Firsts and Lasts

The other day, the Big Yam was watching The Incredibles with the Dotytron.  There is a scene where Mr. Incredible comes across the skeletal remains of a vanquished superhero peer.  The Big Yam asked, "What happened to that guy?" and the Dotytron replied, "Well, when you die, your body turns into dirt and the skeleton is what's left" and without missing a beat, completely unfussed, the Big Yam said matter-of-factly, "I'm not gonna die."  It wasn't even a question - it was very much, "Oh that?  That doesn't apply to me."

That.  That is why the thought of him putting on his backpack with his little label on it, in his labelled shoes, with his labelled lunch bag, and labelled litterless lunch accoutrements (as I now know, a big part of getting ready for school involves spending an enormous amount of time and money on labeling things), and looking back at me when I drop him off tomorrow for his first full day of JK, when the door closes and he's in a class with about 20 other kids all confused and overwhelmed - that is why when I think about it I start to cry.  

I can tell him to get back up when he scrapes a knee and convince him he's fine and brush it off, but I won't be able to convince him he's fine when he realizes that the world is very, very big and can be very, very cruel, and that part of growing up in the world means losing your innocence.  And what is innocence if it's not the blissful ignorance of your own tenuousness?

Part of the deal with being hitched to a teacher is that as a consequence, your life is constantly given form by concrete beginnings and endings.  Starts and stops.  Fall and the firsts and summer and lasts.  Now I'm being thrown into it twofold.  The Big Yam had his last day with J his daycare provider two Fridays ago and she and I looked at each other and gave stern instructions that neither of us was to cry and then she handed me two thick binders of the "homework" she's been doing with him this entire time - his wobbly attempts at drawing faces, cutting straight lines, matching numbers and she started telling us how special and talented he is and I lost it (am losing it as I write this and remember).

Last week there was a 15 minute "interview" with the teacher which went really well.  There was all this DRAMA with his teacher assignment (to be detailed in a later post) and I was nervous but I met her and she is lovely.  She's no the most popular of the kindergarten teachers, but she emphasizes a lot of outdoor time (which I like) and her class size is only 15 kids, which is amazing.  The Dotytron always says that you can throw as much money at the education system as you want, but ultimately, it comes down to teacher student ratio (which is a money issue, at the end of the day), and the lower the ratio, the better your kid will do.  Then on Friday there was a one-hour "orientation" which means that we dropped him off at 9 and he stayed at school for an hour.  He looked so lost standing out there, with his giant backpack on and mayhem around him.  I kept it together for his sake and mine and then got our nanny settled with the babies at the drop-in centre and then walked home and bawled the whole way.  I anticipate more of that on Monday.

I read something on a mommy blog (I know, just shoot me now) that resonated though.  It was something someone's mom told them, to the effect of: "You just make sure that when your kids walk through the door at the end of the day, home is the most comforting place to be."  I know there is so much that I can't control, but that, I can do.  I will make sure that my kids feel supported and loved and safe within these walls and hopefully, that sense of security will allow them to carry "home" with them, throughout the day, as armor against the world's many, many indignities.

The point is: he's not just ours any more.  For the past 4 years we've been working on making him a person that will go out into the world and be kind, and moral, and productive, and now is the time for us to see how we did.  We've been getting him ready to be shared with the world and slowly broadening his circle bit by bit and now's the first big test.  I hope we get an A.  I am nothing if not the grade-grubber of all grade grubbers.

They set the bar kind of low in JK.  I went in to the interview with the teacher wondering if we should be working harder on sight words, and she came back at me with, "his only homework is to read a book each day," and she kept stressing the importance of reading and I was like, Lady, MAMA KNOWS.  We've recently started into chapter books.  I took him with me and we picked out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which he was into for a day, but lately he's been more into Little House in the Big Woods.  He likes the pictures (so do I) and seems to be quietly absorbing some of it.  Sometimes we supplement the reading by looking up clips of panther screams so it can be a little more concrete for him.  I asked him to assign characters and he was like, "I'm Mary, you're Pa, Baba's Ma," and I asked, "Who would Lenny be?" and he said, "Lenny would be the big black cat" (the panther).  LOL!

People keep asking me how I feel about going back.  Fine, I guess?  I think it will be hard, but our nanny is wonderful and amazing and the kids love her and we've worked out a comfortable routine so knowing that is all squared away makes me feel good about going back.  Also: they opened a J. Crew near my work, so, um yeah, I'm stoked.  I've decided that my style icons are Jenna Lyons and Lucy Chadwick, with still some hippie boho Coachella vibes at home and weekends in the summer.

This layering game is so TIGHT.

