Month:
April, 2003
I’m outside in my backyard, which is really quite lovely. It’s pleasant out here and I’m about to begin working on Cualcotel. Tonight’s mission is a scene listing and some progress towards names, as all my characters save one are unnamed. I’m terrible at names, so I expect there’ll be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I can hear Sophia crying, presumably because she wants to come outside too, but I have to be alone and undisturbed in order to get my writing done so I imagine Kurt is telling her she’s going to have to stay inside. I have some things to relate concerning Sophia and the past couple of weeks, including accounts of Easter and the Grandparent’s visit but I think I’ll save those for later. Right now I just want to tell you about two quick things my daughter said.
She has these bears, you see, beanie baby bears and she loves them a lot. She likes to set them all out and make them listen to her stories, put them down for naps and so forth. She even yells at them and forces them to go to time out from time to time. The constantly present bears were the first recipients of her hugs and kisses. She wipes their noses and faces. Occasionally she makes them do the gestures that go with Humpty Dumpty. She lies them on the floor and puts little blankets on them and tells them to shush. Often I can see new phrases and new emotional tonalities emerging in her transactions with the faithful bears. Yesterday, I observed that she was telling the bears that things were not theirs.
“Not yours, bear!” she’d growl angrily, and fling the bear away from her. I’m not sure what it was that was not theirs, but she was serious about it. This is interesting to me for several reasons. First, it shows the beginnings of a grasp of pronouns. Up until now she has been using nouns in all sentences. Secondly, it shows the first expressions of her growing sense of possession and possessiveness. I don’t know how long she’s been percolating on this concept, but I suspect that with her playmate Matthew’s weekly visits of the last two weeks and the constant struggle for items at daycare that we’ve arrived at the “mine” stage.
The second thing was even more astonishing in a way, and brings home to me yet again how much information kids are absorbing all the time and how little control over what pieces will be digested and retained and which pieces will be filtered and forgotten we actually have. She several times told one of her bears to “Quit yer yapping!” I was a little taken aback by this, and I wondered where she could have heard something like that. She was saying it so vehemently, and I was fervently hoping they weren’t telling the kids to be quiet in that tone and with those words at daycare. Well, they may or may not be, I’m not sure, but I am pretty sure where she got that phrase from, as it was in the book I’ve been reading to her every night for over a week. I just didn’t put two and two together until I heard her saying it and then later that night saw the phrase in the book, moments before I uttered it in the nasty tone she’d used with the bears. That’ll teach me to do the sour kangaroo’s voice in Horton Hears a Who with so much venom. I didn’t think she was paying that much attention, to be honest.
And before I get completely off the subject of Sophia, I could use more variety in our night time reading. She’s decided that Good Night Moon and Guess How Much I Love You, previous favorites, are too short and only Dr. Suess’ Sleep Book or Horton Hears a Who will do (she calls the latter “Hort-Who-Elephant”). What I’m looking for is a 20-35 page illustrated kid’s book with no more than 4 or 5 lines per page preferrably on the topic of bedtime and going to sleep. Suggestions are welcome.
And now, to face Cualcotel
There was a spider in the bathtub this morning, and Kurt had already gone to work. I spoke loudly and bravely, “Ok, live and let live, live and let live, you just stay in there, I’ll just stay out here.” I was pretty proud of myself for not shrieking, falling to pieces, calling Kurt at work to come home and rescue me or trying to kill it. I had to keep checking to make sure it was keeping its end of the bargain, though. So I’d peer over the edge of the bathtub with the toothbrush in my mouth and squeak when I laid eyes on the thing. Ack! Still there. No wait, that’s good, still there is where I want it. That was alright at the time because I was fixing to leave for work anyways. But now, when I get home, if the spider is not in the bathtub I will have to worry about where it went and whether it will try to eat me while I’m sleeping.
I just remembered the dream I had last night.
Topics: Shasradio, music tastes, and Lewis makes his first appearance in my dreamworld.
