twirt

So G & I thought we were ahead of the game by submitting an application for childcare at the Waldorf School a full 5 months ahead of time, but duh, no:  they contacted us a few weeks ago to let us know they’d filled all (17? 18?) spaces for the fall and we were 26th on the waiting list.  They regretted to say that it was pretty “unlikely” that we’d be able to get in.

On the one hand, I’m totally delighted that there’s so much support for the Waldorf here, and that there are parents out there excited about getting their kids into the program, since it means there must be (at least 30-35) moms in our immediate vicinity with toddlers Zen’s age who’re down with the arty Waldorf educational philosophy — potential friends!

On the other hand, damn them for getting there ahead of us, and who exactly are we competing against, here?  Where are all these arty moms, are they actually here in Pittsburgh?  Can I meet them?  Do they push unaffordable strollers and obsess about cleanliness and are they trend-conscious in their interest in Waldorf, or are they actually real people who eat meat and dress their kids in hand-me-downs and take public transit?

More specifically, do they say they live in Pittsburgh but actually live in places like Mount Lebanon and Fox Chapel?  Because that’s just not cool.

This post is a rant but it’s not anything to do with the Waldorf — really it’s to do with this aggravating trend in which young professionals looking to start a family avoid the City of Pittsburgh like the plague, talk trash about its horrendous public schools and crumbling infrastructure, but of course all the while they all work in the city and commute in by car every day, shop at Whole Foods and visit museums and theaters and sports events and so forth, availing themselves of culture and city services they never have to pay for.  And of course if you ask them they all say they’re from Pittsburgh.

Take the well-intentioned www.pittsburghmom.com, which appears to be a site where Pittsburgh mothers can connect with each other to consult about local playgrounds and schools and daycare and family-friendly restaurants, etc., maybe set up playgroups and make new friends (which is why I just signed up — I’m looking for all those things).  Check out the discussion boards, though, and it seems like 99% of the people using the site live in the suburbs.  One post from a woman looking for information about Pittsburgh in advance of a possible future move here from Ohio asked for recommendations about neighborhoods and schools and so forth — and not a single one of the replies even deigned to consider what’s available in the city.  Have you looked at Fox Chapel and the Avonworth schools?  We love it here in Mount Lebanon and Cranberry.  There’s so much available in the Monroeveille/Plum area.  Meanwhile I’m all, but if you’re going to be working at UPMC, why not live in Oakland?  or Squirrel Hill or Shadyside, if Oakland is too declassé for you.  Is this for real?  Where are all the Pittsburgh moms, exactly?

I’m looking ahead to the fall when I’m planning to stop working for a little bit in order to Mom full-time, and getting nervous.  It feels like a little bit of a luxury to be able to stay home, after all — we’re able to squeak by on G’s income, and we don’t have to hustle like we did in New York just to make rent, so as far as we’re concerned we’re rich, and this staying-at-home plan is something of an indulgence.  In theory, at least, we’d be even better off if I worked full time, right?  But in reality I’m beginning to doubt that.

I learned from experience in New York that the more you work, and the better paid you are for that work, the more money you spend, and the less time you actually have to yourself.  Within an order of magnitude, the marginal return on a pay increase is a fraction of the actual difference in pay level.  You spend more time at work, and when you’re done you don’t have a lot of mental energy to do stuff like housework and errands and body maintenance and other chores, let alone spend quality time with your family and fun stuff like cultural events, etc., so you buy things and contract for services in an effort to make your life more enjoyable or convenient or efficient.  Life gets more expensive.

Here in Pittsburgh it’s maybe even more the case — because the payscales for the non-profit work that I do are pretty low, and the difference between what I make per hour and what we pay our babysitter, for example, isn’t a whole lot.  I could work more, but I’d have to pay for full-time childcare and probably also a housekeeper (to avoid going completely insane); and then I’d also have much less time to bargain-hunt when shopping for food or clothing or other necessities; not to mention the fact that I’d have very little time to interact with G given his chaotic round-the-clock schedule; and of course I’d be doing all this while giving someone else the privilege of playing with my baby.  It really doesn’t seem worth it, and ironically I feel like I’d actually be able to save money by not working at all.

