Angus reading The Hunger Games

Did anyone else realize that the guy named Peeta was the baker's son and when you say Peeta out loud it sounds like Pita, which is HILARIOUS? Because, like, it's a kind of bread? Yes? Everyone except me? Fine, fuck off then.

Angus is about halfway through Mockingjay, the third book in the series. When I'm folding laundry at night on my bed he lies in Matt's spot and reads and sometimes reads lines out loud. The other night he read:

"I cleaned my teeth and smoothed my back hair again."

Me: what's that now?

Him: "Wait.....oh. 'I cleaned my teeth and smoothed my HAIR BACK again.'"


I know, this is pitiful. I have a funny story to tell, and I have to review The Juliet Stories, but my overly dramatic airways kept me up most of last night and Matt's away (must be Tuesday), and Eve had dance tonight and we just got home and I wasn't going to blog at all, but then it will be a week, and the thought of the last post in anyone's blogroll with the caption "1 WEEK AGO" underneath makes me unutterably sad, so....

Digging a Hole for a Post

I've been ignoring all of your blogs because it helps me pretend I'm not writing because I don't have a blog, what? I don't even know what a blog is, what a funny word, blog blog blog, lalalalalala I can't hear you.

This week sucks much less than the last week Matt was away for the week, which was two weeks ago, what a funny word, week week week week. I always forget to reverse whine about my head not hurting - hey everyone! My head doesn't hurt this week! I have wrapped, I have taped, I have melted and beaten and creamed until light and fluffy. I have trod the mill and pumped the iron. I have done all this while still producing creative and nutritious meals every night (that's a bald-faced lie - this week has been brought to you by frozen pizza, grilled cheese and chicken wraps made from grocery store barbecued chicken. I just wanted to feel like Superwoman for a millisecond. It really wasn't me).

I'm slowly managing to separate the actual decorations from the boxes of shiny things that should actually be put away so we can enjoy the decorations without tripping over the boxes of shiny things. I'm not entirely sure why wrapping a shiny red and gold string around a stair bannister makes it a decoration and leaving it sitting in the box makes it infuriating aneurysm-inducing CRAP, I only know that it does.

I assembled the Christmas parcels to send away to Matt's family and got most of my Christmas cards written and then realized I couldn't find my pretty red address book with the whimsical drawing of a house on the front of it ANYWHERE. I emailed Matt in Japan and said if he didn't send me the addresses of the various family members the parcels weren't getting mailed. Somewhat to my chagrin, he emailed me most of the addresses. I emailed everyone else I knew and said send me your addresses or no Christmas card for you. Somewhat to my chagrin, most of them promptly sent their addresses. This reminds me of a page in a calendar I bought for one of Matt's family members. Oh look -- here it is. Thirty years ago, if I couldn't find my address book I could have had a brief tantrum, then thrown the cards away and kicked back with a bottle of wine. Now we have The Internet. What did we do before Google? Argue for hours over what the guy's name was, or who played the character, or what year the movie came out in? Live with uncertainty? Let me Google what we did before Google.

My friend Collette invited us over for dinner tonight - when people invite us over for dinner when Matt's away I always feel so incredibly overwhelmingly grateful it's all I can do not to insist that they come over for dinner instead (somehow I manage). She poured a couple of glasses of wine into me before dinner, which she may have regretted when Ben asked for a bun at the table and I yelled 'go long' and put a nice spiral on one. I told the kids to enjoy their dinner since we probably weren't getting asked back any time soon. And now I am sleepy. To all a good night.

Wednesday Waffling

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows how I stand on cursing. Or they should - there's a small chance that they think I'm against cursing and just have really poor impulse control, and, well, I guess that wouldn't be the craziest thing to presume, but.... wait, I'm getting off track.

There are people who seem to think that cursing is one of the worst things you can do - up there with stealing and burning down orphanages and nun-beating. There are people on Goodreads who lament getting into a book and starting to enjoy it and then encountering 'the f word' on page forty-eight and having to stop reading, and wishing they hadn't wasted all that time getting engaged with something they couldn't possibly finish because.... what? Reading the word 'hell' or 'shit' would keep them from sleeping, or cause them to go out and rob a convenience store? I'm genuinely interested in what their line of reasoning is. Okay, you disagree with the use of 'foul' language. That would really keep you from finishing a book that you've been enjoying so far? I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, I just... don't get it.

The thing that people who don't swear don't seem to get about those of us who do is that we're not being all that transgressive, because we don't actually think we're doing anything wrong. Swearing isn't against the law. There are certain words that, for whatever reason, our society has deemed 'dirty' or 'unseemly', and for this reason they draw attention to themselves. When I use them, I want attention drawn to something - either in a negative way, i.e. whatever I'm talking about has made me angry, or in a humorous way, i.e. using a 'curse' is supposed to make whatever I'm talking about more funny. I tend to veer more towards using curse words humorously, or if I'm angry about a situation, because directing them at an actual person seems too hostile. This is the first part of my waffly feelings about swearing.