Sophia’s review of the new Tangential Cold piece Star Schema was : “mam! so coool!”. That pretty much sums it up for me as well. It’s been too long since the last piece, but this is quite a reward for the wait.
AlterNet: Patriot Raid [link credit to Legomancer]
There’s a whole lot of things I could, and perhaps should, say about this. I don’t seem to be able to formulate coherent thoughts about the subject right now. It would take a lot of explanations of my history to understand why I find these sorts of incidents so personally terrifying, but I do.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about music. Music has been at the fore of things for me lately. Today, my mainstay of work day music, ShasRadio has been down out of commission. Fortunately, I have brought in several CDs to work in order to listen to them more closely and rip them and such. So all day I have been listening to my newest three CDs. One was a Valentine’s present from Kurt and the other two were spendings of an Amazon Gift Certificate I hadn’t used up yet and it was a particularly delicious pleasure choosing which ones from my wishlist I would have sent to me (thanks, Ielleen!). I just don’t buy CDs as much as I used to. For one, I already own quite a lot of music that I like, I don’t have an ever increasing appetite for more. In general, I think music is mostly overpriced. Also, since I work in an Archives, I feel a little queasy about the recording industry and what irrational screaming babies they’ve become about the whole copyright thing. Not to mention the whole napster/mp3 debacle. The idea of putting money in the hands of these greasy middlemen makes me feel like I’m paying gangsters. I’m not sure what the solution might be but I’m pretty sure helping keep the system entrenched by buying truckloads of cds isn’t it. The CDs are Gift by Curve, Skindive by Skindive and Heathen by David Bowie. So far I can say that I am very pleased with all three of these albums. Maybe buying less music means I’ll be buying better music.
Rant time : does anyone know what’s going on with CD cases? Two of the aforementioned CDs came not in a standard jewel case but in a cheap cardboard package with a flap cover and a plastic inset for the disc. I’m all for less packaging, but I’m not sure I’m thrilled about this. Sophia mouthed my Curve case for all of fifteen seconds and the cardboard cover practically melted away, rendering it pretty useless. My question is, is this the standard for CDs now or is this some sort of extra cheap packaging I get for purchasing from Amazon.com? Anyone know the lowdown?
Tangentially related gripe : I was extra bored, I suppose, so I ventured into some of those Amazon.com recommendations lists that flash up on the sides of the page. I’ve previously looked at ones relating to baby toys and baby books and those tend to be very useful with lists of extra durable toys that hold a kid’s attention for a particularly long time. Not the lists from the music section. The lists from the music section are all about people telling you what are great not to be missed albums that no one else has yet discovered. The thing that gets me is this : they’re all practically the same list. I must have seen Norah Jones and John Mayer 30 times. And my question is this, why make a list if it’s just going to look like everyone else’s list? Who do you think buys stuff at Amazon and hasn’t heard of Norah Jones? She won approximately 752 Grammy’s for heaven’s sake! Even my recently arrived from a foreign country sister-in-law was asking me if I’d heard Norah Jones. She’s not secret or undiscovered! Everyone who wants her album probably already has it. Also, every one of these best 20 albums ever listmakers acts like music began 10 years ago, with the exception of the obligatory Dylan or Hendrix album, to which the comment is always something like , “If you can’t appreciate this I don’t know why you’d listen to music at all.” Only less coherent. And with more misspellings. Yes, I know, serves me right for bothering to look. Had to gripe, though.
However, back on the sunny side of the street, I am pleased to report that
ShasRadio Volumes 3 and 4 have finally come to fruition. These are mix CDs I made for myself based on ShasRadio discoveries : bands or songs I had not heard before ShasRadio. I’m pretty pleased with myself about having finally finished these, and having them done well before the summer.
Welcome to a new category in my journal : Dreams. I’m probably going to place every dream in the way I just placed this one, forcing you to click through to the extended text to see it, because I predict violent, sexual and generally bizarre content (though this one is quite harmless). I might even come up with a rating scheme on my dreams to put in this part of the post, so you can avoid the ones you probably don’t want to read.
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This blog, Among Mad People, and its contents by Anna Schwind are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.