The title for the job ad says, “This is not a job.” I think that this is a coded reference to the Rene Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images.” So I follow the link, and the first line says “…it is a career!!” Two exclamation points.
Yesterday on the bike path that we walk on to get to the park and the plaza in our new suburban neighborhood, I noticed a sprinkling of orange flowers (this kind), all wound tightly into little buds. In Seattle these flowers are already open, I told Tricia. This morning I walked up the same path. The flowers had all opened up and flattened out wider than I ever see them in Seattle.
If you see interview footage of me on the local news saying something intelligent about security cameras in parks, then I assure you that my words were taken completely out of context. My answers were actually inarticulate and internally inconsistent.
If there’s footage of me playing with my son in that news story (captured perhaps by security cameras), and if it looks like I knocked a three year old girl in the head with the back of a swing, that’s exactly what happened, and I regret it.
When cell phone miniaturization advances to the point that Bluetooth earpieces are tiny beads that fit into a user’s ear canal, it will be more difficult to tell assholes from everyone else.
A passing remark by Dan helped me find the appropriate home for Benjamin’s web presence.
When I clicked on the link to badspock.blogspot.com (via Tom), I had the fully formed image of a blog about current events written from the point of view of the parallel universe Spock from the episode Mirror, Mirror — the one who had a goatee and who wasn’t bad himself, so much as he was from a bad universe.
The site is instead a collection of bad drawings of Spock, an infinitely better idea than mine.
Somewhere in a box at my parents house (or possibly in a landfill) there’s a bad drawing of Spock’s father, Sarek, along with the characters known only as Romulan Commander from Balance of Terror and Klingon Commander from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, drawn by me twenty years ago and signed by Mark Leonard, the actor who played all three characters. (Oh, my long suffering parents! They put hundreds of miles on their cars taking me to Star Trek conventions. Benjamin, spare me.)
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Benjamin and I spent the afternoon walking around Berkeley while Tricia went to interviews. Our stroll stretched longer than expected as Tricia’s interviews ran late. I was armed with enough diapers and formula to keep Benjamin dry and fed. He had a bottle and flirted with girls at the Peet’s by the BART station, and he napped in the Baby Bjorn while I browsed bookstores. We had a good time. Tricia finally found us after six, finishing our dinners at a cafe on Telegraph Avenue. We were happy to see her, Benjamin to the point of bliss. We shared a brief reunion. Then, business-like, Tricia and I loaded Benjamin into his back-facing car seat, strapped it into the rental car, and headed back across the Bay. Tricia took the wheel: “I’ll drive. I’m already sort of in that mode.”
Benjie reached the end of his patience in the car. He started to fuss. I pulled faces and made funny noises, cheap laughs that got us through the toll booth and onto the Bridge. Tricia sang to him from the drivers seat. But by the time we’d crossed Treasure Island, Benjie had broken down, crying and babbling, “Ba-ba-bababa”, inconsolable. The “baba”-babbling has been a familiar sound in the last three weeks. Today it was more insistent than we’d heard it before; and somewhere over the Bay, we realized that Benjamin’s “Bababba” was starting to sound a lot like “Mamama.” Benjamin taught us his first word today.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Benjamin has started to favor his thumb over his foot. Progress.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
I notice the parrots around the neighborhood all the time now. I can recognize their chatter. They fly far enough overhead that they appear in silhouette, indistinguishable as anything remarkable until the sunlight hits them just right and their feathers flash green for a moment. They usually flock in small groups of four-to-eight, always in an even number of birds. The largest flock I was able to count had 22 birds.
It rained a little the other day. It was nice. The television at the laundromat was tuned to the local news which was reporting on the slick roads and the potential for mudslides. An actual quote from the broadcast, “It’s rained as much as half an inch in some places.”
Oedipal onesies:
Monday, November 26, 2007
All people of a certain nationality are endowed with a good sense of direction. This was implied by an off the cuff comment made in my presence last week. The person who said it saw right away that I was struggling to parse his words. So he explained his intent using the bigot’s defense. “It’s a joke!”
To be honest, I didn’t know that awareness of the nationality in question was strong enough here that a stereotype, beyond those associated with foreigners in general, would have surfaced. Bigots were easier to understand when their biases were dumb, rather than stupid.