jug jub a glub glub on the way to the club
THE SUBTITLE TO MY ENTIRE DIARY IS “WHY I SHOULD NEVER BE LET OUT OF THE HOUSE, EVER”
If you boiled and ate me right now I bet I would taste pretty foul. Posting this right after the last (pitifully distant-in-time) entry is going to make it sound like I only post when hungover, but that is not true! Sometimes I post drunk. And sometimes I post while all fucked up on cold medicine and a cup of coffee that makes me say, “Ack, blech, Jesus fuck!” every time I take a sip, because there is nothing as vile as coffee when you have a sinus infection, but for some reason I really crave it whenever I do. And sometimes I post when I am stone cold sober, except that because I am me it seems that I am never actually stone cold sober. I have a MimiTonin or MimiOpamine receptor blinking on and off and not-reuptaking in my head, which keeps me slightly loopy and makes me post stupid shit for all the retarded Internet to see. Hi. How are you today?
I have been thinking about being boiled and eaten, because I recently read David Foster Wallace's “Consider The Lobster” article in Gourmet magazine and which, until recently, was available online all .pdf-ingly and copyright-infringement-ly thanks to people with scanners and too much time on their hands. I don't eat anything without gills or an exoskeleton but I am in pretty much the same higher-mammal-with-an-overactive-conscience boat (boat?) as DFW about this stuff, which is that I want to come up with a way where I can continue to eat these animals (because they are tasty), while also dealing with questions in my head such as why is it okay. I have no patience for meat-eaters who have never thought about why is it okay. If you think long and hard about why is it okay and you pretty much come up with because I want to, that sort of works, although it is interesting to me how our taste for a particular protein can trump the survival instinct of another mammal, even if it is just a cow, and believe me I am no fan of cows. Hi. How are you today?
So. DFW makes the point (kind of accidentally) that although lobsters definitely feel pain, it is possible that without frontal lobes they do not process pain. Perhaps, in the absence of any sort of self-consciousness or emotions or sense of time, they don't experience pain as unbearable or tormenting. People with lobotomies feel this way about pain; they will jerk their hand off a hot stove just like any other creature with a spine, but they don't then become afraid of hot stoves, they don't moan and groan about how much their burn hurts, and for them pain is processed no differently than a light breeze blowing on their faces.
I have gone on too long but this is possibly a big intellectual deal for me (although I have to think on it some more), because if it all works out I will be able to happily continue eating sushi, shrimp cocktail, and lobster rolls when I travel northeastward. Hi. How are you today?
Back to being hungover. Yesterday after work I walked to Kat's house, a very nice condo on a very weird semi-gentrified street in Humboldt Park that has that condo condo GHETTO! GHETTO! GHETTO!* rhythm every other block or so. Do you have the problem where, if you're wearing headphones, you somehow think that means that no one can hear you? So you end up singing out loud to music no one else can hear. Also, if you are me, you end up walking on one of the GHETTO! blocks and you are wearing your iPod and you see a stray cat and you are all like KITTY! And you start making those teeth-sucking kissy noises that cats like, only you do it in front of a whole group of Mexican construction workers, who have been known to make these very same noises to women in a sexually-aggressive and inappropriate context. And then they literally stop on the street and stare at you, because are those noises meant for them? And everyone is confused and embarrassed, and you (meaning I) scoot as quickly as possible the rest of the way to Kat's house.
We had some beer there while we waited for her husband to come home so we could ditch the baby (bye baby!) and go to Rainbo Club, and there was more beer, and cigarettes, and drunk guys trying to share our booth, and things kind of deteriorated from there. Kat and I are both doing the relatively-new-mommy thing and we really needed to get out and talk about parenting and religion and sex and the higher brain functions of lobsters, but it is possible that we did not need to drink a hundred beers each. Or make drunken confessions about the shocking and upsetting instances where we came really really close to actual child abuse, such as the time when I put Nora down on the floor much harder than necessary and then left the room to yell obscenities and kick a door, or the time when she swatted her child open-handed on the butt after a whole day of toddler whining and screaming and general ornery-ness. I know. We are terrible people. Please call Child Protective Services immediately.
