Wifely Duties

Since I've been doing this job for almost 3 1/2 months now, I thought it was time I did the Full Housewife and got down on my knees.

You know, to scrub the kitchen floor. What did you think I meant?

I'm not particularly particular when it comes to cleanliness. I'm not cleaning the floor on a weekly basis. Or monthly. But we have one of those Swiffer things, and every time I use it, I get pissed off. It's completely useless if your floor has any more texture than, say, your average pane of glass. So I'd use it, curse it, and put it away for another couple of months, then use it, curse it, put it away. Every single time, I'd look at the dirt still stuck in the pattern of our tile and think that some day I'd scrub it with a brush. For some reason, today was some day.

If this is how housewives before 1972 spent their days, it's no wonder they wanted to leave the home and join the workforce. It kinda sucked. I spent almost 4 hours, split between two Thumper naps, on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a brush, then wiping up the dirty water with a sponge. I kept thinking about Girl 6, Spike Lee's movie about a phone sex girl. In it, one of the phone sex operators acts out Richard Belzer's character's fantasy of a big-breasted woman in a short dress scrubbing a floor in "big, soapy circles."

Wait, where are you going? You got this far through a story about scrubbing a floor, and you're going to let the proximity of the words "sex," "Richard Belzer" and "fantasy" chase you off?

Well, anyway, I scrubbed a floor today. I thought about my mother telling me years ago that I'd make someone a good wife some day. I compared myself to a big-breasted vixen in a short dress. In the end, my manhood returned, though. As I neared the end of the job, I thought to myself, "I wonder if this will get me laid?" Sure, years ago, that thought would have occurred to me much, much earlier in the project and probably would have even been a prime motivating factor in undertaking the project in the first place. But at least I still thought it. I'll take what I can get.

I'm Pretty Sure This One's AHEAD of the Curve

Apparently to drive home to me the fact that I'm no expert on the timeline of developmental landmarks, Nine-Year-Old-Niece today presented me with this conversation while simultaneously impressing Thumper with her mastery of the Skip-It* on the deck in her backyard:

NYON: I like recess. You know the funny thing about recess, though? I have a crush on this boy, A? And he has a crush on me? So we spend a lot of time together. And B? He still likes me, too? So everywhere I went at recess, I had two boys following me around. But that's OK. I really like A, so I enjoy his company? But then B, he said he'd devote his whole life to me.

IR: Uh...

NYON: I know, right? Boys are so ridiculous.

IR: So are A and B friends?

NYON: Well, B kind of gets on A's nerves. And A kind of gets on B's nerves.

IR: I bet.

NYON: So then we're playing volleyball? Me and four of my friends? And C and D are really good, so they're playing the rest of us? But then they said that I should come on their team, but then E and F said, "Hey, that's not fair!" So I said A should play with them, but he said, "No way!" And I told him, "Look, if you're going to hang out with me, you're going to have to get used to my friends..."

IR: Maybe we should go in now and check on your brother.

NYON: OK!




*I asked her if the Skip-It had a counter on it, and she said no, the one with the counter is the new model, this one's an old model from a couple years ago. Wikipedia says this is a toy from the 80's, and the one with the counter came out in the early 90's. Her daddy's a big anti-pop culture Luddite! Can you believe these kids got a Wii for Christmas??

Note to Self

While Googling on the phrase "teaching baby to roll over," I found this. I don't know anything about RIE or Magda Gerber, but these words helped talk me down from another "Ohmygodmybaby'sdevelopingabnormallyslowlyI'mscrewinghimup" spiral of anxiety. I'm trying not to have those, but what's life without a little homebrewed stress?

"Trust baby’s natural development. Physical development occurs in predictable, progressive stages in all children, although the timing is individual.... Wait for the next stage, and don’t push. It is not necessary to teach a baby to move. The infant’s body is intrinsically driven to move through each milestone, when ready to do so... [A]ll over the world, children that are not taught how to sit, walk, crawl, still learn how to do so within the average age range."

I think I should unsubscribe from the hospital's weekly developmental milestone emails. The subject line this week was, "Your Baby This Week: Can Your Baby Do This?" No, he can't! Crap! It contains helpful paragraphs like this:

"While 4-month-old babies are usually able to pick up and hold toys and other objects, 5-month-old babies are able to pass them back and forth from one hand to another. This is an important milestone in brain development as a baby learns to move both hands at the same time: opening one and closing the other. Five-month-olds also adore putting objects into containers and taking them out again, and can amuse themselves for minutes at a time with a box or bucket and a pile of safe toys."

Which I translate into: "He's five months, and he doesn't pass objects back and forth! It's an important milestone in brain development! And he doesn't adore putting objects into containers and taking them out again! Crap!"

Yeah, I think maybe I could do with a little less of that kind of helpful information.

