Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, July 31, 2006 Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth If you ever want to learn a lot about yourself, fill out the paperwork to adopt a child. You don't even have to actually go through with an adoption; just fill out the forms and throw them away. Trust me, it's a learning experience. When Trash and I were filling out the paperwork a couple of years ago, we got to the part where it asks you what kind of…problems you're prepared to deal with in an adoptive little one. We went into this section full of naïve bravado. After all, we thought, people who get pregnant the old-fashioned way don't have any guarantees as to what they're getting, either. A couple of triathletic Rhodes scholar supermodels could end up with a Clint Howard character, for all they know. It's only fair for us adoptive parents to take the same risks, right? And there are selfish reasons, too. At the risk of seeming cynical, the more picky you are, the longer you're likely to wait. So Trash started reading things off to me. Things like clubfoot. Cleft palate. 20% blindness. 40% blindness. 20% blindness in one eye. 20% blindness in one eye and 20% deafness in one ear. 20% blindness in one eye, 60% deafness in one ear, and total deafness in the other ear. And so on, until I was 60% deaf in one ear and 80% blind in both eyes. It went on. Missing extremities. Missing limbs. Missing limbs both above the joint, missing limbs below the joint, and missing limbs at the joint. Missing faces. Clearly, whoever designed the paperwork put a lot more thought into this than we had. This went on and on for pages, like a sort of macabre Chinese menu. Every imaginable form of disease, syndrome, infirmity, and deformity was listed, both alone and in combination with every other disease, syndrome, infirmity, and deformity. After about forty or fifty pages of this, we started to get a little depressed. Who wouldn't be, considering that by this point, our prospective child was pretty much down to a brainstem? Needless to say, we were no longer checking off items blithely. We could pretend to be heroes, or we could be honest with ourselves and let the hypothetical schizophrenic hermaphroditic quintuple amputee with chronic halitosis and projectile diarrhea go to someone better equipped to care for him/her. It also meant that when M. Tiny arrived, perfect in every way aside from being in such a big damn hurry to be born, we could be that much more grateful for how well he turned out. Of course, the form didn't have the one trait that might have been a deal-breaker. By which I mean humorlessness. Good thing M. Small doesn't have that. His sense of humor's been developing nicely, ever since he was only a few months old. I remember an old Ray Romano standup bit, where he complained that the only joke he'd written since the birth of his new baby was to jangle his car keys and go "Heeeyyy…" I'm proud to say that even at an early age, M. Small was above such primitive japes. His initial tastes did tend towards physical comedy, however. Specifically, the funniest thing in the world to him was to find himself upside-down. Hours of hilarity, until my or Trash's back gave out. But more recently, he's been venturing into verbal humor. A few weeks ago, I put him into his crib before remembering to zip him into his sleep-sack. "Oops," I said. "I forgot your sleep sack! Daddy's crazy!" M. Small gave one of those belly laughs he only does when "breakdancing" (another physical-comedy bit, in which he lies down on the kitchen linoleum and I spin him on his back at approximately 200 RPMs until his irises get all swirly). "Hazy!" he mimicked, laughing harder every time. When you're not yet able to string a sentence together, your jokes have to be very short indeed. For the entire rest of the week, his favorite joke was "Crazy!" And he was generous with it, too; no matter who said it, it was cause for hysterics. Eventually even the best joke loses its luster, no matter how much soul of wit it possesses. Fortunately, he's got a new one that he likes to tell: "Ah-CHOO!" This is accompanied by raucous giggles and spectacular full-body spasms, until he bumps his head on the carpet from a standing position and goes to be with his mom for a minute or two until the stars go away. I can't tell you how glad I am that my son likes jokes. The challenge over the coming months is to keep him supplied with appropriately short ones. I know one two-word joke: "Pretentious? Moi?" As for other one-word jokes, the closest thing I can think of (not counting "Motherfucker," which is probably inappropriate) is "Kalamazoo." Long joke short, I only hope M. Small keeps learning English quickly. posted by M. Giant 7:57 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I'm adopted and it has never been anything but wonderful. It was never a secret and I totally got my dad's wonderful sense of humour. I'm glad to hear that M. Small is going to have the same terrific experience as me, because I wouldn't trade it for the world.
