Seven Red

Wow. This whole blog-thing is getting so confessional. Whatever.

• The pilgrimage to the holy shrine of all mid-30′s-middle-income-urban-parents today. That’s right: the Blue and Gold Temple of IKEA. We picked up a shelving unit for babygirl’s room. IKEA is not unlike the Catholic Church. When you’re actually there, it’s a mild and almost anodyne experience, during which you feel virtually nothing. Both have the clearly defined ritual paths and behaviors, designed to slow and pacify a gathering crowd. Both have the serial repetitions: The Lord be with you…and also with you…We lift up our hearts…We lift them up to the Lord…Should we get some new dishtowels?…Do we need them?…The old ones are getting kinda grungy…OK, let’s do it. But most of all, like the Catholic Church, the true pain of Ikea – like searing, lingering guilt – never hits until you get home, and have to build the damn thing. The problem with IKEA is not the instruction sets; they’re actually remarkably clear. Like Catholicism, you always know what you’re doing wrong. The problem is that you do wrong despite knowing it’s wrong, because the thing, the shelving unit in this case, makes it damn near impossible to do it right. Which is to say, it is precisely like the Catholic moral system: personal failure is a feature, not a bug. Why, I ask you, must a system designed for DIY construction be organized such that a half-millimeter error would make its construction impossible? Oh, God of IKEA, we are merely human, with all these human faults! So we spent the afternoon in sin and penance (and more penance than sin, but that’s always the way…), but ended up with a pretty nifty shelving system. Irony? It’s called the Expedit. They need to expedite the building process.
• I find it odd that both she and I have male first cousins who live in Boston and have visual arts careers (photographer, film-maker). Neither of them is from Boston. I sometimes imagine that they’re the same guy, which weirds me a little. It’s also true that we hardly ever speak to either of them, though not for lack of desire. I think I’ve seen my cousin twice in ten years.
• The shelving unit is part of the preparation for the babybelly. Don’t ask me how; it’s not the point. We’d done the equivalent of jack squat to prepare for the arrival of the babybelly until about two weeks ago, when we were like, “Oh, shit…we’re gonna have another baby in less than 90 days!” Well, yeah. Maybe we should get off our asses and get our shit together vis-a-vis the impending arrival of another human being (and a very needy one) in our home. Last time around, we were uber-prepared by now, but we see now that the whole preparation thing then was really first-time-at-the-rodeo sort of behavior. This ain’t our first rodeo. So, all things considered, I think we’re at about the right mix of “Eh, it’ll all come together” and “We’re so screwed!” Plans are in the offing. Plans and lists. Lists and more lists.
• We’ve been watching the DVD’s for Season 1 and 2 of 30 Rock and we think it’s friggin’ hilarious. Alec Baldwin deserves every award he gets for that show. Double that for Tina Fey.
• We had yummy dinner courtesy of one of the best Vietnamese joints in Chicago, Pho Xe Tank, better known as just Tank Noodles. I worked in a Vietnamese restaurant some years ago, and we’ve made Vietnamese a pretty consistent staple of our diet ever since, so I know good Vietnamese food, and this is good. It’s located in what could be called the Little Vietnam section of Uptown (Broadway and Argyle), and it’s always, always packed. They must make a mint. In any case, I got the house pho (with the tripe, soft tendon, and all), while she got a nice beef dish (wrap it up with a ton of veggies in some rice paper, yums). The cha gio, of course, are mandatory. babygirl thought the nuac mam was too spicy, but she liked the cha gio. Tank does not eff around. I’m not sure these pictures convey the scale of the pho I got for $7. That’s a friggin’ salad bowl:

Sonogram technology seems to have advanced quite a bit since 2005. All I saw then was a blob, with the technician doing these weird interpretive moves, like “see the leg?” Uh, no. I see a blob. That was last time. This time I could actually see pretty much everything, even before the technician pointed it out. It was pretty cool, actually. I saw the kid’s friggin’ face. The face! I said, “Hmm, that’s a face…that’s the nose and those are the lips and that’s a little chin,” and then the technician said “that’s the nose and those are the lips and that’s the little chin…” Pretty amazing stuff.

I did not, however, see the goods downstairs. I relied on the technician for that. But it’s a boy, and she wasn’t qualifying it at all. “See that?” she said. “It’s a boy.” How sure? Oh, she was sure. Apparently she’s seen that kind of thing before.

Then we’re driving away in a kind of daze (how can you not be in a daze after these things, I don’t know), and she says “A boy! But that’s completely different from….me!” Oy gewalt! Until we have a successful birth, the babybelly will continue to be referred to on this blog as babybelly, but dang, son. Babyboy this spring, should everything go well and everybody stay healthy.

So it’s been a big month over at the Seven Red household, as may have been noticed by our two and a half readers based on virtual non-activity on this blog. So here’s the news from Seven Red Land:

1) topspun finally, finally, finally defended his dang dissertation. Now, most people say “Huh? I thought you already did that!” Well, no. I hadn’t. It was a long and painful slog, not helped by a variety of factors that I don’t feel much like going into like, ever again. Life got in the way. Other things. My own insistence on doing it right the way I wanted to. But that’s done now, and I’m not really in the mood to apologize for it taking so long, to myself or others. In the end, it came out better than if I had kept to the route (and the chapters) that I had in the Spring of 2007, and I can live with it. During this whole long and – wait, did I say “painful?” – process, the worst days were the last day of each month. I’d go to bed on the last day of each month saying “There’s another month that I told myself I would be finished by, and here we are.” That’s the gut check time: lights out and alone in the dark with that burden. But on the last day of last month, I had submitted what I was going to submit. And on the last day of this month I can go to sleep without that hanging question hovering there in the dark. I’m going to sleep like a baby. Well, maybe not like a baby, but you feel me.In any case, it’s now time to take up the projects that have had to go on the back burner while this thing was eating away at my soul. I also have a new motivation to guide me: vendetta. I’ll leave that a mystery for now.

