. Again, I can picture parodying a poem and lifting a whole verse from the original. But the attribution would be clear - if I were parodying someone and used someone else's work to do it, I think I would have to cite them or make it clear who I was quoting. I am actually wondering if I would be okay with that fake River blog if they hadn't lifted sections of Zayed's writing. If they had, say, kept a paragraph of River's blog and then segued gradually into some sort of grotesque parody (the original fake site was not too well done, but just put in weird sections that said things like "Allah blast the infidels!" and stuff like that.) then I might have been okay with it. Even a badly executed, stupid, racist parody has a perfect right to exist. So go for it, fake River blogger. I consider what you are doing to be pretty spiteful (again, so is whitehouse.org and much political parody...) and it is also against what I believe. But the people who think the fake site should be censored are wrong. posted by badgerbag 10/29/2003 08:38:00 PM comment Tuesday, October 28, 2003 goofy pictures Well... don't say I didn't warn you... posted by badgerbag 10/28/2003 09:36:00 PM comment Cool, calm, courageous, and whiskery From a Reuters article about smart mother rats We are doing another study where the rats have to eat a cricket," Kinsley said. "The virgin females are clueless. They don't know what to do. They can't find the thing. Lactating animals can snag it. It takes them like a minute. It points out how much more efficient a nursing mother is." Huzzah, mama ratties! posted by badgerbag 10/28/2003 05:04:00 PM comment dream of a great room i just woke up from an interesting dream. My parents had bought a big house and I'd walked through it a bit earlier. It had 3 bedrooms - one big one off to the side of the house with an extra room opening into it, then in the main part of the house, two smaller rooms. later, they made a big deal out of giving me a really nice suit. I put it on and it was really comfortable - not wool, which I am allergic to, and it made me look nice - really grown up and powerful. They made a big deal out of making me come look at the house with them. (Minnie was still in high school, by dream magic.) "Come look at the big bedroom" said my mom. I went in there and it was all done up with a million bookshelves and my bed and fancy new bedspreads. It looked like a cross between a library and a victorian whorehouse with a sort of chinese art objects theme. "I figured you guys would take the big bedroom and Minnie and I would have the small ones," I said in shock. My dad really gruffly described how he built the bookshelves for me. I was amazed. "This stuff is too nice... I'll mess it up... all this bamboo stuff is really cool but I know I'll break it." My mom said "Oh no of course you would be careful since we went to such effort." Suddenly I realized something. "Where will Rook and Moomin go?" I mentally started rearranging the room "Oh, Rook will stay near his work and we gave Moomin to these other people." I freaked out. "What!!! How could you think that I would arrange my life like this so I couldn't be with them!?" Outside, the house was high on a hill and was part of some kind of national monument. There were beautiful stone arches and old wooden bits like a covered bridge but painted elaborately... maybe like a circus wagon... There were people everywhere who had been there to listen to a speech by some Reagan era S & L scandal banker who was bashing the current government. I was supposed to make some sort of speech, but I skipped out and went clicking down the hill in my sensible yet grownup shoes, looking for Moomin and Rook. I then realized I was dreaming and was about to wake up. I managed to hang onto sleep a little longer in order to 'fix' the dream, at least until I had Moomin safely with me again. posted by badgerbag 10/28/2003 12:19:00 AM comment Monday, October 27, 2003 thorns I can't remember where I heard this, but someone told me lately about their ( a friend's?) catholic school - elementary school - where in the back of the classroom they had this plastic jesus-on-the-cross with little plastic thorns next to it. If you did something bad then the teacher would make you go and put a thorn into Jesus's head. According to whoever it was, this would commonly break even the toughest kindergarten hoodlums down into remorseful tears. In my quest to find such an object I have come across this burlap jesus and this amazing nightlight and this mother of sorrows with bloody thorns and daggered heart yo! This velvet painting would be funnier if mother theresa weren't such an evil, stupid bitch. In my idle avoidance of doing my foucault homework I then found this awesome guy who will airbrush anything onto velvet. Maybe even my ass in those new fuschia hotpants that say "redwood city". no. even better. For xmas I will get Minnie a whole bunch of airbrush gear and some lessons from the car body shop over on the east side and some black velvet, and she can set up a fabulous business airbrushing really funny punky geek things. posted by badgerbag 10/27/2003 09:18:00 PM comment lots of books, neighborhoodies The other day in some social context a friend of mine was introducing me to someone. I don't remember at all where this was, or who. But the friend said, "She has a lot of books. No, really a LOT. Like, 500." I started laughing... Anyway, as I read the stories about the CA fires and people who lost all their stuff, I wondered how many books I do have. Per shelf I am figuring an average of 50 books. (Some only 30, some 70 depending on book thickness, amount of books shoved in on top or double-stacked). I just counted 94 shelves full - not counting my own journals and binders and not counting Rook's and Moomin's books. Laboriously I arrive at 4700. hmmmm. that scares me a little. but now I know. There are more in the garage so I think we can make it an even 5000. In other news, I am reading Ariel for the 2nd time and trying to let it percolate in preparation for using it to write a paper. Also must do homework tonight. My throat hurts all over again -- horrible. I am cheered greatly by this cool thing - CafePress is good in theory but who wants a white tshirt? Not me. Neighborhoodies is very cool and a funny idea. I hope they add more cities -- if they have your city, then they also have a bunch of its neighborhoods. But you can also get whatever text you want. And now I can get my very own hot pants with N A R R A G A N S E T T written across the butt. I also keep thinking of funny xmas presents for people I know. I could get GAMEMASTER across the butt of some retro shorts, for Rook. Or maybe some imaginary place - like PALACE - KINGDOM OF OZ. J. should get something from the LAND OF NENG. heh heh. I want a BRYGGJAFEL VINLAND COMMONWEALTH from our goofy game. Max and s. should have GEEK RANCH - UTOPIA or something. if i were rich i would be getting these for everybody i know. they are just hilarious. posted by badgerbag 10/27/2003 07:39:00 PM comment Sunday, October 26, 2003 fabulous new invention Moomin and I just made a chocolate cake which I have christened the primordial chaos cake. I have tried to make cake with him many times but he mostly loses interest and then my heart sinks. "Here I am trying to be all motherly in the goddamned kitchen and i get this kid who is not interested." Well, this time he was more than interested. "The box says 3 eggs. Can I put the eggs? They are lumpy and slimy..." He was laughing gleefully at all of it and was not even scared of the cake mixer this time. "Hi spinny things! They're so spinny! They're so twisty! They're swirly in the chocolate!" Yes... hallelujah.... he gets it... while it cooked we sat next to the oven and played with fridge magnets. he spelled cat, rat, up, bug, yak, efatqxm (elefant) qabefj (quail) and his first and last name. the numbers 1 through 14 were also formed. I was describing to Minnie on the phone how the cake is all fucked up looking and has every kind of frosting and sprinkles on it. "Fine. As long as it doesn't have ASS-PRINTS on it, I'll eat it," she said. What a great idea! Sit on your cake and eat it too. The invention is a sort of reverse cake mold shaped like a butt, so that it looks like someone sat on top of your cake - perhaps with cheeks spread so that you get a good anal print. Instead of bundt pan it would be a butt pan. I'm sure many people have made cakes shaped like butts, but I bet no one has made a cake that looks like someone had deliberately sat on top the way they might sit on top of a xerox machine if they were a bit demented. I guess you could improvise, maybe with moldable cookie dough, and before baking the cookie-cake, wrap your naked ass securely in plastic wrap, and sit. But the pan would be better.... Help me name this brilliant invention! posted by badgerbag 10/26/2003 12:28:00 PM comment funny moment A funny moment from last night - I went over to sit by the fireplace in r.p. and s.'s amazing house full of cool art... On the hearth next to the wall was a really cool small box sort of iron filigree or whatever. Idly I picked it up and opened it and a bunch of "magnum" condoms fell out. Hahahah. Glad to know you need the MAGNUM size, rob. I handed the box to b.s. who was also sitting there. She took it reverently, examined it front, side and back for its lovely and presumably meaningfully poetic qualities. Then she opened it and busted out in an uncontrollable attack of stifled giggles... posted by badgerbag 10/26/2003 10:25:00 AM comment home from the poetry reading and how fabulous it was. Started out kind of dismal with horrible asthma from someone's big funky cigar and everyone smoking but about an hour later I was okay. this is our "BS" gathering, by invitation. There are some regulars and then other people seem to come and go. this time 4 'new people' at least new to me - novelist, playwright, poet/translator, and another person who I think writes something or is an actor but she didn't read. anyway, great stuff was read by all. once i got over the yukky asthma/ventolin-heart-racing-feeling-like-shit feeling, I was okay to read. stop now if you are revolted by the idea of me bragging on myself for a bit. I blush to say this is the good part, but