Seven Red

One big announcement in Seven Red Land. The Brooklyn Famiglia has expanded by two, as my brother and his wife had their twin girls last night at around 11 EDT. I like that the twins were born on 4-4. Kinda fitting. Ellie, for her part, saw pictures of the twins and said, “We have to go on an airplane!” Don’t worry, sweetheart, you’re gonna have one version of this thing within the next week or so. We do miss being in NYC for this sort of thing, of course, but we’ll try to get back to see the girls soon.

In the meanwhile, more pics of Ellie for Granny.

This is the “Che Faccia” pic. My father was (and probably still is) a big fan of this phrase, which translates as “What a face!” But it really means more than that; I can’t quite convey it. He was also a fan of “che faccia di criminale,” which means “This person has a face like a criminal.” Needless to say, his expression was fairly predictably indexed to various southern Italians in the neighborhood. It took me a long time to notice that it was some holdover Lombroso-ism, as well as the prejudice against southern Italians that were part and parcel of my father’s upbringing in Milano and Genova. Ah well. I still kinda liked when he said it. We always used to laugh.

Conversation with Ellie, while giving her a bath

Ellie (reaching into topspun’s sweatshirt pocket): Daddy, what’s that box in your pocket?
topspun: It’s nothing. It’s daddy stuff. [It's a pack of cigarettes]
Ellie: So, it’s not nothing.
topspun: No. It’s something.
Ellie: So what is it.
topspun: It’s a bad thing just for grown-ups.
Ellie: You use it when you go outside, right? You put it in your mouth and blow through them?
topspun: Yes, that’s right. But it’s bad.
Ellie: When I grow up, I want to have those in my pocket, too.
topspun: No you won’t. I’m going to stop, and you’re not going to start. They’re bad.
Ellie: Then why do you do it.
topspun: I don’t know.
Ellie: You didn’t have those when you were a little kid, did you?
topspun: No. But my Daddy, your Nonno, had them.
Ellie: Hmmm.
topspun: But I’m going to stop, and then I won’t have them any more.
Ellie: Well, if you stop, then I’ll never even touch them! Even when I’m a grown-up!
topspun: Hmmm. [realizing he's just been played by a three-year old...]

She’s getting craftier…

1. The Coolness – Last week, we had Ellie’s birthday party at Little Gym. These things have gotten much more complicated since I was a kid, but maybe in a good way. I remember bowling birthday parties (these were always fun) and, of course, the ubiquitous McDonald’s Birthday parties (we still don’t know how we’ll handle that one if it comes up, since we do not patronize McDonald’s, or any other fast food, for that matter). But these gym birthday parties are pretty snazzy. They have all kinds of wacky gym activities for the kids, when they’re not running around just raging on all the equipment. It looks damn fun, is all. Today, we went to yet another gym birthday party for a friend’s four-year old. Ellie fell down while she was running around a circle, and I think she got embarrassed, because she wouldn’t participate in any of the other organized activities, and she generally got very sullen. Is that right? Can a three-year old be embarrassed? And then you suddenly look down and this little blob of scream has some well-developed internal consciousness, and concern for the thoughts of others, and a burgeoning sense of self and all that. When did this happen? And, of course, it signals the fast impending date when they are embarrassed by you, when your very presence in the room is almost unspeakably mortifying to them, rather than seemingly their greatest source of joy. And we’re supposed to handle that moment how? A friend of mine has even written a book on “cool,” on the concept of cool, but I want more on this: what’s supposed to happen to your own sense of cool when your kid thinks you’re decidedly un-that. Ah, well. Maybe we have a couple of years yet on that. But seeing her today, seeing her feeling embarrassed, the realness of that day was just out there, and you have to face it.

2. The Wackness – Almost a year ago, I wrote about The Wackness before seeing it, tying it back to my own memory of that crazy New York summer of 1994. We finally got around to seeing the film last night. Now, in my typically obnoxious pre-viewing reviewing, I sniffed at the premise of the film, suggesting that its Manhattan setting and characters wouldn’t allow it to capture the feeling of that summer particularly well. Not working class enough. Not Outer Boroughs enough. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong about that. It’s a wonderful film, dead-on in creating that mood, and I just loved it.  I mentioned in my previous post that that summer had a kind of fin-de-siecle feel to it, a general euphoria seemingly derived from a feeling that everything was coming to an end. Apparently, I’m not the only one that remembers it that way, because the film just nails this theme, a Catcher in the Rye for the nineties, perfect. Everybody smokes pot, drinks 40′s of malt liquor, writes graffiti (even Ben Kingsley as the nostalgic therapist), and dreads the cultural transformations being wrought by the Giuliani regime. It’s exactly right on all of this. Everybody stays out all night, chases something, thumps Biggie somewhere in the background, and makes mixed tapes. The main character’s love interest tells him something like “You look at things the wrong way — I always see the dopeness in things, but you always see the wackness.” Everybody talks like that, yo, even in their most intimate and sincere moments. That’s how we talked, ridiculous as it now seems. But that was ours. And then the meta moment, the pomo-ness of it all, with Method Man playing Percy, the Jamaican drug dealer, talking to Luke Shapiro the drug dealer, while Method Man’s verse in The What pounds behind the scene: Yo I gets rugged as a muthfuckin’ carpet get… We’re supposed to get it: hey, that’s Method man acting and that’s Method Man’s verse.  I’m not sure my response to this film is portable, given that that time looms so large for me as this phase transition, becoming more what I now am, maybe, and less what I was, and having to face that. Leaving Queens, and everything that was, but everything it was leaving us as well, and we knew it, felt it. A whole way of life, as Raymond Williams says. Something was over. I know this is maudlin. But that was ours. I’m surprised this film tapped into it so well. And it wasn’t as maudlin as this description of it; it was even smart, and not condescending. I said in my previous review that it was a comedy. It’s not. Not at all.

