Random Thoughts

1. A few weeks ago, my older nephew, R., was playing in the kitchen. He had been alone in there for a total of about four minutes when I walked in to discover him perched on the sink, cradling something in his miniature hands. He smiled at me.

"Whatcha got, there?"

He turned around and unfolded his hands. Inside were two white pieces of broken ceramic that, moments before I entered the kitchen, used to form a glass thimble.

"Look -j-j-."

"R. did you break that?"

He nodded.

"I see. We need to go show Mommy."

I hoisted him off the sink and we headed to the computer room. R. hung back as I announced his entry.

"C'mon." I said.

He crept through the door, his hands cupping the remains of the glass thimble, and a grin pasted across his face. Having learned from my own experience that one does not smile when admitting the destruction of another's property, I coached him.

"R., you might not want to look quite so proud when you show her the pieces, know what I mean?"

The smile disappeared and he presented the shards to his mother. She was not happy. The thimble, a token from B.'s ancestral Ireland, had been a point of contention for a while. R. begged to play with it and his parents resisted, knowing the damage R.'s four year mitts could wreak.

Their predictions were 100% correct.

"This was Daddy's special thimble from Ireland, where his family is from. He's going to be very sad, R. and your going to have to tell him what you did."

R. contemplated this for a moment. His eyes shellacked themselves in tears. His lip trembled. His chest heaved a small sob.

"Sometimes accidents make us sad and you have apologize." His mother said, assuming, as I did, his anxiety over confessing to his father.

"I'm not crying about that." More muffled tears.

"What are you crying about?"

R. gasped though his sobs "I just gets to me...I don't know what it is....maybe love?...I don't know..."

He doubled over onto the couch, weeping.


2. The word "moist" has been slandered long enough as one of the most hated words in the English language. "Moist" has never bothered me except when paired with something distasteful.

For instance, "Moist Cake" is delicious. "Moist Earwax" is nauseous.

"Moist" is only as bad as the company it keeps.

The word "Yeast", however, is its very own lingual hooligan. "Yeast" is the equivalent to being trapped in a silent room with 23 people eating mayonnaise.

(The very word Mayonnaise, has a similar effect...23 people in a silent room eating Yeast.)


3a. The Grey Tedium of Change. After the first terrifying and/or exhilarating days of a major turning point, there comes a time of complete and utter boredom. It's the part no one tells you about.

It's not sexy. It's not dramatic. It's driving in bumper to bumper traffic along a stretch of flat highway, nothing to entertain the eye but a solitary farmhouse or silo in the distance, scratchy lite music on the radio. Everything seems a little grey and hollowed out in the prairie state of I Really Should Be More Together By Now. It borders the states of Disproportionate Emotional Response, Weird Public Crying Fits, and Arizona.

I think the clinical term is malaise.

(And, it rhymes with mayonnaise to boot.)

I can barely even be poetic about it. Jesus, this is my second car analogy in a week.


3b. Along those lines (the doldrums, I mean) why is it that nearly every "turning point" movie about guys dwells in that malaise arena? Most "turning point" movies about women are about how free they are and the exuberance of change. Are guys the only ones who get the white noise sadness and 4-yard stares?


4. By some cruel twist, Iron & Wine's The Creek Drank the Cradle has taken up residence in the CD player in the boys room. J. insists, INSISTS, on listening to it over and over, despite my gentle (if increasingly firm) efforts to switch to something a little more upbeat.

I don't care if he is two years old, I'm going to kick this kid's ass.