it was, at least one of the good parts, because j.b. was like "you should read X poem, because j.w. can't stop talking about it" and j.w. was actually begging me to read it. "But it's so long (7+ minutes). I was going to read something new. " No it's not too long! Read it! It's one of the best poems we've ever heard! everyone was saying. o yeah. You know, if you flatter me and call me a fabulous genius, I'll read the lines off my own asshole. Its not like I'm RELUCTANT to read my own work, people... But j.w. actually leaped to her feet and jumped up and down going 'yay she's going to read it!' Really now. This can't be good for me.... I had to fumble around looking for it and meanwhile, everyone still praising it to the skies, which was nice, but became really embarrassing. So I read it... becoming less selfconscious and actually swept away by it. And it was good. (I could hear some awkward bits and there is something I want to add, but it all worked) Then afterwards there was crazy praise happening. we're going to make it just like fucking ginsberg, HOWL by Badger Hemulen, it is that good. it is the ginsberg of now, that no one dares say and has said before. it is like the amazing ever widening circles from the ripples when you throw a stone into a pond and they just keep going... you don't let up or stop and just say everything without holding back... etc. etc. Those must have been some really good martinis they were drinking... because the BS kept flowing. Later the other really good part was hooking up with the poet/translator chica and we had some amazing parallel thoughts (granted it's 1am by now and we're all a little nuts) Clearly r.p. invited us both on purpose knowing that would happen. We sat by the fireplace on the floor pawing each other's huge ring binders. that sounds kinky doesn't it? but some poets carry a neat little sheaf of 'latest work', some have a notebook, others have enormous ring binders. well me and b.s. (I just noticed her initials!) have simliarly ridiculously large binders full of translations and poetry. what heaven. we even suddenly realized we have weirdly parallel poems written to o. paz with the same basic thing happening and same personal metamorphosis into bird/tree/alternate dream country or world. We then cruelly mocked the eliot w. translations of o. paz, line by halting, totally incorrect line. and some poor sap's bad translation of neruda poder whatchamacallit. dude, oeste is NOT east. it is west. anyone can screw up like that, granted, but there were other more heinous crimes against poetry. Americans like waffles,but not in their neruda - "Oh! Vigilencia clara!" is not "ah sharp watchfulness," no, no, no. On the drive home I was thinking about being praised. I think we can all agree on the "narcissistically wounded" thing - I am like the poster child for it. I was thinking of 3 incidents. In one, I was in high school and things were rocky between me and parents. I was playing my favorite very moody chopin prelude - the short one with the giant hand-wrenching chords - I did special hand stretching exercises just to be able to play it. Anyway, I was moodily playing it with great delicacy, imagining it as my personal soundtrack, perhaps in a movie where just outside the window was someone walking by who woudl be my perfect mate and woudl be amazed at my fabulous emotional playing of chopin. My dad came in and said "That sounded really nice Badger. Now that's the way it should be, you play something simple like that, that we can all enjoy." okay... now, number one, the wondrous part of this was that I was brought nearly to tears of joy that one of my parents had said something nice to me - which rarely, very, very rarely happened. It was all usually bitter reproaches. "You think you're SO SMART. Then why did you ....X, and, y, and z, and why can't you remember to empty the wastebasket every tuesday and thursday? If youre so smart, why can't you even sweep the floor right? If you think you're so great, why did you make a 95 on this test? If you just slow down and think you would get it right. You think you're so smart, but you're not, or you would do it right. If you want to get into harvard or stanford you are going to have to make perfect grades and get a scholarship. And you have to get serious about things, no more farting around with choir and piano and poetry" <----- constant refrain from the start of jr. high, age 11, to age 16 when I had complete fucking nervous breakdown. Now, if you look back up to my dad's "compliment" it is still fucked up, as he implies his great surprise that it's the first time in his life he's heard me play something he could bear to listen to. It does suck to hear someone practice - one bar slowly, as slow as it took to do with no mistakes, because your fingers might learn it wrong, then the next bar, then 2 more. Then all together, slow as a wooly mammoth with its feet stuck in the tar pits. once you have 1 line you can play that one line a little faster. Then the next line tying it in carefully. you get the idea. this technique a bit hard with giant trilly run up the keyboard with funky rhythm on the other hand. o well. the point was, I was in tears at even this faint praise, because it was so rare and so welcome. I almost forgot to point out that the prelude, while when played right should sound simple and effortless, actually took me many months of practice and painful hand-stretching and strengthening exercises. Another moment: my dad a few years ago saying a lovely thing that a few lines of one of my translations made him think of fitzg's translation of the odyssey. I think he knew it was a nice thing to say, this time, as he gave me the book when I was 7 or 8 and watched me lovingly re-read it a bazillion times over the years. again it was an amazing rare moment of being praised - this time for the right thing. Another even more recent moment: my mom asks me to describe my plans for my paper. she talks about how horrible it was when she had to write an english paper and how she didn't know how to do it at all -very traumatic. I was there, locked out of her room listening to her cry over the typewriter and then come out with her face all red and blotchy to wash the dishes while listening to her tape of the most boring professors in the world droning on about dickinson and hawthorne. i was also sometimes in the class or subjected to these maddeningly bad tapes, and I read all her books for class, and read her papers as well. Anyway, she wants to know what I will write about (asked pityingly as if it must be a gut-wrenching emergency for me) I happily natter on a bit about my weird research project. She interrupts me in like 30 seconds. "Oh my god! You sound JUST LIKE an English professor! Wow Badger! I am just realizing suddenly how this is like the perfect THING for you! You will be such a good professor!" I took this as "meant well" praise and let it pass. But this is so fucked up on so many levels. Okay, woman who first disowned me, then grudgingly paid for my college but fought me every step of the way. Okay, woman who then said she and my dad would not pay for grad school unless I went to get an MBA or become a CPA (this, just out of the fucking BLUE) because being a literature professor is a stupid job, that does not pay enough even to live on, it is in fact a ridiculous unrealistic thing to want to be, as it says here in some arcane reference book of all professions, and you can do so much better than that in Business because you are smart and they need smart women and (imagine lame backlash-esque believe in affirmative action here, and imagine it with those 1980 kathy whitmire powersuit shoulderpads on.) Fine, fuck you both, I will apply for loans and go to grad school anyway. Disowning # 2 happened somewhere in there over other things. But really now.... did she just say "oh, you will make a great literature professor?" Unthinkingly? Like all that shit never went down and never helped fuck up my life? Hey mom, how bout you go back in TIME and say that in 1990, when I was 21, and needed to hear it. Anyway, I may have grown up being good at a lot of stuff and smart, but the depth of the no-praise, I can't even express. I realized it as I started jr. high adn pointed it out to them. "I just kept count for 2 days, and you guys did not say anything positive to me - only telling me things I had done wrong." "Well do it right then." "That's not the point, you are supposed to be nice to me because you are my parents and I'm only 11 and I could use some encouragement here, just a nice word now and then, a "good job"." "Well quit fucking up then. You bring a perfect report card and then we'll say something nice." "But when I get one B you ground me for 2 months." "Thats because we are trying to help you, because you are so smart you think you can just breeze through everything... but you still mess up. You are not really so smart, you just think you are. You have to have experience, not just what you read. (a whole diff issue from doing everything perfectly) "I just kept count for a whole week. You did not ever say anything positive to me about anything I did, or about anything else at all. Go ahead and still criticize me but please also find something nice to say." "Whatever, Badger. you think you are so smart because you won the science fair... but you can't even wipe off the kitchen counter. Look at this! and this hair! and this over here! Do it again." I can go look in my diaries from around age 14 and find these conversations carefully and weepily recorded - with ostentatious tear splotches all over the page. So it is sort of beyond narcissistic wounding. I don't know what you call the complete withholding of praise. Eventually my wounded hatred of them overwhelmed my desire to even try anymore. Meanwhile my sister is sort of in my shadow, as I am 'the smart one'. Thank god she is no longer in my shadow but are seen as just different people. I warn my friends against any hint of behaving like this to your children. Praise your children regularly, for what they do right, and also just praise them and love them for just being. I guess now you also know why I hate cleaning - In my mind I hear my mom carping on it and I feel either a defiant rage as I do a sloppy job, or I