Wedding on the Weekend

We trekked to New Jersey to attend a friend's wedding.
It was lovely. Yay, L & O!
But I realized that Madge has been to three weddings with five grooms between them.
And the sole bride is the one who wears the proverbial pants in that relationship.

Another New Yorker thought

I got to finish another New Yorker article. Yay, me. This one was by Hilton Als and it was on stage fright. Stephen Fry in particular, though I think all anyone will take from the article is the superfluous bit Als threw in at the end about Carly Simon overcoming her stage fright by having her band spank her.
Oooo.
Oddly enough, I figure anyone under thirty who knows who Carly Simon is probably doesn't know what a spanking is, and vice versa (anyone under thirty who knows what a spanking is hasn't a clue as to Carly Simon's identity or profession).
Just a thought.

The Curious Reader Department

I’m having little contact with people lately, mostly because the kids are still recuperating from the trip and would rather remain in the safety of the home. So I actually got to read some of the words in The New Yorker (not just skim the cartoons, or “jokes” – the old-school term for those things).
The New Yorker, aside from articles, reviews, and “jokes,” also has little snarky asides where they print editorial slips (from other publications, of course) in small print in a corner of the page. They call it “From the/In the/The [BLANK] department.” There’s one on page 125 in this week’s New Yorker. Then, on page 129, an article on Bob Dylan has the following:
“The first time Dylan heard the Beatles, he was in a car somewhere and they came on the radio. He almost fell out the window.”
Would it be “The Trailer Park Department” or “The Unsafe at Any Speed Department”?

The essential sincerity of falsehood (J. Conrad)

I’m sure this never happens to you.
You are telling the truth, but it sounds so outrageously like a lie that your facial expressions and tone of voice make everything even worse.
Consider what I told Madge this morning.
“It’s the weirdest thing. When I went to bed last night I finally found your tooth. [The one we lost during the day because Madge gave it to me while Coco and I were napping and my grip isn’t the most secure when I’m sleeping.] As I was moving the covers, I saw something move and there was the tooth. I tried to wake you when I put it under your pillow, but you were too fast asleep. And now there’s the dollar. Cool.”
This is all true. I’m better off lying.

Lumpen

Ah. Smells like family.

I just noticed, they're all blond. Weird. There's only two natural blondes left among the parents (sorry about outing you and your bottle of bleach, T.).

Strand-ed

Went to the Strand bookstore. 18 miles of books – this is supposed to be impressive. But Coco proved they were understating their case. He took a book off the shelf and arranged the pages so that one book alone spread out over about 27 yards. (I’m kidding. Strand people, keep your hands off of Coco.)
But I did see a couple racks (of books – get your minds out of the gutter) that had the heading “Oversize History.”
This country is taking its obesity obsession a bit too far, I think.
But wouldn’t that be something? A book on oversize history, illustrated by Botero? I smell another book project that might not come to fruition.
Mental note: find illustrator and time. Subdivide into oversized bodies and oversized egos.
Or, better yet, make it all BS and just supersize the actors. I.e., Washington crossing the Delaware was such a big deal because the boat almost capsized five times, etc. I’m just thinking aloud here, feel free to add your ideas and requests for characters not to be ignored.
Julie, for example, might want Russian history rewritten. The Russian Revolution happened because Anastasia was put into hiding. Nicholas and Alexandra were ashamed of her size and stashed her in some pre-gulag weight-loss center. The peasants thought she should be proud to be her size and wanted her freed. Lenin was a shill.
Or maybe Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” was a prescient self-help tool, way before its time, about an equality of the soul, and the French peasants preferred to have aristocratic ideals of ascetic deportment and bulimic execution. Just an idea. A sketch. Let me think it over.
Ideas welcome.

Fozzy Bear would be proud of me

Hee, hee. I amuse myself with the stupid puns that pop into my head.
Ready?
Coco got some new pants from my parents. They’re leather shorts with suspenders, touristically-idealized-German-style. I tried to put them on him this morning. He seemed willing. They got stuck because we hadn’t unbuttoned them properly, so he didn’t want to anymore. At least not now. That’s why they’re called
LATER-Hosen!
The good thing about this blog thing is that you can’t physically punch me in the arm now.
There’s a second part. Not punny, therefore more funny.
My sister-in-law is in town. And when she saw them she accidentally called them Unterhosen (paging Dr. Freud). Unterhosen are underpants, in case you’re wondering.
Then she topped it by saying that the only place she’d been to in Germany was Unterhosen. While my jaw dropped and my mind reeled, the kids interrupted and I couldn’t find out what she meant.
I’m only wondering, who was her tour guide?
(See, K? I told you I’d blog about it.)