The second part is about when I'm walking into the community centre with my kids on our way to the library and the kids from the attached school are standing at the door smoking and swearing every second word. This does kind of bother me. It doesn't surprise me, of course, but it bothers me. When I swear, I am always mindful of my audience. This will likely come in time for the teen-agers, of course, but I like what my friend Collette told her son - that she knows he will swear when he's with his friends and has no objection to that, but that he should be aware that if adults hear him swearing it will be considered disrespectful and they may assume certain things about him that aren't true.



However, not swearing sometimes seems to me to be a way of drawing attention to yourself just as much as swearing would. One of my friends on Facebook is friends with a woman who is vocally religious and quite self-righteous, and at one point she made a joke and then speculated that she would now be considered a 'smart behind'.

Really? REALLY? I'm too lazy to look up the reference, but I believe it was an Andrew Greeley book, where the main character is in the seminary but home for the summer and trying to teach a girl he used to date how to water ski. He says something like "try to get the, uh, lower part of your body straighter" and she rages "it's not a sin to say 'ass' you stupid prude!"

Yeah.

I won't go out of my way to swear around you if it's something that bothers you. But it's not like second-hand smoke - it won't actually make you sick. It won't even cause you to swear. I strive constantly for greater purity of thought and deed. But I'm quite happy making judicious use of dirty words.

Will no one ease their pain?

I like to think I'm not a grammar snob. I'm fine with the opening of Star Trek The Next Generation when Patrick Stewart says "to boldly go" even though it's a split infinitive (truthfully Patrick Stewart could say whatever the hell he wanted and I'd listen with gladness in my heart). I've been known to dangle a participle or two (I'm badass like that).

It does shrivel my soul a little, though, when someone abuses an apostrophe. And I'm on Facebook -- I see a LOT of apostrophe abuse.

Sometimes I think about pointing out someone's error -- gently, kindly, self-deprecatingly ("I know, I know, I'm totally anal about apostrophes, and it doesn't really matter, but just in case you always wanted to know..."). But I never do, because I have a feeling that, no matter how nicely you do it, correcting someone's punctuation usage is going to light you up as a big ol' douchebag.

And then I got a few emails from this library staff listserv that I had to join as part of my last course and now can't figure out how to un-join (how's that for good-grammar?) in which someone agreed with something someone else had said with the expression 'here here!'.

And someone else responded "I'm sorry, but this is one of my pet peeves. It's 'hear hear'".

And you know? She DID come across as a big ol' douchebag.

So go ahead. Have your way with those poor little apostrophes. You won't get any trouble from me. (I'll just talk about all of you behind your back's. SEE, doesn't that just look SO CRUELLY UNUTTERABLY WRONG??? How can we stand by and let this happen, are we barbarians?)

Balls to you if you don't think this is funny

Yes, I am incredibly immature. I pride myself on being puerile. When I saw The Pillow Book with my boss from the book store where I worked, I could only look at Ewan McGregor buck naked for a second or two before I filled the theatre with hysterical giggles and almost got simultaneously fired and asked to leave. My husband often gets angry at the kids for being silly at the dinner table. Then he has to get angry with me as well, because hell, it IS funny when someone keeps saying 'beef burger' over and over again in a German accent. I love this ship. Why? Because it's called a frigate. And don't you sometimes just want to say frigate? Or, go here, you can here some other guy say it over and over -- how awesome is that?

So this? Well, this made my friggin' day. And with that, I am off to Toronto to see singing men in drag, leaving my husband and children to fend for themselves for TWO whole nights. One hockey game, one hockey practice, one hockey photo session, two birthday parties... say it with me...

In your dreams

I used to have very elaborate, vivid dreams on a regular basis. They were mostly quite entertaining, except for the ones that made me feel like I was going to die or wake up with various organs in the wrong place. I often knew I was dreaming, and the only time this would be bothersome was when I was trying to wake myself up and instead ended up surfacing through several layers of dream, like continuously changing tv channels -- I'd keep closing my eyes and opening them and seeing some damned fifties living room arm chair and lamp or battle arena instead of my bedroom. I would write these down and let my husband read them and he would say they could be made into Batman movies. I can still remember some of them very clearly, without reading the written accounts. There's one image of a burned, blind man weeping on a long stone staircase with his face in his hands that I can't shake. Also, standing humiliated on a public street while a policeman cites me for improper grooming, even though I explained that I spent hours on my hair -- that one still stings.

