Me, singing in a loop: People are people so why should it be etc
Huck: Do you want to be singing that over and over?
Me: Not particularly
Huck, eyes lighting up: “Oh baby pleeeeease, give a little respect to-oo-oo-oo me!” There, does that help?
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
So today Rilla asked if we could play a game where I pretend I’m her mommy. Um. OK. About ten minutes in, she said, “Can you pause the game for a second? I need to ask you a question when you’re my REAL mommy.”
Me: “Our family uses a lot of hyperbole.”
Rilla: “Mom, I would NEVER do that.”
Beanie’s take on the Romantic poets: “I was into childhood before childhood was cool.”
***
Have just been informed there are two crane flies in the patio room. Their names are Bert and Arugula.
***
My kids have been setting up this game of Catan for so long it’s an entirely new generation of settlers from the ones who left the homeland.
***
—writes funny tweet
—nah, that’s 100% snark, doesn’t further convo
—okay, I’ll just send it to Scott instead
—he asks me to marry him again
***
Neighbor just rang our bell. Dead crane fly in her hand. “Thought your crew might want a close look!” She gets us.
***
Huck: Can I get some short jeans?
Me: Short jeans?
Huck: Yeah, like Rilla is wearing.
Me: Ah yes! Jean shorts!
***
One of the sweet kids whose classroom I visited on Thursday wrote a thank-you note to “Melissa Lively.” Wondering if it’s too late to change my pen name.
***
Personal aesthetic: buttered toast.
***
Beanie: You and Rose think in words. Rilla thinks in pictures. I think in colors and sounds. I’m not sure what Jane thinks in. Me: Elvish runes, probably.
***
I completed a downright lyrical grant application for a wetland restoration project in LA County today, but my proudest accomplishment of the day is photoshopping* a pic of Adam Driver dropping a cup of coffee on the ground.
*very poorly
*not actually in Photoshop
*in Powerpoint, all right? Look, I was busy.
***
In the car on the way to piano lessons, there’s a heavy sigh from the backseat. Rilla: Sometimes…sometimes I just wish I were a mantis shrimp.
Last night I was chatting with Jane on Slack—she had a story for me about her Victorian Lit class—and Sherlock Holmes came up. She asked if I remembered how old she was when she started reading them. I was guessing around age ten or eleven—was it before or after our move to California?—and she remembered that she first encountered Sherlock on a Jim Weiss story tape. So: Virginia probably. Then she pinged a burst of laughter—
lol lol lol i just searched bonny glen + jim weiss
Good old blog comes through again. Our family memory bank.
Of course this made me wince, knowing I’ve dropped the ball on daily posts yet again. I do have a lot of tidbits stashed in drafts, but those aren’t searchable.
We’ve talked so much about how our collective shift to social networks changed our blogging habits, both as blog writers and readers. One of the more subtle shifts, I think, began to happen even before we jumped on Facebook: bit by bit our blogs took on a more formal tone. On Facebook and Twitter, we’re looser, less polished. Personal blogs used to feel spontaneous, immediate, diaristic. A few of them still do, but I think on the broad spectrum of kinds of writing, a blog post is usually closer to essay than tweet. These social conventions fascinate me. These days, more people are likely to read and respond to my writing on Facebook than on Bonny Glen, yet I feel freer about slapdashing an unpolished thought over there.
I used to worry about losing things on Facebook or Twitter. I’d post funny kid quotes there and then, zip, they’d be carried along by the current and disappear. I wanted to archive all those memories here, and I worked out elaborate systems for saving things. I even had a side-blog for a while that was nothing but kid-related tweets I wanted to save. Later, I got savvier and set up IFTTT functions that automatically archive all my Twitter and FB posts in Evernote. This is both handy and dandy, but it’s a clunky substitute for the searchable family chronicle that is this blog.