By I hope M. Small figures out that he has incredibly smart, funny, cool parents before he grows up and moves out. :-)
By I can't wait for Trash to teach him demented combinations of traditional cliches, such as, "That's kind of like a wolf in grandpa's sheep skin rubber," or "Don't put all your chickens in your handbasket in hell." The schoolkids are sure to beat his ass in the bathrooms between classes...
By
I have been meaning to email you to ask you some questions about the adoption process. I am still composing the letter in my head, but just know one will be coming in the future. Thanks!
By Chao is totally right - Trash doesn't understand cliches. Ask her to explain a bird in the hand sometime.
By Wednesday, July 26, 2006 Kick in the Bus While M. Small's day care provider is on vacation in a couple of weeks, Trash's mom is coming up from Iowa to pick up the slack. Which looked like it was going to be difficult when her car broke down. We considered options. Go down and get her? Buy her a plane ticket? Send a cab? Mail her a pre-paid FedEx box with airholes and snacks? Worst of all, put her on a (shudder) bus? My mother-in-law picked the bus. I know, but it was her choice. "We'll see if she still thinks that's the best option when it's time to go home," I told Trash. Trash got to work researching the details. She also looked into the train option. How cool would that be? Nobody ever gets to take the train in the Midwest. Trash quickly found out why. It only works for my mother-in-law if she wants to make her 200-mile trip into a cross-country odyssey that will take her from Des Moines to Minneapolis via Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle. And people wonder why Amtrak isn't doing better. No, I'm kidding. People don't wonder why Amtrak isn't doing better. Everything else in that paragraph is completely true. So bus it was. Trash contacted not Greyhound, but one of those other bus companies where the passengers take turns behind the wheel (yes, I just referenced an old Jay Leno joke. Please come to my house and shoot me in the face). She happened to know about it because one of her old clients at her job is some sort of bigwig there. A position, I might add, that Trash helped him get. After having any number of conversations with her mom working out the logistics and the timing, Trash is ready to call and order the tickets over the phone. She accomplishes half of her task. That is to say, she calls, but she does not order the tickets. That's because the person on the other end of the phone won't sell them to her. I don't mean that there's some kind of systemic or regulatory obstacle in the way of Trash purchasing the tickets. I mean that the guy simply flat-out refuses to sell her tickets. Period. I'm not sure what else he's doing that prevents him from selling her tickets. Maybe he's too busy at his job, which is…let's see…SELLING TICKETS. I don't know. Trash becomes stymied, and actually starts laughing in confusion. "I don't understand," she says. "I know it's less than two weeks away, but I'm willing to pay the extra fee." "I'm not willing to sell them to you," he insisted. Trash persisted, until he offered to transfer her to someone who could help her. The lack of hold music after he clicked off was her first clue as to what had actually happened. The dial tone a minute later closed the case. Trash did a little more research, and called back. "Can I buy these tickets?" she said. Nope. No, no, and nope. "Is there someone else I could call?" she asked. Here, at last, the guy actually did something helpful, and rattled off an 800 number. Trash called the other number. "Thank you for calling Greyhound," the operator answered. "Sorry," Trash said. "Wrong number." Trash called Not-Greyhound back and got the same operator. She asked to speak to his manager. "I am the manager," the guy said. Trash asked to speak to a different manager. "I'm the only manager," the guy said. Trash actually asked to speak to someone under him. He hung up on her. For the second time. She called back again. The same guy answered. "How can I help you?" he asked. Trash asked for his manager again. "How can I help you?" Trash again asked for the manager. "How can I help you?" Trash asked for his name. "How can I help you?" he demanded. How, indeed? This was going beyong Seinfeldian and becoming downright Kafkaesque. Trash isn't the kind of person to throw her weight around. But she felt she owed it to her former client -- the bigwig at this company, you'll recall -- to give him a heads-up that this kind of thing was going on in his company. She didn't get him on the line directly, but she left a message and then did get a call that very afternoon from another higher-up, who listened to her whole story, apologized profusely, and offered her a free ticket. Trash declined, because everyone else at the company had been great, but the bus company did prevail upon her to let them waive the usual service charge and FedEx the ticket to her mom. I would have suggested letting the bus company buy her a plane ticket, but I wasn't the one in charge of negotiations. As for the "customer service" guy, the lady from the bus company told Trash that this guy -- the only guy in the call center, by the way, so nice giveaway, dude -- had done this same thing weeks before. On that occasion, she had gone down to fire his ass, only to find out that he'd been taken away in an ambulance. So she cut him a little slack. He'd been recovering from back surgery ever since, and who knows what kind of pain he'd been in on the previous occasion? This was his third day back. One wonders if this time he's going to try to blame his behavior on generic Oxycontin or something. Either way, something tells me that it's going to take more than an ambulance ride to save his job this time around. posted by M. Giant 10:06 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Am I losing it, or did I just read the same post twice?!
