Via the internet (how else), I just dipped so far down into pools of what’s starting to feel disturbingly like my former self and my former life that, when I came up for air, it almost seemed weird that I had a child sleeping in the next room. Like: Wait. What am I now, what is this life I’m living?
Thing is, I wasn’t really dipping into anything I could call mine. It was all about people I’ve known, mostly, and the excellent things they’re doing or have done. I know this is all very annoyingly vague but I’ve just got to keep it that way. Besides, I’m typing in the dark. I’ve been (and continue to be) lucky enough to know some insanely talented and with-it and successful and driven people in my short life so far. And I feel very thankful for that, but I also let it mess with my head sometimes. Or my head messes with the (good) facts and turns them bad, and in creeps this stinky despair. . . Anyway, so, I clicked around in the dark and started to get bogged when I maybe should’ve been getting inspired, damn it, and then I paused to reflect on the baby in the other room.
I had to go in there and turn on the light and run my hand over her head (this doesn’t wake her up, but usually makes her squirm a tiny bit and elicit this amazing little baby sigh) and pull myself back into the here and now. Two truths:
—One of the best things about having a baby is how it can make all the stuff you were so caught up in before seem not so very big a deal.
—One of the worst things about having a baby is how it can make all the stuff you were so caught up in before seem not so very big a deal.
Re the second truth above, I’m getting to the stage (if I haven’t sort of been there all along) where I try to reconcile the pre-baby self with the you-are-mama-now self, see if they can co-exist. Or if I’ll end up with a life that’s the metaphorical equivalent of Mom Jeans (even if I never, ever wear them, because seriously, I will not; I’m not even worried about this). And I guess that’s why I’m here, typing in the dark.
But what I want to write about now are two bottles of Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers. I guess they are close relatives to wine coolers, though they contain no wine and nothing wine-like. These Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers are in my fridge, in the way back, and neither I nor husband put them there. They’ve been back there for almost exactly a year—ever since some friends from Chicago came through town on a road trip through the South and spent a super-hot (it was 100+ degrees) weekend with us. Plenty of drinking that weekend—nothing shamefully excessive, just the usual. (The usual being, um, drinking of the caliber that I haven’t done in almost as long as the coolers have been there. I got pregnant a few weeks after these friends came to town.) The four of us drank beer and wine and some sangria at Rojo, I think. And the last night, post-Rojo, we hit the Western and brought some drinks back here to the apartment, and one of our friends, the girl-half of the couple, brought a six of these Mojito things.
Which was funny. Because before we moved from Chicago, we’d had two bottles of some other flavor of Bacardi cooler in our fridge—placed there by, of course, the same friend. She left them behind when we had a party one time (winter solstice, I believe), and we—Drinkers indeed, but not fans of the alcoholic cooler-type beverage—never drank them. But we let them sit in the fridge. For at least a year. Because, well, honestly, husband and I are too much alike in a few respects, and one of them is that things like having bottles of beverages you’re never EVER going to drink cluttering up your fridge doesn’t bother you too much and so you just let them sit there. . . So there they sat. Until we had to clean out the fridge because we were, like, vacating the apartment. And then? I don’t know. We probably put them in the alley. God bless those Chicago alleys: you can put ANYthing in them and some grateful someone will come along and take it off your hands. (Sigh. I miss the alleys.) I like to think maybe the alcoholic couple who lived across the alley, the ones whose fights kept us duly entertained for two years, enjoyed them.
So you see where I’m going with this. The friend left her leftover Mojito thingys in our fridge here in B’ham, and history repeated itself. Those bevs have been in there almost exactly a year, and I see them all the time and think, “I should throw those out.” But I can’t bring myself to throw out perfectly good (at least by some taste standards) alcohol.
Now. Are you a Bacardi cooler fan? Or even just really, really thirsty and/or jonesing for a light buzz? Then you may come over and relieve us of these items. You know how to contact me.
Solicit aside, I feel like the lingering coolers say something about us (they may say something about our friend, too, but that’s another topic), something not so flattering (but also fairly benign). But right now, paired with all the dipping-into-stuff-online and accompanying sentiment, they’re also doing that Proustian thing where they take me back to the old fridge in the old apartment, and then I’m closing the fridge door, leaving the old coolers be, and looking out the window over the counter where we have just a sliver of a view of the downtown skyline, and maybe there’s a little chill in the air outside, and…ouch. The nostalgia.
On second thought, maybe you can’t have my Bacardi Silver Mojito coolers. Maybe they’ll stay right where they are until we leave this apartment. And then?
I was at the mall, and I had my parrot with me. The parrot wore a diaper, and I carried her snug against my upper chest and shoulder, with one hand cradling the parrot’s diapered, er, bottom.
The parrot and I entered a shoe store, and I found a shoe I wanted to try on—it was black, a sort of sporty, casual style, I think. I gave it to the saleswoman, who was blond and disdainful. Maybe she didn’t like her customers to waltz in carrying parrots, diapered or otherwise. She returned with a shoebox and walked away, and I realized that she’d brought me the wrong pair: the shoes in the box were strappy-dressy, patent leather, open-toed. The only thing they had in common with the ones I’d requested was their color, black.
I became inordinately huffy and approached the saleswoman. I dropped one of the wrong shoes at her feet, far too dramatically; it rolled over and wobbled, and immediately I felt stupid for making a scene but I had to follow through. “You brought me the WRONG SHOES,” I hissed.
