A meme! Woot!

I got tagged for a meme, and it couldn't have come at a better time: Sunday night!

10 Honest Things about Me

1. I eat a lot more junk food than I let on. I am metabolically blessed, apparently, and it's not fair that I'm as judgmental about others' food choices as I am. I just don't seem to pay the price for my own bad choices.

2. I'm at my very best when I in front of a classroom. I'm funny, I'm charming, I'm incisive, I'm rigorously smart and precise, I'm irreverent.

3. I'm trying not to look at the Christmas flyers yet, because I'm one white-star-on-red-background motif away from bringing out the Charlie Brown Xmas CD and putting it on repeat until New Years. Intellectually, I know it's too soon ....

4. If you met me, you would find me funny. Unless we're in a group. Then you might find me a little pushy or maybe manic. Sorry 'bout that.

5. I'm more interested in non-fiction reading (eg, How to Read Like an English Professor) than novels, for the last several years at least, which kind of appalls me, seeing as I am an English professor. But this week I'm really grooving on a Jeeves omnibus edition. 700 pages of modernist idle rich goofiness, ahhhhh.

6. I have really ugly feet. Wide and mismatched. But it really doesn't bother me, and I can be fond of them, subjectively, even as I can see, dispassionately, that they're really not the kind of feet to show of in any context at all.

7. As much as I love complicated critical theories of media or subjectivity or written expression, as much as I decipher and tease apart political and public culture and texts with a clear eye and an engaged adult mind, I increasingly recoil from much adult entertainment: I find most serious novels too depressing to read, most TV dramas far too bleak or gruelling, most Hollywood film beyond romantic-comedy overwrought and emotionally exhausting. I could watch Dancing with the Stars forever and just be done with adult art, I think, and live a happy life.

8. I find Crocs really really really comfortable. I have a pair that is in constant use as my year-round indoor slippers. I do not walk 10 feet without putting my Crocs on. Yes, they're ugly, blah blah. But! Oh, the comfort. Sometimes, I bring them to other people's houses when we visit. Yikes.

9. I can read faster than most people I know, but the truth is, I don't really remember anything about any of it after about 24 hours. Sometimes I'll get halfway through a scholarly article before I realize I've already read it. Fast but sloppy.

10. Once, I wrote Ricky Shroeder a fan letter--I was the queen of the elementary school playground for a week or so when he wrote! me! back! and sent an autographed picture. Swoon. It was a really good week, and it was nice to not be a loser dork getting shoved and ignored, however briefly.

Thanks Debbie at Pink Journey for lobbing this my way!

NaBloPoMo! I can't quit you!

And so it is that I'm posting a photo of me and Pynchon, on a date, taken with my iPhone sometime shorty after 10 pm tonight. We're at the fancy-shmancy bar area of the go-to fancy-shmancy restaurant in our town centre. So, about five minutes walk from home, so we can both have a stiff drink before staring deeply into ... the camera phone:


We got a sitter--let's call her Mary. Mary is the only sitter we've ever had, the pint-sized daughter of a colleague who, much to her own chagrin and our delight, has not yet managed to find a retail job to pay her high-school-student entertainment and fashion expenses. Hence her willingness to babysit for us lo these past 2.5 years. Munchkin loves her, and shoos us out the door the minute Mary arrives. Mary allows Munchkin to boss her mercilessly ("No! This way! Hold the pony like this, and then you say 'Hola! Soy Pinkie Pie!'"), and in return Munchkin idolizes her ("Please Mary, can I look at your beautiful braces again? Oooh, they're so beauuuutiful").

It sure is nice to traipse down the front steps, holding hands with my husband, while our daughter cheerfully orders us to get out and leave her with her beloved Mary. "I'll see you tomorrow! Have a great party!"

A fine time was had by all.

Better content tomorrow, I swear ...

Just like you can't store sleep ...

I had an epiphany today.

I was thinking about how everyone is telling Amy to get lots of sleep now, because she soon won't have much choice in the matter. We all give this advice ruefully and ironically: you can't store sleep, obviously, and while it's nice to head into labour after a nice nap rather than after an 18 hour cupboard cleaning binge, in the bigger picture, the best night's sleep in the world while hugely pregnant offers little or no benefit much after the first 12 hours of wakefulness.

Sleep is great. You'll miss sleep. Very true. But you can't stock it up now, in a time of plenty, for use later.

It's like that with babies, too. Amy, get used to people also telling you to "enjoy this time" because "it's all gone so fast." Enjoy the mustard poops and the toothless smiles and those couple of days of funny caveman reflexes in your baby. Drink it in! Savor it! Don't waste a minute of it! These days will Soon! Be! Gone! Forever!

Well, I guess that's true: look at me! My kid used to be a newborn and now she's nearly three and a half. Time has, in fact, flown and, from the rate at which she continues to grow, the prospect is remote that she will return to her original squally if adorable nine pounds.

Gone!

Looking back, I find that I cherish the memories that I have from that time. Of course I do.

However. I also find that I do not regret one single instance of handing her to her father and running out to Starbucks to read the paper. I know, from reading it in my own damn archives, that I agonized about leaving her, for wanting to leave her, for wanting time to myself for even 20 minutes of sweet blessed alone time. I felt guilt-ridden and preemptively regretful: this time is never coming back, I fretted, gnashing my teeth and wringing my hands.