By Kick in the Bus While M. Small's day care provider is on vacation in a couple of weeks, Trash's mom is coming up from Iowa to pick up the slack. Which looked like it was going to be difficult when her car broke down. We considered options. Go down and get her? Buy her a plane ticket? Send a cab? Mail her a pre-paid FedEx box with airholes and snacks? Worst of all, put her on a (shudder) bus? My mother-in-law picked the bus. I know, but it was her choice. "We'll see if she still thinks that's the best option when it's time to go home," I told Trash. Trash got to work researching the details. She also looked into the train option. How cool would that be? Nobody ever gets to take the train in the Midwest. Trash quickly found out why. It only works for my mother-in-law if she wants to make her 200-mile trip into a cross-country odyssey that will take her from Des Moines to Minneapolis via Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle. And people wonder why Amtrak isn't doing better. No, I'm kidding. People don't wonder why Amtrak isn't doing better. Everything else in that paragraph is completely true. So bus it was. Trash contacted not Greyhound, but one of those other bus companies where the passengers take turns behind the wheel (yes, I just referenced an old Jay Leno joke. Please come to my house and shoot me in the face). She happened to know about it because one of her old clients at her job is some sort of bigwig there. A position, I might add, that Trash helped him get. After having any number of conversations with her mom working out the logistics and the timing, Trash is ready to call and order the tickets over the phone. She accomplishes half of her task. That is to say, she calls, but she does not order the tickets. That's because the person on the other end of the phone won't sell them to her. I don't mean that there's some kind of systemic or regulatory obstacle in the way of Trash purchasing the tickets. I mean that the guy simply flat-out refuses to sell her tickets. Period. I'm not sure what else he's doing that prevents him from selling her tickets. Maybe he's too busy at his job, which is…let's see…SELLING TICKETS. I don't know. Trash becomes stymied, and actually starts laughing in confusion. "I don't understand," she says. "I know it's less than two weeks away, but I'm willing to pay the extra fee." "I'm not willing to sell them to you," he insisted. Trash persisted, until he offered to transfer her to someone who could help her. The lack of hold music after he clicked off was her first clue as to what had actually happened. The dial tone a minute later closed the case. Trash did a little more research, and called back. "Can I buy these tickets?" she said. Nope. No, no, and nope. "Is there someone else I could call?" she asked. Here, at last, the guy actually did something helpful, and rattled off an 800 number. Trash called the other number. "Thank you for calling Greyhound," the operator answered. "Sorry," Trash said. "Wrong number." Trash called Not-Greyhound back and got the same operator. She asked to speak to his manager. "I am the manager," the guy said. Trash asked to speak to a different manager. "I'm the only manager," the guy said. Trash actually asked to speak to someone under him. He hung up on her. For the second time. She called back again. The same guy answered. "How can I help you?" he asked. Trash asked for his manager again. "How can I help you?" Trash again asked for the manager. "How can I help you?" Trash asked for his name. "How can I help you?" he demanded. How, indeed? This was going beyong Seinfeldian and becoming downright Kafkaesque. Trash isn't the kind of person to throw her weight around. But she felt she owed it to her former client -- the bigwig at this company, you'll recall -- to give him a heads-up that this kind of thing was going on in his company. She didn't get him on the line directly, but she left a message and then did get a call that very afternoon from another higher-up, who listened to her whole story, apologized profusely, and offered her a free ticket. Trash declined, because everyone else at the company had been great, but the bus company did prevail upon her to let them waive the usual service charge and FedEx the ticket to her mom. I would have suggested letting the bus company buy her a plane ticket, but I wasn't the one in charge of negotiations. As for the "customer service" guy, the lady from the bus company told Trash that this guy -- the only guy in the call center, by the way, so nice giveaway, dude -- had done this same thing weeks before. On that occasion, she had gone down to fire his ass, only to find out that he'd been taken away in an ambulance. So she cut him a little slack. He'd been recovering from back surgery ever since, and who knows what kind of pain he'd been in on the previous occasion? This was his third day back. One wonders if this time he's going to try to blame his behavior on generic Oxycontin or something. Either way, something tells me that it's going to take more than an ambulance ride to save his job this time around. posted by M. Giant 10:06 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Ahh, yes. I was already thinking the guy was hopped up on the goofballs, but you said it. You gotta love the drugs people are on post-surgery.
