don’t let trouble climb
TWENTY TEN Y’ALL/ POLAR BEAR’S DEN Y’ALL/ HE’S NAMED SVEN Y’ALL
Well, that certainly was a lot of holidays. We had Christmas (cookies and Webkinz* and science toys), my birthday (pasta and wine), New Year’s Eve (girls eventually asleep in footie pajamas, their parents drunk on good beer, an unfortunate-but-brief tour of terrible pornography on cable). Soon it will be LT’s birthday and time for more celebrating. Later in the month it will be Nora’s (SEVENTH!) birthday. By February I will be so done with things like wine and cake and French cheese. I will be begging for a lettuce leaf and a glass of room-temperature water.
*There is no reason that you should know about this unless you are parent to the target audience, but Webkinz are stuffed animals that come with their own online avatar. Of a sort. There are quasi-educational games** to play that earn your fake animal fake money with which it can buy fake items for its fake room. Nora adores the games but she is the richest person in Webkinz Land because of a serious lack of interest in the fake-shopping component. I think it’s stupid, but harmless, and that if she chooses to spend her limited screen time in front of the computer instead of a superhero cartoon I shall not, as they say, “sweat it.”
**Actually, I have to be honest and admit that I am just as hooked on this Scrabble analogue as she is. Not only is it fun to make words, but the music is strangely Dave Brubeck-ish and I like how upset the beavers get when you don’t do well. One of them clutches his little beaver head and rocks from side to side. It’s awesome.
Oh, and speaking of celebrations, here is a sign that Nora inexplicably made and taped to my living room wall. Time to party, I suppose.
THE ETERNALLY TEDIOUS TOPIC
Disclaimer: I like Kristin. She is friendly and warm and cheerfully hauled my West-Coast-impaired ass from San Francisco to the middle of wine-country-nowhere for that blogger meetup party back in the fall. She’s on some kind of fitness quest and that’s cool. I could give a shit where people find their bliss, as long as it’s not in puppy-stomping or yelling about Jesus on public transportation.
She wrote this post on an exercise-focused blog, and apparently it’s a response to some other post about obesity and genetics and body types. My standard response to those kinds of discussions is yawny rather than drama-rrific, because after twenty years of reading everything there is to read about gender and body image I am not able to argue about it anymore. Either you get it or you don’t, and it makes me sort of sad that the larger issues get lost when they are glossed over with a coating of “health” and “obesity crisis.”
However, because I am pathologically unable to ignore this kind of thing, I did end up reading it, and in all the comments, not one person remarked on the thing that Kristin said about losing weight that really saddened me:
I do love that I don’t feel the need to turn off all the lights before I get into bed with Corey. And yes, it’s an immense relief to not have to contort myself into various hunched self-conscious positions in order to make myself less conspicuous at the swimming pool.
Listen hard, now: you never did have to turn out those lights or hunch into those positions. No one has to. Not at one hundred or three hundred pounds.
In fact, I order everybody to fuck with the lights on and carry a sign at the swimming pool that says YEAH I’M IN A BATHING SUIT. Maybe that second part is unnecessary. I’ll leave it for you to decide.
Like I said, Kristin’s a good egg. Because of that, I hope she takes this next criticism in the gentle teasing spirit in which it is meant: girl, you simply have to stop blogging about “tasting vomit” or “almost puking” or “wanting to puke” when talking about strenuous exercise. You are not making it sound very appealing.
CONSERVATION IS GROSS
My office is replacing all the toilets with water-saving ones, and when I got this memo I shrugged and forgot all about it. Yay planet Earth, yay feel-good corporate gestures, yay fewer gallons of water washing away our excretions. Whatever. Then I actually saw one of the new toilets. It looks like a regular toilet, but there is a little metal sign near the flusher that instructs you to press the handle up for “liquid waste” and down for “solid waste.” Oh god. I was not prepared for so much discussion of “waste.” I know it is just between me and the toilet, but do we have to talk about it so much? Every time I read the sign I get embarrassed all over again. In a tiny bit of good news, the handle seems to work fine in both directions.
WINTER OLYMPICS
Nora and I went ice skating last week. Her first time ever and my first time since the teenage years. It was sort of alarming how well she did—a few spills but she got the hang of it very quickly. “Very quickly” is also how she skated, I was not sure why we had to skate so FAST. I was planning some leisurely turns around the rink to the strains of radio-friendly hip-hop, but somehow she was always zooming way ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up. Time to get her fitted for one of those speed-skating full-body condoms.
—mimi smartypants is an ice-devouring sex tornado.