must obsessively and with equal rage make the sink shine in its perfection like a pearl in a jewel box. There must be no speck or hair or water-spotting. Either way I am filled with hatred and self-hatred as I do it. Back to the good part. When people start praising my poetry I feel a terrible hunger. I feel that naked greed for more praise must shine from my every pore. It is embarrassing, and worse, it feels like they are lying, they must be lying to try to trick me, and yet, I can never get enough. Keep it coming. It hits the sweet spot. I feel like a million dollars. I love the world. It fixes me. I get my fix, and need another. I think this is how actors feel. I don't know what to do with this hunger at all. posted by badgerbag 10/26/2003 01:56:00 AM comment Saturday, October 25, 2003 ravens and lobsters Took Moomin (only mildly feverish) to a halloween party. He was pretty excited to 'win prizes' and to see all the costumes. Gorilla mask, ghosts, grim reaper and hissing black cat pictures all freaked him out though. I thought of calling jhk "Rook" after one of his old characters. It seems fitting... finally, a nickname? Off to poetry clique. Note to any other aging, refuse to admit grownupitude, 30+ people out there: if you get punky color all over your forehead, you can scrub it off with ajax. posted by badgerbag 10/25/2003 05:41:00 PM comment Friday, October 24, 2003 new blog from iraq Now we have Zeyad at 'Healing Iraq' posting from Baghdad - along with Salam Pax and Riverbend. Ishtar has not posted in a long time. G. has not been posting - It sounds like he got arrested and beat up by some American soldiers and maybe the whole Salam being famous thing also freaked him out. Or maybe he gets a lot of hate mail... Salam said he stopped for ideological reasons. I think the more the merrier. Otherwise the whole fucking burden is on Salam and he doesn't want to be glorified like that - obviously. Zeyad I hope you can show a couple of other people how to blog and persuade them to start doing it. The more points of view we can read - it does an end run around the mainstream media and the stupid TV crews (see Zeyad's post about the TV reporting on the bomb that went off on his street). And when I say "the more points of view we can read", by we I mean anyone around the world trying to understand what is happening. It may not change things overnight to have 5 blogs out of Iraq. But I think in the long run history will take note and that is important. History does not get to be written by the big guys anymore. Your history will not be lost. Please keep writing! posted by badgerbag 10/24/2003 11:03:00 PM comment sleep... the final frontier I don't remember much of last night, but it was a whirlwind of weird nightmarish itchiness, poor Moomin screaming, coughing, retching and drooling, or yelling "My butt hurts! My mouth hurts!", crawling back into bed with tiger balm and cortisone cream smeared all over me, reading until I drop back into a fitful doze (awakened by more screaming and coughing, or jhk snoring like an asthmatic manatee). Somewhere in there, I polished off the bottle of port and took a benadryl, hoping to pass out. Don't freak out, it was one tiny benadryl and one small wineglass, I have no deathwish. Did a little reading for class... went to myth class but realized in the middle that it was early pickup day ... raced home... in mid-race realized jhk might still be at home and he could do the pickup. Duh. Pretty much the whole day was like that. Moomin running a sort of base fever of 102.x in which state he can be happy and chirpy and demanding that I be a platypus and enter a halloween contest, or admire his tinkertoy 'rainbow bamboo'. When the fever starts to go up, at about hour 3, Motrin time, then he becomes hell child. My mantra: "yes, it hurts, it's yukky to be sick, mama wants to help you feel better. If you can stop crying, that will help you feel better." Eventually this turns into a thinly hissed "ListentomeSTOPcryingandhowlingrightnowMoomin!!!!!!" reading helps him calm down... or peeing... or if you can get him to talk at all then he quits with the horrible screaming His dr. finally prescribed some antibiotics just to make me quit going in there. It HAS been over 2 weeks that he has this fever. Yes, it could be a virus but just in case, how about we ruin his infant purity and the microbial ecosystem with a little zithromax? THANK you. Mood: bad. It was interesting being in the war zone of the drugstore pharmacy right before closing time. Bleary eyed guy in lowrider pants and mechanic shirt ("Fernando" in embroidered script) covered in spit-up and pink dribbles of children's tylenol... howling, drooling sick toddlers everywhere... Old diabetic guy looking absolutely horrified at it all... Me with my hair sticking straight up and my nightdress on, and black sneakers... A far cry from the Peaches concert where I thought I would be tonight. posted by badgerbag 10/24/2003 09:34:00 PM comment Thursday, October 23, 2003 inside book Amazon "search inside the book" is great. hats off to them. pants off to them too. Yes, providing me with a lot of data is a great way to get into my pants! come on in, Amazon. I swear... look at this... ... for fuck's sake. that translation SUCKS. Mine is so much better. I am all for having lots of translations of the same thing, but that poem is a great poem and it just feels like a crime to mutilate it into halting stiff unpoetic english that I would scorn to let come out of my mouth. Seriously if you can read spanish out loud read that poem out loud and hear how lovely it is. tomorrow, I write to whoever edited this book and send them some de ibar. translations for their next edition. butterfly of night, MY ASS. (sorry linda i'm sure you are a nice person... next time run it through google, it would come out with more sexiness and poetry in it. meowr!) don't mess with my poet! you be messin' wit' the H-dog in translation accounts reeceevable! posted by badgerbag 10/23/2003 11:02:00 PM comment they must be kidding Is this some sort of sick joke? "excite is hiring"? posted by badgerbag 10/23/2003 04:08:00 PM comment still sick I'm still sick... yesterday went to school fueled up on coffee and advil. By around 5pm I was ready to pass out and my throat hurt like hell. But did I shut up in class? No. We split up into groups. Mightly I resolved not to talk a lot. Everyone in my group looking at each other - blank and nervous giggling. "I just dont know, i didn't understand it, how can we summarize it? I tried to do the assignment but just couldn't." They keep looking at me. FINE. "Okay then ..." In the pressure of the moment with 3 nervous self-deprecating gigglers looking at me, I actually pretended for a few minutes that I hadn't understood the reading. As you can imagine, this pose didn't last long. so i shot off my mouth. As usual. This would not be so bad, except it made my throat hurt. The gigglers are all very intelligent and articulate people - what gives? why must they act like that when confronted with a little deconstruction? I wish I had clued them in to how I looked up about 5 diff. summaries online of the reading and then read it again with those summaries in mind. a) everyone I could find online summarized it or explained it differently. b) it is not magic that I 'got' it, it was work and thought. Also, DJ the prof either was all punchy from cold medicine, or he was playing some sort of in-your-face pedagogical game because he was really aggro on everyone in class today. This also made me a little crazy trying to figure itt out. was he just on the rag? Was this deliberate? And if so, why pick a class guaranteed to be when the insecure people are confused, and then relentlessly pounce on them? That made the nervous giggling worse and also made me feel more conspicuous. thank god the weird christian guy and the east coast lesbian had some confidence and could talk without constant declarations of not getting it. (Meanwhile, I just want to put my head down on the desk to sleep, and the babble of voices blending together disturbingly into one big senseless sound as I phase in and out of reality.) I wish I had not forgotten to get my flu shot. Last night I read proust till midnight - it was great and very relaxing. It is nice to find people in books who are more fucking neurotic than I am. Reading Swann in Love, I think of how RMM lying in bed with me and how she used to read aloud Huysmans, Bataille, and those dirty stories by anais nin - all in her oddly flat mechanical voice and then both of us giggling hysterically until we cried. Today I am going to stay home, do homework, read tax booklets and try to find medical receipts. I can do some 'archiving' work from home too (was supposed to go to work today, but there is no way I will make it through day of work, then playing with Moomin, then school till 9pm) The tax situation: to count part of our house as a home office, that part has to be used ONLY as an office, and if you're telecommuting, it has to be certifiably for the convenience of your employer. Neither of those things are true for us. I think if I were teaching, I could set this sort of office up. I also read that medical expenses, to be deductible, have to be a certain percent of your adjusted gross income. Considering my thousand dollar dental bill from last year, and the expensiveness of my prescriptions, this could be true. Maybe the pharmacy can print me some kind of giant receipt of everything I bought there last year. Dream on.... posted by badgerbag 10/23/2003 09:14:00 AM comment Tuesday, October 21, 2003 music Just realized tonight that I never imported all my old napster stuff into itunes. wooo! Omigod. It is heavenly to hear some of this stuff. The Raincoats. How wonderful they are... all that skasmopolitan stuff... the scofflaws... the New Model Army song I was thinking about just recently while reading Barak's blog - "My Country". The butthole surfers' version of 'Underdog'. Yeah! The Toy Dolls singing Back in 79. But mostly the Raincoats. I am having some sort of Raincoats seizure-like orgasmic plateau as I listen to them over and over. "black and white", "pretty", "fairytale in the supermarket" all so full of that happy soulful bluesish ska-y punk thing. THAT THING. It is