By I think Greyhound is really not that bad. I've ridden it across the country horizontally and vertically both and met all kinds of interesting people, only three or four of whom were genuinely unpleasant. And I could say the same of air travel. Your Amtrak quip was hilarious!
By Sunday, July 23, 2006 Lost in Downtown. Again. So I was just getting ready to tell you about my walk from my office building to my appointment with the speaking-study people, all the way at the other end of downtown. The walk itself was fairly uneventful. It was the end of it that got weird. Because you know that piece of paper with all the information about my appointment? We'd rushed out the door that morning and I'd left it at home. Still, I was confident when I left work. After all, I'd been here before. I'd done this before. There aren't that many buildings in the area I was headed for. And certainly the one I had been in the first time would look familiar to me as soon as I laid eyes on it. Plus it was a nice walk. I actually hadn't been to this side of downtown since M. Small was born, and it's changed a lot. I spotted the new Guthrie Theater building, which looks like a cross between a supply freighter for an alien invasion fleet and an IKEA (if that's not redundant). I also noticed a big building that at first glance looked like a record store, but seemed instead to house some kind of large recording studio. I'd never seen that before. You miss a lot when you drive everywhere. The only thing was that the walk was taking me longer than I thought. At 3:29, a couple of blocks away from where I thought I was going, I called Trash on my cell phone and told her I was about to go into my appointment. "All-righty," she chirped. At 3:40, I called her again and admitted, "Okay, I don't know exactly where my appointment is." I had spend the intervening ten minutes reaching and then entering, one by one, a cluster of buildings that looked a lot like the one I'd gone into two years before. Alas, none of the people inside them seemed to know what the hell I was talking about. This is when it's handy to be married to a librarian. She could figure this out, I just knew it. I could already hear her tapping on the computer keyboard in her office. "Where's the piece of paper you got?" she asked. "At home." "Useful. What about an e-mail confirmation?" "They never sent me one." "Messages on our voice mail?" "They never left me one." Believe it or not, I could have thought of all this even without a librarian. But I guess they get in the habit of asking the obvious things first, because most of the people they deal with aren't as smart as me. I told her, "I think the company is called Cultural Logic. Find their address. I'm going to try this other building and if it's the wrong one I'll call you back." Wrong building. I called her back. So far all the Cultural Logic she had found was in Providence. "I'm pretty sure I didn't go to Rhode Island for this two years ago," I explained. "In fact, I'm pretty sure I've never been to Rhode Island." Trash did some more searching. Nothing. "Okay," I said, "So find out what Cultural Logic in Minneapolis changed their name to." "You don't have a phone number?" "No." "A person's name?" "No." "Part of an address?" "I had kind of an idea that it was 1100 South Second Street, but there's nothing there but a parking lot." "No guy there with a computer on a card table?" "Cultural Logic! Go!" Trash also suggested I call my Mom, who happened to be at our house taking care of a pinkeyed M. Small that day. I asked her if anyone had called for me that afternoon. It was now 4:00 and I was a half hour late, so it wasn't outside the realm of possibility. They hadn't. I considered setting her to look for the confirmation letter, but since I had only the vaguest memory of what it looked like and where I'd left it, it seemed like it would be poor form of me to ask. The next time I talked to Trash, she still didn't have anything for me. "I am so disappointed," I said. "Dude, you have to give me something!" "Besides the time and date? Sheesh, lady." "This is so not my fault." "I know, I'm kidding. Listen, I'm just going to try this one more building and then I'm walking back over there and we can go home." "Walking back?" So that was a whole other conversation right there. Trash told me to return the call I'd missed from Febrifuge about our plans for the evening, and then catch a cab back to our parking ramp, where she would meet me at the car in ten minutes. Except that all this yapping had drained my phone battery, which died as I was dialing Feb's number. And Minneapolis isn't New York, as you will learn if you ever try to randomly hail a cab here. Ten minutes later I was still a ten-minute walk away from where Trash was no doubt sitting in her car, trying vainly to raise me on my phone. Of course as a backup, there was the God-voice phone in her rearview mirror, but…oh yeah, that was with her too. Pretty much, she could call herself. This is also when I learned that in the three-and-a-half years since I got a cell phone, it has become very hard to find a pay phone anywhere. The day, meanwhile, had gone from "nice" to "hot" and the back of my shirt was pretty much soaked when I finally made it to her building and tried her office from the lobby phone. No answer. Her cell phone answered right away, of course. I explained. She suggested I get my ass to the parking ramp, where she was waiting in the car. I considered calling the God-voice phone just to verify that, but it seemed wiser to just be on my way. When we