couldn’t trust my homies just a bunch of dirty rats
So it seems that washing my hair every day makes it look bad, but washing my hair every other day means that it looks bad about 12 hours before it is due to be washed again, so I…need to wash my hair every 36 hours? That is going to be complicated. It could work if I were a lady of leisure with an odd sleeping schedule but I am not, I am a lady of INDUSTRY (with a somewhat odd sleeping schedule). Give me all your dry shampoo recommendations! Speaking of, I kind of love that this was a thing in the 1960s (according to my mom) and then it totally disappeared (I never used dry shampoo as a teen) and now it is back! What does that mean, hairstyle-zeitgeist-wise? I want everything to have a secret meaning, suitable for lengthy, Adderall-and-Old-Style-fueled pseudoacademic discourse.
BORING CAT ANECDOTE
We have BIG NEWS in the arena of CAT MENTAL HEALTH because Rocko the Anxiety Taco was observed PLAYING WITH A TOY. I don’t know if he was just having a good day or one of us accidentally double-dosed his meds, but Rocko bumbled his fat mopey self around the dining room in pursuit of a jingleball and it was super crazy adorable (to me and the other two humans who love him). Also adorable was Murphy’s astonishment—you could tell he hated being left out of a play session but he knew better to than to interrupt the world’s grumpiest old man.
SEASONAL
We are hurtling toward the black hole of the holidays. We already, believe it or not, had one Xmas-related one-side-of-the-family get-together because everyone’s rest-of-December was terribly messy. It was a little bit of a live-and-in-person debut of my kid and his new name and no one even screwed it up. I was ready to gently correct, and of course I was ready to POUNCE on anything truly rude that was not just an honest mistake, but it was not needed. That freed me up to drink wine and poke at my cousin’s new baby. The baby is not truly interactive yet but it is at the stage of being truly fucking astonished at every little thing, and that is fun to watch and in fact a good strategy for taking care of a baby that age: just astonish it all day long.
So. Back home we put up our tree, it is not beautiful but it is very homegrown and still has the T-Rex head from a long-ago tube of “Jurassic Park”-branded lip balm at the top instead of a star or angel. But a T-Rex is a star! And it would be a kick-ass angel, as they were reportedly rather freaky-looking if you believe the Bible (I’m not at all sure that you should). This week we will make several batches of ravioli, the traditional Xmas food. And Aaron and I will continue our yearly wintertime “watch an entire television show” project—this year it is The Americans, which I like quite a bit, as it is a family drama disguised as a spy thriller. My favorite character is the FBI mail robot.
MATURITY
Also this weekend, my child wrote a 5-page English paper WITHOUT flopping around for several hours panicking about how it was an impossible task, and WITH notes and first drafts and sketching out how, in general, he wanted the thing to go. I read it over and inserted exactly one hyphen and it was very, very good. Like, first-semester college-freshman good.
Aaron has always been excellent at things you can just sit down and DO—math, science, answer-the-question-type work—but has tended to suffer Analysis Paralysis about anything that took planning. It used to make me crazy to see him sit down in front of a blinking cursor* and just try to write a school paper from the top, and to fiddle about with word choice and trying to get something exactly right without even planning what needed to be said. You need a blank page full of things like INTRO and MAKE THE POINT ABOUT HISTORICAL CONTEXT and CITE SO-AND-SO HERE and TRANSITION??? before you can even start putting sentences together!
*It is ironic and hilarious that I would be bitching about this since “sitting down in front of a blinking cursor” is 100% what I have been doing in this stupid little blog since 1999—but I am not being graded on this blog. (Oh shit! I’m not, right???) Also I don’t think too many English teachers would be fans of No-Delete Thursdays.
—mimi smartypants, defensive rookie of the year.