Author Archives: Naptimewriting

I *need* 5920 hours of sleep…that’s a medical fact (sort of)

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Most scientists agree you can’t make up for lost sleep. But at least one sleep center claims it takes two hours of sleep to replace one lost hour of sleep. (Bear with me. This isn’t the journal Nature. This is my pathetic little writing, ambivalence, parenting, anti-corporate blog and I feel like a little pseudo-science today. It’s not like the Internet isn’t full of made up crap already.)

So in the 27 months that Peanut woke frequently every night, I figure I got about 4200 hours of sleep. (Not counting that one, blissful night where he had a fever and slept for ten hours straight. Ah, bring on the 103 degrees.) Had I slept normally, I would have gotten at least 7100 hours of sleep. (At least is right. I used to need 9 hours a night, so that 7100 is probably 8000, but I digress from my highly technical calculations…) Plus the past five months, in which I have gotten 190 hours instead of the requisite 250. That leaves me with a deficit of at least 2960 hours. Using the Quanta Dynamics Sleep Research I found on a half-assed Google search, that means I need 5920 hours of sleep to catch up.

So to all the people asking when we’ll have another baby, the answer is, “As soon as someone arranges for me to sleep for 5920 hours straight.”

(Or, “when you have my conscience and maternal instincts removed so I could, hypothetically, let a child cry.” I don’t think that surgery is wise, as it goes against everything a feeling person knows, though just such a surgery was undoubtedly approved by the FDA under the previous administration. With postsurgical injections of materna-botox to insure your nurturing muscles are paralyzed so you can continue your life as though your children aren’t there.)

Spouse has a different idea of usefulness

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For our last move, I packed an entire 1500 sq. ft. house by myself. Over the course of seven months. And in the final stretch, Spouse came home and asked if he could help. Sure. There’s a cabinet full of ceramic mixing bowls and casserole dishes. Have at it.

Okay. He plops down on the floor with newspaper and a box. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle…I go off to pack another bookcase full of texts I swear I’ll read again. I already got rid of hundreds of books I know I won’t read again. I’m in the living room and see Spouse walk past with a single AA battery.

Me: What are you looking for?

S: The box with the batteries.

Me: Above the washing machine. [interested that he’s recycling a battery when he was last wrapping bowls]

S: I’m going out to the garage for a few minutes.

Me: Are you done with the cabinet?

S: I need a break.

So I go in the kitchen and see he has wrapped two bowls. And, not to be judgmental or anything (yeah, right), but he did a crappy job. Two or three layers of newsprint between the bowls, nothing inside the bowls themselves.

When he comes back inside later, he goes straight to the kitchen. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle…”This is bullshit.” He heads back to the garage for a while.

So now we’ve taken a few months to unpack. We’re quite slovenly, really, living amongst boxes for nigh on two months, and no end in sight.

I opened a box today, thinking that instead of working on my conference paper or my novel or any of the things that might return me to the realm of the living and thinking, maybe I should clean this joint up.

Inside the box were hand-selected, and carefully wrapped, items from my Goodwill pile. Spouse must have thought they might be useful and should be rescued. That night of “help” was a night of dumpster diving of the worst sort—stuff I already marked as headed to someone who really needs it had been retrieved by the one person who decidedly did not need it.

Do you think Goodwill will take one slightly used husband?

Hussein is not an epithet

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True story:

I had a student one semester, in his second year at the college. He was a great guy who worked hard in my class. He mentioned to me once that another professor had made fun of him for his name, asked him if anyone in his family was a terrorist, and told him that maybe he should change his name so he could get along better in the U.S. This student, the professor never bothered to find out, was third generation American. He was raised in the States, as were his parents.

His middle name happened to be Hussein. And until about the mid-nineties, he was pretty proud of it. Now he hid his name because of reactions like this other teacher’s. I told him, without a beat, that hundreds of thousands of people with his name throughout the world and throughout history had been fine, decent, honorable people. That one really famous a–hole and his family couldn’t erase all the other history of the name. That there are probably thousands of kind, loving, thoughtful people named McVay and Nichols and Bundy and Manson. That it’s not fair to judge people by their name any more than it’s okay to judge them by their skin or sexuality or political affiliation.

