First Post of the Last Day of November

Marmot, Manning Park, 2005.

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The Internet Went Away So We Had Cookies for Dinner.

5:55 am: The Internet is broken at our house. There are no emails, no comments to read, no waves to surf. I put on my denim maternity dress from the SPCA Thrift Store and a sweater overtop and a pair of tights and my new boots and I get me to work, as hastily as I can, because the Internet always works there.

8:30 am: At work there is other internet but my website is not here either; it can not be found! I gnash my teeth and read the CBC website for a while but it isn’t the same, no not the same at all. Already very tired of Olympic mascots, except Mukmuk, the non-mascot. Love marmots. Love. Marmots.

12:03 pm: I have grown quite used to the idea of no longer having a website. I will quit nablopomo, with a good reason! I think, how can I blog, after all, if there is no blog to blog in! I will spend the evening watching shitty TV and not thinking up anything to blog about. Hoorah! Hoorah!

5:30 pm: Home, I remove my boots (whilst sitting: aha!) and my tights as well since they are maternity tights and fit funny, as in, they don’t have enough elastic to stay up, which is nice because that way Alien doesn’t boot me when the elastic cuts into my belly but not nice because I am forever hitching my bits up and no one likes that in the office. Or on the Transit.

6:00 pm: While Trombone scampers about the house clutching the remote control and dancing to Kanye West (I don’t know) I stare into the cupboards and freezer, waiting for inspiration to strike re: dinner but inspiration does not strike. What, after all, can one concoct from 8 cans of beans and a box of Arrowroot cookies?

I decide I would most like a taco. There are no tacos.

6:20 pm: Saint Aardvark comes home to find me barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen and about to bake chocolate chip cookies. He takes a picture (actually rather more pictures than necessary), which gives me something to blog and now we are done.

Posted in babby, food | 2 Comments

Rob Brezsny and his Band of Merry Angels

I think what I like best about Free Will Astrology horoscopes is not the astrological aspect, in which I do not really believe, at least not in the ways that people who have faith truly believe or that people who think they are right about everything are completely irrefutable when you engage in discourse with them, but in the permission to take a meditative look at some aspect of my life and wonder how the sentence / paragraph / idea fits with what I am doing right now.

For example, this week’s aquarius horoscope says:

What if I told you there will be 13 militantly helpful angels in gossamer armor standing guard around your bed every night, fighting off nightmares and ensuring that your dreams are blessed with floods of sublimely practical revelations? Would you regard what I said as a poetic metaphor, as the hyperbolic fantasy of a kooky astrology writer? Or is there a chance you’d take me literally? That you’d consider my vision to be the prophetic truth about an actual event? If it’s the latter, then I urge you to be aggressive about asking the angels for the very best mojo they can muster. This is one time when you have license to be greedy about tapping into the primal power of supernatural goodness.

What am I doing right now that I might ask for supernatural goodness from angels? Not much. Lately I feel as though I am surviving, dragging my feet from one day into the next, engaging in a routine that is simple and serves its purpose; to get me from day to day. If I were less – or more – tired, it might bother me that I don’t have the emotional time to squeeze in a phone call in the evening or an extra 15 minutes of writing in the morning. But I am aware that life won’t be like this forever and right now, in head-down-keep-slogging mode, I don’t tend to stop and remember any other life. And I can’t miss what I don’t remember.

Only when I actually ask myself the question, baffled, as though I am quizzing myself in metaphysics – the help of 13 angels? The mojo? – do I consider that in a previous life, I would have had an answer. I would have had a ready set of life improvements simmering in my brain for which I needed luck or psychic blessing or the powerful act of articulating just what I wanted from each bubbling pot.

At one time, for example, I would have eagerly asked the angels to support me in the following:

I’m going to publish a short story by the end of this year,
start or join a rock and roll band,
go back to school,
work in radio,
support myself with creativity,
be more political.

None of it ever happened. But I was forever thinking it might. Despite rarely having the courage to take the third step towards any of those goals (first and second steps are no problem) I really believed, to lesser and greater degrees, that someday I would achieve them. That optimism, that hope, that living for the five year plan, THAT I miss. No matter how coated in chickenshit my optimism was and no matter how completely useless it is to have the creative visualization without ever taking a step out of your comfort zone. I am nostalgic for my optimistic self.

What I really lack right now is the ability to look past 12 months from now and imagine a future that is as different as this present is from the future I imagined in 1999. A future where my sentences are less awkward. A future where I look back at this year or two of my life and wonder that I didn’t see what fantastic things I would do.

