Can I tell you how much I love this photo?

It's the best photo ever, EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE:




The drink umbrella? Held jauntily over his head? I'm dying.

Later when he wins a Tony award for reprising Gene Kelly's role in "Singin' in the Rain" you can all say you knew him when.

Today's Words of Wisdom

"The strange thing about children is that they love anarchy, but hate change."
--Carl Smith

.

Exactly.

MYSTERY SOLVED!

So we have TOTALLY SOLVED the vacuum mystery. But we're not going to TELL YOU THE ANSWER, not quite yet, because a friend said she wanted to watch the video first.

Anymore guesses?

Update: Le Answer!

So the question is: what sort of vaccuum both "bonks" and "sleeps"?

the answer is: A Roomba!




One of which is owned by elliot's friend Robbie, and which he saw in action a few days ago and has, evidently, really been wanting to tell us about. Baccuum! Bonk! shhhh!

Of course, a roomba doesn't actually sleep, but it does sometimes stop doing it's awesome bonking, and at this point one might explain, to a whinging toddler, that the lack of activity was due to "sleeping" which also required leaving the roomba alone. to sleep.

anyway, that video is not elliot, it's just something I found on youtube, but i think it captures his relationship to the roomba quite well. when elliot saw it, he shrieked, said "Baccum! Baccum!!!!" and then tried to kiss the laptop screen.

Elliot and the mysterious urgency of the vacuum

What's this about? We're still not sure.



Since Elliot is still on about this today, we continue to be interested in your attempts at translation.

Why I Pay Homage to Mothers: A Response to Garrison Keillor

Normally I love Garrison Keillor.

But I think his recent column about Mother's Day is a load of bunk.

It's well-meaning, I’m sure. And it's conclusion--that we love mothers because it's so amazing that they will always love us--is quite sweet.

But what about these claims about motherhood:

little does she know what cataclysm awaits her inside: the loss of individuality as she joins the Holy Order of Maternity.

Mothers were, at one time, young women with Possibilities…and instead found themselves cleaning up excrement and jiggling colicky babies…They hardly ever have time to read James Joyce. They sit down to dinner with adults and feel brain-dead. A bouquet of flowers hardly seems compensation enough. How about a million dollars and a house in the south of France?

The cruel injustice of motherhood is that, out of devotion to her brood, she sacrifices so much of her own life that her children grow up to find her a little boring...Mom is just the lady who runs the vacuum.

There is an important point being made here: motherhood is often overwhelming, and it does lead to a lot of boring exhausting brain-deadness, even when done under the best of circumstances. We should talk about that, and the unfortunate ways our culture intensifies this issue.

But the conclusion Keiller reaches seems to be that motherhood is an experience, begun by the violently painful experience of childbirth,* involving necessarily a series of boring, repetitive individuality-killing tasks (his examples are vacuuming, clothes-washing, and birthday-remembering),** which leads ultimately to a fundamental debtor relationship between mothers and their children: mothers give up everything, and you can never give them back to themselves, so you should buy them expensive presents and feel guilty.

I hate everything about this logic.

First: there is no inevitable relationship between birthing a baby and doing the laundry. If you feel like it’s important for a boring job like laundering to be done, then help out, Garrison .

Second: Garrison might be surprised to hear that I actually know a lot of mothers who talk about James Joyce. I myself mother and talk about narrative theory and the gendering of race in 19-c America; my mother mothers and talks about neurodevelopment and trauma in contemporary literature; my grandmother mothers and talks about early Mormon history. Other mothers I know both mother and talk about educational theory; domestic legal policy; environmental health; third-world poverty relief, and cinematography, just to name a few examples.

Many mothers actually continue to have an intellectual and professional life post-maternity, and the fact that they should be acknowledged as having that capacity was a major point of this thing you may have heard of, Garrison, which I like to call "Feminism." Who knew?

Thirdly, finally, and most importantly: MOTHERHOOD IS NOT CONTRADICTORY TO INDIVIDUALITY. For most women I know, mothering is exhausting, yes, but also invigorating, rewarding, and challenging. It is sweet. It makes us better. It makes us happier. It gives us more complex ideas about the world, and our role within it. It gives us fun projects, and it helps us be in the now.

It is stupid and ignorant to believe that the only sign of adult intelligence is to “talk about James Joyce.” It is equally, if not more, compelling and interesting to talk about mothering.

Keillor’s essay, to me, seems written by an overgrown boy who never paid enough attention to realize that not everything in his mother’s life revolved around him, and if it did, maybe they both could have made some changes to improve the situation, and should have.

