New Things: Month 1

So, at the beginning of this year I set a goal to do one thing every month that I've never done before. And for January, I got off to a good start by doing two things I'd never done before.

• I entered a fiction writing contest. I didn't win it, but considering that they had more than 1,000 entries and only chose five finalists, I don't feel too bad about this.

• I tried Peruvian food for the first time. It was chimbotanos (like a spicy potato stew) with brown rice and a side of fried yucca, and it was quite good, not to mention very different than what I expected Peruvian food to be like. Here's a photo:

I'm already eying a few potential activities for February, and will report on whatever I choose at the end of that month. So far, so good!

Esta es la hora del gato

Last night G wanted me to lie down with her at bedtime. I agreed, and as I lay on her bed, half asleep in the dark, I suddenly heard a deep Spanish-sounding voice proclaim:

"This is the hour of the cat."

Needless to say, this gave me quite a start. Then I realized that it was this talking Puss in Boots, which we bought for G when she was five or six, and which she's long since outgrown and forgotten. Either Puss's batteries are finally running down after all these years, or he would like me to liberate him from the bottom of the basket of discarded stuffed animals in her closet. Maybe both.

On a side note, Puss's random speech reminded me of my mother's belief that P communicates with her through a similar battery-operated toy that she keeps in her family's car. She's been insisting for years that this thing speaks up at opportune moments and she knows, knows that P is somehow controlling it, to which I've always countered that a.) odd experiences aside (and I've had much odder ones than she has), I don't really believe that dead people can communicate with anyone;  b.) if P could communicate with anyone, it would be with me and no one else; and c.) P was a direct-verging-on-blunt man who didn't fuck around, and if he had something to say, he'd find a direct way to say it. I imagine if I told my mother about Puss, she'd tell me that P was behind that somehow too. It's a good thing she can't see me roll my eyes over the phone.

Well, when you put it that way

Me: You know, torturing Mommy is not a game we play.
G: But it is. It's exhilarating fun.

Darned smart kids and their big vocabularies!

The "torturing Mommy" conversation came about because G has lately rediscovered an interest in roughhousing with me. We used to do a lot of this when she was younger; it's something kids normally do with their dads, but because I was always the stronger parent, even when P was alive, I was the one who tossed her up in the air and wrestled with her and gave her horsey rides around the house. It was all good fun when she was little, but now she's 5'5" and weighs 125 pounds and she can just about take me down in a tussle. I've told her repeatedly that she's too big to play like that and she needs to stop before someone gets hurt, but she insists on running up from behind and tackling me, or trying to knock me down and sit on me. I'm at a disadvantage when it comes to defending myself because I don't want to hurt her by accident, so I deliberately hold back a bit. But she knows no such caution, and I usually end up yelling "I said STOP IT!" as I extract myself from a stranglehold.

It's a problem, not only because of the risk of grievous bodily injury (mine, not hers), but because it won't be long before she's bigger than I am, and I don't want her getting the idea that she can push me around physically. She's just playing now, like an overgrown puppy that doesn't know its own strength, but I can envision scenarios a few years down the road when she might not be. I guess my first step ought to be cutting her off as soon as she starts to play rough, and if that doesn't work, I'll have to think of some sort of consequence. This is certainly not an issue I expected to have when I gave birth to a little girl--though at 10 pounds, even newborn G probably could have played in the defensive line on a baby football team.

The year of many changes

In thinking about 2011, I've realized that it's going to be packed full of milestones:

• This month, G turns 12, beginning her final official year of childhood--not that she'll suddenly be grown up when she turns 13, but a teenager is not a kid in the same way a 6- or 8- or 10-year-old is a kid. (A 12-year-old isn't really either, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.) This is her last year of day camp, afterschool care, children's tickets at the movies, and all sorts of other things that have been fixtures in our lives for a long time.
• Speaking of which, in June, G leaves the elementary school she's attended since her first day of kindergarten.
• Hard on the heels of that milestone, in early July, is the fifth anniversary of P's death, and then a few days later, what would have been our 15th wedding anniversary.
• In September, G starts junior high, which I expect to usher in all sorts of lifestyle changes for both of us.
• In November, I turn 40. The idea doesn't bother me as much as you might think, because the alternative to getting older is being dead, and I'm not up for that. But no matter how you look at it, it's a huge milestone. Maybe even a monolith.

