tuckova

tug

Logic and emotion are fighting again. Logic says I don't understand and Logic does some explaining of why understanding is important while Emotion's feet tap impatiently. Impatience is also an emotion that Emotion has. Emotion wants to be trusted. Emotion says I shouldn't have to explain why I feel this; it should be enough for you that I say I feel it. Logic doesn't know what to say about that, because Logic feels the ice cracking all around. Feels it like through vibrations, not with feelings. Emotion says can you please just please try. Logic says I am trying and Emotion says not hard enough you're not. Logic talks about common sense and being sensible and Emotion talks about sensitivity. Emotion wants to know why Logic's point of view gets to go first all the time. Logic counts off facts using graphs and figures and fingers. Emotion starts to cry. Logic says why are you being so emotional. Logic passes over the tissues and puts out a hand all can't we be friends and Emotion says between sobs never mind, never never mind.

whoa welcome to February

The conversation with the principal about "Perhaps the school should alert parents to the fact that their kids are on facebook" did not go quite as planned, since for example he did not know that his own school has a facebook page. He thought I was warning him THERE IS PRON ON THE INTERNETS!! which I was actually on like, the fifth book in that series, but whatever: baby steps.

Last week there was also a conflict with the gym teacher; he apparently thought that we were making fun of him with our very politely worded "Please excuse Squire from the whole-class detention" letter. The guy has some respect issues, as do I, so we started at least with that in common. I was kind of outraged about the whole situation; Friar seemed to be afraid I was going to go in and actually kick the guy's teeth in. Apparently he didn't understand that I have to get really angry as a form of girding. Maybe it's my Cold War upbringing but my thought is that I need to be armed, not that I need to fire. Naturally when I went in there my intention was to make sure that we're all on the side of getting my child as well educated as possible. I was all California smiles and charm. My people skilz are unfathomable so now we're all best friends and stuff; I know all about his daughters and his cottage and his 10 year break from teaching and his blood pressure and alla that. And he has a better understanding of Squire, and wheee, job well done awesome high five to myself.

"Unemployment" (by which I mean: no longer collecting a steady predictable paycheck) is not really all that bad; I've got enough work coming to keep my devil's playthings busy. I do spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time looking up stupid crap that I have no actual interest in, and I watched the entire first season of GLEE in basically one sitting, but ehn, things are happening. The brain surgeons keep giving me work, and then fun little things along the way, like a job reading a book for a recording for blind people.

Yesterday Squire and I cleaned his room. It's basically the first time I've set foot in there since September (I call "goodnight" from the doorway, because whoa! he is messy.) I generally believe that you should be allowed to keep your own room, but like, not when you can barely open the door, so it was time for an intervention. FIVE HOURS, yo. Mostly because the archaeological significance of many things had to be appreciated for a few minutes, which my Pave The Earth housekeeping style does not understand and so I had to have frequent breaks to keep from screaming. But anyway, it got done.

I am distressed by people who do not understand LOLCATS grammar and try to make up their own, like they think it's just speaking English badly rather than any actual structure. Also irritated all out of proportion by people who "loveeeeeeee" things. It is a silent E; you are not emphasizing anything by typing it a dozen times. Yeah, so I'm going to go to Prague for a bit and take care of an actual baby until I can start thinking like a grown-up again. Wish for pretty weather for me! 

get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter

Hearty chortled greetings. How was your weekend? But first let me tell you about mine. Friar had been having recurring nightmares about the cottage. When I have nightmares about the cottage, I do not want to go there in case they might be true. When he has nightmares about the cottage, he has to go to be sure they are not true, so we bundled up and went to the cottage this weekend.

I believe - no, I admit - that at some point Squire made a face about the trip, and I hissed in his ear that I did not want to go, that I was going in order to be kind to Friar, that periodically we do things we don't like in order to be kind, and that the kindness is removed by our bitching about it, and I am going so he's going and I don't want another word about it. I do understand that my saying to him that I don't want to go is fundamentally no different from his saying that he doesn't want to go. I'm balancing my hypocrisy with a little self awareness. That could totally be my epitaph.