*I almost forgot the GHETTO! footnote. While browsing through TiVo menus recently, LT came across a film on one of the soft-porn pay-per-view channels called Ghetto Booty 10.
LT: (describing the discovery of Ghetto Booty 10)
Me: So, did you record it?
LT: How could I? We have not yet seen Ghetto Booty 1 through 9.
Me: You're right. We’d be totally lost.
Speaking of booty, and henceforth poop,* I bet I am the only middle manager at a large publishing company who had voice mail yesterday about POOPING IN THE POTTY. Forgive the capitals, but this is monumental. The transcript of my voice mail went like this:
Mommy! Poop. Poop—potty. Nora. Poop. Potty. Big girl! Mommy. Bye-bye.
And of course I had to save the voice mail because HOW CUTE IS THAT, I LOVE THAT KID SO MUCH, and if Diaryland could handle the file I would probably be digitizing it somehow and posting it because HOW SELF-ABSORBED IS THAT. We have had poop (IN THE POTTY!) two days in a row now. All the child-rearing books will tell you to make a big deal of this, with the praise and whatnot, but: Nora don't play that way. Seriously. She tells me “poop,” I rush her to the potty, she does her thing, she stands up and says “wipe” and “flush,” we wipe, we flush, I flap around saying YAY! YOU'RE SUCH A BIG GIRL! POOP IN THE POTTY IS AWESOME! in my two-octaves-above-normal** Mommy Voice, and Nora is completely stoic. Nora just wants to get on with her life. I try to bring up the fact that you POOPED! IN THE POTTY! SO PROUD! at random times of the day and she just gives me this look like Mother Do We Have To Discuss This Now. So basically I feel like an idiot, because my not-quite-two-year-old is the one with the psychologically-healthy and businesslike attitude about poop, and I am the one who wants to bust out sticker charts and sing songs about HOORAY, POOP IN THE POTTY. I need to back the fuck off about poop in the potty, is what Nora is trying to tell me. And I shall.
*Henceforth poop! The only Google result for “henceforth poop” is a long-defunct weblog about ulcerative colitis. Until now! Mimi Smartypants: Should Never Be Let Out Of The House Ever. (Henceforth Poop!)
**I am a gravelly contralto on the best of days, and of course right now I am so hungover that I sound like Lauren Bacall after a bucket of muscle relaxants and eight clove cigarettes. If there is poop in the potty today, I will only be able to muster a muttered “good job,” which is all Nora seems to require from me anyway.
When I feel this polluted and hungover, like a lobster from a garbagey sea, the only bright spot I can find is that at least I am not Shostakovich in the gulag, about to chow down on a human foot. This might be apocryphal, since I cannot find evidence of Shostakovich's foot-eating online, but I recall some story about him being frozen and starving and having to eat some dead guy's foot. LT does not share my love of 20th-century string quartets, which he calls “your crazy Russian circus music,” so whenever he starts to harsh on Shostakovich I always scream “GIVE THE GUY A BREAK! HE HAD TO EAT A FOOT, OKAY? GOD!” And that always cracks us up, although I have a feeling that's just us.
I am not eating a foot. But oh god my head hurts. Hi. How are you today?
Because you asked (yes you did, don't lie), here is a picture of Nora, who decided one day to put on her mittens and carry around a wicker orb that I bought at Pottery Barn. Please do not ask me why I bought a wicker orb at Pottery Barn, because my shame is great enough already and I will run screaming into the night in search of beers to drink and feet to eat.
Diaryland as virtual scratchpaper:
1. Those dogs that can't seem to keep their dog penis in its dog penis sheath. This makes me angry. Isn't the whole point of dogs that they are trainable? Can't you henceforth (!) train your dog to keep its penis hidden? Can't you just say, “Rufus!* Penis!” and then he will obediently tuck it away?
*You could use your own dog's name, instead of “Rufus.” If you prefer. I honestly don't know where the fuck I got “Rufus,” it just came out of my fingers all on its own.
2. Actually I think that was it. The dog penis thing. Hi.
—mimi smartypants doesn't think you're ready, for this jelly.