finslippy

The suburbs are tougher than I thought.

Overheard at the library this afternoon:

Ten-Year-Old Girl #1: My grandma has a gun. She shot someone once. She got in jail.
Ten-Year-Old Girl #2 (while rolling her eyes): Psssht, everyone's grandma got in jail.

We're off to Montauk for the July 4th week, where we shall enjoy quality time with my parents. Beachtime with my family is a charged affair, as my olive-skinned Italian mother enjoys mocking me as I apply SPF Infinity and don my broad-brimmed sunhat and Kevlar bodysuit because you can't be too careful. You'd think she would have ceased her mockery after the cancerous lesions began sprouting all over her well-tanned hide. But no, she just has them excised, applies SPF 15 (amateur) and laughs some more. At me. This is the reaction of most people when they see just how pale I am (ask Liz!) but most people are polite enough to hide their laughter behind two hands or a sheet of tin foil.

Posting will be light but hopefull not nonexistent. I hope there will be broadband. Please God, let there be broadband.

Meanwhile, hey, I have a new post up at Wonderland. And there's one from last week, too! We had some comment trouble but all is working now, so comment away.

Ain't got no mind, etc.

Henry is seriously into Hair. Not the keratinous filaments sprouting from your head, you charming scamp! The American tribal love-rock musical! And let's get this out of the way—yes, I bought the CD of Hair: The Movie with my own well-earned money; yes, I have been known to sing along; yes, I'm a dirty hippie. But you knew that already.

I got him into Hair: The Musical: The Movie to get him out of the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack, which was his father’s fault, and so here we are. And yes, I know that half the songs are about sex and drugs and sex while on drugs and making drugs while having sex, but we zip right past those songs. I do allow the occasional "orgasm" or "virgin" to slip in there. I'm probably asking for trouble. But then, he's already listened to Bowie; he'll be hooked on drugs before the year is out. I'm pinning all my hopes and dreams on the cat.

Anyway, a while ago Scott pointed out that the lyrics in Hair consist almost exclusively of lists. And now this is all I can think about when I listen to Hair, which we have to do every time we're in the car. Now instead of grooving on the mellow vibes and rock-by-way-of-Broadway stylings, I can only think about the lists. The lists! Why? If Charismatic Hippie Treat Williams isn't naming his many bodily and spiritual assets, then Righteous Black Hippie is tallying the various derogatory synonyms for "black," or Nell Carter and Another Hippie Who Kind of Reminds Me Of That Guy From Ashford and Simpson are specifying all the items they do not have, which come out to quite a lot. One thing they do have in abundance: scarves. That’s why they’re so cheerful!

Because musicals often mirror reality, it’s clear to me that hippies were deeply into itemizing. It was how they kept from slipping into a hashish-induced paranoid funk. "I love a lot of things, man. Brother, I'm gonna enumerate the many things I love, while swooping around with my fan-freaky-tastic Twyla Tharp moves. Dig!"

I love peace and birds!

[kick turn lurch arabesque]

I love songs and beats and words!

[graceful fall into a pile of leaves, afro is covered in twigs, no matter!]

I love drugs and love and shit!

[entwining hands with an ambiguously ethnic, macrame-wearing woman]

I love you, let's all say "tit!"

[all the hippies fall into place]

Tit tit titty-tit tits!

Now we'll all sing about our bits!

[incoherent mumbling]

Aaaand... nipple!

War is bad! WAR IS SAD!

War is bad and sad and makes me mad!

Here are 37 more synonyms for negative feelings we have about war!

Aaaand... fade out.

This is how life was.

In conclusion, I love that movie still and you can't make me not love it, even though Treat Williams has actual caterpillars pinned above his eyes, after he lost his eyebrows in a motorcycle accident.

Om mani padme om

When your child has a week off between school and camp, and you are helpless to do much of anything but go along with his childish whims, you learn things. Happily, you learn that when you adopt a Zen-like attitude, abandoning all wants and desires and living purely in the moment, your child can be ... fun.

