Donut Crap

Yesterday was a scorcher. Late in the afternoon, we all found ourselves lolling in the kiddie pool and watching the approaching storm clouds. Larry went inside the house and emerged a few minutes later holding a fistful of almonds, with predictable results. Sammie asked to try some, then the G-man said, "What are you eating?"

Rolling his eyes, Larry said under his breath, "Dog crap." G perked right up. "What? Donut crap? What's donut crap? I want some donut crap, too."

I shot Larry the spousal glare of death, but he just smirked. G wouldn't give it up. "What does donut crap taste like? Please? Please can I try some?"

I pinned Larry with another glare. I may even have cocked a finger gun at his face and said, "Bang." 

Larry said, "He doesn't know what crap means." To which I said, "That's why he'll say it indiscriminately." This made Larry sigh. Then he handed G the rest of his almonds. Whether it was an act of penance or an attempt at distraction is hard to say. But it worked.

Sharing

Now that Larry's working at home, we have to share a lot. We share a phone line and a printer. We share the house, naturally, but it's a lot smaller with two people in here. And we share clients, which creates a lot of interesting situations. For example, I can say to him over morning coffee, "Have you heard from Joe lately?" And when he says, "I got a note from him yesterday," I snap back, "What? He answered your email and not mine?"

Exceedingly petty? You bet.

Also, I'm now the tech guy for all of Larry's computer problems, even though he has a PC and not a Mac, and even though I've never owned a PC, not once, and can't stand them. Larry is the smartest guy I know. He can remember anything, fix everything, and figure anything out. But Larry is a two-finger typist. His understanding of computers is moored in that stage where he thinks the keyboard will crumble to dust if he pushes the wrong button.

So when Larry was designing a newsletter for the aforementioned Joe and couldn't figure out how to turn it into a PDF file, mostly because he doesn't own a program to do that, I got to spend three hours coaxing him through the process of downloading said software. 

Larry: This is so stupid.

Me: Okay, okay, now click on the word "download."

Larry: It's not doing it.

Me: Yes it is.

Larry: This is so stupid.

Then I gave up, moved the file to my computer and spent even more time finding a way to make a PDF file that wasn't too large to send via email, while Larry stood behind me saying over and over again, "This is so stupid." 

And for the record? My printer is stupid. Gmail is stupid. The whole freaking internet? Stupid. 

A couple of weeks ago Larry wanted a powerpoint presentation transferred to his computer. I put it on one of my little flash drives and handed it over. Easy peasy, right? Nope.

Larry: Where does this go?

Me: In the little port-thingy on the side.

Larry: Now what?

Me: Now you open it.

Larry: This is so stupid. It won't open. How do I open it?

Me: It's your computer; How do you usually open files?

Larry: (pointing to the window for the hard drive) I don't know, they're always over here.

At this point, I was standing behind him. I slapped at his shoulder and said, "Move, move." But he wouldn't yield the chair. A little window popped up, listing all of the files on the porta-drive. The one at the top was a MP3 file, and it asked him what to do with it. And to choose what program would open it. Larry panicked. 

Larry: What do I do?  What do I do?

Me: Click ignore.

Larry: No!

Me: Why not?

Larry: It says it'll do this to all the files.

Me: Move. I'll do it.

Larry: No!

Then he wanted to know what it was, what a music file was doing on the disc, anyway. Actually, I knew it was a stray track from my audiobook of dirty boy D.H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover. Great book. But I was hardly in the mood to listen to two depressives having sex or nicknaming their genitals or whatever while trying to pry Larry's keyboard out of his hands.

Fortunately, the phone rang. In our new domestic situation, this solves all disputes. On second thought, maybe we should have played the file. It's possible that our computers would engage more fully, if that's the phrase, if we nicknamed them John Thomas and Lady Jane. Worth a try.

The Proper Garden Party

Having attended recently a large and elaborate outdoor birthday party for a small child, I thought it might be fun to read from an old etiquette book about the proper way to entertain outdoors.

This is from Manners and Social Usages, by Mrs. John Sherwood, published in, well, the book has no date on it, but I would guess the early 1880s. The section begins with ways to ensure good weather, and to deal with bad and then proceeds to deal with amusements and food.

"A hostess should see that her lawn-tennis ground is in order, the croquet laid out, and the archery tools all in place, so that her guests may amuse themselves with these different games. Sometimes balls and races are added to these amusements, and often a  platform is laid for dancing, if the turf be not sufficiently dry. A band of musicians is essential to a very elegant and successful garden-party, and a varied selection of music, grave and gay, should be rendered. Although at a dinner-party there is reason to fear that an orchestra may be a nuisance, at a garden-party the open air and space are sufficient guarantees against this danger.

