as if there were tiny weights attached to the corners
LT had to go to a “parent-teacher conference” about Nora. Yes, for preschool. We needed a full report on her progress in preschool. How are the fingerpainting skills coming along? Can she string the wooden beads on the shoelace? Is she adequately “showing her shoe” during the “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear” rhyme?* Next week is spring break, and just in time too because all the pasting and puppets and communal, ritualistic eating of Veggie Booty was wearing Nora out. My girl is going to hand in her last independent study (titled I Can Put Numbers On The Felt Board: A Conceptualist Paradigm of Discourse), hop on a plane to South Padre Island, and party down.
*I am curious how they handle this particular song, since surely our slightly woo-woo preschool, which decorated paper Easter eggs for “spring” while seemingly making an effort not to actually mention Easter,** does not sing the “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say your prayers” line that I learned back in the jump rope days. Perhaps they use one of these modifications.
**A fact that annoyed even agnostic me, since Easter is a calendar fact: see my earlier gripe about “holiday trees.”
Nora was described at the conference as follows:
Verbal (This, we knew. Please pass the earplugs.)
Poised (Huh? I did not know there were toddler points for “poise.” Does Poise come before or after the swimsuit competition?)
Directive of others' play (This sounds like a polite way of saying “bossy” to me, but the preschool teacher claims to mean only that Nora likes to describe the action when playing with other kids, like a miniature play-by-play announcer.)
Apparently she pals around almost exclusively with her classmates Irene and Molly, which I find hilarious since they are easily the two biggest girls in the class, with Nora being the smallest. It's a girl gang! They're the muscle, Nora's the brains!
EYE DOCTOR ADVENTURES
First, the office is really big on this dilation thing. I know, preventive care blah blah, but it's just never convenient and I hate it, so I declined this time around. And it was a big freaking deal, like the optometrist's feelings were hurt, and there was all this weird pressure to reschedule it for another time. The guy was practically hissing like an afterschool special, “Tryyyy it, you'll liiike it….the first one's freeeee…”
Then, I had my vision exam. This? or this? A? or B? The usual drill. Except for one thing. I have an ingrown eyelash on my top left lid. How the hell does that even happen? The eyelash is only a small, flesh-colored lump on the lid, totally skinned over (and thus non-tweezable), and not visible unless you are putting makeup on me or getting right up in my face while I tell you what to look for. Which, don't. Get away from me, freak.
Suddenly the eye doctor is pulling at my eyelid, then he's using a cotton-swab thing to keep it in place, then he says “hold still” and grabs some kind of instrument and starts poking. It takes me a minute, but then I realize that he is working on the ingrown eyelash. I think about saying, “Hey, you can't get that with tweezers, I tried,” but what if he has Special Optometrist Tweezers? What if he has Tweezing Skills acquired at optometrist college? So I stay quiet and let him poke, even though it hurts like fuck, I can sense that we are not getting anywhere, and the eyelash, though moderately unsightly when viewed in extreme close-up, is non-painful and non-troublesome and probably should just be left alone. After a few minutes of alarming and unproductive tweezing, the optometrist tosses the tweezers aside and says, “I can't extract that eyelash…if I had a scalpel I could, but I forgot to bring it today. You could see a dermatologist or something, or make another appointment and I'll make sure to have a scalpel here.”
(a) He wants to take a scalpel. To my eyelid.
(b) If a scalpel had been available, he would have been slicing and dicing faster than you could say “Buñuel film” or “Pixies song” or “Pixies song about a Buñuel film.”* With no warning or informed consent.
(c) I could go see a “dermatologist or something.” (Who's the “something” who would be good at such things? A manicurist? A surgeon? Freddy Kruger?)
(d) The optometrist normally travels with a scalpel! But he forgot to bring it today! Oh damn, I left my scalpel in my other pants!
*The polite thing to do would be to put a link here, but shit, come on. And if you don't get the reference, you can Google, which is good for the soul, and then you can write me and say, “Mimi, that so was not fucking worth it, next time you feel the need to be faux-clever just keep it to yourself.”
I tried to recover from my Near-Scalpel Experience by picking out new eyeglass frames. Flirty Eyeglass Guy was being helpful with narrowing down my choices, when all of a sudden he said, “You know, I lived in Wicker Park for seven years.” We were not talking about neighborhoods, but about eyeglass frames, so I'm not sure why he suddenly felt the need to establish his Chicago hipster cred with me. I hope it wasn't his influence, but I did end up with glasses that are even more wacky and cat-eye-shaped than my current ones. I am going to have to calm down and buy some Ann Taylor twinsets and sensible low-heeled loafers soon, because between the crazy glasses and the petticoat skirts I fear ending up a Me So Kooky! self-caricature by the time I'm thirty-five.
FA. FA. FA. FA. FASHION.
My sister is getting married this fall, and Nora is to be a flower girl. I was kind of surprised that most flower girl dresses are white, since the mini-bride thing is a touch creepy and I don't think I have ever dressed Nora in white in her life. However, I must admit that the proposed dress is very cute:
(Note the hot pink Chuck Taylor poking out of the hem!)
Still, I think the ultimate flower girl outfit is shown below:
Nora put all these accessories on of her own accord and then told us, “I'm ready for the party.” What party? I guess every day is a party when you are dressed like that.
—mimi smartypants is ready for the party.