So, my official request to the mojo angels is: Please, more dreams that are about what fantastic things I will do (in detail, please) and, if possible, fewer dreams about waiting in line for an hour to get into an Italian restaurant (that was last night.) (Unless of course I am meant to be envisioning myself as an Italian restaurant owner? Doubting it.) If it helps, I’ll cut out the cheese before bed.

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Verbatim

Ultrasound technician, digging madly at my midsection: Darn baby! Won’t turn around for me. Come…on…TURN! (pokes hard) Come on!
Me: It’s sleeping…
UT: Well, I got a really good profile shot. But I need a head on shot too. I need it to turn. (cajoling) Come on baby….come on baby…
Me: Funny – with my son’s ultrasound we couldn’t get good shots of him because he was moving around so much. This one’s just lying there. Chillin’.
UT: (grits teeth) FINE. I’m moving down to measure its legs. OH COME ON.
Me: Hmm?
UT: It’s legs are crossed. Look! Perfectly cross-legged. So comfortable.
Me: (laughing) Little yoga baby.
UT: Harumph.

– time passes –

UT: All right. (pokes hard) TURN.
Me: Hey – it’s turning –
UT: YES! There…there…there’s its eye and there’s
Me: Good lord!
UT: There, there’s the lens of the eye
Me: Ack!
SA: It’s an alien!
UT: There’s a great shot for you (clicks keyboard). OK – we’re done!

It’s a good thing I know how these things turn out because this is the most terrifying portrait I have ever seen and it doesn’t help to think that its subject is inhabiting my body.

Posted in babby, funny | 8 Comments

Of Puke and Snow and Hallelujahs

Trombone has thrown up three times in his life. One of those times was sometime last night so this morning when I opened his bedroom door, expecting my usual delightful toddler smell, I was greeted instead with a great whiff of day-old frat house.

Luckily he didn’t get any on himself. Which meant he didn’t get any on me when I picked him up. But oh, that smell stayed with me all day.

Being mostly fine, though a bit woozy from not having any food in his stomach, we soldiered on to MamaNonna and PapaNonno’s house and I carried on to a regular work day with my regular challenges. (You can tell it’s a good day because I didn’t refer to my challenges as “fucking lunatics who don’t deserve their ridiculous salaries.”) I looked out the window periodically to see if it was snowing yet because I love it when it snows, even if I have to drive, even if it’s evening and trafficky, even if it’s hell on the non-snow-tires, I love the first snow in the evening because it’s quiet and pretty and no one can go very fast at first, everyone is forced to eke along and look out their windows a lot while the snow swirls in the headlights and streetlights and against the Christmas lights and oh! I love the snow.

Instead, the afternoon grew darker and darker till at 3:40 pm it felt like 6 and when I asked my boss if I had missed another time change he just laughed at me. “It’s going to get darker until December 21st, my dear,” he said and I was reminded of my father, who counts down the days to darkness and then counts up the days to light.

When I left the office it was not snowing, no, it was pissing icicles, dumping freezing buckets with a slight breeze to get right under your collar and up your sleeves. My two blocks to the bus stop were unpleasant but when I missed the bus by a hair and had to wait another 10 minutes for the next and the next was a short, full bus with one of the most painful conversations evAR going on behind me (Geek teenage boy: I LOOOOOVE fantasy novels. LOOOOOOVE them. Dragons and wizards and spells and stuff? LOOOOOVE. Teenage girl: Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy book all the way through. They’re like, too weird. Boy: Oh.) that was some super unpleasant.

Then there was the three block walk to my parents’ place to get Trombone. Oh! Was there snow in Burnaby? No, there was not. There was slightly slushier pissing icicles and a slightly sharper wind. Fucking awesome, my feet are wet and my nose is missing.

The drive home took 45 minutes instead of 25. Trombone fell asleep and I drove slowly and wondered about people who speed when slush is falling from the sky. When we got home, Trombone woke up and ate some cereal and the catt puked on the floor to celebrate his dinner and I suddenly, uncontrollably yelled nasty things at the catt, the lowest form of life in the house and therefore the most frequent recipient of my wrath, with a gusto that has not been seen since my last brush with karaoke Guns N Roses.

Then in the bath, Trombone splashed his toys gently and looked up at me with his big, blue, shadowy eyes. Such a tired boy, such a long, long day for all of us. I sang, “Trombone row the boat ashore…hallelujah…” and he smiled and said, clear as a snowflake, “a-lay-yuuu-yah!” So it’s all right, after all.

Posted in outside, public transit, the parenthood, trombone | 5 Comments