sarcastic fringehead

For some weeks now, a couple has been picketing a local car dealer who, they say, “stole $7700 from our family.” I got one of their flyers once; it contained extensive documentation of the guy’s being a big jerk, but no details about the theft. So I can’t really take sides. I’ve bought enough cars not to put anything past a car dealer, but I’ve also worked in sales long enough to know customers are sometimes insane.

Anyway, they’ve been picketing, and occasionally drivers will honk at them to show support. So about a week ago, the dealer started putting people in cheap cartoon-character costumes out on the sidewalk. These characters carry signs with the dealer’s name, and the message “Please honk to say hello.”

The first time I drove by, I thought, hmm, that’s weird. The second time I got it. It’s a honk neutralizer! “Yes, people will honk,” says the evil car dealer, “But is it because they believe you? OR DO THEY JUST LOVE SCOOBY-DOO? You’ll never know!”

This has got to be the most impotent battle of wills I have ever seen. I’m generally conflict-avoidant, but I secretly kind of hopes it escalates. It has the potential to reach shocking new levels of lameness!

We’ve been fairly deeply immersed in the land of multiple identities here at the homestead. W. is turning out to be the Daniel Day-Lewis of toddlers, selecting a role and then not breaking character (or allowing anyone else to do so) for weeks on end. Why, for a full month, we were the stars of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast: I was Maggie, W. was her pig friend Hamilton, and R. was, of course, The Ferocious Beast.

Some dialogue:

“Come here and let Mommy put your shoes on.”
“You’re Maggie!”

“Hey, whatcha doin’, cute boy?”
“I’m a cute PIG.”

All. Day. Long. (Perhaps needless to say, the entry title also comes from this part of the story.) (Less needless to say, I had not called him a sweet, beautiful boy. He may have been saving up adjectives.)

But it really got special when you took into consideration that (a) he was referring to his father as The Beast, and (b) we have to live in the world, which has other people in it. For instance, the helpful lady who worked at the pharmacy and tried to do her part to stomp out toddler lollygagging by telling W. “Sounds like your daddy’s calling you!” He looked up at her, flashed his sweetest smile, and corrected her: “He’s a beast!”

Also, if you happened to be at Santa Monica Beach a few weeks back and saw a frazzled-looking redhead chasing a small blond urchin and hollering, “No, honey! We can’t keep walking! We have to go see the beast!”? There was totally nothing weird going on there.

For a while, he became a wrecking-beam clown. You don’t know what that is, do you? Neither did I, so I asked. A wrecking-beam clown is “a monster you want to stay out of the way of.” His father was also a wrecking-beam clown. Me? I’m “Puppet.”

There’s nothing quite so validating as putting a bottle of dip on the dinner table and having your 2-year-old exclaim, “Salad dressing! Good puppet!”

I intentionally steered him toward Jack’s Big Music Show then (“you can be Jack, and I’ll be Mary, and your dad can be Mel, and Grandma L. can be Laurie Berkner!” How could a kid pass that up?) because it involved less explaining – like, why we would name an innocent child Hamilton and how my husband is not actually a beast. It didn’t take care of the problem of having people think I let my toddler call me by my first name (no! he calls me by OTHER people’s first names!), but I think I’m still ahead.

The fun part is, every time he calls me Mommy is as exciting as the very first time was.

For those of you who don’t know this already, I’ve had a terrible case of tendinitis; it’s slowly improving, but the result is that I have a ton of half-written entries that I never finished and published because the ouch set in.

My intention over the next week or so is to finish them all up – well, the ones that are still worth posting – and get them up here. This may not happen, because my arm could get worse again, but I’m going to try. The reason I tell you this is that I don’t want anyone to suddenly log on to 15 new entries and think I’ve gone on a coke-fueled blogging tear or anything.

Hey, I think I just named a band in that last sentence!

To those of you to whom I owe email – same excuse and proposed solution applies. Sorry! I love you! Please come back!

Yeah, that whole we’re-moving-to-Altadena thing? Did not so much happen. We’re in Alhambra instead – bright side, it’s a much nicer (read cleaner) apartment, and it’s got some groovy midcentury fixtures I’m quite fond of. It shares a lot of the qualities that had me so smitten with Altadena (many of which I believe are completely attributable to both towns’ Route-66-adjacent location), and it’s closer to the 10 than the 210, which puts us closer to many of our favorite people and places. Hey, that’s a lot of bright side – what’s my problem? Oh. Right. We don’t know if we’ll get any of our first month’s rent back on the other place.

