sos

I pride myself on figuring things out, but Blogger is defying understanding. Why can't I get all of my posts into a standard font/size?

OK, all but one post are in the same font now. I guess I can live with that.

North by northwest

The baby didn't sleep much yesterday. But was a trouper about it. (Or is that a trooper? A member of an ensemble, or a military dude?) He's catching up today. And so am I, here.

Yesterday morning it seemed that the day would flatten me, like a crop-dusting plane gone haywire. There were people to be "managed," errands both self- and super-imposed, a snow-covered car to be moved - twice - for street cleaning, and not enough hours in which to cram everything. But it turned out to be a beautifully choreographed series of interactions and coincidences, including a pseudo-karmic exchange in which I loaned my snow brush to a guy trying to clean his car so he could exit the very spot I needed. Also, I had extracurricular caffeine at lunchtime, in the form of a Thai iced tea, and it blew my mind how effective a coping strategy that was, in the face of a sleepless baby. Instead of shrinking internally at his refusal to nap, or even cursing externally (and ill-advisedly, given his rapid pace of language acquisition), I merely shrugged (which should have hurt, given all that I did at the gym yesterday with my trainer) and bundled him up and took him out to play. Also I eked out a few non-prose words about the placenta, and read them aloud to J in the evening, and found to my surprise they did not completely suck.

The moral of this non-story? Some extra caffeine during the day may not hurt.

There is some there there

The election can pretty much be summed up by this. I don't need any further commentary.

J is 14 months old today and decided this would be the perfect day to morph into a toddler: mood swings, unpredictable appetite, throwing every single piece of macaroni from his high chair when we were out to lunch (the same macaroni he'd eaten with gusto last night for dinner). He is changing so rapidly that I think even his face changes from the morning to the evening. His diapers' contents smell worse and worse with each passing day.

I just watched this video of the mistreatment of cows at a slaughterhouse. I am a lifelong carnivore, and have never before considered the source of the beef that I'm eating. I don't think I can continue to ignore that in good conscience. I'm not going to give up eating beef, but I am planning to scale back my consumption to meat from reliably humane sources. Of course, I don't even know what that means... must do some research. A few years ago I switched to free-range chicken, so hopefully there are similar options for beef? (All pricey, to be sure, so we won't be having steak nearly as often as we have been.)

Finally, one of my all-time favorite sites on the WWW (which I discovered back when folks still used that charming acronym) is back! For all of your agricultural clip art needs. I think I like the descriptions of the simple/naive/pixellated clip art perhaps more than the clip art itself. The notion of someone sitting at a desk all day and coming up with captions for some of these bizarro images is very satisfying.

I present to you: Man pushing a cart which has pigs in it.

I am he and he is me and we are me and he are all together

An entire day spent projecting my own sleepiness onto the boy, with little success until 4:45 p.m., long past the safe window of naptime. [Hmmm... interesting - I start writing a post here and it feels like a pole goes immediately up my ass. What is my blogging style? Can it evolve?] He projecting his needs onto my day. I projecting my needs onto his. Who wins out in this game? Usually, he.

He is self-aware in that he knows when he needs soothing, sometimes gets into a posture of surrender to accept it. The diaper ointment tube has magical powers, or else tastes good to him, and it's the only thing that can induce him to allow me to have the privilege of changing him.

This morning I spied him playing with something under the table, and that something turned out to be a hardened pellet of poop that must have escaped his diaper before the morning change. I hope that was the only one, that there wasn't another one in his mouth for safekeeping. There must be a lot of valuable things in that mouth of his, he refuses to open it to show me. He smiles while he averts his face from my prying fingers, my imploring, "peek peek peek?"

How will I know when I am losing myself? How will I know when I find myself? I'm in the process of doing both.

In a tube, darkly

What I don't enjoy so much about my new gym are the monitors attached to most of the machines. I give TV a pretty wide berth at home and try to extend that to my activities outside. My old gym was not fancy enough to have this type of machine. At Fancy New Gym, there are some machines with no screens, but at peak times, those tend to be taken up by people who (I imagine) are like me.

Today I used a treadmill with a screen, leaving the screen dark. It was uncomfortable at first. I was unable to avoid an interaction with Exercise Self. Exercise Self looks a lot like me, except she wears tighter, stretchier clothes, eats energy bars, and logs her workouts online. Exercise Self probably doesn't have a lot of time to read or write poetry, since she is obsessed with sites like ExRx and what the right kinds of stretches for a sore groin muscle. The one thing that's good about Exercise Self is she likes a lot of the same music I do, so it's not hard to come up with a good playlist for her workouts. Exercise Self probably would not want to listen to Glenn Gould's hour-long radio tone poem, The Idea of North, though. Exercise Self doesn't really want to know about persistent rotator cuff injuries, the Feldenkrais technique, or yoga, though she ignores these at her peril.

Is there a way to exercise without becoming Exercise Self? I am not sure. When I speak Italian or Spanish, it's hard not to become Italian Self or Spanish Self. (Those selves are both a wee bit shorter than me, more effervescent, and seem to use lots of idioms.) Is fragmentation of the self a bad thing? I guess not, if it doesn't take half a day and a lot of alcohol to get back to your functioning primary self?

at last.

It took a lot of attempts to find a title for this blog. The vast majority of the blog titles I tried were for attempts that seem to have been aborted before they actually existed. The best of the squatters I found was this one: One post, and one comment asking whether the name could possibly be freed up for another "lover of Mike."

I finally settled on a line that Mr. Johnson, the zookeeper responsible for the care and feeding of the seals, says in Sammy the Seal, just before the protagonist sets off on his Great Quest. I have adopted this line to signal to my son that mealtime/snacktime is over, so I say it a minimum of five times a day. I have taken the liberty of giving Mr. Johnson the voice of Mr. Moviefone.

This blog's title is a reinforcement of a lifetime of promising fits and starts followed by woeful underachievement - that lifetime being, of course, my own. So, there may be posts like this one, or just phrases, or maybe just random photos. Or perhaps there will be just this one post and none to follow it, and if that occurs, please know that it was intentional and that I'm not fucking blog-squatting.