From my friend Halo, the academic librarian:
—–Original Message—–
From: all campus email [mailto:all campus email] On Behalf Of XXXX XXXXXX
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 12:52 PM
To: all campus
Subject: Coffee Cart Early Closure, Tuesday August 9
Importance: High
Due to an unexpected event the Coffee Cart will close at 2:30 today, Tuesday. August 9.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
I had a dream that I was in a cafe, looking at the menu, waiting, waiting, when suddenly I realized that I was waiting for my good friend, Jude Law. I am meeting Jude Law, I thought. I wonder how he’s been? I didn’t have to wonder long, because soon he slid into the booth next to me, on my side.
“How’s things, SJ?” he said, in his creamy Jude Law voice. This man is flirting with me, I thought. I am not into this.
I have had enough of the scrawny rake type to last me a lifetime. Rakes are okay, but not scrawny ones. As far as I’m concerned, Jude Law needs to eat more warm pork.
I had a friend through most of school from the time I was five on. We attended school together in the first grade, until I moved away to the city next to hers. But our moms helped up stay in touch throughout grade school, and we finally ended up in the same building during middle school, at which point we had drifted a bit. Her household was uber-Christian, to the point of not celebrating Halloween (this is borderline child abuse, if you ask me, the godless communist). This made her turn out pretty sheltered, so by middle school having a conversation with her was like having a conversation with someone a couple of years younger than me.
(As an aside: my household was the opposite of this. One of my earliest memories of being taken to the movies was going to see a Dirty Harry flick. Most of it was boringly violent, and violently boring, but what sticks in my memory is a prostitute giving old Clint a blowjob. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I pieced it together later. I must’ve been about six. Then there was Robocop when I was eight. My poor sister was taken to see the sequel ten years later when she was eight or nine, and it scarred her too. Did I mention that I had horrible nightmares as a child? I am protective of my girls, but…no Halloween…versus dirty-cop blowjobs…I guess what I am trying to say here is, find some balance, people!)
ANYWAYS, my friend was lost to me during middle school, because a fellow orchestra nitwit I went to grade school with latched on to her. So I would see my friend in the halls occasionally, small frame dwarfed by her cello case, thick as thieves with Nitwit (second-chair violin). I was banished to bandland with my Fronch horn, so we didn’t cross paths much.
By freshman year, things changed. My friend had a falling out with Nitwit, and remembered how much fun I was. We made plans to go on the big biology fieldtrip together to the enormous aquarium in Chicago. It was the typical public school outing: permission slip, fee, money for a fast food lunch, and a day of mostly-unbridled freedom. We were both heavily into the Violent Femmes and sat in our bus seats with our heads smashed together, sharing one set of headphones. Gordon Gano’s whine seeped out of the walkman’s earpieces, causing the popular kids who only knew about top-forty music to peep over the seats and give us incredulous looks.
We got bored about halfway there and decided to start taking pokes at the other drivers racing down the Kennedy towards Chicago. We ripped off the heavier cardboard backing from one of my spiral notebooks, and she found a marker in her backpack, and we got to work making a sign.
The sign had two sides. We held the first up to the window and gestured frantically to any driver who was currently keeping pace with our bus. What could these panicked-looking high school girls possibly have to tell them, as we all careened down a four-lane freeway at 60-plus miles an hour? Once we got their attention, we would make certain they read the first side:
We would then point to their back tire and look stricken. We would watch in delight as the driver’s eyes, and sometimes the backseat passenger’s, would turn into three perfect “O’s.” You could see forty-ninety-twelvedy separate thoughts rush through their heads all at once. What? What about their wheel?
We would then flip over the sign so they could read the rest of the message:
This provided hours of entertainment, on several fieldtrips we took together. Sometimes we got a dismissive wave and a laugh, and sometimes we got flipped off. In hindsight, I think we deserved worse. When we wanted some variety, we would alternate with a sign that read “Your keys are in your door!!!” Most people would look.