One of the things I mastered this year while on maternity leave is the J Crew sleeve roll, so I'm feeling pretty good about that.  I'm on an extreme fitness regimen in the interest of losing weight so I don't have to buy a whole new work wardrobe.  I don't know if it's working or not...maybe a little?  It is making me feel very hungry every night when I go to bed and it is inspiring me to go for a 30 minute run so I can earn more calories so I can eat more sweets.  

Here are some pics from my life, lately:

Dr. Rei had her baby and he is an original nuttah and basically the best and he is making me want to have a million more babies so I can cuddle them and then largely ignore them while I use my phone and/or practice the J Crew sleeve roll.

We took the whole family to the Ex with our neighbours and their daughter and were there for 6 hours and I almost died from exhaustion but it was so worth it.

These two at Lowe's.  

Probably the last time they'll wear their South Beach onesies

Being a joker, as usual.

My goon squad.

The Wonder Twins have been going buck and seem to be doing some catch up.  The other day we had penne and meatballs for dinner and they ate 3 plates of pasta and 4 meatballs each and only stopped because the Dotytron wanted to save some for me.  They both have lots of words now, the cutest thing being that Lenny defaults to pointing at something and saying, "What's this" and the Quincess points at stuff and says, "That."  They are basically the embodiment of this jungle tune:

They also say "ball", "woof" (for dog), do the sign for "more", say "po-po" (Cantonese for "pick me up") and Poh Poh, as well as Mama and Baba.  The Quincess can say the Cantonese word for "light" and can also mimic you when you say "turtle."  They both love stories and reading, and the Quincess will often quietly sit and pretend to read Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and sometimes sits and points to the pictures and "reads" out loud by saying, "Dut duh duh. Duh duh," with this regular cadence.  It's so cute.  Lenny is a wild man with no sense of caution.  At the wading pool he will crawl into water with his mouth open until it's over his head and not notice a thing.  

They are extraordinary beings and I love them the mostest.

Okay, gotta go decide which tree I'm going to hide and sob behind tomorrow morning!

Fin.

Growing Up

Overheard the other day, while the Dotytron was running point on getting the Big Yam set for the day (which involves feeding him a pre-daycare-breakfast breakfast of whatever he's currently fixated on, which right now is PC Organics shredded wheat squares and milk), the Big Yam told the Dotytron, "I don't want my Thomas placemat any more."  The Dotytron inquired whether he still liked Thomas, and the Big Yam replied, "No.  I don't like Thomas any more.  I like all sorts of movies.  Like, like, movies about meatballs." (we had forced him to branch out beyond Frozen on Friday night and we watched Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs together).  He wanted a "lallo" placemat like the ones that the Dotytron and I use.

Guys, if you had told me a year ago (when the Thomas obsession began in earnest) that I would be brought to tears at the notion that I wouldn't have to countenance Thomas' stupid perpetually smiling face and that of all his poncey British friends again, I would have laughed you out of the room.  I hate Thomas (and Friends!)  I think it's the worst programming ever!  I hate the books, the lack of narrative in the episodes, the movies and misadventures brought upon by the trains' lack of judgement.  But the thought of him outgrowing something, made me cry like a baby yesterday.

 

It was exacerbated by an incident I witnessed while with the Wonder Twins at the drop-in centre yesterday.  One of the drop-ins on our circuit is housed in the school where the Big Yam will be starting JK.  I saw two junior kindies, or possibly full kindie kids (white, with that obnoxious bowl cut/Dorothy Hamill hair that some moms love to do with their sons when they have full heads of hair), making fun of this little Indian kid in their class who was sucking on a plastic toothpick.  The boys were like, "Ew! We don't do that!  That's a GIRL thing."  "We do BOY stuff.  Like, like Spiderman!" Thankfully, the little Indian kid was oblivious (which made him SO. MUCH. CUTER), but it took considerable will power to not lay into those little s**ts.  I recognized one of the kids from the Big Yam's ballet class (the boy shows up to ballet in a full Superman bodysuit with the fake muscles) and the past two lessons the Big Yam hasn't wanted to wear his tutu in ballet class and I immediately thought that it might be because that little a-hole said something to him, the very thought of it put me into a murderous rage.

I was so mad/sad at what I witnessed that when the Dotytron came home, I was in sad/angry tears.  People are the worst!  Like, it's no secret that I'm a general misanthrope.  Love humanity, tend to hate individual humans, unless I know you and deign to like you, in which case, you're golden forever.  The idea of the Big Yam being bullied or being made to feel like his interests aren't cool, or being shunned for stupid gender conforming stuff makes me just want to scoop him up and home school him.  As the Dotytron correctly identified, I just don't want him to have his innocence stripped from him.  I think the think that makes those "awkward tween/teen years" so awkward and repellent (to me) is the inbetween-ness of it all.  Not a girl, not yet a woman, etc.  Not innocent, but not an adult.  I guess, in the long run, it's better that the Big Yam be bullied than be the bullier.  But at least if he's the bully, I can do something about it (harangue him into submission).  It's hard to take away the sting of being made fun of as a kid.  Kids are vicious.  I just want to protect him from that, and from the stupidity of their parents' poor decisions.