something like nostalgia and I would call it that, except that since it's not like I grew up in 1979 listening to this stuff, it is a nostalgia for something I never experienced. I love the Rezillos the same way. I think a couple of years ago I spent at least 2 days listening to "Destination Venus" over and over. posted by badgerbag 10/21/2003 11:05:00 PM comment Can it be? Call me gullible, but can this possibly be real? (thanks addlepated) Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used. *** similar article on the white house infighting: "What happened was that Cheney and Rumsfeld essentially went on a crusade against terrorism, starting with Iraq, and Powell kept trying, mostly without success, to rein them in," said one official, who like the others spoke only on the condition of anonymity because Bush has demanded that his advisers stop talking to reporters about the disunity in his administration. "Cheney is always in Bush's ear, whispering `terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.' He's obsessed." You know, I don't blog very much about the war(s) and the political situation, but I am still thinking about it. I still recommend Riverbend's blog very highly if you want to follow the war in Iraq. Someone should rewrite Tom Lehrer's song "Who's Next", but to fit the question of who's going to be invaded next (by us in the US). I think I was about 20 before I figured out what was meant by the line about Alabama. During the war I was spending 2-4 hours a day reading news, sometimes summarizing it for the Back to Iraq guy. Now it is more like 2-4 hours a week, even though things are even more horrible. I can't even track how many fucking wars we're IN. *** Oh look! someone already did the "who's next" new version. posted by badgerbag 10/21/2003 08:03:00 PM comment myths Here I am in bed, fortified by extra sleep and magical tapioca. for the class i am sort of TA-ing I have been asked to give a lecture on female hero-myths. Hrmmm. I have thought long on this subject but I'm not sure i have anything coherent to say. One take on it: look for an overall pattern of 'the female hero' archetype. (old fashioned theoretical approach, but fun and I think a productive question) Another: Reading traditional hero myths and looking for the women's hidden stories. ie. reading into the gaps/subalternity. (what if we are to see Medusa's head as a hero? How about seeing Hera as a hero with her perpetual quest for revenge?) Another: Modern re-writings like Xena and Buffy. (I am no expert here, though) Another: in most of the female hero myths the woman dies not as successful queen but in battle or because there is no place in society for her. The only ancient 'hero myth' I can think of really who follows what is usually thought of as the hero archetype is Inana, who obtained/stole the laws of civilization in a sort of promethean myth, and then who later descended to the underworld to trick death. (She was rescued by her faithful maidservant). How about demeter getting persephone back? I forget how she did it. begging zeus? sending a hero? or did she go herself? some shared qualities of female 'hero tales' - vengeance or defence or battle carried out because the man who should be doing it is missing or dead. If the man/male hero is around, then the woman incites him to vengeance. she is the embodiment of various 'negative' qualities - rage, madness, anti-civilization - that then are used in service of defending some aspect order and civilization. 'socially acceptable' ways for women to be mythic heroes: to be defending family. to be avenging family. to lead in battle in place of missing family (those vietnamese sisters, etc) to come from an 'upside down' society ruled by women, i.e. the Amazons. to be virginal (Athena, Artemis) to pray for help and then manifest the power of a god (Draupadi) to get pregnant by a god and defend one's honor (countless! blood moon, kunti, virgin Mary, etc) loyalty to family (gandhari) Think about amaterasu, and the chinese chariot driving sun goddess, etc. what is the pattern of the story? this is the question jhk and I asked when I pointed out the sex-linked nature of the star wars movie. X-wing fighters as penises/ sperm and the death star as the huge and powerful egg that must be fertilized/destroyed. There were other funny things that made it a male hero-tale despite the whole over-hyped leia thing (but I have forgotten them). What would the archetypal female hero-tale look like? At the time I blathered on about Ayla in clan of the cave bear and valley of the horses. I think we came up with a list of possible plot structures that would somehow be more female-hero-ish, maybe centering around communication and connections (restoring a satellite link) rather than destruction and penetration. The notes for the resulting one-shot game are here. the male hero as fighting/taming nature/monster. gilgamesh, beowulf and dragon slayers in general. the female hero as the embodiment of the monster (but turned in service to civilization and order as the gorgon's head or juno's vengeances which defend the institution of marriage ie. control of desire) 'heroic trio' and their superheroness as opposed/in conflict with marriage and family. Anita Mui's char.'s 'husby' dies but she successfully manages to be a parent while flying around and fighting. The female hero does not become queen, but successfully integrates her role as hero within a community and within family. ‘spirited away’ as mythical hero tale. SanSen/Chihiro: adolescent or pre adolescent girl. separated from parents, must rely on self, develop independent skills but also other relationships. problems solved through noticing other people’s characteristics, through hard work and being helpful. empathy. naming and identifying. Improvising and adapting. Social awareness and verbal skills. girls in fairy tales who help animal (ants who later help her) or use domestic implements for magic (comb turns into bramble thicket, mirror to impassible lake) help me out with your ideas please! posted by badgerbag 10/21/2003 01:15:00 PM comment Monday, October 20, 2003 Sick - reading - in bed I have an increasingly horrible cold. Went to the doddering old doctor who always can see you right away. He is kind of disturbingly diseased looking, especially around his red, eyelashless eyes, making me fully, deeply realize the meaning of "rheumy". I think his schedule is always free because - who would go see him - I mean, physician heal thyself, and all that. Apparently I have a fever and some sort of disgusting throat and ear infection. One antibiotics prescrip later, here I am in bed. Dr. Rheum also treated me to a giant lecture on how I really should own a good thermometer and it will be the best investment I will ever make. "But what good would it do to know my exact temperature? Unless I am delirious it doesn't really matter." But no. He is stuck in 1950. Maybe next he will tell me to eat more stewed prunes? Moomin is feeling better now, perky and oddly defiant. "I didn't hear you" he kept saying as a thin excuse for not coming to take his bath after the 100th time I said in my new, sultry, husky, infected-throat voice, "it's time to come and take your bath". "I forgot. Oh, sorry, mama, I just forgot. And I didn't hear you." Glad to see he is practicing his devious lying. I recall saying in desperation to my mom, when I was about 4 or 5, "It must have been somebody else that just looked like me..." when my 'friend' Lisa told on me that I had been playing doctor with Steven in the bushes at the playground. Doctor meant that you pulled your pants down a bit and put a small twig in your butt crack (back in the days of rectal thermometers). In retrospect it was not that bad, but you would have thought I was the 5 year old whore of babylon from the reaction. I knew the lie wouldn't pass muster, but I had to say SOMETHING. Reading Alexander von Humboldt still, to go to sleep. I still think he is the coolest. Polished off giant amounts of Derrida, Foucault, more craptastic theory that was, while craptastic, oddly intriguing. the 'Q' kinsey milhone mystery. did I mention Eleanor Farjeon? she is cool. Catching up on proust (up to the 2nd one now). Finished homework as I slacked around burlingame with Minnie. grocery shopped, then realized I was almost passing out from illness and loss of body fluids from blowing my nose all morning. Thus the dr. visit. The bathtime showdown: there was a hefty amount of crying, me telling Moomin he can stay in his room crying till he is ready for bath, then him apologizing for crying, and me apologizing for being mad and frowny, and we shook hands and agreed to be friends. Jeez. my merest frown wounds his very soul. jhk read "a little princess" - was actually unable to put it down. Next, I introduce him to elsie and her blotted copybook. or maybe 8 cousins. Would someone bring me custard? Or a lot of eggs? if I had remembered to buy eggs i would make some. I have eaten nearly all the ice cream and mouth-numbing cough drops. Clearly here is an unexploited market: Sucrets-flavored ice cream! maybe some ora-gel popsicles? Minnie I'm sorry i drank out of your ice coffee glass this morning - at least it is not strep throat. I also note that there was a short article in the NY Times saying that there is no particular medical reason not to pick up bird feathers. I love feathers, but always hear my mom giving me the nervous lecture on how they might be filthy, diseased, and crawling with some kind of scary invisible bird lice. Well, it's not true! I read it on the INTERNET and now I believe it. Also not true to anyone except my mom: a) they give you like 40 shots in your stomach when you get bitten by a possibly rabid dog b) don't wear your bathrobe to bed because the sash might somehow strangle you in the night. (she denies ever telling us this!) I love the happy smiling rabid skunk illustration here: Treatment of rabies no longer consists of painful injections administered by long needles into the stomach every day for 14 days. The new vaccine is more potent and causes fewer side effects. The new rabies treatment only requires a total of five injections that are given on days 0, 3, 7, 14 and 28. Vaccine shots are given in the arm to adults and in the thigh to small children. posted by badgerbag 10/20/2003 11:23:00 PM comment oh so tacky! Dear America, Sometimes, you do something right. Hurrah for the shenis! Hurrah for its silly and brilliant name! Hurrah for its delightfully Mahir-esque web site! posted by badgerbag 10/20/2003 06:06:00 PM comment Sunday, October 19, 2003 the Big Talk well dr. analyst hung about till just now. I sat with him reading and being scholarly and drinking port. Also talked family tree and i showed him my dad's memoirs. His burning ambition is to be a writer and also to write the story of his life, but he can't manage it. Around 9 he sprung the "big talk" thing but actually phrased it in terms of asking jhk if he wanted to talk about anything. This immediately led into a fair amount of heinous and laughable lecturing from him on the subject of buying houses and how he has vast experience. (jhk squirming and eating his hands trying not to say that every house they have bought has been like the pits of hell) When the lecture turned to money I casually lobbed the hand grenade i had been saving: 'in my work at st--f--d' and it was really beautiful to see the gears turn as I was reassessed in the snobbish brain of the dad in law who thinks i am a lazy and low class parasite on his eldest son, (the reluctant prince). You work there? You work? You are in school and you work? you work at st--f--d?!' 