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I’ve been reading two books lately that are..interesting…to read together: Falling Man, by Don DeLillo, and The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. The DeLillo book takes place in the days immediately following September 11, and one of the main characters is someone who walked out of the Twin Towers, and reunited with his estranged wife.
The Klein book is about how neoliberals have been using the aftermath of various natural or man-made disasters–including 9/11, the tsunami of 2005, and Hurricane Katrina–to do massive social re-engineering that privileges big corporations and displaces the poor. I’m not that far into it yet, partly because I can’t read more than a chapter at a time without having my blood pressure rise into a dangerous neighorhood.
The interesting thing about reading it in conjunction with the DeLillo book is the feeling of being pushed back into that week, when the shock was new and ever-present. The point of the Klein book is that the Administration (and global capital) used the shock and dislocation of that time to rush through the abrogation of our civil liberties, and to enter into contractual relationships with companies like Blackwater and Halliburton to engage in war in Afghanistan.
It’s thought-provoking, to say the least.
Potato: What does it say on the bottom of my socks, Mom?
LM: Old Navy.
Potato: Old Lady!?!~?!!
(cue sound of adults laughing)
In Martin Sherman’s Bent, there is a scene where two of the main characters (gay men in a Nazi prison camp) move a huge pile of rocks to one side of the prison yard, take a three-minute break, and then move the pile back to its starting point over and over again. Sometimes I feel like that’s what landisdad and I do with the stuff in our basement, except without the pink triangles or the threat of death.
Which is a long (and melodramatic) way of saying that we’re once again living with a ton of boxes in our dining room.
Because our water heater cracked, and flooded the basement.
sigh.
Fortunately, it happened on a day we were home. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize it in time to keep 38 gallons of water from flooding our basement carpet. Which now needs replacing. And the guy who finished our basement in the first place has gotten out of the residential contracting business, and now only does commercial work.
(And let me just say what a sad day that was for residents in our area, since when I called him to find out who he subcontracted the carpet to, he called me back within 6 hours, and offered to find us someone else if we couldn’t use our original carpet guy. Best. Contractor. Ever.)
I can’t tell you how many plumbers, electricians, and other contractors we have called over the years. Many of them never called back. Some of them made appointments, and then never showed up. Some of them came and did estimates, and then never came back to do the actual work.
Enter the fine folks from Service Magic. Ever since we started using this free service to find contracting help, we have had no such contractor problems, and they didn’t fail us this time either. Two carpet guys called within a couple of hours, and both showed up for their appointments. One of them is coming tomorrow to sign a contract, and then on Saturday to install our new carpet.
We’re never using the phone book to find a contractor again.
I had a great idea for a post this morning. In fact I thought, “that’s such a great idea, it’ll write itself!”
Then I promptly forgot what it was, so you get this video link instead.
the Potato, on President’s Day:
“Mommy, I only like George Washington. I don’t like Abraham Lincoln.”
“Why not, pop?”
“Because Abraham Lincoln started fights, just a little bit.”
Yesterday, the Bee brought home the following essay:
I have a little brother who turned four on August 11. His name is [redacted] and let me tell you something, the day he was born I knew the new baby was going to be a pain. Well I turned out to be right, he is. He doesn’t even go away when I asked him to. And something else, he’s a crybaby. Sometimes he cries when I poke him playfully. I want to get rid of him, but whenever I mention this to my parents they say no.
You can feel the love, dripping off the page.
And the teacher’s comment?
Try working on great openings and endings! This was good and well-written.
Sigh….
We’ve had a couple of run-ins with bullying in the past week.
On Thursday evening, while I was out with the Potato, a neighbor stopped by to tell landisdad that the Bee had upset his kindergartener daughter during the after-school program that day. It seems that the Bee and a 2nd grade girl had been ‘grading’ the younger kids on their artwork, and had given this girl an F-minus (with a really absurdly large number of minuses). Landisdad talked to her about it, and she initially gave the ‘it was just a game’ answer, and then admitted that what they had done was hurtful. She wrote a note of apology to the girl, and gave it to her the next day.
Then on Saturday, the Bee had rehearsal. I went to pick her up at the end, and overheard the directors telling all the kids that they are heretofore banned from bringing Nintendo DSes to rehearsal, and that any found there would be confiscated and returned only to a parent. The DS, evidently, has some kind of IM-like chatting capability, where one can send a message–or forward a sent message–to others in the room who have the game.