Last week I went to the Science Centre with the kids with my neighbour and her kids.  We ate in the food court area and I sat across from this like, 8 year old Indian kid, who was clearly pretty fresh-off-the-boat.  He was the CUTEST.  Super-chubby, wearing classic FOB gear, mangled teeth, super-articulate.  We chatted about his lunch (egg curry!) and he was so sweet and kind and oblivious.  Nerdy FOBs are the best kids in the world.  I wish I could turn my kids into nerdy FOBs but you can't recreate that fresh-off-the-boat naiveté in North American-ized, urban kids.

The Big Yam is so oblivious to so many things.  Tonight (this post has been composed over 3 days), as we were coming in from playing outside, I told him to say goodnight to his friends.  "GOODNIGHT!" he shouted, and then just before the screen door slammed shut, "AND GOODNIGHT, WORLD!"  LOL!  So good.  An unprompted "goodnight, world!" with gusto is just about the best thing ever.  I can't do anything about it, but I want to protect him from butting up against people's expectations.  I want him to be able to wear a tutu and it not to be a big deal.  I want him to get into Harry Potter and want to dress up as Professor McGonagall or as Hermione for Halloween and for no one to bat an eye.  I came up with a pretty solid family Halloween costume which hits all the marks - something we're into, not fantastically labour intensive, intrinsically funny, and we were telling Momma D at dinner the other night and she was a little put out by the fact that it would require the Quincess to dress up as a woman.  But here's the thing, if the Quincess was a girl and wanted to dress up as Harry Potter, NO ONE WOULD BAT AN EYE.  It's only when guys want to wear girl stuff that people get all side-eye about it.  ON HALLOWEEN!  A NIGHT WHEN YOU'RE GIVEN LICENSE TO PLAY WITH IDENTITY!  THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE NIGHT.

Using "devil's night" as a segue, allow me to share a video of the Quincess' particular style of getting around:

He is SO FAST like this.  It's so funny, especially when he's all excited as above and basically skittering around like a deranged inchworm, in and out of rooms and your line of sight.  The video above is also notable because you'll see at the 20 second mark, when Quincess makes his way over to Lindsay Lou-Lou and Lindsay does one of his classic, overly dramatic, super-sensitive wailing jags.  It's also funny when the Quincess comes up against a flooring that provides resistance (like thick carpeting), and he can't leverage the helmet-on-hardwood mechanics.  He plants his feet and does a bridge that would make a moksha yogi envious, in his attempt to slide.  

Long story short: kids are the worst.  Don't give your kid a Dorothy Hamill bowl cut, and let your kids be kids as long as possible.

Fin.

Babylon Registration

I registered the Big Yam for junior kindergarten yesterday.  The night before, I was a bit of a sleepless wreck because of it.  Well technically, it was 1 part "my baby is growing up!"/"I hope the school system doesn't strip him of his innocence and openness", 1 part the Wonder Twins only wanting to sleep if they had a steady intake of boob nectar, and 1 part reading this Guardian article about James Lovelock and how he's this big climate change doomsday guy who basically says that we've fallen off the precipice and that the effects of global warming are irreversible, any attempts we make to curb greenhouse gas emissions are laughable, and that in 20 years we're facing a future of famine, mass human migration, and other Max Max-type nightmare apocalyptic scenarios.  This of course spiralled into, "Why am I bringing children into this horrific future?" and on and on and on.

Anyway, I was fully expecting to be an emotional wreck, picturing this as a bit of a dress rehearsal for his ACTUAL first day of kindergarten when I will have to drop him off by myself (as the Dotytron will be facilitating OTHER people's kids' first days of school) and will probably promptly come home and bawl myself silly.  I somehow turned a corner without knowing it and now that I'm faced with the open, guileless, exuberant person my Yam turned out to be, I want to protect him from all that school represents.  It's the thin edge of the wedge here, people.  Bullying!  Other people's poor parenting decisions!  Hegemony!  Conformity!  Well meaning but ill-informed liberalism!  Gross white kids in fedoras!  It's all there and then some.  I can't shield him from all this ugliness indefinitely, but I would like more time.  It's so personality dependent, too.  The Big Yam is a gentle, sweet kid who doesn't have the kind of toughened, entitled, bragadociousnes with which I swaggered into kindergarten.  I've been hanging around with the Wonder Twins at drop-in centres trying to suss out prospective nannies and the reports from staff, other parents, and caregivers who frequent the centres are all unanimous - the Big Yam has a reputation as being a considerate, good-natured, kind soul.  I mean, the kid spent an hour yesterday practising his hip hop dance routine, of his own volition.