But I don’t want to deprive Zen of the company of kids his own age, even if I’m able to give him much more of my attention — which brings me back to whole issue of signing up for daycare and looking for playgroups and moms of toddlers Zen’s age, and the mysteries of being a mom in Pittsburgh.  Like many cities, Pittsburgh has many excellent daycare programs that are all over-subscribed, with long waiting lists; but unlike many other cities, Pittsburgh doesn’t actually have many kids.  Enrollment in the public and parochial schools is declining drastically, and there’s a big demographic hole where the 25-to-40-year-olds are supposed to be, here. 

Which leads me to be very suspicious about the fact that we’re 26th on the waiting list at the Waldorf.  If there are that many kindred-spirit moms in Pittsburgh, how come I don’t know any of them?  Am I totally out of touch?  I can’t help but think we’re competing with families from the snazzy suburbs who’re up on the Reggio Emilia trend, here.  Makes me want to stalk the pick-up lines for the Little Friends program this fall, just to see how many kids are being fetched in SUVs with suburban stickers.  Grrrrr.

I could be totally wrong, of course.  I’d be happy to be wrong.  Maybe this fall I’ll have the time to sleuth out the hidden meet-ups of 30-something really-from-Pittsburgh moms with second-hand strollers and good recipies for kale and butternut squash, and I’ll cheerfully print a retraction to this rant.  But until then…

When I was a kid we had two air conditioners in our house:  one on the first floor, where my grandparents lived, and one in my parents’ bedroom.  I remember a few rare nights when the heat was so unbearable that I slept on the floor of my parents’ room — but that was when I was really little, and it didn’t happen often.  Mostly, I slept in front of a fan, and was brought up to believe that if the fan blew directly on my head all night that I’d almost certainly develop a sinus infection — so the fan was never really blowing ON me, it was sort of blowing PAST me. 

It was hot.

I’m not saying this out of any kind of nostalgia — it sucked, pretty much, and I was really envious of my parents that they had the air conditioner, though I didn’t feel like the arrangement was unfair or anything.  Resources were really limited in our family, and obviously air conditioning was expensive, and so there it was:  there could only be one unit, and it had to go somewhere, so it went in my parents’ room.

I remember days spent improvising cooling devices.  I set up a floor fan in my room, taped a sheet all around its perimeter, weighted the edges of the sheet down with books, and sat in the resulting air-inflated tent for hours, reading books and napping.  (I actually do recall having sinus trouble after a few episodes of falling asleep with my head a few inches from the fan like that, but whatever.)  Or I’d turn the air conditioner on in my parents’ room and curl up in front of it on the window seat, letting the cold air blow straight on the back of my neck, and drink glass after glass of instant lemonade with a lot of ice.  Of course we had a wading pool, but no sprinkler; one could shoot water up from the hose and run under it, but there was always the issue of wasting water (these were the Carter years,* after all!), so we didn’t do a whole lot of that.  There was the neighborhood public pool, but it was always really crowded and (is still now) shadeless, so that inevitably if we went swimming I ended up feeling hot anyway after drying off and walking home.  Mostly, I remember heat-beating remedies at home.

(* - I was trying to find some page about the “Mickey and Goofy Explore Energy Conservation” comic book I remember from my childhood — you know the one, where Goofy explains how important it is to take shorter showers and to turn off the lights when you leave the room? — and holy moly, did you know that book was produced by Exxon?  Someone should tell Mr. Tillerman.)

All the time that I lived in New York, I didn’t have an air conditioner, either.  In New York I came to resent air conditioners:  they expell hot air onto the sidewalk and make the already unbearably oppresive heat rising from the softened asphalt of the street just feel like injustice.  I did learn about the strategies of taking advantage of public air conditioning as a way of dealing with the heat, though.  Too hot in your apartment?  Go shopping!  Go to the movies!  Go to a museum or a cafe!