To be fair, the person who volunteered to be in charge of preparing and packing the food failed to prepare anything for me other than boiled eggs, which was a large factor in my dampened enthusiasm. Yes okay also we brought bell peppers and tomatoes, but for protein: boiled eggs. Mmmm, really, boiled eggs for lunch dinner and breakfast? That causes brisk rubbing of the anticipatory hands! And heart attacks!

It was 20 degrees below. Celsius, but still: that is cold. Fortunately we were bundled and had many, many pairs of extra socks. Mostly the whole weekend I couldn't get warm. Even when the inside of the cottage was a perfectly reasonable temperature I was generally under a pile of sleeping bags and doing Inward Moaning. However, we also played in the snow, which was very fluffy and unsuitable for snowballs. It was, however, very nice to run in and also to fall down in, which I did quite a bit. Squire made snow angels for his grandmother, who had mentioned them (city snow is unsuitable, as it can contain Surprises), and I took pictures. And that part was a lot of fun, and coming back to the toasty cottage after that part was also a lot of fun. And breaking out the wine and cigarettes and sitting down to play games with a now-crackling fire at our backs, watching the thermostat inside rise while the one outside fell, that was also also fun.

We played every game in the cottage at least once, dried our socks over the stove, and Squire and I started reading "A String in the Harp" (1970s Newbery book), which is very promising. I have some ideas about the 70s and children's literature in the 70s in particular, and the contrast between what Newbery winners reflect and what bestsellers reflect... but I'm really not probably qualified to expound on it without at least a bottle of wine tucked under my belt.

Anyway. How was your weekend? I hope it was also good.

kids these days

A bunch of kids in Squire's class have facebook accounts. They're posting things that I, as a parent, would not want my child posting. Even if the account is locked, one can still see all the things of which they are "fans" and so on. So for example, I know that this 12 year old classmate of his, real first and last name, is interested in meeting men, long passionate kisses, and looking at men's asses in tight pants. What to think?

a. The parents know, and they don't care.
b. The parents don't know, and don't care.
c. The parents don't know, but would care.
d. other.

An American friend of mine suggested bringing this up at the school; that the school should have some kind of program to address it. To my knowledge, nothing along the lines of internet-savvy behavior is part of the curriculum. I don't know if kids are taught about it at all. Certainly Czech television doesn't have James Lipton telling them to give it a ponder. Is this a situation where one sticks one's head in, or not? I worry about these kids just putting more of themselves out there than they would if they were thinking straight; I worry about somebody getting hurt. Some pretty shitty things happened to me when I was a teenager that would not have happened if I had been prepared for them; there's stuff I would have avoided if I'd known how to. It is also true that I was warned very sternly not to do things that I went ahead and did. So maybe this risking of yourself is part of growing up?

What would you do?

front window

Dear Boys Across the Street,

Well, not boys. I assume that since you're living just two of you in those big rooms that you have incomes, and incomes usually mean jobs, and jobs mean some kind of grown-upedness, but now I am an old woman and any male this much younger than me is a boy. Anyway, dear boys:

Thank you so much for moving in. Thank you for being home pretty much whenever I am looking out the window in the evening. Thank you for dressing up to go out, or for staying home to have parties. Thank you for knowing that towels don't get you as dry as the air does. Thank you for having parties with beautiful girls, drunk already at 6 and everybody laughing to show all their teeth. Thank you for going out dancing. Thank you for dressing sharp. Thank you for not having curtains.

Love,
What I Am Becoming

what we disagree about when we disagree in the kitchen

COOKING:

Rice does not need to be washed or toasted before it is cooked.
Meat can be cooked in a tablespoon or less of oil.
Rinsing cooked pasta, especially in cold water, is a sin.
Toast should be brown but never black.
Sugar is not an appropriate second ingredient in any savory food.
Most vegetables taste better raw.
Potatoes do not count as "vegetables".
A meal should not take longer than 1 hour to prepare.

