gone viral
Sick. Mere days after I had been semi-smugly reflecting on the fact that I had not been sick in a while. Thanks, karma! I have a terrible sore throat and LT is sympathetic but also keeps asking me if I think a zinc supplement would help. Ha ha. Very funny. So far (knock wood, throw salt, cross fingers, contort fingers to ward off evil eye) I have not felt bad enough to stay home from work, but the sore throat necessitates that I sip water every five seconds or so, which means that I visit the bathroom several times an hour, and maybe I really should just stay home. Or take my laptop to the john and telecommute from there. It would be more efficient.
But perhaps there is something more exciting than a mere virus going on in my body! This morning I woke up disgustingly early, as usual. My body seems to have re-set its wakeup time at 4:30 am. I don’t like to talk about this because it makes me sad. It is progressively getting worse, and if this keeps up I will eventually be a wan ghost haunting the fringes of society. Too bad there is no shift work for mid-level publishing executives.
So I was hunkered down in the blankets, mentally cursing the fact that I cannot even sleep until my goddamn alarm, when I heard a tiny sound from within me. Like an audible stomach gurgle. Except, get this: it sounded electronic. Then it happened again. It was like a teeny synthesizer inside me, and it played the same sequence of tones twice. Shut up. I know what I heard. I am becoming cyborg! Or the CIA planted a microchip in my food, and that was the test signal, and any day now you’ll read about how an obscure Chicago blogger was arrested with a backpack bomb and a map of a federal building.
SETTLED INTO CLICHÉ
Right now I am hating how folksy wisdom crap turns out to be sort of true. Being grateful for one’s health. Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. They grow up so fast. Ugh, it’s all so precious I want to die. But dude! They do grow up so fast!
Nora turned eight. She had an ice-skating party with about fourteen of her crazy friends. I knew that when one rented the smaller rink at this place that it did not come with an attendant, and I really did not want to skate, so I was grateful that some more-athletic parents laced up and got out there. I had been picturing a kid breaking his ankle out on the ice and me yelling, “Crawl to me, sweetie! Crawl to me so I can help you!”
Also, for quite a few months now Nora has been asking to get her hair cut super-short, and I decided that eight was plenty old enough to be in charge of one’s own hair. (Up to a point. No hair dye or bleach or military buzzcuts, yet.) We poked around online and she expressed interest in Hermione’s post-Potter hairdo, and now Nora’s hair is maybe a teeny bit longer than that. She loves it and mentioned that it could be spiked up with gel for a “special occasion.” I think I approve of her notion of special occasions.
SHRED IT UP
More birthday weekend fun: small fry got to go back to the skatepark, making a grand total of two sessions on her Christmas skateboard. I took lots of video, and she would be mad at me for posting the only run on which she wiped out. But I like how she falls with style, and I love how she gets up to retrieve her deck and try again.
(Skateboarding culture, which I have a serious danger of becoming very acquainted with in the next few years, is kind of foreign to me. The music is familiar in a punk-rock-lite sort of way but everything else is flipped on its head, because so many of the kids are straight-edge and it’s all about friendship and athleticism and being “positive.” And you know, that was just not my punk experience at all. My punk “ideals” were more along the lines of property destruction, antagonizing the police, drinking hobo wine, and finding the darkest, gloomiest hole to mentally inhabit. I think the skaters are adorable but I’m still a bit puzzled by the whole thing.)
OKAY THE LAST NORA THING I PROMISE
While I was downloading video from the skatepark I also found this. Nora took the camera into her room at our old house, made some beats on her music machine, and filmed a lengthy stuffed-animal video that is somewhat Warholian in its combination of Zen and stupidity. Nearly four minutes of your life that you will not get back. At one point it sounds like I give her pointers on focal length but I do not recall this day in the slightest. Eerie!
—mimi smartypants, ghost in the machine.