Girl Detective

2.5yo Guppy woke at 2 a.m., screaming with rage, in a continuation of a tantrum he’d had before bedtime, when my husband G. Grod thought he’d try to be helpful and remove Guppy’s sock. Guppy, who of course wanted to do it himself, threw a fit and insisted that he wanted me to put the sock back on, but I was at the movies. G. and I stumbled around in the dark, trying to find his socks in the dirty laundry pile, and then I put them on Guppy. At last he was appeased.

But then 5yo Drake, who’d also been awakened by the ruckus from the bunk below, asked me to get him a drink of water. Then Guppy wanted a drink of water. Only then G. and I were allowed to return to bed.

I attended the Orson Welles double feature at the Heights of Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons. Kane impressed, again, on so many levels–the back and forth storytelling, the aging of the characters, the sets, the transitions between scenes. It _is_ a masterpiece, and one that’s also enjoyable to watch.

But that brings me to the second film of the double feature, and Note to Self #502: I don’t like Magnificent Ambersons. I find it boring. Perhaps this makes me an unappreciative cretin; so be it. The sets I found stunning in Kane felt precious and overwrought in Ambersons. The characters, save Agnes Moorhead, felt thin and didn’t interest me. (Moorhead did give a delicious cackle at one point that foreshadowed her later work on Bewitched.) I was fighting to stay awake for the saccharine ending. Yes, as the second in a double feature, my attention and energy are going to be compromised. But nothing in Ambersons, which I think I’ve seen once before, made me want to rally.

And that brings me to Note to Self #503: A Pumpkin Pie Blizzard for the first movie, and buttered popcorn for the second were, indeed, overkill, even though I bought each in size small. As I’ve said before, I thought it wasn’t a good idea, and I did it anyway.

Rhyming is a developmental stage for kids. 5yo Drake’s been doing it for about a year, and 2.5 yo Guppy is just starting. He’s a second child, so he hits a lot of milestones earlier than Drake did because of his big brother’s example.

Last week, though, we had a few rhyming incidents that left me less than proud.

Drake, listening to the song “I Like Bugs” on the new Yo Gabba Gabba microphone: I like jugs!

Guppy, after I sang the Thumb-in-the-thumb-hole/Putting-on-your-mittens song: Thumb in the bum hole!

I was thankful I was the only audience. Though it was difficult, I did not laugh. Best not to encourage them in naughty rhyming.

I’m just going to assume that I’ve had at least 500 memos over my 40 years, and start with 501, like the classic jean. Memos to Self are my hopeful attempt to analyze recent mistakes so as not to make them again. Usually, enough time passes that I forget, so maybe writing them down will aid my memory.

Memo to Self #501: Plan ahead for kid vacation weeks. Sudden, increased togetherness for me and the boys, which is already at a peak, results in stress, not bonding. Babysitters, playdates, and planned activities would have helped.

Strangely (or not) my husband G. Grod and I did not have this problem when we went away for a mini break, the weekend before last. Sudden, increased togetherness resulted in increased relaxation and happiness. Go figure.

2.5yo Guppy and I are off to the doctor’s office to get a strep culture. Never had to do it with 5yo Drake. It helps much that Guppy clearly is in pain as he swallows, and says his mouth hurts. Whenever Drake was sick as a toddler, he would just scream and scream and refuse to let anyone get near him.

One of my favorite memories of childhood is the time my dad decided to do the strep cultures for my sisters and me at home. He did the swabs, touched them to the red stuff in the plastic dishes, then my mother put them in a low oven to develop.

And forgot them. Till the house smelled bad, and she had three melted strep cultures all over her oven.

I’m sure my mom didn’t think it was funny, but I did.

Normally autumn, with its launch of the television season here in the US, is one of my favorite times of the year. I devour the Entertainment Weekly guide to fall TV, reading it to tatters, then carefully plot out what I’m going to watch, and how, since our Tivo can “only” record two shows at a time. This year, however, was different. Perhaps the quality of shows took too big of a hit with the writers strike earlier this year. Perhaps I’ve simply reached my allowable tolerance for only-OK television. In any case, my interest is failing fast.