Then I told him to report the professor who acted so unprofessionally.

His look told me I had no idea what it was like to be judged by a racist, narrow minded society. Reporting it might not have hurt his opportunities at the college, but then again it might have. And it clearly had before.

End of true story. Beginning of rant:

Barack Hussein Obama is President of these United States. He’s not a terrorist, he’s not a fundamentalist, he is not a bad person. He’s fine and decent person who might just help us come together to make this country what we believe it can be. And he is not the only fine and decent person with this name. Those of you who say that we should focus on the name Hussein instead of on his actions, shame on you. You’re giving your own family a bad name.

Book release

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One of my favorite photographers just published a book of images as captured by her possessed (as in totally wack-job alien spirit took hold of her camera and made absolute freaky pictures from the potentially banal shots) digital camera. This first book of images is a selection of freaky images the camera created from shots of JG’s neighborhood.

Go check it out. It’s freaky. Buy it for the freaks in your life.

Camera Morte, by Juliette Goodwin

John Hughes, we need you!

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Mr. Hughes, could you make a few movies for the dorks and dweebs and losers amongst us, who, at mid-life, still haven’t figured it out, and who were holding out hope that the popular and not-nice people in high school would turn out painfully unattractive (pockmarked with the reality of their blotchy souls or at least saggy and droopy from the ill-advised production and subsequent ignoring of their spawn) and unemployed (or at least pursuing some morally turgid career like RNC strategist) and perversely alone, but who facebook now shows us are all toned and tanned and really rich and by no means socially ostracized as we had so hoped they would be? One, ideally, that shows us how we might still have a chance at making a difference and being loved by the people who are beautiful on the inside and who really will, soon, shun the same shallow and vapid people they were *supposed* to have shunned by graduation, at the latest?!

Kind of like a Thirty-Eight Candles or The ‘Why Bother with Breakfast When My Life is in the Toilet’ Club or something?

Inauguration without a t.v.

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Whether you’re employed in a place without television or plan to be at home Tuesday without a television or work really hard but plan to be in a place without a television because society doesn’t value what you do and you can’t afford a television, you might want to thank the kind people over at newteevee.com for posting this detailed list of where to get your Hope and Change online Tuesday at 9 am pst.

(I guess my last bit about not affording a television is silly because linking from a blog to another blog that details live feeds implies access to a technology that costs a lot more than a television. But still…)

A darned good trip home

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Our US Airways flight didn’t go anywhere near the Hudson, so A+ flight.

Our return flight attendants were about 3000 percent nicer than the outbound flights.

When *someone* forgot to leave us the car keys and *someone else* later left the car seat in the rental car and then thanked *their* lucky stars that the flight was late and *someone* noted to another passenger that a connection in Phoenix is always easy because it’s a relatively small airport and then, later, that same *someone* had exactly 19 minutes from wheelsdown to haul ass from the absolute farthest gate in one terminal to the absolute farthest gate in another terminal (on crutches and cheering on a three-year-old functioning on vapors a full three hours past bedtime and with no food in him to run at full tilt with his frog backpack [I know it’s heavy baby, and I know you don’t like running encumbered, but you’re doing a heckuva job!] and trying not to laugh at the hilarity of a three-year-old let loose in an aiport and told to run as fast as he can, wobbling a bit when the crutches hit the moving walkway and when the three-year-old stopped dead in front of her to ask if this was an escalator or something different, and just a little after she smacked the kiosk toadie upside the head with her crutch when he asked her, as she all but ran a three-legged race with the aforementioned toddler and packmule Spouse who carried everyone’s carry-on and personal item and carseat while running at helf-tilt, whether she could spare 30 seconds to hear about a special deal with MasterFuckingCard) made it with, no joke, two minutes to spare only to find that that *someone* had lost our boarding passes but that a certain airlines that can land on water or tamac can also replace a lost boarding pass with, like, no problemo, well then *all* those someones relaxed into their seats with a sigh and forgot even to bemoan the fact that you don’t even get pretzels anymore, let alone beverages on these flights home. Or that airport freaking restaurants close at freaking 9:00 pm when your flight is scheduled to land at 8:55pm and your three-year-old and your crutches conspire to keep you away from a different burrito—not the burrito they refused to serve you at 8:55am, noting that they didn’t serve bean and cheese burritos until after 9:00 am, and yes they’re sorry that your flight leaves at 9:06, but that they can’t make a burrito so early unless it’s a breakfast burrito, yes, ma’am, even if you’re willing to eat it cold andyes, ma’aam, even if you’re willing to order a breakfast burrito without the filling and substitute rice and beans, sorry ma’am; or the burrito that the wonderful airline who replaced your boarding passes refused to let your husband dash and purchase because even though their plane was late and even though they don’t have food on the plane and even though your three-year-old will probably lose it if he has to subsist on clementines and raw almond slices for *another* flight after being promised a burrito, they have a firm four minutes before takeoff door policy, and you’ll just have to eat at your destination. That’s three burritos denied, just this trip. If I weren’t still achy from the hilarity of  watching the three-year-old drop to his hands and knees in the airport, pretending to eat the floor, I might write a strongly worded letter.