She replied — something suitably disdainful and dismissive, I can’t remember. I think she argued with me, and I pointed to the display with the correct shoe. I’m sure I was blushing. There was nothing left to do but make a grand exit. I left with a feeble attempt at a sarcastic stinger—”Thanks SO much for all your help”—and my parrot and I made our escape into the bright expanse of mall-dom. Except that it wasn’t an escape, because then we became stuck in one of those situations where you can’t find your way out, you’re running out of time, etc. You know what I mean? So that was happening, my parrot and I were trapped in the mall, and then I looked at my parrot and saw that her face resembled rather closely that of…a baby. My baby.
OH MY F-ING GOD WHAT DID I DO WITH THE BABY? And I remembered that I’d had my baby with me too, along with my diapered parrot, only I had apparently left the baby somewhere over the course of the shopping trip. At the Gap? The Great American Cookie? Macy’s? I had zero recollection, and I was overcome by that lightheaded, blood-pressure-spiking kind of total panic, for a split second.
And then I woke up.
(True whereabouts of the baby? Napping on the bed inches from my face, the only way she would nap today.)
1. It is absurdly cute when a baby burps. Sometimes the burp fits the baby. Sometimes, as with the disproportionate ratio of baby’s head to baby’s body, the burp is oversized, alarming. A man’s burp. (Ditto for gas on the other end.)
2. Not only is the baby burp cute, it is satisfying. For everyone involved, I mean. For the burping assistant (that would be me), the burp may bring an enormous sense of accomplishment. “YES! I got one!”
3. Often, my attempts to burp her result only in my own emission. You know the “turn on the faucet and you have to pee” phenomenon? Could it be something like that? Seriously, almost every time I begin patting T’s back, up comes my own bubble.
A bunch of rusty orange train cars marked HERZOG in big white lettering rolled by this afternoon. My immediate association was Werner Herzog, which was kinda funny. I’m no Werner Herzog expert, far from it. But the little I know of him makes me think it’d be somehow fitting for the director to buy up a bunch of train cars, have his name painted on them, and use them to haul stuff needed for his films-in-progress around the USA. I’m not sure what said stuff would be. (Bear suits?) Or maybe those were cars full of life-size wax Herzog figures, or a massive shipment of Herzog DVDs. Maybe Herzog has expanded his business interests into rail freight (is “rail frieght” valid terminology? The husband might know, but he doesn’t even read this thing much), because rail frieght is nicely complementary with filmmaking, and he’s always wanted to make that hobo film anyway, and well, because if the Virgin mogul dude can do record stores and airplanes (etc.), why not Werner and trains?
Yoo-hoo! Anyone out there? I won’t be surprised if there’s not a soul around, I’ve been gone so long. Not my fault this time. As some of my three readers might know, the site’s been down, and I’ve had not a smidge of recourse. But we’re back. Let’s move on. You’ll see that I’ve already posted a (late) one-month pic of Thalia, yay. (Cute, right? Gal likes her bath time.) I wanted to post-date that post, but couldn’t quickly figure out how. Correction: I figured it out. Hah! And as for the off-center appearance of the pic, well, dealing with this kind of technical foul-up is the kind of thing I simply do NOT have time for these days. It’s Flickr and/or WordPress’s fault I guess, and if anyone wants to tell me how to correct it quick-fast-in-a-hurry, do tell. Otherwise, meh—and onward.
I have a new idea about how I’m going to use this completely shapeless (but not shiftless!) excuse for a blog. I think that, going forward, many posts will be quite brief and lacking in much ado: musings on the mundane (or not so mundane, if life presents the material) as they occur to me, without too much running off at the mouth. Sure, I’d love every post to be a crafted, well-developed mini-essay on whatever, but my hunch is that shooting for that means no posts at all. Anyway, I like to think that the brevity approach will, in addition to being feasible in this New Parenting Universe, be in the vein of Georges Perec, Sei Shonagon, and, to cite a much more contemporary chronicler of the everday, Amy Krouse Rosenthal. (I considered trying to do a series of A to Z posts, and decided that even that was too confining right now.) Of course, I’ll still do any shameless self-promotion that’s called for, and an occasional post may get rambly. Because that is how I all too often roll, right?
So. That’s the plan. That, and occasional baby pics. I don’t know why anyone should really care to read any of it, really, and probably a scant number of anyones will, but aw hell. More very soon. Cuz while my blogging hands have been tied, don’t think I haven’t had inspirations.
Here it is, my first-ever embedded video, and my first-ever contribution to the world of YouTube. And of course it features my first-ever human contribution to the world! I don’t expect anyone except the grandparents to dig this, really, but this is my blog and I can post gratuitous baby videos if I wanna. It’s only 40 seconds of cuteness, after all. Ladies and gents, here we have “Thalia’s Interpretive Dance to Bright Eyes,” including baby snorts and gurgles.
“I was thinking,” Alice said. “Instead of selling popcorn, we could sell Pop-Tarts.” What was going through her head? She didn’t do drugs. Somehow, Pop-Tarts seemed quirky. Quirk was the way. “Pop-Tarts will be cool. Pop-Tarts will create lifelong memories for everyone,” she said.
–From Nellcott Is My Darling, a most wonderful novel by Golda Fried