I canceled the season pass for Dirty Sexy Money before the season even began. I’ve dropped Heroes and Sarah Connor: Terminator. I’m waiting to hear how the Mentalist is; the premiere was good, Simon Baker is very good, but I’m tired of watching shows that are only OK except for one thing: Life for Damian Lewis, Bones for the witty banter, the overcrowded House for what Hugh Laurie is going to do or say next. When I look at my Tivo to-do list, I find only a few shows that I consider A-list: Mad Men, Project Runway, the Office, and 30 Rock. I’d add How I Met Your Mother, only it’s wildly uneven, and last night’s was really lame.

I’m highly dependent on, and grateful for, the tv critiques of Alan Sepinwall. He likes the good stuff, and is intolerant of the mediocre and bad stuff. He’s about to give up on Heroes:

Like Peter, I think you really have to be able to turn your brain off to enjoy “Heroes” these days, and unfortunately, I don’t have that ability… er, power. (Gah!)

And he goggles that one of the two reasons he still watches Terminator is because of former 90210er Brian Austin Green:

He’s gone from squeaky-voiced “Beverly Hills 90210″ fifth wheel (did anyone at any point watch that show for David Silver?) to convincing bad-ass, and, along with Summer Glau, the reason I remain engaged by a show that’s otherwise just slightly better than mediocre.

Sepinwall is a reliable indicator to me of what to watch, and what to avoid. I’ve got about 110 pages of Crime and Punishment to go for my book group this week, and I’m giving the B shows the boot so I can finish it. Will I watch them again? Who knows. But I’m rather looking forward to the increase in free time. I’ve let TV become a chore, and that’s just wrong.

This morning, 5yo Drake woke up complaining of stomach pain. He skipped dinner last night, so I knew what to expect. I gave him only a little water, and he threw up for the next few hours. I think he’s got mild ketotic hypoglycemia, which recurs because he’s such a picky, stubborn eater who skips meals.

Then 2.5yo Guppy whipped off his diaper, flinging poop on the floor. When I cleaned it, and him, up, he threw a 20-minute tantrum while I tried to deal with barfy Drake.

Finally, when I wasn’t looking, Guppy started throwing puzzle pieces in Drake’s barf bucket.

Am I on a sitcom? Insult to injury doesn’t even come close.

At The American, Charles Murray asks, “Are Too Many People Going to College?”:

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) I worked for an educational services company for many years. I worked with high school students and their parents who were focused only on getting into college. I worked with college students who planned to go to graduate school simply because they didn’t know what else to do. My children are only 5 and 2, so the question of college is still a long way off. But I hope I’ll be able to encourage my kids to consider all the options, and choose a university education if that’s the best thing for them, not just because everyone else does it.

Esquire doesn’t even pretend to objectivity in its “75 Books Every Man Should Read“:

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.

That’s a good thing. And many of the books are pretty good too. For men AND women–I’ve read 12 of them, and many more are on my TBR shelves. But I think I only counted one female author–Flannery O’Conner–on the entire list. Come on. Only men can write great books for men? That’s just silly.

Link from The Morning News.

Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.

Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:

The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.

Link from The Morning News.

Was anyone else concerned by EW’s cover of Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty?

Now:

About 14 years ago:

Doherty looks strangely the same, plus as if she needs a sandwich, or five. Garth’s face looks suspiciously tight. These women are only in their mid-thirties. Plastic surgery to make them look like their original-90210 selves is pretty extreme, and depressing.

One of my readers, SmallWorld Reads, commented about the movie Mamma Mia! that the movie characters, played by actors between 48 to 59, were significantly older than the characters’ ages in the play, which were supposed to be about 40ish.