I digress.  I also put the cart before the horse.  Yesterday's registration turned out to be rather unemotional and instead, boringly administrative.  So much paperwork!  Emergency contacts and then a 6 page sheet on your kid - what they can do, their fears, their interests, their skill level.  SO MUCH HANDWRITING.  My hand cramped up after writing my address.  Seriously school board, can't this stuff be done online?!  Upload that shiz yo!  I didn't even know how to answer the questions - my sense is that they're just trying to prescreen for those kids who have always been at home with a parent or doting grandparents and haven't been socialised.  For his interests, I put down: transportation, dance, music, reading, philosophy.  LOL!

Last night was Academic Book Club, which is slowly being seeded with non-professors, which is nice.  We read A.M. Homes' May We Be Forgiven.  It's about this kind of layabout, directionless, blank slate man, Harold Silver, whose brother has clear violent issues and basically destroys his family, leaving Harold to pick up the pieces.  It sounds like very, very heavy stuff, and yet, the book is blackly comedic (I would say more black than comedy).  I had a lot of issues with this book.  Unlike similar family-implosion books (Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You for example), I had a hard time navigating the tone of this one.  According to my book club member, Homes is deeply critical of the ridiculousness of bourgeois, middle-class American life and this is meant to be a big EFF-YOU to that.  I got that to a certain extent, but I found the satire was lacking.  Right when things would border on being humorous (in a Jonathan Tropper/David Sedaris way), Homes would bring in an element of grotesqueness or grim, discomfiting reality (bully brother as a child circumcising a cousin in the basement during a family gathering), or something so beyond the realm of reality that it made the novel no longer funny but just kind of depressing and unbelievable.  I kept getting jolted out of my wavering investment in the characters and events.  The ending is also a little tacked-on and maudlin as well.  I was also uncomfortable with how a non-Jewish writer wrote a Jewish main character - first of all, I never got that Harold Silver was Jewish.  As my (Jewish) book club friend said, "Bashing your wife's head in with a lamp so isn't a Jew way to kill someone.  First of all, if he was Jewish, she probably would have been able to fight him off."  LOL!  I was also uncomfortable with a lot of the Asian stereotypes and supporting characters, whose race was used for cheap jokes.

I wasn't the biggest fan, but Book Club was of course, hilarious.  One of the academics was talking about how she'd read in The New York Times about "this app that allows gay people to look up other people who are nearby who want to have sex" and I'm like, "Yeah, Grindr, what's the deal?" and she's like, "How do you know about it?" and I'm like, "BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE WORLD, DUH."  I will never understand how these women can read everything like The New Yorker, The Guardian, Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and still KNOW NOTHING!  How can you be so "informed" but be so clueless at the same time?!?  It's the biggest paradox to me.

Other books I've read lately.

Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott, who writes fiction, memoirs, and is a contributor to Slate.  This was another Academic Book Club pick.  I was intrigued.  Lamott became Christian later in life and is a leftist Christian.  I am so deeply secular that I find it hard to empathise or relate to people who have religion or faith in their lives.  You might as well be telling me that you believe in aliens.  In this memoir, which is really well written (she can turn a pretty phrase and conjure evocative, imaginative metaphors), she talks about how she came to Christianity and how her faith has helped her.  To me, the idea of praying and knowing that God exists is so far removed, I can't even approximate what that must be like.  Anyway, I found the book revealing because Lamott is kind of a gong show.  Recovering alcoholic, eating disorders, unnaturally obsessed with her son.  She writes about the mother-son relationship charmingly and describes her love for him in a way that completely resonated with me, but at the same time, there was definitely an undercurrent that she was/is too reliant on her kid.  Like, she NEEDS her son to prop her up in some way (she's a single mother).  Her son ends up getting some woman pregnant at like, the age of 19, after going to "art college" and living and studying on his mom's dime (yes, I'm feeling judgemental about that).  Also, Anne Lamott looks like this:  

That is to say: kind of cray.  Even though she writes about her hair in this book that I read, I can't get over the thin white-lady dreads.  She also comes across as mad drama.  Too emotional.  The kind of friend who has too many peaks and keening lows and NEEDS YOU all the time to talk them off the ledge.  Still, it was worthwhile reading.

