badgerbag

I’m looking forward to tonight’s party but a little exhausted from the trip to the Xplorat0rium — which was a total blast. We met up with Dr. Bit.

It was sunny and nice when we got there but hailing when we drove off.

I can’t stop thinking today about the uncertainty to do with school and what I’ll be doing. What if professor F. read my paper and hated it so intensely she doesn’t want me for her student and won’t pull for me anymore? What if I just get it back in the mail or get a terse email about how she expected better from me and she’s disillusioned with my scholarliness? I’ve been coasting most of the time on “whatever happens, happens for the best and I’l’l cope” but there are moments of terrible unease and near-panic.

Also thinking suddenly very intensely about identity and anonymity (the extremely thin anonymity of this blog is only one aspect… when I publish stuff, what to publish it under? When I write an author bio, depending on context, what do I include? The old zines? Sleazy things? “respectable” things? ) i am in principle against my being closeted about anything. And it feels like pointless lying because it will all end up being connected or coming out anyway. I’m not aiming to be a super respectable academic so it’s not like I’ll be fucking that up. It’s just the thought of upsetting my parents and their extended family or friends that bothers me. By now I just wish they could go “Oh well, that’s my weird daughter, it’s her life” in the same way they got to a point of putting photos of me and M. with funny-colored mohawks on their desks at work.

I look at other people’s novels and short stories and wild poems that are web searchable and think about this a lot. THEY deal with it don’t they? You think kathy 4cker’s great-aunt gave her mom shit for her novels? Or was it all just politely ignored and glossed? For fucks sake sometimes it feels like people’s families have an easier time sweeping their alcoholic wife-beating family members under the rug than they do their slightly transgressive writers and thinkers. Or possibly I’m just overly paranoid and no one in my family will give a flying fuck about anything I do.

I saw a funny letter somewhere lately that schopenhauer’s mom wrote to him about how intolerably obnoxious he was. i’ll link to it later.

I’ll talk more about this but for now… feeding, bathing Moomin and a quick pre-party nap for the Badger!!!

we’re off to the Xplorat0rium!

woooo! It’s sunny out!

I forgot to tell about the part where I was waiting to get into the dressing room with an armload of completely whorish thong undies. I am scruffy looking today and was in a nasty sweatshirt that I slept in and some green carpenter pants that are 2 sizes too big and my pink furry boots with pompoms and my gnarly hair unbrushed, unwashed since yesterday’s gelling-up.

Now you can picture me looking very skanky with this bunch of lacy seethrough things over my arm… and the whored-up anorexic V.S. saleswoman with spike heels on (why?!) and a, oh, more than a ton, let’s say a cubic hectacre of makeup smeared over her face. And right when these 2 other very gorgeous expensive skinny-assed big-boobed playboy bunny-looking girls walked up next to me with a lot of pushup bras to ask a question, I sneezed really hard, which made me fart, but I was totally crowded into a corner and could not swiftly flee the scene of the crime. Overcome with horror and stench… I just had to stand there and try not to start laughing…

Later driving away I remembered it and started laughing for real thinking that I would blog the incident… petrifying… trapped in my own fart, right next to the popular cheerleaders!

Oh, the cheap, tawdry, glory of the crap I just bought with my m4cys and vickwhoria’s secret gift cards…! And the things I tried on… V.S. was especially full of rhinestone-studded thongs with little dangly things like pieces of insane chandeliers. Ass-crack chandeliers…. I resisted those actually but now I kind of wish I had gotten one. They were TACKY. Some of them were on sale and some were like 25 bucks. One could take a regular thong and sew a dangly earring onto it and achieve much the same effect.

The un-padded pushup demi bras were good… I seem to have gone down a bra size since pre-pregnancy. Am now 34 B… just fyi…

m4cys underwear dept. is full of crazy bargain racks with scary pink sheer things with marabou feather trim. They might be peignoirs. In english I think we just call them “slutty things”.

I was going to save the m4cy’s card for what would amount to a deep discount on leather pants or a fancy dress, but instead just now frittered it away on sparkly things and ridiculous underwear…

I was wishing that I had some of the really slutty clothes that my aunt handed down to me in high school… my mom threw them away… that one horrid dress that was obviously really expensive but looked like torn up slutty safari-esque rags… like something br00ke shields would have worn in that one movie about being castaway on the tropical island. Alas, that garment is gone, but my stupid highschoolish taste in clothes is not.