'and my mom is paying my tuition' (my 3rd grenade - my low and stingy parents give us $$) I lob my 4th of how I want phd someday and then 5th of how my burning ambition is to have a job that will support jhk while he (6th) takes time off to write his book. (subtext: your son is doing and will do this thing (writing) that you are dying to do but can't, ie, son properly fulfilling ambitions of the father) la la la. I am SO GOOD, I must say. I rolled an 01 on my 'orate' skill. i am sincere in it but also i am manipulative. dr. A. pisses me off many, many times in the past but I also respect him in many ways. maybe more pity than respect is there, because i see the lame-ass ways he tries to reach out to his family and constantly fails - in fact is doomed to failure. this then lead to jhk golden opportunity to talk about his writing and game theory and novel and gm-ing and the history of film theory and narr. theory. I was actually very amazed that dr. analyst listened to it all and seemed impressed. that was the first time I have seen him listen to anything jhk says. usually by sentence two coming out of jhk's mouth, we are treated to a really ludicrous lecture that is mostly cryptic aphorisms (our favorite, pronounced with killing, confucian gravity: "You have to THINK before you doing ANYthing." (ie before you waste life playing rpgs and marrying low, sleazy, punk-haired wench, instead of going to medicar school) posted by badgerbag 10/19/2003 10:32:00 PM comment ack! Moomin sick in the night with a fever. Aaah! I was mad at him for being all droopy and whiny but it must have been from his getting sick. I wake up at 2am with such a bad sore throat, I consider the emergency room for me and Moomin in the morning. There must be some kind of fist-sized blister back there. But we all wake up more cheerful. My throat hurts, Moomin's throat hurts, jhk's ankle seems strangely crippled. Coffee helps everything. Moomin builds tall buildings and zoos and elephants and cranes with legos. I go off to 2 different optometrists (closed on sunday), the drug store and kinko's again for making the powerpoint thing with Dr. Analyst. In drug store, after about 10 min. of standing in front of sunglasses rack, i realize he just wants clipon sunglasses. There are only 2 varieties of clipons. I go off and cruise the entire longs drugs. It takes him 40 min to decide which plastic clipons are more expensive and classy looking. (And as if an optometrist would have classier ones? The mind boggles.) It is still a bit irritating but much better w/out the Hurricane shrieking about everything being an emergency. Also I don't have to yell at her every 5 min. for not wearing her seatbelt. jhk stopping the car and refusing to move until I get up and forcibly buckle her in as she protests and quotes Mr. Toad. posted by badgerbag 10/19/2003 12:00:00 PM comment Saturday, October 18, 2003 chinga la mesa today: 8:30 wakeup. Hurricane-in-law (The Hurricane) whooshes in. i make coffee. The table is discussed. What will we do today? First we will fix the table, but in the meantime we could go through some elaborate thing to get the cobwebs off the ceiling, involving several dampened dishtowels, brooms, me leaving the house to avoid any asthma etc etc.. I like the spiders, they eat the other bugs. To avoid the elaborate process, I get a dustmop and sweep the cobwebs away in 30 seconds. Then I make some calls to furniture repair shops and leave some more messages, mentioning bitterly that I will do it if I must, but would rather wait till after school is out so I have time. There, it is DONE. Now what will we do today? We go to the park and hike around. it is okay. I have made a quick picnic lunch - me, or maybe that angel in the house. my knees hurt though. Moomin is happy in the woods and we saw a deer with huge antlers. Then, quick, emergency, off to the kinkos to help Dr. Analyst make his slides for his conference. Whoops, surprise, he has actually made the slides more or less. This surpassed all my expectations. But there is no disk drive and - get this - no ethernet jack on the laptop. nor is there a dialup number. woo hoo! he asks me if there is an optometrist nearby. I just stare at him in outrage, not getting it. Dont ask how but I got the powerpoint things a) off the laptop b) onto printer c) onto the demanded floppy d) onto transparencies. to his credit, Dr. Analyst did not get all uppity about me helping him and basically doing everything. I was expecting to have to assuage the male ego but that didnt' happen - it only happens in front of other people. When it's just us two, he is as wax - he is humble, grateful, plaintive - and I am his goddess of technology. in front of anyone else, he is Unmanned if I touch the keyboard. he is full of anxiety about the conference and about lacking the correct sunglasses - we must go to a nice optometrist. There is no time. Phone calls fly. Hurricane-in-law has suddenly changed her flight time to leave on red-eye instead of tomorrow. We must quickly return and everyone drive to alameda for dinner with family friend and then airport. Me and my knees are doomed, doomed, doomed to be in the back seat of the saturn for at least 2 hours. Here is where I really fucked up, I should have stayed home with Moomin. Because the both of us were cranky and tired. now my knees are all swollen. jhk's ankle has mysteriously become all painful (high heels last night + hiking + driving too much all today?) I snapped nastily and incoherently at the Hurricane when she put a giant chopstickful of some mystery vietnamese food in my veggie no-peanut noodles (as i had just had to painfully explain for the Nth time that I must not have crustaceans or peanuts and cannot trust fish sauce to be free of either) Jhk also losing his cool in restaurant a little. Is there an upscale optometrist nearby? Or a drugstore? Someone needs sunglasses FOR SOME GODFORSAKEN REASON RIGHT FUCKING NOW. ahhh... again, they are really nice... I am not good at paying attention to other people and yet if i am around them i feel compelled to do it. it feels like for several days I have done nothing but serve and take care of other people, feed and placate and listen to in-laws, pack and move sister, do all of group project for class because flakewad project partner will not answer my emails, wipe kid's butt, sit on floor with tinkertoys and help him out of the pits of hell whenever he hears sad music, which seems to be every freaking 5 minutes. thank god that jhk is a real partner in shouldering all this and not a person i have to take care of all the time. he is my hero. I think he dealt with the powerpoint presentation for probably 6 hours or more. also not to be too bitter, I am happy that I got to go out and hang out with friends and blow money at 'ultimate elegance' with minnie. this all maybe part of why i was kind of out of control last night. All I did was act a little bit whorish and giggly around my friends but what I actually felt like doing was SO much worse. I felt I could have gladly done anything Bad and Unwise - hang gliding while on acid, telling b. about things I used to do with her husband/my ex-boyfriend, picking up 16 year olds in bondage pants and spiky hair who hang smoking out in the alley behind "Shooters", giving my boss an unexpected wedgie. the problem is Days in a row without downtime. i just can't take it when this happens. minnie is the same way and so is jhk. we need a lot of hermit time or we begin to go crazy and roll our eyes like loco mustangs. At the vietnamese restaurant i honestly felt like slapping the hell out of my little moomintroll who had fallen asleep in the car (after he had been loathsomely eating loudly and slurpily next to me who was painfully wedged next to his car seat behind a 6 foot tall person hogging the front) anyway then he wakes up in restaurant and whines and coughs and cries and says his tummy hurts in a super fakey way (I took him to the bathroom then outside) Forced him to walk up and down the sidewalk. I started with trying to talk him down but then just meanly ordered him to Stop Crying Right Now. he did, but then was sad and cringing for the next hour and a half until we left the restaurant. I hope I woudl never slap him and i never have, but it was fucking close there for a minute or two. I do think he has asthma. for months I have noticed that sometimes he wheezes at night. now after this cold he has been coughing in an asthma-y way every time he gets upset. Grrrrreat. couldn't he take after me in some more pleasant way? I grimly breast fed for 18 months him hoping that it would help him not get allergies. fat lot of good that did. posted by badgerbag 10/18/2003 08:22:00 PM comment alphabet evolution J. found these animated gifs of the evolution of various alphabets! v. cool. The latin one is the most detailed. posted by badgerbag 10/18/2003 12:45:00 AM comment Friday, October 17, 2003 fun