You will realize, quickly, that most of your annoyance (which is sometimes unfettered rage, because let's face it, you have issues) stems not from your son's actions per se but that his actions generally run exactly counter to whatever you need him to do. The timetable of the preschooler is not compatible in the slightest with the timetable of reality. For instance, you could say to the preschooler, after giving many friendly time-is-almost-up warnings, "Time to go!," and the preschooler will say, "Yes, but first I have to do X"—x being "construct a lego battleship" or "tell you a long, convoluted story involving a transformer" or "watch two hours of Jimmy Neutron." Once he's announced this, there is no moving him, although you still do, hoisting all 45 pounds of him into the car as he shouts I AM NOT DONE YET ARE YOU LISTENING. Sometimes this will happen as you are crossing a street and you will find yourself pulling at your child's wrist and hissing there is a car coming MOVE IT but he believes that time has simply frozen while he provides the backstory on his imagined rocketship adventures. And to do this he must stop walking. To concentrate on the hand gestures. While a painful death swiftly approaches. But I digress!

But when you have no agenda, nowhere to go, and nothing in particular to do, you can pass the day at the leisurely pace that the preschooler demands. And you see that his adventure-filled brain is not without its entertainment value. You can, say, spend an hour in the backyard engaging in a "tickle battle," and watch your son strike all manner of hilarious ninja poses before he strikes at your midsection with his Tickling Fists of Death. You don't have to hurry him through bathtime because he's not an hour late for bed, so he can spend a full hour lying on his back with his ears underwater, singing songs he is composing on the spot, your little half-submerged Marvin Hamlisch. You can play Magneto and MagLady, with MagDog and MagKitty standing by in case of extreme peril. He can list his many favorite colors (every one of them but yellow, in case you're interested) and you don't feel like you want to pierce your skull with a fork—because you're not late, no one is expecting you, and there's nothing you have to cross off your list.

Of course, you can do all this knowing that he'll be in camp by Monday. Thank God.

Swiftly fly the years, and shit.

I am outraged.

I just returned from a marathon of emotional manipulation the likes of which I have not experienced since that fucking E.T. almost died but then (spoiler alert!) didn't die and returned to his alien peoples. And I am outraged! I said that already.

Picture, if you will, twenty rosy-cheeked preschoolers wearing paper mortarboards, solemnly processing to a taped version of "Pomp and Circumstance." Then those same preschoolers singing a cappella songs about growing up and learning their numbers. Then those SAME damn kids, some of them waving to their parents, getting their preschool diplomas. And wait a minute, one of them is your son! And he's standing incredibly still so as to keep the mortarboard on his head, and he's gazing at his diploma with obvious satisfaction and pride! And his teachers are crying! DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL. I was there to take pictures and congratulate my son, not frantically blink back tears while scouring my purse for a used Kleenex. My stomach still hurts from holding in the sobs. Dicks! All of them!

And it's not even like he's really graduating from preschool—he still has another year of preschool because some genius decided to be born six days after the cut-off date. But still, DAMN IT, it was adorable.

While you're here, I've got a Wonderland post from this week for you to read, and also from last week. Please note that the URL for Wonderland has changed. There are some exciting new changes over at Alphamom, including new Baby Name Finder and Product Ratings sections. Change is good, unless it arrives in the form of your child graduating and his school faculty and administration creating an event designed solely to make you sing "Sunrise, Sunset" to yourself and leave mascara puddles on your husband's button-down.

It takes him longer to catch up, before he's had his morning coffee.

"Charlie has no water in his water bowl."
"Dogs don't need water to live."
"No, they need beer, is that what you think, Scott? You would probably give him beer."
"…"
"Hey, you know what I think? I think we should make a special kind of dog beer. Think about it! Dog beer! So you'd never have to drink alone!"
"Why not just give them regular beer?"
"You'd want to make a special kind, with a lower alcohol content, so your dog would only be loveably tipsy."
"But what if your dog drank too much of it? He'd still get drunk."
"No, it would be a magical beer that keep him only mildly buzzed."
"How is that possible? How do you keep blood alcohol at one level like that?"
"I'm really glad you're arguing these points with me, because I AM COMPLETELY SERIOUS."
"Look, I'm just trying to help you, here. You're a better writer than you are a beer maker, all right? DO NOT MAKE DOG BEER."

What? Oh, hi.

I don't know, I just woke up with this crappy headache. I'm going to start each blog post in the middle of a conversation, I hope you don't mind. So I imagine that we've been chatting for a few minutes now and you finally just blurt out, is something wrong or do you hate me? And then I say, etc. Bad headache. As if any headache can be good? I guess the headache that tells you you're alive. Like, you wake up in the hospital, filled with tubes, and your head is pounding, and you're all, I can feel my head! Jubilee! You use "jubilee" as an exclamation, did I mention? If you didn't before, now you do. Come on, try it. It will make you happy! Jubilee!

