Seven Red

The last couple of days, Ellie’s been coming home from daycare with actual writing that she’s done. Well, writing out individual words, but still. I’m impressed. Her latest effort seems to be focused on the letter U, as the assembled words make clear: bud, nut, cut, mud. I would have started with A, but maybe they covered that and I missed it. We also noticed that one of the words seems to be RUM, and that the theme itself seems to have to do with rum as well, or at least drinking in general. You have your cup, your mug, and even your jug. Come to think of it, the other words could fit into a drinking theme, too: you’re at the hub, some nut’s around, at least two people get cut (one of whom’s your bud), you end up in the mud, and then you have to take the bus. Sounds like a fun Friday night. Ah, I’m proud of her.

Ellie and I also just got through the 8th volume (out of 8 ) in the Judy Moody series. Let me tell you, Judy Moody is a world class pain in the ass. As a character, I mean. The books are really meant for second and third graders to read, I think, but Ellie digs ‘em as bedtime stories one or two chapters at a time, so I oblige her, and now I know more about Judy, Stink, Rocky, Frank Pearl, Jessica Finch, and even Amy Namey than, to be quite honest, I ever really cared to. It’s a lot of friggin’ pages of this stuff!

In other news, Rafe goes straight for the Bergson. I’d stick with Judy Moody.

Is this really going to be a weather post? A weather post? No. I guess I shouldn’t do that, not least because it really means we’ve hit bottom on subject matter – the worst kind of uncomfortable small talk: “Cold enough for ya?” Yeah, well. But it is winter, finally, after a mild November, so we’re just hoping to get our trips off OK out of the sucking pit of O’Hare. We have quite a few. The whole fam will fly to Albany, and from there the short drive to Schoharie to see Granny and everyone else. Then we drive to Queens, spend some time with the NYC famiglia, then back to Schoharie. Then she and the kiddos make the solo flight back to Chicago, while yours truly takes the Amtrak to Philadelphia, where I have some – ahem – business to take care of. No, not that kind. The other side of the table kind. The asking the questions kind. Should be interesting. Then I fly back to O’Hare, and then it’s New Years. So, winter, finally. I suddenly remembered that we’re leaving from Midway.

Has this been pointless enough for you? Good. Because it was all a thin ruse, a mere delivery device for these adorable pictures of the kiddos in and around various signifiers of the season.

On Saturday we took a trip down to the Taste of Lincoln Avenue festival. Luckily, we ate before we left, so there was nothing much to do but drink beer and bump into too-rich twenty-somethings. Oh, and the Kids Carnival.

  she and Ellie have quite the conversation on the El.

  But Ellie wasn’t really happy until she got to go down the giant slides.

   But that wore her out, which of course meant it was time for…more beer!

  This is the part of the story where the kids are asleep so I’m standing around drinking beer.

Then back on the train, Rafe in tow.

Oh, it’s that time again. Insomniac rambling about daily life and such. Meaningless reports: nostalgia for the always incomplete end of bureaucratic culture. There’s still something vaguely sexy about the forgotten colonial outpost, and the dedicated functionary who sends in the dispatches, despite the fact that nobody’s reading them, and that the surveillance has lost all utility. Hmmm. The horror of banality. So here we go.

1. The kids are asleep. I’ve been saying that a lot, even when they aren’t, or not really. It has a nice ring to it. The kids are asleep. Variations: The kids are sleeping. Kids? Asleep.  …and a couple of kids of course. Them’s some sleeping kids. You might have fooled the Philadelphia, and joshed the Joliet, but you never did the Kenosha kid(s are sleeping). Are the kids asleep? Yup, they are.  It’s fun to say. Try it. The kids are asleep. On account of there’s two of them. Kids. Asleep.