It’s good to be home.

Groundhog month

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Since the doctor saw a shadow on my X-ray, I’m due for another six weeks of crutches.

I should be walking normally by June, they chuckled. (Actually, they were really nice and sympathetic, but I’ll go mad if I can’t make someone the villain in this story.)

This is unacceptable. I have a three-year-old hellion who never stops moving, a sick cat, a paper due, four thousand library books due on campus and no way to park within a mile of the drop slot, a novel that’s so close to being done that I can taste it, a potential move, two trips involving air travel, a filthy house, an unbearable urge to go running, and an overdeveloped case of liberal guilt pulling me to volunteer seven days a week to deal with this month.

Can’t you freaking take these feet off and give me stronger models?

And while you’re at it, fit my kid for new hands. He’s been asking and I figure it’ll be like an early birthday present.

Melissa and Doug alternative

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So I just blogged last week (okay, it felt like last week, but it could’ve been three months ago—my life is a black hole and days get lost, sucked into the vortex of trying my best and driving myself insane in the process) about my disappointing discovery that the dressable, mix and match outfit dolls from Melissa and Doug are horrifyingly, nineteen-thirties-ingly, cringe-inducingly gender stereotyped, with one career boy doll and three pink, frilly, princess-y dolls. (I’ll repeat here that I love the boy doll, and I’m only very, very upset with the toymaker about the difference between boy doll and girl dolls.)

Well, I found the antidote. (note: I found this on my own, in a locally owned and operated toy store. I don’t get stuff free, I don’t advertise on my blog. I vent. If you don’t believe me, try to find another product endorsement in these posts. There aren’t any that I remember. Second note: my memory sucks, so don’t hold me to the sales-pitch-free site promise I just made, ‘cuz I can’t be held responsible for what I blog at midnight. Third note: of course I can. I just don’t remember all of it. In an “I don’t remember what your fourteenth word was, honey” kind of way, not an “I don’t remember that we had sex, but I believe you if you say we did” kind of way.)

Schylling makes a wooden boy bear and girl bear set, where you mix and match their expressions, clothes, and shoes. And they’re as close as I’ve found to gender non-assumptive. Yes, the girl has some pink outfits (including a ballet getup) and the boy doesn’t. But there are several almost-gender-neutral outfits for both, and, surprisingly, the expressions are almost exactly matched. (Boy has a crying face, so does girl; girl has same number of smiling faces as boy; neither has angry face. The only difference is that the girl has a sleeping face to a befuddled face for the boy. I’m willing to let that go. Even Spouse was shocked. He expected only crying and smiling from girl bear, and only angry and sleeping from boy bear. But whether that’s more a statement on our marriage or on his feminism, I don’t know.) The girl has a pair of overalls, the boy does, too. Yes, hers have a couple of sunflower buttons and his have plain buttons. But it’s about three hundreds years more advanced than M&D’s nonsense.

I plan to buy both and mix all the clothes into the boy doll’s box. If I had a girl, I’d buy both, surreptitiously toss the frilly outfit, and mix all the other outfits into the girl doll’s box.

