Author Archives: Naptimewriting

Okay, let’s get six or seven things straight.

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Lady in the magenta cotton cardigan, black leggings, white T-shirt, and black Chucks? The 80s are over. Please get a new wardrobe.

People at Target who branched out from wine in a box to sangria in a box? Nice idea, and I would totally go for it, but the so-called natural flavors within are supposed to be fruit juice, not whatever nasty chemical concoction gave me the terrible hangover this morning. Your ideas suck and your sucky wine sucks you suckers.

Cats? Knock it off. That’s not funny.

Trader Joe’s? Kudos on the vegan products, dudes. LOVE the vegan jell-o. Heaven. Totally forgot how good gelled fruit mushiness could be. But I’m totally let down by the fake beef strip thingamabobbers. Stir fried that beef-less stuff with veggies. Gagged on the texture and picked it all out. Can’t anyone make fake meat that actually tastes and feels like the flesh of a muscle-y critter? No, of course not. Thanks for trying, I guess.

Small person who lives in my house and eats my food and more than necessary pokes me in the eye? Please top the bedtime bullshit. Sure it’s understandable for your age that after a move you’re all topsy-turvy. But see, I have less patience at the end of the day. Try out your nonsense at the beginning of the day and we’ll all get on better. I swear.

WTF?

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We don’t get it, Naptime Writing.  Why do you claim to like moving, when we know you have a three year old child who is, shall we say, a bit needy, patience about three hours’ shy of his 15-16 hour days, and a laziness par excellence? why iis this your third cheerful move in nine months?

In a word, dear readers, accessories. We can’t justify frivolous expenses. Usually. But in a new place there are neighbors who need blocking via curtains and walls that seem shabby without a bit of color via low VOC paint and floors that seem naked without throw rugs and a doorstep that feels bare without a mat and a garden that can’t be left with its original flora.

So IKEA and Target and local retailers get a visit during naptime, while Spouse is sleeping off his superhuman feats of  moving a whole household over a weekend (our system is that I pack, for a week, while Peanut sleeps his paltry, oft interrupted 9 hours and spouse lifts and heaves and relocates like mad for a day or two until we’re done).

I’m off for a new lock for the garage, a dish rack for our new dishwasher-free life, and bigger pots for our fruit trees. ‘Cuz we aren’t dropping actual roots at this place. We’ll be here a year or two, tops. Not enough to hand over our four mass-producing pear, plum, apple, and peach trees forever.

Easy weekend

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Two adults, one child, one 16-ft. truck, three days, and a house and garage full of stuff to move less than one mile.

I bet we’re done in  two and a half days.

Another rental, this time away from the noises and neighborhood we’re not crazy about for different noises and neighborhood until Mr. Mortgage (over at his new blog which is finally up at Field Check Group) suggests that, some time in 2011, that the bottom has finally arrived and it’s time to buy.

I think you can. I think you can.

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Peanut skated into the living room this morning with one foot in a box car from his 1970s hand-me-down train set, flipping socks into the air with a silicone spatula.

P: Mommy! I’m flipping pancakes and skating!

M: [actually looking; in fact marveling] Yeah you are.

P: I’m cooking on the train. It very hot! [realizes what that might mean…] Just the cooking part. This part [indicates the box car] not hot. Just right. A little warm, but  I’m being careful. Don’t worry. I’m skating!

M: You sure are.

P: And flipping up to the ceiling and everything gets cold and then we eat it up!

M: You’re cooking on a train engine and flipping pancakes and letting them cool on the ceiling and skating in a box car and eating the pancakes when they cool down?

P: Yes!

M: Wow.  Keep up the good work.

Sure, cute and all. But now I’m jonesing for pancakes, have no idea where to find a cooking locomotive, and not at all sure what to pack first for our move this weekend, because clearly anything in a box is something he needs for the “rolling out dough for a quiche in a tugboat” project he’ll invent tomorrow…

Just running the numbers now…

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Yup, my calculations support this thesis: sixteen hours a day is too long to spend with someone. Even someone who is wonderful, adorable, brilliant, creative, funny, and sweet, with a great perspective that makes life interesting.

Especially if that someone is human and has a few minor flaws, the most glaring of which is that he’s three. and that he’s here, every day, all day, for sixteen hours, seven days a week.

On a wonderful day, like today, where everyone is in a great mood, the weather is stellar, the universe cooperates, and everyone has joy in their heart and a smile on their face, by about hour thirteen, things start to devolve…

These are a few of my favorite spam…

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No, I’m not going to post the spam here. But I will categorize, analyze, and belittle for your reading pleasure.