2. Kids These Days – Two flicks I liked recently, with the usual proviso that “recently” for us means months or even a year old for normal people who can go to movies in actual theaters. First, Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s continuing exploration and twisting of the American high school film. A clear follow-up to Elephant, even if not in the trilogy, complete with the continuous following shots of teenage boys walking. I noted this feature of Elephant in a discussion with Chuck from Austin once, and he made a good point: the frustration and boredom the viewer feels at the seemingly aimless, though clearly purposive walks mimics the boredom and aimless directionality of the American teenage experience itself. Elephant opens with what feels like a 10 minute sequence of the following shot; it feels like ten minutes, in the same way the last two minutes of sophomore level math felt like ten minutes, so you’re back there while watching the film, in the pointlessness of the educational system that you already know, by tenth grade, is cracked and broken. That it gets shot up or otherwise cut in half then seems like an afterthought, or at least something happening. If anything, Paranoid Park is even less moralistic and sentimental than Elephant (or Milk for that matter), and certainly seems less interested in pointing up some lesson about youth culture. Yes, it’s fucked like everything else. The film is also, maybe in the same way as The Lookout, about writing. I could see how various expressivist teachers would love this sort of thing, even if it leaves off ambiguously, to the extent that the main character has to write himself a meaning for a meaningless act. Maybe that’s high school, too. Second film, the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. For some reason, the version I got was dubbed rather than subtitled (truly the sign of a shitty distribution agreement), so some of the acting seemed off, but it maintained itself despite this thoughtless crime. Plot: Oskar, a weird little Swedish boy is bullied at school until he meets his new neighbor, a little girl vampire named Eli. The film is then their story. I’m not usually into horror or vampire films, but this one did good. It’s more a sweet little tale with the occasional and very subtle special effects. In one scene, for instance, the little girl scampers up the side of a hospital building seeking her guardian, a man who keeps her in blood through various murders until he screws up for the last time. Her insect-like climbing is a background effect, made more effective for being almost out of sight. Even the one real attack scene has a novel element, as the little girl clutches her victim like a child would, which suddenly seems eerily animalistic. It’s well done. These are both small films, mostly about people, with the sudden and nearly antiseptic introduction of gore.  Better, then, for being small. Of course, we get the sense that Eli’s previous guardian, who came to such a grotesque end in what seems to be his mid-fifties, was the last Oskar, perhaps engaged when he was himself a sweet and bullied little boy, and so the sweetness of the movie leaves off with this disastrous implication. Better, then, for cutting the saccharine with the ultimately dark suggestion. We also saw Frost/Nixon, which is engaging, if a little Karate-Kiddish. The Karate Kids are asleep.

3. Trips and Events – Our big summer trip will be to….State College, Pennsylvania. Oy. Some people go to Paris, etc. I’m going for some workshop that I applied for, while she and the kids are coming along because we know people there, etc. I wouldn’t call it a vacation destination, but it’s pleasant enough in the summer. So we’re probably going to drive out, and we’ll try to then make our way to upstate NY, maybe, but even that sounds dicey. That’s our vacation, essentially: one night in Ohio and a few in Happy Valley. I would have also gone to Montreal this summer for the ISHR conference, but I received notification that my paper was accepted in…April! Everybody else I know received acceptances in friggin’ November. And I’m fine taking the second cut after somebody else no doubt dropped, but I had just assumed that the non-notification was a rejection, not some limbo state waiting list sorta thing. So I’m not going. I have too much other stuff to finish up now to rev up that research bit again for these people who kept me dangling. It seems like an odd way to run things up there. Finally, if our last Big Night Out was kind of a catastrophe, our next promises, I hope, to be better. We’re going to pay ridiculous fees for some professional nanny-type to watch Ellie and Rafe, and we’re going to see Leonard Cohen at the Chicago Theater May 5. Just rah. Can’t wait.

So back to the colonial outpost, and the proverbial forgotten functionary. There’s always a strange local fever spreading mysteriously across the outpost in these things, and no less so now. Isn’t there a strange moment in every one of these plague panics (swine flu) when you think, just for a second, that you really should be scared, even though any disruption would be an inconvenience or worse? It’s like the first few pages of Camus when the rats start to come out of the sewers to die, or the first few pages of And The Band Played On, with the Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii popping up all over the place – and you’re gonna be the one who is both alarmed, but much too jaded to act on it?  Maybe my usual disdain for being affected by media outbreaks is being blocked by the fact that the kids – these two kids – are asleep…

So she  is on maternity leave, and I’m just loving it. Be aware that she’s bored stiff, despite a (fingers crossed) very non-colicky baby. Everybody told us with Ellie that her non-stop screaming was very much out of the normal range, and I think we knew that implicitly, but when you have no measure for comparison, the whole claim seems somewhat unreal. But this baby might be on the other end of the range; he seems to fuss in minor ways and eat constantly one day, and sleep all the next. I think it’s an eating-growing-eating-growing thing, but what do I know, really? Answer: not much.