The summer after graduation I subletted a space in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment with my friends Gina and Dawn.  The space I slept in was a storage loft above the galley kitchen; I had a little fan up there and mostly it was ok for sleeping, though there were a few episodes that stand out in my memory.  One morning I woke up almost delirious with the heat and could barely think clearly enough to be able to diagnose my disorientation as stemming from the fact that it had to be over 120°F in my little loft.  I hitched my way over to the ladder and swung my legs over, gasping; and right below me was Gina, blithely baking muffins.  It didn’t even dawn on me.  I just said, “God is it hot!” and Gina looked up at me, and looked down at the muffins she was baking, and then looked up at me again and said, “Yes!  You should maybe take a shower!”

Later that summer, on a weekend when both Gina and Dawn were out of town, I woke up feeling hot and stupid, came down from my loft and sat on the floor of the living room, and glommed onto the one rational thought I was able to form in my head:  I need to get out of the apartment, and I shall walk down Broadway until I find a sunhat for sale for less than $20, then I shall turn left and walk to Central Park.  So I did:  I packed a jar of lemonade, walked out of the apartment at 100th St and Riverside Drive, walked over to Broadway and down to somwhere in the mid-80s before I found a store that sold me a nice broad-brimmed hat for $19.99; then I walked into Central Park, made it to Summer Stage, and fainted.  When I came to, I could think only, “I need to go to the movies.”  So I walked east to Lexington, got on the subway, rode to Houston, went into the Angelika and saw the next thing playing — which happened to be Orlando, a movie whose surreality was really all that my fried brain could have handled.  After it ended, I felt much better, and walked to the 1/9 line feeling like a movie star in my new hat, with my almost-like-new air-conditioned brain, feeling light (headed?) and awake.

The point of the story, though, becomes apparent when you check the map:  I walked 3.2 miles in 100°+F heat before I thought it would be prudent to get on the fucking subway or find some air conditioning.  Hot is dumb.

We don’t have air conditioners in our house now, either, and yesterday and today have been hot enough to cook my brain into mush — so it’s not surprising I did another stupid thing today.  At 3:30 I couldn’t stand it anymore, we had to get out of the house, and even though Golan was happily coding away in front of the fan I made a fuss and bundled us all into the car where I promptly turned on the air conditioning, picked a direction and drove vaguely off.  I didn’t really start thinking straight until we got to Lawrenceville (where we bought an iced coffee) — even then, I made a lot of bad driving decisions and we meandered aimlessly around.  The carbon footprint of us cooling off this afternoon was pretty high — but how great is it to treat the family to an hour or so of air conditioning?  Worth any amount of future climate change!

Sigh.

I’ve been simultaneously amused and distressed by the stupidity of global warming politics these days.  Gas is now $3.99 a gallon (but it’s going higher, of course, and soon) — now the pols who understand about peak oil and climate change are in a bind because how do you really break it to your constituents that the way to make life better in the long run is to make gas even more expensive?  Not surprising the Boxer-Lieberman bill died in the Senate, and as weak and ineffectual as it was I suppose it’s just as well… but it really makes you wonder what the turning point is going to be.  When will the senior senator from Kentucky be taking the floor to say “my constituents are paying $5 or $6 or $10 a gallon and by GOD we have to make sure that price keeps going up until they stop acting like a certain airhead in Pittsburgh who drives her family around on unnecessary shopping trips just to stay cool in the summer!”?

The fault, my friends, is in our house, not in our selves.  Or at least the house bears equal responsibility, here.  We live in a little kit-built house from the early 1950s, a brick-clad framed cube that’s perched on the edge of the virgin hillside fronting Schenley Park.  There are so, so many things about the house that are heartbreaking to me — the fact that it has a lovely park as its back yard but no windows from which to appreciate the view, for example.  But in the summertime we suffer from the fact that the walls are really poorly insulated (if they were ever insulated at all, the loft of the fill material tamped down long ago — the wall cavities are basically empty), the ceilings are low, and the windows are all single-pane aluminum casements (many with sheared-off operator hinges and broken locks) — in other words, our little brick cube can heat up like a kiln.  And those casements?  Impossible to fit with a standard window air conditioner.