well, 2 nights of free babysitting and I'm ready to bow down during birthdays, become a doctor, fix the table, and anything else necessary. The outlaws are actually being really nice... jhk dressed in brilliant and perfect outfit as Yomiko Readman from "read or die". classy pleated skirt just above knee, white shirt, jacket, briefcase full of paper, nice black shoes and ponytail. hahaha. He was very cute. his parents trying to keep their new york cool as they watch us walk out the door for b.'s anime-watching birthday party. I had a similar schoolgirl outfit, but sleazy, with a large octopus hand puppet and a magenta wig (I was a tentacle porn girl). OUtlaws get major points from me for pretty much keeping cool. Dad in law, the freudian analyst, comments nervously that if we hold hands we look like lesbian japanese schoolgirls. thanks dad! I can tell you 'have internet'. Minnie kept ripping off my skirt very hilariously with a dramatic scritch of velcro but alas, I had not bothered to wear any particularly interesting underwear, just black shorts and tights. The guy who brought all the DVDs had on the outfit from... from Noir? no the one from scryed? I can't remember now. It looked like one of Action Girl's outfits, or a band uniform. There was the max wolf suit, bunny suit, sleazy vinyl cleavage suit, and bear suit with cute skimpy outfit underneath. I had never seen cowboy bebop and I liked it. Noir was my favorite I think, and it had the most awesome translated song lyrics! ghost in the shell left me very bored. It just occurred to me that it is funny how horrified minutae will be if she reads this. I keep disrespecting my inlaws! For a moment, m., imagine yourself dressing up your husband in a sexy japanese schoolgirl outfit and then waving good bye to your inlaws as you nip out the door in knee high platform boots and a blue wig. i think this will give you a good laugh. posted by badgerbag 10/17/2003 11:48:00 PM comment motion to table 6 years ago my inlaws moved and gave us a bunch of their old furniture. Among these things - an oak dinner table, a bit cracked, with 6 chairs. Though we were driving it halfway across the country, they were careful to say that they might want it back someday. (for gods sake... that is stupid...). In the U-haul this table cracked a bit more. Ever since then, when they come visit it's table, table table. Why haven't we fixed the cracks? Why is this chair cracked? And this other one? I tell you, before they visit every time, including this time, I polish that fucking table with furniture polish all over, rubbing it down as if it were a thoroughbred that just won the kentucky derby. Now, mamaInLaw is out there eating scones and drivelling on about her Plan, which will be an Adventure, which involves Not going to the working historical farm with Moomin and all of us, but instead, driving around town with a chair to various antique stores to find someone to fix it, becuase it is an Antique. This will be an Adventure and 3 year old Moomin will have Fun doing it, and it will also be a Present. BLOW ME. It is much like fluffy's brother Ryan's mom and her obsession with vests. It is true for several years I have been promising the outlaws that I would investigate and pay to fix the Table, but at this point I would rather have been eating on the floor for the last 6 years. most of the time I have dinner in bed anyway. holy mother of god it is fucking irritating!!! dadInLaw has mysteriously disappeared, supposedly to work on his paper. I have now called a bunch of furniture repair stores and left messages. Did I mention that the table is ugly as fuck? posted by badgerbag 10/17/2003 09:36:00 AM comment Wednesday, October 15, 2003 more small things of note minnie's coworker guy who had this perfect dilbert moment and lost his cool talking to irritating and pesky marketing manager who was saying "why don't you just add a window.open..." and he answered her thusly: "why don't you just window.shutthefuckup!" hahaha. The Epoxies. Oh, they are great. It is just like the goodness of Devo, but with girls and good lyrics. I will note here, to date myself, that the first album I bought was "Get The Knack" by The Knack. The second was "We Are Devo". There was another thing but I forgot what it was. Also I got kind of into reading all that derrida yesterday. It's nice to be a grownup. though increasingly I feel that I have missed something in the last 10 years because it feels like the paper I want to write woudl have been a really radical essay 10 years ago, but is not really anymore. I am trying to have faith that I will catch up to Now. Do I _want_ to catch up to Now in this particular area? maybe. Would rather catch up in translation theory. But I need this stuff as a foundation, seriously, and also I need to know feminist theory in a much more solid way -- even if I don't write academic papers for a living it will be very useful to me as a poet and translator. (sneaky voice in head adds, "and as a future writer of fabulous, epic, dark and wild sf novels that blow everyone's minds") Relaxing reading of late has been: Eleanor Farjeon's biography, Literary HIstory of Spanish America, and nth-reread of some jeeves crapola, and rerere-reading Humboldt. Humboldt is the coolest - I love him so! Everything he sees, he sees intelligently - he writes intelligently. He just thinks of good ideas, and points out flaws in the thinking of others without being really bitter or obnoxious about it. He speculates about earthquakes, and volcanoes, and deeply hates slavery, and is all excited when the spanish governor at Cumaná knows what a hygrometer is. He points out one of my pet theories; that it was not conquerors bringing civiliation to the new world, it was new world and its people inspiring conquerors to progress in ideas. This discovery not only brought new objects to satisfy man's curiosity, but also new ideas about physical geography, about the varieties of human species, and about the migrations of tribes...It is impossible to read the narratives of the first spanish travellers without realizing the happy influence that the appearance of this great continent, the study of its marvellous nature, and the contact with men of different races has exerted on the progress of knowledge in Europe... this germ would have given fruit had it not been crushed by fanaticism and supersition... And I bet a new 20 dollar bill that he was getting it on with Bonpland. I count him as a friend. posted by badgerbag 10/15/2003 11:49:00 PM comment full bellies and looming laptops I thought that I killed the angel in the house long ago. But she came back for a little visit. Actually, she keeps coming back all the time like some sort of horrible undead creature. Essentially that's what angels are. My classes were cancelled today so I tried working on my long paper... came home at 4:30 and did more cleaning and laid out my dinner out of the roberts grocery store deli. jhk called and said they want to go to peruvian restaurant. rrrr. NO. come home and eat this damn food. Because setting the table is an event rare as a total solar eclipse and should not be missed. All was well. dinner was eaten. No comments on my choices in life or my parents' lack of polo ponies were made. Actually they practically do have polo ponies at this point but since they are in tx, it's just not the same. Moomin cried at some sad music. (first Bob Wills, Beethoven and Chopin, then half my cuban music, then apparently 'Goodbye yellow brick road' is also too sad to be borne, and now Manu Chao? I won't be able to listen to anything anymore.) No one could figure out why he was sniffing pathetically on the couch and then I finally got it. Anyway. All was well. I helped Minnie pack some of her stuff. Am now benadryled up and ready to tackle the rest of it in a bit. Moomin just figured out the whole thing about grandparents bring you presents and read to you for a very long time and make much of you. Good! Before -- a) he didn't get it b) he was too shy to interact with Hurricane Mom-Out-Law who never stops her shrieky running commentary. As he gets older I can see they will have a lot more fun together. Dr. Dad-Outlaw tormented jhk with some sort of illconceived and ill-fated powerpoint presentation. Okay... a) he has nothing to say b) when he says it he rambles incomprehensibly. c) he has never used power point. However... d) he will be presenting it to a bunch of analysts (as in Freudians - real live freudians!) who probably won't notice or care. He brought his scanner with him. No, I am not kidding. So we can teach him how to work it. I hope this isn't the same fucking 5 year old windows laptop that i've had to look at every xmas. I hope he has the cables and the cd with the drivers and stuff. He might have actually brought all this stuff. WHY ME? At least when my mom tortures me by taking me to the mall, I might get a wearable pair of jeans out of it. Note, if you see me, that I am wearing my special marcus aurelius necklace to remind me to keep my fucking temper. posted by badgerbag 10/15/2003 08:48:00 PM comment Tuesday, October 14, 2003 video on cinderella video on. textbook found. pate and brie devoured. I feel MUCH better, though guilty for being a Bad Mom. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the universe for my being kind of an asshole. Later tonight, mellowed by port and some more really nice food, I will love all of humanity again. posted by badgerbag 10/14/2003 06:55:00 PM comment suegros my outlaws are here tomorrow. With that in mind I just bought a huge wad of expensive groceries. Wine.. well she likes her wine...check. tofu and green onions for him... check. Fancy pie and ice cream, check. Fancy (yes, it IS fancy) truffle pate for me. huzzah! While paying for it I suddenly remembered the whole very unpleasant nastiness of Dad-Out-Law on the subject of my evil american consumerism and tendency to spend too much money. Well big fucking oops. If I hear it from him I am going to take out his $3.99 fancy tofu and her $12.99 pie and stomp on it. No, no, no, I won't, if, no, I mean WHEN I hear any sort of bullshit I will bite my tongue and quietly plan my bitter, witty blog entry. What is up lately with my temper??? They can be really fun and interesting but boy, I can just feel it in my bones that they're going to be riding my ass for not having a job for the last 2 years, not being in medical school, and not going to stanford or berkeley because i am a big fat underachieving loser. I really hate it when people pity me for not going to stanford. Stanford can so suck my dick. posted by badgerbag 10/14/2003 05:59:00 PM comment bummer if I don't soon find my goddamned copy of critical terms for literary study or whatever the hell it's called, i am going to scream. day of hellish and boring reading of tiny little books out loud, watching someone else ineptly color, retrieving thrown balls, constructing t-ball tees out of duct tape, boxes and a toilet paper tube, and pretending to be an octopus at a picnic. 