But back to maternity leave. Thanks to the good people at Giant Foreign Financial Institution, she gets three months leave. But what do you do to eat up the time? Ellie’s in daycare all day, and once you get them in a daycare here at a particular clip, it’s foolish to try to move them back to part time. I go in every day on my usual 8-4 schedule, though I’ve been coming home a bit earlier than usual since the kid was born (ah, academic schedules…how anyone complains about a job where you can just pick up and leave when you want is still beyond me). But still: that’s a lot of hours, and that dude from The Big Bang Theory can only be on The View so often. So she‘s taken to making some food. I likes it.

To be clear, I do the dinner cooking in the family. Always have. I think we’ve gone weeks at some points during which she never cooked one meal. This is a great deal for me, since I like cooking, and yet I can still pretend it is a household chore. The problem does not escape she‘s attention. Versed in all the feminist arguments about unequal household labor, she consistently points out that traditionally male household labor can often double as a hobby (home repairs and the like), while traditionally female household labor could never be mistaken for hobby (just don’t tell the Bathroom Cleaning Club of Vancouver). I’m like the guy who argues that he shouldn’t have to clean up after the barbecue because he “manned the grill.” So my feeble attempts to suggest that we share the household labor equally because I cook does not fly even as a theoretical matter. (I think it’s also a case of tolerance for general disorder, or household entropy, where my cycle is about two weeks, while she‘s cycle is about 8-12 hours.) But now there’s more encroachment on my already weak case, as she gets more and more into doing the cooking. I’d say cooking every night buys me out of maybe two loads of laundry, in the Family Labor Exchange Guilt System. And I feel like I’m losing a load in the bargain, especially if this whole cooking thing sticks, and perhaps even drifting toward mopping the kitchen floor territory, ledger-sheet-wise.

But the upside, despite the looming threat of all natural all purpose cleaners in my future, is that she actually makes good goddamn food. I make good food. I’m a good recipe cook. I’m not very creative in my cooking, I don’t think, but if you give me a decently constructed recipe, I can make something really good. And because I’ve been at it for awhile, I’m more comfortable, and for even some complex meals that I’ve done several time, I even understand the theory (I guess you’d call it), so I can do those without checking the recipe and make some variations. Blah blah blah. I’m still talking about me, when this is a post about she’s cooking! Do I ever shut up? In any case, the larger point is that I’ve been coming home to really good meals and other foodstuffs, which seems like a definite benefit attached to this whole baby thing. So I took the following pictures, which she calls my “documenting of her domesticity.” We’re only two weeks into this thing and she’s going all Germaine Greer on me.  Anyway, it’s nice when you show up and find

Butternut Squash Risotto

fresh baked Banana Bread

Chekhov famously stated that if you introduce a gun in Act One, it must go off by Act Three. Similarly, if any non-extra woman in a sitcom or movie is seen to be preggo, she must deliver the baby before the close of the action, and preferably in some public spectacle, complete with an approving Greek chorus of onlookers, and either hissed curses or a hard squeezing of the testicles for the father. This is your fault! So, yes, a cinematic cliché. Now, you’ve all seen such scenes, maybe a hundred times. Us too. But it turns out that you can watch the proverbial taxi cab or elevator delivery a thousand times and never be quite prepared for it.

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babyboy arrived April 10, three days ahead of schedule. Much drama was involved, which I’ll have to get into later. In any case, Raffaele Francis (we’ll call him Rafe) joined us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. she and Rafe are recuperating at the hospital, and I’m about ready to pass out, so I’ll just leave you with a first pic. Needless to say, more to come, plus the very interesting story about how we didn’t quite make it to the hospital. Yeesh!