New shoes just posted at the Shoe Project.

Do I have your shoes yet?

Miguel: [punches a long series of numbers into telephone, amazed that he can remember his parents' number while simultaneously forgetting PIN codes and passwords at random]
Voice on telephone: Hello?
Miguel: Happy Mother’s Day!
Voice: Why, thank you! How’re you?
Miguel: I’m fine, how’re you? Doing anything special for Mother’s Day?
Voice: I’m watching a squirrel outside the window, on top of the bird feeder your dad put into the big stump.
Miguel: That’s nice.
Voice: We may have salmon later on. It was on special, so I bought four pounds and froze it.
Miguel: We’re having a nice day. I made fruit.
Voice: Oh, a darn fly! I hate it when a fly gets into the house. We’re always careful not to open the doors wide when we come in.
Miguel: Fly, huh.
Voice: Oh, where’d he go? It’s under the table!
Miguel: You’d like it at our house. We live across the street from a pig sty.
Voice: [Loud whacking noise!!] There!
Miguel: Oh! Heh.
Voice: I picked up some roast beef for your dad for lunch. It doesn’t seem to make his feet swell, so I guess it’s low sodium.
Miguel: Anyway, we’re having a nice day…
Voice: Lottery’s $70 million now, have to go over to the mall and get some tickets.
Miguel: Lilac’s blooming…
Voice: Well, I don’t want to run up your telephone bill! Send everyone our love!
Miguel: Same here. Be sure and take it easy for Mother’s Day.

Kids say the damnedest fucking things.
Have your kids ever embarrassed you? Did you embarrass your parents? Have you ever witnessed a little hellspawn demolish his or her parents in public? Go tell your story at Raising Hell.

Monday, May 6, 2002

Interesting conversation over at Blogatelle about plagiarism and related issues. I know I would take some perverse pleasure in seeing someone else copying my weblog posts and placing them on their own weblog without attribution – I sometimes wonder, as we all do, if I’m writing anything that’s worth reading, much less copying. But I would also be angry.

Stacy, you are the Sydney Bristow of weblogging.

Instruction #98: Whenever possible, send a child to feed the tortoise.

#99: Before bending over to pluck dandelion foliage for a tortoise, make sure your cell phone is stowed securely so it does not drop onto the ground.

#100: If your cell phone drops onto the ground, check it for mud before replacing it in your shirt pocket, especially if you are wearing a white dress shirt and it has been raining heavily.

#101: When changing out of a white dress shirt soiled with mud as a result of some stupid action on your part, do not announce this fact to your wife who is already in a bad mood.

#102: When your wife asks you to put a bottle of mineral water from the cellar into her car, it is up to you to realize that this means a small bottle from your car and not a big bottle from the cellar if all that is left in the cellar are large bottles.

#103: When leaving the daycare place in a big hurry after dropping off the youngest member of your family, things will – paradoxically – go faster if you take your time and open your car door completely before getting into the car, then close it carefully, instead of throwing it open and jumping in, because the door may bounce back and hit you in the eye, which costs you time as you sit there seeing stars, saying “ow, ow, ow!”

#104: If you tell your 12 year-old daughter, “I gave myself a black eye. Great, now I have something to blog about today,” she will only think you are weird.

#105: On the other hand, she is 12, she thinks you’re weird anyway.

Happy Mother’s Day.
Alpha posted over at Raising Hell.
Gotta go.

Let me start off by expressing my gratitude to Miguel for giving me this opportunity to address an audience qualitatively different from my average fans, although I love them too, make no mistake about it; I would also like to wish Miguel a very happy birthday – many more, Mig.

There’s another thing I’d like to get off my chest before moving on to my main essay today. I was listening yesterday to a CD by the young cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras playing Britten (in the series “Les Nouveaux Interpretes”) and all I can say is, fantastic pizzicato. He’s a promising young talent and if you get a chance to listen to his work, I recommend him highly. He’s inspiring and reminds you of the innate sublimity of life, despite the world at large.

I just had to say that, sorry. What I wanted to mention today, though, was my view of the family. I see it less as a collection of individuals in a more or less successful equilibrium; rather, I see these same individuals as a mere cross-section of the family, which I view as a whole nother organism, a historical machine with the function of transmitting characteristics through time. What the end destination is I cannot venture to say; and you will also notice that I use the term “characteristics” deliberately, and not “genes”, since genes are merely one way of transmitting characteristics from individual to individual, from generation to generation. There are also learned characteristics of behavior and perception that travel through generations, things like world view and sense of humor are passed on just as much as hair color or morphology.

The normal view of the family – father, mother, children, perhaps grandparents etc – is merely one brief cross section of a river, as I see it. In my view, the family would be the entire river, flowing through time. Changing as it flows – growing deeper and broader and richer. You can get a sense of this looking at old photographs that show various generations of the same family, or if you are fortunate enough to have a family where several generations are still alive, at a family reunion.

I have no conclusion to draw from this yet, other than that we are more closely connected than we often think; that we are not as discrete from one another as we are often led to believe, for all our independence much of our selves are given to us by preceding generations. It is good to know what we are up against as we strive to improve ourselves; likewise, it is good to be aware of our responsibility when we deal with children. Not only parents, anyone in a child’s environment contributes something to that child’s development, to an unforseeable degree, because so much is taught and learned by example.

So when I wish you all a happy Mother’s Day, I wish it to all of you, to all mothers, first and foremost, but also to anyone else who ever gave love or solace to a child or support to a child. Thank you.