badgerbag

– Just so I don’t lose track of this…
venez. song lyrics.

– Listening to Tatu. I still love their bubblegum melodrama pop music, lezploitation or not. I think I just coined that word. Blaxploitation, lezploitation. Ha. No, wait, someone else thought of it but it’s spelled lesploitation.

– I love Stanislaw Lem but he can really be a pompous ass. Also so, so, so unspeakably sexist. (Am pulling quotes from Microworlds essay on SF for my paper)

– it is really hard to concentrate. I need a “paper-o-thon”. Continuity… writing more than 2 paragraphs before crapping out and checking my email for the Nth time. I could blog or write memoirs and random tangents of thought all day long without breaking a sweat but formality and structure make me itch, itch, itch.

– I feel so, so, so guilty at all the moomin-caring that Rook is doing this week and I’m sure all of next week too until I finish my papers dec. 15th.
No, it’s not enought that he support my ass financially for 2 years straight, he also gets no free time to himself. Why am I not superwoman? Why was I thinking of having another baby? Am I completely crazy?

I am reminded to go look at SLJ’s page by B.’s boggling of her name last night. And oh what beauty! I love the images and writing on her pages about Libby Pace. Especially the part about the grammar of art and the importance of making sentences.

“There’s my painting, ‘the birds fly up over the blue city,” I said.  And, ‘the viola handle reaches achingly toward the bare tree branches.’  That’s a sentence.” 

“I don’t know if my work makes sentences at all,” said Lib. 

“Sure it does.  ‘The baroque, organic pattern of the stencil slowly disappears to reveal the formal perfection of the spheres within,” I said.  “While doing so, it creates infinite refractions of the light and the space around it, suggesting meditations on the nature of inner versus outer beauty, the natural world versus human constructs, and the timeless nature of spirit.’” 

Steph, you are so hilarious and right on! And your curating is noble and wonderful!

B. and V. I still hate you for buying Vietnamese Restaurant I because I can’t have it, but on the other hand I love you as long as you keep letting me into your house to see it.

It’s usually hard for me to fall asleep in the daytime. That little nap I just had was like a fabulous gentle ocean smoothing away all troubles.

Dr. B.’s kid turned 3 today and we had a great time at the party. She seemed tense in general and I wonder what to do to be supportive…I realized all of a sudden that her mom/parent friends are somehow not around. Suddenly it really hit me that her whole social network fell apart when she fell off the lesbo wagon after, what, over 25 years of wild uberfeminist impurity, moved in with boyfriend and got knocked up. And I’m talking the extreme lesbo wagon. No, the XXXtreme. Where are they? Some of them lingered on until the baby shower. They don’t seem to be around now. Does she have no network, but only the boyfriend? so wrong.

I am the only person here from her checkered past. I thought of books like “Passing” which I read long ago. She passes amongst the preschool moms, if she is careful to show only a very superficial skin.

Meanwhile, Moomin was bouncing off the walls with excitement at a whole indoor playground in a huge gym with only 6 other kids in there. He shared toys. He wore a cute hat. He was bold. He boasted that his race car went faster than mine. He talked to other kids. Huzzah, my gentle flower in blossom!

I played on the floor a lot when I realized no one else was.

And huzzah for Rook who also leaped in there to play and make merry. And drove and then dropped me off (dying of sciatica gritting teeth in car) and took Moomin grocery shopping.

thus the nap. the very, very welcome nap.

Sciatica hit me like a hammer in the middle of the party. My leg still has that horrible tingly feeling like hitting your funny bone in your elbow, but all the way down into my foot, and without going away. It makes my foot cramp. Sometimes it prickles or weirdly feels like needles inside trying to stab their way out. Sometimes it is just tingling and an ache that goes all the way from my butt to my foot. Whine, whine. Post nap, I now feel like I can be a normal person without making a giant effort.

MEMO

To: Badger’s brain, Control Center of Body and Empress of the Known Universe
From: Badger’s sciatic nerve or whatever the hell it is somewhere deep in the pained ass or tailbone of Badger

Do NOT attempt to pick up million-pound 3 year old child who has fallen in ball pit and is floundering and flailing. Do not lift and twist. Do not do this while also standing in ball pit on round slippery multicolored ping pong balls. Afterwards, do not sit on floor playing trains.

***

One more indiscreet thing about my friend Dr. B. Not for the first time in lo these many years, I found myself staring at her abstractedly and thinking “My friend, for an XX year old woman, you have the Best Ass on the Planet.” Musing on this to Rook, who somehow had not noticed.

I love drunken Boggle… I was out-nerded, I think, by V. who was in top Boggling form. Minnie’s boyfriend T. seemed to find the rudest words. Minnie brought the notorious pumpkin cake that drove her to despair the other day as she set T.’s kitchen on fire and ripped his oven door off with accidental super-strength. It was really good cake. The hustle was hustled and technical terms such as double trouble shadow turn, jelly roll, “in the slot,” and “doin’ the pony” were thrown about like confetti over the heads of the kinesthetically challenged (me).