Gay Angels!

Beware of the Golden Compass spoilers...

If I had not heard of the controversy surrounding Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the first book of which is The Golden Compass, I might never have listened to the audiobooks. It seems like religious groups that find certain things objectionable would have learned by now to shut the hell up about them because the controversy inevitably increases the popularity of the objectionable music, movie, book, etc. If I hadn't heard that Christian groups are outraged over a novel, and now a movie, in which two children set out to kill God, I probably never would have listened to the entire trilogy. Of course, the movie's got Nicole Kidman in it, who's on my list of female actors who, as anniemcq put it, I'd watch read the phone book. So I'd have seen the movie eventually, and if it engaged me enough, I might have read the books. Or maybe not. But kids killing God? One, I figured it had to be an oversimplification, an unfair characterization of the actual plotline, and two, I wondered how exactly you write a story like that it. So I burned through all three books as quick as I could and enjoyed nearly every minute of it. Thanks for the tip, fundamentalists!

Top Ten Things Fundamentalists of All Faiths Might Find Offensive:

10. The wisest, kindest, most spiritual people in the series are a kind of invertebrate elephant-gazelle that tear around at high speed on wheel-shaped seed pods like they're Hell's Angels.

9. Part of the three-part nature of humans (body, soul, and spirit), the spirit, is physically manifested as an animal, a kind of familiar, known as the person's dæmon. Apparently, this is pronounced exactly like "demon," so I was unaware until today that it was spelled differently. Granted, there's a significant difference between "dæmon" and "demon," but whatever. I still think it's funny that the human spirit is a demon.

8. Only some of the witches are bad guys. The rest are heroic! It's almost as bad as Harry Potter here!

7. There are an infinite number of universes, and in presumably an infinite number of those, humanity is not the supreme life form.

6. The Kingdom of God keeps the dead in a horrible prison camp known as the World of the Dead. No "good guys to Heaven; bad guys to Hell." Essentially everyone goes to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Heaven's a lie they've told us to keep us meek.

5. The dead are set free and allowed to drift away into their basic atomic components to re-enter the world and become air and trees and PVC pipe again, or whatever. This release is a supreme joy to them.

4. The children may or may not "do it" at the end. Yep, you heard me. Premarital sex! Underaged premarital sex, even!

3. One of the major projects of the Church is to figure out how to separate children from their spirits by using a kind of guillotine. The process renders the children catatonic, but at least they're free of the burden of Original Sin!

2. A pair of male angels are deeply and passionately in love with each other. Yes, in that way.

And the most offensive plot element of the series is:

God is himself completely helpless and senile. He is kept in a crystal box by his one-time lieutenant, an angel who was once human, and who apparently named himself after a Transformer (More Than Meets the Eye!). When the children accidentally kill him by opening his box, he is relieved and grateful. And to add insult to injury, the scene is really only a minor incident in the story.

But behind all of that offensiveness, the truly ironic thing is, the central message is as conservative as you can get: the children learn that they must be kind, be cheerful, study and work hard. The end. Revolutionary stuff, that.

That's a Stupid Name

There's a whole set of male actors that I love. Why male? I don't know. That might require a whole level of personal introspection that I'm not prepared to make at this moment. But these actors, I'd watch just about anything if they were in it. I think I mentioned Brad Pitt before. Would I have sex with these actors? I don't know. Maybe. If they asked nicely. I don't think that makes me gay. A partial list might include Morgan Freeman. Ben Kingsley. Bruce Willis. Josh Hartnett. I know, I know. I don't know why on the last one either. It must be the hair, carefully coiffed to look like he just tousled it carelessly before walking out the door.

Maybe you can see where this is going. My Netflix list, as I've mentioned, is unnecessarily long. It takes so long for a movie to rise to the top that when it arrives, I no longer remember anything about the movie, like why I picked it or what it's about. This week, Lucky Number Slevin showed up in our mailbox.

Mrs. Rodius, from the beginning, was unaccountably offended by the title. "That's a stupid name," she said. I think she felt that the name of the character of Slevin was contrived such that it would rhyme with "seven" and thus provide a clever twist on the familiar phrase, "Lucky number seven." She may have had a point. It's not until the 17th Google hit that Slevin becomes an actual name unrelated to the movie. But, whatever. I'd watch it.

Now, our Netflix queue is occasionally a point of contention. Mrs. Rodius has neither the time nor the patience to spend adding movies that she's interested in, so she has little other choice, besides finding something else to do, than to sit through the schlock that I pick. Sometimes even I am dismayed by the choices I made when they, after a long, long cooling off period, arrive in our mailbox.

"Why did you pick this?" she asks. I can only admit I haven't a clue.