We're baaaack

We have a lot of catching up to do, don’t we? I don’t know how to do it best. A week is a long time, when you’re on vacation. New experiences piled high on top of each other. Little do you know how easily those experiences can topple when you’re traveling with little kids. But we had very few of those, I think.
Give me another week and my overly censorious memory will make the entire trip a pastoral frolic in the land of the ancestors.
But for now I’ll still remember some chaos.
First things first. Jet lag. Eek.
It’s like the common cold. You know it’s coming, you know what it’s like, you know what causes it. And yet there’s nothing you can do about it.
INCORRECT SPOILER ALERT.
An aside. I don’t remember the details accurately, and I’m not going to look them up, but some of what I write will be factually accurate. The rest is accurate in terms of remembered truth (cf. censorious memory, above).
Aside aside. Nicholson Baker’s U and I is a great book that works along these lines. He recounts his relation to John Updike’s books and the Updike he has created in his mind by reading them, but he consciously refuses to look up the exact locations and locutions of what he remembers, making it a personal account of himself, rather than a study of Updike. And yet. Awesome book, any way you slice it.
Back to the SPOILER. War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells. I saw the movie with the recently disgraced Tom Cruise. That is, I saw the movie with Julie, but Tom Cruise starred in it. Really, Spielberg’s camera motion starred in it, but that’s beside the point. The aggressive aliens get beaten, in the end, by some earthly bacteria (or virus?) which they weren’t prepared for. Sort of like the decimation of Native Americans by European invaders, but with poetic justice. Anyway, I don’t remember what the bacteria (or virus?) was, but in my memory it’s the common cold.
And here’s where jet lag comes in. To add to the terror, we never find out why the aliens attack in the first place.
But I think I know.
Space lag.
Think about it. They traveled for months in the dark. They probably came from a planet with a rotation period of 79.3 earth hours, have two suns, three moons, and six seasons. They get here, can’t see to get any sleep, are always hungry, toss and turn in bed, and get increasingly ticked off.
I, too, would have let loose with eerie tripods and OOOOMing noises, if they had been at my disposal.
Instead, I stuck to drinking beer to overcome my crankiness.
And I took the occasional nap.
Maybe aliens should learn about beer and naps.

lookit that

Here we are in Berlin, with a little reunification of our own.
The New Yorkers are exhausted, but now it's bathtime and things will be fine once people get to bed.
This was just to say we're okay. My mind is a little numb from the airplane whining. Meaning the children whining on the airplane.
Or, as the new horror flick might have it: Kids On a Plane!
Run away!

off to the old stomping grounds

We’re off to Berlin tomorrow, so communication via blog will be very sporadic for a week.
Then we’ll be back. So don’t worry.
Madge is a very excitable traveler. Which means we always need to be as close as possible to the next leg of the trip. For example, when at the airport, she’s not comfortable until we’re at the gate, not loitering in shops and restaurants as her parents prefer. But then again, safety measures will probably preclude any relaxation anyway. Fun stuff.
Serenity now.

language manipulation

Some of Coco’s lines are better than anything you could make up.
It’s about 9:20pm, and he’s still awake.
Me: Coco, go to sleep.
Him: I’m tired of going to sleep; I’m gonna take a nap instead.

N fable

The Newborn and the Nipple

The nipple gave the newborn a sad look, “As much as you love me, some day we’ll have to put an end to this.”
The newborn didn’t open its eyes. “Why even bother to tell me?” Glug, gulp, gasp, gulp, glug.

non-moving staircase

I’m at a bit of a loss tonight, because I’m tired. We should be getting ready for our week-long trip to Germany, but we’re still going to pool, fighting about computer privileges, and generally wasting time.
We had a good time-waster yesterday. Went to the Guitar Center and let the kids bang away in the percussion room. Ah. Good times.
They should feature that activity in New York with Kids. It’s free, and nobody gets hurt.
I almost did, of course. They’re working on the escalators, and therefore one of them is blocked off and the other functions as a staircase.
Nothing makes you feel stupid like tripping over something that’s neither unexpected nor moving.

It’s those lines, those grooves.
They make me think it moves.
But no. It stands in place.
And I fall on my face.

How to make your dad wet his pants, laughing

In three easy steps.
Step 1. Say, “I went poopoo.”
Fair enough. Dad will go check it out.
Step 2. Say, “I flush it self.”
Excellent. Good communication. This way Dad isn't at a loss to unflush the toilet to stop the screaming.
Step 3. Raise and lower the toilet lid, saying (in a cookie-monster-ish voice) “I like eat poopoo. MMmmmMM.”

old joke of mine

Limericks are going to keep me busy for a while, so I'll just give you a quickie.
Channeling Allan Allen (again):
Last night I had a weird dream. I dreamed I was having "relations" with Marilyn Monroe.
Let's just say she has not aged gracefully.

