whooping of the car alarm
LUKE I AM YOUR PERSONAL TRAINER
In my last post I mentioned going to the gym, albeit in a gentle, Nora-centered context (about the way she marched in and took over the childcare room). If that was not enough of a hint, here is where I come clean. I have gone over to the dark side. I am exercising. A lot. Not just yoga or long walks around the neighborhood, either. I have been running. I have been lifting weights. Not fast (11-minute miles), not competently (my bench press numbers are really, really sad), and not with immediately obvious results (it was not my goal to lose weight, although I have lost a little). There has not been a drastic health overhaul: Miller High Life and gummy worms are still two of my major food groups. And yet. To the gym I go.
I got some guest passes to the gym, liked it, joined, made it a regular thing, and then realized that exercising makes me about a thousand times hornier than I have been in a while. I run three miles, I use my little spaghetti arms to throw some iron around, and then I come home and OH YEAH. It is like yo, check it! My body is awesome! It can do this! And this! You like that? Yes you do, you little worm. Who's your daddy now?
Ahem. Anyway. Just mark “regular exercise” down in the ever-lengthening column of My UnGoth Activities. If my 1987 self could see my 2007 self,* she'd never stop throwing up. To be fair, the 2007 self gets a little nauseated when looking back on the 1987 self too, with all the pretension and faux-smarts and literary nihilism and clove cigarettes. (Gah! We really smoked those things! Why didn't we just spray a heap of sawdust with lavender Febreeze and inhale that into our lungs? It would have been much cheaper.)
*Insert my usual caveat about not believing in static time-capsule selves but rather a “self” in a perpetual state of becoming, etc.
STREET GENIUS
I was hauling my huge catch out the door of the library, or rather trying to shove it all back in my dorky canvas Trader Joe's bag after the security guard's cursory glances and good-natured ball-busting (“You again? You going to read all that?”), when a woman approached me. At first glance she seemed relatively normal—clean, not drooling, not wearing an empty pizza slice container as a hat—although if I had looked closer I would have seen her pinwheel eyes and her facial twitches. “There you are!” she said. “Why weren't you at the seminar?”
For some reason, instead of anything like “uh, I don't know you” I asked, “What seminar?”
“It was in the basement,” she said quietly. “It was about false consciousness. There was cookies and cake and the doctors had pills. I looked for you but you didn't come, didn't come, didn't come. Can I have a dollar?”
This last bit plus the panhandling clued me in that something was wrong with this picture, so I smiled an enigmatic smile, fixed my gaze safely on Middle Nowhere, and kept walking. She asked again, “Why weren't you at the seminar?”
Don't ask why, but I love to play along. I said, “I wanted to go. But I signed up too late. They were full.”
Sounding weirdly lucid, the library loony said, “Too bad. Maybe next time.”
Maybe next time indeed. If there truly is a seminar somewhere with cookies and pills and Marxist doctrine, sign me the fuck up.
NORA EATING TASTY ANIMALS
So axiomatic that it is devolving into clichÉ: the idea that children will at some point do something, be something, or enjoy something that is in direct opposition to their parent's values. The hairy-legged hippie with the Barbie-worshipper, the fraternity jock with the poet son, the sunny evangelical with the sullen punk. I am a vegetarian (with a fairly large “mmm, sushi” loophole), and Nora loves meat. I think I have posted a few examples of her enthusiastic flesh consumption in the past, but now she is at the point of being able to articulate her love. LT and I have both been on the receiving end of her sincere and unironic soliloquies about how she loves meat, she loves all kinds of meat, meat is delicious, and she can't get enough meat (and the sad thing is, in our house she really can't). For laughs, we sometimes toss out the wildest food words we can think of and ask if she would try them—Nora, would you try seitan? Menudo? Chateaubriand? Huitlacoche? Before answering, she always asks, “Is that meat?” If the answer is yes, she is game.
I don't think Nora will have the standard oh the poor little creatures epiphany any time soon, either. She was eating canned chicken soup for lunch, chasing up all the chicken bits with her spoon, and asked me how the feathers and beak figure into the chicken soup equation. Without delving too deeply into the horror of the slaughterhouse or the grim realities of agribusiness, I said that “the farmer” throws them away after killing the chicken. “The chicken dies,” I said, in what I hoped was a neutral fashion. “Then its body gets chopped up into pieces, for food and for soup.” Nora thought about this for a moment, still eating her soup, before declaring, “And then…it's chicken!”
—mimi smartypants, and then it's chicken.