got home to find my mom and M. Small hanging out in the back yard, I tried to tell my mom the story. "I couldn't find the place," I said. "So I called Trash, but she was no help at all." Surprisingly, Trash didn't care for that version. But see how much longer the truth is? After mom left, we all went inside to organize some dinner for M. Small. There in the center of the kitchen table was the confirmation letter. The phrase "Cultural Logic" was, of course, nowhere to be found on it. Out of curiosity, I looked at the address of where I was supposed to be, just to see if they had moved (which they had), or if I had even come close. Oddly enough, I had. I had walked right by it, in fact. It was the big building that at first glance looked like a record store, but seemed instead to house some kind of large recording studio. So the downside is that I missed out on $75 bucks, and Trash is going to have to do her who's on first routines with her rearview mirror for a while longer. But on the plus side, now when they ask me back again in two years, I will absolutely for sure know exactly where I'm going. posted by M. Giant 12:37 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Dude, I know you're a Mid-Westerner, but if you're ever on the east coast, you really should check out Rhode Island. Newport is an awesome town: you can eat fresh seafood, down some great beer, get your palm read, buy some cute nautical stuff, and check out the amazingly vulgar displays of wealth that are "The Mansions".
By Sunday, July 16, 2006 Talk to Me There are two possible setups for this story. The first one goes like this: Back when I left the radio show and was deciding to make a go of it as a freelancer, I wasn't proud. I would take any gig at all, pretty much. It didn't even necessarily have to have anything to do with writing. For instance, I once participated in a research study for 75 bucks. It wasn't anything embarrassing. Basically all I had to do was sit in front of a computer and speak certain numbers and phrases into a digital recorder for an hour. As I understand it, what they were doing was collecting samples of speaking voices and then feeding those into some database or whatever in order to better refine voice-recognition software. I did this two years ago, and a couple of weeks ago they sent me a letter asking me to do it again. Setup number two. A few weeks ago, I was riding with Trash in her car. She pressed a button on her rearview mirror. The next thing I know, the radio had gone silent and there was a female God-voice issuing to us from the speakers. "Your car is talking," I told Trash. I'd never seen her using her OnStar system before. She quickly shushed me, for reasons that quickly became apparent. After a brief series of voice instructions from Trash, the God-voice was ready to dial whatever phone number Trash dictated. Or so it claimed. What happened instead was that Trash read off her mom's phone number. The God-voice read it back, with only three or four digits changed. Trash repeated the number, more loudly and slowly this time. That time the God-voice only got two numbers wrong. Before long Trash was embroiled in a full-on shouting match with the God-voiced gremlin that lives in her mirror. She claimed to me afterward that Midwestern non-accents are the hardest for voice recognition software to decipher. And I'm sure my increasingly loud cackles didn't help it any. "I'll just call Mom from home," Trash finally said. "Does this happen to you a lot?" I asked. "All the time," she said. And of course by now we were home. So naturally, when I got this recent invitation to participate in a study that would help improve voice recognition software, Trash didn't even ask me how much it paid. "You're doing it," she said. I see now that I just should have gone with the second setup all along. So, again, I get this a couple of weeks ago to participate in a voice study. Some guy calls me on the phone and reminds me of my participation in the previous study, then asks me a bunch of questions. The last of which is, "Do you speak with a foreign accent?" I think that's something you probably could have figured out yourself there, Sparky. The call came during M. Small's dinner one evening, so it wasn't convenient for me to write down all the information at the time. That's why I was glad to hear they'd be sending me a confirmation letter with the time, date, and address of my appointment. Sure enough, that piece of paper came in the mail a couple of days later. Last Friday, the day of my appointment, I had it all worked out. I'd told my boss that I was cutting out at 3:00 for "an appointment." And so I did. By the time I got down to the elevator, I figured, what the hey? It's a nice day. I have a half hour. It can't be more than twenty blocks. I might as well walk. An additional advantage to this plan was that Trash was also working downtown that day, and we'd driven together. So I figured that by leaving her car where we'd parked it in the ramp by our buildings, she could come pick me up if my appointment went long and she finished before I did. Now, obviously, you're waiting to hear why walking instead of driving turned out to be such a dumb idea. I'm not saying it wasn't mind you, but in the end it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference. More on that later this week. posted by M. Giant 7:47 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:cliff hangers in a blog?? c'mon! Tell us about the walk
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OK, it's "later this week" now.