2) Bigger and more importantly, Seven Red – as so many facebook messages have indicated – is expecting another baby in April. babygirldos or babyboy, we’ll know (for the most part) on Tuesday, when we get the big twenty week sonogram. Let the gendering begin! We are, of course, thrilled and scared and wondering how we’re going to manage it all, but mostly thrilled (and scared). More on Tuesday.

3) Despite the near collapse of on of the nation’s Giant Financial Institutions, she (who works for said Giant Financial Institution) has thus far managed to keep her job, and also successfully completed her First Graduate Class (thanks for the tuition, Employer Institution!). As our friends who we had over for Thanksgiving said, full time job in an industry in crisis, a two and a half year old at home, four months pregnant, and still manages to ace her first class in ten (or so…) years! Not effing bad. If I don’t say it enough: you rock, baby!

So, all-in-all a good month. Seven Red is all smiles. Oh, and there’s also that little thing called Barack Fucking Hussein Obama getting elected President of these United States. After an awful October, and an awful eight years, it is a sweet November.

Vote, goddammit.

Here’s this, written on Day 1,000 of this fucking war:

In the heady days of January 1991, we used to cut out of our senior year of high school early and go smoke joints at R.L.’s apartment. We’d often have beer as well. From about 2 pm to 6 pm, a large group of us would chill there, maybe with CNN or MTV or cartoons on the television in the background. It was the line in the sand day, or thereabouts, and CNN was on. The war had not yet started, but we were waiting for it, full of bravado. We were sure that if the war started, it would lead to a general Mideast conflagration, and we would all be called to service. We were all 17 years old, and in good health, if often high.

I left R.L.’s at about 6, heading home to dinner. I walked back to my apartment with Sulli and Steve. We were pretty lit by this time, and the electricity in the air said it all: the war is imminent. Steve started belting out the lines as we walked down the Queens street: All we are say-ing/ Is give war a chance! I remember laughing. When I got home I found my mother standing in front of the television, her hand over her mouth. “What’s going…” but she shushed me, and I looked at the television. The eerie green light, the tracers going up over the minarets, the stentorian intonations of some spokesman or other. War. I went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, my heart filled with joy…

*****

Why doncha come on back to the War. – Leonard Cohen

September 10, 2001. I have dinner with an old friend at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Then we go to DBA, a bar. Jay-Z’s “Hova” comes on the bar’s sound system: H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay, what else can I say, dude, I gets bizzay. We talk about how great it is. I’m drunk at this point, and I have to get back to Brooklyn. I have to be up early tomorrow to do campaign work in Lower Manhattan before I head to work at my building near the Ferry terminal. I take a cab back over the Manhattan Bridge, with a final glance at the lights flickering in the Manhattan skyline just as we hit the center of the Bridge. Goddamn is it beautiful.

*****

One…we are the people
Two…a little bit louder
Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now
One…

March, 2003. The first Saturday of the War. I am at a conference in New York, but I stay at my brother’s place in Brooklyn rather than in the conference hotel. I don’t live here anymore. On Friday I got food poisoning. My brother, his wife, and my wife went to a French restaurant in Fort Green, but I stayed at his place, sick as a dog, watching the lead-up to the War on television. On Saturday I go to Midtown to see a friend’s panel, but the war is on television there, too, real now, green-lit tracers over the minarets, Shock and Awe booming through the hotel lobby. I leave after the panel, and wander into the anti-war march that is just beginning. The crowds are tremendous. I walk downtown with the march, but on the sidewalk. Hard for me to be a joiner that way, I guess. Earnestness irritates me, but I’m with them. When I get down to 10th street I encounter the drummers – a group of Latinos and Latinas leading the chant: One…we are the people, Two…a little bit louder, Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now. Everyone on the march and on the sidewalks is cheering. On a third floor balcony above the march, a woman comes out with a little boy and a conch shell. She starts blowing it in beat with the drum. Everyone’s eyes seem to move from the drummers to the balcony and back. The drummers acknowledge her, and the little boy dances. There he is dancing on the first Saturday of the War.

*****

And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. –Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Other Dancing Song”

One Thousand Days. I should have waited another one, and led with One Thousand One Arabian Nights. Too clever by far. And no history or stories will save me, like Scheherazade. It is the one thousandth day of the War. I often wondered when I was a child how people could live normally on the home front when a war was going on. How do they face it everyday, I wondered, knowing what must be happening, knowing that everything is at stake? How do they go out to dinner, play sports, make love, gesture to each other on the street? It bothered me. I’d think of the swing clubs during World War II – everyone dressed up and dancing. A sip from a bottle of beer, or a Tom Collins. How? It is the one thousandth day of the war. No stories will save me. In March, if all goes well, my first child will be born. Perhaps on the first Saturday of the fourth year of the War. I want her to dance to something else. I want some other occasion for her joy and even for her heartbreaks, something other than what Langston Hughes once called “the same old stupid game, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” I want for her some other dancing song. But it is the one thousandth day of the war and no stories will save me.

*****

Now back to the present, today, election day, 2008. And another one on the way. Another child, another dancing song. For the first one, now our dear babygirl (life is dearer than all that wisdom ever was), and for this second one, whoever he or she will be, and whatever he or she will dance to: VOTE. Vote some other dancing song. Vote OBAMA.