Y'all know how much I loved Eleanor and Park, so based on my sis' frantic FB status updates on her book, Fangirl, I read that and followed that up with Attachments (her first novel).  Fangirl is a YA book about one half of a twin sister set who goes off to university and experiences the inevitable growing pains of that first year away from home.  The girl, Cather (sister named Wren - Cather-Wren, get it?  I will say that one of my bones of contention with Rainbow Rowell is her character naming!  It's so teenaged girl Writer's Craft!  I should know!  Every female character in my OAC Writer's Craft course had a name like Mächen, or Zelda), writes fan fiction and is famous in the fan fiction world.  When she goes to college, her sister decides to forge her own, independent path, leaving Cather, who has clear anxiety and attachment issues stemming from their mother's abandonment and their father's mental issues, to figure out how to become an autonomous being.  The writing is SO GOOD.  It was deeply addictive reading and the romance in it (OF COURSE THERE'S A ROMANCE!) unfolds in a YA-approved way.  I loved this book.  Some people have had quibbles with all the examples of Cather's fan-fic that are interspersed amongst the chapters, and I can see that, but I might have liked this more than Eleanor and Park, if that was even possible.  Eleanor and Park goes to this really dark place that I didn't love, but the boy-girl stuff in it is better than in Fangirl.

Attachments is written from a male point of view and is skewed older than YA.  The characters are in their mid-to-late 20s and it's about a guy who is some kind of arrested development genius who is living at home with his somewhat smothering, over protective mother, working nights where he screens people's flagged inappropriate emails at a major newspaper (this book takes place in the late 90s).  By reading the email exchanges between two female staffers, he starts to fall for one.  This was okay.  A decent, quick read but I didn't love it.  Let's just say I can see how Rowell got a book deal, but this one definitely felt like a person's first novel to me.

Relish is a graphic memoir that chronicles the author Lucy's long standing love affair with food.  Picking particular dishes and memorable food moments throughout her life, she illustrates how her gourmand parents instilled in her a love of fine wine and cuisine.  The book has charmingly illustrated recipes and I quite like the clean-lined drawing style.  However, I will say that it felt kind of slight.  She was raised by a pioneering caterer mother in Rhinebeck, New York, before Rhinebeck became Rhinebeck and I would have liked to see more of that.  Otherwise, it's a pretty flimsy memoir as far as memoirs go, and the food writing isn't as tantalizing as top-notch food writing can be.  I didn't salivate once.  

I finished the Divergent series and as I suspected before it came out, Veronica Roth didn't end on a high note.  Like many other YA trilogies there were too many loose ends to wrap up and it wasn't properly plotted.  The ending of the series is deeply unsatisfying and meandering.  The message is all garbled and while there is a big, shocking death of a principal character, I wasn't super invested in any of them any way.  It felt like a chore to read.  

And that pretty much brings me up to date on the reading tip.  Not too shabby for a mum of 3, if I do say so myself.  

Last weekend we spent with my sis and outlaw bro.  It was a very low-key weekend.  Lots of eating, maxing, relaxing, some House of Cards watching, and some shopping at Target.  We left on Valentine's day, but I still made the Big Yam make Valentine's for his friends.  We did a heart-shaped potato stamp on cardstock, signed his name on the back, and made these chocolate sugar cookie cut-outs and gave them out in little cello bags tied with red yarn bows.  

Valentine's breakfast

Our Valentine's dinner was boss.  A friend of mine from the jungle days is the chef de cuisine at Aft Kitchen, a tiny barbecue restaurant in Riverside.  He hooked us up with 2lbs of brisket, their queso mac'n'cheese, baked beans, and collards.  The brisket was SO GOOD.  Melting, fatty, with a delicious crusty barque.  It was amazing.  So spoiled.

Made a batch of cheescake brownies recently.  Ate practically the whole pan.  My go-to recipe is this one from an old issue of Gourmet magazine (RIP Gourmet magazine, I miss you so).  

I finally tried the famous Marcella Hazan tomato sauce that's been floating around the internet.  Made a triple batch and dialed back the butter a bit.  I froze it but used some for a skillet lasagne dish - it's really good!  Nice and rich with the acidity of the tomatoes mellowed by the butter and simmered onion.  I thinned mine with a bit of water.

Made a version of the Barefoot Contessa's (one of the most ridiculous cooking persona names, ever!) pot roast with roasted tatties and brussels sprouts.  The pot roast was bomb.  My new trick is to freeze the extra pot roast/beef braising liquid to use to add richness to beef broth-based soups, or in pastas like the one below.

Mushroom pappardelle with garlic bread.  So easy!  Sautéed like, almost 2 lbs of thickly sliced onions in butter/oil.  Then added diced onion, garlic, and about 500mL of pot roast liquid and a sprig of rosemary.  Reduced it and then tossed with just-cooked pappardelle with some pasta cooking water to loosen.  Finished with grated parm.  I ate bowlfuls and bowlfuls of this stuff.

Cheddar broccoli soup and Ace bakery roasted garlic bread, spread with my garlic butter and broiled on both sides, then spread with basil-scape pesto and topped with white beans that I simmered then mashed with some rosemary and lemon zest.  Topped with a drizzle of good olive oil.  So good!

Fin.

On aging

My honest opinion: don't do it.  