In keeping with this theme of change, I've only made one resolution for this year, and that is to accumulate more new experiences. This came about because just after Christmas, I was filling out one of those end-of-the-year surveys that circulate on Facebook. The first question was "What did you do this year that you've never done before?" and I couldn't answer it, because I hadn't done anything new. How embarrassing!

So, anyway, I thought it might be nice to pick one new thing each month and do it, so I'd have 12 different answers to that question when the end of this year rolls around. I'm having a little trouble getting started because I can't do anything unless I take G with me, and so far she hasn't been into any of my ideas. (I thought the Moroccan restaurant with belly dancers sounded fun. Sheeesh.) But I'm determined, and sooner or later I'll come up with an activity that interests both of us. Stay tuned for updates.

Optimism

G: Am I going to get a car when I turn 16?
Me: If you save up some money, I'll put in the extra to help you buy a nice used car.
G: Can it be a Ferrari 458 Italia?

At least she dreams big!

Dear Rain

Normally you are my favorite sort of weather. When I wake up to a sky full of black, lowering clouds, my heart sings, and I feel energized and happy. I enjoy going for walks when you're gently drizzling, and I love lying in bed at night and listening to you drum on the roof.

This time, though, we have a problem. This time you've been going on for four days straight, and you are causing the windows and skylights in my house to leak. As a result, I now have an 11-year-old roommate who can't spend the night in her own room because gross, dirty water is dripping from the wall behind her bed. I love the 11-year-old dearly, but she's 5'5" and sleeps diagonally, which means there's no space for me on my own mattress. Plus, I like total darkness and silence to sleep, whereas she gets nervous without light and noise. (In this, she takes after her father, whom I also loved dearly, but whose insistence on leaving ESPN Sports Center playing all night long drove me bonkers.)

In short, I want my bedroom back, and also all the pans and Tupperware containers and towels I'm currently using to catch and/or soak up the drips. So please stop raining, just for a while, and let us dry out. Thanks.

Holiday music and magic

Today was the annual holiday music performance at G's school. They split it up this year so the upper grades performed first thing in the morning and primary performed just before lunch, and also flipped the order around so sixth-graders were first on the program. It really reduced the crowding in the auditorium, and also prevented the "disappearing audience" phenomenon I've witnessed at other performances: when younger kids are performing, the whole Mom-Dad-Grandma-Grandpa-Auntie-Uncle-baby-cousins family shows up, whereas older kids are lucky if they get one parent. These big packs of people watch their children perform and then get up and leave, so the last group in the rotation ends up playing to a nearly empty room. That didn't happen this time, and I was glad.

Because G is in band (she plays flute), she was part of the show from beginning to end: she sang with her grade, played with the rest of the band between each grade's performance, and also had a duet with her friend A, who plays the piano. They did Bert the Sweep's song from Mary Poppins, and it went quite well, I thought--not to mention that it was a huge deal for G, who has a very pretty singing voice but doesn't like being the center of attention, to grab a microphone and perform on her own in front of 200 people.

Watching her up there, all tall and confident and grown-up looking, I couldn't help thinking of her kindergarten and first-grade holiday shows, when P was still alive, and we couldn't quite believe we were the parents of a schoolkid. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but G herself reminded me just how far she's come since then. When I picked her up this evening, I asked her how the second show was (she played with the band at that one too), and she gushed, "Mom, the little kids were SO CUTE! They're just so little and young!" Yes, my big girl, they are.