Since I had the kids, I don't seem to have or remember those types of dreams. What I wake up with are remnants -- words, phrases, scraps of music, feelings that aren't connected to anything that happened the day before. After humming the same six notes in the shower over and over sometimes I have to go turn on some other music to chase them away. Often I have to look up definitions of words that are floating indelibly in my mind -- once it was trocar (' A sharp-pointed surgical instrument, used with a cannula to puncture a body cavity for fluid aspiration'.) More recently, hemolytic converter (hemolytic has something to do with the destruction of red blood cells, and it's not usually used in conjunction with the word converter -- maybe I was trying to invent one?)

I find this sort of fascinating. I know, I know, it's really just junk that my subconscious is throwing into the garbage disposal of my dreams. But I like to think that maybe my dreaming self is different from my waking self. Maybe she's physician or research scientist material. Maybe she gazes unflinchingly into the mysteries of the human body, wielding her trocar fearlessly.

I've never been a big one for dream interpretation -- I've read some of the Freudian stuff and it seemed laughable. Sometimes the underlying meaning won't allow me not to see it, though. When I had stopped going to church and was struggling with the whole crisis of faith thing, I kept having one of those dreams where I realize I've been going to school for a term but missed one entire class, which means a zero on my record, which if you know anything about me you understand is a REALLY BAD THING. After I had the dream several times, I finally figured out what the class was. It was religion. Very subtle, subconscious.

Don't Wear it Out

I'm cranky. We had a lovely visit with family on the week-end and went out to see the great-grandparents on Monday (hooky-playing kids and all) which was wonderful, but I'm still coughing like a tubercular opera heroine and not sleeping well and hopped up on inhaled substances (prescribed) and generally feeling less than stellar. I didn't go into the school library on Tuesday which is my usual day so I could clean up my house and self-medicate in peace, but I didn't feel that much better when I went in today. Today was also the day that all the classes that missed their library period on Monday and Tuesday because of a software upgrade and a spontaneous Chinese delegation, so it was fortunate (for the library tech) that I was there since we were slammed with two classes at once for most of the day. A school library overflowing with spring-feverish first-to-sixth graders is not the place to be when you're not feeling top-notch. I was snappish. I was curt and snippy. Less than patient. Maybe even slightly persnickety. Coincidentally, a large number of the children were slow, dense and puddinglike (this is objective fact and has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with my mood). We were just not a good match.

I just read Lynn's post about the meaning of two of her kids' names, which reminded me of the first time she told me her children's names, which reminded me of a time when I wasn't a child-hating persnickety sourpuss, so I thought I'd share it, without revealing the actual names, since she doesn't post pictures of her kids or name them on her blog, because unlike me she actually CARES about protecting her children from cyber-predators and people like Tracy at Crazy Town (who really believes she had all those kids herself and is still that thin?). Anyway, when I asked what her kids' real names were she said 'oh, this might be hard for you.' I didn't understand what she meant until she said them and I realized she meant that her husband is not Caucasian and the kids have names from his culture, which means they're not named Billy, Cindy and Jennifer and she thought I might find the names difficult to pronounce/spell/comprehend easily. This was funny, but I never really got to explain why because then we had to start trying to answer fiendishly difficult trivia questions.

We live in a very multicultural neighbourhood, and my kids' school is the very model of the cultural mosaic. One set of twins in Angus's JK class were named Becky and Susan, the other set were named Anwar and Ismail. Names I had never heard before which I now know include Chirag, Shulini, Shruthi, Chehak and Yeabsara. We know three Puneets. Eve had one classmate with the same name as one of Lynn's kids, whose brother has the same name as another of Lynn's kids. Angus's name was at the top of the class telephone list since my husband's last name starts with A. Right under him was another child with the same last name. Her first name was Funmilayo. Before school started, the teachers speculated on whether they were twins. Twins named Angus and Funmilayo -- wouldn't that be insanely cool? .

One day when I was volunteering in Eve's JK class, the teacher had the kids sit around in a circle and then they all had to take turns guessing letters for whoever was going to do the calendar that day. When they were done, the name spelled out on the card was Nedrar. I was looking around for Nedrar to come up and do the calendar when all the kids burst out laughing and eventually rearranged the letters to spell 'Darren'. I'm sitting there thinking 'oh, you're fine with Sanskrooni, but Nedrar is funny?'

I really like this. Where I grew up classroom populations were a lot more monochromatic. The weirdest named kid was probably my friend Betty Jo. Eve has been to birthday parties where she gets to dress up in saris and get mehndi tattoos. They celebrate Chinese New Year at school. Their horizons are a little broader than mine were. That's got to be a good thing. As an added bonus, no one's kid's name seems strange to me ever.

(Although there is an Indiana Jones in our school. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.)

Babel

You know how some things just don't translate well? The problem with having to write in French when you're basically English is that you can only 'think in French' so far. Sooner or later you're going to have to translate something that you think of in English into French, with variable results.