Museum

Man, I didn’t even want to blog about the hot dog prices yet. Reading Tristram Shandy (awesome birthday present from an even more awesome wife) is getting to me already.
We went to the Museum of Natural History today, where you get to set your own price. You have to have a ticket to get in, but the ticket “price” is a “suggested donation” and you can (really) just give what you find appropriate. You just need to have the nerve to do so. I try to do some quick triangulation on potential food purchases, crowdedness discomfort, and gift-shop distraction to figure what I think is fair. It’s better still when Julie’s along because the corporate membership lets you skip the longer lines.
Anyway, we’re at the museum and it turns out things are no longer so easy with the two young’uns because Coco no longer does everything Madge says. He wants to see skeletons and she wants to see stuffed animals.
Now what.
We go home early. Yay.
But we run into a hot dog stand on the way to the subway.

Pricing

Here’s my guess. As the summer progresses, the hot dog vendors get increasingly frustrated with the tourists (and other customers). The heat doesn’t help. So now a hot dog that used to be a dollar is two (I posted something about this before). But here’s where it starts to get ugly.
The kids have “special” appetites.
Coco likes the sausage with mustard (no bun), while Madeleine likes the bun with ketchup (no sausage). Sounds easy, right? Well, you may not have been to a Sabrett’s stand recently.
There’s a language barrier.
And a willingness barrier.
And a rip-off hurdle.
What used to be two bucks and a smile is now four and a shifty grunt.
I swear I need to start taking pictures of these guys to remember who has been trying to rip me off and who hasn’t. Today’s guy looked familiar, is all I’m saying. And the last time he tried to rip me off with drink prices. But I lingered and called him on it and got a refund, but then the kids were still hungry and I had to spend the money right there again. Boy, did that grate.
On the other hand, there’s a corner store a couple blocks from our house which has the advantage of being open 24 hours, in a row. They manage to make everything an even dollar amount. They’ve got a great grasp of the tax laws, I believe. That, and their register never actually rings up an amount.
Because of the linguistic barrier, I checked the register the last time I got ice cream there. I thought I heard the guy say “ten” and couldn’t believe my ears. The register read 1,149.00 (really). So I said, “pardon?” and the guy behind the register said, “Seven. Uh. Six.”
A similar price reduction after clarification had happened there before when we got lollipops. Somehow, I love that about the place.

birthday, evidence

I polished off the remainder of this masterpiece tonight.
Did I detect a hint of lemon?
Perhaps.
That's how they got the cake to be so shiny. (Whereof do I speak? See the second picture)

birthday, 2

Occasionally, I check out what historical figures share my birthday and what they've been up to.
And guess what?
I'm way behind.

or

Sometimes I check to see
whose birthday and mine match up.
There's a few. And guess what?
I've got a lot to catch up.

birthday

My birthday was today, as it is every year around this time. No need to congratulate or send gifts, but there are some highlights of the day.
First off, I think I managed to keep the sugar high under control, which made for a fairly calm day.
But my two planned events (by planned I mean that I thought of them five minutes before we left the house) didn’t go quite as (see beginning of sentence).
I thought we’d have a Thai lunch special at the place where the proprietress is in love with Coco (who calls her the Cookie Lady – I wonder why). They’re closed Mondays. So we had bagels. That is, I had a bagel while the kids fed theirs (after I made them lick off the cream cheese first) to the swans, geese, and ducks on the lake where we were going to rent a pedal boat. But (see Thai place). Maybe the Cookie Lady chartered all the pedal boats for an outing. Instead, I had a nice walk, while the kids dozed.
I know everyone’s curious, so I’ll go ahead and say it: the loot was great. I got some guitar music (I got a guitar for father’s day – turns out some people appreciate my efforts), but I didn’t get to play much because Buzz Lightyear had to patrol the fretboard to make sure my intonation and wobbly fingering posed to danger to the galaxy.
When Julie came home we dug into the cake, which had a musical candle. (Really the candle HOLDER is musical, but they market is as a musical candle.) Coco confiscated the holder and candle right after it was used. First he licked off the frosting. Then he wanted it relit, so we could do it again using other names. No problem. Then he wanted it relit to make Buzz Lightyear fly just like Sid.
Eeek.
So we explained to him that Sid was a bad kid and …
Coco went straight to his room and wrote some stuff in a notebook entitled “Material for Analyst or Memoir.”
And I went to the blog.