Unlike Keillor, I honor the mothers in my life not because they “gave up their individuality” for their children, but because they took motherhood as a chance to grow as individuals--letting it enhance their lives without becoming the ultimate limit of their selfhood. I am grateful to my mother not because she makes me feel guilty, but because she inspires me to be a better individual, tapped into the ground of motherhood from which my sense of potential now grows.



*Really, don't get me started on his description of childbirth.

**Because laudering and remembering birthdays are similarly degrading, I guess? What?

A few Elliot video tidbits

A little quiet reading of the New Yorker, a little sweet potato, a little bit of beasties -- it's pretty much your typical day as an Elliot.

Why we blog

Dooce, the ur-mommy blogger, has some thoughts about this. As with most of her thoughts, they are both funny and smart.

portrait of the artist as a young plum

Wee Hairy Beasties

Elliot is super-addicted to the Wee Hairy Beasties, a Chicago-based kid's music band. Actually, he's addicted just to the song Wee Hairy Beasties, by the Wee Hairy Beasties. Actually no: he's addicted to the chorus of the song Wee Hairy Beasties, which goes

Wee!
Hairy beasties...
Wee!
Hairy beasties...
Wee!
Hairy beasties...

He couldn't care less about the rest of the song -- let alone the rest of the album. During the verses (like, 5 seconds after the end of the chorus) he turns to me forlornly, puts his hands together like a supplicant, and says "mooore? moooar? morr beek?" (Which means beasties.)

If you need morr beek, the song is here.

A digressive reflection on danger and disapproval

Saw Zella Rose riding in one of these today. It looked super cool, and they said it's actually very stable, despite my first subliminal impressions ("...merciful Jesus, is that a child on the handlebars? Honey, find a cop.")

To use this device (which is probably safer after all than the rear-mounted kind, since it's right in the middle of the center of gravity, rather than way out back), you'd have to be mentally prepared for some public finger-wagging, tsk-tsking. But then again -- that's what we gear up for whenever we leave the house. Mismatched socks? Toy water pistol? Pthalate-infused sippy cup? French fries? Kid-on-a-leash? Kid-not-on-a-leash? Sledding without a crash helmet? Almost anything might be an invitation, to somebody, to correct you or judge you. Sticking the baby on the handlebars doesn't fundamentally change the game.

The silver lining, though, when you feel whisk of the tsk-tsk, is that at least what people are manifesting -- almost without being able to help it -- is that they give a damn. They care. In public, they care! Look at them caring. It's a spectacle little witnessed in American society, and I think it's entirely human and good. This caring impulse is the polar opposite of littering; littering expresses the basic lack of care. Are we a village or are we not a village? Tsk-ing says we are a village; littering says we are not.

The caring/meddling/judging impulse is one that I saw at close range when I was a kid in Germany. (Where I did not see any littering.) I can testify that Germans, by and large, indulge their inner busybody freely, loudly, and without shame. Especially where children are concerned. Forget admonishing the parent -- a German is never happier, it seems, than when he's nattering at a stranger's child, delivering the full explanation about why bicycles must be walked -- not ridden -- for the next .2 kilometers until the juction of the Fußgängerzone and the Städtebauförderungsgesetz, between 5 and 10 PM on Saturdays during the summer, as clearly marked on the green tiles mounted above the haberdashery. (At least, I think that's what he said.)


Postscript: some people in my neighborhood litter. Some of these same people drag along, and bawl out, young children in a way that just isn't appropriate given the youngness of the children. I'll admit that I judge the hell out of these people; but I can never bring myself to natter at them. Where's a dour German burgher when you need him?

$$$

gDiapers -- nice ad copy, but whoa.

gDiaper liner refills (diapers.com):
==> 128 / 52.00 = 41 cents each

Huggies (Costco):
==> 258 / $39.99 = 15.5 cents each


P.S. By a quick calculation similar to this one (we don't fit 24 diapers in one load, but we have a much more efficient washer than he does, etc...) or this one . . . I figure that each cloth diaper costs us something like 6-12 cents of energy & detergent, plus the sunk cost of the washer & dryer & the diapers. Plus labor.

He is as is a little sponge

so i totally yelled at elliot on Saturday. I mean, not really--it's not like I lost my temper or was actually angry, really, at all. But he was bouncing on Ada's head--by which I mean, literally sitting on her head and bouncing up and down and I just decided that this behavior could not continue. I am tolerant; Ada is tolerant. But head bouncing is right out. Forever. Definitely. Finito.

So anyway, I was like, "Elliot, NOOO. Noooooo." Very firmly and loudly; there may have been some finger wagging and meaningful eye contact. Elliot's response was to burst out laughing, so I was like--oh well, so much for my attempt at being Firm.