2 hours is fun, 7 hours is the fucking 9th level of the inferno. I keep sneaking off to read and write but then feel bad and go receive instruction in how I should behave, if I were a chicken in the hamtaro clubhouse or whatever else is required of me. YOU are a CHICKEN in the clubhouse. NO NOT LIKE THAT!!! You are a CHICKEN! Bock! Bock! You have to BOCK! No not like that, like THIS. Here is your egg. You have to be this ham-ham and I am Boss and I am Pashmina and I am Hamtaro. You are this octopus. And you are a chicken. NO! This is your nest. Right over HERE. You have to drink your milk! Here's your orange milk and your purple milk right here. Drink it, chicken. Mmmm. Don't sit there, it's the OCEAN. Help. I have not finished my homework. Maybe we will go to the grocery store just to preserve my precarious 'sanity'. All those people who savor every precious moment of their kids' childhood - what the fuck are they ON? posted by badgerbag 10/14/2003 04:38:00 PM comment bob the destroyer Quote from Moomin, as he plays on the floor making animals march around: "CAN WE FIX IT!? NO WE CAN'T!!!" (repeat 20 million times) posted by badgerbag 10/14/2003 03:32:00 PM comment wtf You know... this makes me want to scream. After reading the first page of the article with the possible dangers of NOT menstruating suddenly you get the whammy that no one was worrying about the dangers or not when the pill was first established. There is just one reason women who take the pill bleed at the end of their cycle. Dr. John Rock, an inventor of the pill, wanted to make it easier for the Roman Catholic Church to accept. He felt that monthly bleeding, mimicking the natural cycle, would make the new form of birth control appear more like the rhythm method, according to a profile of him in The New Yorker in March 2000. posted by badgerbag 10/14/2003 01:22:00 PM comment Monday, October 13, 2003 Pssst... Your qualia is showing! I'm really enjoying All You Zombies by J. Tangent: I just had a weird flashback to junior high and realized something funny as I typed the words "by J.". Another tangent: I found this translation mega-textbook earlier today and it is heavenly, heavenly, heavenly. Bruce Osimo, you rock my world with your wonderful free book. I want to send you some money. posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 11:46:00 PM comment the Geek Debutante Ball Minnie and I invented the Geek Debutante Ball long ago, probably during some crazed reading session of Egalia's Daughters. I don't remember how she pictured it but I was thinking that geek boys would dress up in their best black tshirts, grey washed-too-many-times pleated pants, etc (primping nervously in the bathroom I hope... how? messing up their bowl cuts some more?) Meanwhile in the ballroom the punky geek girls would be on the prowl. the boys would be maidenly and bashful. Minnie how did you imagine it? Were they wearing eyeliner and ball gowns or what? posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 02:36:00 PM comment polish movies "The Deluge" and "With Fire and Sword" and "Colonel Wolodyjowski". Love story between Kmicic and Olenka with a lot of great in-costume 17th century battles. The fur hats must be seen to be believed. I can't wait to watch the whole movie and also to read the books. Wow, the sword duel that we watched was great for posturing, chest-beating, thin wet white t-shirt half falling off of the handsome Kmicic, who hat is a hat of marvel and whose teeth must glow in the dark. Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote the trilogy and I see that he won the nobel prize.... note to self, lend "kristin lavransdatter" to Val. posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 01:38:00 PM comment office Landlord is now considering how much he will lower our rent, since Minnie is moving out and we can't rent the "shed" in the back yard to anyone else for fear of city inspectors. In landlord's fantasy world, we would be renting the "shed" aka 400 sq. foot studio apartment, for $900 or $1000 a month. hahahaha. Yes during the boom, No right now. And I so, so, doubt that he will lower our rent by $900 a month. Wouldn't that be nice? Minnie was paying us 600. If I could get 500 off the rent then I think we could stay. Maybe even 400 off would be okay. I am wondering about taxes and use as a home office. Maybe jhk and I can declare it as in use as a home office 20% of the time based on his one day a week telecommuting. (And my writing?) I have never done my/our taxes the complicated way with itemized deductions. I should be. What if I start now in saving medical receipts and other stuff - even though the year is almost over. I have to study up on what is deductible.... I have no idea really. I wonder if I could rent the space as a sort of shared office? Would have to wire up phone or net (as I should have done long ago for Minnie...) Like charge someone 200 or 150 bucks a month to have use of the space whenever they want, other than sleeping there of course... posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 11:39:00 AM comment wowie zowie! I told her that poets are sorcerers, that they have the power to melt and mold words, and make them magic. "How do they melt the words? What kind of oven do they use?" "No ovens. They use their minds, hands, eyes, and mouths. Minds to conjure up the words, hands to write them, eyes to read them, and mouths to speak them. Magic. Respect them, they are powerful beings." Jhk adds, "And they are subtle and quick to anger. And quick to gripe." posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 11:10:00 AM comment up all night Well, j. was up all night, I was not. It seemed like I woke up about every 2 hours. He dealt with it all. Saintly! My excuse is that I have a really, really hard time falling back to sleep when I have to get up in the night for anything other than a silent, trance-like bathroom visit. By around 6 am I was thinking groggily, "Maybe Moomin could just be an only child. Can we really take another 2-3 years of this crap?" It took Moomin over 2 years to sleep through the night consistently. Maybe over 3 years. I can't even remember any more, but it was hell. Maybe hypothetical baby #2 would be one of those miracle sleeping through the night babies. I also felt a shudder of fear and repulsion as I watched M. revert to babyhood and nurse on his sippy cup. I can't explain this well, but he was a horrible nurser. Yes, I had some moments of lovely primeval bonding. And yes, I had a hormonal thing where if he didn't nurse at least once every 3 hours, I would go a bit crazy, and then once the milk was out, I felt drugged and happy. But partly it was a teeth-gritting exercise in endurance, because M. was a nibbler. He would not latch on all the way and gulp it down like some babies. Nibble, nibble, nibble. Half-hearted, lips pursed up, tenative, prissy little sucks and then he'd fall asleep for about 30 seconds. I would be desperately petting and poking him to make him stay awake and eat. He can still take an hour to eat one peanut butter sandwich, though he no longer falls asleep in mid-meal. Anyway, I watched him do this exact thing to his sippy cup of juice and medicine last night and it made me feel absolutely crazed. And NOW he sleeps peacefully and fever-free for hours on end- has been asleep without a murmur since what, 7am? I'm glad... but... arrrrrrgh. posted by badgerbag 10/13/2003 10:49:00 AM comment Sunday, October 12, 2003 my x hurts Moomin seems pretty sick after a rough night, a whiny morning and a heroic trip to the store with jhk. He has a fever. I tried cooling his brow with my hands and talking to him and that seemed to help him fall asleep. (He would not drink the juice with the tylenol in it...) Nothing like being at super fancy delicious dinner at B.'s house and having your kid suddenly grab his own ass cheeks and yell, "Help! My butt itches!" I wavered wildly between thinking maybe it was time to take him to the emergency room (as he fell to the bathroom floor and writhed in pain) and thinking he is sad for other reasons and whining for attention, like his mama is prone to do. (This morning, he limped up to me told me in something suspiciously like my own voice, "My KNEE hurts." "Does your lollapalooza hurt too?" "Yes! Waaah!" Hmmm. "Is the whole universe out of whack?" (silence) As usually he is actually sick, but unclear on how to communicate what is wrong. *** Hernia? Intussuseption? Gas? Ulcer? Appendicitis? "The flu"? why is his belly button all red and gross? I noticed it yesterday, washed out a bunch of dried grody blood and lint and scabby stuff, and put antibiotic on it all day long. This morning it looked completely better - now it's all suddenly gross again. Is it related? Some people barf and get it over with. I hang on and refuse to do it, heaving and swallowing. Moomin, like me, is a stubborn non-barfer. Which I guess is good, because he keeps fluid down when we can get him to drink it. But in practice, it means long bouts of howling crying, drool, snot, and revolting sounding half-heaves that make me want to vomit too. He seems distracted by alternating comforting baby books and harder make-you-think books. Books are working better than video, I think because he feels comforted that we are actively trying to help. Meanwhile, in between soothing M.'s troubled brow.... "I am not telling the truth in this sentence." I am trying to wrap my mind around some evil Derrida that is occasionally exciting and cool, but still very, very annoying. DJ the prof likes