Poh Poh (the Big Yam's Tai Poh) got a spot in a nursing home this past week and was moved into her new digs on Wednesday.  We went to visit her on Sunday evening with my mum.  

The good: the facility is a Chinese one, is close to my mum's house, and is a newer building so everything looks fresher and cleaner and brighter than some of the other, sadder places I've seen (like that one on the corner of Dufferin and Bloor).
The bad: it's a nursing home, people.  They suck, any way you cut it.

The staff were all really sweet.  I think something about the Chinese filial-piety, veneration of the elderly thing means that there's inherently more respect and care for the elderly, but maybe I'm projecting.  I will say that I'd be very surprised if the staff that I met were capable of elder abuse, whereas that hasn't been the case of other retirement residences/nursing homes I've come across.  My Poh Poh's Alzheimer's means that she's on a floor that has restricted access - to prevent people from wandering off and strangers from getting in.  

There's nothing to say - it's grim, but in order to assuage my mum's guilt over having to put my Poh Poh in there, I will say that the grimness is inherent to the generalized process of getting so old/incapacitated that you can no longer care for yourself/be cared for by loved ones who have external full-time responsibilities, and nothing to do with the facility.  We arrived at meal-time and all the residents on that floor eat together at one time, grouped at tables.  The food smelled pretty good.  I think another thing about the specificity of Chinese-run facilities is that (as far as I know), the specific Chinese foods they're serving have to be made fresh and can't necessarily be delivered in powdered form from a Serca or Beaver Foods truck.  

She has a private room that overlooks the courtyard and features utilitarian, hospital-issue furniture with her own bathroom.  It's all pretty institutional-looking but there are activities to do every day (like karaoke - Dotytron: "I have a feeling that particular session is pretty hilare," and cooking classes and gardening) and this is only her first week there.  

The Big Yam, bless his little geriatric-loving heart, was in high spirits.  He's been talking about "maybe see Tai Poh" for the last few weeks and when we picked up my mum to go, he said to my mum, "Go see Tai Poh's new house" and my mum (who is hearing impaired), said, "we're going to see Tai Poh's new home" and the Big Yam replied matter-of-factly, "yes" (more correctly, it sounds like "yesth" with his lisp).  It's pretty cute watching him and my mum interact because they frequently have parallel conversations about the same thing entirely in short, observational sentences with an economy of language.  He was SO HAPPY to see his Tai Poh and of course, the other residents on my Poh Poh's floor (the ones who were more aware of their surroundings) loved him.  

This one old guy was like, "he's grown so much!" (I've never met him before in my life) and kept giving the Big Yam an enthusiastic thumbs-up and big, toothless, gummy grins.  When we went around the corner, the Big Yam pulled on my hand wanting to see "Gung Gung again" (Gung Gung being a general, respectful designation for an older man.)  

It relieved a lot of the internal pangs to see the Big Yam in that environment.  First of all, it made my Poh Poh so happy.  Second of all, it helped make some of the other residents happy.  Third of all, he's at the perfect age where he's so blissfully unaware of his surroundings that he can interact with her without being aware in the slightest that she's not 100% herself.  I'm not going to lie: it was emotionally really hard for me and the Dotytron (and my mum too, I'm sure).  An old woman in a wheelchair was periodically shouting a nonsense refrain from her room, at nothing.  It is a strange hinterland that people with Alzheimers and similar degenerative brain conditions occupy and it hurts you, as the outside observer because of their liminality - my Poh Poh is at once lucid and aware enough of her own surroundings to know she's not at home, and yet, not so aware or unaware that she can either continue to live with my parents or fail to care about her immediate environment (assuming that any level of brain degeneration results in enough loss of sentience that one can reach the point of not caring at all, on any level).  

I try to take comfort in the fact that the Big Yam and my Poh Poh have such a special bond and such a special relationship, but it is a bond that makes us unbelievably happy and sad at the same time.  Because he won't be able to understand when she's gone.  Because he's so young that he won't be able to remember how they were best buds.  Because life is inevitably about losing people you love and being lost in turn.  

It's an old chestnut, but a true one: every day, is a getting closer, going faster than a roller coaster.  The amount of things that have happened in the past 5 years, both good and bad, is staggering.  I blink and I find myself married, with a home, a kid, and down 4 grandparents, and a father-in-law.  I don't know how we're supposed to manage it, and by "it" I mean "life."  

I'm in a melancholy mood.  I re-read The Fault In Our Stars because I picked it for our book club next Wednesday and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The season doesn't help.  Reading about mortality and love and what it means to live and die doesn't particularly help.  That book is SO GOOD.  So good, but not really doing much to dispel the glumness of my latest trifecta of read books.