"If the hostess wishes her entertainment to be served out-of-doors, of course all the dishes must be cold. Salads, cold birds, and ham, tongue, and pate de foie gras, cold pates, and salmon dressed with a green sauce, jellies, Charlottes, ices, cakes, punch, and champagne are the proper things to offer. A cup of hot tea should be always ready in the house for those who desire it.

"Ladies always wear bonnets at a garden-party, and the sensible fashion of short dresses has hitherto prevailed; but it is rumored that a recent edict of the Princess of Wales against short dresses at her garden parties will find followers on this side of the water, notably at Newport, which out-Herods Herod in its respect to English fashions."

Strange that there's no mention of barbecue grills, Jello salads, or Wiffle ball. These must appear in a later edition. 

Zingo!

We're working hard on the boy book these days. This week is the chapter on competition, and in it the doc talks about what the deal is with boys and competition. Why do they compete over everything all the time? Why is playing games such a nightmare? Why do they cheat?

Of course, the G-man provided inspiration for some of this. But I see now that Sammie the bamster is pretty competitive, too. Her need to win is tempered by other things, such as getting along with the other players and being very nurturing to them. When we play a game, she often likes her stuffed doggies to help. This means holding them up and talking baby talk for them in a squeaky high voice. The dogs themselves have plenty of questions about how to play. The dogs are easily confused, you see, and they make a lot of baby talk complaints about how hard it is to wait your turn. And she patiently answers all these questions in her own voice and coaches them through the game. Rarely does she get annoyed with them when they ask too many questions (unlike a real parent) but she does allow herself the occasional weary sigh as if to suggest that being a mommy isn't just fun and games. I nod to her in agreement. Kids, what can you do? (Larry says she's crazy, but I say to him: this is girlhood; suck it up).

But when it comes to winning, well here she doesn't mind dropping the gloves. Zingo is her favorite game these days and it's a kind of bingo game with pictures instead of letters. Best thing about it is the little pez-like dispenser that spits out two tiles at a time and then you match the icons with those on your card. A round is over in two or three minutes and because it spits out two tiles at once, there's no turn-taking. Brilliant. The idea is that you have to know the images on the card and then grab the tile that matches one on your card before the other player. We don't do that. I give her first dibs on everything. Why not?

Still, she takes great pride in beating me. Great pride. She counts how many tiles she has left after every turn and shouts "I'm winning, I'm winning!" Once, I accidentally had more tiles than she did during the game (miscalculation on my part). She counted up the tiles for both of us, looked at me for a long moment, horrified, and then said, "Well, I think I'm still winning."

She has never lost this game. Never. And yet she cheers for herself every time she wins as though stunned by her great fortune. She pumps both fists into the air and jumps to her feet, shouting "Zingo!" It's true joy. I tell her how great it is. Then she turns right back to the game, very business-like, and says, "Okay, you have to win, too." That means we're going to keep playing this round until my card is filled up, too. And when it is, she throws fists into the air again (and I'm expected to do this, too) and together we shout, "Zingo!"

That's the girl style of play. I'm going to nurture my doggies while kicking your ass, and then we're all going to be happy and celebrate together. Or else.

The Third Policeman

The back matter for this novel describes it as, "Flann O'Brien's brilliant comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to 'Atomic Theory' and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road) and de Selby's view that the earth is not round, but sausage-shaped. With the help of his newly found soul, named Joe, he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policemen present to him."

Yowza. 

What the back matter doesn't mention is that it's a very talky narrative. Hugely entertaining chatter, but for long stretches not much happens. The writer can spend a whole page talking about how roads have personalities, making jokes and puns of every stripe along the way, but at the end of the page, the folks in the scene, if that's what we're calling them are in exactly the same spot that they were in the beginning. A thriller, it's not. Luckily, I'm not reading this, I'm listening to it as an audiobook, narrated by Jim Norton (lately a Tony Award-winning actor), who is as hilarious as the text. And that's saying something. My favorite bit so far is when the narrator reveals that he has forgotten his own name, and he reels off a list of possible names to his new best friend who is also his soul, Joe, who makes fun of the names by making up stories about the lives that might go with such names.

"Signor Beniamino Bari, Joe said, the eminent tenor. Three baton-charges outside La Scala at great tenor's premiere. Extraordinary scenes were witnessed outside La Scala Opera House when a crowd of some ten thousand devotees, incensed by the management's statement that no more standing-room was available, attempted to rush the barriers. Thousands were injured, 79 fatally, in the wild melee. Constable Peter Coutts sustained injuries to the groin from which he is unlikely to recover. These scenes were comparable only to the delirium of the fashionable audience inside after Signor Bari had concluded his recital. The great tenor was in admirable voice. Starting with a phase in the lower register with a husky richness which seemed to suggest a cold, he delivered the immortal strains the Che Gelida Manina, favorite aria of the beloved Caruso. As he warmed to his God-like task, note after golden note spilled forth to the remotest corner of the vast theatre, thrilling all and sundry to the inner core. When he reached the high C where heaven and earth seem married in one great climax of exaltation, the audience arose in their seats and cheered as one man, showering hats, programmes and chocolate-boxes on the great artist."