I have the kind of headache that screams you need coffee, friend, but I've now enjoyed far more coffee than a hothouse flower such as myself should ever enjoy, so I'm trembling and my head is still pounding. I don't know, I don't even know why I'm mentioning the headache. It's probably allergies. That's my mom's answer to everything. Did I ever tell you about the time I developed severe vertigo? One day I was in my apartment, sorting through the mail—I think this was, oh, six years ago—and WHAM the entire room tipped over, and BOOM I was on the ground, and FLIMFLAMAROO I was then okay but wondering if rooms are supposed to tip over like that. Then it started happening every twenty minutes or so, this normal normal normal BAM normal vertigo attack, and it was no good at all. My doctor sent me to another doctor who screamed ANEURYSM! EMERGENCY! And Scott and I were screaming and crying all the way to the emergency room, but of course it wasn't that, and then the neurologist said MS! YOU HAVE MS! And we wept and rent our garments, but nope, it wasn't that, and all along my mom is calling me and insisting, allergies, I know it's allergies, in her Long Island-by-way-of-Astoria accent, ALL-UH-GIES, and OH it made me mad. Allergies, she says, when I am clearly nearing death! Then the weeks passed and the vertigo went away and I stopped thinking about it until exactly one year later, when it hit me again. At the beginning of autumn. And I went for more tests. Final diagnosis: allergies. Damn it all to hell.

I was going to write about something else, but I am both sped up and foggy, kind of like I imagine Izzy is, all the time. What's this? Whatever it is, I will kill it. And—POUNCE! Oh, my poor dog. I will write more about cat/dog relations some other time, so you non-pet-loving people can skip over that entire post. But my poor dog is not happy with this kitten. I am betting on her calming down with age, but for all I know she will just gather more strength and more energy until she is able to tear him apart with the force of her mind. I always wanted a telekinetic cat, sure, who doesn't? but not at this price, dear God, no.

Hey, it's our eighth wedding anniversary today! Which makes it especially wonderful that I woke up growling my goddamn head is killing me can you quit it with the goddamn whistling? He would marry me all over again, if he had the chance. Seriously, though, if you're not married but want to know what to look for in a spouse, I will lend you Scott for a day or two. All right, that's creepy, so I'll just tell you why he's excellent marriage material. First of all, he wakes up with Henry, allowing me extra sleeping-in time. I'm almost embarrassed to add that he brings a cup of coffee to me each morning, too, but there, I just did. And on the weekends, he makes pancakes, baby, and the pancakes are delicious. So the whole morning-routine thing alone makes Scott a man worth marrying. And he's scarily funny. This weekend alone, at several different times, he had me laughing so hard I got a little frightened that I might not be able to stop. Ah, that heady combination of giddiness and terror—you can't beat that. So marry Scott today! Oops, too late. Hands off, ladies. You too, men.

Everything I learned about writing, I learned in 10th grade French class.

Hello! I am called Alice. What are you called? Here it is hot. It is very hot. It is not cold. There is no snow. It is very very humid. I like sandwiches!

I have a dog. My dog is named Charlie. I also have a cat. She is Izzy. Charlie and Izzy are not friends. Charlie is very afraid of Izzy. Charlie runs from the cat. Izzy likes to hit Charlie. Izzy has sharp claws. Izzy has small sharp teeth. Bad Izzy! Poor Charlie! Izzy has a bathroom in a box. It does not smell good. I clean her box bathroom. Would you like to go to the library?

At the library there are books.

Charlie wants to go outside. I go outside with Charlie. It is too hot. Charlie does not feel well in the stomach. Here is some water for you! Charlie does not drink the water. No, Charlie lies in the sun. Dogs are not smart. Shucks!

I am eating melon. I eat the kind of melon that begins with water. In hot weather, this melon is very good. Charlie, you cannot eat it! If you eat it, then you will sick on the lawn! It is refreshing.

I sit here outside. There are bees. I am afraid! The bee goes away. Celebration! I am also fatigued. Tomorrow it will rain. I hope. I would like to go to the beach, or perhaps the cinema. I like where it is not so hot. Have you seen my friend Jean-Pierre? I am waiting for him.

P.S. I want to tell you about a new writing. This writing is in the other place, called Wonderland. I forget to tell you! But here it is. Now we eat french fries and dance at the disco!