Anyway, we are not even remotely unpacked, and I’ve had some rather surprising/time-consuming events in my usually low-key part-time web design gig, and W. went through an extremely unpleasant phase that I blame on his being almost 3 in general, his making some major developmental leaps, and then that whole moving for the second time in six months issue. But today he was back to his charming self, and even allowed several boxes to be unpacked without ugly incident, lovely child.

I realize this is the least entertaining entry ever, and I do apologize – this one’s just for the people who check in for the facts. More soon!

To the five people who read here even though I haven’t really told people about this yet:

Hi!

I’ve been gone for a while because (a) my computer died, but as they didn’t recognize that fact for some time at the repair shop, I was without a computer for three weeks; (b) even when I am with computer, I am also with useless hotel internet connection, so my online time is let’s just say abridged; (c) I lost all my bookmarks, including the one that allowed me to post to this blog; (d) oh yeah, and I’ve been slowly working my way through the 1700 unfiltered emails that accumulated in my absence.

But now I have a nifty new MacBook thanks to my mommy, and a week from now we will be living in an apartment and not having to deal with hotel anything. Yes, we finally got a place – it’s in Altadena, which I’m kind of excited about. It’s kind of cool historically, and it’s just a crazy mix of people and stuff – for example, one street features a punching-bag store and a pastrami restaurant facing each other. If we didn’t have to take things like commutes into consideration, we’d definitely want to live more toward LA proper, but this place could be fun.

Anyway, I have a lot more to tell you, but I need to work on moving for the next few days. I’ll probably be back next week. Maybe I’ll even have time to work on the layout here – I swear I never intended to have two duplicate columns down the right and the left for more than a day or two!

The lyrics to the song that W. composed to avoid eating dinner tonight:

Zo-e wanna be Elmo
Zo-e gotta be Elmo
AND
ELmo gotta beeeeeeeeeeee…. ELmo!

Me: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray/You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”

W: “Actually, Mommy, I AM going to take your sunshine away.”

We had another hitting incident at the Remo drum circle yesterday. This one mystified me, as usually W’s victims have at least looked at him funny. This kid was just standing there when W. hit him in the arm with his drumstick.

“Why did you hit that kid, anyway?” I asked him (after reading him the riot act).

“I was using dat widdle boy as a cwash cymbal.”

Oh. Great.

I mean, it’s not like we haven’t had to give the people-are-not-drums talk a few times, but never before for such a specific reason.

Sorry it’s been quiet ’round here… we’ve had company in our wee little room and that doesn’t leave much time or space for writing. Quick update: Everyone’s reasonably healthy, I’ve got a bunch of potential employment situations in the works, and… well, that’s about it in a nutshell. Fascinating minutiae to come.

I’m about to put on Beatles ’65 because the classical station is boring right now. Before I can quite get the CD in, the radio switches to another flavor of boring, which R. thinks he should maybe listen to for professional reasons.

A minute or two in, it’s clear that it’s neither very good nor bad in any particularly instructive way, so R. says, “If this gets unbearable, you can put on the Beatles.”

And I say, “That might be the best epitaph I have ever heard.”

Then I put on the Beatles.

W. has problems with impulse control sometimes. He’ll be fine for months and then blam, people (mostly me) start gettin’ hit. I’m about 80% sure this coincides with physical growth spurts – not that it’s an excuse, but I think it’s the reason.

And so, along with the negative consequences (which are completely ineffective when used alone with my particular kid), we reintroduce the concept of the Super Reward – 24 hours of no hitting, no hurting and no being mean and he gets to pick out a medium-sized toy. That’s how we transition out of these phases. It goes a lot more quickly this way.

This afternoon, he said he was ready to try for one. For the next two hours, he sat in his play area playing quietly, except that every five minutes or so, he’d sing out, “So far, so gooo-ood! I am just putting balls in dis truck and dere is no being mean at all.”

And you know it’s so important not to laugh. And you don’t laugh. And you wonder if you will rupture an internal organ, with the not laughing.

And that’s pretty much how life goes, until suddenly he’s two inches taller and much more pleasant.

****

If you’re in the northern part of the Los Angeles area and looking for something to do tomorrow, the Multicultural Festival at Moorpark College is free and might be interesting. W.’s favorite band (we like them too!), Masanga Marimba Ensemble, is playing in the late AM, and there’s lots of other musical contents that looks interesting, along with things such as lectures on bird flu that we will probably not attend.

Masanga has a few other free shows coming up, as well. They’re well worth checking out.