accidental feminist

they just keep being funny/awesome July 31, 2006

Dina- we’re all sitting on the couch at my mother’s reading a book called Foolish Goose; it’s one of those early readers with a lot of repetition and such. Then I ask “Who wants to go to Curves?” and Dina says (include everything in double quotes):

“‘I want to go to Curves,’ said Dina”.

Pretty hilarious.

Bassie- She was playing with these color-coded foam shape fractions thingies (circle segments, triangles, etc) and she found two oblong right triangles that were supposed to fit together to form a rectancle. So she put them together base to base, to form a diamond with one set of sides longer than the other, so I said “I think that’s a diamond”, to which Bassie responded, “No, it’s not, it’s a pyramid!”

Well, yes, I suppose so, if you abstract to three dimensions without the aid of the standard dotted lines receeding into the z-axis. I wonder, at what age do children learn that divergence and abstraction are less functional skills in life than convergence and agreeability? I think it happened to me when I was five and my first grade teacher yelled at me for refusing to take my turn in reading cirlce because I “didn’t want to read like a robot!” Her exact words: “Then you can sit down!” (in my desk, away from the “circle” at which sat my peers). Moral: try to stay “in the circle”.

They’ll learn…or be crushed by the Council of Athens!

careful what you say around her July 28, 2006

Last week in Seattle, it seems that Uncle Matt and his friend Rob were trying to fill my child’s head with frivolous information and pop culture references. How do I know? Well, there was no hint of the “imprinting” they had attempted at first; it lay, dormant and undetectable, until last night on our way to dinner, when Bassie suddenly started to sing:

Bassie: The sun is a mask (sic.) of millions of degrees…

Me: What was that?

Bassie: Oh, just a song that Rob taught me.

I proceeded to teach her the whole chorus, which she won’t be singing for another few weeks. It’s called ” excellent long term memory” and “superior information retention”. She may not be able to tell you that a baloo is a bear, or that to wuzzle means to mix in time to score in the 99% on a 4th grade state assessment test, she will remember what you were wearing the first time she met you, and what she was wearing, and what you ordered for dinner, and that will freak you out!

my apologies to avid afers July 25, 2006

It seems that the computer that was acting as our server was forced to accept an “early retirement package”. Sorry for the lapse…we’re back, and for those of you who were willing to wait out your frustration, you shall now be amply rewarded.

In the past few weeks, I have:
* officiated my first wedding (cograts to my iconoclastic brother-in-law for sticking it to the man in the most wonderful bit of irony I’ve ever witnessed: to legally marry the woman he loves and then have a lovely reception with friends and family to celebrate. My favorite bit of satire was the “cutting of the cake”. Ha ha! Jokes on us, huh, Matt?)
*Visited Seattle for the first time. The best description I can give of the weather is that it feels like what I’ve heard the Moon in like: hot in the sun, freezing in the shade. And yet the locals insist on wearing tank tops and sandals no matter what the weather report is. Other than that, it was really very lovely, and it seems like a totally “livable” city. Very agreeable. The highlight, from an anthropoligical point-of-view, was walking the bar strip with Jazmin and Georgie for an hour, finally deciding on what seemed like the low-key-est bar we could find, refusing to pay the $5 cover, and finally ending up at “The Bookstore Bar”; leave it to three UofC girls. Ah, well, that was a pretty good Stella I had, anyway.
* been accused of giving more attention to one of my children than the other (by Bassie, re: Dina). It’s amazing it took so long, but we talked it out, then hugged it out. All good.

I’m on a strange computer right now, so I’ll upload some fun pictures later, but I just wanted to say “I’m back”.

Lovely.

walmart = worse than home depot July 10, 2006

I hate them both, but at least I can aknowledge that there could be perfectly reasonable human beings, who, possessing a certain “handiness” that I lack, might find a good deal of the merchandise at Home Depot that could be very useful to them, and rather aesthetically pleasing once installed, built, etc. Walmart, on the other hand, assumes that, unlike that Tim Allen-esque creature prowling Home Depot, we are too stupid and ignorant to understand how to proerly take care of ourselves, and thus, will be fooled into thinking that the cheap, nasty, poorly-made, unhealthy, and exploitative items that burst out of every aisle there are actually a “bargain” (this, of course, excludes the soon-to-be-released “Chapelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes, which I’m sure we’ll all be lining up to buy at our nearest Walmart on the July 25th release date). Case in point, this “Super-Size” bag of sugary-goodness, for which they couldn’t even hire a decent copy writer to at least come up with a name that wasn’t completely self-mocking:

Having just seen this yesterday, I was tempted to believe that the manufacturers knew how funny this whole scenario was. Ah, but that would be like when I was in high school and wanted to believe that “The Doors” were actually quite whimsical and ironic, since, clearly, no one could take themselves as seriously as they appeared to. In fact, I did believe just that until I was publicly mocked for being so naive. That’s when the cynicism started…

Customer is Right? July 7, 2006

What ever happened to the idea that the customer is ALWAYS right? Honestly, over the past two days I have noticed a lack of concern for my consumer money.
(more…)

to dream the impossible dream July 3, 2006

I ran into an old aquaintance from high school today. She’s two years older than me, and has two children (a bit younger than Bassie and Dina). “What are you doing?” I ask. “I’ve got the two kids…being a stay-at-home mom…and I live in Deerfield!” The varied and conflicting emotions that fill me at this point are mind-boggling: guilt (”Why did I go back to work so soon?”), contempt (”Is that all you plan on doing with your life?”), amusement (”The wheel comes full circle…”), kinship (”Let us present our young children to each other as a symbol of the bond of motherhood that inextricably ties us, one to another.”). Instead, I said “Well, Happy Birthday” in response to the two large ice cream cakes she had just purchased, to which she replied, “Oh, these? They’re for a barbeque…Nice seeing you”.

All in all a very successful rununion*.

* My latest contribution to the Sniglets dictionary: run union, n. a briefl crossing of paths with someone from high school or college for whom you had neither a particular affinity nor contempt. (v. runune, adj. rununy)