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I have to say that I am from the West (the land of "no accent." No, really), and my aunt's OnStar NEVER understands her. It's hysterical, actually. Something like this:
By Monday, July 10, 2006 Palimpsest We are desperately in need of rain here. The fifth incarnation of my lawn isn't yet brown and dead yet, mind you. I credit that both to early planting and the fact that I didn't quit watering it once the entire area turned green like I normally do. I think this is the farthest into the summer my backyard grass has ever survived. That may change if it doesn't rain soon. I skipped a few days of watering last week (mainly because now M. Small insists on "helping," which consists largely of standing in one place and bonding with his new best friend, "Hosey"), and yesterday the grass started taking on that teal-ish cast that signals when it's about to turn yellow and blow away. I caught up on the watering during M. Small's naps this weekend, and brought it back, but unless we get some serious rain soon I'm only postponing the inevitable. That's not why I say we desperately need rain, though. M. Small's very most favoritest thing to do outside is playing with sidewalk chalk. He got off to kind of a slow start, but now he's really discovering his artistic vision. Basically anything outside the house is fair game for him to scribble on, aside from the house itself, on the theory that it'll all wash away with the next rain. Which, in case you hadn't already gathered, we desperately need. Marks he made three weeks ago are still there. So are the marks he made today, and the marks he made during every one of the intervening days. Our deck, deck railing, deck box, deck furniture, patio, patio furniture, tree bench, and many of his outdoor toys now look like a New York subway station on the turf of a very short gang, or like if Jackson Pollock only worked in pastels. And actually, I'm exaggerating when I say that all of the marks from three weeks ago are still there. Many of them have at least partially wiped off onto his clothes, hitching a ride into the house. Where it rains even less frequently. It's not that we mind the mess; we know it's transitory, and if we really wanted to get rid of it we could just hose it all down. Maybe we should do that anyway. M. Small has become so desperate for a blank canvas that he's taken to "tagging" the sidewalk at intervals on the way to the park. But we don't know how he'd react to having his work so abruptly and deliberately washed away, especially by a trusted friend like Hosey. * * * Trash and I aren't keeping a list any more of the words M. Small knows. They have become too numerous to keep track of. Besides, he's getting to be such a good mimic that it's hard to tell which words he actually understands and which ones he can only parrot back without understanding their meaning. A few things are clear, though. For instance, the other day we were out on the deck with his sidewalk chalk and I wrote and pronounced the first initial of his name. And then he spelled the rest of his name out loud before I could finish. So of course I gave him a nice, long time-out for interrupting me. The nerve of that kid. Sometimes he can also count to go. As in "one, two, three, go!" I can't for the life of me figure out where he got the idea that go comes after three, can you? posted by M. Giant 7:46 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:I always like reading about what M. Small is up to. He's the same age as my niece in New Orleans, and between your blog and my brother's, I feel like I get a good couple updates a week. Mostly from you, but, hey. I'll take what I can get.
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I must thank you for enriching my vocabulary today - I actually looked up "palimpsest"!
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Is Small saying "palimpsest?" Because that would be AWESOME.