Some French words seem to me to perfectly match their English counterparts. 'Oeuf' is just fine for 'egg'. "Vert" works for 'green'. 'Chat' practically is 'cat'. And how do you say 'appalling'? -- 'épouvantable'. Isn't that fantastic? When I was in Germany with a friend, we were flipping through the dictionary and collapsed into giggles over the word 'uberspannt', which means stressed-out, or 'overstrung'. Her German cousin later made us t-shirts with the word on them.

Photo by Sebastia Giralt

But sometimes the results are rather less felicitous. Angus is currently doing a speech on the Greek Gods (thank-you Percy Jackson books). He did a rough copy and then while he was at school I was looking up a few words so I could help him edit it that night. One of the words he'd left in English was Zeus's 'thunderbolt'. I looked it up. I looked it up again. I switched to a different dictionary. I did everything I could to avoid having to write that Zeus's symbol was an 'éclair'.

FEAR ME.

Photo by Paul and Hien Brown

Talk about losing something in the translation. I can't get this image of this hugely muscled shirtless dude with luxuriously white hair and a beard, standing on top of Mount Olympus, hurling chocolate-covered cream-filled pastries down on the targets of his displeasure.

WTF just happened?

Are your kids (if you have kids) doing the MS Read-a-thon in school (if they're in school)? Because holy crap, are my kids ever doing the MS Read-a-thon. Angus is quite into it but Eve -- she doesn't even know exactly what MS is, but this event, plus the 'contest' her class is in against the class next door to see who can read more -- has brought out shades of competitiveness and determination that were hitherto unsuspected. Okay, I'm lying, I totally suspected. Actually I flat-out knew. Since she was about four days old. Still, it's intense. Her teacher gives them little blue slips of paper that I have to initial and send back -- one for every 30 minutes she reads. And she's six. Thirty minutes is a long time to laboriously sound out words and fit sentences together. In fact, thirty minutes is kind of a long time to listen to someone laboriously sounding out words and fitting sentences together. But what am I going to do -- say that's enough reading for now? Hello, leg that I don't have to stand on.
So yesterday she's getting ready for another marathon session, and she comes to the table with an enormous Robert Munsch compendium. We have two of these -- Angus's French one, from a couple of Christmases ago, and her English one, from this past Christmas. I assumed she knew which one she had, but I guess I was wrong:

Eve: "Okay. I'm ready."
Me: "Okay. I'm listening."
Eve: "On...partage...toot"
Me: "Tout" (thinking -- that's weird -- she knows that word)
Eve: (turning page) "Le premier...hey! Why is this in French?"
Me: "Huh? Because...it's a French book."
Eve: "No it's not!"
Me: "Pretty sure it is. Let me see. Yep. L'univers de Munsch."
Eve: "How did it turn French?"
Me: "It's Angus's. Yours is upstairs."
Eve: "Angus has a Robert Munsch book? Since when?"
Me: "Christmas a couple of years ago. I thought you got his on purpose."
Eve: "Why would I want the FRENCH one?!!!!"
Me: "Um, because you're in French immersion and you read French every day?"
Eve: "No, I wanted mine! Where's mine? I'm going to get mine!"
(stomps away from the table, stomps halfway up the stairs. Pauses. Turns around, comes back downstairs, comes back to the table, opens the book)
Eve: (sweetly and calmly) "Actually I think a French book would be good for me."
Please excuse me from coherent conversation for the rest of the day. I have mental whiplash and I think I need to lie down.

Also, if you haven't read Tabatha Southey's rebuttal to Pat Robertson's claim that Haiti deserved the earthquake because of their alleged deal with the devil, and you feel like having an admiring giggle, you really should.

Once a Pona time

I don't have time for a real post. My husband's away and Angus stayed home sick today and I went for a walk with Pam anyway and it was good even though it made my heel hurt because I ordered the stupid snow-runners from L.L. Bean in a men's size for some stupid reason and they fit my husband, so he took them on his oh-so-arduous business trip where they're going to fit in talking about how fucked the fibre optics business is around skiing in the fucking FRENCH Alps.

In spite of that, I actually feel fine. I slept last night, I walked this morning, the kids have been great, they both shovelled in the sweet chili salmon I made for supper and now Angus is reading Percy Jackson and Eve is working on her book (writing, not reading) and I'm about to go tuck them in and hit the sack with a funny book recommended to me by Magpie on the screwy history of marriage and men who are hysterically, insanely, almost amusingly afraid of women's woman parts.

Eve just read me a little of her story. It's about a man named Boo Boo who's a clown and his job is to 'phart' and make children laugh. He looks sad but only because of his makeup. Until he loses his phart bag and gets fired, and then he really is sad. Apparently chapter 2 features a boy named Stinky.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go have a bedtime story read to me. Sweet dreams.