Ernest Moody and Emma Moody. Relatively inexpensive. Sold separately. Smaller and more portable than the Melissa and Doug discrimination-fest. Tell your local toystore to carry them (and why!)

If you know of something even more equal, let me know. But for now, I’m pretty happy to find an alternative to Melissa and Doug’s discouraging message that boys can be anything they want and girls can be pretty.

CNN thinks it’s groovy to leave a job for another job, but not to parent.

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So this article beatifies those who leave a lucrative career to follow their gut. The people profiled left jobs with great benefits for…other jobs.

There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands of women leaving really good jobs to make a difference in their children’s lives. Those, for instance, who leave simulating and lucrative careers in advertising to be more useful to society as the parent of a decent human being. Or the child-free idealists who leave corporate america to teach or be a voice for the voiceless.

Apparently, leaving because your gut tells you to raise your own kid or save the world doesn’t count as news. Way to show your priorities, Turner Corporate.

Does any part of my life belong to me?

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Peanut and I were playing near each other, he tatooing himself and me pretending that burning mix-CDs is like making mix tapes. It might not be as difficult to accomplish, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

So he comes over and tell me he wants to color on me. I’m usually game for that, and we have a rule in the house that you can color on paper or skin, but that’s it. And that if you want to color someone else, you have to ask. So he asked, and I said no.

And he grabbed my arm, gently, and said, “I want to,” and started an elaborate Celtic blob on my forearm. And I almost cried.

Don’t I get to have a say even about my own body? He’s always crying and telling Spouse, “It’s my body, you can’t grab my body or push my body, Daddy!”

Well don’t I get the same respect?

On big things, yes. On art, I guess not. And that’s okay 99% of the time, but today it felt like a violation. I give you everything kid. Can’t you freaking leave me out of your blue and purple fest today?

“Round here, we talk just like lions, but we sacrifice like lambs.”

He said *what*?

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Long trip from the doctor’s office yesterday, and lots of traffic, so I  put on my ‘most patient mother of a verbal, almost-three-year-old kid’ ears and had almost two hours of conversation with Peanut. Favorite snippets:

[silence, silence, singing, silence]

P: If baby comes I house, I hit baby.
M: We don’t hit babies. Why do you want to hit?
P: Babies small, so I hit them.
M: We don’t hit babies.
P: I want hit them, I no want them be sad.
M: Well, hitting hurts, so if you hit a baby, it will get sad.
P: Babies don’t know, so I hit them, they be happy.

later, with no lead in:

P: Mommy, I very big!
M: Yeah, baby, you are very big.
P: No, I getting big.
M: True.
P: I want take these hands, give them to people who need, get new hands.
M: What?
P: I want take these hands, give them people who need, get BIG hands.
[blink, blink, blink, trying to decipher, then not laugh]
M: You’re getting big, and you want big hands?
P: Huh. [translation: yes. No idea where he got this contraction of uh-huh, but I loathe it.]
M: So you are going to give your hands to people who need and get new, bigger hands?
P: Huh!
M: Well, sweetie, the parts of your body don’t come off. As you get big, your hands will get big, too. [not wanting to squash the creativity, though it’s too late now, ] But wouldn’t that be fun? If we could take off our bits and pieces and get new ones?
P: huh.
M:  We take off our noses, put on different noses; we take off our hands, get bigger hands; we get of our feet, put on smaller feet?
P: huh. I want take off me shoes. That okay?
M: Yeah, that’s okay.

later, answering a question about college

M: College is a kind of school where you can choose. School is usually learning letters and numbers and reading and games, but when you get big enough to vote, you can choose college. And if you want to be a doctor, college teaches you about bodies. And if you want to make books, college teaches you how to write good books.
P: And if I want be car maker, college teaches how cars go and how wheels go and how motorcycles go and how trains go and how BART go and how man go and how ladies go and babies go and bruzzers go and sitsers go and I don’t know.

and my favorite of the day

P: Name this is.
M: This what, babe?
P: Name this, this, where HG live.
M: This is San Rafael.
P: No San Teo. San Fell.
M: Right.
P: Name Uncle B live.
M: Los Angeles
P: Not like lost your toys. Like lost your angeles.
M: That’s right. Los Angeles, Los, different than lost. Different word. Really los angeles, the angels, in Spanish. Los. Different from lost.
P: Uncle B live in Toast Angles.
M: Right.