The Mansion of Happiness is a collection of Jill Lepore's essays on life and death (as the cover says).  The essays are loosely related, but generally use one illustrative example (like, the board game from which the book derives it's title) to use as an aperture into how American views on life and death have changed over the past 150 years.  The essays can be a little disjointed from one another, but I particularly found the ones on birth control and the right to life movement fascinating, as well as the ones that detail the regrettable perversion of Darwin's theory of evolution into social Darwinism and the subjugation of certain races and classes of people.  The first essay is a bit of a slog, but after that, I found the rest of them quick going, with a lot of interesting factual nuggets and a feminist slant.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers earned it's Pulitzer Prize like whoa.  This is investigative, immersive non-fiction that lies at the junction between anthropology, sociology, and Dickens.  Detailing the lives of select residents of Annawadi, a slum that lies at the edge of the Mumbai International Airport, bordered by luxury hotels, over the course of 4 years.  This is a ground-level study of global capitalism and the seemingly insurmountable division between the ruling classes in a booming metropolis of the new millennium, and the shifting underclass that lives on the margins, endlessly searching for openings to grab a foothold on stability and to rise up from poverty.  The book is descriptive - there is little editorializing from Boo on the widespread corruption, hope, despair, and capriciousness that make up the stories of the Annawadi residents.  This is globalisation and it is capitalism in all its raw, unfettered glory.  Where there are opportunities for upward mobility but where these opportunities are dependent as much on luck and fate as hard work and skill.  Here are the clashes between old beliefs and new, between traditional gender roles and a new world for educated women, where Muslims and Hindus are forced to live side-by-side, where caste still matters even as the city churns itself towards a newly imagined, democratic future-self.  I can't say enough good things about this book.  It is staggering in its scope and execution.  The questions that Katherine Boo asked to land in Annawadi are central to anyone hoping to understand the realities of unfettered capitalism outside of the North American context.  

Katherine Boo is so damned smart.  This is her quote from the afterword of the book: "It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people ARE good, and that many people try to be..." 

See?  Smart.  That quote and the experiences of the people in this book also made me re-think some of the unquestioned, institutionalised racism towards First Nations in Canada  that I had unconsciously been allowing to color my views of the "Idle No More" movement that's been happening.  I needed that kind of re-alignment and re-assessment of my unconscious biases and I'm glad that this book kick-started it.

The rest of the weekend was busy.  Chinese school, grocery shopping, visiting our friends R & R and seeing their new little baby M, who slumbered away in my arms like a quiet little sack of teeny tiny (fingerling) potatoes.  We started watching Homeland, which I enjoy 150% more than Deadwood, if only because it provides lots of opportunities to see Claire Danes do her signature-Claire-Danes ugly cry.  It also provides lots of chances to crack up any time someone says the name "Abu Nazir" with intense solemnity.  It's super-far-fetched but I find it way more engaging than Deadwood.

On Friday I made us homemade Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supremes.  These were AWESOME.    I based it off this recipe, which is less a recipe and more of a wake-up call to spark the thought that OH MY GOD, OF COURSE I CAN MAKE THESE AT HOME.  Very filling, but very delicious.  I made my life easier by pressing them in the panini press and also crunching up the tostadas into big pieces, which made folding the (whole wheat) tortillas around the filling much easier.  Big hit:

Sunday we went for all you can eat hot pot with my mum, after R & R stuffed us with a million Babu treats (fish patties and samosas).  The Big Yam seriously ate at least 4-5 different treats (which Babu charmingly calls "Shorteats") and the patties were SPICY!  He kept reaching for another one after I tried to cut him off.  He's a total Tamil Tiger.  Consequently, he was ruined for any food at hot pot.

Tonight we had tuna noodle casserole with my patented buttered challah cube topping, alongside green beans and brussels sprouts.

And that bring us to the end of this lengthy post.

Remember: don't get old (but also don't die young - you can see the bind you're in).

Fin.

a compendium of oddities

this is going to be a real mish-mash of random tidbits.

so on wednesday, i walked out of work and went to the bike rack, only to find that my front tire was COMPLETELY flat. i deliberated for a bit and then opted to lock it back up, rather than wait around for an hour until the ttc says it's okay to bring bikes on the trains.

i IMMEDIATELY suspected that someone had let the air out of my tires and i was a little put out by it. i mean, i know i'm a brassy broad, but who in the world at large would hold such ill will towards me? what had i done to insult, offend, give umbrage (i know you can take umbrage, can you also give it?) the next day, i walked my bike over to the nearest bike repair place and the guy offered to put a new tire on for me while i waited. as he took the tire off the rim, i said, "when the tire is off, can you see what happened? i suspect foul play." without missing a beat, the dude said, "you're irrational." lol!!! it's funny cuz it's true! he then went on to say that most people suspect foul play but that it's rarely the case. phew. so all my haters in the public service are still deeply bored into the woodwork. when i retold the tale to the dotytron, he agreed, "you ARE irrational."