I’m the last nerd on earth to know this, but Firefly is awesome and incredible and I am now obsessed after watching the pilot and the first episode. J. sent it to Rook… He sends the best stuff! OMG I don’t think I ever give him comparably excellent presents. It’s impossible.

We watched it last night with Chula, who thrills me with her ability to translate most of the chinese swears. Earlier she played with Moomin while I watched Peanut for a little while.

Peanut really, really likes a medium-sized playground bouncyball. The sort of ball you’d play dodgeball with in a more barbaric age, but smaller. She almost crawled after it, many many times! She’s so close to figuring out crawling! But as I watched her trip out heavily on how the ball rolled around–it goes away! Moomin rolls it back! she whacks it and it gets smaller again and then can’t be reached! that means it went away again and Auntie Badger sends it back into the lap of the Peanut! I thought surly crusty old-person thoughts about the sort of electronic toy that doesn’t make any sense or teach you anythnig. We make fun of them as “rave trip toys”… you whack it or hit a button and a random sound and flashing light happens. There is no logic to it. You learn nothing about cause and effect. Okay, I realize I’m talking out my ass here as when a baby is cranky I’d do anything to shut it up and if the random flashing lights hypnotize it or make it happily flail its arms and legs around, I have no objection… but…. A rolling ball is just as unpredictable to an infant who has just recently learned to sit up, and yet the rolling ball becomes gradually more predictable because it teaches physics… Just like dropping all the toys outt of your crib teaches you physics and yelling for your parent to pick them up teaches you psychology.

Moomin was v. helpful with the charming little Nutmeg as he played rolly-ball, leaped around to entertain her, and picked up her sticky banana spoon over and over as she flung it under the table. He is buying the line I feed him that “Peanut wishes she could walk around like you” and struts about proudly displaying his big-kid skills. (instead of sulking or competing for my attention)

Peanut v. cute like some sort of perfect roly-poly baby advertisement… and yet as I became covered with sticky banana I was filled with revulsion and impatient weariness, and wished I could eat my dinner with 2 hands. In short she is fun, but I am immensely relieved to think that I can avoid going through all that again. Especially I was glad later as I peacefully slept through the night. Sleep! It’s so wonderful!

It looks like the Pilot and I will trade off some childcare this coming semester! I will take Peanut Thurs. mornings. This works out great as I can just walk her over to bad-moms coffee if we keep it on that day! and she will then watch Moomin Thurs. afternoon till Rook gets home.

It wasn’t on purpose that I looked extra butch today when I visited Rook at work and met his boss and all his co-workers. It just so happened that I had freshly shaved my head and gelled back the top part of my fauxhawk, because I’m growing out the back and it sticks up funny… so it either needs to be spiked up or slicked down. Nevermind that i looked extra dorky with my pants falling off me and headphone wires tangled up with my wallet chain. The boss of Rook gave me an extra special weird smile like “This explains a lot…” but I could not tell what conclusion he was drawing or what suspicion was confirmed.

Moomin requested some exciting fun, so rather than bring him home to the same old playground I tried the downtown xmas tree festival thing. It was not really exciting fun- just some dumb trees and animatronic crapola… the best part of it was the quetzalcoatl statue. Moomin is a genius art critic as he took one look at it and started laughing hysterically so hard he was falling down, hanging precariously by my hand and sort of twirling in that annoying little-kid-helpless-hangy-way. “San José is silly. They have a statue that looks like a giant pile of poop!” I didn’t even have to prompt him. As we got closer he then said, “It is a very silly statue of a dragon coild up that looks like a pile of poop!” He’s so right!