What a fabulous cartoon. For that, you have to get off the treadmill to laugh in earnest. And that's only half the bit. Joe has another name at the ready and another funny story. Following this the narrator walks along and meets a man and tries to figure out who he is. He asks a bunch of questions of the odd little man with the pipe and he gets strange answers. Finally, he says to the man, "What is your objection to life?"

The reply is this:

He blew little bags of smoke at me and looked at me closely from behind the bushes of hair which were growing about his eyes.

'Is it life?' he answered. 'I would rather be without it,' he said, 'for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.' 

Funny, right? It's even funnier out loud.

Asthma Camp Update

Here's the thing about expectations: they're often so very wrong.

I was sweating out my time up at asthma camp, in part because I was afraid to interview 9 to 13 year old kids. I mean, what are they going to say? How am I even going to approach them with a microphone? And these are kids struggling with severe asthma, who've spent nights in the hospital, who sometimes can't breathe, can't run and play with the other kids. Some of them have multiple ongoing problems in addition to their asthma, such as poverty or morbid obesity. One of the participants in camp arrived with a Ziplock freezer bag, a big one, overflowing with meds. 

And here I am with my microphone and cheesy pseudo-hip, I-was-a-kid-once-too type questions. Disaster, right? And the last radio story I did involved Broadway actors, some of whom could barely hold it together long enough to answer even one question coherently. And these are kids. Could be a short day for middle-aged housewife type reporters.

No so. 

I wandered around the craft cabin and found the girls working on some sort of teepee. They were coloring and gabbing. When they noticed me, one of them nodded at my microphone. "What's that?" I told her. She brightened.

"Yeah? You gonna interview me?" 

I said, sure. And before I could unfurl the first question, she was going on and on about the friends she'd made and how much she loved it. And I mean on and on. Within five minutes, all the girls were up and doing the cheer they'd made up. Then they each wanted to be interviewed in turn. One of the girls told a story about how she was laughing so hard during the canoe ride that she farted. And she was laughing so hard while telling it that we were all holding our noses in anticipation. Two of them grabbed my microphone and sang songs. 

"Too bad you guys are so shy," I said. They looked annoyed.

"We're not shy," one of them said.

Best quote was when one girl told me that she didn't miss TV. I said, "Really?" I couldn't help it. Then when I was interviewing the boys during their cookout, I said to one of them, "Hey, one of the girls told me she was having so much fun that she didn't miss TV." 

He smirked at me. "She's a liar," he said. Then he got up, walked away from our interview and over to where the other boys were sitting. He said, "Hey, some girl said she didn't miss TV." They looked up from their plates. "What?"

The S&G Journals

I bought the kids journals this summer. Well, it's the G-man who writes and writes and writes. About ten minutes after he learned that letters could be strung together into words, he was writing away, working laboriously page after page. We have some of these pages. Goodmarneengmynameis

is the usual greeting, followed by his full name, and whatever was going on in his mind. One details his distress that it's a holiday, and mydaddyworksfarrawayfrommetooday. He wasn't big on spaces between words. Still isn't.

My big plan was to give him a composition notebook that he could write in during the summer and tell stories and draw pictures. He's forever doing that, detailed line drawings of large insects engaged in battle with rocket ships circling planets. He goes in for surreal space opera.  

He loved the journal. He wrote his name on the front, and his grade. He put Spiderman stickers on it and on the first page he wrote, "My favorite sea creature is" and then he drew a picture of a jellyfish. I was all misty-eyed when he showed it to me. Sammy got  a little journal, too, and she put Dora stickers on hers. She likes to write squiggles and pretend they're stories. And she draws like you wouldn't believe. Birds. Birds and princesses.

They're having a lot of fun with it, and I'm jealous. So I dug through my old pile of blank notebooks, and found one that I got for 25 cents at Building 19, a composition notebook with graph paper instead of lined paper. I put stickers on the front, like they did. And I cut up some of my playbills from the plays we went to see this past spring and glued pieces of them on the covers. It now looks like something that could house mash notes from 7th grade. I carry it everywhere, like a secret friend. I even took it to asthma camp. This is what I want to do this summer with my notebook. I want to draw ridiculous pictures of Purple and Brown and space aliens and birds. I want to make lists of favorite sea creatures, and bad rhyming couplets, and squiggles that I pretend are great stories. I want to have fun.