WASHING DISHES:
The person who cooks is ideally excused from doing dishes.
When washing dishes, it is important to wash at least all the tableware.
Sometimes this involves two loads, but it is part of "doing the dishes".
It is okay to soak pots overnight.
Dishes that are soaking should soak in the sink.
Emptying the dish drainer is part of washing the dishes.
Putting away the dishes is the last step in doing them.

check this hand

Oh, hey! Hi! I'm so scattered I make the leaves look organized. I'm actually getting a lot done, via plate juggling. On Monday, I went to a concert and quilt show with my new dance partner, who is two years old, because dating the inappropriately young is the new cocktail hat. He was an extremely attractive conversation piece, which I appreciate in a date, and he also clutched his sweet pudgy fingers around my neck, which I enjoyed very much, as certain people in this house are Too Old for cuddling. The music was good if you like hearing people sing folk songs in not-their-native language, which I very much do. The quilts were pretty much My First Real Quilt; not badly done but kinda boring. When we left I was reintroduced to how awesome it is when people give you their seats on the tram and so altogether it was a fine night.

On Tuesday, Mr. H came and painted the bathroom. I have liked him since he first laughed at one of my jokes 8 years ago instead of correcting my Czech (My desire to anthropomorphize objects does not always translate). We are mutually delighted by each other, and it is a pleasure to see him now, eight years wider, with hearing aids and a little slower on the stairs than before, but still so good at straight lines it's like a superpower. Rulerfinger! I used to paint everything myself but now I would rather have Mr. H come and show me pictures of his grandchildren, thus saving my energy for the clean up afterwards.

Squire came home Wednesday singing Lady Gaga's hit song, "Mah-mah-mah pockmarked face, mah-mah pockmarked face" and that was pretty funny. And then later he told me there was a Lidl store opening up down the street and it took me like an hour to understand that it was the supermarket chain Lidl, and not a leetle store, which explains his weird accent. It's two blocks away so I imagine we'll be having this problem for a while to come.

Today I am going to meet another baby! It is good research and I appreciate all my friends having babies at varying ages so that I don't have to. I smell their sweet heads and read them educational articles from the paper and teach them some dance moves and laugh at their jokes as many times as they want to tell them and then hand them back to their moms when they start to smell funny. I'm like a Victorian daddy. (I actually can change a diaper and like to think of myself as somewhat useful but I like also this idea of me in a morning coat; don't you?).

And that's it. I'm finishing up my job at the educational web site in a week or so, following which I plan to take a long bath in apple cider vodka, and then fully devote myself to babies and brains (the separate study of both, not the eating of either, although nomnom) for a year, whereupon I shall either emerge entirely brilliant or pretty much the same as always. SAME THING I KNOW.

November on Her Way to Winter

-by Deborah (Gottlieb) Garrison

Here we go again,
up the narrow stair
of fall, and I'm full of nerve,

have to have you, I'm looking for you
everywhere.  It's true
I like men too much, and when

I see one in the street
I used to know -- starting to be
bald, in a raincoat eight years old,

worry a lit fish swimming across
his face -- I could nearly wrap myself
around him, I'm all too ready....

But I'm sorry! It was for you
I meant to do these things, for you
to unbutton my blouse without a care--

Not so difficult, now the sun is tart,
the river the very color of cold,
November on her way to winter.

(I like this poem so much, and I had it posted once before on the old site, but I think it's worth looking at again.)

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sarah did this when she was mad." Sarah being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Naturally the mother had left no phone number where she could be reached. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting career. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".

not quite

You're just saying what it looks like to you, you're just riffing, making jokes, trading barbed wire tongue gossip. This one is an idiot trapped in a loveless marriage for fear of dying alone; that one is hopeless with the idea that love can make over the face of the beloved into something more useful than a mask; the other believes that belief is enough to transform the world. This one thinks that what it says is interesting while clearly everyone is wiping away their yawns; that one isn't even clever enough to understand the function of a thesaurus, much less a dictionary; the other hasn't learned the function of words to start with. You could rail against the world all night if left unchecked.

What's behind this of course is the illusion that while we're looking at this, that, and the other, people might fail to notice what was in fact clear way more than a paragraph ago: that you are less than what you mock; that what you are is nothing more than vinegar and salt, spooned onto others for entertainment value. You do not nourish. The poorer flavors you describe rise above sea level to majestic impression despite your sour evaluation, and you are left to float alone, as salt does. And vinegar and salt are insufficiently satisfying, which you mention as though it had nothing to do with you and your damaged taste.