Golan was reading over my shoulder as I typed the word “heartbreaking” in the paragraph above, and he snapped, only 3/4 kidding, ”I’m sorry you don’t like the house.”  I actually like living here a lot, but the house itself has never had a lot of charm for me.  Sorry, Golan.  It’s a home, and I love my family, and the location couldn’t be much better — but I wrestle with this house a lot.  And we can’t afford to re-build everything that’s wrong with it.  So we endure, and I complain.

This year, I think we can resolve:  we’ll replace two windows, and fill the walls with blown-in insulation.  And maybe we’ll buy an air conditioner to put in one of the new windows.  And, you know, contribute to the global problem.

I dropped a little chunk of change at the May Market this year and bought:

• two french tarragons
• one exotic-looking marigold I’ve since lost the tag for and therefore can’t name
• two strawberry bowls each containing 4 (fruiting!) plants
• one tiny lavender
• one summer savory
• one winter savory
• one rhubarb plant with three crowns
• one miss kim lilac
• one orange azalea
• one bag of azalea food

… and that’s on top of the 6 excellent heirloom tomato plants that Christine picked up for me in Blairsville last week.

The herbs will comforably go into my raised bed, and won’t turn their little noses up at the exceptionally poor soil therein; but I’m still not sure where I’m going to plant the tomatoes or the strawberries or the rhubarb.  And I’m still debating about where exactly the lilac and the azalea will go in the front yard.  I still have a butterfly bush I bought two summers ago sitting patiently in its pot by the front steps, waiting to go into the ground — but bless its weedy heart, it’s been thriving on my utter neglect.

My house has a fair amount of yard, but for whatever reason I’ve had a lot of trouble making use of it.  I’d pretty much like to change everything, but where to begin?  Soon after we moved in in 2005, I declared war on the ivy that was covering the south wall of our driveway, and began ripping it out.  This ivy had apparently been planted at the same time the house was built in the early 1950s, and had long ago consumed pretty much any dirt that had been available behind the driveway wall — what had looked from the surface to be an ivy covering of a high bed turned out to be a very tall pile of ivy roots and a sprinkling of soil.  Then, of course, removing the ivy exposed the fact that a large portion of the driveway wall had collapsed who only knows when — so naturally the plans of planting up the ivy bed had to be put on hold until the wall could be re-built. 

The wall is still not re-built.  The waste stone it was originally built with has been carefully sorted according to thickness and distributed in piles that are still occupying our garage.  With the totally humbling help of my dear friend Bob we got the first three or four courses laid before the nightmarishness of building with waste stone totally kicked our asses and we basically gave up.  I persist in believing I’m going to just rebuild the fucker at some point soon, but the thing is, when?

Meanwhile, of course, the denuded bank has become a big forest of weeds — I can’t plant it up properly without a wall to hold it together, and the ivy has been ground into little bits for mulch, so basically the jewel weed, thistles, dandelions and switchgrass have been having free rein for two years.  I feel so sorry for my kind and patient neighbors, I really do.  If I were them I’d have called the authorities on me long ago.  Remind me sometime to tell you the sad sorry saga of the Dirt, the remnants of which are still choking the north wall of the driveway, choking out the grape hyacinth that had naturalized there.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the hedge.  I hate the hedge, I wish it gone — but I’ve learned from the ivy experience that I had better do my homework before I go ripping it out without a good thing to put in its place.  Two years ago I ripped out one hedge plant to allow a volunteer maple sapling that had clearly rooted there many years ago to finally grow, and now I have a maple sapling about ten feet high interrupting the hedgeline along the driveway.  What next?  I want the lilac (and hopefully future lilac friends) to border the sidewalk, I think.  And the butterfly bush.