In Other News
Via Manuel, Postsecret. This site is so sad. This was my secret, but I’m 27 so I beat her by a whole year. Except it’s not a secret anymore. I will tell anyone I meet. I might even stand on my balcony and shout it down to the street tonight, if I eat enough Goo-Goo Clusters first.
I wrote this April 25, when Strudel was six weeks old and I was so tired I felt like my brain’s record kept skipping.
I am exhausted physically so I send out psychic entreaties that go unfulfilled. I will the baby to bathe herself; I will the schmutz next to the garbage can that comes from a careless four-year-old tossing out oatmeal and jammy crusts to stop stinking; I will the groceries to shop for themselves and put themselves away. Mostly, I will the baby to sleep for ten more minutes so I can have the fleeting satisfaction that comes with actually completing a task. I am fooling myself though: the tasks are all completely circular and will need to be done again in an hour, day, or week. Somewhere these brain waves are being received, perhaps. Somewhere, in Akron, Ohio, or in the middle of nowhere in China, a child has the overwhelming urge to clean her room right, the first time. Or the laundry somewhere does its goddammed self for once. Maybe a baby stops crying somewhere and smiles. Maybe my psychic brainwaves just have lousy aim.
Most of the time, despite the fatigue that comes with being a new parent, I enjoy taking care of Strudel. When I was gleefully childless, I watched other parents suffer and struggle with their children, and thought that being a parent meant joylessly proceeding from one unpleasant phase to another, beginning with being vomited on repeatedly and ending with bailing junior out of the clink for grand theft auto. I watched these parents, suffering along, victims of their horrid, self-centered children, who were spit upon one minute and turned the next to encourage other people their age to experience the wonder of spawning.
Now I can see there are other sweet rewards. Franny is smart and strong and loves me, even though I tell her that we are having rocks for dinner or that I am going to start keeping her in a cardboard box. Strudel smiles when she sees me and is getting fat and gigantic through hours of dedicated boob ranching, and snuggles into my neck on the rare occasions she is not pulling my breasts down to where she thinks they ought to be, which is around my navel.
At lunch with my sister the other day, I had the realization while we talked about family history that I had no memory of my mother taking care of me–performing mundane tasks like dressing me, bathing me, or even hugging or reading to me. When I left my grandma’s at almost six years old to go to finally live with my mother, I was independent in many ways and too big to be coddled by her. I know she took care of me when I was very small, I just don’t remember.
Taking care of your own child is like remembering or even learning for the first time how loved you were. I’m sure my grandmother loved me as much as I love my own children, and she knew how fleeting the time was. She knew that someday, sooner rather than later, my mother would come to collect me again. Time is collecting Franny away; she pushes me away when I cuddle her and call her my baby. Maybe parents want other people to have children partly so they can gain the compassion that comes from seeing the other side of parenting. Or maybe they just want someone else to talk with about the weirdness of finding rocks in your pockets or walking in on a potty-trainee painting the mirror with her own poo. I don’t know.
In Other News
Coolest thing evah…I just discovered that my blog has something called “power editing.” So I have republished all my old entries, way back to the far-out year 2001. However, they are going to be chockablock with broken links. We must take the good (Men’s Pocky) with the bad (Bertie Bott, you dickhole).
I started typing and suddenly I was on page five of my Word doc. Fasten your seatbelts, bitches, or come back tomorrow. I am spilling it today.
1.
This weekend was pretty taxing, as Franny was on a rampage. It’s hard, because there’s the normal, four-year-old rampage, and then there’s the extra stuff that comes with having a child with two households. She seems to be regressing in a mighty way, because she’s with her dad a lot and not at delightful iron-fist her school. The first day she came, she had forgotten her manners to the point of forgetting to even say “please” or “thank you.” The way she demands things and talks back with such ease, it makes me think that’s the status quo over there. Her dad didn’t enforce manners, or even seem to notice when she’d smack her food or say “gimmie some water” when I lived with him, so I find it hard to believe he’s enforcing manners now.