SuspendedAnimation

guest blogger as requested

"Once there was a cat that was very greedy and it was very hungry. It wanted a nice juicy mouse for a snack. So it thought it should go to the pig yard because pigs have lots of stuff in their trough. So the cat went over to the pig's yard and asked, 'Do you have any nice mouses in that trough of yours?' and the pig said, 'no, but I have some noodles and a donut--would you like to try?' and then the cat said, 'what's a noodle? yuck!' and the pig said, 'if you're going to talk about my food like that you are going to have to try,' and then the cat said 'no way, I don't like noodles' and the pig said, 'you've never tried them--try them.' And then the cat said, 'well okay' and the pig gave the cat a big noodle and the cat took a little bite of it and said, 'Hmmmm, hey, I like this!' And that's how the cat learned to be a good tryer. Do you like it?"

how to create a wise-ass little monster

[calling from my room to hers, realizing that I've been hearing a nonstop stream of lively chatter that does not resemble the sound of pajamas being donned] Are you putting on your pajamas?
[calling back] No, I'm getting my bed ready.
Well, in my opinion you should be getting your pajamas on.
Well, I need to get my bed ready.
Well, I'm the mother and I say, get your pajamas on.
Well, but it's my choice
Well, but it's my daughter.
Well, but it's my body.
Well, but it's my house.
Well, but it's my room.
[I can't help laughing at this, thereby undermining the teensie smudge of authority I pretend to wield.]
[Actually, I'm generally pretty heavyhanded.]

hey! it's Jill! don't ignore!

That post title was really, no really, the subject line of an email I sent today.

But there's an explanation. I sent the email to my faculty advisor, and he is very Active In Professional Service this year and literally gets hundreds of emails a day. So, he explained, to us, if you send him an email, well ... he might not notice ... unless you give it some kind of hysterically urgent subject line. And the above formulation was my attempt to do that, so that he'd send me the class handouts I was missing.

Still and all. The appropriateness of my choice of words does not elude me.

This is what I said in an email to someone else today on this topic:

... I know that I have this really weak ego that keeps begging to be reminded that I exist, from external sources. so I realize that it's my problem, but I'm grateful for people putting up with me and sometimes even loving me anyway.

So there's that. In addition, there were post-birthday blues, and they're not what you think. I bet you think I build up in my mind some kind of wild expectation of fantastic rivers of affirmation and affection that will flow over me in a 105F  jasmine-scented mineral bath of satisfaction, but that is not the case, no. All blog evidence to the contrary, I expect pretty much nothing for my birthday, and am ever surprised and deeply gratified by any mark of recognition that comes my way.

I think post-birthday blues are just my annually aggregating disappointment with myself. I'm not much: a fistful of good intentions backed up with a wavering will; a booklet of $.50 words and little sparkly bursts of ideas on how to juggle and nudge them together, and a talent for remembering information that is moderately useful and what you said that time and how I felt about it, and what she looked like walking toward Central Square with the fat straw-colored French braid dangling down her back, and the decision not to follow her and I wonder what her name was.

Increase The Size Of Your Log!

That oh-so-l3vitr4 message is plastered all over the pages of my statistics service, reminding me that I could cyberspy on my readers in much more depth if only I were willing to pay, pay, pay. And for months now I've been wanting to include it in a post, because really the eighth-grader in me is still as green and lively as she was twenty-seven years ago. Twenty-seven years ago. Egad.

Just a few unconnected thoughts. Well. They are connected by my usual preoccupations: vanity, pruriency, tilt-a-whirl ego, what have you.

Today a twenty-four year old man tried to ask me out. No obvious deformity was in evidence, and he appeared to retain the use of all his limbs, teeth, mental faculties, and social skills, though his English was a bit halting. I'm going to hire a private investigator to see whether anyone in my acquaintance arranged for this occurrence as a sort of birthday morale boost.

Tomorrow we take off for two days to join my family for Passover. I'm roasting about twenty pounds of root vegetables (both white and orange sweet potatoes, rutabaga, parsnip and carrot) with red pearl onions and fresh sage. Does that sound like enough root vegetable for twenty-two people? We're Jews, remember. We don't drink a lot at holidays—bizarre as it sounds, we actually eat. I also have to cook two quarts of the Italian style haroset that I started making a few years ago and which is now demanded instead of the usual raw-chopped-apple-and-walnut type. It has lots of dates, prunes, golden raisins, apples, pears, ground almonds and pinenuts, along with the usual cinnamon and sweet wine.

This is what happens when you have a daughter of great personal loveliness, if you're me: you release a tiny fraction of your persistent, intensely neurotic desire to be lovely whenever there's an event that will potentially showcase both of you; instead, you lavish considerable attention on tarting up the child. This afternoon we bought the Jellybean a gaw-jus dress, lacy stockings, and a little white crochet cardigan; I don't know what I'm wearing tomorrow and need to do my laundry.