La mauvaise influence

G and I amuse ourselves with Google Translate:

Your face looks like a monkey's butt

Votre visage ressemble les fesses d'un singe.

A monkey put a banana in my ear.

Un singe a mis une banane dans mon oreille.

I said, "At least I'm smarter than a monkey."

J'ai dit: "Au moins, je suis plus intelligent qu'un singe."

The monkey cried.

Le singe pleuré.

And then flung poo.

Et puis merde jeté.

After we finished giggling over this, G said meditatively, "I think I'll take French in high school." I should probably warn her that high-school French involves lots of useful phrases, like "My aunt's house is yellow" and "Stephanie and Laurent are going to the disco," and little to no mention of butts or poo.

Sign of the times

I need to mail a payment on my way to work tomorrow, and as I was addressing the envelope this evening, I had to stop and think hard about which corner the stamp was supposed to go in. I've been paying everything online for so long that I barely use the postal service anymore, and I'd forgotten.

It occurred to me then that I belong to the last generation of people who will remember getting that big stack of bills ready to mail out each month--G knows "paying bills" as something you do on the laptop, not at the kitchen table with a lot of envelopes and a checkbook. Similarly, going inside the bank is an unusual event for her: where I often went with my dad to deposit his paycheck and get cash for the weekend (if I was lucky, we'd use the drive-through teller, and I could watch the vacuum tube get sucked down and then shoot back up with money and a lollipop inside), she only knows that money somehow invisibly goes into my account and comes out again via debit card and computer, just as invisibly.

I'd never trade the convenience of the electronic method for the old hassles of waiting in line at banks and post offices, but it makes me feel a little like a time traveler to remember a world that doesn't exist anymore. I suppose it must happen to everyone sooner or later, at least in the modern world--if you lived before the Industrial Revolution, and certainly before the Renaissance, day-to-day existence didn't change much in the span of centuries, much less one lifetime. No wonder we're all so neurotic.

Disconnected

On Monday, the cable went out at our house and took our broadband with it. This was annoying for me, since without Internet access I can't read blogs, waste hours watching old commercials from my childhood on YouTube, or enjoy Photoshopped images of Michael Bublé and a velociraptor. But for G, being Internet-less for the evening was a tragedy so epic that Euripides might have hesitated to tackle it. She didn't want to draw, or read a book, or write a story, or play video games, or watch a movie, or dangle toys for the cats, or do any of the myriad other activities that she normally enjoys--she wanted to be online, damn it, and nothing else would do. We got home at 5:30, she finished her homework by 6:30, and then we had this conversation over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over:

She: Is it working now?
Me: Not yet.

I hadn't slept well the night before, and by eight o'clock I was so tired my head was spinning, so I went upstairs to lie down for a while. It would have been great, except that G followed me and spent the next 45 minutes hovering over my semi-conscious body and asking "Is the cable working now? Is it working now? What about now? Can you check and see?" until I finally sat up and said "Look, kid, humans survived for 100,000 years before the Internet was invented. I think you can make it for one night. GO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO."

"This is torture," she groaned, and moped off to her room, where she sat--surrounded by TV, DVD player, Wii, Nintendo DS, flip video camera, books, movies, art supplies, and various other amusements--and was grumpy until bedtime. I was strongly tempted to get out our copy of The Phantom Tollbooth and make her read the first chapter, where Milo has everything in the world and is still bored.

(Actually, if someone had delivered a phantom tollbooth to our house right then, I probably would have paid the toll and waved her on her way. She could have come back when she'd learned her lesson, or when the cable was fixed, whichever came first.)

Anyway, the next day we had Internet access again and all was right with the world. I'm starting to wonder, though, whether I ought to restrict her computer time more if she's that obsessed with it. I've never actually seen a crack addict in search of a fix, but if I had, I'll bet it would have looked a lot like G did when she was stranded at the side of the information superhighway.