Blog spam is quite different than email spam. Email spam tries to sell you something, get your money to Nigeria, or increase your [fill in the blank: size/pleasure/results/income/whatever]. Blog spam, though, tries to get your readers to follow a link to something they’re selling, whether product or ideology.

My delight stems from the approaches:

1) The “I stop here today read your amazing blog wow this is post I find  interesting for the thank you for posting” poorly translated obsequious post. Optional bonus: the barely coherent promise to “be frequent visitor here”

2) The dump of unrelated words and a link. Totally  nonsensical and pointless…if you’re just commenting hoping to find someone who doesn’t screen comments and posts everything, why bother with the random words? just post the link and hope it gets through.

3) My new favorite: the beligerent spam. These are new to my comment section and include a sentence of praise for the post, an acknowledgement that the following link has nothing to do  with anything you’ve ever said, and the admonition “don’t be an ass. This isn’t spam.” Oooooh. Thanks for telling me. I thought unrelated comments that refer not to my nonsense but instead point my readers to your nonsense was called spam. But if you call me an ass for thinking about deleting your comment, that makes it not spam? Nice tactic.

Maybe if I start asking people on the street and deriding their “do I know you?”s with “don’t be an ass, this isn’t mooching!” I will actually have an income. That would be nice, no? Try it yourselves. On strangers. With whom you have nothing in common and who have no interest in your having extra money. Ask them for some. Pre-empt arguments with “don’t be an ass; this isn’t unsolicited.” See how it goes over. Then tell me about it. I’ll even let you link to your site if you have actually read something I’ve written. Even if you call me an ass.

For really, at least this new spam tactic calls a spade a spade. Except it won’t call a spam a spam. Puzzling.

Denouement

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It’s not surprising. It’s not heartbreaking or arresting or even a bit of a shame. It’s certainly not ironic. But I will admit that there is a rue-twinged sense to the day in which I return from my first vacation since making the tough decision to stay home full time with my child, my first weekend by myself in three years, my first flawless days since his birth, my first experience in which I not only controlled my own time, activities, and thoughts, but also had the added gift of seeing the world, this lovely world of solitude and adulthood, through the eyes granted to me by staying home full-time, eyes I would not now have had I not decided to seek to learn every day to see things from a small human’s perspective and to privilege that perspective, respect the learning and explorative needs of those eyes that take precedence for now over mine own; this day after the first time alone as the new whoever I am is exactly as terrible as could have been (and was) predicted. Not because I glimpsed my freedom and was dragged back kicking and screaming (though that is true); not because the tiny tyrant is any worse than any other day of being three years old in a family of people trying to follow an attachment parenting philosophy but hobbled by two of the participants who are prisons of the selfish lack of patience of overeducated, driven, self-absorbed thrity-somethings (for it is a day pretty average as three-year-old battles and nonsense and wonderment and bullshit go); not because I am angry that I took so long to take a break or that it will be so long before it happens again (there is no anger, there is no regret, there is only general lack of sanity and sense of futility and hopelessness  and frustration and borderline acceptance of this choice we’ve made).

No. Today is relatively awful because it’s hot and nobody slept much last night and we got locked out of the house and Peanut is glad I’m back but punishing me a bit, and is enboldened by my absence, wherein the other parental unit played by his rules rather than mine, and so the young one is trying to navigate which of his  tricks will work today, trying the crap that works on Spouse out on me, hoping I’ve changed my ways and will do something different than my new anti-yell stragegy (asking three times, warning that this is the last time I ask, then going to bed with a book…his idea of hell is my idea of the best time-out ever. ) So today sucks not in contrast with my 74 hours of self-directed living free from the hostage taker who is a brilliant, healthy, funny, loving, thoughtful terror of stubbornness and obscene and devious cleverness, but rather because it’s just one of those days.

And I think, given that it is one of those days, and that one of those days is following all three of *those* days, that I’m doin’ pretty well, thank you very much.

and another

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another haiku for my trip back to myself

brain pumps blood to heart
sky lake sun breaths blinks french toast
now I remember

Now I’m going back to the voices on the phone. There are no words to thank her for this…

The defenestration of Berkeley

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Wanna know how off-the-charts bad today is? Mid-morning I taught my three-year-old the word “defenstrate.” And used it in a sentence with him as the object.

He wanted to know if you just throw somebody if that’s defenestrating. Nope. If you throw somebody *at* a window, is it defenestration? Nope.

“Please don’t throw me out of the window, Mommy.”

