tragic carpet ride
MAKING ME CRINGE
Here is enough shameless self-promotion to last me at least a decade: an interview I did with Margaret Lazarus Dean via instant messenger. I think I sound kind of like a dumb stoner, with my “whatever, man” flip comments to Margaret’s smart questions about genre and prose-craft and the future of books, but it is true that I don’t spend much brainpower on my diary as Literary Process. I do not have a lot of patience for people who have a grand manifesto about their creative activity.
It’s weird, really, because I enjoy reading about social contexts and broader implications and all sorts of macro-level musings about contemporary life. I am just reluctant to apply any such academic analysis to myself. Sure, personal blogs as subversive narratives of 21st-century female experience blah blah. But me? I’m just typing! Or consider all the ink spilled on parenting, both in the form of how-to manuals and trend stories from people who act like they are the first generation to ever have children. But of course I’ll insist that I’m just making it up as I go along, despite the glut of information and social pressures. Maybe that’s really the dilemma: anthropologists and social critics labor to find legitimate generalizations about groups of people, and the individual nods along and says, “Yes, that’s so true. Except for me!”
GOOD THINGS
Also, I have arranged a piñata.
A picture of Nora not eating ice cream.
Conversation between Nora and her pal on Saturday evening:
Friend: Did you know that you’re Chinese?
Nora: Yeah.
Friend: Okay, just letting you know.
I would like to party with these girls. I could be their Donatello.
TOYS
Nora is getting really into Hot Wheels cars. She has a whole bunch of little metal cars but the official “Hot Wheels” ones are especially prized, probably just because it sounds cooler than “Matchbox” or “Weird Dollar-Store Knockoff.” She spent two glorious hours last week making a ramp out of a half-collapsed card table, setting up cardboard targets for the cars to knock over, and writing down the results of races in a notebook. If it gets me two hours to read and screw around online I will buy her all the Hot Wheels cars she requires—an added bonus that they are, even in this day and age, about a buck each, and thus the perfect unexpected gift/reward/bribe. Or the perfect thing for tightwad Nora to buy herself, without having to diminish her coin jar very much.
Talking about the price of Hot Wheels cars one day led to a wider-ranging discussion of wealth and poverty, wants vs. needs, and the more- and less-fortunate. It also led to a somewhat close call.
Me: I sometimes feel sad when people with kids don’t have very much money, because maybe the kids won’t be able to get presents for Christmas and things like that.
Nora [looking puzzled]: But…Santa.
Me: Uh yeah. Right.
It would not be the end of the world if the magic evaporated, but I’d rather not be the one to do it. It amuses me how I went from thinking I’d never perpetuate the Santa myth to passively protecting it. The kid gets a lot of non-answers to her Santa questions (“What do you think?” and “Well, that’s what the stories say” are favorites), which is good enough for now.
THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF, “TEAM MEETING” STYLE
1. Denial (“Maybe I’ll learn something!”)
2. Boredom
3. Horniness (Fantasies stemming solely from boredom, it’s not like the streamlining of workflow processes gets me hot or anything)
4. Despair (“Everything is shit, I have no future”)
5. Fatigue (Fantasies shift from sex scenes to nap scenes)
—mimi smartypants is asleep at the helm.