Ellie is three today. On Saturday, we’re having a full on party at some place called Little Gym. I don’t know what that is, but I suppose they roll around on the floor for an hour, then eat cake or something. Sounds OK to me. Today, we had a members-only Seven Red party before and after daycare, with Ellie getting her presents from the grandparents in the morning, and getting her favorite dinner (spaghetti) and a cupcake for dinner. We’re ragin’ over here, I tell you! I will be putting more pictures up once we get the Little Gym party done, but here’s a teaser from the private jam session. Three-friggin’-years. I can’t believe it, really.

Ellie says hi to her grandmother, who presumably doesn’t visit this site to read my rants and ramblings. So, from time to time she gets a giant, blue-eyed smiley face for her troubles.

But, on the same note, a pet peeve of mine. I’m fine with calling grandparents “granny” and similar such endearments. Ellie calls her grandmothers “Granny” and “Nonna.” (Ellie’s “Nonna,” by the way, is 100% Irish, but that’s another story). That’s great. I had a grandma and a nonna (my nonna was 100% Italian, while my grandma fled Ireland in the 1920′s). But when I refer to either of my grandmothers in conversation with people outside my family, I always use “my grandmother.” I get totally weirded out when I’m speaking to some adult about something and I hear “Oh, my gramgram used to make that dish.” Your gramgram? Really? It’s a little familiar. But this strikes me as a very strange rule I’m applying. So, say Ellie is talking to me, twenty years hence. It would be perfectly fine for her to say “Is Granny back from her waterskiing junket yet?” If, on the other hand, she was talking to her med school colleague, she should say “My grandmother is waterskiing in Antigua.” Not “My granny is waterskiing in Antigua,” cuz that’s just weird. Hell, when I talk to my brothers I still refer to my mother as “Mommy.” But I don’t refer to her as Mommy to anyone else in the entire friggin’ world – not even to her. I remember making this case once to a woman from the South, and she got all sniffy like “It’s a Southern thing.” OK, maybe. Am I the only one bothered by this? Am I the only one who cringes when otherwise reasonable adults tell me about their Nanna or their Pop-pop?

Yaargh. Curmudgeon! Yaargh!

Or barely, hereby, in the form of the most improbable signature. - Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”

For the last week or so we’ve been working more with babygirl on her letters. She was really resisting writing anything before now, but somehow she managed to interest her in producing letters rather than just identifying them. She’s been pretty good with the alphabet for awhile. For some reason, she really shrank from having to make letters, so we’re happy that this week she finally got into it. Every day that I picked her up from daycare, I saw that she was practicing her letters along with her coloring. She even had her full name written out on one of her coloring pictures.

So, anyway, I’ve been debating whether to scan and post one of these attempts, because all she writes is her name (it’s only three distinct letters), and that would give up the whole anonymous blog gambit, at least as far as babygirl is concerned. She now wants to write her full name, so we’re just going to go ahead and unveil babygirl’s recent (and, to my mind, best) creation. I think it’s pretty tight, less than three weeks before her third birthday, but I’m the daddy, so I get to puff everything up like that.

We’ll work on getting it inside those lines, but there are worse problems one could have, I suppose!

Since a very young age, I’ve been fascinated by the alphabet, which I think explains a lot of my subsequent activities. But watching her struggle with letterforms, slowly improve, and then just grasp them – it brings back all that old wonder. She was making A’s today as part of her quest to write her full first name, and the most difficult part seems to be connecting the lines at the top, bringing them to a point. She draws parallel lines and then cuts across them with a curve. But she’s really tough on herself. She says, “No, that’s not an ‘A.’” Keep working on it, Ellie. You’ll get there.

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

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:

she: babygirl, it’s time to put your shoes on.

babygirl: I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna.

topspun: Do you want to hear the story of the little girl named “Idon’twanna”?

babygirl: Yeah!

topspun: There once was a little girl named Idon’twanna. In the morning, her Mommy came in to wake her up, and said “Idon’twanna, it’s time to wake up.” The little girl said “I don’t wanna.” Then it was time to eat breakfast, and her Daddy said, “Eat your breakfast now, please.” But the little girl said “I don’t wanna.” Then it was time to go to outside to play, so her Mommy said “Put on your shoes and coat,” but the little girl said “I don’t wanna.” At lunch time, her Mommy made her a sandwich, and said “Eat your sandwich now,” but the little girl said “I don’t wanna.” Then it was time to take a nap, and her Daddy said “Nap time! Time to get in bed.” The little girl said “I don’t wanna.” After nap time, they were all going to go to the park to play, but the little girl said “I don’t wanna.” At dinner time, her Mommy said “Sit in your chair and eat your dinner please,” but the little girl just kept saying “I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna.” Then dinner was over, and the little girl tugged on her Mommy’s pants and said “Can you give me some ice cream?” Her Mommy looked down, and replied “I don’t wanna.” So the little girl named Idon’twanna went to bed without any ice cream or any dessert at all. The end.

babygirl: That’s a very sad story.