“I won’t babe. I would never do anything to hurt you, and defenestration might hurt. I would never do anything to scare you, and defenstration might scare you. I just really need you to know the word defenestration right now because I really, really, really thought about it a minute ago.”

“Oh. [beat.] Which window you thinkin’ bout, Mommy?”

Any of ’em, sweetie. All of ’em.

Want to hear a few more? Of course you do. All just from today…

Unsolicited, screeching, as I tried to distract by offering to read several new library stories, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I’m driving you nuts, Mommy!”

Throwing a fistful of toys in the air and yelling, “Rooooooar! I’m really not nice today!”

Clawing at my face, “Mommy I show you how that tree scratch me and then I go out and hit that tree!”

Oh my word, he’s making me earn every minute of child-free rest I’ve been promised this weekend. Virgin America, take me away. [I can’t put this post in the “shoot me now” category, which I reserve for godawful days, because then I wouldn’t get this, my first weekend away. So don’t shoot me now. Please.]

Have I taught you people nothing?!

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This morning’s blog stats note that someone found Naptime Writing by Googling “crutches make me nauseous.”

People, people, people. Or, really, person, person, person. Nauseous means making others sick. The smell of vomit is nauseous. When you smell it, you are nauseated. Or it nauseates you. Saying crutches make you nauseous means that using crutches makes you look so disgusting that people retch when they see you.

Is that true? Damn, I thought I looked a bit schlumpy on crutches, but I didn’t worry that people were hurling the contents of their stomachs into trashcans and gutters just watching me crutch by. That’s some serious problem you’vt there, Google reader.

Also, please read all my other grammatical posts. I’m guessing you put apostrophes all over the f—ing place.And you need help.

You know you do.

(btw, don’t turn to Strunk or White. Those f—ers don’t know their that from their which…love this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education by linguist Geoffrey Pullum.)

Sweetest sounds

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I’m taking a poll in my house (unfortunately I’ve only been asking one person, but now that I have you, the pool might expand a bit…)

Which is the sweetest sound:

a) Early morning, birds singing, cats stretching; the bedroom door across the hall opens. Tiny feet pat softly into the bathroom. Lid goes quietly up, and moments later a faint tinkling means the first battle of the day won’t be one. You can hear the sound of your own back cracking as you stretch, sigh, and wait for the feet to continue their journey to you.

b) The din from the next room distracts you, makes you anxious, bodes poorly for your ability to blink much. You’re pretty sure there won’t be a nap. There’s been banging and crashing and yelling and singing and self-negotiating going on in the bedroom ’round the corner as you sprint to check email, write a blog post, proofread an article, find the best price online on organic crackers, and upload pictures so you can make a picture-filled Mother’s Day gift for the five women in your kids’ lives. Suddenly you realize it’s *still* in the other room. Not calm before the storm still, but blissfully, restoratively quiet. Options expand before you and the shoulders you have come to believe are glued to your ears drop, silently, effortlessly to their rightful place atop your clavicle.

c) Large feet stomp out of the room. Drawers slam, a door is swung wildly on its hinges, then all stops. There is a pause. The same feet walk, slowly, placed carefully one before the other until they are quite near you. A gentle voice, disarming in its difference from the hollering nasty voice of moments before, asks, “Please tell me you’re not blogging this.”

As my college roommate purred, “can’t we have both?” Or all three? Do we have to vote for just one?

You’re welcome to add your own favorite sounds. Please do. I’d love to hear them (or, more realistically, read your description of them. Because I ain’t coming to your house to listen to you uncork your favorite bottle of “help me get through to bedtime”. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care.)

National Poetry Month Part iv

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The changes between Djuna Barnes’s text of Nightwood and the book actually published are striking and make for an interesting study in political bibliographic outrages.I’ll post a paper on that soon, here or on a new Twentieth- and Twenty-First-century blog some brilliant minds are working on.

Here, from Barnes’s later poetry, a different voice that still echoes the darkness of her amazing novel. The change noted in the text was handwritten on a post-publication copy in Barnes’s files:

To One Who Feels Differently
–Djuna Barnes

To-night I cannot know you and I weep
For sorrow that’s upon you like soft sleep
Of which alone you are the one possessed—
And as one in long stuff of mourning dressed—
Drenched deep in garments that take shape of grief
Fold on heavy fold, as leaf on leaf.
You stand, all tremulous with stifled cries
And with chill tears like glass upon your eyes.
Thin shadows, darker than the darkness boil
With foamy somnolence and monstrous toil
The solemn lisping of untimely things
Approaches; and on high lamenting wings
Cold time screams past us, shedding sparks of pain {fire}
Of which you are the core and the refrain.