Maybe it shouldn’t matter this much, but it does.

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I was trying to explain to Spouse, again, why my world is still upside down about David Foster Wallace’s death. Why I still read hours’ worth of blogs and comments and articles about him instead of doing the other work I’ve promised editors and conferences and myself.

And here’s what I came up with tonight.

It’s not just that he’s gone and we won’t get any more of his work. I mourn that, sure, but there’s a few pieces I haven’t read, and they will last me a while. It’s not just that I’m paralyzed with the breadth of non-DFW work that has been published since my reading has slowed to the pace of a cold, squeezie bottle of honey fresh from the fridge and in need of a serious thaw to disgorge its contents, and that I’m convinced that there are dozens of fabulous works just waiting for me, most of which I’ll never get to. Even rereading IJ will last me a year, given the whole toddler in my care thing. The posthumous twisted knots in my stomach and mind are not just stemming from the remembrance that, when I began reading Infinite Jest, the first piece of his work I ever picked up, fewer than 100 pages in I decided I wanted to go to grad school and study literature, theory, rhetoric, and writing so I could bend my mind far enough to more than just appreciate what he was doing to mine. It’s not just that I stopped reading his work, caught up in life and a grad school that didn’t value his fiction as much as I did, and I now feel terribly guilty that I didn’t read everything fresh off the presses, couched as it was in moments of time, popular culture critiques and all.

So why am I still absolutely inside out about his death? Forget the normal psychological, Oh no I’m going to die, too. Oh no I will never write as well as him. Oh no he’ll never write again. Oh no my kid is going to die and I don’t ever want to know what his mother knows. Oh no we’re all going to die and most of us won’t even notice when the rest o us go. I know all that. I deny it like everybody else.

It’s that I want to stop my day to day life right now so I can consume his prose non-stop. I want to read and read and read and read everything David Foster Wallace ever wrote. Because when I read his work—fiction and  nonfiction—right there, in the moment, I am everything I want to be. He leads me to a place where I’m smart and interesting and humane and giving and wise and raw and empathetic and genuine and white-knuckled, staring my demons in the face. He lets me into worlds I’ve never known and deepens the colors for me on worlds I know better than I thought anyone else could.

His words make me the best things about myself, and nothing else does that. So, yeah, I’m absolutely shattered. Still. And I don’t see that going away anytime soon, even if that’s unseemly or silly or just downright unhealthy.

So how do we get up in the morning and make toast and do the dishes, now that he’s dead? What really sucks is that we just do. Because it really shouldn’t matter this much, to those who were not his wife, his sister, his parents. But it does. It really does matter.

F—ing Sony copy protection

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So sony wants so desperately for me not to copy their DVDs (as if…I can barely get them into the drive slot in my computer and I barely have time to watch them let alone copy them) that they’ve made newer discs unplayable in my computer.

Somene who knows more than I do, and who has a better system (like a television and a DVD player made by…you guessed it…sony) explains their dick move here. And here.

I was all happy that I got my draft novel to KDT and Netflix delivered Stranger than Fiction the same day. So Spouse and I got Peanut to bed and loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed then loaded then crashed the f—ing copy protected DVD.

But for people who know better, this was news in 2007. It’s 2009 and Netflix is still sending me this. Today.

With whom shall I be more angry? (hint: the answer is not me, for having a seven year old computer and DVD player therein.)

Now I have to go back to my tape flags, damnit!

Sorry, folks, the tape flags are here.

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Uh-oh. Office Depot just delivered a bunch of stuff, including the tape flags, the arrival of which cues the beginning of my whirlwind research for a February conference presentation.
I gotta go read, y’all, then write. So I have to swear off daily posts for a whil, or I’ll never get this paper done in time to present it. It’s been several years since I presented at a conference, confounded by that choice to stay at home with Peanut and actually raise him without the TV, phone, or computer on when he’s awake, so I have to pinch my spare minutes and read some critical theory at naptime.

Sayonara, mostly. We’ll play again when I’m done with the paper.

–me