Mrs. Rodius made it clear whenever she saw a commercial for Lucky Number Slevin, throughout the theatrical run and again after the DVD release, that she was not interested. She was irredeemably disgusted by the title.

Beware: here there be spoilers.

But I remember seeing the trailers and thinking it was right up my alley. Morgan Freeman. Bruce Willis. Some sort of semi-comic gangster movie? Maybe? I don't know. Whatever. I'd watch it. Maybe not one of those rare, willing-to-pay-an-ungodly-amount-of-money-to-see-it-in-the-theater-I-mean-four-bucks-for-a-soda-you-gotta-be-kidding-me kind of movies, but yeah, I'd watch that.

So this week, we did. Finally. The verdict? Eh. It was all right. I wanted to like it; I really did. But I was distracted by the many instances of horrible wallpaper. And the intentionally concealed plot elements through the first half of the movie made me feel like I was drunk and too embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what was going on.

In the end, all is explained except the wallpaper, and I didn't feel quite so drunk. We find out, too, that the hero with the perfectly tousled hair didn't really let his love die, innocent and insignificant collateral damage in his lifelong Count of Monte Cristo-style vengeance plot. So it can end as the semi-comic gangster/love story it seemed to be before it suddenly went all medieval on our asses. (By the way, that's a reference to Pulp Fiction, Mom.)

So will I learn from this experience and become more selective in my use of the Netflix queue? No, I will not. I will continue to add movies just because I like the people that are in them. Like Christian Bale. And Russell Crowe. Maybe you can see where this is going. Stop by again in six months for a disappointed review of 3:10 to Yuma.

The Scent of Now

I'm not the first to notice that the senses are strongly connected to memory. It probably even has a name, and suttonhoo probably knows it. Me, I'm too lazy to look it up.

In my early teens, I visited my brother in the hospital after he was in a traumatic accident. I had to don the paper scrubs and booties, and a mask. Many years later, I bought some paper masks at the hardware store to wear while doing some sanding, and when I put one on, I was immediately transported back to that hospital room.

And it's not just smell. Sounds, too, can transport me back. The generous use of cowbell on Motley Crue's first album still takes me back to my bedroom and the "You Pick the Story" Dungeons and Dragons book that I was reading when I played that audio cassette over and over and over.

So I was thinking today about what the Scent of Now is. There are three. First, the hair and body wash that we got at the baby shower that we're still using for the boy's baths. He only holds that smell for a day or two, but it just smells like him and his fuzzy wittow head.

Second is the laundry detergent we use on his diapers. It smells even more like him because I get a noseful several times a day, every day.

Third is the smell of melted plastic I get every time I use anything that's been in our dishwasher lately. Two or three weeks ago, a black plastic slotted spoon fell to the bottom of the dishwasher and was melted into oblivion on the heating coil. Ever since, though we scrubbed the heating coil clean, removed all trace of the spoon, and have run load after load of dishes since, everything still smells of that melted plastic. I've even got to the point now where it's not even really unpleasant. I raise a glass to my lips, and it's just sort of comforting and familiar.

So I think in twenty years, it will be those smells, two kinds of soap and burnt hard plastic, that will propel me suddenly and forcibly back to these days with Thumper. Ah, memory.

A New Year

We at Rodius, Inc. took a little holiday break, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. I hope you and your family have enjoyed your holiday season, too.

Today, I took a look back at some old blog posts, mainly because we're way behind on Thumper's First Year Calendar, with stickers for landmark moments and everything that we never made a point of recording. So we were trying to figure out his First This and First That dates, for which the blog was somewhat helpful. I made a label for First, but I didn't really label any of his firsts. Sounds just like something I'd do.

Mostly, though, as I read through it, I was struck with the strong urge to go back and delete all my whiny posts about the baby. I feel so much calmer and more confident about the boy lately. He's doing great at self-soothing, going down for naps and for bedtime with very little complaint, and he's gone from four daily naps to three. He's still not keen on Tummy Time, but we keep working on it, just as we're working on hand-eye coordination and alone time. He's not real keen on the alone time, but we're working on making him suffer through it here and there. He makes me laugh all the time, and he makes me frustrated all the time, and I'm not sure why I didn't know it would be like this.

Anyway, I don't know. I'm half thinking of following my mother's example and pulling the plug on the blog. I feel silly for taking it all so seriously, as if each moment was potentially permanently negatively impacting his future. Does each moment of angst really need to be documented? No, probably not.

On the other hand, it's good to have a place where Thumper's extended family can keep up with what's going on in his life, because I don't really email or (HA!) write as much as I should. And it's fun to write something I think is funny and have people respond positively to it. So I think I'll keep at it awhile. It was nice to have a break, though.

Happy New Year, y'all! Here's to new beginnings. And Mom, I'm sorry to see your bloginess fade; it was good to keep up with what's going on in your world, too.