But it's interesting, because although Elliot has not ceased in his attempts to bounce on Ada he's become very interested in the word "no." All day yesterday, sometimes in context and somtimes not, he just wandered around bellowing "noooo, nooo, noooooooooooo."

Brandon says he is doing a very good imitation of me, which is to say, I think, that Elliot's attempting to convey a complex series of ideas: "it's not that I am angry but rather I'm just disappointed that you are failing to live up to the moral standards which you and I both, I'm sure, agree are imperative for the sustainability of social order, but as I said, I'm certainly not mad."

Today's Reading

I highly highly recommend this essay, in today's Times. It's about an important question, maybe the most important question: why should we bother? When there is a big problem, a problem which needs to be solved but is bigger than our our ability to solve it, what should we do? When our actions cannot "solve" the problem, why should we change them?

The specific set of problems this essay is about are environmental, but they are more generally social; they are about taking responsibility for our own lives. This is something I have been thinking about lot lately--I am struggling with the fact that despite my commitment to living ethicically and responsibly I do not think about ethics or responsibility as I go about making most of my daily decisions, particularly my consumer decisions. I am trying to change that.

For me, this is closely tied with the experience of becoming a parent, because parenting has made me think very vividly about my ideas about consuming, conserving, and prioritizing.  More specifically, I've been thinking about how often I think about parenting in terms of consuming rather than preserving and prioritizing--which is too bad.

Anyway, I'm veering precipitously away from my main point here, which is also the main point of the essay, which I will link to again, because I really think it's just that good. The main point is--you should bother. You should try.

For instance, consider this:

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter...when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle....For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

and this:

Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems...which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

And finally, this:

...our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum...as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Lest I sound hackneyed and kneejerky and pedantic-- I don't mean to. I don't mean that you should make superficial changes that don't make a difference--there are so many of these. I just mean that I am trying to be open to, and less cynical about, the idea of radical personal change and the ways that it can, maybe, matter.



*here i would add that we need to think carefully about how to put pressure on the corporations which accomodate our desires--it doesn't do much to cut down on your own water use, for example, without encouraging government to change legislation for corporate water waste and pollution, which is (from what I've read) a much bigger problem.

Today

Someone in our house did the following today:

1. Closed the dog in this special between-the-doors place, unbeknownst to everyone else. She was not discovered for an hour.
   
   
   


2. Took a shit in this bowl, which happened to be lying on the floor:
   
   
   
   


3. Awakened the entire household at 5:30 AM. It felt like this:
   
   
   


4. The culprit was last seen avidly blowing kisses just like this one:
   
   
   

Everyday Use

So, this morning while working away while at our lovely local coffee shop I up and dropped my WHOLE CUP OF COFFEE onto my laptop.  The whole thing, onto the keys, drip drip drip, and out through the battery slot on the back.  

Now, as you join in the collective gasp of horror issued at that moment by every coffee shop witness, including some meddlesome geek who asked the barrista if she "had a blowdryer" to dry out the computer (what, in her purse?) as well as Brandon and the crazy scone lady, let me assure you that probably probably probably this is fine, the computer is fine, plus it's totally under warranty, and plus I have a print out of my most recent chapter draft, and plus, here I am, typing on another household computer.  It's fine.

Still, though.  I mean, my laptop.  My laptop.  I might as well say, my life's work.

I had to go sit in a comfy chair in the corner and fiddle and be all like my laptop, my laptop (here I think of Shylock, having royally fucked up, my ducats, my daughter) and really hang out there with the fact that really, I couldn't blame that spilled coffee on anyone else, and probably not even on Elliot who wasn't there, and probably not on being sort of tired from giving blood yesterday, and probably it was just my fault.  

Which is the sort of thing I have to be really meditative about, because like most people I have the tendency to have a gut reaction of being crabby and angry when I've done something careless or wrong, and then take that out on other people who might point out (not that anyone did, as it was obvious) that it was my fault, because then they are picking on me when I feel bad and I might have been careless but they are being MEAN, which is WORSE.  

This is such a disturbing part of the human personality--to emotionally compensate for our failures by bringing others down with us.  [edited to add--i'm just reading through this and noticing another means of emotional compensation to which I am prone, which is me being all "well, I might be careless but at least I am wise," which is great, but it doesn't dry out your laptop.]   

Anyway.  I sat there in my chair and thought about Elliot, and how he will break things and spill things, and I will have to teach him to not be careless, but also be nice to him, because being careless or just not careful enough with something special feels so bad.  But mostly I thought about how the hard thing about being a grown up is that you have to allot your own portion of guilt, and sit with it, and then also forgive yourself when your penance is done, and no one but you can decide when that is, when it's okay to pat yourself on the back and say, it's okay, you didn't mean to, you'll do better next time.