peppery lentil ragout
SOME PEOPLE ARE STUPID
Ignorant Woman: How cute! Is she adopted?
Me: Yes.
IW: From China?
Me: Yes. We've been home for about a year.
IW: That's so great! I think everyone who can't have children of their own should adopt!
To my credit, I did not slap her, but managed to say politely through my clenched teeth that Nora IS “our own,” and that the state of my (as far as I know, healthy and functioning) reproductive organs was really none of her concern.
SOME PEOPLE MEAN WELL BUT ARE NONETHELESS SOMEWHAT STUPID
Nora (pointing to letters on a sign): W! X! D! A!
Coworker: Oh my god, what a smartypants! How old is she again?
Me: Twenty-one months. W and X are the only letters she can consistently identify. I'm not sure why she likes those in particular.
Coworker: Probably because they are the closest to Chinese letters!
Um, no. Chinese doesn't even have an alphabet. Also, Nora was eight months old at adoption—it's not like she was sitting in her crib in China reading the newspaper or anything.
SOME PEOPLE ARE AWESOME
An email stranger sent me a hello, and said she likes this journal thing, and also said the following: “I am repeatedly struck by how engaged you are with Nora, at what a deep level. What a gift for her that her voice already is so deeply recognized, heard and acknowledged.”
It made me cry a little, because that is exactly what I hope, and exactly what I consider “success” in this whole mommying endeavor. Wow.
Yesterday I endured yet another preacher on the El. (These are the End Times, y'all!) This particular dude—skinny, black, and carrying Rollerblades—had the usual apocalyptic shtick, but with a hefty dose of anti-gay garbage as well. Because you know, you put the thingy where the poop comes out, and civilization crumbles. And straight people never ever do anything like that, acres and acres of specialty porn* notwithstanding.
*Except that anal does not seem to be a “specialty” anymore—even the most run-of-the-mill straight porn will eventually get around to an anal scene, these days. On the other hand, who even watches full-scale porn movies now, with the Internet providing just-long-enough-to-wank clips of anything you could possibly want? In high school I worked in a video store, and one of my jobs as assistant manager was to order new porn. Because apparently porn goes stale, like popcorn, so every month or so we would pull old porn off the shelves and order new porn out of a catalogue. For no real good reason other than my own amusement—and because the anal movies had the best titles—I decided to single-handedly shift the focus of our store's porn selection toward the back door, and eventually through my efforts our video store specialized in anal. If I had been a serious student of marketing I would have charted any changes in profit margins/clientele as a result of that shift. Instead I was just in high school, and a serious student of nothing but my own gothy-literary pretentiousness.
Look how anal sex led us down the garden path to a whole paragraph's worth of digression! Anal! It's so distracting! Anyway, the preacher man on the El, with the Rollerblades, was also wearing silver lamÉ pants. And I have to say, it really takes a certain something to declaim against homosexuality while wearing sliver lamÉ pants.
SINCE WE LAST SPOKE
1. I have posted before about my little OCD problem. I am a lot better than I was ten years ago, but I still have my moments, and many of those moments have to do with choice. Specifically, TEENY TINY MEANINGLESS CHOICES. I am fine with the big ones—adoption, after all, is in some ways the very definition of deliberately planning your life (along with a healthy dose of blind fate, of course). The stuff I can't handle without a System are things like deciding what to eat (I have a whole list at my desk of possible lunch choices, and that list is alphabetized, yo), deciding what shoes to wear (I own nothing but black shoes, and each pair has a nickname, and yes, in my head, IT IS ALPHABETIZED), or deciding what pajamas Nora will wear to bed (they are not alphabetized, it makes no sense to alphabetize pajamas,** but I have an algorithm that I use to make the choice).
**Mimi Smartypants, are you seriously telling us that it makes sense to alphabetize shoes, but not pajamas? Sadly, I think that I am.
Anyway, recently I was standing in the kitchen and using my crazy-ass mental decision tree to decide what to eat, when I realized that what I really wanted to eat was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And then I spent some time trying to work peanut butter and jelly into the equation, so that, mathematically, I would “get” to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of one of the other choices. But somehow, for the first time in ages, I was able to say BAD DOG to my insane brain and just go ahead and eat peanut butter and jelly because I wanted it.
My sandwich breakthrough is pathetic, I know, but without therapy or Prozac, it will have to do. P to the B to the motherfucking J!
2. I “read” an issue of In Style magazine that my sister-in-law left at my house. I concluded that it is the ultimate waste of soy ink and glossy paper on the planet, and I speak as someone who sometimes reads the editorial travesties that are Parents and Lucky. (A magazine about shopping! Words fail me! Words fail them, too, apparently!)
3. Pixies show! Pixies show! I thought they sounded great, and it was so refreshing to see rockstars rocking with big fat asses (Frank) and soccer-mom hair (Kim). I ran into several people I know, including the lovely and talented and eight-foot-tall Louisa. Nora was babysat by the In Style-toting sister-in-law, which went swimmingly until it was time to go to bed. As baby arm was being threaded through pajamas, Nora asked, “Mommy?” and then “Daddy?” When it became clear that neither parent was being produced, she started to cry a little, refused her bottle, her story, and her rocking-chair session, and demanded to go straight to bed. Even though this makes me sad, it makes me laugh a little bit too. “Lady, you are a fine babysitter, but you can do nothing for me now. Place me in the crib and quit my sight. Game. Over.”
4. Right now I am chewing gum that claims to be “unleashed,” and whose flavor is named “mintensity.” Jeez, calm down. (Warning: linked page contains an image of Jessica Simpson that gets weirder and weirder the longer you stare at it.)
5. Yesterday Nora fell off a chair and struck her head on an end table on the way down. Instinct is a funny thing—after witnessing the accident, I scooped up the wailing child and essentially ran around the house with her for a good ten seconds. Then I got it through my thick skull that clutching the babe to my breast and saying “oh my god” repeatedly was not considered proper medical care, so I got an ice pack and took a good look at the injury. It was mostly her ear that got the worst of it, with a big purple bruise and some swelling. She never had any head-injury symptoms but LT called the pediatrician anyway, who asked all the standard questions and then said that it was probably nothing to worry about, at least until people start asking you who punched your daughter in the ear. Nora stopped crying fairly quickly and switched to very solemnly mentioning her “boo-boo ear” every five minutes or so. Girl knows how to milk it.
—mimi smartypants choo-choo chooses you.