I think 30-40 actors often won’t play parents because of the stigma of aging. Though her reps deny it, Rachel Weisz reportedly refused to reprise her Mummy role because she wouldn’t play the mother of the new 20yo character. (Weisz claims to have been born in 1971. A good friend of mine was in secondary school with her, and says she’s shaved a few years off.) Also, the age of parents goes up each year. I had my son Drake when I was 35, Guppy at 38. I’ll be 58 (about Meryl Streep’s age, now) when Guppy is 20. So 60 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30, and 30s are the new 90210.

Does that make 80 the new dead?

(Thanks, I think, to JV for the joke, which is ironic, since JV and his wife Rock Hack were the most fervent 90210-riginal fans I know.)

From Boing Boing, Marlboros for Moms.

I’ve been a nonsmoker for eighteen years now, and am pretty happy with that choice.

Is it me, or are photos of Claire Danes with her costar Zac Efron from the upcoming film, Me and Orson Welles, more than a little reminiscent of those of Angela and Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life?

Mark Harris at Entertainment Weekly writes about what piles up on his DVR: quality programs he finds himself unable or unwilling to watch, instead turning to shorter, lighter fare.

The oldest movie on our Tivo is Guys and Dolls (1955)–three hours long, and recorded at least a year and a half ago during Oscar month at Turner Classic Movies. There never seems to be enough time, or the right mood, for a 3-hour 50’s musical.

As Harris notes, the same reluctance applies to books and music. I wonder, how many others besides me are feeling bad that they’d not yet read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? It’s been on my shelf for a decade.

To the family who next rents the blue Mazda 5 from the Charlotte airport: check the CD player. I left Abba’s Greatest Hits for you.

On the plus side, I have a good excuse to buy the Mamma Mia! soundtrack.

There was much crying and screaming at bedtime last night. I wonder, is the “price” of a good day a difficult bedtime? We met friends at the pool, then met them again later for burgers, hot dogs and great french fries at the Bulldog NE, picked by Minnesota Monthly as having the best burger in the state. After that, bedtime was challenging. But once Drake and Guppy were _in_ bed, they stayed there and fell asleep quickly, so G. Grod could watch a bit more of Branagh’s Hamlet. I’m not sure how I made it through all four hours in the theater when it came out. I can’t make it through an entire hour without nodding off. Then again, I was unmarried, without kids and twelve years younger in ‘96.

Or merely human? Pre-parenthood, I had no idea how much mess, noise, chaos, poop, and screaming was in store. I thought there would be unpleasantness balanced with joy. But I’ve found the joy to unpleasantness ratio discouragingly low up to now, with kids at 2.5 and 5yo.

Many mothers have told me that the 5 and 7 sibling age period is when things improve. I doubt it is a coincidence that those ages mean that both children are in school.

It has been a long summer. Beautiful weather, and many joys. But also much drudgery and frustration. I think we’ll all be happy to spend time with other people when preschool starts next week.

During my recent visit with family, my husband G. Grod disassembled 2.5 yo Guppy’s crib, and put up bunk beds in 5yo Drake’s room. Guppy finally has all his teeth, and he slept well in a bed, and in the same room as Drake, when we were away. The transition home has been less than smooth. Guppy can climb up to Drake’s bunk, but not down. Drake excels at winding Guppy up, and the four of us have been up and down our three floors about an hour after “bedtime” every night trying to get them to settle. Loud thumps from jumping shake the house.

I hope the novelty wears off soon.

Ugh. Saccharine, smarmy, and boring to boot. Neither funny, nor charming. I gave up about halfway through. Instead, I read more of Hamlet.

Hamlet, on Facebook. (Link from Morning News and ALoTT5MA)

Guess what? White people love Facebook (link from my friend lxbean), which I recently joined. I’m discouraged by how many things I like that White People like–81 out of 106, right now. I don’t delude myself that I’m unique, but it’s a humbling reminder of how herd-like my supposedly independent thinking is.