i was mad hormonal this weekend. i cried like a billion times and picked like 20 different fights with the dotytron. it was kind of awesome. i haven't been cranky like that in a long while. we barely fight ever, anymore. in between being a testy mofo, i did manage to find the time to bawl like a giant baby when s-dawg showed me the following youtube clip. LIKE A BABY. so embarrassing! all weekend he was like, "have you seen the 'christian the lion' video on youtube yet?" and i was like, NO (it sounded kind of ghey.) he kept bringing it up until finally he had me and sister as a captive audience and fired it up on his iphone. i CRIED and got goosebumps like the carefully hidden inner marshmallow i am.



i also finished knitting my niece's sweater. i'm really happy with how it turned out. this is what the original pattern is supposed to look like:

there's an inner button and button hole and the sleeves are long and the collar is floppier.

this is what i did with mine:



i made mine with short sleeves, and i shortened the collar. i also put both buttons on the front, because i thought a thick button on the inside of the sweater would be irritating, and this way, you have some options about how you flip it over. it also looks cute and symmetrical.

little miss up there was being super squirmy with the pictures. more shockingly, we had an incident that i will heretofore refer to as "chunkygate '09" my sister and i were researching a disney world vacation. more correctly, i was researching while my sister kept me company. somehow she took it upon herself to project manage the family's disney vacation, even though she HATES doing stuff like that. within half an hour, i had taken her scribbles on random pieces of paper and had organized a tidy chart complete with footnotes.

anyway, my niece was playing dress up quietly by herself while we were researching. she had put on one of my mom's old jumper from the late 80s and was looking at herself in the mirror when she idly asked, "does this make me look chunky?" my sister and i immediately gave each other significantdangereyes. injecting a forced tone of casual inquiry into our voices, we asked, "why? what's wrong with being chunky?" and my niece said, "i don't want to be chunky, like ____" "who?" i asked. "___" she repeated. my sister looked me in the eye and imperceptibly nodded, "like ___," she said, mouthing the words, "he's kind of chunky" lol!!!!! poor little chunky gaffer. so then we told her there was nothing wrong with being chunky.

later on, when we were having dinner at my grandparent's favorite restaurant she was throwing a pretend costume party for everyone while we were eating and we started giving her the gears, "can i have a chunky costume?" (me) "can i have chunky peanut butter at the party?" (dotytron) etc. exasperated at the teasing, she burst out, "why does everyone want to be CHUNKY?!??" and then we said, "what's wrong with being chunky?" and she said, "don't you see the sign?" (pointing at an imaginary spot on the wall.) me and my sister gave each other dangereyes again. "what does the sign say?" and you could totally see the expressions flicker across her unguarded, impatient little imp face. she paused, and then we prodded her. "it says: no chunky persons INVITED!" terrible!!! the poor little lamb! where is she getting this stuff from? chunky isn't even a kid word! she's only four! but kids are so crafty. when we asked her point blank, "is it okay to be chunky?" she's say yes, but you could see in her eyes that she didn't believe it.

le sigh. it's hard to know what to do and how to approach it. you don't want to turn it into a giant thing, but at the same time, there's going to be a good 10 years of the vicious cruelty of kids/young teenagers ahead of her...there's no need to get a jump on it now.

tonight for dinner i made us meatball subs with leftover frozen cooked meatballs, simmered in defrosted frozen tomato-basil sauce, and topped with provolone cheese and broiled in the oven. served with a mixed generic salad with thousand island dressing.

in other news...my family is going to disney world this summer. eeks! and then the dotytron and i are going to follow that up with a week and a bit in hawai'i. the prices at disney are SO MUCH LOWER in august. it's their low season (coinciding with hurricane and typhoon season.) we used to go in august when i was a kid. it was hot and muggy and humid and there'd be periodic flash thunderstorms when the skies would open up and unleash a torrent upon you and then five minutes later the sun would be back, turning the water into tacky, sizzling vapour. the weather we're not concerned about. we'll bring rain gear. plus, the other alternative was going during the holidays when you get GANKED on the prices and when the park is teeming with people. as i said to my sister, if disney can't protect us during a hurricane, then i don't know what can. lol!

i was worried the dotytron would feel robbed of his lune de miel by piggybacking it on a family vacay, but he was surprisingly amenable. since i'm doing all the vacation planning, it's actually kind of nice for me. before i had to worry about researching all 4 major islands and then somehow whittling it down. if we only have just over a week, we can focus on one island. because seeing the volcano and hopefully catching some lava is our primary goal, that limits us to the big island, hawai'i. much easier! i've found us some cute b&bs to stay at...i'm excited!

this is all provided of course that the upcoming ontario budget doesn't obliterate my job. *weak laughter*

no seriously. i hope i don't get laid off.

fin.