I’m laughing at myself because I’ve traveled this loop before. There’s such an obvious and simple fix: just post the kid stuff here. Because odds are that one day Rilla will ping me from college—probably via a tooth implant that will trigger my phone-necklace to display her text on the back of my hand—wanting to know when, exactly, was her heavy origami phase. So, for the record: April of 2017, right after you turned eleven, I walked into my bedroom after tucking in the boys, and you pounced on me with a square of pink paper. Which is why I had to write your sister, ten minutes later, to apologize for disappearing in the middle of our Slack conversation.
Lissa: [9:00 PM]
Sorry, Rilla came in with an urgent need to teach me how to make an origami pianoJane: [9:00 PM]
that sounds entirely reasonable
–Did it rain last night or is that condensation
–Wait, I thought “morning dew” meant poop
–Various spellings and meanings of do/dew/doo
–Ice/water/steam, water vapor, why condensation happens
–Is that guardrail crumpled from a car crashing into it
–Why are they called “action figures” instead of dolls
–Where do you think the monkey will be hidden this time
–Are peanut butter crackers sweets
–Sewing, pros and cons
–What to spend birthday money on: probably K’nex
–That bus is too long to be Steve’s
–Why does Steve ride the bus
–What does “qualifications” mean
–Qualifications for being on American Ninja Warrior
–Really nice job parking, mom
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that this is a recreation of the Jamestown fort. As my friend Lori said on Instagram, “the Ikea stepstools are a dead giveaway.”
The settlers are getting along all right so far, despite a stagnant water supply and a rather heated dispute about whether the fort should, or should not, have an anachronistic radio tower. I mean, why let a perfectly good tomato cage go unused?
One young settler expressed consternation over the gap in the walls of the brick storehouse (due to the discovery of a brown widow at the bottom of the old brick pile), but his older compatriot pointed out the storehouse needed a doorway, after all. Crisis averted.
We’re in the car on the way to piano class. There’s a heavy sigh from the backseat—a bone-deep sigh full of longing.
“Sometimes,” says Rilla, “sometimes I wish I were a mantis shrimp.”
I’ll let you sit with that for a moment. I was baffled by this remark but Beanie knew at once what she meant.
“I know, right? Twelve color rods!”
And then they explained to me that human eyes have three photoreceptors, giving us sensitivity to red, blue, and green light. Mantis shrimp have twelve photoreceptors. Rilla was staring out the window, wishing she could see the world in more colors.
I wrote a quickie booknotes post last night in the five minutes between work and family movie time, but I took it down a short while later because it was too quick, too silent about events I actually have quite a lot of words for. Choice words. Not all of them fit for my kids’ ears. I’ve been speaking them elsewhere and seem to have annoyed a fair number of people. Well, that’s too bad. I suspect I’ll be saying more, not less, in days to come. Perhaps not always here, in this space which is a happy little retreat for me. But maybe here too. There is so very much to say.
(Deep breath, fingers twitching.) Not this minute. Right now, I need to work. So I’m going to just open a space for a family story or two. If you want my activist voice, come on over to Facebook or Twitter.
A couple of days ago, a Girl Scout rang the bell. It’s cookie season, as you know. I turned her down with regrets, because, frankly, five dollars a box is too rich for my blood.
An hour later, another ring, another sweet kid, another set of regrets.
THREE MINUTES LATER, another doorbell chime. But this time it was our neighbor, Guy—who seriously is the nicest guy—holding out three boxes of cookies.
“I can’t say no to a little girl,” he said, thrusting Do-si-dos, Samoas, and Tagalongs into my arms. “But I also can’t eat these cookies.”
My children would like to raise a statue in his honor.
My son wrote the following about me in an email to a friend: “She used to cook dinner or all the time until Dad [took over the meal prep] and now she only Cooks now and then. Her Specialties are sandwiches and leftovers.”
I may need to add that to my resumé.
I had garden-y things to add to this post but my five twenty minutes are up. Tomorrow, maybe. And I’m going to re-post the one I took down yesterday (it’s not much of anything, trust me, just disconnected sentences about what we’re reading) now that I’ve had a chance to explain why I was quiet (here) over the (tumultuous) weekend.