Also, I didn’t have a jacket for him so he got to wear my jacket and I froze. So we spent 16 bucks to go to the tech museum, which was suckily crowded. Full of total fuckwad adults who shove past small children in their eagerness to put their face on the bug puppet or make a shadow picture with the butterfly screen… god! nassssty. also after me and moomin waited in line for a million years to spell his name with the robot arm and the blocks, some asshole teenagers shoved in and I had to tell them off. We spent a lot of time at the tinkertoy build a machine sensor feed-the-fish thing.

other than that… my day… some spanish-workbooking… I got my teeth cleaned and my glasses fixed…

I ate lunch at an awesome korean place called “Totoro” in downtown Mountainview – I highly recommend it. For $8.95 I got a giant clay pot of perfect tofu-mushroom soup with fancy mushrooms, a raw egg to crack into the clay pot (which was still boiling several minutes after it came to the table) a hefty amount of kimchi, garlic sprouts, and vinegary cucumbers. YUM. When the waitress whipped out the little dish with the raw egg I started grinning madly as that seemed like a good sign for authenticity and weirdness instead of the grody fake korean food you get sometimes as fast food… and YES. it was totally delicious… Tantalizingly, there was almost wireless, but not quite. If I had a usb antenna extendy-thingie…

Basically i had like 1 hour to myself in the morning between 10 and 11 and then had to do dishes, laundry, shower, and go to the dentist. It was not quite my dream of working hard for hours and hours but actually will tide me over nicely… If I send out poetry submissions tomorrow I will be doing okay.

I liked this short essay from Suzette Haden Elgin’s blog this morning:

Over and over again, instead of choosing what I knew perfectly well that I ought to do, I chose an alternative that was easier for me, or safer for me; over and over again, I chose for my own comfort. I did what I wanted to do instead of what I knew I should do. I did a lot of skillful rationalizing, but I knew what I was doing. And every single time I did that, I was making my own small contribution to the vast global web of circumstances that has brought us to the current situation.

We just were watching The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love — as Rook is still wading through druidsquirrel’s giant stack of lesbian movie classics — and I realized it had the same ending scene as Fucking Amal – the 2 having to come out of a squalid room with a howling mob outside…

Which makes it seem much less about individual lesbian experience and more about the gay rights movement and visibility of queerness.

Fucking Amal was about a million times better of a movie. But 2 girls in love, though so cartoony, laid things out more explicitly and had an interesting violent edge — the parents all howling “I’m going to kill you!” not meaning really kill them — but then the scary married guy really threatening to kill them because they were a danger to (his) marriage. “Amal” didn’t have that threat.

Anyway. It’s a perfect example of how context deepens your understanding of the value and meaning of a work. When I saw that scene in Amal, I was mostly thinking about “coming out” as an individual experience. I was thinking about myself in high school and comparing experiences. That it showed up in both movies made me rethink the scene and realize that it’s also about a general social change and cultural visibility on the macro scale. I am sure any real queer-theory-reading person will roll their eyes at my slowness!

I’m so odd. I was feeling really low earlier today. Working on some dumb spanish workbooks made me feel so relieved, like time isn’t just sliding away without my doing something to make progress…

Progress! Strange!

If I don’t pressure myself… no one else is going to.

(Depressingly… McCoot is back in town. I don’t want to work for him really and I think he can tell I am way less tolerant of his longing to be social and talk about politics and lesbian love. If I get into Bezerkeley, I’ll quit. Hell maybe I’ll just quit anyway. Typing medical transcripts was way less stressful, and paid the same, if I get to where I feel like I need to pull in some cash.)

And Rook will take Moomin tomorrow for the morning and early afternoon, to work, so I can do some translating, more workbook stuff, or whatever, and go to the dentist alone this time.

Much better!

People die all over the place every second. But I still can’t stop thinking about the tsunami. I watched the video from in the restaurant by that norwegian guy a couple of times. The way the water just kept coming. Even a small wave is so very strong…. nightmarish. I had a cartoonish mental image of a giant wave about to break towering overhead, but that’s not how it is… instead, that fast implacable rising water turning to waterfalls.

I napped, played with Moomin, laid around feeling strangely cruddy but not really all the way sick, either. My hands hurt a lot from the rain I guess, and I just didn’t want to do much of anything.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll drink a ton of coffee, make myself go out… I wanted to get so many things done but it hasn’t been happening. I could be working through some spanish workbooks and doing some translations even if I’m uninspired and low-energy like I was today… we’ll see, tomorrow.