The biggest obstacle to planting up a garden is the lawn, I think.  Lawn saps the imagination as well as the energy/motivation required to get out there and plant things.  It’s a big blank canvas, basically, but one in which changing even a square inch requires cutting through turf that hasn’t been disturbed since the house was first built.  And the soil that’s under all that grass is, I’m guessing, really not great.  And part of me is anxious about disturbing the surface of any part of my rear yard, lest I hasten the day when the hillside collapses and takes half our house with it.  Let’s hear it for the Pennsylvania red beds and our tragically eroding hillside!

Regardless, though, I’m resolved to get these plants into the ground at some point this week, and am hoping Zen cooperates by letting me get some yard work done.

2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/3 cup white flour
2 T flax meal
1/2 t salt
1 T baking powder
4 heaping spoonfuls of sugar
grated zest from 1 lemon

mix all that together well.  cut in:

7 T butter

in a measuring cup, beat together:

1 jumbo egg
milk enough to make 3/4 cup with the egg

beat the egg+milk into the dry ingredients until thoroughly mixed.
take a small handful of dough in one hand, and a small handful of:

chopped fresh strawberries

in the other — press the strawberries into the dough and form a kind of ball/pocket.  Drop onto a buttered baking sheet.  Repeat with rest of dough and strawberries (this recipe used I’d say about 1 cup of chopped strawberries, but whatever — you can also use frozen fruit, other berries, etc. — I was just trying to make use of the quart of berries I had that were too old to be much good for eating straight).  Makes about 6-8 scones.

Bake at 425F for 15-16 minutes.  Glaze (if desired) with:

1 T lemon juice mixed with
4 T powdered sugar

belatedly responding to Katie’s generous comment on my inagural post, here are a few things that little Z has been working on lately:

• walking.  Z actually spontaneously walked across the room about a month ago:  with no prompting from anyone, he got up and walked over to his great-grandma to hand her the toy he was holding, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  And then later that same evening, when his daddy came home, in response to my “show daddy how you can walk!” he smiled, turned, and walked about 10 feet over to his dada, like it was no big thing; and then sat happily in his dada’s arms surveying the room, enjoying all the shrieks of amazement and slack-jawed holy-shit expressions on our faces.  But then of course he refused to perform after that, and would only occasionally stagger a few steps here and there, preferring his crab-crawl to scoot from place to place — for weeks, he’s mostly been crawling.  But then, since two days ago or so, it’s mostly walking.  Which is, you know, Wow.
• eating.  Berries are the food of the gods, did you know?  All the baby gods love berries.  Love to disembowel strawberries with thumb, forefinger and incisors, soak sleeves and shirtfront in berry juice, rub blueberry bits into hair and eyebrows and ears.  (My mother points out that berry juice stains can be removed handily with boiling water.  I thought of this as I regarded my berry-juice stained hands this afternoon, thinking, really?  Yikes.)  Z’s love for berries came to my attention a few weeks ago while shopping at Whole Foods — they had a free sample tray of mixed fruit offering melon and blackberries and I took a blackberry and absentmindedly offered it to Z, as I pushed the cart towards the next aisle.  Looking down, I realized he had swallowed the first bite and was straining with every available muscle to reach the rest of the berry, which was tantalizingly just out of reach in my distracted free hand.  So I fed him the rest of the berry, and I have to confess the mess his face was in afterwards was actually just as charming as his unselfconsciously physical enjoyment of the thing.  Babies really get INto it, you know?  Revel in the whole body experience of food.  I’m reminded of that South Indian saying that eating food with a knife and fork is like making love through an interpreter.  It’s like that.
• playing ball.  His djido bought him a big pink nubbly rubber ball, and has taught him to play catch.  For a one-year-old, he’s surprisingly good.  Actually, he’s a goddamn prodigy.  He can catch the ball on the up-bounce, and throw it to you.  Most of the time.  Clearly, we’re going to have to set him up with some ball-playing friends in a year or two.  Midget midget soccer.  Can you just imagine what that’d be like?
• humming.  He doesn’t have much range, but he has an eerily good sense of pitch, and can most-of-the-time match the tone you sing at him, and sing it back.  “uhhhhhh” — just a single tone, not a melody, but it’s definitely sung, not uttered.  All that time his daddy has been encouraging him to bang on the piano may finally be paying off.
• getting bigger.  Doctor’s appointment was today:  Z is 30 1/2″ tall and weighs 21 pounds.  All that black coffee I’ve been feeding him isn’t working, clearly.

No words yet, really.  I read somewhere that babies focus on mastering one thing at a time, and that if they’re working on walking properly they don’t talk, and if they’re working on talking they don’t walk.  Z’s been plugging away at the mobility thing for a little while now, but he’s also been driving us all crazy for weeks now pointing at things and demanding to know what they’re called, but then not really trying to repeat what we say. 

“de Dah?”
“That’s a bottle.”
“de Dah?”
“Window.” 
“de Dah?” 
“Kitty cat!”
etc. 

The other day I thought I’d be a wiseass and insist that he at least try to say “doorknob” before I’d let him play with it (his favorite thing to do while sitting in my lap in the rocking chair in his room — reach over and play with the doorknob.  Go figure).  

“de Dah?” 
“Doorknob, baby, that’s a doorknob.  Door…. knob.  You can say it.”
“de Dah?!”
“Door knob!” 
“de Dah?!??!?”
“Door… knob.” 

I didn’t last but a few minutes into the screaming before I gave in and let him play with the doorknob anyhow.  Small wonder he isn’t learning to talk, I’m such a pushover. 

It seems to me in comparison with other kids he’s a quiet little guy, and he smiles a lot at adults, looking for smiles back.  It’s hard for me to judge, because we don’t know that many one-year-olds, but the few we’ve played with have mostly been more active and vocal than Z, or so it’s seemed to me.  Very hard to tell.  I need to get this kid some playmates, sigh.  He spends too much time with me and G individually, and only children that we are we’re not always aware of how little we’re actually speaking when we’re playing with him, since he doesn’t talk.  We’re both so accustomed to playing silently by ourselves, and we’re inadvertantly raising our kid to do the same.

But then, wasn’t it Pascal who said that all of the evils of society are the result of men’s inability to sit quietly in a room?  Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

Nah, I’d rather he actually wander in the world, than like Pascal be confined, infirm and bitter, to the house.  Get out there, kid.  Play ball.  Stuff your face with blackberries.  Make new friends.  Come home dirty, and tired, and happy.  That’s the ticket.

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once?  Who shall blame him?  Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her — who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

that I’d feel in any way ambivalent or reluctant about weaning my baby boy after a year of breastfeeding.  I am SO ready to say goodbye to the pump and very, very excited about being able to do crazy things like take a day trip down to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival on May 3 without worrying about the milk supply — but it’s much harder than I expected to get over that very physical compulsive feeling of wanting to FEED him.

G & I turned out the lights, unplugged our wall warts, unplugged the stove, turned down the heat, and spent a very enjoyable hour in the dark with little man Z, hanging out on the couch and playing peek-a-boo by the light of a solar-powered flashlight and a handcrank lantern.

It was lovely.

Of course, I had to plug my laptop back in and re-start my wireless internet in order to blog to the world about the experience, but the peacefulness of the one little unplugged hour hasn’t worn off yet, and I’m resolved to do it again.  I’ve really come to hate having a laptop at home, honestly — it’s more of a timesuck than a television would ever be, for one thing, but for another it really intrudes on the way G & I interact with each other and the baby.

When I lived alone in New York I deliberately didn’t own a computer, the same way I deliberately didn’t own a TV (until Reb forced one on me when she moved out of Carrol Gardens — thanks, Reb, I still have that piece of crap, and we use it for watching DVD’s - :)).  I had continual email at work, and I spent the majority of my workday sitting at my desk answering emails as quickly as they came in — I had zero interest in catching up on email at home, or randomly surfing the internet, or whatever.  Instead I painted, and read books, and cooked dinner for friends, and took walks by the river, and spent quality time with my kitty-cats.  It seems so amazingly idyllic from my current perspective, really.

I mean, I used to read books!  And now what?  When was the last time I read anything more challenging than Harry Potter?  Mom bought me a copy of Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals for my birthday in October and I have yet to open it, though it’s been sitting by my bedside the whole time.  Waiting.

You may read this and think I’m making stupid excuses for being lazy, but it’s not so much an excuse as it is an explanation:  my free brainspace, such as it is, is being used up reading page after page on nytimes.com, or trolling through the netherreaches of IMDb, or playing countless games of Scrabulous on Facebook (and to all the folks who’ve been nagging me about Scramble, I’m sorry — I had to remove that app for the health and safety of myself and my family, it was getting out of control).  As long as the laptop sits open on my desk, and the internet connection is never broken, it’s just so darned hard to cast temptation behind me, as it were, and get housework or reading or knitting or anything else done.

I’m resolved to be more directed in my internet use, though.  Ironically, I think part of my salvation may lie in another damned internet device.  G & I bought iphones the other week, and it’s basically meant that I can do totally outrageous things like surf the net while I’m breastfeeding or check email at stoplights in traffic.   The phone makes me feel plugged in, and it’s fun to play with, but it offers so much less in terms of the immersive physical experience that a bigger screen and full keyboard offer, that I’m not in as much danger of zoning out while I use it.  I maintain a higher degree of autonomous agency, and switching the thing off when I’m done retrieving a piece of information is a piece of cake.

Yargh, can you say rationalization?

Whatever — I resolve, through whatever means, to spend less time aimlessly hanging out online.  And more time making things with my hands.  And playing peek-a-boo with the baby.

And speaking of little men who are now ONE and impossibly sophisticated in their cuteness – we’d decided to forego the planned party today, which was to involve a bunch of other one-year-olds in some form of contained chaotic sugar-charged play, partly because Z was sick this last week and partly because G & I really needed the time to recuperate, probably more than Z himself.  Instead, with practically no notice at all, I baked a bunch of cupcakes last night and had family and a small handful of friends over to witness the awe and wonder of the birthday boy encountering that first candle.  (Thanks, Heather.)

Happy birthday, little man.

For very sad reasons, I found myself at a Roman Catholic mass this afternoon, for the first time in a long while.  A close friend’s dad died suddenly last week, and the services were today at St. Frances de Sales in Newark, OH.

It was a very dignified service, and the personal tributes to my friend’s dad were very moving — but (and please don’t think I’m an awful person for focusing on the trivial, here) I have to get it off my chest that every time I check in with the RC’s in America I find the church more and more ridiculous. 

I grew up attending Byzantine Catholic services at St. John the Divine in Pittsburgh’s South Side, where high mass is still sung in Old Slavonic and the priest is liberal with the swinging censer — so I know from arbitrary religious theatricality, believe me.  But I really think Vatican 2 seriously effed the RC’s shit up.  In one swell foop, they basically chucked 700+ years’ worth of priceless art commissioned of the world’s great masters in favor of some disposable kitschy airbrushed velvet portraits of Jesus.

I mean, have you seen a post-V2 RC hymnal?  I have trouble understanding how anyone can take it seriously.  The sappy lyrics are bad enough (why have dignified veneration, when you can have sentimentality?) – but the melodies are what really get to me:  a bizarre hodgepodge of hippie-dippie campfire songs, old English and Irish tunes that you remember from somewhere but can’t quite place, and (this is the real kicker for me) a bunch of old hymns they’ve poached from the Protestants.

For example, the closing hymn in this afternoon’s service began with the extremely familiar opening chords of the Old 100th – so I took a breath and actually started to sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow — “ but realized immediately that the words everyone else was singing were totally different (and now Google is failing me, because I can’t recall the lyricist or the title of the song they were singing).  It was something really dull and obvious about walking with Jesus, I dunno — my attention was shot, because all I could think about for the duration of the song was “wait a minute, was this melody written by a Protestant or a Catholic?”

Louis Bourgeois was a Protestant, of course.  A Calvinist, even.  Someone for whom the Pope would have represented the Anti-Christ.  Someone who could probably have been burned at the stake by the Catholics for heresy in another time and place.  But hey, you know, it’s a popular melody, and it sounds churchy, so we may as well use it for a new RC hymn.

It reminded me forcibly of an RC wedding I went to a few years ago in which my whole world-view was rattled by the still-to-me-inexplicable choice the bride and groom made to have “Simple Gifts” be the hymn to be sung during the Presentation of the Gifts (itself a bizarre V2 mutation of the liturgy, imo).  They were probably thinking, here’s a pretty song about gifts, let’s have everyone sing it while our cousins bring the eucharistic bread and wine up to the altar.  But of course this left me thinking, wtf?  Shaker dance song as accompaniment to papist sacrament?  And everyone is somehow ok with this?  Am I the one who’s crazy?!

Even though I know that tradition is hardly fixed, and that religious rites always involve a fair amount of superstitious and arbitrary marching around the rug, so to speak, I just can’t get over how blithely modern American Catholics accept the post-V2 liturgy.  To me it totally feels inauthentic and amateur — barely even religious.  Pedantic and utterly without magic.

Like the priest in today’s service:  out of deference to my friend’s dad’s longstanding aversion to the V2 English mass, he rendered the consecration in Vatican Latin (using the soft c and g pronounciations) – but he did it so awkwardly that it was all I could do to keep from giggling.  At one point I think he stumbled over discipulis suis and what came out sounded like ‘dishipooey sooey,’ at which both I and the woman standing behind me visibly lurched with surpressed snorts.  Cui?  Hui, dui et lui!  Ptui!  Like, what IS that?

And really, what is it, other than unselfconscious nostalgia (read: kitsch)?  Before V2, the liturgical use of Latin by the RC was merely stubborn and antiquated; but now the vernacular barn door is open, any return to Latin is inherently inauthentic.  By which I mean, there used to be a real reason why the mass was in Latin; but once that reason was exploded in the interests of expanding modern intelligibility and accessibility, any attempt to bring Latin back feels totally arbitrary.  Unlike the Koran, in which God is very specifically speaking in Arabic, the Bible has always been a multi-lingual collage, and there are any number of older languages we might use in the interests of carrying on a sacred tradition.  I mean, if you don’t like the mass in English, why not have it in Ancient Greek?  Or Hebrew?  Or some antique Aramaic?  Anything, so long as you don’t understand what you’re saying.

Instead, we have an English-language mass where the text is intelligible but the historical subtext is completely obscured.  I’m 100% certain I’m the only person who was musing on this stuff during today’s mass, for example — or for whom there was any kind of cognitive dissonance in the appropriation of Protestant melodies in Catholic hymns, etc.  I can’t imagine why anyone else would care.  Why trouble yourself?  Bibite ex eo, omnes!  Seriously — everyone, gather ’round, take a swig!

Clearly, I need to get a life.

movie tickets for two = $17.50
cupcakes afterward = $10
babysitter for 3 1/2 hours = $42
evening out of the house while the baby sleeps = priceless

seriously, I know it’s ridiculously expensive, but OH it’s nice to go to the mooovies every once in awhile.  I’ve been cooped up in the house for the past couple weeks as the weather’s been dreadful, and little z and I basically have just been looking at each other wondering “what now?” for days and days.  G & I went to see this movie, which I’ve been wanting to see since before it came out, and even though it didn’t have any explosions or car chases I think G liked it almost as much as I did.  (we’re both suckers for wisecracking dialogue that’s much cleverer than anything you hear in real life — someday I’ll tell you all about our obsession with the Gilmore Girls).