Actually I am here at the table with the ruins of boggle before me and could preserve some choice pieces of wit:

Me: glom. glob. spathe. yoni. cully. lares. y-quorpt. wether. glifty. rothe. torr. fettle.
Rook: moans. septet. miser. dross. shadow. quailed.
T: shat. fart. shag. scat. condom. romeo. condor. mated. spats. rutted. fidgy.
Minnie: zines. second. slit. nifty. scrim. spent. drays. molar.
Val: fleer. arse. orison. romesco. grist. trances. senator. romances. cress. cubit. finis.
B: snitch. mold. feces. ream. fate. lien. elans. stephs. gipter. mote. sincere.

Can you detect the bullshitting people who love to make up words? And the made up words themselves? A challenge.

Bounced on trampoline – cooked overly garlicky and possibly partly unwelcome yet delicious italian delicacy – made hand turkeys with crayons – ate and ate – marched while playing ocarinas and recorders – loafed – wondered vaguely if the bald guy was schizophrenic – thanked lucky stars that this was someone else’s family not mine and so I did not have to be aware of any seething undercurrents – listened to football – visited some other guy’s house that I don’t know and met some artist guy whose name I immediately forgot – ate 2 kinds of pie – drank a little – provoked a 10 year old into eye-rolling sarcasm and experienced a hilarious sudden parental generation lack of coolness “Uh, no, dude, I’ll pass, I had a traumatic experience with drawing hand turkeys in 1st grade” – pushed by this charming lunatic in a large jogging stroller into oncoming traffic on a dark suburban hill – received a finnish moominmug meant for Moomin and appropriated it as my own until he is Of Age – fun had by all!

Here is what is going on with my paper, FYI:

Parageography of J. de Ibar poem that I am talking about as a thing in between science fiction and the pastoral. The triangles are messengers between worlds.

There is another world map where I locate her names. She had at least 6 different names that signify various allegiances. I guess i should take this to the Ibar blog as I don’t want to be googlesniped.

Need a word for that: being accidentally found – not on purpose (webstalking or googlestalking) – and not through the injudicious use of your own name – but by what you are writing about. Something like being caught accidentally in machine gun fire.

Due to the magic of my particular psyche and probably some sort of sanguine chemical balance of my brain and ability to forget and deny, this morning I no longer loathe myself (as I did last night). Whew. I can’t even go into the horribleness and depth of the sudden self-loathing that came over me. But now in the sunlight it looks like a far distant hell, rather than my doom and my destiny.

This morning all is jollity, dragons sleeping on heaps of golden pennies, unicorns being ridden by handsome ostriches, rat princes and princesses, benevolence, pound cake, and coffee.

Rook’s dad just called and bent my ear about how the family in K—a loved the geneology that I sent them and he somehow made a ton of money while there (consulting? weird investments? what?) and wants to take us all, and when I say us all I mean like 20-30 people, touring Mt. Paek—an next year, and I cheerfully agreed, although I have no idea how the motley troupe of us would get into (china? N. K—a?) It sounds like a total nightmare – a group tour! with completely insane relatives! in the axis of evil! with toddlers and babies! aaaaaah! – and yet in the light of morning, full of fairy tales and coffee, I nodded and smiled and thought it might be an Adventure and an Expotition.

***
have just been reading some other guy’s diary of his hiking about the border up there. It seems to involve running into guys with AK-47s. I also recall with a shudder the line “As usual, the store was empty except for some cans of sea cucumbers.” Mmm. Canned sea cucumbers. In heavy syrup.

I am completely incompetent with money and have fucked up royally and forgot to pay any bills this month. Yes, I was sick, yes, I was out of town, and yes, I have all the usual excuses, but it remains that I am a fuckup. even when my life is easy i am fucking incompetent in every way except the imaginary things that don’t matter for shit.

I worked hard on one paper today and did some homework too. It is a bit goofy. I plan on using some of whump‘s old notes from the parageography course and I looked up how to cite them. Heh. As I go through them I am in awe of their hilariousness and oddness. “The Pagan Pastoral: Music, Love, Death, and Goats.” The final exam has to be seen to be believed. Or disbelieved.

From the book Very Bad Poetry, edited by the siblings Petras:

An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy

Sweet Dog! now cold and stiff in death,
What cruel hand enticed thee here?
Did toothsome crust of juicy bone
Allure to stretch on thy bier?

… ruthless hands of alien race
Are opening up thy quiet breast,
With prying eyes they peer within,
Explore the contents of thy chest.

fragments of a poem published in 1907 in the New York Evening Post