By Friday, July 07, 2006 Random Crap First of all, on behalf of bass players everywhere, I want to apologize to Pamie. No all bass players drive like rude, dangerous, impatient assholes. I mean, sure, I do, but there almost has to be a few of us who don't, just from the law of averages if nothing else. Or maybe it's an L.A. thing. Here in Minneapolis, I used to see Lori Barbero from Babes in Toyland driving around all the time, and she hardly ever almost ran me over. Then there was the time I sighted Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum at the Turf Club. Of course, I nearly ran him over trying to get back to my table and tell my friends, "Dudes, check it out! Dave Pirner!" But that's probably just the bass player in me. * * * Speaking of bass players, I'm going to be recapping at least one of them this summer. Yes, I'm finished with Windfall (as is TWoP), and will be covering Rock Star: Supernova instead. Aside from a couple of substitute recaps, this will be the first time I've recapped a reality show. And one that's supposedly about the music, even though I have a suspicion that the main differences from American Idol will be louder guitars and lower ratings. I missed Rock Star: INXS last summer (although I came this close to auditioning at First Avenue the previous fall), so this is going to be an almost completely new experience for me. If you plan on posting in the forums, please keep that in mind. * * * I took M. Small to Home Depot the other day to look for some kiddie lawn furniture, or possibly an outdoor playhouse that will withstand the weather better than his dryer box is likely to. Unfortunately, all they had was a wide selection of miniature fold-up camp chairs and a little round folding table. Since Trash wasn't with me, I pulled out my cell phone, set it to "camera" mode, and then set up a chair and a table. Then I unstrapped M. Small from his seat in the shopping cart and set him down, hoping I'd have time to snap a picture before he got bored with the whole enterprise and led me a merry chase into the Lighting department, where he would point in all directions at once and warn me, "Hot!" I had just enough time to get this picture:  And also this one:  And then figure out how to send them to Trash's phone, which took me several minutes. Throughout this period, M. Small was happily and comfortably sitting at what he'd already decided was "his" table, probably imagining himself enjoying a milk and some Nilla Wafers at a Parisian sidewalk café. By the time I had Trash on the line to ask if the picture had come through, he had dragged his chair over to a display of patio-chair pillows, and was busily trying to decide whether custard or terra cotta would go best with Buzz Lightyear. Yes, that son of mine was nesting at Home Depot. He was actually mad when we had to leave. This is actually good news, because it means that in a few years I can send him up there by himself. He'll probably know more than me about hardware by then anyway. posted by M. Giant 7:33 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Oh, I love the second picture - with his feet up. I can just picture him with a beer and the remote.
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Tag sales! (Or garage sales, yard sales, whatever you call them where you are). My SIL has a yard full of those expensive plastic outdoor toddler toys -- a little house, a little swingset, an outrageously large fleet of cars -- that she gets for a dollar or two each (well, I think the house was more like $15. New, they're probably ten times that much). She could be running a day care center. In fact, she and my mother drove up to a tag sale more than an hour away this morning to get a plastic log cabin -- she had one once, then sold it because she had too many toys. I don't know whether they succeeded or not. Or whether they actually NEED two outdoor playhouses... but I suppose those cars need somewhere to park.
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I really did try to watch Windfall, just to enjoy the recaps, but fifteen minutes in to the first one and I could only think about how soon I might die and what I needed to be doing with my time before then.
By Tuesday, July 04, 2006 Blown I write this entry tonight with the sound of distant explosions drifting through my open window (non-American readers, fear not; it's perfectly normal on this date). M. Small's bedtime happens to fall well before dark this time of year, and even if it didn't, he's got conjunctivitis. So if I want to watch shit blow up, I can go downstairs and watch a movie. But instead, I find my thoughts drifting to Fourth of Julys past. And my browser, as well. Yes, the holiday means that instead of a proper entry, y'all get a clip show. One of the advantages of having done this for a few years is that you can get away with cheesy shit like this once in a while. Today is M. Small's second Fourth of July, unless you count the one when he was still eating and breathing through his navel. Here's the story of his first one. A year ago today, he could sort of walk a little bit, if you followed along with him, stooped way over so you could hold onto his hands to give him balance. Now he goes down playground slides that are taller than I am. Last week, Trash and Bitter and I were fondly remembering the Fourth from two years ago. So fondly, in fact, that we were considering going out there and doing it again tonight. But again, that would have required us to foist a pinkeyed toddler on my parents for the night, which doesn't really seem in the holiday spirit. Any holiday, really. And then there are the stories of as many as I can remember before then. So that people don't feel completely screwed by this non-entry, I'd like you to take a minute to post your favorite 7/4 story in the comments section. Think of it as creating your own filler. Assuming you still have all your fingers on the morning of the fifth, of course, and don't have to type with a pencil clenched between your teeth. posted by M. Giant 8:30 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:My favorite memory of the 4th is going to the local VFW (because we were all class) and watching the fireworks with my mom and dad. We did it for years before they divorced and then we would go with just my mom. She tried, but she doesn't like fireworks so it wasn't the same.