But here's the thing: Looking back, I don't really feel that I missed anything. I actually do not have any regrets about my daily 90 minute respite, date nights with Pynchon, going back to work when she was 6 months old. We did not inaugurate a pattern of dis-attachment that I rue to the present day. No. Actually, we grow closer every day. So all the tooth gnashing, the fretting, the hand-writing? That was wasted emotional energy. To be perfectly frank, I don't even remember what I was so freaked out about--I'm just reading it here.

In all honesty, I am full to overflowing with memories of Munchkin's life: how could I not be? What possible reason could I possibly have for preemptive regret at frittering away the experience of her early years if my heart and my mind and my blog and my photo albums are so so very full?

This morning, when I called her down to breakfast, Munchkin cried and cried because she wanted "Mommy to come plaaaaayyyy ponies with meeeee!" and I felt, of course, guilty. Because she's not going to be three forever, you know! Soon she'll be out of ponies and into whatever tween crap they play on the Family Channel--not Treehouse--and what then? I'll never get this chance to play ponies with her ever again, WAHHHH!

That's when it hit me: you can't store up time with your kid. You can't, that is, stop time by gorging on moments until you burst. And that's okay.

We've probably all always really known this, deep down. Memory is fickle and incomplete: baby has hardly been home a week before we see a photo from Day One and have the sudden shock of realizing "I don't even remember that happening." But we do not lack for memories, nevertheless. And when that newborn disappears and you start counting his age first in months and then seasons and finally years, rather than in hours and days and weeks, you will have, instead of that newborn, a baby! then a toddler! then a preschooler! who is yet even more lovable and loved that the child of those moments that have slipped passed you.

I love and cherish the memory of my newborn, of my 6 month old having her first taste of mashed banana, my 14 month old doing her first Frankenstein walk on the checkerboard floor of our old kitchen, my two year old in her first splash pool. But I don't need more of that--I still have so much more to come.

My memories are full and rich. My daily life is full of moments and durations and glimpses of love and time and experience. It's okay if I skip a pony session at 8am one Friday morning in November 2009. I played ponies at 6:45 am, actually, and many many times before that and surely many more times to come, most of which I don't and won't remember. But that's okay too.

I guess my epiphany is this: manage your time in its natural daily rhythms, its gives and takes, its us-time and its me-time, without always a wary eye on the potential for future regrets. Because keeping our eye on Gone! Forever! means you're too worried to actually just be, in the moment, or out of it, as needed.

The Great Flu Scare of Aught-Nine

As I joined the 769 people in front of me on the track encircling the arena at the Rec Centre, watching the Zamboni do slow circles while our even slower circle of the would-be-vaccinted, I thought: I'm going to tell her this story someday.

I'll talk about the Great Flu of 2009, that flu that created so much panic: panic about whether the disease would be a mass killer; panic about whether the vaccine produced with such haste would be sufficient, whether it would be safe; panic about whether we could ever come in out of the rainy lineups and get The Shot before we got The Flu.

Was there a big lineup? Yeah, there was.


But not as bad as other days, from what I hear. And there was--can you believe it?--a rolling coffee cart:


I wound my way around the arena for 90 minutes to score a numbered wristband: 770. That was at 3:00. The Info People told me I could leave and come back later. Maybe try around 4:30 or 5, they suggested.

I called Pynchon, and he arranged to leave work early, just after four, to pick up Munchkin from daycare and meet me at the Centre. He would just drop her off, because parking was nearly impossible. We live so close to the centre that we could easily call him to come get us afterward, and he could be there in 5 minutes. A three-year-old shouldn't have to walk home after a flu shot, I think.

Munchkin hopped out of the car and into my arms. "Yay! I looooooove flu shots!" she shouted. Her last needle was at her 18 mos checkup, so she obviously didn't remember needles.

With our blue band, we marched right through three different checkpoints--public health employee! cop! paramedic!--and then right into the lineup for the nurse. In front of us, the same two 50-something women with emphysema who were directly in front of me earlier in the day. Only they had just stayed in the same line, from 1:30 until 5. All around me I saw toddlers and babies and nursing moms that I had seen at 1:30. Poor buggers. Munchkin had a ball eating a little bag of treats and mugging for the crowd. I have to say, the whole scene wa very organized: everyone knew what to do, the line was controlled, directions were clear, people were helpful.

And then the fire alarm went off.

People actually started laughing. The siren wailed and buzzed, but after about 30 seconds, a public health nurse got on the portable PA system (!) and told us to just wait for a minute. Then a minute later? It turns out one of those desperate or bored kids had pulled the alarm. Well, that's one way to try to get out of getting your flu. Nice try, but the flow of people was hardly interrupted at all.

The nurse very calmly showed me how to restrain Munchkin and everyone was all smiles. Munchkin watched the needle enter her arm, passively. The inject was half-done before she started to cry, not from fear but from pain: "Owwww, Mom! That hurts," she wailed, surprised and dismayed.

And then it was done. I lavished her with praise, and thanked the nurse. I had doudou and I had a little piece of compensatory chocolate and I even had a does of cherry-flavored Tylenol for her. I picked up her immunization record in the sit-and-wait area. She announced she didn't want to leave.

But then we went to "Old MacDonald's Restaurant" and there were My Little Ponies in her Happy Meal: a reward for a trial survived:


So it's done. I am relieved. Pynchon's not immunized yet; I'm not immunized yet. That's fine. It was the three year old I was worried about. And now I know I have done what it is possible for me to do.

WW: Stop and Smell the (November) Flowers

Kids. They have a good sense of what's really important: