Seven Red

Yup yup.  It’s that time again.

• Victory! Having scarfed down about 20 chocolate chip cookies, there was no way I was going to get to sleep at my usual bedtime of 1am. But I tried anyway, tossing and turning and generally getting no closer to sleep. Then I watched as my daughter came scampering out of her room, headed for the bathroom. She went in, pulled down her pajamas and her pull-ups, sat on her potty, made her pee, dumped it, wiped, and flushed the toilet. In the middle of the night. This is a great victory in the Seven Red house, and I’m just so proud that I’m telling all you fine folks about it. Potty training was an ordeal, but what I’ve learned is that it’s a completely non-linear process. We worked on her for four months, through refusal, tantrums, false starts, hiccups, half-steps, half-a-dozen how-to books, and massive frustration. We were getting nowhere. Then, one day, I sat with her for about an hour and simply refused to let her leave the bathroom. She settled in, did her thing, and then took to it. Overnight. She went from refusing the potty and saying “I’m a BABY,” to using it all the time, as if by magic. It’s clear that she could have been potty trained earlier, but she just didn’t want to do it. But a night-time trip, completely self-motivated? It’s a beautiful thing.
• Irony! We live on the third floor of a three-flat, as they call them here in Chicago. Downstairs from us is a nice guy named Steven, who lives (I think) with his girlfriend (who I’ve never seen). Below them lives a couple who moved in when we did – the building had just been through a gut rehab, and we were the first tenants. The first floor couple are married, but they’re young, maybe in their mid-twenties. They fight all the time. It’s really unbelievable. I go out back to smoke, and I hear them two floors down in these brutal conversations, like “Can’t you even understand the question I’m asking you? Are you stupid? “Are you?” “I’m so sick of dealing with your shit!” All the time, like that. This qualifies, in my book, as “putting your business in the street,” and she knows that there is nothing I detest more than putting one’s business in the street. I don’t think she and I have ever had a fight in public, because as soon as one even comes close to starting, I mutter something like “business in the street” and disengage. And we don’t wonder whether they have the same fights inside. The basement of our building is a general storage area for all the tenants, and we put tons of stuff down there because we have almost zero closet space. So, from time to time we have to retrieve this or that from the basement. As it turns out, you can hear conversations in the first floor apartment pretty clearly from the basement. It goes like this: “I can’t fucking believe you. You asshole.” “Oh, like you’re better. Fuck you.” “God, something so simple and you still manage to screw it up.” Etc. All the time. Now the kicker for this came about three months ago. I was in my usual state of insomnia, and heard some ruckus outside at around 2:30am.It was so loud that it woke she up: some commotion in the street. We both went to the front window, and saw a very drunk woman laid out on the ground, with a man trying to pull her to her feet, tugging her arm roughly and yelling “Get up! You never fucking listen to me!” The woman was saying, screaming “I want to stay here!” “Get the fuck up!!” she and I looked at each other like – no, is that them, our neighbors? People started coming out of their buildings to see what was going on and help the woman into her house, and the police even came. Sure enough, it was our downstairs neighbors. A truer instance of putting your business in the street would be hard to imagine. The woman was literally in the gutter.  Two days ago, she was yelling at her husband to let her into the car, and he drove off while she was still gripping the door handle. This as I was walking up the block, so I reached our front door at the same time as she did. “Uh, how you doin’?” I asked awkwardly. So today I was coming in, and I bumped into Steven, the nice guy on the second floor, not connected with the first-floor couple. But he says to me,  mistaking me for the first floor guy (I had a hat and scarf on), “Sorry about the noise last night.” Huh? Then he sees that I’m his upstairs neighbor and says “Oh, sorry again. The first floor people were banging on the ceiling because we were being too loud.” I smiled. Nope, I would actually come down and knock on your door if that was happening. Since I’m like, an adult. We parted ways at the second landing. But I just had to laugh that the first-floor couple would have the nerve to tell other tenants to, um, lower the noise. Amazing. Now, she thinks that they shouldn’t be married. I agree. They seem to despise each other. But I will say that there is at least one activity they seem to enjoy doing together, and they are no less loud at that than they are in their fights. Let’s just say that I hear a lot when I am outside for my smoke breaks…
• Fluffy! We watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Eh. I can do without that Juno kid, for reals. Always with the same character. I get it, with the halting delivery and self-consciously charming not-like-the-other-high-school-guys bit. I really do. I’ve had a television series and now three movies to learn it, and I get it now. Basta! But I will say this. The movie gets exactly right the teenage all-night-Manhattan-trip, even down to the Rasta guys who invariably butt into your conversations. We used to do this occasionally when I was a teenager, especially after the rave clubs opened on Hudson Street, and it was always exactly like that. In similar news, we watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno last night. I also get the whole Seth Rogan bit. she calls it the “schlubby guy gets hot chick” appeal. For my part, I don’t think any of those Judd Apatow movies (and their various Roganesque offspring) are about women at all. They are about the intense pathology of the male friendship. The women in these movies are merely functions to contrast the male friendships. This is most obvious in Pineapple Express, but re-watch The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, whichever, and tell me these aren’t primarily studies of the contemporary male friendship circle.
• Cookie! It’s all like Revolutionary Road up in here today. I made my ass-kicking Organization Man 1950′s Style Meatloaf and she baked a batch of her awesome cookies, which is why I’m still up writing this blog post at 2:56 in the morning. I should have been asleep for twenty minutes by now! (I don’t really sleep. It’s a personal failing). I won’t even try to describe the cookies. This is what the kitchen counter looked like at around 4:30 this afternoon:

• Pretty! As in, you think you’re so…

• Groovy! Michael White and the original Liberty Jazz Band were just incredible on American Routes today, playing live at the House of Blues in New Orleans. Knock you down good. We had it on when we were eating dinner, and I was just mesmerized by it, as I always am by good live jazz. There are worse ways to spend an hour than this, I assure you:

American Routes, February 21

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