By I always loved the 4th when I was a kid, because my parents' front yard has an absolutely perfect view of the city's fireworks, which are shot off 1/4 mile down the road at the high school stadium. All of my friends and our neighbors would gather in our yard to watch the show-both the fireworks, and the idiots who would turn down our dead-end street trying to beat the traffic afterwards. We did this for the first nineteen years of my life, until some cruel person on city council decided to move the fireworks several miles from us this year. Thoughtless. So my husband and I ate barbeque at my parents' house and watched old John Wayne movies with my dad. It was still fun, but not quite the same.
By I always loved the 4th when I was a kid, because my parents' front yard has an absolutely perfect view of the city's fireworks, which are shot off 1/4 mile down the road at the high school stadium. All of my friends and our neighbors would gather in our yard to watch the show-both the fireworks, and the idiots who would turn down our dead-end street trying to beat the traffic afterwards. We did this for the first nineteen years of my life, until some cruel person on city council decided to move the fireworks several miles from us this year. Thoughtless. So my husband and I ate barbeque at my parents' house and watched old John Wayne movies with my dad. It was still fun, but not quite the same.
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I think I love the idea of fireworks better than the actual display. My oldest son lives out of town, my middle son and his girlfriend hate crowds and my youngest is working as a camp counselor, so my husband and I went alone. We had the chairs,the blanket, the great view of the stadium, but after the first ten minutes, it's all about waiting for that great,very brief finale. The display we chose was in a smaller suburb-so no shapes or real fancy stuff. And then the 45 minutes waiting in line to get out of the parking lot. Fortunately, I file that in my short-term memory with labor pains and hang-overs and I know we'll go again next year.
By I worked at a summer camp up in the Sierras (just above Yosemite) for a couple years after high school. Every 4th is the big annual staff-only party. 30 late teens/early twenties partying out in the woods, drinking awful shot sized concotions, sneaking off in pairs (although as the parties wore on there were fewer attempts at discretion), drunkenly trying not to set the woods on fire with the massive bonfire, and finally stumbling back through the woods happily terrified of being attacked by bears. Good times, and definitly the best time I've ever had on the 4th.
By Sunday, July 02, 2006 The "M." Stands for "Magazine." So, remember how I said I'd post a picture of M. Small's magazine cover when it came out? I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to link you to the magazine's website. It's not only easier for me, it also serves as proof that we didn't just go to the photo place and have them dummy up one of those novelty magazine covers. Click here. I'll wait. Remember how I also said the art director had told us they had six or eight usable shots as opposed to the usual one or two from a shoot? I'm not really clear on what happens to the ones they didn't use, but as I told Trash, the solution is obvious: put him on the cover of every issue. Trash thought I was kidding. "I don't think they're going to put him on the cover of every issue," she said. "Why not?" I demanded. "They do with Oprah. Rosie. Martha Stewart. If Rosie can wave her bandaged-up staph-stump at me for the better part of a year, I can certainly put my adorable child on newsstands." "Those are their own magazines," Trash pointed out. "Fine. So he can start his own magazine, too. It'll have sections every month on things of interest to M. Small. There'll be a car section, and a truck section, and a bus section." Trash started getting into it. "Places to look for pacifiers that your parents can't reach or don't know about," she said. "This month in cookies." "Reviews of Dora the Explorer." "'Naps: Pro or Con?'" "'No, Oscar!' Showing your neighbor's dog who's boss." "And of course, the Letter from the Editor. 'Mommy! Daddy! Kitties! Uh-oh. Oh nooooo! Please? CAR! CAR! CAR! Milk, vacuuming, moon. Thank you!'" "I would buy this magazine every month." "Lots of people would. There's something for everyone. Whether you're into cars, buses, trucks, or even boats, M. Small Magazine is for you." "And planes. Don't forget planes." "And vacuum cleaners." "Oh, totally." "You still think I'm kidding, don't you?" She did, but by this point it was wishful thinking. posted by M. Giant 9:49 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:Lucky for M. Small I already enjoyed a juicy cheeseburger tonight.
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Oh.My.GOODNESS!
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Maybe it's because I don't have kids of my own, or maybe it's because I've read too much about serial killers, but all this stuff about Small being so cute people could eat him... I dunno.
By Adorable cover boy! Congratulations!
By What a great cover. Are you planning to have him model in the future? Think of the college fund or the vacation fund.
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"'No, Oscar!' Showing your neighbor's dog who's boss."
By If you're writing the copy for that magazine, I'm totally subscribing. Freaking hilarious.
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