It seems that some of the kids had been hijacking other kids’ screen names, and ‘anonymously’ writing snotty things about the people who were onstage at the time. As we left, the Bee told me that she and two other girls had been the ones who reported it, although as she said, “I’m sure the teachers already knew about it, since the whole room was buzzing about it.” (One of her friends had had her screen name hijacked and abused in this manner.)
It’s the first experience of this kind of high-tech bullying that either of us have experienced in person, and it made me really happy that we haven’t given in to the Bee’s pleading for a DS. I told the Bee that she did the right thing by reporting it to a teacher. Then, of course, she asked me for a DS again.
It’s an odd perspective, to have the two experiences of bullying so close together, one perpetrated by my kid and one reported by her. It makes me think that the practical existence of the bully is not one that is entirely one-sided–except in extreme circumstances, no one is a bully all the time.
But anyone can be a bully in a moment. The trick is to teach our kids that those moments aren’t acceptable, not that they themselves are unacceptable.
As a kid, I played out side and ran around all day. In the spring, summer and fall, I probably spent five or six hours outside every day. Although I was already an inveterate reader, my mother would kick me out of the house to get some exercise (and save her sanity, no doubt).
My brothers and I, along with the other kids in our neighborhood, had the run of our block, and at the end of our street was a Catholic school with a huge parking lot, bounded by an enormous field. We rode bikes, played war, tag, Breakout, and other games that now make me wonder if we were all practicing for a life of evading the police.
In my early adulthood, I had a job that actually required that I walk around for three or four hours per night, and didn’t really worry about my level of physical activity. But as I grew older, a more sedentary lifestyle, both at work and at home, getting regular exercise got harder. And when we moved from California to a place with real winter, and then had the kids on top of that, it became downright difficult to keep up the limited activity regimen I had established.
CamiKaos from Mommified Me issued a challenge last month to the blogosphere–to pledge to each other that we would exercise at least three times a week. I told her I would do it, as long as I could count my new workout: climbing the stairs wherever possible. Since, when I go to my office, I park in a garage where I routinely have to park on the 9th or 10th floor, that does require significantly more effort than you might originally think. (Oddly, I work on the 3rd floor of a 4-story building–it’s just the parking lot that makes me huff and wheeze.
Here’s a thing I know about myself–I hate to exercise. I will, however, concede that I need to do it. But if I can make it not a special thing that I have to do, and instead, a habit–that is what is going to make me succeed.
And look, she made me this adorable button:
It is fairly common for the Potato to climb into bed with me and landisdad of a morning, especially on cold winter days. Because of a quirk of construction, he has the coldest room in our house, and because of his congenital inability to sleep under blankets, he is often quite cold, which wakes him up. Sometimes, he comes in and just grabs his morning snack of dry cereal, then goes back to his room to read a book. Sometimes he climbs in for a cuddle. On weekend mornings, he will occasionally bring a book into our room to read (as I am often reading in bed when he wakes up).
One iron-clad rule is that he is not allowed to eat his snack in our bed while reading a book, because I do not love the crumbs.
So I performed a double-take last Sunday morning, when in my sleep-addled, blind-as-a-bat-without-my-glasses state I mistakenly thought that he brought a juice box into our bed.
It was, in fact, the Maurice Sendak Nutshell Library (which, to be fair to my near-sightedness, is about the same size and shape as a juice box).
He has been learning the months of the year at school, and he started spelling out the months from Chicken Soup with Rice. I think every parent, once in a while, has a moment where they are thrust back into their own childhood by their children, and that was one for me. I absolutely learned the order of the months from this book, and I can remember obsessively reading over and over again, “In July I’ll take a peep/into the cool and fishy deep/where chicken soup is selling cheap/selling once, selling twice/selling chicken soup with rice.” Why are they selling chicken soup with rice under the sea? I have no idea, but I was fascinated with that idea when I was little.
I don’t remember having the other books in the Nutshell Library–Alligators All Around, Pierre, and One Was Johnny. Either my little brothers lost/destroyed/ate them or, more likely, we got CSWR as a promotion from Campbell’s Soup, and never had the others.
They are fun books, and very good for a pre-schooler like the Potato, with their cleverly intricate drawings and especially Pierre’s tendency to shout, “I don’ t care!” But they will never replace, for me, the joys of imagining a snowman sitting down to an anniversary party “with cake for him and soup for me.”
I know that sometimes people wonder why we’re supposed to care which politicians are endorsed by which celebrities. After all, why is, say, Harrison Ford qualified to decide who should be the next president?
To which I normally say, is any of us?
But there’s a lot at stake for a politician who is seeking celebrity endorsements. Looks like Obama lucked out with this one:
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