If you missed the opportunity to say 'Happy Birthday' to me in my covert pre-birthday attention-begging post, here's your chance to do it now. If you have already wished me a happy birthday in that venue or elsewhere, consider yourself encouraged to devise some other way to express your deep appreciation of the wonder that is me. If you like.

protest too much

I'm trying to suss myself out. There's been a whirl of talk and thought in my environment about sincerity and honesty and integrity, just seems it's in the air like pollen, all sticky and heavy. It's not all about me, it's not all about anybody. sometimes it just happens this way, to try out a different metaphor: that a certain idea, or maybe it's a sullen group of ideas sitting in the back of the classroom throwing spitballs at you, and you try to ignore them but they won't stop til they get a rise out of you.

do I have any right to make any claims to those '-ty's? To the extent that I do, I'm not sure I can claim a lot of merit in it. Sincerity might be an inflated way of saying I have no talent for faking it, or maybe no motivation. Honesty? Gentleman's C? I've seen people use 'honesty' as a trojan horse for cruelty or, more commonly, a lazy disregard for whether their words were not only accurate but also helpful and meet. It means more to me that you know that I can be trusted, that I won't harm you, than that everything I say to you is just exactly as it is.

I might say something that isn't so if I'm ashamed: if I haven't met my own expectations, or if I've fumbled something and want to save face. I might tell you that I haven't an eye for interior design, because there are no words within reach that could convey my nauseated response to the chandelier you were just admiring—a pity you had to ask for my corroborating opinion! But now I know not to go shopping with you in future.

'Integrity' is the oddball of the bunch, in my view. I am hypnotized by the way the word is put together, thinking 'integrate, integral, integer', and it has the heft of cool, smooth granite: of a piece, whole, put-together. I'm stubbornly literal with words, sometimes. So I see that, feel that meaning and it's lovely but I don't see myself in it, at all. Certainly not lately. What could be more dissolved and dissolving, fragmented, constantly recombining than how I've experienced myself over the past who-knows-while? It's a pretty word, though. It emanates solidity and quiet and rest. I can see why it would appeal. But I don't know if that's what we're meant to be. Granite is a material for funeral monuments.

please to let this alter you ineradicably

Let some mysterious chunk of space debris
puncture the roof and set me free.
—Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of by the fabulous Mountain Goats

we tolerate a lot of motion

The Earth travels something like 925 million kilometers every year in its orbit around the sun. That would mean that we're travelling through space at well over one hundred thousand kilometers an hour ... and the speed of the rotation of the Earth is in the neighborhood of one thousand miles an hour. Yes, I'm mixing units because I can't be bothered to convert. So what? bear with me. You see what I mean. We're going somewhere—sooo fast. And we come around again.

Yet. On a spring day, if the breeze is somewhat gentle, we can experience a sensation of stillness. And it's spring, isn't it? Spring is relentlessly, inexorably vibrant; spring busts out with the motion of growth. From the first time I notice buds on the trees, and a faint flush of red comes over the thousands of Eastern redbuds in my neighborhood, it's only a matter of a week before I suddenly see froths of pink and white and yellow blossoms everywhere. So much motion. So many instances of stillness ...

breakfast table with view of birdfeeder

Daddy: Look quick!—right on the corner of the deck is the cardinal.
Jellybean: Ooohhh ... is that a baby?
Daddy: No—it's an adult male. see how bright red the plumage is?
Mommy: The female is over there, on the feeder. Her feathers are mostly brown. Most of the bright colors in birds are the males ... [extemporizing] they need the fancy colors to attract females. but the females don't need to look fancy; they attract the males just by being clever and interesting.
Daddy: So ... just the opposite as with humans, is it?
Mommy: [laser look of death]

unsatisfactory results for image googling: 'clutching cliff' 'white knuckles' 'grasping ledge', and variations on these themes. anyway, that would be melodramatic. blues lingering but dwindling; I also have a mild flu-ish thing with head in very efficient invisible vise, aching skin, and is the self-pity thing part of the virus or the depression? no matter—I've always been able to summon it up at a nanosecond's notice anyway.

this morning, in my first shower since [shocking interval undisclosed upon second thought], I turned the temperature up and closed my eyes, imagining that I was standing underneath the spray as a rock-candy skeleton. I thought of times I'd run hot tap water over ice cubes and watched them disappear in the stainless steel sink. I pictured the gradual, gentle erosion of my skull, my cervical vertebrae, imagined the looser articulation of my joints as they tapered under the persistent pulse of the warmth flowing downward. That made me feel quite a bit better. I don't want to melt away entirely. I just want to be a little less.

reduce, re-use, recycle

no point reinventing the wheel—these two sum things up nicely for me today :
The gorilla post  and get out your handkerchiefs.

Edited to add:

To those of you who feel cheated if I haven't offered a fresh metaphor: have you ever been saddled with the job of cleaning the produce bin after a period of neglect, and you open the drawer, peer in, blanch, and head for the drawer where you keep those lonnnnnng yellow rubber gloves? the ones you usually cuff? but then you pull the cuffs back up?

That would be me. There, in the drawer.