Time in a bottle

I used to be a pretty low-maintenance person. I wore makeup and shaved the parts that needed it and all that, but my morning and evening routines were simple and centered on face-washing and teeth-brushing.

Now, with 40 right around the corner, things are getting more complex.

- Before I walk out the door in the morning, I take my B complex vitamin for stress, my calcium +D for staving off osteoporosis, and my beta blocker for palpitations. I coat my face and neck with Age Shield SPF 55 sunscreen--it's too late to do anything about the sun spot that's already popped up on my right cheek, but I'm not getting any more if I can help it--and I smooth down my poor dry, flyaway hair with shine spray.

- Then before I go to bed at night, I wash with enzyme cleanser, coat my face and neck again with "Revitalift" night cream, use the Water Pik to hold the constantly lurking gum disease at bay, and attack my disgusting crusty heels with a grater. Once a week, I also exfoliate my face with sugar scrub, because no amount of cream seems to completely stop my skin from slowly drying up and flaking away.

- Not to mention that every three weeks, I buy yet another box of hair dye and cover up the grey that has taken over about 50 percent of my head.

And this is all just the basic maintenance work it takes to keep me from falling down dead, breaking my bones, losing all my teeth, or turning into someone who looks like she lures little children to her house of sweets and bakes them in her oven. It doesn't include anything extra I might want to do like painting my nails or putting on lipstick or doing something different with my hair. At this rate, in 25 years I'll only be able to leave the house for an hour a day, because I'll need the rest of the time to tend to my deteriorating body.

I love the Internet

Clearly the work of people with too much time on their hands, but still damn funny:

Michael Bublé Being Stalked by a Velociraptor

The best ones are where the velociraptor isn't immediately obvious, or where you can only see its shadow or its reflection or a tiny part of it.

But this one is my absolute favorite. (I've stood on that exact street corner, BTW. I wasn't stalking Michael Bublé, though; I was taking a photo of P under the Late Night marquee.)

A pause for reflection

Me: And what are you thankful for?
G: Ninjas.

Happy Thanksgiving. :-)

Live and learn and lose

In a tangent to the ongoing family drama, last week I discovered that a lot of our belongings, which were put into storage when we moved just after P died, were auctioned off and sold earlier this year. I had meant to retrieve them when we moved into this house and finally had room to keep them, but when I asked the relative who'd arranged the storage for us about getting them back, I got a vague answer. I had a sinking feeling then that something like this had happened, and now I know I was right.

Among the things we lost were P's comic-book collection, which was extensive and probably worth upward of $10,000, and quite a lot of sentimental stuff, including G's baby clothes and toys--I gave most of them away as she outgrew them, but I'd kept a box or two of favorites--as well as all our Christmas decorations from when P was alive. The first Christmas after he died, I bought a tabletop-size artificial tree and a few miniature ornaments to go on it, and that's what we've been using ever since, waiting on the day when we'd finally have our "real" ones again. I suppose now I can stop waiting and just go buy actual replacements for this Christmas, although I can't really replace ornaments like the one we bought the first year we were married, or the year G was born.

What bothers me most of all about this is that it's my own fault. I'm not a trusting person usually, and I should have known better than to let someone else be responsible for anything I cared about. I did know better, but at the time, I was tired and distracted and this relative was offering to take care of things, so I let him, and I got burned. I'm not even angry at him, just at myself, the same way I'm angry at myself for moving into this house that we now may have to leave, all because of another person's irresponsibility. P would be shocked that I'm in this position--he said to me once, "You don't trust anyone at all, do you?" and I said "No one but you." I should have stuck by that credo. I should have rescued our possessions as soon as possible instead of waiting. I should have done a lot of things, but I didn't. I won't make that mistake again.

Advertising of the day

Spotted on a display at the supermarket:

"Gift Cards Make Great Gifts!"

You don't say! I was planning to buy 1,000 of them and use them to tile my bathroom, but maybe I'll try giving them as gifts instead. Thanks for the tip!