to ask us to "summarize in one paragraph" the most damnably incomprehensible stuff, on purpose, because he likes to make everyone uncomfortable. I am having fun analyzing his teaching techniques, and the exercises are useful and good. The structured exercises and workshoppy things are much, much better than the ones from last semester, which just came off like he hadn't really prepared any sort of lecture or was doing a sort of scientific experiment in non-responsiveness and non-teaching in order to see what we woudl come up with. (This, I found very irritating, and said so in signed course evaluation). It comes off at times as condescending assumption that 'we' don't know how to read and think. So, good if you tend to read a book and have nothing to say other than "I liked it" or "it sucked", which stems from laziness and lack of engagement. I am pretty "engaged" with whatever comes up so the assigned thoughts can be an irritant. On the other hand I lack discipline and signed on for school partly to get some. But at some point it's going to come down to me EITHER just doing the "assigned thoughts", or blowing that off and having my own thoughts. All that said, I will still imitate this teaching style if I ever get a chance. posted by badgerbag 10/12/2003 01:29:00 PM comment Almost In my dream I was in my grandmother's house in Maryland. It was different - on steep hillside with an amazing garden and an elaborate security system. She was out of town. I looked at the hillside garden with fond nostalgia and broke into the house. There while I was writing at the dining room table, I had a waking vision of my grandmother and grandfather having an intense conversation. In the dream, I knew t his was impossible, since she was out of town and he was dead. Usually this would lead to me realizing that I was dreaming. This time, I thought, "It's not real, and I'm perfectly awake, and they are not ghosts, but I will accept what's happening for whatever insight it will give me." I listened to them - it was difficult. It was actually really wonderful to see my grandfather though I was feeling really sad as it hit me how he was dead and I would not have the chance to know him better. I can't remember now what they talked about. Afterward I was desperately trying to write down the amazing epiphany I'd gotten from this imaginary eavesdropping. It was a blindingly beautiful and complicated thing. But all over the house people were interrupting me, talking, eating, getting drunk, coming in and asking me questions like "Where are my keys?" and "What are you doing?" or "Aren't you coming to dinner?" "Just give me 10 more minutes... don't talk to me!" I yelled. I started to get it down in writing - I was almost at the point of writing something that would be unbelievably great. But then I realized after every interruption, I was losing a little bit of truth - it was turning into fainter and fainter echoes. This turned into a sort of nightmare for a while, where my evil stepfather (completely imaginary) tried to tricky me and steal my notebook. There were some bad moments here. Finally he peeled out of the driveway in his loud, fast car, thinking he had it in his briefcase, but I had actually tricked him. The dream ended just after I found the Secret Chamber where my great-great grandfather had left his will. It was addressed to my grandmother and I was very happy as I realized she would now be rich and wouldn't have to sell her house. The coolest part of the dream was the realization that I wasn't crazy or dreaming, but something impossible was happening and that was okay. posted by badgerbag 10/12/2003 09:51:00 AM comment a goofy memory I was just thinking of skarat and his baby and wondering if he has any homies with babies. When I first found a reasonable person to talk with, Moomin was 4 or 5 months old. I remember hope springing anew in my heart at our first words together in the parking lot of our scary SoCal apartment complex. I called jhk. ""I was walking around aimlessly with Moomin in the baby bjorn... and I met this woman... with a baby.. and it was IN A SLING... and she said 'fucking assholes'! maybe she will be my friend!" Yes, it was that rare to meet another "wear your baby" type of hippie, one who says swears, behind the Orange Curtain. Afraid to impose, actually terrified to impose for probably the first time in my whole clueless life, I would say "so... um.. are you doing anything tomorrow..." "Tch. Yeah I'm doing something tomorrow, lying around nursing this baby every hour and a half and reading Sara Paretsky. How about you. Hahahaha just kidding, come over." We laid around on the floor reading, talking and drinking homemade decaf lattes while our babies lay on blankets like drunken epileptic slugs who are trying hard either to fart or vomit, but who had been caught in some kind of slow motion vortex. The babies would nurse every once in a while, or cry. Then either sleep or wiggle around helplessly or both. As the weeks went by Nan and I branched out to cafes and walks to the park, and learned each others' entire life stories. I loved how she always refered to her husband as "The Boyfriend." Apparently still not able to deal with the oddness of being married. Alas, I have lost her email and can't seem to find her, maybe she went back to europe? I think she might possibly have saved my sanity and my life with her hospitable floor and her lattes. (Ulrike too with her pastries and trips to the park; she is a goddess). The story was that I asked her and The Boyfriend to come over for dinner. Dinner was had, babies were discussed, etc. The next day she told me, when they went back home across the parking lot, The Boyfriend had with great concern asked, "Do you think they feel BAD, you know, when they see Ace, compared to their own baby... Ace is so good looking of course and IT'S so ugly!" "You dumb ass everybody thinks their own baby is beautiful!" she claims to have replied. "No! Do they think Moomin is beautiful?" "Yes they do..." *disbelief* I was dying with laughter as jhk and I had felt a definite surge of pity for them -- such nice people and such a nasty, pasty pink, bloated blob of a neanderthal thug, that bony-foreheaded baby with the vacant stare. Being next to our dainty paragon of babyhood - brown, tiny, skinny, hairy, alert, mongolian-spotted, thoughtful and analytical even as he drooled - must have been rough on them as they looked with shame upon the bald pate of the slack-jawed fruit of their loins. Now I'm looking at a photo of the 2 babies together, and they're both boring drooly little babies. My friend knew enough to laugh at our odd early-parental hormonal phenomenon, or whatever it was. But she still took Ace down to some sort of baby casting call for a commercial because he was the perfect type of baby that they want for those commercials. "Um, no, Nan, they want HUMAN babies." But she did not listen to me. My other friend Bharati moved to Bangladesh. She so totally rocked. I wished that my baby Moomin would grow up like her 3 year old Mitran, solemn and funny and sort of fey. If I could find her last name in my old computer I could probably find her email and tell her that I got my wish. There were other moms around, scary ones who had all the fancy stuff and a million strollers. One invited me for tea once, all laid out with different kinds of cookies etc. I was terrified that I would do something that would clearly mark me as Not a Good Mom -- not sure what, drop baby on its head ? Forget to raise pinky in air as I daintily sip tea? posted by badgerbag 10/12/2003 01:22:00 AM comment Saturday, October 11, 2003 Fuck yourself and your faint heart. Thank you, whoever sent Margaret Cho to this earth to join me in flipping off all of humanity. I can't even describe how hard I just laughed at her calling Ann Coulter "Cunta Kinte" or the awe I feel at the aids/pope rant. posted by badgerbag 10/11/2003 04:12:00 PM comment a little bit drunk Last night I was maybe a little bit drunk as I flirted with an entire troop of mariachis and then shoved my friend Squid out there into the street to be their next victim. She played along for a while and then mentioned our husbands. Aw man! They were good sports and still talked to us and let us play their violins and guitars. Maybe still hoping for some "superfreak" action to develop. Ep came in for plenty of teasing too which she bore with fairly good grace and many blushes; the rather handsome and hip young guy kept shaking his butt right in her face and playing the violin to her until she was ready to sink under the table. Yet she bore with it bravely! I busied myself analyzing Squid's friend the Weird Woman, and her odd agenda. I really liked her. But why did she need us there to photograph and interview - gringas in the neighborhood restaurant? Why not just interview the actual people who live in that neighborhood and go to that place all the time? It seems the worst of bad journalism to actually plant your gringa friends and then interview only them. Jeez. Well, not to be too hard on her, I tried picturing her early life as Weird Girl before escaping to the big city/Bay Area and it was a grim picture. It also seems like a practical technique to sort of give legitimacy or gentrify -- "oh look, white girls come to this event/restaurant, you (assumed middle class whitey) can come too! come spend your money here". So, practical if that is the effect you want, but still turns my stomach a little. I was thinking about it related to techniques for canonizing minority literature. Anyway she is probably something of a kindred spirit, even if I disagree with her "theory". Who am I to criticize it, really -- I know growing up a white freak is way different from growing up a nonwhite freak (and clearly she is freaky as I am if not more so). But it was odd to be the token majority minority. And Oh the shame of it as I vaguely remember flinging my arms enthusiastically around the hapless Squid and proposing that "Estaramos marimachas, no necesitamos nuestros maridos!" Uh. Sorry 'bout that, I take refuge in blaming Tequila, Goddess of the Agave. posted by badgerbag 10/11/2003 02:20:00 PM comment

Ranting, complaining, speculating, confessing from Badgerbag in an extended Crossing the Line ceremony. Past current